The issue is all about “colliding worlds” with “interactions disciplines” becoming “more appropriately integrated into other creative disciplines (e.g. architecture and music), into business, and into the new business models that will shape the 21st and 22nd centuries,” as described by the editors Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko in their editorial.

It also features contributions by Allison Arieff (Sunset), Eli Blevis (Indiana University at Bloomington), Shunying Blevis (Indiana University at Bloomington), Benjamin H. Bratton, Valerie Casey (IDEO), Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research), Dave Cronin (Cooper), Allison Druin (Human-Computer Interaction Lab), Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson (Carnegie Mellon University), Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Adaptive Systems and Interaction group), Zhiwei Guo (Adobe Systems Inc.), John Hopson (Microsoft’s Games User Research group), Steve Howard (University of Melbourne), Tuck Leong (University of Melbourne), Zhengjie Liu Dalian Marine University), Bob Moore, Donald Norman, Steve Portigal, Scott Palmer (University of Leeds), Sita Popat (University of Leeds), Kai Qian, Laura Seargeant Richardson (M3 Design Inc.), Richard Seymour (Seymourpowell), Frank Vetere (University of Melbourne), Huiling Wei, and Ning Zhang (Dalian Marine University)

Interactions Magazine is the bimonthly publication of the ACM [Association of Computing Machinery] and is distributed to all members of SIGCHI [Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction].

It recently underwent a complete makeover the inspiring and volunteer (!) leadership of Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko who turned it into a publication full of timely articles, stories and content related to the interactions between experiences, people, and technology — the must have magazine for the user experience community!

They have an interesting programme, with some speakers I really like. They are called “Relatori” on their English website, which non-Italians should obviously know means “Speakers”. A small detail, of course, because they got names like Peter Eisenman, Massimiliano Fuksas, Adam Greenfield, Jeffrey Huang, Nicolas Nova, Dominique Perrault, Renzo Piano, and Hani Rashid. To name just a few.

Registration is cheap. 100 euro. So I want to go. But then the trouble starts.

First you go to the website where any button “Registration” is missing. OK, you find out that it’s actually called “Participation”.
Then you have to create a personal account. Of course, I completely forgot that I had done this months ago to receive a newsletter. So I got an Italian language error message - on the English site of an international event - when I entered my normal email address.
Next step: a whole bunch of personal information. To enter your company name however, you have to hit a radio button which I of course missed. So I entered my information as an individual, and clicked “Update data”, which didn’t do much more than refresh the screen with the data I just entered.
Hmmm. What now? The left side menu has 16 clickable menu options. I click the most obvious one: “Registration and Payment”.
Wrong, of course. I arrive at a huge screen with lots of information. None of which I need.
At the bottom of that screen: “Go to subscription”. I click that.
New screen: “Add partecipants” (That’s the spelling!).
But I registered as an individual! Not as a company. I just added all my individual information and don’t want to add another “partecipant”.
This is clearly not a good choice. Next one up: “Your registered members”. Interesting! I am curious what the membership of an individual might mean. But I have no choice. So I click that.
Now the system says that I have no registered members. Strange: I just registered!
Maybe it’s a good thing. I don’t want “members” of myself anyhow. I just want to register. Please let me pay my 100 euros.
So I click on “Proceed to payment”.
Back to the huge screen with lots of information that I don’t need.

This is getting terribly irritating.

I guess the system requires me to be a “registered member” of myself. So now I have to register even more personal data, such as my identity card or passport number. I also need to select a country (not sure which one: country of citizenship or country where I live). I choose Italy. Now I also need to select which “Professional bodies of architect” (sic) I am from. It’s obligatory. But what comes up is a bit baffling: a list of Italian provinces and the word “Nessuno” which I know to mean “None”. Good luck, German or American! Perhaps, I was just stupid enough to list Italy as my country of residence.

Once I have done gone through all of that (remember that I registered as an individual), the system asks me again to “add partecipants”. Yes, I know: the spelling. I don’t want to “add partecipants” anyhow.

By now, I figured out that this stupid system requires me again to click on “Registered members” in the left menu, and discover that I am now a registered member of myself.

But how can I pay? It’s baffling. I managed to figure it out this afternoon — after 20 minutes of deep frustration. Now I tried again in order to write this post, using a different email address, but for the life of me, I can’t find the solution anymore. I CAN’T PAY. I have no clue at all anymore on how to do it.

