From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
This site documents the process and the results.
Service Ecologies and The Geospatial Web
Mike Liebhold is here today to talk on the topic of the Geospatial web.
What does the IFTF do?Brainstorm through possible, plausible, probable and preferred futures. Present a context for understanding the future. Up to clients to develop insights based on the foresights. Foresight to insight actions is the operating principle of the company.
Research areas are sociological impacts of technology.
Some IFTF clients: AMA, Johnson & Johnson, Alstate, Intel, Pepsico, Lego, Kraft, Kodak, Honda, McDonalds.
Methodologies: Mapping, Ethnographic, Expert workshops & interview; Scenario development & analysis; Surveys & quantitative analysis (sort of..); content facilitation; prototyping/artifacts (building objects from the future.)
What happens if the US holds onto ICANN and others want to split off the root server infrastructure?
What is the lesson here? Chinese are buying lots and lots of Nextel, etc., so they can influence technology design by virtue of their force in the economics of design — they can say what they'll buy and when they're buying lots of something, they can shape design and thereby create protocols or variations of protocols independent of task forces.
Platforms: P2P Networks
* Mesh Networks
* Automotive Nets
* Sensor Nets
* Self-configuring Nets
Trend in the future for web-like experiences out in the world. Leads to the Geospatial Web.
What is interesting here? Imaginary world draped over physical world. Long standing area of interest for Mike. Profound new kind of world wide web, hypermedia objects are not just identified by URI or URL but by spatial coordinates — lat/lon/elevation. What are these? Text objects; sounds; images. Enormous amount of cartographic data that should be viewed in situ. Invisible attributes become visible. Sentient landscapes. Context-aware computing. Geoweb Geospatial EcosystemUsage: Computational Grids
* health mappingTechnorati Tags: geospatial web, locative media, Service Ecology
With “A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begins With an Open Code
In collaboration with ARNIC, Michael Liebhold, Senior Researcher, The Institute for the Future spoke to the Networked Publics group on October 27, 2005 in the living room of the Annenberg Center for Communication at 2pm.
I've posted some notes from the first day of the Urban Play and Locative Media workshop on my blog.
I posted a brief note on LBS — Location Based Services — with a bit of inspiration from Russell Buckley's dispatch on the pathetic offerings recently announced for mobile phone-based LBS services from British Telecom.
It made me think of the door-before-the-house way of designing for social practices. When you put the meme-fetish-acronym du jour ahead of an appreciation of the practice you're supposedly designing for, you wind up with ATM finders.
This is a pretty important netpublics theory object, I think. Discussed more fully here:
Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air) theory object.
(Note the deadline for abstracts is October 14th)
Edited from: http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz/publications.html
To be published concurrently with the ultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts symposium in Auckland, December 2005, Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul state that they have interest from international academic publishers in a book on issues relating to the conference from those not attending the event, including work outside the regional focus of the symposium.
Themes that may be addressed in the publication include:
* Place-based new media practices
“The Network City: Emergent Urbanism in Contemporary Life
MIT's Digital Derive project will be shown at the M-City exhibition (curator: Marco De Michelis) in Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 01, 2005 - Jan 08, 2006.
"Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity... Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website... The Real-Time City Map will register and visually render the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz, thus showing a different layer in the use and experience of the city. Furthermore the users of A1 Mobilkom Austria in Graz will be tracked anonymously by 'pinging' their cell phones as they move through the city. The record of this movement will be collected, processed and finally displayed as set of dynamic traces showing their paths through the city on the same map..."
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