Material

Deb Chachra is a Professor of Engineering and one of the early faculty at Olin College, which was founded to rethink engineering education at the undergraduate level. She has research and teaching interests in education, design, and infrastructure, with a background in materials science. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto and held a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and her research has primarily focused on biological materials, including heart valves, bone, and the fibre-reinforced polyester made by bees. At this conference, her goal is to help participants develop a deeper understanding of some of the central ideas of materials science, including how they manifest in emerging technologies like 3D printing and bionanotechnology. WIRED magazine described her work as being plugged Oculus-style into her brain while she meditates on science and culture’.

Björn Steinar is an Icelandic designer who takes a closer look at all the waste we produce on a daily basis. From food waste to plastic, he explores ways we can do better. His most recent project, Catch of the day, is fighting food waste one vodka bottle at a time. Food waste is a severe problem on a global scale with no solution in sight due to fluctuations in production and demand. Fermentation and distillation of leftover fruits prolong the “best before” date to infinity; since alcohol over 23% can never go bad. Each batch is carefully crafted using discarded fruits, picked up from local importers, farmers or dumpsters. Björn will get us thinking about all the physical waste we are producing as part of the Web and what we can do about it!

Former Principal at BERG, now working at Google in London on various top secret projects as Principal Designer in Google Research & Machine Intelligence. Matt Jones' talk will look at some of the ideas around raw computing. If the Web were a material, he'd brute force his way to the best answer, maybe without even understanding how he got there — and that's OK.

Dewi is a designer who recently completed his BA in Design at Goldsmiths University, London. His approach to design is process driven, experimenting with people, location and material. Using his making abilities as a means to collect data, influencing the direction of his thoughts and practice. His talk will be based on the theme of urban and rural, discussing the similarities, differences, and the ability to bridge both together as one. He will tell the story through objects he has designed, which has lead him to a new destination: living on a farm outside of London, a future farm for creativity.

Nina Walia is an Experience Designer for ubiquitous technology and emerging platforms. Currently, she is weaving technological experiences into interactive textiles and surfaces at Google. Her previous experience includes overseeing innovative, award winning designs intended to motivate, inspire, educate, and improve people’s lives for Nike, GE, PBS, and the Office of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. Most recently, Nina was working as Experience Design Lead on Jacquard, a collaboration of Google and Levi's. She holds four design patents for her work and has spoken about her craft at many renowned conferences, such as the Interaction Design Association's (IXDA) annual conference, South By South West, Games for Change, the International Conference for Interaction Design and Children, and the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union's annual workshop. She is passionate about community organizing, and co-founded Subcontinental Drift, a nationally syndicated group to encourage South Asian Americans in the arts. She sometimes reminisces about her days as musician, record label owner, and DJ.

Ben is a geographer who works on spatial data analysis and geovisualisation. His research interests include social and spatial inequalities, humanity's impact on Earth, global sustainability and new concepts for the visualisation of these issues. Ben works at the University of Iceland and is a research associate at the University of Oxford. He is also involved in the Worldmapper project which will be the main focus of his talk. The talk will make us rediscover maps with novel cartographic approaches. Be prepared to see the world as you’ve never seen it before!

Charlotte Dann is a designer/developer based in London, working across a wide spectrum of disciplines ranging from electronics to fine glasswork; she has not yet found a craft she does not wish to master. While undertaking an MA in Computational Arts she created Hexatope, a combination of her two central vocations of jewellery design and web development. Hexatope allows anyone to design their own jewellery by intuitively interacting with a hexagonal grid entirely in the browser. Designs are then produced in precious metal using 3D-printing technology and traditional metalwork. Charlotte's going to talk about the integration of artistry to the web and how practical design techniques can evolve with computational thinking.