The procedure I managed to find this afternoon has disappeared. I remembered that I somehow found a check box next to my name, which was the key to get into the actual payment system, but that’s gone now.

Guys, this is hopeless. How can you manage an international congress this way? And an interesting one at that! Your registration process is horrible. HORRIBLE! No wonder you have so few registrations. YOU HAVE TO FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY!!!

In short, I am more than just a little angry.

(And can someone now remove my duplicate pre-registration, so that I don’t get all your emails twice?).

The centre of events for 31 December 2007 is Piazza Castello [the “Castle Square”], the Baroque heart of the city, seen on TV screens worldwide as the “Medals Plaza” of the XX Olympic Winter Games of 2006.

The New Year Eve’s activities contain a lot of interaction design with Luminous LEDs, Shining microvideos, and Interactive balls, plus of course the live music and the DJ’s.

Aside from the many events planned during the first World Design Capital in 2008 — with quite a few requiring your participation — keep also an eye open for what’s coming up in the following years:

2008 - UIA World Congress of Architecture (29 June - 3 July)
For the first time an Italian city hosts a World Congress of the International Union of Architects. Torino will be the location of this prestigious event which every three years reunites thousands of professionals and students to cover a theme analysing the future prospects of the profession and its relationship with the social and cultural problems of the moment. The theme chosen for the event in 2008 is Transmitting Architecture.

2009 is dedicated to sports with the European Athletics Indoor Championships (6-8 March) and the World Air Games (7-13 June).

2010 - Euroscience City (2-7 July)
The EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) is Europe’s most important interdisciplinary forum for presentation and debate of leading scientific trends and key science policy issues. It brings Europe’s science community together to discuss the social and economic impact of science, technology, the social sciences and humanities. The event is promoted by Euroscience, an organisation that includes scientists from 40 European countries.

2011 - Italy 150 (17 March - 31 October)
In 2011 Italy will celebrate its 150th birthday as a united nation: an opportunity to look back of course but also to debate what future should Italy be aiming at (a hot topic also in the international press - see The New York Times and The Times). Many of the planned events will take place in Torino, Italy’s first capital. The slogan: “Experience Italy” !

“Architecture and design, says my friend Jeffrey Huang (photo), are becoming the interface between physical and virtual lives. And that’s his field of study: how can constructs (buildings, cities and landscapes) incorporate digital communication systems? What are the effects of digitization on the typologies of cities today?

Last week, professor Huang — who among other things was instrumental in creating the Swiss House in Boston, now called Swissnex — gave his inaugural lesson at EPFL, the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he runs the Media and Design Lab (he was previously at the Harvard School of Design). Here my running notes.”

Read full story

“The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering.”

Read pamphlet

(via Régine Debatty)

The conference, held in NewcastleGateshead in October 2007, asked how design is transforming as it adapts to a world in transition. Two days of stimulating and energetic debate considered how designers are adapting to the new landscape by acquiring new know-how.

Audio and transcripts are now online and feature a series of keynote presentations:

• Frans Johansson (Medici Capital Management) on innovation at the intersection of disciplines and cultures: audio | transcript
• Tim Brown (IDEO) on the challenges of design thinking: audio | transcript
• James Woudhuysen (De Montfort University) on the limits of design: audio | transcript
• Peter Higgins on the convergence of architecture and communication media: audio | transcript
• Richard Seymour (Seymour-powell) on designers’ approach to the future: audio | transcript
• Clive Grinyer (Orange France Telecom) on the silence of design: audio | transcript

as well as panel discussions and breakout sessions:

