From scraping to chirping. Manchester’s Future Everything ...€¦ · The makers are open to...

29/05/12 Eye blog » From scraping to chirping. Manchester’s Future Everything conference looks to everyb…

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From scraping to chirping. Manchester’s Future Everythingconference looks to everybody’s future Published on Monday, 28 May, 2012 | 8:09 am

The soldout ‘Future Everything’ conference was part of a large and widerangingprogramme of events, exhibitions and workshops spread across several Manchestervenues, including the ‘Future Everybody’ exhibition, which runs until 12 June 2012.Here, Pam Bowman and Matt Edgar file their report from the twoday event.

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This year’s conference aimed to look at ‘the next lurch into the unknown broughtabout by a new participatory culture that is changing our world.’ There were a varietyof presentations, participatory workshops and panel discussions in the Museum OfScience and Industry, where speakers presented a host of ideas, tools, problems andopportunities for discussion.

One of the tools presented came from Animal Systems, the Chirp. This tool, which willbe released as an app, transmits data via sound to enable devices to talk to each otherand people to exchange data.

The chirp is created by one device and ‘heard’ by another nearby. It opens up all sortsof possibilities for local game play, encrypting data into a piece of music, branddevelopment, accessibility and simple communication. There are issues ofinterference but this communication can take place without internet access. Chirpscan send links or other simple data and the most interesting applications haveprobably not even been thought of yet. The makers are open to collaboration andsuggestion.

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The idea was inspired by birdsong but the developers were keen to dismiss thepossible interpretation that it is a romantic idea but rather that it has intrinsic charm.‘The wisdom of nature, but not in a fluffy way.’

‘The use of sound is the media but also the signal that something has taken place. Itsalso evidence that it is working – data is being transferred.’

Stand and Stare’s Theatre Jukebox is a small and fairly mobile performance space,the content of which is currently a project born out of the Mass Observation Archive,held at the University of Sussex Special Collection in Brighton. Brother and sisterteam, Barney and Lucy Hayward spent time researching the archive to find a fewstories to interpret. With such a rich collection of material to work with, the scale ofthe project feels quite limited but it is a popular piece in the ‘Future Everybody’exhibition.



Each Jukebox contains six cards that are recognised by their RFID tags and allows theJukebox to play sound and a projected animation unique to that card. There issomething immediate and seductive about the way the projection interacts with theprinted card but the temptation is to change the cards mid way through and attemptto create your own, unintended narrative.

César A. Hidalgo (below) was a lively speaker, full of enthusiasm and a desire toimpart a real understanding of the material he is presenting – the ‘Global MarketSpace’ (you can also see his talk from TEDxBoston online.)

This is not just pretty data but data with a purpose, creating a model that can be usedto predict economic growth, decline and opportunity for a country.

Juha van’t Zelfde heads up Nonfiction http://nonfiction.nl/ which ‘is an Amsterdambased and internationally operating innovation agency working at the intersection ofthe arts, heritage, media and architecture.’ He is also cofounder of VURB which ‘is aEuropean framework for policy and design research concerning urban computationalsystems. The VURB foundation, based in Amsterdam, provides direction andresources to a ‘portfolio of projects investigating how our cultures might come to usenetworked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabitcities.’



His talk described cities as entities other than the physical space, but as the world wecarry around us. An example he gave was that we no longer go on holiday and sendback postcards that arrive after we do but take our friends and family with us andremain in constant contact through various social media channels. We now havesystems for communication that ‘are a thousand times stronger than we had when wewent to the moon.’ Van’t Zelfde came back several times to Shakespeare’s rhetoricalquestion: ‘What is the city but its people?’

The following morning’s keynote speaker was Icelandic MP and hacktivist BirgittaJónsdóttir. She proclaims that the system has failed us and that the 21st century mustbecome the century of the ‘common people’. A former key member of Wikileaks,Jónsdóttir advocates active participation by the public in shaping society throughcrowd sourcing, cocreation and direct democracy.

