Now that I’m working at Microsoft Research, I’m doing a bit more public/academic speaking, but I’ve done a terrible job of announcing where and when. So let me take a moment to list some of the upcoming talks in the next four months in case you’re attending these conferences (or should be):
- April 7, Boston – CHI (commentator on paper about publishing at CHI)
- April 18, Penn State – Teaching and Learning with Technologies Symposium (proper talk)
- May 3, Philadelphia – American Association of Museums Annual Meeting (proper talk)
- May 7, Atlanta – Computing at the Margins Symposium (panel)
- May 23, Chicago – ICA (International Communications Association) (two paper talks)
- June 29, New York – Personal Democracy Forum
- July 2, Urbino Italy – Modernity 2.0: Emerging Social Media Technologies and their Impacts (proper talk)
- July 22, Boston – SIGIR (proper talk)
- July 25, Chicago – Blogher (panel about online safety)
Hopefully I’ll get to see some of you at these events – they’re bound to be quite fun! And utterly diverse. Needless to say, I won’t be giving the same talk at each event but hopefully they’ll all be quite entertaining!
I’ll be at CHI as well. Looking forward to meeting you again.
Cheers
Hang
I’ll be at Computing at the Margins wrangling a personal poster and a poster for one of my work projects – would love to take you up the street for dinner or lunch or just settle for a chance meeting.
Also would like to connect you with my friend & colleague Joyce Bettencourt who lives near Boston and is a social media for good person who works at Global Kids – she is super-well networked in the Boston social media scene as well and would probably know some folks you should know. Do you use same email?
–Katherine
on the off chance you didn’t already know of this, i thought i’d share
http://www.tie-boston.org/TGS/EM/viewevent/viewEventPT?id_event=3173&from_where=chapter_homepage
sounds like life is good over there, so happy for you! get some good r&r in between talks, mmK?
Danah,
I said I would leave the following thoughts for your examination or comment.
The virtual and real world issue is a quite tricky one. I hope the piece below might help to shed some light on the discussion, or put forward some interesting questions.
I commented at Joelonsoftware:
‘From airline reservations to sonic the hedgehog’, a book by Martin Campbell Kelly. The book describes very well the relationship between software in the early days, and traditional contracts used in the construction industry.
To which someone else commented:
You see, that’s where the big change in IT has come. Once upon a time, software was a capital expenditure, something you invested in because it allowed you to change your business processes, and gain a competitive advantage. Today, software is more like a general expense, not that much different than buying paper, or paying your utility bill. You can’t operate your business without it, but when was the last time a company went to a bank or financial markets to raise capital to buy software?
So, taking the above into consideration, I needed to say the following:
For all the digital revolution, office buildings and factories do still require regular updating and changes to comply with changing work practices and philosophies. It is interesting though now, companies such as Siemens retail estate and Regus offer a full range of business accommodation – from physical office space, to the ‘virtual office’.
I should mention in passing, a book about the construction industry:
Understanding The Construction Client
Code: 5234
ISBN: 9781405129787
Author(s): Boyd, David and Chinyio, Ezekiel
It argues strongly a case, that for any organisation to commission a new building facility – that by its very nature, will change that organisation. In other words, as you (the designer) go through the process of working up the design, and go about realizing the design for the client – inevitably, the client will ‘change’ as you go through the process. For example, an organisation which moves into a larger office building. That inevitably is to do with some underlying change or makeup in that organisation.
There is a consultancy in the UK, called DEGW, headed by Frank Duffy who indeed specialize in providing a business management service in addition to designing the new workspace for the client. Because Duffy believes very strongly, that these two are very much inter-linked. In other words, DEGW might suggest to your organisation a strategic mix of both physical and virtual office facilities. To suit your particular way of working.
But the book by Boyd Chinyio above, might be of some use to some of you, who are interested in that question: How much impact does roll-out of a virtual system, have upon the organisation in 2009? While software may not represent the same capital investment of a new workplace facility, I think the impacts of software on organisations – how they are ‘housed’ so to speak, in a virtual sense – needs proper analysis.
Brian O’ Hanlon
Blog format:
http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2009/04/team-work.html
B.
Of course, the usual list of texts relating to building design, and used also by web-centric folk is long indeed. I was reading Chris Alexander’s Pattern Language, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, etc, etc from the early 90s onward. Texts by Charles and Ray Eames, Jane Jacobs also.
Herman Hertzberger is a character who should be on the whistle stop tour. And there are some nice publications of Archigrams work out there available also.
But I think books like Boyd, Chinyio’s book above is a useful variant on that same trend. A book perhaps which you would find in the quantity surveying section of a good building-oriented library.
B.
I’ll be at the Modernity 2.0 conference as well.
I’ve been reading your blog and you researches since I’ve started to study social media and now… I can’t wait to see you in Italy.