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2009-05-27 (Wed)

Δten / Δ10 / delta10

May 27th, 2009 by Gavin

Many late night discussions over the last year from FOWA, IT@Cork, eTech, Green:net to Geekyoto, and with the AMEE team have led me to think on topics like

  • “digital inheritance”
    (e.g. what if you could inherit your grandfather’s iPod?)
  • dematerialisation
    (digital products and products transforming into services)
  • desiring what we need
    (as opposed to the consumer movement that drove us from a needs-based culture to a desire-based culture)
  • modelling flow rather than inflation
  • and change and adaptation in an elastic society
    (to redefine the notion of “growth”)

Far, far too much to try and summarise here, but hopefully good springboards for discussion. A recurring theme is the transformation from products to services  (eg. the instant car rental schemes where you can rent for 30 mins). Digital music has already dematerialised the physical product of music to replace CDs.

Inspired by the powers of ten, I’ve been wondering how in the world might make the 90% reduction in CO2/GHGs that’s required to address climate change. This is an order-of-magnitude change in the way we currently live.

We need to all make “powers of ten” changes to our lives, from the CO2 intensity of our power production, to the way we relate to products and services.

So, to my latest call to action…

“Turn every product into a service for 10 people”

I’ve christened this Δten / Δ10 / Delta Ten, so it can be talked about in those management consulting meetings where (Six Sigma) is mentioned.

In fact, maybe Delta Ten should be an add-on to Six Sigma?

“Delta Ten seeks to improve the sustainability of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of inefficiencies (errors) and variation in manufacturing and business processes, and extends this to usage patterns (e.g. resource sharing and re-use), consumption and waste, by using strong reductionist techniques to diminish the use of energy and materials by a factor of ten.”

  • delta 1 = 10% efficiency increase (10% reduction in materials, increase in energy efficiency, or energy consumption through re-use)
  • delta 9 = 90% efficiency increase (90% reduction in materials, increase in energy efficiency, or energy consumption through re-use)
  • delta 10 = The process is rendered wholly and demonstrably sustainable through the effective and credible management of resources (e.g. renewable energy, managed forestry, effective waste management, and cradle-to-cradle/biomimetics).

A delta 10 means you have created an environmentally-intelligent service, not a product.

Anyone like to help?

2009-02-18 (Wed)

Age of Stupid

February 18th, 2009 by Gavin

Watch it here:

http://www.ageofstupid.net/screening/pp/london_vue_acton

2008-10-26 (Sun)

Virtual conferencing at HEAD conference

October 26th, 2008 by Gavin

HEAD conference

I presented at <head> at the London Hub (in person) on Friday, and today online (from home). I wanted to capture some of my thoughts immediately before I forget:

This is the first time I believe I’ve seen what I’d call true p2p broadcasting.  Perhaps a coming of age.

Having spent (too) many years webcasting everything from Glastonbury to conferences to Parliament, I have to say that this went very well. I started doing “webcast chats” at Virgin Net in 1996, which worked – and helped me learn how to mash up broadcasting with chat rooms – but the video was still “one-way”. The distributed-source nature of HEAD really changed this context.

As a presenter, I found the experience relatively seamless*. The great benefits of presenting from home included;

- not having to travel the venue, hang around, and travel back.

This is a vast benefit. It’s very low stress, even travelling across London is stressful. No (/minimal) missing out on family time at weekends.

- No CO2 footprint.

- No £cost.

The negative bits? Missing out on serendipity.  This was mitigated, in part, by the Hubs – which is a great idea – and the chat room. It actually felt a bit more human than standing on a stage.

I enjoyed this more than most conferences I’ve spoken at, and had more (and better) questions via the chat room. I also felt much more comfortable stopping “presenting” and actually listening to the questions. Maybe physical conferences should present the back-channel to the presenter on their tele-prompt?

The distributed nature of the presenters coming into the video stream really helped to create a feel of community. Being able to jump between rooms was also very handy.

Things that would make it better;

1) As a presenter, being able to see and/or hear the viewers; somehow. I’m not sure how. More emoticons, a “sucks more/less” slider? This would really help with gauging feedback. Put pressure on your presenters to be better – this can only be a good thing.

