summ( )n

INTERNET OF THINGS – iMAL 09 from internetofthings on Vimeo.

Rob posted the first batch of people’s feedbacks and media reactions to the event in Brussels, including this video made by the students from iMAL. Dragons galore!

A bit late announcement, but as I just learned there will be an interesting presentation of the projects broadly described as “intimate interfaces“, at V2, this coming Thursday. I will try to come there, if anyone is also planning to come I would be happy to catch up.

Last Saturday we joined the long-waited opening of the Internet of Things Council‘s opening in Brussels. The event, held in the premises of iMAL, gathered more than a hundred leading figures of the emerging socio-technological phenomena commonly referred as IoT. There were ideologists and politicians, researchers and hackers, lawyers, students, soft-, hard, and middle-ware developers, even few business people. There were us, three summ( )ners too.

The program of the event was very intense, a 12h long marathon of speeches, speeches, workshops, speeches, and again speeches; the most diverse spectrum of the opinions and also a HUGE amount of the used post-its. Kudos to Rob van Kranenburg who managed to support everything, helped to everyone, and took all the blames for all the (really tiny) mess on himself.

Our workshop was, of course, the best one (that’s an “objective opinion”). Instead of endlessly debating about the past, the present, and the possible futures of the IoT, we proposed to our newly initiated Elves, Dwarfs, and Trolls to build… Internet of Dragons (hereafter IoD)!

And do so in a very competitive manner – the three races had develop and submit their proposals (or, rather, working prototypes) to the high Council. The work was to be done under a heavy time-pressure and using a range of diverse magical resources – communicators (== woolen threads), transmitters (==sticky paper), and dynamic tags (well, omnipresent post-its).

The time pressure, of course, didn’t bother the Elves much, who start developing a Very Strategic Eternity-oriented Plan:

The team of Elves builds their Internet of Dragons

Meanwhile, the Dwarfs began accumulating to their net all the available resources, including rare Green Dragons (and Trolls started to build a hidden system to eventually derails all these plans, holding scissors behind the back).

At the end of the session the dragons networks spread their (wings? tails? talons?) widely over the entire world, shaping WorldWideDragonnet:

In a fierce competition aka collaboration the hefty prize (Belgian chocolate!) was won by the Elves (lesson learned – do plant with eternity in mind):

Later we very briefly presented the game to the whole conference (kudos to Otto and Maki!),

and got a very warm applause from the audience:

It was all great fun and lulz, but it was a very useful fun indeed: in a short period we manages to develop a range of interesting propositions, and reflected, albeit shortly, about their possible collisions with each other, their potentials limitations. But more importantly, the participants tried those different (and in fact very carefully developed) roles, and learned how different value system define the results of their activity. We didn’t manage to do the ultimate step of such game, a role swaps and subsequent development of a mode complex, integral position – that’s the task for a bigger session, which we will hopefully conduct in the beginning of the next year.

The whole set of the images from the game can be found here, and even bigger set of the images from the entire conference is here. A summary report with the key results of the game will be placed here later.

In view of the coming workshop in Brussels, the house is suddenly full with all kind of dragons, relatively peaceful and otherwise, and the smell of sulfur became not too uncommon.

Otto wrote recently about this coming event, The Future of the Lab conference in Eindhoven. Yesterday there was a public opening of this gathering in the Baltan Labs in the Strijp-S complex. The list of participants is very impressive, 35 various media labs, art and technology centers, and sort of other labs from all over the world: Kudus to Baltan for gathering them all together in one place!

At this very moment they should be fishing their ‘future mapping’ exercise (at least, according to the official program); the promise was that that all these materials will shared on their website (at some point). I was *slightly* disappointed with the presentation by Horst Hörtner, head of the FutureLab of the Ars Electronica, but perhaps because I had very high expectations from the talk. We’ve been to the Ars Electronica festival this year in Linz, and it was a stunning show, so I somehow expected to see the sparks of that in the presentation. Instead, it was just four barely visual slides, and then reading aloud from the prepared text. If one prepared the text, don’t read it at least but beam it to the wall: I read quicker than you speak, and all in all, we will have more time for the discussion. But well, at least some observations of him were very interesting.

The rest of the evening was pretty impressive, there were two projects shown, the Tracker by Geert Mul (see below) and another installation by the MUA team; so it was all pretty gezellig, as they say in Dutch.