I was lucky to participate to the PICNIC 08, thanks to the research group Enquiring Minds which was created by Anne Helmond and Sabine Niederer. The exchange was based on a feedback report inspired by the learning and exchanges that PICNIC brought me, in the frame of the different researches, rather informal, but which help me to eleborate on projects I manage or impulse.
The frame : PICNIC is a beehive, a place of movements and interactions. As those thousands of bikes which cross back and forth to converge at the Westgasfabriek, PICNIC is to me like a giant brain, with thousands of synapses that meet, and join, and divide again. Both informal and professional, PICNIC seduces me by its mixing of students, researchers, scientists of all fields, almost and already gurus, thinkers, inventors, artists and creators, marketing and executive people. … Through the labs, the specials, and the conferences,
the place is ideal to exchange, share, confront with freedom. In fact, Picnic is very close by its shape, from the theme which is debated Collaboration and creativity.
Trends: Time of all convergences
The digital convergence borrows all shapes. A bit like a giant mashup between hardware and software. No one can say what will be the final shapes of this « thing » that we create each of us at our own place. Two images cross my mind, one from Matrix, one from the wall of images of Minority Report. With a piece of Total Recall… Services & products are merging, mixing both real and virtual, with multifunctional terminals that become news senses of the human being, willing to give him total ubiquity. Everyone is looking for the standard, that would be consensual. Open source really modified the time of innovation. Strangely, the game industry shows the way thru hardware and software offering lots of inspiration for both use of immersion and simulation. Education and medical purposes are just behind.
Social/Me : I am the Media. Paradox : the machine changes me into a more social « unity ». All digital productions become social objects. Pieces of chat, posts, movies, picture, datas, widgets … that I put on the web, circulate and are shared into circles, networks… where i belong… Everything can be public, limited or private. Politics and citizens are getting closer, the powers are constantly moving, education is choosing new paths, transversal interactions are booming to draw new kinds of collaborations more direct and instant. Intermediate people or organization are disappearing replaced by 2.0 services based on a « producer to consumer »’ model. In the same time, many professional services networks are emerging, organized around strong communities. I become more aware and more demanding, my perception of time and location is changing, while I surf from a network to another, knitting my personal world of interactions.
Mobile : The cell phone is a 2 way-radio terminal which connects me to this « virtual social me » in real time, and allows me to interact cross-media with a multitude of datas. It is the fast food communication, and its shape and use, are deeply influencing the material communication itself. It is in itself an optique and semantic reader ready for the augmented reality, a spatial localization engine. It is also becoming the terminal of other external applications as a bridge between reality and virtuality.
Real/virtual : With the special focus I gave to the conference about virtual worlds and realities, I end up thinking that the border between real and virtual is progressively disappearing. A bit like an infinite fractal, real includes virtual, and vice versa. Facebook is as virtual as Second Life is, and virtual goods whjich transit there are the prelude to a successful economy. Footbridges and bridges are been being built everywhere. And small and medium-sized businesses, fortune companies and industry, are starting to understand the time and the money they can spare using those 3D worlds as places of collaboration and
training for world delocalized teams.
Green. The concept of sustainable development is everywhere. The conception of services better takes in account the user perception and experience, and the role of virtual and real social communities. The energetic problematic and the massification accelerate experimentations towards new representations of the streams and the use of augmented or virtual realities.
I think about how this world which appears, is transforming us. Interconnected in real time we become the media, receiving more and more informations that we have to sort and organize, inventing new types of collaborations. There is no first and second life, there is the « connected » life. And still a lot of questions about security, liberties. I would have like to discuss about human beings, emotions, and of those holes we are opening for the best and the worse. But my Thalis was programmed at 18h26, with wifi onboard...
To end this feedback note, PICNIC was a great opportunity to get the big picture and add new
entries to my main project. I really want to thank you all for financing my participation.
// L'homme et sa sécurité doivent constituer la première préoccupation de toute aventure
technologique. Albert Einstein
Mankind and his security must constitute the first preoccupation of any technological
adventure. //
