Schedule: Developing Markets sessions

As we progress to a post-scarcity society, either you'll measure your consumption or someone else will. More data is becoming accessible than has ever existed. Whether driven by climate change, peak oil, or economic change, sustainability is now a fundamental factor of your business and your life. We'll unpack and map the dramatic changes coming to industry, markets, politics--and you. Read more.

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. Read more.

The business benefits of open source software are well documented. But can the same or similar benefits also be realized by using open source hardware (OSH)? Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, will address some of these issues, discuss the opportunties and challenges, and provide anecdotes from his experiences at Bug Labs. 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.

Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and has minimal access to education. The Playpower Foundation is using a radically affordable $12 computer, based on an old video game console technology (now in the public domain) as an 8-bit platform for learning games. Global poverty meets 8-bit design constraints--with only an open source community of 8-bit hackers in the middle? Read more.

Mike Mathieu outlines the emerging civic software movement where tech-savvy heroes leverage rapid development and improving web infrastructure to build projects and services focused on social impact. You'll come away with a new understanding of some key players in the space, as well as some specific ideas for actions you might take with your professional skills. Read more.

Diseases are spreading faster. To detect them we need to enable faster and accurate communication that can create life-saving responses. How do you do this without Western infrastructure in the jungles of South East Asia? InSTEDD has been building SMS and mapping applications while figuring out multilingual issues, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems. Read more.

What do Japanese geeks, teenagers, and high school girls do for hours behind their computers and cell phone screens? Katayama and Yamazaki demonstrate several examples of web apps and gadgets that are fun, creative, and uniquely Japanese. Through these, we see how crucial, hard-to-grasp aspects of Japanese culture materialize as new obsessions when technology is thrown into the mix. Read more.

Constraint--the Conference's theme--is not only a set of conditions against which design must struggle, to constrain is also itself a design strategy. Cambrian lurches forward in design ecologies tend to occur in response to an emergency, often a war. Read more.