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Session

Early Career Researchers: The Survival Guide

Tuesday 8 December 14:00-15:30 CET

Read the report made by Michelle Thorne at the OpenDoTT website.

This collaborative session anchors in the experiences of several researchers at different stages in their careers, some centered more in academia and some more in activism. From our shared reflections, we’ll write a survival guide for studying responsible technology and recommendations for how to make the most of your research career. 

Hosted by Jon Rogers and Michelle Thorne, OpenDoTT. 

OpenDoTT is a PhD programme  from Northumbria University and Mozilla to  explore how to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things.

The challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) require interdisciplinary thinking. OpenDoTT will train five Early Stage Researchers with backgrounds in design, technology, arts and activism to create and advocate for connected products that are more open, secure, and trustworthy.

Prof Jon Rogers – Northumbria University

Jon is Professor of Design at Northumbria University. His work explores the human intersection between digital technologies and the design of physical of things. He balances playful technologies with cultural and societal needs to find new ways to connect people to each other and to their data in an approach that explores not just what is possible but also what is responsible. Jon was previously a Senior Research Fellow at Mozilla and has worked with organisations like BBC, Microsoft, NASA, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Michelle Thorne – Mozilla

Michelle is a Senior Program Officer at the Mozilla Foundation and leads the OpenDoTT PhD program with Mozilla and the University of Dundee. She regularly facilitates programs that advance innovation through open, collaborative practices and advocate for equality through digital empowerment and peer learning. She founded Mozilla’s Open Internet of Things Studio, the Mozilla Festival and Maker Party. She is currently interested in making the internet carbon-neutral.

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AMA session

RIOT report release

Friday 11 December; 15:00-15:45 CET

The annual State of Responsible IoT (RIOT) report will be unveiled by Andrea Krajewski and Peter Bihr — and some of these amazing authors will be there to join in on the fun as well:

Adrian Gradinar (ImaginationLancaster)
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Designswarm)
Andrea Krajewski (Hochschule Darmstadt, ThingsCon)
Antja Karoli (Futurium)
Davide Gomba (Officine Innesto)
Dries de Roeck (Studio Dott, ThingsCon)
Elisa Giaccardi (Delft University of Technology)
Elise Marcus (Studio of Earthly Matters)
Felipe da Motta Rezende Pierantoni (Delft University of Technology)
Fieke Jansen (Data Futures Lab)
Gabriele Zipf (Futurium)
Harald Welzer (Futurzwei)
Iskander Smit (INFO, ThingsCon)
Maximilian Brandl (Hochschule Darmstadt)
Michael Stead (ImaginationLancaster)
Michelle Thorne (Mozilla Foundation)
Paul Coulton (ImaginationLancaster)
Peter Bihr (The Waving Cat, ThingsCon)
Philipp Kaltofen (Hochschule Darmstadt)
Simon Höher (zero360 Hybrid City Lab, ThingsCon)

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AMA session

Patrick Tanguay

Friday 11 December; 16:05-16:50 CET

Patrick is founder, curator, and publisher of Sentiers Media, which gathers the most interesting ideas to bring context, sense, and understanding. There’s a public weekly bulletin synthesizing and contextualizing the changes in technology and the many ways in which it transforms society, and custom monthly briefings for clients, at the intersection of technology and each client’s specific field and needs. 

Previously Patrick was a web developer for 15 plus years, co-founded the first coworking space in Montréal, Station C, and co-initiated the critically acclaimed print magazine The Alpine Review. Over the years he also helped start a number of groups bringing people and ideas together: The Awesome Foundation Montréal, Webcamp, Creative Mornings Montréal, and Hacks/Hackers Montréal. Back in the day Patrick was caretaker of the oldest and longest running blogger meetup, Yulblog.

In this AMA session he will explore the theme of Just Enough.

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AMA session

Nadya Peek

Friday 11 December; 17:05-17:50 CET
headshot

Nadya Peek is an assistant professor in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) where she directs the Machine Agency. Her work focuses on unconventional digital fabrication tools, small scale automation, networked control systems, and advanced manufacturing. Spanning electronics, firmware, software, and mechanics, her research focuses on harnessing the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals.

