PERSONALDEBRIS  

Dr. Janet Abrams, Director of the Design Institute at University of Minnesota was the keynote presenting a talk titled: Ubiquity/Urbiuity: the B.U.G. and other Ludic(rous) Pursuits. She started out with some provocative statements about the general inaccessibility of ubicomp research and the question if perhaps the efforts of different researchers to “locate, tag, and place” people is merely “a displacement of being unable to talk face to face.” Most of the critiques were familiar ones, yet it was still good to have the same questions about purpose, necessity, and intent asked again.

As a counterpoint to much of the work featured in the conference, the rest of her talk focused on mapping projects by artists and designers. Among the projects mentioned were GPS Drawing, Amsterdam Real-Time, PDPal, One Block Radius, and PacManhattan. She also breifly mentioned Urban Tapestries, and Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? The majority of the talk however, was devoted to describing the B.U.G - or Big Urban Game. The general idea was to “engage audience in mass conversation in urban design” through developing a large scale event which turned the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul into a game board. Basically there were three teams, each equipped with a huge inflatable chess piece, and the objective of the game was to have the shortest route time over a period of a few days. The catch: the public got to decide the route through voting by phone or online.

A very interesting choice of keynote, all things considered. Also a bit of controversy ensued when Janet called out specific paper titles for using (in her opinion) particularly obscure language, and a very specific project for being (in her estimation) useless and reductive in its perspective on human interaction. Needless to say, it seemed like a lot of people approached her to chat afterwards.

this entry was posted 09/08/2004 at 12:15 pm and is filed under NEWS.EVENTS, RESEARCH. you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.