• What is the new know-how in service design? (audio | transcript)
  Services have been around for centuries, but Service design has recently become a hot topic. Designers Gillian Crampton-Smith (IUAV), Chris Downs (live|work) and Heather Martin (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) outline some examples of good, and bad, service design and discuss what the core skills of service designers are whether traditional designer notions such as craft, beauty and visualisation are still important. Jeremy Myerson (RCA) moderates.
  <  >
• As designers, are we guilty of killing the planet? (audio | transcript)
  John Thackara (Dott07) will argue that 80 percent of the environmental impact of the products and buildings is determined at the design stage; and the ways we have designed the world force most people to waste stupendous quantities of matter and energy. But for John, playing the blame game is pointless, the best way to redeem ourselves is to become part of the solution.
  <  >
• Clever by design (audio | transcript)
  Where does design fit into management thinking? What is the role of the designer in the modern economy? Sir George Cox, Design Council Chairman and Dr Andrea Siodmok, head of its Design Knowledge team discuss with chair Jeremy Myerson whether businesses are making more use of design capability and, if so, whether designers have the right skills to talk to business.
  <  >
• New connections: question time (audio | transcript)
  At the final panel session of Intersections 07, delegates had the chance to put questions to the panel (Peter Saville, Richard Seymour and John Thackara), ranging from the lack of women in design, to the role of designers in creating unnecessary landfill, and how best to reconcile the desire for visionary design with co-creation. This session draws together some of the key themes from the conference.
  <  >
• Fashion connections (audio | transcript)
  Vicky Richardson, Editor of Blueprint magazine, Ignacio Germade, Design Director of Consumer Experience Design at Motorola, Sarah Maynard, Designer and MD of Maynard Bespoke and Tom Savigar from Future Laboratory discuss the influence of fashion on wider design practice. They argue that fashion is not just about the type of things that designers create, but it can be an approach to design thinking about products, interactions, space and environments.
  <  >
• Interaction blur (audio | transcript)
  How is interaction design changing and what the drivers behind this? Has it managed to develop the skill sets it needs to deal with the challenges ahead? And how does interaction design overlap with other design disciplines? Andy Altmann from Why Not Associates, Durrell Bishop of Luckybite and Daljit Singh, founder of Digit discuss with chair Nico Macdonald.
  <  >
• Are design schools the new B-schools? (audio | transcript)
  Business Week has floated the idea that tomorrow’s Business school might be a design school. Jeremy Myerson, from the RCA, Janet Abrams, from the University of Minnesota Design Institute, John Bates, London Business School and Christoph Böninger, formerly of Siemens discuss whether designers can really go head-to-head with the MBAs and whether students would be better equipped for the business world if they were design trained?
  <  >
• Feedback: Day 1 breakout sessions (audio | transcript)
  Vicky Richardson reported back to delegates on Fashion Connections, the Culture thread of day one’s breakout sessions, and Nico Macdonald told the audience what they had missed if they hadn’t been discussing Interaction blur in the Interactions thread. Chair Jeremy Myerson told delegates all about the Business thread and how the panel had discussed whether D-schools were the new B-schools?
  <  >
• But is it art? (audio | transcript)
  Can design fill the aesthetic and cultural vacuum left by contemporary art? Where are the boundaries between the two disciplines and is it even useful to try and draw distinctions between them? Designers Allan Chochinov, Peter Saville and Richard Shed are joined by artist and writer Matthew Collings in a discussion about the nature of ‘design art,’ chaired by Vicky Richardson, editor of Blueprint magazine.
  <  >
• Can good design be co-created? (audio | transcript)
  Can good design be co-created? What can designers learn from the open source software movement and ‘wikinomics’? While everyone is a designer, isn’t it the job of professional designers to champion good design? Writer and journalist Nico Macdonald chairs a discussion with Joe Heapy (Engine), Lynne Maher (NHS) and Austin Williams (Future Cities Project) about the possibilities and pitfalls of co-design.
  <  >
• What can design bring to strategy? (audio | transcript)
  Design strategy is a growing sub-discipline of design. This session, chaired by conference director Kevin McCullagh, asked what strengths designers bring to strategy building and what new skills they might need to acquire. The panel, Jonathan Sands from Elmwood, Richard Eisermann from Prospect and Ed Silk from Interbrand, covered the topic with reference to their own wide experience as designers and strategists.
  <  >
• Feedback: Day 2 breakout sessions (audio | transcript)
  Vicky Richardson“>Vicky Richardson informed delegates who had not attended the Culture thread of the breakout sessions on Is it art? of what they had missed. Nico Macdonald feedback what delegates who had attended the Interactions thread thought about the question of whether good design can be co-created and Kevin McCullagh, who had chaired the Business thread debate on design and strategy, updated the audience on what had been discussed.

In this article Joost Beunderman, a researcher at the UK think-tank Demos argues that, “if we would wish to favour the use value of places to the public over the financial value that space generates, then we cannot be satisfied at our current ways of planning towns and cities. Inhabiting places implies an active, creative and constantly changing relationship of the user to his or her environment – a more diverse category than shopping or buying a house. There are urgent reasons why we should put this enriched concept of use central, and make tangible steps to empower people’s relation to places.”