‘Wikileaks was an icebreaker that has opened up wider discussions about how directdemocracy might work’. The Icelandic International Modern Media Initiative (Immi)is a movement that aims to establish a freedom of information and expression andemphasises the importance of participatory tools and social media to help facilitate abetter kind of democracy, one that is shaped and owned by the people. The talk set thetone for a day where the social and political were strong recurrent themes.



Workshops and breakout sessions ran alongside the talks and keynotes, with theScraperWiki workshop demonstrating how to ‘scrape’ data from the web. Delegatessuggested that ‘Drowning in Data’ could have been an alternative title for this year’sconference. In this session Chris Blower demonstrated that an interesting questionallied to a few smart lines of code could yield fascinating results that could beexploited by journalists, designers and artists alike. It’s an interesting tool that couldhelp make sense of complex and often hidden layers of information and data withinthe web. https://scraperwiki.com/

Lancaster University’s Professor Jon Whittle introduced The Catalyst Programme,which explores future (citizen) tools for social change. He introduced Juliana Rotichwho told us that ‘geeks want to save the world, too’ and showed an example of how onesuch participatory tool, the open source online platform Ushahidi (‘witness’) is beingused in the field. The original idea was to put a communication tool into the hands ofthe crowd so that they could verify events and consequently remove the ‘deniabilityfactor’ of, in the first instance, the Kenyan postelection fallout in 2008. A crowdmediated, bottomup map is created to document hot spots of violence that create avisual picture that can instigate action. A vital tool for NGO’s and agencies trying toestablish a clear picture of what is needed in times of crisis. Since then the tool hasbeen used during the Haiti and Christchurch earthquakes. http://ushahidi.com/

MIT Senseable City Lab guru Carlo Ratti (below) brought this years conferenceproceedings to a close with his keynote on Future Cities. Ratti explores the spacewhere concrete and silicon meet.



Our cities are becoming smarter and more responsive as they become embeddedwith smart materials, and electronics, a sensor – actuator model, building in ‘backtalk’, where denizens are walking sensors transmitting and receiving open data inrealtime. One such example; ‘Trash Track’, an MIT lab project that attached GPSsensors to waste and then mapped the journey of that waste creating a diagnostic toolthat maps the ‘removal chain’. Its intent is to ‘promote thinking about resourcemanagement and promote behavioural change through pervasive technologies’.

The interdisciplinary nature of the work is most clearly seen in the ‘CopenhagenWheel’ project where designers, architects, computer scientists and engineers cametogether to create a smart bicycle wheel for a more sustainable transportation system.The wheel harnesses the energy of the cyclist and then stores it for when a boost isneeded. It’s smart in other ways too and includes a sensor kit that monitors CO, NOx,noise (dB), humidity and temperature linked by Bluetooth to your smartphone. Hecited Christopher Alexander’s early research on collaboration as a way forward. Heconcluded with an observation that the top research papers are now often multiauthored where ten years ago they would have been single authors, accompanied bytwo slides to emphasise the point.

First, a Le Corbusier model of Paris with the architect’s pointing hand entering frametop right like Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ (above); next a composite head andshoulder image of a multitude of faces that have worked together across manydisciplines on projects at the Senseable City Lab (below).



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This was a fitting finale to two days in which the ‘Future Everything’ conferencethemes of participatory culture and interdisciplinary practice allied to smart toolsrevealed exciting possibilities for the future. Everything.

17 > 18 May 2012Future Everything Conference, Museum of Science and Industry, ManchesterDetails and further information at Futureeverything.org.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, publishedquarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical,informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all gooddesign bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions andsingle issues. Eye 82 is out now, and you can browse a visual sampler at Eye beforeyou buy on Issuu.

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From scraping to chirping. Manchester’s Future Everything ...€¦ · The makers are open to...

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