PICNIC07: The revolution in personal fabrication, Neil Gershenfeld

Fablabs: in between the large digital fabricators at MIT, and the personal fabricators we will have in 20 years time. Costs less to send the means to create objects, than it does to send the objects themselves.

Shows $10m chip fab: fundamentally it spreads stuff around and bakes it. Contrast with the ribosome: assembler of amino acids, basically a digital machine. Shows a computer made from bubbles in fluid. Bits are carrying information, but also material. What's a digital revolution? Adding digitisation to phone systems (by Shannon) improved them. Von Neumann did the same for computers in the 50s; for old analog machines, the longer you ran them the worse an answer you got. Chip fabs are still fundamentally analogue. Not a computer connected to a tool, they should be the tool: bringing the programmability of the digital world to the physical world.

Started a class at MIT: How to make (almost) anything.

Shows off ScreamBody.

"Animals are underserved for their IT needs": Interpet explorer.

In a world of personal fabrication, you create technology for yourself, not for mass production.

Fablabs are a hack, they're not the real thing. Shows K&R with a PDP: the moment computer systems went timesharing. The Fablabs today are a PDP - at the time everything was anarchic and the PDP was in the middle of this mess; right now we're at the start of an era, with the labs getting faster, cheaper, and better.

Fablabs don't fit into current organisational structures: e.g. the Pentagon love this from a hearts and minds perspective, but they don't have an office to do tech research that doesn't involve blowing things up. "Anyone being able to make anything, anywhere breaks everyones organisational boundaries".

PICNIC07: The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experiences, Q&A

Q: Who's the target market for these games?

Dennis: The street games are difficult to monitise because there's an infrastructure and running cost. The more passive games which run for a longer period are easier.

Nicolas: It's a bit like laser games, requiring a place with a specific infrastructure. My fear is that it could be turned into theme parks. It might be designed for specific targets or niches.

Fabien: I don't see how to get out of this niche or one-shot campaigns.

Dennis: There's a spectrum; at one end you have Pacmanhattan which only 10 people have played, at the other Nike+.

Q: I don't understand why you're pessimistic about the technology. Why can't it be server-based? Location services will become standard, and motion controls like on the Wii be widespread.

Fabien: I heard this 5 years ago. You have to show me a scenario that's engaging for people to use.

Q: We have this in Korea now.

Fabien: We need Koreans over here then. (He's talking about Koreans being somehow genetically predisposed to LBS gaming I think... I'd massively disagree)

PICNIC07: The City Is Here For You To Use, Adam Greenfield

Not so much about play, more about cities. Comes from user experience background of developing large-scale web sites. Cares about human experience, not devices.

"How I learned to be an urbanist": Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Bernard Rudofsky

They worried about cars, traffic, overplanning... we've killed the street without that (though not in Amsterdam where lots of this hasn't happened, as in Seoul).

"The repeating module of doom": Manhattan streets look like a background of a video-game. Walking 10 blocks along the street, you get into a cycle of the same large brand franchises/chains repeating themselves.

Cities keep you deliberately confounded in order to keep you there and spending money. Las Vegas and malls are examples of this: a persistent sense of delocation.

And the environment is actively being made hostile: stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery. e.g. postboxes covered with spikes to stop people sitting on it; Tokyo park benches designed to be uncomfortable to sit on, impossible to sleep on, etc.

Mobile devices get us withdrawing from society, instead of engaging with it.

BUT...

Nostalgia is for suckers. How can we rediscover what it takes to make cities, again? Ubicomp is the answer! Informatic systems embedded into the environment, communicating wirelessly, imperceptible, and post-GUI.

To ambient informatics, and beyond! Information processing at different scales: body, street, etc. Nike+, RFID, etc. Urban information processing. Shinjuku lamp post which reacts to RFID contact with helpful information: infrastructure that has more agency than it used to. All this giving rise to a new model of interaction: e.g. Octopus in Hong Kong, where the entire transaction between card and reader happens in a dance choreographed by women (in particular) swinging their bags over the reader as they go through. A complex set of protocol exchanges turned into a dance.

How will the positive side of this play out?

One natural thing we do with information is visualising it. e.g. Stamen Designs' cabspotting; Paris visualised by wi-fi hot spots; and we can use these visualisations to pipe information back to people inside these places. e.g. maps of street crime made available to mobile devices.

(What are the second-order effects of a closed feedback loop like this - I avoid an area because they are areas I should avoid, so less people go there, so there's less scrutiny...)

Some of these inputs regulate the shape of buildings - e.g. living glass, with sensors that respond to CO2 levels in the room and opens windows to let in oxygen automatically; the incredible Blur Building; the carbon tower, with active lateral balancing based on inhabitants, weather and seismic conditions.

Also: addressable/scriptable objects, screens, surfaces: RFID, augmented reality, semacode/semapedia.

Upshot: a city that responds to its residents and other users (e.g. weather) in real time. "The city is the platform".

These systems will be used to reinscribe class boundaries.

The downside: overlegibility, everything is explicit and there's no room for ambiguity or plausible deniability. Everything is stated, announced, and made social: maybe we don't want our friends to know where we are all the time. Emergent behaviour: we'll have to accept the cost of this.

The upside: more efficient use of natural resources and infrastructure. e.g. letting people how long they have to cross the road before the lights change, saves lives!

New ways to use the city based on these devices. e.g. Nike+ lets Adam run in NY and compete against friends running in London and SF.

So what (whimsically) could this look like, in Amsterdam?

1. Coffeeshopper: using sensor networks in coffee shops to break down potency of waste products, to identify coffee shops by strength of product;
2. Red Light 2.0: service providers wearing an anklet and the window is a touch display exposing charges, language spoken, etc.
3. WhiteBike (beta): free, LBS-tracked bicycles deposited around the city at random. At the end of the day a programme specifies optimal route for pickup, taken by a truck.

"Systems are for cities, and cities are for people"

PICNIC07: New interaction partners, Nicolas Nova

The problem with ubicomp: the model translated into gaming is messy, it's not clean.

Examples: augmenting animals. Shows a cockroach controlling a robot; a rat with survival goggles; special collar to track floating dogs; wiring poultry up to the internet.

How about playing against animals, or using animals as partners in gaming? Pac-man against animals instead of against an AI; or another one where a rodent is pursuing you through a virtual environment.

MMORPGs for pets: a dog running around a physical environment, transmitting its movements to a dwarf inside Wow. Twitter communication with a cat: when the cat scratches the device, the device reports onto Twitter - or when a message is twittered by the owner, it's reflected on the device.

Nicolas is not interested in trivialising animals, bee-dogs, or just controlling them. It's about animals, plants or weather as new interaction partners.

PICNIC07: Julian Bleecker

Went back to the keyboard, the early human/computer interface. Designed to spell the word "typewriter" with the top row of keys, as a tool for salespeople :) Shows guidance computer from the Apollo landing module, which had 18 keys. Contrast this with the space shuttle ("which doesn't even go to the moon"), a massively complicated bank of controls: it's the same thing but with many more buttons. There hasn't been an evolution of the interfaces (shows compulsory iPhone screenshot).

So where did this interface come from? Doug Engelbart; shows patent diagrams for mouse/computer diagram.

How would computers see us? A being with one eyeball, a huge finger, etc. How might viewing how the computer sees us change the interface in more playful ways. Looks at traditional playground play: physical activity becoming a game controller. Shows children playing a meteors-like game in real time.

He's not a gamer, but is more interested in their playful characteristics. To play WoW, he'd want to be able to take a hike or go for a bike ride and have that be of value within the game experience. Talks about Nike+.