“In public services, the past period has seen a slow but steady trend towards ‘user-led design.’ It aims to spread new ‘operating systems’ for services such as social care, allowing people to become participants in shaping, commissioning and delivering the services they use, rather than passive and dependent recipients of what the system routinely provides. There is much that that we can learn from such concepts. The Demos study People Make Places showed how public spaces, in order to be successful, need to encourage people’s participation, rather than merely providing set-piece designs.”

Read full story

Nicolas Nova is a researcher at the Media and Design Lab at the Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne and one of the organisers of the LIFT conference.

His talk “Designing a new ecology of mixed digital and physical environments” was a critical overview of ubiquitous computing based on current research in the field (showing what people like Paul Dourish or Genevieve Bell are discussing but also geographers such as Stephen Graham), art/start-up/research projects and alternative visions such as what Nicolas is doing with Julian Bleecker.

The talk was organised by Experientia and the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin.

(Thanks to Experientia collaborator Haraldur Már Unnarsson for making this possible).

The OAN is a free, Web-based network that’s part database of architectural projects, part design tool, and part community, and its ambitious goal is to improve the living standards of 5 billion people—a number that includes not just the 1 billion people living in abject poverty today, but the one in three people who, by 2020, will be living in slums. It’s a goal that Cameron Sinclair, the architect-cum-activist who spearheaded the site, knew could only be achieved by tapping the collective intelligence of the Web.

- Read full story
- View slideshow

12 July 2007 - 7pm
Order of Architects of the Province of Turin
via G. Giolitti 1 – Torino - 3rd floor

Nicolas Nova will give a critical overview of the evolution towards “hybridised environments”, i.e. mixed physical and digital ecologies, sometimes also identified as media spaces, mixed realities, ubiquitous computing, and lifelogging realities. He will describe the systems as well the underlying technologies needed to support them, with a strong focus on how to best address people’s needs and enhance their lives. Examples such as lab projects, start-up products and art pieces will help outline the main trends and applications to expect in the near future. Nova will discuss the implications of this evolution for designers, architects and engineers on issues such as the user experience, the practice changes and the challenges to be solved.

Nicolas Nova is a researcher at the Media and Design Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne where he completed a Ph.D in human-computer interaction. His research focuses on spatial and location-awareness, location-based, virtual and tangible gaming experiences, and the hybridisation of digital and physical environments. He is a co-producer of the highly acclaimed, and internationally prestigious LIFT conference in Geneva, which this year was attended by over 500 participants. He blogs at Pasta and Vinegar about emerging technologies usage and foresight.

The lecture, which will be in English, is jointly organised by Experientia and the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin - the organisation which by the way is also responsible for next year’s UIA World Congress of Architecture. Additional communication support is provided by the design community TURN.

RSVP: architettitorino at awn dot it

Excerpted from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies:

Jyske Bank recently fundamentally changed its business concept, so the customer can put together his own banking solution. The bank has focused on the product experience, both “virtually” and in the branch. The bank calls the initiative “Jyske Difference” [”Jyske Forskelle”] and their slogan is “Jyske is the bank that makes a difference.”

In the short process (four months) during which the new business concept has been developed and partially implemented, the bank has been especially inspired by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies‘ thoughts on Creative Man and the individualization megatrend. As they write to FO/futureorientation:

“Many consumers see banks and bank products as uniform - and a little boring. At the same time, we see that customers are changing behavior. They want more influence; they are more self-reliant while demanding personal service. The creative consumer, who wishes to create his or her own solution, is the coming thing. Consumers want to tailor their own charter vacations, car, and bank product. With the new initiative, the bank can better meet the modern consumer types of the present. With Jyske Difference, Jyske Bank signals that we are more than a bank. Jyske Bank is a bank, a store, and a modern library. Jyske Bank is the place where customers become smarter, inspired, and experience a straightforward atmosphere.”

See also this concept presentation video (2:49).

At the end of August Frank Pedersen, communication- and marketing director at Jyske Bank, will explain what they did and what the result was one year after, at Motion, the brand new experience economy conference in Norway.

