Open Transcripts

An Introduction to Infrastructure Fiction

presented by Paul Graham Raven

The Someone Else’s Problem Field around infrastructure is, ironically enough, a measure of infrastructure’s ubiquity and success. You don’t think about infrastructure because you don’t need to. It just works. And when it doesn’t, there’s a phone number you can not bother calling, because they’ll only put you on hold anyway, and by the time you get through it’ll probably have fixed itself, so why bother?

Little Big Systems

presented by Erin Kissane

We can’t let our young designers and developers and writers, who want to be craftsmen, be separate from the stream of people who are working on these really complex, often kind of daunting, intimidating, tricky problems.

Designing a Country from Scratch: Nation Branding in South Sudan

presented by Anne Quito

Design for emergence operates on a different set of criteria steeped in the politics and urgency of its time. I believe that in this scenario, having these so-called safe choices is not a bad thing. During this time of emergence it’s good that we have defined a graphic language of nationhood, expedient variations of heraldic traditions of crests, cartouches, and coats of arms. A lingua franca of legitimacy.

Khaleeji Design: An Imported Aesthetic?

presented by Nawar Al-Kazemi

If you are given the task to lecture on design somewhere in the Middle East, do you think you’ll need to tailor your approach? Maybe think about your references, the language, the vastly different background? The answer most probably is “yes.” But the reality of design education in the Middle East, and more specifically the Gulf Region, prove otherwise.

Wrapping Sentences Around Things

presented by Nicholson Baker

So that’s what we’re trying to do, I think, we devotees who write about the designed and pen-outlined world. We’re just wrapper-uppers at Crate and Barrel. We’re packagers, temporary packagers. And our chosen packing medium—sentences, paragraphs—sometimes obscures as much as much as it helps us see.

The Web We Lost

presented by Anil Dash

I can have my independent blog, but if it’s not being promoted through one of these networks, nobody sees it. If it’s not being injected in one of these streams in a format that’s consumable in one of these streams, that’s compatible with what they call native advertising, which is stream items that are ads, then it doesn’t get seen.

The Platonic Network

presented by Alex Wright

I wanted to give you a little bit of perspective on Otlet’s broader vision, which I think is in a way even more interesting as a reference point for thinking about some of the changes we’re seeing today as our lives are increasingly reshaped by technology and networks. What Otlet offers is a different way into that space, and a different way of thinking about what a networked world could look like.

Imaginary London

presented by Darran Anderson

What I’d like to to look at is alternative versions of London, unbuilt buildings, different structures from fantastical literature (science fiction, that sort of thing), and just see how that reframes the city that we inhabit every day. How it makes us see it with perhaps new eyes.

Re-calling the Modem World: The Dial-Up History Of Social Media

presented by Kevin Driscoll

Where did the Internet come from? And in order to answer that question, you would have to have a pretty clear idea of what you mean when you say “the Internet.” I suspect that if we were to poll everybody in the room, we would have a variety of different, sometimes contradictory, sometimes incompatible, sometimes overlapping, definitions of “the Internet.”

Photo of Ian Bogost during presentation,with a slide displaying the word "Fun" in large letters.

Fun

presented by Ian Bogost

What if we arrive at fun not through expanding the circumstances that we’re in in order to make them less wretched, but actually by embracing the wretchedness of the circumstances themselves? What if, in a literal way, fun comes from impoverishment, from wretchedness?