2) As both audience and presenter – a cross-room chat back-channel. I’d love to see the chatter from other presentations to see if there were points of serendipity I could pull out (while presenting). As an audience member I’d like to see all the chats.

3) Better software* integration to manage my view vs everyone else’s view and how it can be customised.

4) Presenter’s need to be retrained – this will take time. Aral made a training video, which was great, but we need to extend this to a whole new “stage” (e.g. getting good lighting, decent cams, etc.). I hooked up 2 webcams so I could jump-cut but manage it well while speaking – but I have a motorised cam, so could have given position control to the audience.

In summary, this was a great experience (especially for a first conference) and one I’d definitely repeat.

I also estimate that this approach saved between 1,000 and 5,000 tonnes of CO2.

Well done to Aral and the whole HEAD team.

*Adobe still have a huge amount of work to do to get it right (there were some pretty basic features missing from the online app).

2008-06-21 (Sat)

Acoustic Cosmology at Interesting 2008

June 21st, 2008 by Gavin

Interesting 2008

Interesting2008 lived up to its name today. I gave a rather rapid (7 minute!) summary of Acoustic Cosmology. As a few people mentioned afterwards that they would be interested to know more, here’s a few links;

Acoustic Cosmology (Interesting2008 presentation PDF)

Acoustic Cosmology: Summary essay

My own music

2008-03-4 (Tue)

Speaking at ETech and SXSW

March 4th, 2008 by Gavin

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008 sxsw

AMEE is in the USA (California and Texas) from 2nd – 13th March.

I’m presenting at

1) ETech talk (8:45am Thursday, 6th March 2008, Marina Ballroom D)

2) SXSW panel (3:30-4:30pm Tuesday, 11th March 2008).

If you would like to meet, please get in touch.

2007-02-25 (Sun)

O’Reilly Energy Innovation Conference

February 25th, 2007 by Gavin

This should be a very interesting conference…

“The O’Reilly Energy Innovation Conference frames the ideas, projects, and technologies that are being invented and tested right now into a coherent picture…

[we're] pulling together people from all these overlapping fields”

http://www.energyinnovation.com/pub/w/59/about.html

On thing we need to do is crack the “IP packet” model for electricity distribution … or “packet electricity” as I like to call it.

2006-06-12 (Mon)

transmission.cc

June 12th, 2006 by Gavin

“a gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy.” it said.

it was very good fun. and might just produce some good results….

2006-02-1 (Wed)

Poitiers presentation

February 1st, 2006 by Gavin

Talk went ok.

Dominique Proust was interesting – mapping the history of Music of the Spheres from Pythagoras to Kepler to Herschel, so I followed on nicely with my 21st Century “Music of the n-dimensional hypercube”

His astronomy research also focussed on the Great Attractor, so he wants to use the Radio Cube sonification tool we have to plug his very rich redshit data into.

Here’s the cathedral with the planetarium dome in the foreground.
Science Center

.. the upper level of the venue
Science Center

Inside the planetarium
Planetarium

In an exhibit
Planetarium

2006-01-29 (Sun)

France :: Acoustic Cosmology

January 29th, 2006 by Gavin

If you are near Poitier or Bourges next week you are very welcome to come along to a small festival of music and science..

I’ll be giving my first “Acoustic Cosmology” talk on Tuesday 30th in Poitier at 6pm, and then playing in Bourges on the 3rd Feb.

Context of my presentation:
“A conjoining of languages, Acoustic Cosmology is an attempt to describe sonic worlds: moving beyond a music of the spheres to acoustic sculpture within an n-dimensional space.”

Presenting just before me is Dominique Proust, author of “Harmony of the Spheres

Links (mostly in French)

Bandits-Mages festival
Session: aller-retour/science-music

http://www.maison-des-sciences.org/

some more details

Many thanks to Aidan Keane and Andrew Newsam for their input into this.

2005-05-19 (Thu)

Switzerland presentation

May 19th, 2005 by Gavin

Space:Planetary Consciousness and the Arts‘ – 10th Workshop and Symposium

Château d’Yverdon, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (PDF 2MB)

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