IFTF's Future Now

links for 2006-04-29

• Foresight Vehicle future transportation automotive technology research
  R&D programme aims to promote technology and stimulate suppliers to develop market driven enabling technologies for future motor vehicles (cars, taxis, HGV's, buses and light commercial vans).
  (tags: technology automotive UK light_infrastructure)
• Desktop Engineering Magazine - Time for RP Standards
  "The lack of standards for rapid prototyping (RP) is a perennial barrier to launching it on the fast track to wide acceptance."
  (tags: prototyping manufacturing design)
• Desktop Engineering Magazine - Fast & Clean
  "3D scanning helps a kayak maker navigate between hand crafting and digital design."
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design sports)
• Desktop Engineering Magazine - Manipulating Space
  Spatial controllers help engineers and designers get a handle on using a host of 3D MCAD applications.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping interface design)
• Lay of the Land - May/June 2006 - Sierra Magazine - Sierra Club
  "The algae are eating carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides from the plant's emissions--40 percent of the former and 86 percent of the latter--and turning them into harmless oxygen and nitrogen."
  (tags: environment)

The Future of Parking

Still here at Silicon Valley's wireless community forum, and there's an interesting speaker from Emeryville startup Spark Parking who has a surprisingly interesting blog on the future of parking. Basically, its a system of sensors and mesh Wi-Fi networks that can report back to a city how many of its curbside or garage spaces are occupied, and you can layer all kinds of services and surveillance on top of that.

Silicon Valley Wireless Network

Today I'm blogging live from a meeting of Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network, which is a non-profit organization that for a few years now has been a sounding board and source of research on critical issues affecting the future of Silicon Valley. Surprisingly, it's taken until this year for Silicon Valley's local government and business leaders to recognize the opportunity provided by lightweight, unlicensed wireless infrastructure technologies like Wi-Fi to create new platforms for social and economic development. Muniwireless.com has been tracking the thousands of communities that have been considering building out public, unlicensed wireless networks based on Wi-Fi. However, only one has made it to full operational status so far - St. Cloud, Florida - and there are major problems with establishing seamless coverage thorughout the entire city, indoors and out. Vendors have been over-blowing the capabilities of Wi-Fi, which is more like a cordless phone than a cellular phone in terms of signal reach and potential for interference. One thing that's exciting about the agenda here is that there are 11 speakers talking about applications for the network - around the country and the world, there has been so much focus on infrastructure and not enough on what people will do with it (other than the obvious - surf the web). I'll add notes if anyone says anything interesting....

 

More on the project can be found at the Wireless Silicon Valley site.

links for 2006-04-28

• bitsandspaces/
  (tags: architecture design future)
• ISHUSH: kirkyan timesuits reprise
  "[L]ibraries, books, and patrons will become some kind of seamless, novel, autopoietic intelligence."
  (tags: web2.0 socialsoftware library collective_intelligence)
• Spatial Discursions: Flames Of The Digital And Ashes Of The Real
  "Cyberspace as originally envisioned in the works of William Gibson was neither a form of media nor a communal space. It was the operant field of a radical individual empowerment by technologies."
  (tags: culture cyberspace)
• J. LeRoy: Web 2.0's Oedipal Trajectory
  "Web 2.0 is based strongly on its cyberspace roots, [but] it must kill some of the primary concepts of those roots to continue and better serve human interaction."
  (tags: socialsoftware wireless mobility web2.0 cyberspace)
• Knowledge Creation and Temporality in the Information Economy
  "As knowledge creation became a focal point of our thinking about economic activity, managers faced an environment with two attributes: increased emphasis on knowledge creation and a transience of existing products and knowledge."
  (tags: innovation business Internet)
• Public Life in the Era of Communicative Abundance (Canadian Journal of Communication - Vol. 24, No. 2 (1999))
  "Modern communications media since the invention of the printing press have been dominated by images of scarcity. In contrast, the emergence of a new galaxy of communications... is now stimulating the growth of images of abundance."
  (tags: cyberspace culture communication)
• 'Intelligent' Robots Hold Rich Potential for Korea (Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition))
  "The Korean government’s goal is to have the country recognized as one of the world’s three strongest robot-tech nations by expanding its global market share to 15 percent and export revenues to $20 billion."
  (tags: Korea robotics)
• Selective Laser Sintering
  Brief description of laser sintering.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping)
• The RP&T Centre at the University of Warwick
  "The RP&T Centre is dedicated to developing and optimising rapid prototype techniques and tooling."
  (tags: prototyping manufacturing design UK)
• Rapid Prototyping: SLS
  Overview of selective laser sintering, and comparison with other rapid prototyping methods.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Rapid Prototyping: An Overview
  Rapid Prototyping (RP) can be defined as a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a part or assembly using three-dimensional computer aided design (CAD) data.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Laboratory for Freeform Fabrication
  "Any material, any form, anywhere." Lab at University of Texas.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Rapid Prototyping Laboratory at Stanford University
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Plastics Machinery and Auxiliaries
  "There is promise of growth in the rapid prototyping industry. RP technologies have immense potential for future applications such as rapid manufacturing."
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• A View from 10 Year Ago (2006)
  "Terry Wohlers' view from 10 years ago—Where the industry was headed and where it ended up."
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Are Under $1,000 3D Printers in Our Future?
  "As 3D printer hardware and materials evolve, and the demand for them increase, some unit prices will likely dip below $20,000 for the first time."
  (tags: manufacturing design prototyping)
• 3D Printing in Education
  "[H]igh schools and vocational-technical schools across the country are using 3D printing technology to restore young people's desire and enthusiasm for engineering."
  (tags: manufacturing design prototyping education)
• Laser Focus World - Rapid prototyping evolves into custom manufacturing
  "With new materials, more-efficient lasers, and faster computers, techniques such as selective laser sintering and direct metal deposition are producing parts, not just prototypes."
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Rapid Manufacturing Research Group at Loughborough University
  "RMRG is involved in a number of national and European government funded research projects to develop dedicated Rapid Manufacturing technologies using a range of new and emerging materials."
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Research Projects - Rapid Manufacturing Research Group at Loughborough University
  Links to research projects at RMRG.
  (tags: manufacturing prototyping design)
• Rapid Prototyping Models --- George W. Hart
  Mathematical models created using rapid prototyping.
  (tags: prototyping art DIY manufacturing education)
• Rapid Prototyping and Solid Freeform Fabrication - The Worldwide Guide
  Worldwide Guide to Rapid Prototyping
  (tags: prototyping manufacturing design)
• Rapid Manufacturing; What RP will be when it grows up.
  (tags: prototyping manufacturing)

