Donald Norman, “Concerns About the Design of Future Things”, WNYC, 2007/11/14 January 5, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: design of future things, donald norman
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Leonard Lopate interviews …
Designers and marketers are working on new smart technologies like advanced navigation systems, and homes that anticipate residents’ every need. Design consultant and computer science professor Donald A. Norman says that we should be concerned about some of these products. His new book is The Design of Future Things.
WNYC – The Leonard Lopate Show: Too Smart? (December 14, 2007)
Erich Gamma, “IBM Rational Jazz”, OOPSLA 2007, RedMonk Radio, 2007/10/26 January 5, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: erich gamma, rational, jazz
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Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk, interviews Erich Gamma on the Rational’s Jazz project:
Erich first gives us a general overview of Jazz, and then we discuss the motivations for Jazz, highlighting ways it aims to help geo-distributed teams and better document desires and explanations in code. We also talk about Jazz’s architecture: how it can be deployed as a whole, or taken part-by-part.
Next we get into a discussion of how to manage the “openness” of a project like Jazz, where-in Erich makes some interesting comparisons to the way Eclipse was developed early on. Tied up with this is a brief discussion of how thinking about commercializing the architecture enters general design thinking.
Rounding out the Jazz portion of the podcast, I ask Erich about the use of REST over SOAP (or other WS-* stuff) in Jazz.
People Over Process » Erich Gamma on IBM Rational Jazz, OOPSLA ‘07, RedMonk Radio #43MP3 audio
Fred Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Rise of Digital Utopianism”, MediaBerkman, 2006/12/01 January 2, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: berkman, fred turner, stewart brand
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At the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Fred Turner of Stanford University ….
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers represented a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
Fred Turner explores this extraordinary and ironic transformation by tracing the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs who made the connections between San Francisco “flower power” and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
MediaBerkman : From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Rise of Digital Utopianism
Graham Harman, “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger”, LSE, 2007/11/29 January 2, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: graham harman, heidegger, latour
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The Information Systems Research Forum hosted a talk …
Though Heidegger continues to solidify his status as the consensus “great philosopher” of the twentieth century, there are some obvious points of difficulty with his ontology. Latour strikes an effective blow on two of these points. First, he restores agency to non-human actors. Second, he revives a taste for concrete discussion of specific kinds of objects (trains, apricots, volcanoes).Yet there is one key weakness in Latour’s ontology that must be addressed: his relationism. The reality of an actor, for Latour, is defined by the way it affects, modifies, or perturbs other things. This leads to problems that I will review in my talk, and which are only partly remedied by Latour’s intriguing new concept of plasma.
Surprising resources for a new realism are found in Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. Transforming Latour’s army of onefold actors into an armada of fourfold objects, we find a Heideggerian alternative to Latour’s shapeless molten plasma. Latour corrects Heidegger’s Dasein-centrism, but at the same time Heidegger counters Latour’s overinvestment in relationality. In this way, object-oriented philosophy crossbreeds the virtues of its two ancestral heroes.
