IdeaFestival

Space boomerang!

Now for the answer to question you probably weren't asking today: How does zero gravity affect the flight of a boomerang?

The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, released this video showing that that answer is "not much." As Universe Today pointed out, while microgravity had little effect on the "roomerang," it isn't the same as space, which has zero gravity and is a hard vacuum besides. Aerodynamics are useless there. JAXA on the same mission released a fleet of paper airplanes to see how that they might fare during a descent through Earth's atmosphere.

Wayne

"I, Gamer"

In a brief post at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds wonders what the societal impact will be of a generation of game players that self-identify as "gamers." Without providing any answers - are there any now? - I just thought it was an interesting question, as was the title of his blog post.

Wayne

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

Podcast: Why fashion matters

IF continues to release great audio from the 2007 IdeaFestival.

The very latest podcast features New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker discussing her creative process, design style and the meaning of fashion. Podcasts may be obtained directly via RSS or from iTunes.

Wayne

Dilbert gets his social on

Delivering sarcasm with a well engineered mix of pith, pity and put-down Dilbert has long been a favorite of many office workers and introverts like me who spend too much time in their heads. Still, every once in a while the strip will miss the punch line.

If all that time spent in quietude has sharpened your observational powers, now you write a better one.

Wayne

Curry Stone global Design Prize makes IdeaFestival home

The Curry Stone Foundation, which funds activities to support healthy communities and public health, has announced the establishment of the Curry Stone Design Prize for “…exceptional emerging designers with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity.... Public health is best achieved when all people have access to shelter, health care, clean air, clean water, clean food, education and live in a time of peace," according to a news release accompanying news of the financial gift to the University of Kentucky.

This $100,000 design prize will be presented annually at the IdeaFestival beginning this year.

Developed in partnership with the University of Kentucky, College of Design, the prize is being supported through the foundation established by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone of Oregon. 

IF is excited about the establishment of the Curry Stone Prize and the opportunity it presents to greatly expand the design content of the festival, which has hosted such design luminaries as Cameron Sinclair and Adriaan Gueze. More here.

Kris

Unwinding "Bolero"

What do the composer Maurice Ravel and Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist-turned-artist who died of a rare disease last year have in common? Both suffered from the same brain disorder and both produced memorable art at the age of 53 - Ravel composed "Bolero" and Dr. Adams painted it. New York Times:

'Bolero' alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments.  At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato base lines.... [building] without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.

Adams translated the music thusly:

Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of 'Bolero.' The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme.... The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion.

Because of the way one variant of the disease progresses, some individuals develop artistic talents as the brain literally reorganizes. For Adams that meant an area of the brain known to be responsible for the integration of perception such as color, sound, touch and space took on a larger role to compensate for the diminished capacity of the frontal cortex, resulting in an overwhelming creative urge and an ability to cross-scribe sense. Over a ten year period, Adams gave medicine unprecedented insight into that urge by undergoing periodic scans that documented the changes in her brain.

Her art may be found here and here.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Synesthesia

Design elasticity and less stuff

I enjoy creative descriptions of how the mind copes with change, recently writing, for example, about the  opposable business mind. And even more recently, I've linked a couple of times to an installation called Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art.

If you believe that designers are merely glorified decorators, Paola Antonelli would like a moment of your time to challenge that assumption. In a recent SEED essay, she argues that design and designers, for example, play a large role in simply making change manageable:

Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of human intelligence, but today's instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity. The by-product of adaptability and acceleration, elasticity means being able to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one's own rhythms and goals. It means being able to embrace progress, understanding how to make it our own. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change (my emphasis, above).

She further links elasticity to the need to bring the monuments produced by scientific discovery to a human scale, and how science and design are engaged in unprecedented cooperation.

If you're at all interested in how modern fast-paced and beery-eyed change can be made more understandable - and how it is being made more understandable - I encourage you to read the essay.

Much to my delight, Antonelli also suggests that coping-with-change can play a role in a kind of conservation:

[E]ven as technology offers us more and more options, many agree that we in fact require fewer—not more—objects in our lives.

Here, here. That's a design challenge I can embrace.

Wayne

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo