ThingsCon Stories: Recent Episodes
Peter Bihr & Andrea Krajewski
ThingsCon is a global community that explores how we can make connected technologies responsibly: How can we make sure that things like the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities work for everyone? In this podcast we talk to experts from our community. Season 1 features interviews with the contributors to our annual publication, the State of Responsible IoT (or RIOT Report for short). Enjoy!
About Dries and Iskander
Dries De Roeck has a background in industrial design and has been switching between the academic research and design practitioner hats ever since. He is a designer and researcher, with a strong interest in how technology impacts the day to day life of people.
Iskander Smit is innovation director at agency INFO in Amsterdam, that crafts connected digital products and services. Iskander is responsible for research and development and leading LABS. Next to that Iskander is visiting professor at Delft University of Technology faculty of Industrial Design researching Cities of Things. He is also chairman of the Dutch chapter of ThingsCon.
Links
- Follow Iskander and Dries on Twitter
- Cities of Things, a research project by Iskander
- Target is New, Iskander's website, blog & newsletter
- roeckboe.be, Dries' website
About Maximilian and PhilippMaximilian Brandl is an interactive media designer and freelance design/creative technologist. Inspired by Clarke’s third law, he loves to shape the future by designing and building magical interactions and prototypes for intelligent products and spaces.
Philipp Kaltofen is an interactive media designer and creative technologist with a special interest in the interaction between emerging technology and society. He believes in the ability of design to impact our lives in the best ways possible – if created with good intentions and regulated democratically.
Links
- The Butterfly in the Room: Master thesis by Maximilian Brandl & Philipp Kaltofen
- Maximilian Brandl's website
- Philipp Kaltofen's website
How to design meaningful voice interactions? With Felipe Pierantoni. As his thesis project, Felipe developed a toolkit with 45 practical guidelines to support designers in creating voice experiences that foster well-being.
About Felipe
Felipe Pierantoni is a product designer with 7 years of experience in large scale projects and a Master’s in Design for Interaction from the Delft University of Technology. He is particularly interested in how technology influences our perceptions, behaviors, and the way we communicate.
Links
- The Repertoire of Meaningful Voice Interactions (PDF)
- Project summary on the Delft Institute of Positive Design website
Simon Höher heads the Hybrid City Lab, and also co-founded ThingsCon. In this episode, we discussed what systems design can learn from this year of global crisis.
About Simon Höher
Simon Höher heads the Hybrid City Lab, the urban & public design unit of Berlin-based innovation firm zero360. Since 2014 he also co-chairs ThingsCon, one of Europe’s leading initiatives on building a responsible Internet of Things. In his work, Simon explores systemic concepts of technology and society in a global context, reaching from strategic foresight and innovation, to tech and data ethics, to speculative design.
He is an alumn of Seedcamp and of the MIT’s International Development and Innovation Network (IDIN). Over the past years, his work and contributions have been featured in inter- national media like WIRED, Fast.co, Make:Magazine, Deutschland Radio, and others.
Links
- Follow Simon on Twitter
- Simon's website
- Hybrid City Lab
- ThingsCon
- Change My View on Reddit
- Future Overflow
At Futurium, Gabriele Zipf and Antja Karoli help visitors engage with building blocks of various potential futures. In our conversation they share how this works in practice and how this helps explore desirable futures.
About our guests
Gabriele Zipf is the Head of Exhibitions at Futurium, Berlin. She has studied prehistory and anthropology in Munich and Paris and received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin. As a curator and project manager she realized the settings of new museums and developed the concepts for several exhibitions during the last 15 years. These projects have presented the challenge of communicating complex and often abstract themes to a broad public. She loves working on multidisciplinary topics and bringing science, the needs of societies, and the hopes of individuals together by breaking the boundaries between classic museums and science centers.
Antja Karoli is part of the exhibition team at Futurium, Berlin and works on preparing content for the exhibition and maintaining contact with different scientists, mostly with focus on the topics digitalization and robotics. She has studied communication, cultural anthropology and media education in Mainz and Passau. Her master thesis focused on the integration of virtual reality technologies in artistic productions and how technology in general can change the way in which we perceive art.
Links
- Futurium
- Futurium on Twitter
Together with Adrian Gradinar, Michael Stead and Paul Coulton of Imagination Lancaster contributed a piece titled "Must All Things Pass? Designing for the Afterlife of (Internet of) Things” to ThingsCon's RIOT Report 2020. In a speculative design scenario they describe how AI-supported things will be able to enforce their own right to repair in the future and thus protect the environment. What would be, the authors ask, if a greater degree of sustainable decision-making were to be delegated to the things themselves rather than to their users?
