I spent most of my time ducking between various talks at the conference, but did make time to visit the exhibition at CUBE, as well as catching AntiVJ and Murcof at RNCM.

There were a mixed quality of presentations during the conference.  Highlights for me included Stowe Boyd on 'Social Tools and Future', Ewan McIntosh from 4iP on 'The Death of Industrial Education', Adam Greenfield's 'The City Is Here For You to Use', Stefan Agamanolis from Distance Lab on 'Getting Over the Social Communications Burger', Aaron Koblin on 'Data Visualisation', and the BBC's Philip Trippenbach on 'Why We Must Use Games for Good'.

Stowe Boyd presented a whirlwind tour of the rise of Social Media and the Social Media tools we've utilised over the past few years - software intended to augment social systems.  From email, to IM, to Facebook, to Twitter - Social Media has moved from the private inbox of email clients, to the fully public correspondence of Twitter. Boyd believes Microblogging is the tool of the new world, a world where we can easily stay abreast of status and presence information. I've heard many people discuss these new 'decentralised' systems, however, what was interesting about Boyd, was the declaration that these systems are egalitarian but far from democratic. They depend heavily on social status, how many friends you have, how many people are following you. We are existing within a new context, so what are the rules?

Ewan McIntosh began by outlining that education is 'done to you', it's supplied by adults for a 'captured audience' and they 'put you to work in boxes'. McIntosh looked at a number of case studies - creative projects targeting young people that 'work'. He discussed the use of anonimity in projects like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and compared this to sites like Landshare where anonimity wouldn't work. His presentation interestingly examined the delicate relationship these sites have with people's information - if people feel the data still belongs to them, and they can choose how much or how little they give, trust is convened. Trust cannot be enforced, it doesn't work. McIntosh suggested that bringing this balance into pedagogy to replace the proprietry systems that education tend to use at present, will create a healthier, more effective system.

Nokia's Adam Greenfield discussed the idea that data belongs to everyone and should be freely available everywhere, at all times. He cited some interesting projects, including:

Christian Nold's Emotional Maps - "participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-eplore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community."

and Tom Armitage's Making Bridges Talk - "Twitter can be a wonderful messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful. So when I found an untapped data source for such an object, I thought it was worth having a poke. Half an hour of scripting later and Tower Bridge was on Twitter."

Distance Lab is well worth checking out, particularly the Iso-phone project and Mutsugoto, both presented by Stefan Agamanolis.

Philip Trippenbach discussed 'Why We Must Use Games for Good.' You can read his presentation on his website, which I'd highly recommend.

Finally, do check out Aaron Koblin's Data Visualisation work (image 2 shown in the box above is from an animation of data that plots incoming and outgoing planes over New York). Koblin has recently been snapped up by Google, and is a master in scraping open API's and making sense of the data through often beautiful visualisations. Koblin is always looking for innovative ways to create new artworks. In Bicycle Built For 2000, 2088 voice recordings were collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result is a version of the song 'Daisy Bell', made up of 2088 voices.