Blog posts tagged as 'upcoming'

On March 21st, St. Bride’s Type Library in London are hosting us for the rather-marvellously titled “An Evening with BERG”.

Timo is the headliner, but there’ll be a few of us from the studio, discussing our work and approach to it – and hopefully getting a good discussion going.

If you’d like to come along, the event page is here.

I’m rather hoping there will be bar stools and tumblers of scotch, a bit like Dave Allen used to have, while we tell tall-tales of injection-molding and machine intelligence…

We’re really pleased to announce that we’re participating in a couple of incredible events in the next few weeks.

Myself and Schulze will be at the MoMA “Talk To Me” symposium on the 19th October in NYC, alongside an array of intimidating design superbrains like Slavin, Kati London, Revital Cohen, Natalie Jeremijenko and Bjarke Ingels.

We’ll be giving a short talk and participating in a panel discussion about “Translating Worlds”.

We imagine it will not be about learning Klingon or Na’vi, but who knows.

Can’t wait.

Later that same week, I’m going to be speaking at PopTech in Camden, Maine.

This is incredibly exciting to me as I’ve long admired and wanted to attend this particular event – the diversity of speakers and subject matter that is critically and pragmatically addressed has always been top-notch.

And they have, let’s face it, a cracking logo.

Former colleagues from Nokia and the RCA Design Interactions course – Jan Chipchase and Daisy Ginsberg – are also on the speaker roster, and I believe I’m going to be in a session on the ‘Future of UI’…

I’m pleased to have been invited to speak at Sci-Fi London’s Comics day, on Saturday April 30th about the work of Warren Ellis – our Chairman-Emeritus and collaborator on SVK.

I’ll be alongside friend-of-BERG Matt Sheret and Ian Edginton (co-creator of such wonders as Stickleback, Leviathan and Scarlet Traces with frequent collaborator D’Israeli, co-creator of SVK).

I hope to show some sneak peaks of SVK as well as discussing the influence our dialog with Warren and comics in general have had on our studio.

Here’s the panel description from the Sci-Fi London site:

3.30pm – The work of Warren Ellis
Writer Ian Edginton (who collaborated with Ellis on X-Force), Matt Jones (principal, BERG design who commission Ellis’ new comic SVK) and Matthew Sheret (writer, whose love of comics started with Warren’s work) discuss the work of comic book / multimedia writer Warren Ellis who has penned some of the most influencial SF comics of the last twenty years.

Followed by 20 min preview screening of new documentary – “WARREN ELLIS: CAPTURED GHOSTS”

Jack and myself are going to be teaching for a week next week on the Interaction Design course at SVA in New York, and as part of our stint there we’re doing a talk 6-8pm on Wednesday 2nd March.

Looking forward to it enormously – hope to see you there perhaps.

Last week saw the first of a series of talks on robots, artificial-intelligence and design at London’s Royal Institution, curated by Ben Hammersley. Our friend Alex Deschamps-Sonsino presented the work of the EU-funded LIREC project in a talk called ‘Emotional Robots’.

I took a bunch of notes which were reactions rather than a recording, and my thoughts will hopefully bubble up here soon…

However, I hardly have time to collect my thoughts – because this week (Wednesday 16th) it’s m’colleague Matt Webb speaking – giving a talk entitled “Botworld: Designing for the new world of domestic A.I.”.

If the conversations we’ve had about it are any guide, it should be a corker. There are still tickets available, so hopefully we’ll see you there on Wednesday and for a bot-fuelled beer in the RI bar afterward.

Ben Hammersley is curating a series of three lectures at the Royal Institute of Great Britain during February. The RI is a 200-year-old research and public lecture organisation for science. Much of Faraday’s work on electricity was done there.

One of the lectures is with me!

All three lectures are at 7pm, and they are…

1. Uncanny & lovable: The future of emotional robots, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (also of @iotwatch on Twitter, where she tracks the emerging Internet of Things). This is on the 10th, this coming Thursday.
2. Botworld: Designing for the new world of domestic A.I. — I’m giving this lecture! My summary is below. It’s on Wednesday 16th February.
3. Finally, A.I. will kill us all: post-digital geopolitics, with Ben Hammersley, series curator and Editor-at-large of Wired UK magazine. Date: Thursday 24th February.

You’ll need to book if you want to come, so get to it!

My talk is going to build on a few themes I’ve been exploring recently at a couple of talks and on my personal blog.

Botworld: Designing for the new world of domestic A.I.

Back in the 1960s, we thought the 21st century was going to be about talking robots, and artificial intelligences we could chat with and play chess with like people. It didn’t happen, and we thought the artificial intelligence dream was dead.

But somehow, a different kind of future snuck up on us. One of robot vacuum cleaners, virtual pets that chat amongst themselves, and web search engines so clever that we might-as-well call them intelligent. So we got our robots, and the world is full of them. Not with human intelligence, but with something simpler and different. And not as colleagues, but as pets and toys.

Matt looks at life in this Botworld. We’ll encounter a zoo of beasts: telepresence robots, big maths, mirror worlds, and fractional A.I. We’ll look at signals from the future, and try to figure out where it’s going.

We’ll look at questions like: what does it mean to relate emotionally to a silicon thing that pretends to be alive? How do we deal with this shift from ‘Meccano’ to ‘The Sims’? And what are the consequences, when it’s not just our toys and gadgets that have fractional intelligence… but every product and website?

Matt digs into history and sci-fi to find lessons on how to think about and recognise Botworld, how to design for it, and how to live in it.

I’ll be going to Alex’s and Ben’s too. I hope to see you there.

I’m going to be attending the Data & Cities conference that our friends at Stamen are organising this week (on the 10th and 11th of February). I’ll be writing some notes from it whilst I’m there, with any luck. It’s set to be a great event.

And also: my first time in San Francisco! Looking forward to it a lot.

I’m going to be speaking at Interesting North in Sheffield on Saturday 13th November. Alongside a great lineup of speakers, I’ll be giving a talk called – at the moment – Five Things Rules Do, which I’ve summarised thus:

The thing that make games Games isn’t joypads, or scores, or 3D graphics, or little bits of cardboard, or many-sided dice. It’s the rules and mechanics beating in their little clockwork hearts. That may be a somewhat dry reduction of thousands of years of fun, but my aim is to celebrate and explore the many things that games (and other systemic media) do with the rules at their foundation. And, on the way, perhaps change your mind at exactly what rules are for.

It’s already sold out, but if you’ve got a ticket – perhaps see you there!

Matt’s going to be giving a talk on “Old Sci-Fi & Little Robots” at this year’s Do Lectures, in a tent in West Wales!

Having been to a previous Do, I’m very jealous. It’s a fantastic event, and all the videos from past Do Lectures are online – it’s a bit like TED but with fewer presidents or rockstars and more mud…

Last one of the parish notices. Matt Webb will be in Amsterdam alongside our good friend and occasional colleague Timo Arnall, and longstanding friend-of-BERG Tom Hume – giving a talk on design to the Mobile Monday event next Monday, 6th September.