Tommy Stadlen is the co-creator of Polaroid Swing, a Silicon Valley startup writing the next chapter in Polaroid's iconic history alongside Twitter founder Biz Stone. Swing's vision is to reimagine the photograph. Tommy is going to enlighten us about some of the challenges that Polaroid and other companies are facing. He's going to look at Polaroid's history and the intersection of art and science, the importance of tangibility and will explore the resurgence of physicality and nostalgia. Why are we all so interested in vinyl records to film photography? We now have the power to capture and explore how memories move, how does that impact the way we think about or digital lives?

Dan Rubin takes everything he's learnt and rolls it up into some observations about the physicality of things.

Tristan Gribbin is the creator and CEO of FLOW and is passionate about helping bring meditation to the world. She has been practicing meditation with serious dedication since the year 2000 and is a recognised meditation teacher in Iceland. Flow has a VR meditation app which has won the opportunity to pitch in the US at TechCrunch Disrupt this September. Tristan will walk us through meditation, Virtual Reality and how this new material impacts our senses and where the Web might be headed.

Stories have form and structure. Beginnings, middles and endings. People, places and things. Setbacks, climaxes and conflict. And the web has form and structure. Sites, pages & links. Interactivity, personalisation and adaptation. He'll look at how stories and the web can interconnect and overlap in forms and structure, showing examples of some of the new ways that people are telling stories using the web. From choosing your level of detail, varying the length, personalising a story and interacting with explanations, to the latest BBC experiments with voice-controlled stories and atomised news. And he'll explain how the BBC is experimenting with atomising media and deconstructing stories into fundamental, structured building blocks that we can present in new and powerful ways; building responsive stories for the web.

The context of ideas from classical art such as the vanishing point and the perspective of the renaissance to the pixels of Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. The devices and the tools that the creators of the web have permanently at hand. Goddur works as a graphic design professor at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík and is without a doubt Iceland's best-known commentator on design issues. He teaches mostly theory courses and will be discussing the history of technology and design with examples of perspective tesselations and other patterns. He's been working in design since before the first Macintosh computers and has grown and learned with the technology.

Halldór Eldjárn is a musician & audio developer who tells us a little story about how he took 15,000 public domain photos from NASA's Apollo Space Mission and created a unique soundscape for every single one. Hint: They were programatically generated! Halldór created the piece to open up this incredible photo library. The mood in the pictures is somewhat unusual as some of them quite casual unlike the most famous and polished pictures we are so used to seeing, from these missions. Some are even quite bad, but still they are taken during one of the most incredible journeys mankind has embarked upon and thus become mysterious and exciting. The web app selects pictures at random and the browser then starts playing the soundtrack for that picture. When dealing with the Web, we tend to think solely about the screen and visual experience, but in this mini-talk we'll explore the material of sound and what that means.

Amber Wilson Amber Wilson worked in the field of Psychology for many years and is now a budding Web developer at a design agency in Brighton. New to Web development, she is continually eager to improve her skills. She has found that the skills and experiences she picked up studying and working within Psychology have guided her as a developer - sometimes in surprising ways, always in useful ways, and in some ways she has yet to discover. She is excited to bring along her unique perspective on Web development through the eyes of a discipline she knows so well. She’ll talk to us about how folk that work on the Web can be aware of other disciplines that surround us, embrace their lessons, and harness these to build both a stronger Web and stronger bonds with each other.

OmNom Chocolate will be giving us a mini-bean school, taking us through the stages of production through to all the new product development. They have a deep understanding in their material: chocolate. In this short talk, they'll surprise you with what you thought their ingredients were as well as their ingenious use of waste-materials repackages as a new product.

Hannah and Justin Floyd had an idea. What if they could find a new way of working with wool and so perhaps bring something back to their small market town, a once thriving part of the woollen industry? They learnt that the coarse wool from hill-farmed, upland sheep had dramatically lost its value in recent years. So they started to play. To turn the way wool is worked on its head. The end result is Solidwool — a strong, beautiful and unique composite material. Think fibreglass, but with wool. They know better than anyone else, literally down to the micron scale about wool. That deep understanding is what we're going to talk about in relation to knowing your material and its affordances.