The newest slow kid on the block is the Slow Home movement, a web-based design community and resource library dedicated to taking residential architecture back from the grip of the “cookie cutter houses and instant neighborhoods” churned out by community-blind development corporations, to revive the presence of good design and empower individuals to create homes that will support and fulfill them for a long time. It’s a sustainable approach in that — like with all products — a commodity that is longlasting both in terms of material quality and evolving personal taste can prevent waste and produce trusting relationships between people and their environment.

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Barton was one of the many speakers at Postopolis!, a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007.

Dan Hill, former head of interactive technology and design at the BBC and currently director of web and broadcast at Monocle, has done a tremendous job reporting on all the Postopolis! presentations (all posts here) on his great blog City of Sound.

In his talk, Barton describes several of his recent people-driven projects that to me seem very relevant to be featured in this experience design blog:

• Miners Story Project - to preserve and share stories about life in mines and mining communities in the Southwest US;
• Storycorps - a national US project to instruct and inspire people to record one another’s stories in sound;
• Timescapes - a giant 3-screen projection that enables people to approach the city itself [New York] from different angles simultaneously;
• Public Information Exchange - an initiative of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects aimed at fostering proactive dialogue between all those involved in public architecture.

In a concluding remark, Hill describes the Local Projects’ approach as “rooted, considered, elegantly open, and specific to the problem at hand” which provides “an imaginative yet pragmatic illustration of the potential in the overlap between physical and digital spaces”.

Read full story

Participants at a recent Web 2.0 conference organised by Nomades Advanced Technologies Interactive Workshops (NATIW) [blog] in Geneva, Switzerland were scratching their heads as to what it all means.

Among them were some pretty wily web veterans, including a member of the team from Europe’s Nuclear Research Centre (Cern) that actually invented the web.

Web 2.0 may not be the different species some claim, but sort of what they had in mind from the start.

“The original slogan was always to have a web that was easy to write as it was to read,” said Robert Cailliau of the World Wide Web Consortium.

“We went through a sort of dark ages where the ideas survived, but the technology needed to catch up, so where we are now is indeed the point at which the people take control of the web, make their input, which is what we originally wanted.

“Our idea was for a web that was as easy to write as to read.”

The article then continues on how the concept of user-generated content is also having an impact outside the internet, and particularly on architecture, with some designers now “putting the people in charge of changing the look of buildings”, with the “internet of things” becoming “the real departure from the original vision of the web’s founders.”

Examples of this approach featured in the article are:

• the SMS-enabled buildings in Berlin and Paris by the German Chaos Computer Club
• the interactive Swiss House in Boston, designed by Jeffrey Huang, director of the Media and Design Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (who is also working on the architecture of banking)
• a building designed by Carlo Ratti Associates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the International Exposition in Zaragoza, Spain.

Read full story

The paper was published in the latest issue of Planning and Design - a theme issue on “space, sociality, and pervasive computing“.

Abstract

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation `off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embedded in the environment around us or carried or worn on our bodies, suggests that computation is beginning to manifest itself in new ways as an aspect of the everyday environment.

One particularly interesting issue in this transformation is the move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical ones. Basically, once computation moves off the desktop, computer science suddenly has to be concerned with where it might have gone. Whereas computer science and human – computer interaction have previously been concerned with disembodied cognition, they must now look more directly at embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology.

In this paper, we explore some of the implications of the development of ubiquitous computing for encounters with space. We look on space here as infrastructure—not just a technological infrastructure, but an infrastructure through which we experience the world. Drawing on studies of both the practical organization of space and the cultural organization of space, we begin to explore the ways in which ubiquitous computing may condition, and be conditioned by, the social organization of everyday space.

I am also quoting one synthesising paragraph from halfway into the paper:

What we are suggesting then is an alternative model of space and spatiality than that which dominates current discourse in the design of pervasive-computing technologies and environments. Pervasive computing brings computation out of the traditional desktop and into the spaces beyond; but the critical feature of these spaces is that they are always already populated and inhabited. More to the point, the experience of space is the experience of multiple infrastructures — infrastructures of naming, of movement, of interaction, etc — and these infrastructures emerge from and are sustained by the embodied practices of the people who populate and inhabit the spaces in question. Spaces are not neutral, and their complex interpretive structure will frame the encounter with pervasive computing; as, by the same token, the opportunities afforded by new technologies allow for a reinterpretation and reencounter with the meaning of space for its inhabitants. Fundamentally, the experience of space is coextensive with the cultural practice of everyday life.

