[Noisebridge-discuss] "High-Low Tech" Talk at UC Berkeley

[Scott Murray]

Dear NoiseBridgers — You may be interested in this talk on Wednesday.
	
	—Scott



Design Futures lecture series
sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the School of  
Information

Wednesday December 3
6:00 - 7:30 pm
BCNM Commons*
UC Berkeley

Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab
New Craft - A Marriage of High and Low Tech

People knit scarves, build furniture, sew clothing, and solder radios  
together in their homes and garages. Diverse groups of people--girls  
and boys, grandparents and college students--lovingly engage in these  
hands-on low-tech hobbies. In contrast, companies produce high-tech  
things by high-tech processes, using teams of people and sophisticated  
machinery to build devices like cell phones, computers, pharmaceutical  
drugs, and cars. But this clear division between high-tech and low- 
tech is beginning to blur. A host of new tools is making many of the  
resources previously available only to companies accessible to  
individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices  
that integrate high and low technology.

This talk will discuss this "new craft", envisioning a future in which  
individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed  
communication skills to build and share information about "high-low  
tech" devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically  
generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones. The  
presentation will discuss burgeoning high-low tech communities,  
focusing on ways that professional designers and engineers can support  
and encourage this new creative movement. It will present examples of  
high-low tech artifacts--including embroidered circuits and paper  
computers--and examples of tools that empower others to construct high- 
low tech devices--including the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit  
that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers.

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* The BNCM Commons is next door to the Free Speech Movement Cafe at  
Moffitt Library. Map at: http://tinyurl.com/52epzh

d.box is a new media and design-research workshop that supports UC  
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discussions, hands-on workshops, and design-research projects. For  
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