Last weekend, I attended day two of dorkbot Ghent's dorkfest. Due to a few people over-running and a later than expected start, I didn't actually speak for anywhere near as long as I had planned. I even missed out my tube maps in the rush which was disappointing. I hope to return and give a better presentation another day because I definitely liked Ghent and lots of things caught my eye.
Many thanks to Lieven and friends for inviting me, and to all the participants for showing their excellent and interesting projects. Highlights for me were Sven Koenig's sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, Heiko Hansen's overview of HEHE's work and the increasingly impressive NodeBox - think Processing meets Python plus lots more, sadly Mac OS-only right now but work on porting it is in progress.
This weekend, I hope to catch the end of the RCA Summer Show (particularly Interaction Design as covered by Tom at plasticbag) and the Bartlett Summer Show (alas I missed the MSc AAC show last weekend due to the clash with dorkbot Ghent). With luck, I'll also make it to Future City at the Barbican.
Looking further ahead, I'll be in Manchester for Futuresonic from 20th-22nd July. I'm taking part in a panel for the Social Technologies Summit with Stanislav Roudavski and Matt Webb entitled Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things). The rest of the festival is shaping up nicely, I'm pretty excited about seeing Battles again on the Friday night.
One of my fellow EngD students at the Bartlett, Karen Martin, is helping to organise Why Wait? (a workshop on place, time and future technologies) to be held on the 27th and 28th July. You might also like Karen's blog, Mr. Watson. I'll be at the first day of the workshop before I leave London on the 28th for two weeks in Chicago, New York and Boston. If you've read this far and you live in any of those cities, let me know - we should probably meet!
Over at Computing for Emergent Architecture, I just posted an overview of the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme I help out with at University College London.
Since I'm satisfied with Blogger as a path-of-least-resistance to web publishing, I've set up a weblog called Computing for Emergent Architecture for staff and students on the MSc Virtual Environments at UCL.
I need to find out how 'out there' Christopher Alexander was when he started talking about architecture in terms of graph theory (trees and lattices) in his famous paper A City is not a Tree. I know that my colleagues who carry out Space Syntax research in the VR Group at the Bartlett use graph theory heavily in their work, but if I talk to a group of recently trained architects, how many of them will know anything at all about this kind of analysis? If they already have a grasp of it, then it seems to be an ideal spring-board into talking about that classic of software engineering topics, algorithms and data structures. If not, then is it helpful or distracting to talk about both topics at the same time?
NB:- I'm currently only planning an hour long lecture under this heading, so to cover any of this stuff in serious detail will be impossible. I'm still interested in answering this kind of question anyway.
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