I’ve chosen Neri Oxman for my Ada Lovelace Day blog post. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher whose work attempts to establish new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, material engineering and ecology. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman’s work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism…. Neri is the founder of Materialecology, an interdisciplinary design research initiative engaging in design research featuring new initiatives at the intellectual and productive interface between science, art and design…
The following is a talk from PopTech “Neri Oxman: On Designing Form”
I have been fascinated by the work of Jane McGonigal for some time and was very impressed by her talk at this years TED conference.
“Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.” Jane McGonigal
Creator Allen Hahn developed Secret City in order to have a “mash-up of story, expanded theater, and technology facilitated work” in an involving way to see amazing buildings. Players get text messages and voicemails with clues, puzzles and riddles telling them where to go within the huge library. When the puzzle is completed, gamers get a new clue and a new piece of the story.
There are discoveries strewn all along the way: dark hallways, windy corridors and the endless tomes in the expansive building. Wandering around the library conjures images as you pass by books on your search for the next clue. (from PopCity Media)
In my presentation at this years OLA Superconference I spoke about the impact of data visualization and information aesthetics on search. I just came across a beautiful demonstration of this, Pivot from Microsoft.
…Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
Check out Gary Flake’s presentation from this years TED conference.
