Schedule: Materials sessions
Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We’ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new machinesa and technologies. How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?
Location: Empire Room
Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)
Come build a shirt that sings when you're squeezed, a purse that sounds an alarm when someone touches it, or a jacket that shines and sparkles at your command. This workshop will guide you through the process of building an interactive garment that incorporates touch sensors, light, and sound.
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Location: Empire Room
Tom Igoe (Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU),
Brian Jepson (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you'll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We'll discuss what RFID can and can't do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. $70 materials fee required.
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Location: Crystal Room
Andrew "bunnie" Huang (Chumby Industries)
China is one of the U.S.'s biggest trading partners, and is one of the premier regions for manufacturing electronic goods of all types. When startup Chumby Industries needed to migrate their U.S.-built Chumby device prototypes to production, they sent bunnie Huang to China to build the Chumby supply chain.
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Location: Gold Room
Jennifer Magnolfi (Herman Miller)
The design and production of physical/digital spaces is at the heart of what we call the Programmable Environment. Instead of environments complete and fixed in time, subject to renovation or demolition when their purpose is no longer relevant, the result is a spatial system designed to evolve over time, in interaction with the users who inhabit it.
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Location: Gold Room
Carl Taussig (HP Labs)
Flexible paper-like displays will replace the use of print on paper in many applications such as books, newspapers, and calendars. The required attributes of these new displays are readability in a variety of lighting conditions, low power consumption (bi-stability), light weight, mechanical toughness, and low cost.
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Location: Imperial Ballroom
Michael Tchao (Nike Techlab)
The greatest sports athletes' records live and die by their hi-tech gear. They use new swimsuits like the razor to shave seconds off their laps and sensors like the Nike+ to record their training. Michael Tchao of Nike Labs will share with us the process behind these creations and the new materials and technology that make them happen.
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Location: Crystal Room
Tom Igoe (Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU)
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.
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Location: Gold Room
Andrew Dent (Material ConneXion, Inc.)
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.
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Location: Empire Room
David Calkins (Robotics Society of America, et. al.)
What coming in robots? More than just the butler bot, we can expect to see many robots in all aspects of our life - home, work, hospitals, schools.... Single task robots will permeate our lives, as will telepresence bots giving us the ability to truly bi-locate. Noone can predict the future, but we can get a sneak peak.
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Location: Imperial Ballroom
Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)
People knit scarves and solder radios together in their homes and garages. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.
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Location: Crystal Room
Chris Spurgeon (spurgeonworld.com)
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.
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Location: Crystal Room
Shelley Batts (University of Michigan)
Can deafness be cured? Novel techniques such as gene therapy, cell replacement and regeneration, artifical cell creation, and emerging types of cochlear implants will be highlighted.
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