IA Summit Keynote on Calm Technology in Vancouver, BC – March 22-26, 2017

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be one of two keynotes at the IA Summit in Vancouver, BC, a fantastic conference running March 22-26, 2017!

Calm Technology and the Future of the Interface How can you design technology that becomes a part of a user’s life and not a distraction from it? This practical book explores the concept of calm technology, a method for smoothly capturing a user’s attention only when necessary, while calmly remaining in the background most of the time. You’ll learn how to design products that work well, launch well, are easy to support, easy to use, and remain unobtrusive.

About IA Summit 2017

Originally conceived as a one-off get-together in 2000, the IA Summit quickly became established as the go-to event for those of us who want to make information easier to find, understand, and share. We’ve grown in our ambition, toured North America, and continued to figure out how to build bridges of understanding which span seas of information.

The IA Summit exists to promote discourse and offer practical advice about the strategic and intentional design of information environments. Recognized globally as the peak of information architecture learning, the IA Summit is a wellspring of knowledge for every information professional.

You can follow along at @IAsummit and #ias17!

Read more and sign up for the IA Summit here.

See you there!

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I’m Speaking at the Boston Augmented/Mixed Reality Meetup on Wed, Nov 30 2016!

On Wednesday, November 30, 2016 I’ll be giving a short speech on the history and the future of wearable computing and virtual experience at Boston’s AR Meetup Group!

Summary: Early forms of wearable computing focused on augmenting the human ability to compute freely. As pioneer Steve Mann and calm technology pioneer Mark Weiser wanted, “to free the human to not act as a machine”. What does this mean for us as designers and developers, and how can we build interfaces for the next generation of devices?

Who was here before us, and how can we best learn from them? This talk will cover various topics on the history and future of wearables. We’ll also learn about the road from virtual reality to augmented reality and what we need to build to get there. This talk is for anyone interested in how we can add a new layer of interactivity to our world and how we can take the next steps to get there.

Join us to learn about AR Gaming as well as design thinking for reality design. Should be a fun night of fantastic speakers, AR demos, and networking!

Want to come? RSVP!

LocationAkamai HQ, 150 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142

Agenda6:00-6:30pm Doors open – networking and demos. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided!

6:30-8:00pm Latest and Greatest in AR

1) Neil Gupta, Founder/CEO at BostonAR, will present on what’s new in AR.

2) Ross Finman, Founder/CEO of ARSpirit, recently finished at MassChallenge and will present on his startup that brings true AR to mobile devices.

3) Darryl James, Design Strategist at The Meme Design will present on Reality Design.

4) Amber Case, TED Speaker, Author, Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media, will present on Calm Technology and the future of AR.

5) Johnny Monsarrat, Founder and CEO of Monsarrat, Inc. , who previously founded and ran MMO company Turbine (Lord of the Rings Online), will talk about Massively Multiplayer Real World Gaming, a mixture of AR and MMO, the basis for a new company he’s founded.

8:00-9:00pm Member announcements and more demos and networking.

Want to join? RSVP here!

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I’m Joining MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media!

I’m very excited to announce that I am joining The Center for Civic Media at MIT Media Lab this month! I’ll be working on a number of civic initiatives, including teaching people basic HTML and how to code a static website through The Web 1.0 Conference. I also hope to bring CyborgCamp to MIT Media Lab once more! I’m most excited to help with existing and future initiatives by members in the group.

About Civic Media

The MIT Center for Civic Media works hand in hand with diverse communities to collaboratively create, design, deploy, and assess civic media tools and practices.

The group is a partnership between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Together, they work to understand new ecosystems and to build tools and systems that help communities collect, share and act on information. Civic Media focuses on tools that can help amplify the voices of communities often excluded from the digital public sphere and connect them with new audiences, as well as on systems that help foster digital inclusion. You can read more at Civic Media’s home page.

The group is run by the fantastic and fascinating Ethan Zuckerman, who has been a tremendous inspiration and positive force behind a lot of my recent thoughts.

About the Media Lab

Known around the world as a center for cutting-edge research, the Media Lab develops new technologies that will, sooner rather than later, be a part of our daily lives. A place where the future is lived, not imagined, the Lab blurs traditional boundaries between disciplines, designing technologies that empower people to express themselves and understand the world in new ways.

Lab researchers are dedicated to inventing a better future, creating machines and technologies that not only augment human capabilities, but also relate to people on more “human” terms. You can read more at http://media.mit.edu/.

What’s next?

I’m looking forward to doing much more in the Civic Media group in the year ahead, especially along the lines of the Web 1.0 Conference, a gathering that celebrates long lasting static websites and the ability to create them.

Thank you to everyone at Civic Media, especially Ethan, for their encouragement for joining this program. And thanks most of all to Willow Brugh, the person that encouraged me to apply to Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and introduced me to Ethan Zuckerman two years ago when we brought CyborgCamp to MIT!

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