Seems like it was another good summer for the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). I gave a seminar there this week (about blogs and criticism: how blogs have been subject to accusations of narcissism and exhibitionism, not unlike how certain other forms of intimacy get policed) to attendees from (almost) all over the world. I also sat on a panel in the evening about collaborations between industry and academia. Which did a lot of things, one of which, for me, was to highlight the poverty of categories and panel titles. The world that the men from Microsoft and Cisco were describing didn't look or act much like the world that I know, and yet we were all ostensibly talking about the same thing. Industry+academic collaborations have many faces; it's meaningless to say that they are a good thing or a bad thing overall; we have to specify our terms. I tried.

Thanks to the OII for inviting me again.

-kris

Thinking more on the intradisciplinary (if that works) nature of such projects there is a stumbling block in the form of framework. Whose rules do you play by in order to create an initial critical structure? What tool set, language and reflexive position do you adopt? On one hand blurring disciplinary divides can offer unique and fresh, unbounded research yet locating critical foundations can be difficult. But is this a problem? It's something I struggle with coming from an interconnected yet diverse disciplinary background - Can or should you break or bend the rules before you know them? Does it matter?
-kat

My experience at the recent Street Talk; An urban computer happening at Berkeley supports a supposition of taxonomic perplexity. Architects talked like social scientists, developers sounded like artists, designers like researchers and I could even understand what computer scientists were on about. The group of 70 participants and presenters shared a passion and at most times a language for experimental location based applications whilst still being able to provide critiques and challenges from specific perspectives. It felt like it moved beyond interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary collaboration to something far more individually integrated. As if you cannot work in this area without opening yourself to the relevancy of wider disciplinary consideration. There was a call for even more blurring between the urban, social and computer sciences particularly in this area of research. Why? To actually try to improve everyday life rather than just focus on the coolest and newest applications designed for a select tech advanced audience.
-kat

I had a nice chat with Robert Peagler the other day, who we're encouraging to move to London. He's a smart fellow with just the kind of deeply unclassifiable job we like to see. Hard to say exactly what he does, but it sounds sometimes like art and sometimes like social science and sometimes like design. Interesting that there is now this itinerant band of intelligent people for whom there is no adequate institutional nomenclature. Have they always been around? Or are their numbers growing?

-kris

I probably should have already mentioned that last week we had a good visit with the aforementioned anthropologist, Ken Anderson from Intel. But this has always been a tardy blog. We had an interesting discussion about the history of Ubiquitous Computing, as a field of inquiry/study/design, fueled by an Anne Galloway paper and by Ken's longtime involvement in ubicomp (the 'p' is silent) communities. We also talked for a long time about digital and downloadable music, fueled by Gerard's fast-evolving and increasingly interesting PhD work.

-kris