I’ve been to Picnic 08 in Amsterdam, kindly invited by Planetart, that will have a big show on Friday at the final party of the festival.
The bad news news, although anyone knows about, because on Picnic program there was nearly nothing about Planetart activities, for the Picnic attenders is that on that night there won’t be the Tesla Coils show due to security problems.

The good news is there was the sun for three days.
Anyhow from the photo you see a little of the atmosphear there,fizzy and vibrant, in line with the talks: always brilliant and looking forward, with a lot of assertion and few questions. It’s a festival emotioned by technology.
Really well curated in all the details, a little bit tooo much..

Coming at picnic i thought it would be more focused on creativity, where it’s much more about making business with creativity or sometimes entertain guests.

A lot interesting talkers between them Adam Greenfield, that presented his idea of “Long here and Big Now”, about the explosion the time/place coordinates in or contemporary cities, Michael Tchao, general manager of the Nike Tech Lab, that presented the ideas of Nike to connect physical objects, the shoes, to online services and communities, talking a lot about “motivation within motivation”, so looking at technology as a force of motivation. ( to run and to use your running shoes…).
Today there was the director of Business Developmnent of Goggle Europe: the room was thrilled and also the presetators, that was always perfect, seemed a little bit nervous. My impression was that Google has a strong corporate message and she delivered it precisely. Then she did’nt tell anything really itneresting about Google. What was clear is that Goggle is betting on open platforms, letting the user decide how to use it and that’s good for them i think. I think their operationl keyword now is OPEN, meaning that they want to enter everywhere.

Besides the conferences i saw a lot of people having fun and joking, presenting a playful attitude to technology not so much critical.
The only critical content be found inside the free Books printed by Institute of Network Cultures, distribuited at the bookshop.
Then a part from the main room conference i think more interesting insights can be found in the other locations, where there were interesting and more foucsed speech about the impact of newtechnologies in Africa, about RFID, about digital art.

Talking about the e-art exhbition i found it a little bit too clean, I think it’s Picnic style this neat attitude, but personally it brings everything too much on the side of business and less of creativity.

Donal Norman presented his latest book, “The Design of Future Things” at Share Festival 2008, with – Bruce Sterling, writer, Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine and Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino. The book talks about a world where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.

Here you can see the VIDEO and read the text Bruce Sterling wroted about in the catalogue:
”
Every design requires sacrifice; you can’t possibly have a real-world object that is all things to all people. So — if you plan to saturate future objects with computer interactions — where are the constraints? What is the grain of the material?

It was from Donald Norman that I first learned that the limits of the human brain in handling bad design. We lack infinite amounts of intelligence and awareness to devote to a demanding world, just like we lack infinite physical strength or the machine-like ability to chug along without food and sleep. So it’s both senseless and dangerous to predict “smart objects” or “future objects” without factoring in humanity’s “cognitive loading” and “opportunity costs.”

What are “opportunity costs?” Every time we respond to a beep, buzz or click, some mechanical prompt demanding our interaction, we are sacrificing something else we might do. We don’t simply gain interactivity, we *lose* the opportunity for some other interaction that might be better-designed and more effective. We can be harassed into an itchy condition of “continuous partial attention” where our ability to take coherent action is constantly broken-up by tiny flea-bite emergencies.

Then there’s “technological excise,” technical activities we’re forced to perform before we’re actually allowed to get on with our work. We might want a larger type-face on a cellphone screen. How much wandering do we have to do through the jungles of format, with tiny buttons, before the letters on our screen get bigger?

Maybe we’d like to stuff a video into our weblog. With what commands, in what format? How do we discover “how to get it in there” — how do we discover how to discover that? Quite possibly, through frustrated trial and error, we’ll discover some painful, time-consuming work-around — and once we’ve trained ourselves how to do that, rather than suffer the “excise” of going back to the rule-book, we’ll try to save ourselves that painful mental labor by habitually doing it the wrong way, again and again. That opportunity cost is huge.

“Cognitive loading.” How many processes, how many objects, can we bear in our minds? It’s painful to be mentally conscious of some minor. boring task; we’ll try to automate it, habituate it, remove our attention from it. Many American states now make it illegal to drive while using a cellphone. Even walking while using a cellphone can look like an attack of drunkenness.

How do we achieve the cyberneticization of the everyday without polluting our mental environment?
”
Bruce Sterling

This is ”ambient information” — the newest concept in how to monitor everyday data. With Ambient the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information, rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.

The Orb is a frosted-glass ball that glows different colors to display traffic congestion or any other Ambient information channel: weather, windspeed, pollen, traffic congestion, real time stock market trends. The Ambient Orb arrives preset to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, glowing more green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm. It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices or weather in major cities.

http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/platform.html

Worlds are not born, they are created. EveryScape has driven around each of the cities creating full 360 degree panoramas. However, there’s one key twist — anyone can contribute.
EveryScape is looking for photo contributors to capture indoors scenes and “scape artists” to contribute and filter content on their maps. Paid photographic contributors take the panoramic photos, “scapes”, that serve as the canvasses for embedded information contributed by users.