About Michael Stead and Paul Coulton
Dr Michael Stead is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Imagination- Lancaster, the open and exploratory design-led research lab at Lancaster University. His practice-based re- search applies speculative design ap- proaches to explore how design can help societies to understand the role of emerging technologies, including IoT, AI and datafication, in facilitating environmentally sustainable futures. His PhD research is encapsulated in the EPSRC PETRAS publication
Prof Paul Coulton is the Chair of Speculative and Game Design at ImaginationLancaster. His research explores the development of novel applications of emerging technolo- gies with consideration to the cultural landscape in which they may be de- ployed. Bringing a critical practitioner perspective to the development of such technologies, Paul’s work cross- es both Design and HCI. His research has won a number of international awards for innovation, including from Adobe and Nokia.
Links
- Follow Michael on Twitter: @_MichaelStead
- Follow Paul on Twitter: @ProfTriviality
- Follow Adrian on Twitter: @adriangradinar
- The Little Book of Sustainability for the Internet of Things (2019) (PDF)
- Imagination Lancaster
About Alexandra:
Alexandra is an author, consultant, public speaker, entrepreneur and designer living in London. She wrote ‘Smarter Homes: how technology will change your home life’ (Apress, 2018) and her new book ‘Creating a Culture of Innovation’ is out later this year. She is the founder of the Low Carbon Design Institute, a residency for creative people focused on climate change.
She ran the internet of things meetup in London for 8 years, one of the largest in the world and helped the community create BetterIoT, a free checklist to help founders and product managers make more ethical decisions. She was the founder of the Good Night Lamp a connected product for global families included in the permanent collection of the London Design Museum as a key example of the internet of things. She co-founded Tinker London, the first UK distributor of Arduino, the open source electronics education platform that kicked off the maker movement. Two of her projects are in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She was named 1st in a list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers (Postscapes, 2016), 2nd in Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and in the Top 100 Influential Tech Women on Twitter (Business Insider, 2014). She’s been included in the longlist of Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in Tech in the UK (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020).
Links:
- Alexandra on Twitter
- Designswarm
- Book 'Smarter Homes: How technology will change your home life'
- Book 'Creating a Culture of Innovation'
- Low Carbon Design Institute
S01E02: Our guest today is Elise Marcus. In our conversation, Elise tells us how and why we might move from circular design, which aims at having a neutral impact on the environment, towards regenerative design that focuses on leaving the environment in a better state than before the product.
About Elise:
Elise is the founder of the Studio of Earthly Matters. Studio of Earthly Matters is specialized in transformation design within the field of sustainability. The studio strives to break through the communication barriers between entities. Whether this is between humans, or interspecies communication such as plants and humans. For their project ‘Earthly.ai’, the studio is currently developing a game in which users can train a general ai botanist that can represent plant life on earth. With a goal to give citizens hands-on tools to grow a greener, healthier and more diverse living environment for themselves.
Links:
- Elise's website
- Studio of Earthly Matters: Earthly.ai
- Earthly.ai on Instagram
- Elise on Medium
S01E01: Our guest today is Michelle Thorne, senior program manager at Mozilla Foundation, co-publisher of Branch, an online magazine about the sustainable internet, and a ThingsCon Fellow. The internet as it is today is a massive contributor to environmental issues: All the energy that powers servers, connections, and our computers — the whole network — emits a ridiculous amount of carbon. In this episode we discuss options for making the web greener and more sustainable — carbon neutral! — and what role AI can play in this effort.
About Michelle:
Michelle Thorne (@thornet) is interested in climate justice and a fossil-free internet. As a Senior Program Officer at the Mozilla Foundation, Michelle leads a PhD program on Open Design of Trust Things (OpenDoTT) with Northumbria University and research initiatives as an Environmental Champion in Mozilla’s Sustainability Program. She publishes Branch, an online magazine written by and for people who dream about a sustainable internet. Michelle co-founded a sustainable fashion label, Zephyr Berlin.
She is member of ClimateAction.Tech, a network of tech workers accelerating climate action. She is also a jury member of the Protoype Fund, which supports open source projects in civic tech, data literacy, data security and software infrastructure and a Thinker in Residence at Climate KIC. Michelle founded Mozilla’s Open Internet of Things Studio, Ding magazine, the Mozilla Festival and a web literacy program called Maker Party. Michelle managed the Creative Commons international affiliate network from 2007 – 2010.
Links:
- Learn more about Michelle on her website and follow Michelle on Twitter.
- Branch is an online magazine written by and for people who dream of a sustainable and just internet for all.
- The Museum of the Fossilized Internet by Gabi Ivens, Michelle Thorne and Joana Moll
- Climate Action Tech
- Mozilla’s Greenhouse Gas emissions baseline
Fun fact: In German, a pilot episode is called Nullnummer.
This pilot is short and sweet. You can learn more about ThingsCon at https://thingscon.org/
You can follow us on Twitter, too:
ThingsCon: https://twitter.com/thingscon
Andrea Krajewski: https://twitter.com/krajewski
Peter Bihr: https://twitter.com/peterbihr