[Noisebridge-discuss] "High-Low Tech" Talk at UC Berkeley
Scott Murray
shm at alignedleft.com
Mon Dec 1 23:52:08 UTC 2008
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.
------------------------------
* 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
Berkeley designers, scientists, and artists. It is a space for both
producing and critically engaging with new media and design through
discussions, hands-on workshops, and design-research projects. For
questions and comments please write to us at:
dbox at ischool.berkeley.edu. To subscribe to the events mailing list
please send an email to majordomo at ischool.berkeley.edu with subscribe
design-events in the body of the message.
More information about the Noisebridge-discuss
mailing list