Dismantling


So, to summarise the previous posts and to reference the ones I haven't gone into more detail on, here's the list of talks from top to bottom (I hope!):

  1. Christian Nold talking about emotional mapping
  2. Alex Haw talking about Spatial Control - and methods for losing it (a very fast talk - would like to see it again but slowed down to a more sedate pace)
  3. Simon Daniel talking about Moixa Energy's rechargable USBCELL batteries - it was part product pitch and part background information - 15 billion batteries are thrown away each year. He had an interesting quote "People won't buy things just because they're green but will buy them because they are better". The UK currently recycles only 1.5% of batteries - that is a lot of landfill.
  4. Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman talk about the idea of "A secular and environmentally friendly sabbath"
  5. Gavin Starks talking about the AMEE product. Consumed by services like carbonaccount and dopplr, Sounds good, might have to try and think of something to use the APIs at some point - maybe the next Madgex Hackday if I can think of a tenuous link to job boards
  6. Vincenzo Dimaria from Central Saint Martins talking about "Design made in Sicily: a change of perspective" all about tomatoes
  7. Bruno Taylor talking about "Play in a changing public realm"
  8. Richard Sandford from Futurelab talking about the Beyond Current Horizions programme - this was the graveyard, post lunch, slot and I don't have many notes from this session unfortunately
  9. Greta Corke from Diy Kyoto talking mainly about Wattson - another product pitch
  10. Edward Scotcher who mainly told stories about communication, one about the Fashoda Incident (about which I knew nothing) and others about the more current political situations in Kenya and Zimbabwe. One of his comments was "Are we bold enough to contribute without wanting fame and fortune?" His slides are available here.
  11. Bryony Worthington from Sandbag who talked about emissions trading, and the permit system and how it isn't a good method for curbing emissions. This was the most political (small p, not big p), socio-economic talk and was a contrast to some of the more fluffy, or product based talks
  12. James Smith talked about "Can software save the world?" - more specifically two projects he's been involved with from a technical perspective - The Carbon Diet and Do the Green thing (a site which I stumbled across a couple of months ago).
  13. Jeremy Gould and Mitch Sava talked about using "Government Barcamp and Resolution (of the online kind)" which was about how the government is evolving to make use of technology - like e-Petitions, the no 10 twitter
  14. David Wilcox presented a video from Steve Moore all about 2gether08 which is a festival "to explore how digital technologies can bring us major social benefits".
  15. John Gisby did a quick talk about a Channel 4 initiative which is equating to £50 million available for projects over the next 2 - 3 years
  16. The final talk of the day was Ben Saunders talking about his recent North Pole attempt


And that was that, a long day, really interesting, lots to take on board and think about.

Some notes I made about slides - the quality of which varied throughout the day:

  • put any text on the top of the slides so everyone can see it - some slides had key text at the bottom left-hand corner of the slides, which I couldn't see clearly. So a statistic that was supposed to be 95% of something-or-other actually read 5% to me - quite a different message
  • always put up a slide with contact details - name, email address, web site - possibly both at the start and end of the talk. Some of the names of the speakers were mentioned so infrequently, and quickly, that I didn't get them noted down properly and have had to do some guessing.


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