In 2020, Peek was named to the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35.

Before joining the HCDE faculty in February 2018, Peek was a postdoctoral research scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. She is VP of the Open Source Hardware Association, half of the design studio James and the Giant Peek, and plays drum machines and synths in the band Construction.

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AMA session

Matt Webb

Friday 11 December; 14:05-14:50 CET

Matt Webb runs a specialist consultancy Mwie based in London, UK, focusing on ventures and design-led special projects.

He helps corporates navigate the ventures space, able to define and operate in the space between business needs and the startup ecosystem. Clients include R/GA Ventures (where he was Managing Director of two London-based startup accelerators), Nesta, and GDS.

He takes on special projects, usually for the purposes of product invention and innovation. His engagement with Google produced two patents. The self-initiated project Machine Supply (a bookshop in an internet-connected vending machine) was covered by the BBC and hosted by the publisher Hachette amongst others.

Also founder of Job Garden, a recruitment startup in the ventures space, with a handful of advisory roles with London-based startups.

Speaking engagements have included conference keynotes in Sydney, Copenhagen, and Osaka, and in-house at Hachette, EE, and Nespresso.

Previously co-founder of BERG. Clients included Intel, the BBC, Google, Twitter, and Bonnier, before pioneering the consumer Internet of Things, manufacturing our own products, and spinning out an IoT platform startup. Fast Company placed BERG as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies.

Co-author of Mind Hacks (O’Reilly, 2004).

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AMA session

Vladan Joler

Friday 11 December; 12:05-12:50 CET
Black and white portrait photo of Vladan Joler

Vladan Joler is a professor at the Academy of Arts at the University of Novi Sad and founder of SHARE Foundation. He is leading SHARE Lab, a research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, and technological black boxes.

The SHARE Foundation was founded in 2012 in Serbia, with the goal to fight for sustainability of open, free and decentralized Internet and for the implementation of human rights standards in the digital environment. In the last 3 years, we have produced some of the biggest educational events in the Balkans and the Middle East (SHARE Conference in Belgrade, Beirut and Rijeka), bringing together thousands of Internet activists, and organized smaller tailor-made events in Tunisia, Ukraine and Kosovo. In 2013, we have established a new component – SHARE Defense team, a unique policy think tank and watchdog unit proposing new approaches to the issues at the intersection of law and technology.

AMA (Ask Me Anything) session

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Thousands of corporate and government actors compete to stick their flags into the uncharted territories of our behavioral, emotional and cognitive landscapes, invading deeper and deeper into our bodies and minds. This lecture mainly builds upon research and maps that have made in collaboration with others, especially Kate Crawford in Anatomy of an AI and Nooscope with Matteo Pasquinelli, and research done within the SHARE Lab.

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AMA session

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

Friday 11 December; 11:05-11:50 CET
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

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 Influencial 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).

She studied industrial design at the University of Montréal and interaction design at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

AMA (Ask me Anything) session

Alexandra will talk about the coopting of maker culture by corporations and their approach to innovation work compared to the early maker community. It’s in one of the chapters in her new book Creating a Culture of Innovation

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Session

Speculative energy futures

The transition to renewable energies requires new ways of designing. Success won’t come in the form of technologies alone – such as a more efficient washing machine or a bigger and better battery. Techno-solutionism/optimism can only take us so far in this transition. Instead, we need to also be revaluating how design positions the human/ or user / or consumer in this transition. Renewable energy technologies and infrastructures will require the humans to coordinate with nonhuman forces, such as wind, the sun, or perhaps even animals.

We suggest that the design of products and services need to re-evaluate its human-centered orientation and instead equally prioritize other types of agents. Instead of anticipating, catering to, and exceeding consumer’s needs, what if products and services balanced them with that of other nonhumans? Human-centric design has left all sorts of actors out of the loop: such as pets from smart thermostat systems.

Designing energy futures that break with human-centric norms is challenging, is it ever possible to break through our own human lenses? How can we design for people and rivers, which have the same legal status as humans in New Zealand for example? In this workshop, we will conduct a short speculative design exercise and discuss the ways in which designing and developing must change in the future.

