Category: Uncategorized
The Ersatz Constellations
Constellations are a kind of necessary pareidolia, concentrating infinity into a human-scale narrative. The Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese and Arabs all sought to make sense of the world by projecting their cultures onto the heavens and their narratives still permeate our culture. Our recently born near-constellation of robots – Hubble, Spitzer, Fermi and Kepler – have furnished us with a hi-def and precise…
Longevity, Life Services and the Cloud
At Orange, my R&D group oriented its work around the notion of “life services” in which customers would find daily utility. As the web approaches its 7000th day, life services have come to mean something very different to me… October 1999: I signed up for a Hotmail account in order to use MSN Messenger. January…
Shamim Arra {1939 – 2011}
Last Saturday morning, I awoke to the heartbreaking news that my aunty Shamim, had passed away suddenly in Karachi. Amongst our extended family, my parents – two of the eldest – are seen as role models to their siblings and cousins. But Aunty Shamim was where my mother, her first cousin, looked for her own inspiration;…
Countering The Machines Of Loving Grace
"It's not the effect of technology on society, on economics, on religion, on war, on culture – etcetera – on art, it's that everything now is existing in technology as the new host of life. It's the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness…" Godfrey Reggio, director of Naqoyqatsi The recent broadcast of…
Your To-Do list is going to KILL YOU!
If you have an ever-expanding to-do list - then you're failing to understand your mortality. That's right, your cherished, life-affirming task list is ultimately a pathway to your own death! Let me explain… Years ago, my good friend Rich Gibson and I were thinking about design principles for software that reflects who you are, what…
Leaving Mobile Messaging 2.0
After two years, two editors and 140-ish posts, I'll be stepping back from my role as a contributing writer to Corante's Mobile Messaging 2.0. The first couple of years for MM2 were a sponsored curation of thought leadership and conversation around mobility. As my first paying gig as a professional writer, I learned a great…
ETech Day One… (rough notes)
Saul Griffith – Energy Literacy, IoV! Your Cellphone Is Your Controller – megaphone, making digital signage interactice http://www.playmegaphone.com/ Eric Rodenback onstage from Stamen Design walking through various visualisations from Stamen’s portfolio – oakland crime maps, london olympics travel times and property/cummuting vectors Sun’s chief gaming officer – gamers are raising gamers…it’s not a new market,…
About Me…
{ this is a test page ONLY! } Like a neurotic superhero, I have many identities… One of the founding partners of Carbon Imagineering, the emerging technologies think tank and product hothouse behind Fingertip, mee:view, Believr and Personomii…we’re building the next generation of consumer internet applications… (Formerly, Deputy Director of Technology Research at Orange UK…