Personal schedule for Chris Spurgeon

Software development happens in your head; not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware—our own brains? Read more.

Designers and developers are advancing the state of online mapmaking at a dizzying pace. The introduction of global slippy maps in 2005 represented a new era of interactivity and sophistication in geographic user interfaces. Are we on the cusp of another such leap? Stamen says yes, and shows what new work and new advances are being made to push the envelope still further. Read more.

Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.

The American family consumes resources vastly beyond its "share"--more so than other nation's family. However, due to technology, increasing environmental awareness, and a changing economy, it is also the best poised to make a course correction. Worldchanging's Alex Steffen returns to show the results of his latest project about how to make us more sustainable. Read more.

WITNESS works at the intersection of human rights, media, and technology, and was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel. Our mission is to use video and new technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. Read more.

The key to developing low-cost computing in developing markets is power consumption. An often overlooked aspect of that is the screen. Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the OLPC, has started a new company aimed at a low-cost, low-power screen. She will share insights gained in manufacturing, developing, and deploying this new technology. Read more.

Distributed networks create distributed ownership. The identification and wireless networking pieces of ubicomp allow us to turn familiar objects into subscriptions. At a fundamental level, this affects how those objects look, work, and are used, and it changes our understanding of the nature of ownership and utility. What has already become a subscription? What will? Read more.

Come learn about synthetic biology and watch a fun hands-on demo where we build a genetically engineered organism! It's like Spore, only real. No experience necessary. Read more.

Consumerism is crashing, but the logic of digital, networked products promises a path forward. The emerging sustainable economy connects a renewed "repair culture" to reputation systems for companies and customers. It leads to the platformization of everything, ultimately allowing digital products to drive an overwhelming share of economic activity. Read more.

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. In this talk, Igoe will explain where stuff goes when you throw it away, how that's affecting the environment, and how sharing some of the intellectual property of the making process can facilitate the un-making. Read more.

Does paper vs. plastic even matter compared to how you got to the store? Everyone today is aware that there are looming environmental problems, and many are looking to create change. This talk derives a list of the industries and areas of our lives that most need change, in order of priority, and suggests what some of these changes should be. Read more.

Want to help fix democracy? Hackers, those crazy Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes, have begun a sustained assault on government with projects like the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress, GovTrack, Watchdog.net, FedSpending, MySociety, and Public.Resource. The goal? Read more.

True innovation in materials takes on many forms, and for 80% of the world's population means the effective use of often scarce resources. "Technology Transfer," a term used to refer to the process of converting academic research into usable products, is just as important whether between the developing and the developed world or between two disparate industries. Read more.

Werewolf is a game of paranoia and group behavior and a fun way to get to know your fellow conference-goers. Read more.

Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.

When we look at the world around us we see many examples of places and spaces that we both love and hate. What would you "cut and paste" from different parts of your city to create the ideal sustainable urban environment? Arup has spent a number of years discussing what the eco-city would need to look like if we are going to move towards an Ecological Age. Read more.

TCP/IP and The Web were open standards and specifications that created an explosion of innovation by lowering friction and transaction costs for interoperability. Creative Commons is creating a new layer of open standards and specifications for interoperability and to lower friction at the legal/copyright and semantics layer. Read more.

Explosives are usually linked to military uses or mining. Today there are other uses for explosives on a large scale (diamond manufacture) or on a small scale (cartridges to operate instruments or machinery) or somewhere in between. Read more.

We've built a new type of interface that brings computation into our physical and gestural world: a set of cookie-sized, gesturally aware, neighbor detecting wireless displays that act together as one interface. We call them Siftables. People live in and know about the physical world. Computers should too. Read more.

Aaron Koblin will discuss the process of turning data into visual expression. As director of technology on Radiohead's latest music video for "House of Cards," he worked with sensor technologies as an alternative to traditional video. Koblin will also discuss his role at Google's Creative Lab in San Francisco, and discuss some of his other data-visualization software. Read more.

In 1900 about 40 percent of Americans (40 million) lived on farms, and a similar percentage worked on farms. People were makers by necessity, and as a result they acquired many useful DIY skills that they applied to their leisure activities as well. Read more.

Understanding how humans can better interact with and consume information is critical as we work to solve the increasingly complex challenges before us. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch will explore three aspects that will shape the next generation of computing applications. Read more.

What does the platform look like that allows digital architects to layer interaction models from massively multiplayer gaming and Wii-like gestural performance onto urban-scale environments? We are building software, initially for an amusement park in Dubai, that integrates the datastreams from thousands of modular sensor nodes into a high-resolution realtime spatial model of people and objects. Read more.

This talk will trace the history of personal data collection from its surprising roots in the 18th century into its future as a form of self-knowledge. We will see some of the great self-tracking projects of the past and present. No products will be reviewed! This is a talk about the why of self-tracking, with illustrations from real experiments. Read more.

Schneider's multidisciplinary work attempts to investigate human and technological interdependence. Schneider sees this interdependence as both emotional and physical. We are all infinitely removed from everything, everyone, and from ourselves. Our inners do not connect to our outers with any sort of transparency. Language separates us from the experience of the real. All of us is filtered. Read more.

Zoë Keating is a cellist. She plays solo, with rock bands, and writes music for film and ballet. Her musical process involves live looping and layering. Keating will demonstrate how to use a 17th century instrument and a laptop to make electronic music, and discuss the metaphysics of looping sound. Read more.

ETech Fest, the ETech emerging arts showcase, will once again provide a platform for artists to present their vision of the intersection of art and technology at ETech 2009. Read more.

Historically, 3D on the Web has always been associated with difficulties. Although 3D has been around for decades, from research labs to gaming to visualization of a 3D earth, there are numerous reasons why 3D is still having majority adoption challenges. Read more.

The discovery and mastery of new materials throughout history have caused societal upheavals that dwarf our more recent digital revolution. In this lively talk, history of science junkie Chris Spurgeon shows how breakthrough materials changed the world. He'll also explore how we can all prepare ourselves for the materials revolutions to come. Read more.

Design is a kind of authoring practice, crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material to create social objects and experiences is similar to writing fiction. This is a presentation about the relationship between design, science fiction, and the material elements that help tell visual stories about the future. Read more.

Governments all over the world are moving to censor various kinds of online and mobile content, and to expand their capacity to spy on people's digital communications. While the problem is worst in authoritarian countries, democracies are by no means immune. Meanwhile companies and others trying to provide web and telecoms services are caught uncomfortably in the middle. Read more.

In his 1963 science fiction book "The Game Players of Titan," Philip K. Dick envisioned a form of government based on gameplay. Everything from real estate law to municipal policy to marriage contracts were not only derived from playing the game, but the design and sociality of the game had replaced government itself. Read more.

Our 3-day massively multiplayer thought experiment is over! Find out what exactly the ETech crowd decided to do with their personal cube satellites -- and what it might mean for our future. Read more.

Current global disease control efforts focus largely on attempting to stop pandemics after they have already emerged. This fire brigade approach, which generally involves drugs, vaccines, and behavioral change, has severe limitations. Read more.