While a large part of the world was creating memes of a galloping Gangnam Style, K-pop dude, a smaller part was attending absolutely fabulous ‘The Conference’, listening to Kate Miltner explaining what a meme actually is and why it arises. The charming, smart Kate, with a dissertation on LOLCats (!) from the London School of Economics was all tuned-in.
The Conference, arranged by Media Evolution in Sweden’s third city, Malmö, sported a dandy line-up of speakers from all over the world, Ocean Observations being one of the grateful contributors to this inspirational squad.
The Conference was opened by brainy Johanna Koljonen, a great choice of moderator, and followed by the first keynote speaker Ben Hammersley, editor at large at Wired UK. Ben’s talk on how the nerds have won http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6909079/ben-hammersley-keynote-on caused both consents and objections, one of the more elaborated and interesting ones coming from media strategist Brit Stakston (Swedish post, please add a touch of Google translate) http://www.jmw.se/2012/08/24/samhallsutveckling-endast-for-nordar/ where she states that revenge, of the nerds, “is an extremely lousy and dangerous force for social development.” The conference continued with “The city says hi” curated by luminary Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org (if you only follow one Twitter account, it should be hers, you’ll get such a sensational brew of the world) and vitalized by Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6908233/jake-barton-the-city-says-hi Wearable design technologist Kate Hartman’s keynote on new technology was a liberation including expressive hats and the visualisation of how important it is with tactile feedback in interaction with technology, http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6909224/kate-hartman-keynote-on-new
During the second day, Korean artist and engineer Hojun Song gave rise to the largest applauses during the conference after his entertaining speech on how to launch a satellite as an individual, http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6912675/hojun-song-keynote-on-make Later on Jeremy Fisher spoke on collaborative innovation and how to utilise users’ needs to accomplish and finalise things when designing different mechanisms in a digital service, check! Another inspiring session was the one on the origins of creativity where psychiatrist Simon Kyaga from KI spoke about the relation between genius and madness and Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf taught us how to strive for a creative, happy working environment. It’s great to be reminded of the fact how much it means to be greeted with a sincere ‘Good Morning’ when one arrives at the office in the morning, and how that can affect the rest of the day, in a positive way, http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6913634/alexander-kjerulf-origins-of
Our Sofia Svanteson spoke about the future of interaction design in her speech ‘From Chernobyl to Terminator, an odyssey in interaction design and an appeal for change’. She addressed the importance of comprehensible digital, computerised systems and how we interact with services and systems in the future is up to us, not Steven Spielberg, even though he is great at spreading the techniques. There are so many different visions, and it is our choice which one to follow, and it is our choice to decide how well we want these systems to work, and how easily we want to interact with them. Technology doesn’t just happen. http://mediaevolution.23video.com/video/6910455/sofia-svanteson-the-future
All presentations can be found here:
http://mediaevolution.23video.com/channel/6908160/the-conference-2012
Sayonara!
