Reporting from Day 3 of the Doors7 Congress in Amsterdam NL.
The show ended on a high note and seemed to be a great success. I agree. The ideas and interconnections...the flow created by the conference itself was quite amazing. The flow of ideas, concepts, prototypes, and processes came together across Biology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Music, Software Development, Critical Theory, and Device Development...as well as proposing the physical topology and conceptual models to deal with the design of interconnected/networked systems.
What a great chance to meet people who are thinking really hard about these issues and kudos to the Doors team for the forsight to assemble these different disciplines that must create together to design and deliver systems that are highly usable, convenient, sustainable, value creating (in many ways), along with the new responsibility for design decisions in this context.
Control came up as a theme both good and bad...and may be worthy of a new conference. Control:Convenience. It means digfferent things to different people and within different contexts.
J.C. Herz, of JoystickNation has revealed that the character and nature of MMORPGs, and even The Sims represents a new development model that includes the users to enhance modify and maintain the software. (Much more on that later!!!)
Franziska Nori of DigitalCraft delivered a passionate plea to reinvent the museum space. What is it for now? Is it relevant? Should it contain everything, or be an arbiter? Who are the customers, the users, the producers? What is the motivation to be represented in a museum?And, one of the biggest questions was "who is the public, and what public do museums cater to?"
Ezio Manzni, professor of industrial design at Milan Polytechnic. The Sustainability guy. The depiction of networked systems as either "large and fast" (the Highway...Airport, Distribution Networks) and also in a tighter mesh that is "close and slow" (the neighborhood, people-processes). I think this reflects a philosophical approch to the scale-free networks described in Linked by Albert-László Barabási and Nexus by Mark Buchanan.
Natalie Jeremijenko showed project with Robotic feral dogs to detect radioactivity, etc. (using modified aibos etc) and some profound thoughts. (More later...)
Neil Gershenfeld, director of Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT wants to take technology DEVELOPMENT to people that need it...whether it is eskimos to help manage wildlife populations (or to help designers that need help perhaps). This was not GIVING them technology that someone else invented but helping rural communites develop systems that THEY think would benefit. The opinion in the crowd was that this was a double edged sword.
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| The finale of Doors7 with many of the speakers and conference organizers on stage. |
-Robb Bush
16.11.2002 Amsterdam
11:26:42 AM 
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