[dorkbotpgh-announce] Tom Igoe @ CMU next Wed , 22 Apr

[j. eric townsend]

[
Hey dorkbot peeps, Tom is visiting PGH for a day and giving a talk. 
He's a leader in the diy/tech/making world, author of "Making Things 
Talk" and "Physical Computing", and a player in the Arduino open-source 
hardware project.

--jet
]
	
Things as Information and Un-Making Them Right
Tom Igoe
Associate Arts Professor at the ITP in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU
Apr 22 2009 4:00pm
Newell Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Abstract
Recent innovations in materials and processes have radically changed how 
stuff is made. There's not much talk, though, about how stuff is 
un-made. At best, we ship our old electronics off to the manufacturer 
and forget about them. What happens next is often a process that's messy 
enough to make sausage-making look pretty. If we want to innovate 
sustainably, we're going to have to close the loop on how we un-make the 
remains of earlier innovation cycles. That's not happening as well as it 
could now. Part of the reason this happens, I suspect, is because the 
fabrication of new technologies is proprietary information, and 
therefore recyclers don't know how to un-make stuff safely and cost 
effectively. They have to trade off one for the other. Bt what if 
electronics came with a list of ingredients, so that recyclers could 
safely and cost-effectively un-make things? What if all the plans for 
making a thing were online, so that you knew how it was made, and how to 
un-make it? In "Shaping Things", Bruce Sterling put forth the idea that 
we could think of disposal and reuse of goods as an information design 
problem. Drawing on the work of entrepreneurs like Ray Anderson, many 
interaction design programs have begin teaching service design, thinking 
about the things we make not as goods to be bought, but as services to 
be leased. I'd like to propose that we also think about the end of our 
things' lives as part of the process of making things. In this talk, 
I'll look at some assumptions about how we make interactive things 
individually and at scale, and propose a few places we might begin 
making changes.

Speaker Bio

Tom Igoe is an Associate Arts Professor at the ITP in the Tisch School 
of the Arts at NYU. He teaches courses and workshops in physical 
computing and networking, exploring ways to allow digital technologies 
to sense and respond to a wider range of human physical expression. 
Coming from a background in theatre, his past work has centered on 
physical interaction related to live performance and public space. 
Current research focuses on ecologically sustainable practices in 
technology development and how open hardware development can contribute 
to that.

Igoe has written two books on physical computing: "Physical Computing: 
Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers," co-authored 
with Dan O'Sullivan, and "Making Things Talk" Both have been adopted by 
digital art and design programs around the world. He is a regular 
contributor to MAKE magazine on the subject as well.

He has consulted for HBO, The American Museum of the Moving Image, EAR 
Studio, Diller + Scofidio Architects, Eos Orchestra, and others. He is a 
collaborator on the Arduino open source microcontroller project. He 
hopes someday to work with monkeys, as well.

Host: Eric Paulos
Meetings: Please contact Jeanne McDade, mcdade at cs.cmu.edu for meetings
	


For current HCI Seminars Series: http://calendar.cs.cmu.edu/hcii/events


-- 
J. Eric "jet" Townsend, CMU Master of Tangible Interaction Design '09

design: www.allartburns.org; hacking: www.flatline.net;  HF: KG6ZVQ
PGP: 0xD0D8C2E8 AC9B 0A23 C61A 1B4A 27C5 F799 A681 3C11 D0D8 C2E8