presented by Clearleft
13th – 15th April 2011 Cumberland Hotel, London
Writer Ted Chiang’s latest story, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” is about a very near future where the descendants of today’s virtual pets learn, play and interact with us in far more sophisticated ways—not the omnipotent AI of 2001’s HAL or Iain M. Banks’ Culture Minds—but perhaps a stranger, more uncannily-affecting world where software has the intelligence and curiosity of a toddler…
What does it mean to design services and products that contain ‘fractional AI’? When software is an actor and a machine? What will be “UX-best-practice’ when our role is not so much to design a predictable system but cultivate and teach an adapting, changing entity? What will our homes, streets and daily lives feel like? Is this all bullcookies, and will it just be like MSFT’s Clippy all over again? Looking at games, science-fiction, BERG’s own work in the area and a whole bunch of other weirdness—we’ll attempt to find out.
About The Speaker
Matt Jones is Director, Design at BERG and has been delivering digital products and services since 1995. He was creative director for the launch version of the BAFTA award-winning BBC News Online. Between 2003-2005 he worked at Nokia on areas as diverse as RFID/NFC applications of tangible/physical interfaces and the human universal experience of play. From 2005-2007 he was director of user-experience design for Nokia’s Nseries range within Nokia Design. In early 2007 he co-founded and designed Dopplr.com, which grew into an influential and popular start-up travel service, before being sold to Nokia in the autumn of 2009.
He studied Architecture, qualifying in 1995 RIBA Part II and BArch from the Welsh School of Architecture. He has spoken at events such as Reboot, Ars Electronica, Webstock, O’Reilly’s Etech and FooCamp; and has written on interaction design, comic books and planetary-scale, self-replicating robot dogs for 10 years at www.magicalnihilism.com.
He is an advisor to the learning startup Schoolofeverything.com, One-Click Orgs and Amnesty International and is a visiting tutor on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art.