Program

This informal workshop will last 90 minutes and will consist of a brief introduction to the subject, a short speculative design exercise, followed by a group discussion.

Organizers:

Holly Robbins is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of industrial design at the Eindhoven University of Technology where she explores posthuman design research within the context of the transition to renewable energies. Robbin’s blends design research with anthropology and philosophy of technology to explore how to make the complexity behind systems legible. Robbins is a co-author of the IoT manifesto, and also advocates for the responsible design of connected technologies.

Joep Frens is assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on the question of ‘how to design for open and growing systems’. He teaches courses on (interaction) design on all academic levels and advises a number of PhD students. In the academic year of 2014-2015 he held the Nierenberg Chair of Design at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design. When he sees a sheet of cardboard he makes a model out of it.

Lenneke Kuijer is Assistant Professor in the Future Everyday Group at the Industrial Design Department of Eindhoven University of Technology. Lenneke has worked at the touching points of social practice theories, design and domestic energy demand. She did her postdoc in the DEMAND Centre at the University of Sheffield (UK). Over the past four years, her focus has been on the HCI community and in particular the relation between ‘smart’ technologies (and their design processes) and changes in everyday life.

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Student masterclass

More-than-human fictions

Tuesday 8 December; 10:00-12:00

Smart, connected, and intelligent devices, and the algorithms behind them, are more than passive and used objects, but actors that influence the world that they share with us. New companions that roam our floors and that we talk to in our homes, new co-workers that we collaborate within our offices, and new autonomous infrastructure and robot citizens that we share our cities with. In this scenario talking about ‘user-centered’ gets quite confusing as users might not be humans, but things themselves.

In my design practice in the past 10 years, I focused on various ways to explore what it means to be an object in this connected and complex world. I have been designing sharing services to please toasters needs, political systems for power plugs to decide how to turn on lights, and VR experiences for people to experience life as a vacuum cleaner. I discovered that sometimes switching your perspective from yourself to the things that are around us and often designing, can unlock sometimes weird, but sometimes amazing ideas, scenarios, and projects.

The workshop

In this two-hour workshop, we will go through some thoughts, theories, and projects to get in the mindset of looking at the world and designing from a perspective that is ‘other’ than human and more in particular of mundane, connected, objects in a home or in a city. 

We will then work on short stories/scenarios on a common Google Doc, where you will have to abandon your human self and explore the daily life of a device, the interactions with humans and non-humans, the surprises that emerge from looking at the world from that perspective and find a way to tell that story in written form. We will then mix up the stories and find common threads between them ending up with a collection of short stories and point of views which will tell about the more-than-human world that we are living in.

Simone Rebaudengo

Simone’s work focuses on exploring the implications of living and interacting with networked, smart and autonomous systems. Sometimes they are real products, sometimes they are fictional. He is partner at automoto.farm and founding partner at oio.studio.

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Student masterclass

Smart Seesaws

Tuesday 8 December; 10:00-13:00

Designing the future of charity donations through the use of smart contracts

This masterclass is run by researchers from Edinburgh University and offers you the opportunity to explore the future of charity donations which can be personalised and controlled through the use of blockchain-backed smart contracts. These contracts give a donor the opportunity to donate money which is held under specific conditions. Once these conditions are met, the contract is carried out and the money is released to the charity.

The masterclass will start with a brief introduction to a smart contract and how it can be used to personalise and control the release of charity donations.

The workshop will then move to Miro (an online collaboration whiteboard) where we will work through an example of how a contract could be written and personalised by a donor.

You will then be split into small groups where you will develop your own vision for a smart donation. What event will trigger the release of money held in escrow, how long might the contract last, and how do you

The world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, so the second half of the workshop will focus on the dark side of smart donations. Groups will swap ideas and try to come up with ways in which people and organisations cheat the system for their own gain.

The workshop will finish with a discussion exploring under what conditions does society start to trust a smart contract, and how we can implement those conditions to a dumb digital system.

Prof Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Design for the Digital Economy, and The Internet of Things.

Dr Chris Elsden is a post-doctoral research associate in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Chris is primarily working on the AHRC Creative Informatics project.

Jonathan Rankin is a researcher in the centre for the decentralised digital economy and the acting programme director for Product Design at the university.