Sim City, aka Cad Land

One of the largest future market opportunities for very low-cost 3D printers is children. They love to create objects, and they, their parents, and their schools will buy them in large quantities. Consider the past. Many of us grew up playing with Tinkertoys, Creepy Crawlers, Incredible Eatables, Play Dough, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, and Lego bricks. All of them are about creating three-dimensional objects.

Today's kids are producing 3D objects on computers. Consider SIMS (a.k.a., SimCity), the most popular computer game in the world. The buildings, furnishings, and surroundings are fully described as 3D models.

(Terry Wohlers)

It had never occurred to me to think of massive multiplayer game spaces as breeding-grounds for design and engineering skill; but maybe 20 years from now there'll be a generation of kids for whom virtual world-building and rapid prototyping are as natural a combination as word processing and printing were for mine-- or rather, the cohort that came about 3 years after me.

More on this at End of Cyberspace.

Technorati Tags: children, design, education, prototyping

Quote of the day

From bitsandspaces:

Architecture in 2010 will inevitably fall into three classes: physical, virtual, and hybrid 'bits and bricks' architecture.

Pure physical architecture will become rare. Examples could include the most extreme of sustainable buildings, architecture in developing countries, or buildings that for cultural reasons renounce the integration of computer-driven technology. Pure physical buildings can also be the outcome of very natural reactions to specific conditions. The traditional building technologies that developed over centuries in response to the unique needs and circumstances of a certain region are one example.

Virtual architecture will be an alternative in many respects to the excessive production of physical architecture. It will put an end to the non-sustainable expansion of area used per person, which has more than doubled in industrialized countries since the middle of the last century. With improved virtual reality environments and computers, whose performance needs to increase by a factor of one thousand, realistic virtual surroundings will be the natural working environments for most people in information societies.

However, 'bits and bricks' architecture will ultimately predominate -- most buildings will have thousands of sensors, processors, and software integrated in their structure. They will be monitored, controlled and protected by computers and communicate with inhabitants and other buildings. Their aim will be to optimize the use of resources and the comfort of the environment they are providing through active and reactive behavior.

Personally, I think building in developing countries hardly constitutes something "rare," though much of it happens without direction from professional architects, and I'm skeptical about the VR argument, but the notion of a "bits and bricks" architecture is intriguing.

Technorati Tags: architecture, design, end of cyberspace

Gas Price Mapper

Wait - isn't this the map of the 2004 Presidential vote?

I left my heart at MIT Press

I had breakfast this morning with an editor at MIT Press. It was an interesting time, in part because it highlighted something I never really paid much attention to: I've been a serious consumer of MIT books for some 20 years. In graduate school, I had to read a lot their science studies and history of technology books: you couldn't have an STS course syllabus without something from the Inside Technology series. Then, I went through a phase of consuming their architectural history list. More recently it's been their computer science and design books-- mainly the trade books, but a few of the more technical ones as well.

Still, when the question came up of whether I'd think about sending a proposal for the end of cyberspace book to them, I thought: yeah, the computer science and design side would be a good fit, but my loyalty is still with the STS list.

I doubt I could say such a thing about many presses. Do university presses realize that readers have these kinds of relationships with their products? And do they try to do anything with that? More generally, how many few tangled bonds of loyalty to products that could be translated into respect for companies or institutions, if only the relationships were made explicit and visible? Do people feel loyalty to Sony Pictures, or Touchstone, or any media company other than Disney?

Technorati Tags: business, postacademic

You know you're big time when you're a cartoon

You never know where the Institute is going to get quoted!

Technorati Tags: humor, IFTF

links for 2006-04-26

• EastSouthWestNorth: Voodoo Dolls In China
  "he popularity of voodoo dolls is due to two reasons: first, in a society in which competition and conflicts are increasing, certain narrow-minded people experience setbacks and attempt to use superstitious methods to express their discontent; second, it
  (tags: China religion youth education society)