Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Ardler Inventor Day #1: Getting To Know You
When you’re doing research with communities, the first event is always the most nerve-wracking. You’ve made all the contacts, been to the community festival, dished out a small forest’s worth of flyers and posters, bought plenty of biscuits. But will anyone actually turn up? Repurposing Hackathons for Everyone The Ardler Inventor Days are being run…
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Launching: Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement
In November, we kicked off Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement, a project funded by EPSRC to explore how hackathons can be used to design civic technologies with communities. Over the course of the project, we’ll be running a series of hackathons with the Ardler community in Dundee to identify and attempt to address some local issues with…
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CHI 2016: Making Community: The Wider Role of Makerspaces in Public Life
We’re very happy to have had a paper accepted into CHI 2016 based on the makerspaces survey we carried out in the early stages of In the Making. The pre-print is now available to download. Summary Makerspaces are a growing resource for amateurs and professionals alike. While the role of makerspaces in innovation and peer learning is…
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The Internet of Arrogant Things (or My First Month with a Nest)
Just before Christmas, I got a Nest installed. I’ve only lived in a house with a thermostat for one glorious, cosy year out of 12 years of renting, so this was kind of a big deal. Never again would unpredictable British weather and a mechanical timer thwart my attempts to be vaguely comfortable. My energy bills…
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British HCI and HCI in Britain
Note: I started writing this last month to capture a lot of different conversations I had at British HCI (and which I think everyone else was having too). Long before I bothered to finish it, John Vines distributed offical notes from the town hall meeting, which are much more complete and well worth reading. British HCI was the…
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