convivio 2006, and the Edinburgh fest

I write from Edinburgh, after finishing a 2 week workshop called convivio 2006. The theme of the workshop was 'Technology, enjoying it or enduring it?' Me and a bunch of other attendees were part of the 'Bandwagon' atelier. We designed a system which helped the rate any performance, of the festival(the context here was the Edinburgh fest) by the audience with the help of a special haptic device called the 'star'. As always I managed to bungle while handling Silvio's(our atelier leader)mac, so there were awkard moments for me during the presentation. By now I think I have lost the nerve of feeling awkward during the presentation, because I seem to be doing it so often, and especially during handling a presentation device.Other than this regular goofups, I found my stay here for convivio very satisfying and have met many interesting people and attended many intense lectures, the focus being on technology-user centric design-ethnography-prototyping and the usual interaction design jargon types. A very fruitful and exciting time indeed.
key topics-
Edinburgh art fest
fringe fest
Scotland
UK

Speckled computing, Prof DK Arvind
crowd study, Kyntia
bridge between physical and digital
space-as horizontal and vertical
creativity and children- Jean Baptiste- the facist prototyping design teacher
Dr Ingve Sundblad, Swedish tech design guru, director of convivio- movie- the kitchen stories

and so much of learning...

World flow countrified_3

As the world takes aid of technology to make life easier, it(technology) becomes more complex. This complexity has to be represented in a simple way, with a simple face, an easy shell that is simple for people to use. To learn how to design this face/shell is a constant endevour, which I understand to be interaction design.

Milan - city as a floor for celebration

I just watched the last 30 mins of play, with friends, by the naviliglo. The navilglos are water canals, which criss cross around the centre of Milan, thats where you have all the bars, lounges fancy places, and everybody puts up big screens for people to watch; aperitivo time, buy the drink the food's free.

There was one good moment which was captured very well, after Zidane got the red card, showing his back with the number 10 jersey, going down the stairs with the cup in the foreground, did you see that? its worth keeping a clip of that.

I was alone, i got waiting for Elisa's call, and missed my other friends, it might sound strange but it didnt matter who was next to you, it was dance all throughout, glee dancing to the sound of victory. I went on top of the statue in front of Duomo, meeting people from all over, everybody nodding their head with a satisfied smile if not bellowing sounds of joy.

It rocks where i am;
after a while i didnt bother, it was not about taking pictures, i dont have lots, it was either pump and dance, or take pictures, i chose to pump and dance.

I didnt feel alone without friends, there were djs all around Duomo...blasting sounds of victory; it didnt matter now, the win was there, strongly secure, Italy was happy, high energy around me, like a big rave, frenzy dancing everybody, people half naked, hugging, kissing, screaming, pumping to the beat of victory.

At Duomo when Italy beat Ukraine in the football worldcup quarter finals

Like most Italian cities Milan's city centre also has a church with a large piazza, its called piazza Duomo, because the church is called the Duomo, and the entire city has radially expanded around this cathedral. And its here that Italy's largest television provider installs a huge l.e.d. screen and the match is broadcast. Huge crowds gather, trumpets, bellows, football songs, abuses fill the piazza as a dense aural cloud, a continuous shower of sounds.Its summer, the young precipitate the alcohol excess as sweat. Its the smell of a crazied nation seeking victory. Now that explains my meek presence, with my canon ixus and beer cans from the supermarket, to be amidst the energy, to be a part of the frenzied crowd, to shed my meekness, to record the and store the energy, in something as banal as pixels. A full bodied crowd's energy is so powerful that it can transform, and that transformation is addictive.

The last obscure post

I am still trying to recollect the memory of my last post, this happens when you have a Korean house party and want to break away from a cast which has been holding you for a while. Thanks to the surge.

What really matters are ones values. What one considers values inspite of ones upbringings or culture. It is such because what one derives from the culture is still given, what one promotes is an opinion what one has formed because of oneself. I want to thank all my teachers for this.

World flow-countrified_02

As is so common today of a friend asking your wellbeing through unusual channels, this time it was through flickr, as a comment on somebody elses account; and that friend was Zeenath, asking if Milan had swallowed me, on Aditya Dev Sood's flickr picture comment.And so, I answered no;as another comment on the same picture, that Milan cant digest me, and Neil Churcher and Fabio Serigio from IDII, as project managers for 'Applied Dreams' were trying hard to do so.
Digestion, yes, I cant say that it has been the best for my system ever since I started cooking on my own in Milan, but being human am sure my ever adaptable system will soon cope with the snail paced improvement in my culinary skills.The problem of digesting food tackled there, I moved on to digesting the brief of the 'Applied Dreams' workshop.

World flow-countrified_01

Whats drives the world? Interests of theory, simplifying for my unsophisticated thought flows. With the current system flows getting richer and and denser, criss crossing time around the sphere and along it, we are seeing the 'infosphere' emerge as a crust which the ozone hadnt anticipated; of having a bastard cousin below it. So, information flow, below which rules the layer of economy, where everybody wants to connect, and it has laid a strong foundation, for it to be so.Then happens the banal layer of physical objects, which contain most of the needs for humanly life and being, consuming most of the natural resources in the form of energy.Can free flow of information directly connect to the layer of physical objects? bypassing economy? My naive questions begin... I shouldnt think more than i must, but thats the problem of culturally rooted countrifieds, they do...discussions...debates...ideas...arguments...simplified...

Technoenergia awareness

Knowledge transfer as communication seems to piggy back more and more on forms of electrical energy with linear-ating time. Writing, print, microphone, and more complex ict industrial forms have their life running on electricity. So, what's new? Truism on the screen, not just that, an exercise to your visual senses is the attempt.
Conveying; that electrical energy converts itself into bits of communication taking a particular form as knowledge.
Physics dances with psyche.

The observed observer-Ethnotechgraphy

The ac/rt of participant observation, ethnography being means of understanding human behaviour is a paradox in itself. With the 'observed' in a constant act of being observed, would behave as if being observed and not otherwise. The very presence of a foreign observer, would make it an interaction than an uncontaminated spotless act of a singular self. Ethnography the mini theatre, a drama, the act and the audience. The producer and the consumer. Everybody knows it, theories run awarding doctrates, a very aged problem; issues of privacy, rights and democracy. I write not with a theortical background but with having adventured as the audience mostly, and even as the observed many a times.
The naive ends the paragraph.

Lets employ electronica, let there not be a visual dimension to the act of observation, lets syntheticise it, lets produce live electronic maps, lets observe patterns, lets laboratorise the world, lets see the world flat, lets draw, lets 'tagorise' technology.

Milanese music-ing

The heat is missing for now, it needs a vacation. And why shouldnt it? Even the heat needs to travel up the mountains, to see what it feels to be "cool"?And its not travelling higher to feel adventrous; it comes naturally to anyboby who is "hot", higher the temperature lighter the weight. And thats why the heat doesnt seem to care...as it knows where its travelling...