dConstruct brings together leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow.
There are no people in dConstruct’s collective.
Anil Seth is a professor of neuroscience who is also a bestselling author. He conducts experiments on people’s brains and then talks about it afterwards.
His talks have been known to be mind-altering.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/consciousness
Anil spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
Seb Lee-Delisle is an artist working in different media …but mostly lasers. His Laser Light Synths project is particularly fun!
Seb previously spoke at dConstruct in 2012, when he gave a talk called Pixels, People, and Play.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/lasers
Seb spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
Matt Webb is a technologist, product designer, and writer who defies categorisation. He has headed up a design studio, co-founded a start-up, and now consults on super-clever machine learning stuff. His blog is brilliant.
Matt previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2007, when he gave a talk called The Experience Stack.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/togetherness
Matt spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
Sarah Angliss is a multi-instrumentalist musician, producer and robotic artist who composes for film, theatre and the concert stage. She plays a mean theremin.
Sarah previously spoke at dConstruct in 2013, when she gave a talk called Tech and the Uncanny.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/atomicgardener
Sarah spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
Daniel Burka is a Canadian digital designer who has previously worked in the agency world, at Silicon Valley startups, and even venture capital. But now he’s doing truly meaningful work, designing for busy healthcare workers in low-income countries.
Daniel previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2008, when he gave a talk called Designing for Interaction.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/hardproblems
Daniel spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
Lauren Beukes is an award-winning author from South Africa whose book Shining Girls has recently been adapted for television. Some of her work is kind of sci-fi, some of it is kind of horror, some of it is kind of magical realism, and all of it is great.
Lauren previously spoke at dConstruct in 2012, when she gave a talk called Imagined Futures.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/connections
Lauren spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
George Oates is an Australian designer and entrepreneur. She works in the cultural heritage sector and she’s an expert on digital archives. Her latest challenge is working out how to make an online photography archive last for 100 years.
George previously spoke at dConstruct back in 2007, where she and Denise Wilton had a conversation called Human Traffic.
https://archive.dconstruct.org/2022/flickr100
George spoke at the final dConstruct, a special one-off anniversary edition held in 2022. The theme of the day was design transformation.
That the future needs us to be different is unarguable. But the world cannot change until we change our minds to meet it. We must be literate about the choices the future offers us and moral in ones we take. Mark Stevenson spends his life working with organisations of every hue, helping see their role in creating a better future, or to die gracefully if they need to. Our closing address will be a call to arms. The future is up for grabs. Grab hold.
http://2015.dconstruct.org/speaker/mark-stevenson
Mark is one of the world’s most respected thinkers and speakers on technology and societal trends, helping us see where the world is going and how to adapt. He is the author of the best-selling “An Optimist’s Tour of the Future”, and the forthcoming “We Do Things Differently: travels on the cutting edge of change”. He is the founder of the cultural change agency We Do Things Differently, and his many advisory roles include Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge, crowd-investing company Trillion Fund, start-up incubator Mass Challenge, as well as Civilised Bank and The Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Look around you. The buildings in the city you’re looking at are probably much as they looked 25 years ago (I’m taking a punt that you’re not in Shanghai.) They will probably look much like that in 25 years time too. Architecture changes cities slowly, if at all. The major changes in the way we live, work and play in cities are instead played out in a layer of objects bigger than a mobile phone and smaller than a building — vehicles and wearables, street furniture and sensors, informal infrastructure and pop-up structures, ‘sharing economy’ services and soon enough, urban robotics. This layer is parasitical, accessible, adaptable — new applications running on the old hardware — and replete with possibilities and pitfalls. A new practice of city making is emerging as a result, shaped as much by interaction design and service design as by architecture and urban planning. This talk explores some of what this might mean for design, technology and cities, and how these new intersections change what the very-near-future city is.
http://2015.dconstruct.org/speaker/dan-hill
Dan Hill is Executive Director of Futures at the UK’s Future Cities Catapult. A designer and urbanist, he has previously held leadership positions at Fabrica, SITRA, Arup and the BBC. He writes regularly for the likes of Dezeen, Domus and Volume, as well as the renowned blog City of Sound.
Throughout a career focused on integrating design, technology, cities, media and people, Dan has been responsible for shaping many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed products, services, places, strategies and teams. He is one of the organisers of the acclaimed architecture and urbanism event Postopolis!, running in New York and Los Angeles so far. He also writes City of Sound, generally thought of as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites, as well as regularly writing for architecture and design press worldwide.
Dan is also a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which selects nominees and winners for the Webby Awards, the leading honour for websites, as well as being a jury member for both Core77 and IxDA interaction awards in 2012. He was included in the inaugural list of Sydney’s ‘Creative Catalysts’for the Vivid Sydney arts festival 2009.
Books and essays include “Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary” (Strelka Press, 2012), “Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space”, Mark Shepard (ed.) (2011), “Best of Technology Writing 2009”, Steven Berlin Johnson (ed.) (Yale University Press, 2010), and “Actions”, Mirko Zardini (ed., 2008), amongst others. His writing also appears regularly in Domus’ magazine, amongst others, where he curates the SuperNormal series. He is also a strategic design advisor to Domus.
His design work has featured in the Istanbul Design Biennal (2012), the AAA exhibition ‘Remodelling Architecture: Architectural Places - Digital Spaces’ (Sydney, 2009) and ‘Habitar: Bending the urban frame’ (Gijon, 2010).
At a conference focused on ‘designing the future’, the concept of and narratives about time travel seem like inevitable topics of conversation. While there are a wide variety of types of time travel stories, the narrative Ingrid has been thinking about the most is the one in which someone from the future (or, depending on how you think about time travel paradoxes, a future) comes to the past and intervenes to rewrite and/or game their present.
Ingrid has been thinking about this particular kind of time travel for a few reasons. One is that she has been kind of obsessed with the Terminator movies (for reasons she’ll get into a little bit later) and the other is she’s been interested in emerging technologies and systems that, while not literally from the future, share certain motivations with the revisionist time traveler. The time machines used today don’t look like Deloreans. They look like NTP servers and low-latency networks, like real-time data streams and predictive models, visitors from algorithmically bestowed futures to let us fix, or at least game, our current conditions.
These systems for forecasting futures, however, often lend themselves to the same predestination paradox or self-fulfilling prophecy faced by the T-800 in the first Terminator movie. SKYNET creates John Connor by trying to kill Sarah Connor, governments create terrorists by trying to find terrorists, capitalism eats itself by trying to move faster than capitalism.
So Ingrid been thinking a lot about this because she’s been thinking about resistance—resistance within time travel narratives and resistance to proscribed futures. How do you design a future with resistance built in? What does that resistance look like? In popular time travel narratives, it tends to look like a lot of property destruction—like taking, or quite literally breaking, time and time machines. While she may not be completely sold on that method, there are some examples of acts of civil disobedience that she thinks might offer some insights into the fragility of futures and why, exactly, the Terminators keep on coming.
http://2015.dconstruct.org/speaker/ingrid-burrington
Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes on a small island off the coast of America. She’s a member of Deep Lab, the author of Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide, and currently an artist in residence at the Data and Society Research Institute.
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