I highly recommend reading this paper, although quite conceptual at times , and to savour their thoughts on for instance the importance of ’seamful’ design (as opposed to seamless computing), “allowing technologies to make boundaries and seams visible”.

(Last year, Bell and Dourish wrote another very good paper together which provided a people-centred critique of the current ubiquitous computing paradigm.)

Download paper (pdf, 173 kb, 18 pages)

(via Peter Dalsgaard)

Market of Effects Symposium

From “Imagineers” to “Futurologists”, from ethnographic research to product branding, architectural designers are evermore concerned with the production of entertaining, interactive, and variable experiences through spatial, surface and material effects. These trends parallel last decade’s identification of the “Experience Economy” and its materialization in the fields of “experience design” and “experience architecture.” Formulated in the late 90s, this economic model is characterized by a progression away from subsistence commodities to a service-based economy, resulting in the trade of service experiences appealing to consumers’ emotions and feelings. Through the thematizing of user needs and the theatrical presentation of the currencies of memory, image, sensorial satisfaction and mass-customization, architecture has responded to market forces with projects that merge technology, narrative and dynamic effects in the built environment.

“The Market of Effects” will serve as a critical forum in which to explore the history, articulation and future of the experience economy in relation to architectural and urban design. The symposium solicits proposals that examine or critique designs that combine interactive and variable effects, the engagement with extra-visual sensation, the layering of data, and the appeal to individual taste and identity to construct a personalized point of sale via the built environment.

Full programme and registration information

(I just hope that Molly will post something online afterwards, like presentations, audio or video, so we can all share in the fun.)

With providing an “interactive, participative and technologically-enabled learning experience” at the heart of the university’s philosophy, SMU’s Office of Communications and IT wanted “pedagogy [to] drive the classroom design, including the technology, not the other way around.”

The IT office went on a study tour “to find out how some of the top universities in the United States put the latest equipment and software to use”. This allowed them to draw up tentative classroom designs, which were evaluated by special interest groups of professors of all the SMU Schools.

Then they created a prototype, “an experimental teaching facility, where design ideas could be tested and put through their paces”.

The article also describes some of the innovative technological solutions that came out of this user-driven design process.

Read full story

People and Practices Research (PaPR) is a group within Intel Research that engages the techniques of social science and design in order to develop a deep understanding of how people live and work. PaPR undertakes a wide range of projects in collaboration with universities, Intel business groups and other parts of Intel Research.

The presentation can be seen in video which can be downloaded from the UCI website, but be warned: it is huge (387.4 mb) and you need to download the entire file before you can view anything. The audio and video quality unfortunately leave to be desired.

(via Fabien Girardin’s blog 7.5th Floor)

“After Barcelona, Berlin, Beijing and Istanbul, the worldwide community of architects is set to meet in Turin, Italy, between 29 June and 3 July 2008, on occasion of the 23rd International Union of Architects World Congress.”

“For the first time since 1948 an Italian city is to host this important international event, choosing as its overall theme Transmitting Architecture: architecture which communicates and is communicated, in all manners and in all locations, involving every aspect of a profession which deals, on a daily basis, with the quality of life, the landscape and the environment. Ten thousand architects and architecture students are awaited from around the world.”

“Transmitting Architecture; communicating in order to increase the knowledge of, awareness of and demand for high quality architecture amongst a wide an audience as possible, which in turn will be encouraged to participate in an active and dynamic manner.”

- Event website
- Read background article

“The creative class and the creative city are two notions which have also recently forged a path to politicians and opinion-leaders in the field of urban society in the Netherlands.”

“This development presents myriad new opportunities for cities: redevelopment of former industrial zones, new business activity in the old city centres and new jobs.”

“The book describes all these opportunities and the consequences for the spatial development of the city; at the same time it also warns about the dangers of this creating a new élite of people who isolate themselves from those who miss the boat.”

“The new developments are considered in a series of 15 articles, describing the political, social and societal consequence and analysing the resulting spatial developments. Lastly, the book contains many tips for practical urban policy. Creativity and the City is a book for a broad group of politicians, policy-makers, urban planners, economists and sociologists. It includes contributions from Richard Florida, Charles Landry, the independent Dutch thinktank Nederland Kennisland (Knowledgeland), Jeroen Saris, Arnold Reijndorp, Robert Kloosterman, Nachtwacht Amsterdam (Amsterdam’s ‘Night-time Mayor’), John Thackera and others.”