“Follow us [ uidsph ] on Twitter!”

[Special thanks to Jen Shook, DSPH Twitter Reporter]

DSPH Grants Awards

DSPH congratulates all the awardees and thanks the faculty and staff who served as review panelists.

Special thanks to Cheryl Ridgeway.

DSPH inaugural series of bi-weekly Jelly’s* this semester has one remaining sesssion on Thursday, May 3. Students, faculty and staff with an interest in developing or working on a project, or just looking to gather in an informal work setting are enthusiastially invited to drop by!

Thursday, May 3, 2 to 4 pm.
DSPH bi-weekly Jelly
Main Library NW corner on the ground floor.
1015 LIB

“No project too big – or small.”

* From workatjelly.com: “Jelly is a casual working event. It’s taken place in over a hundred cities where people have come together (in a person’s home, a coffee shop, or an office) to work. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.”

Now under way!
April 12-14 Schedule

[click on graphic to enlarge.]

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We’re delighted to announce a third public talk during the upcoming April 2-3 DSPH-sponsored visit to The University of Iowa by technologists Anne Balsamo, Dale MacDonald and Scott Minneman.

The overall visit, dubbed “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination At Work,” will promote a discussion of the vital role of technology and innovation in the humanities and society. See previous post for information on the other pubic presentations.

Monday, April 2, 12:30-1:20 p.m.
110 MacLean Hall
Talk: “Computer Science Challenges in Culturally-inspired Innovation”
Dale MacDonald

The University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab has the charter of leveraging the cultural expertise of the School of Communications and Journalism to define, create and disperse culturally relevant applications, platforms, media genres, and practices, in conjunction with the other schools at USC, with corporate partners, and with the engagement of students who come from a range of design and technological disciplines. In his talk, Dale MacDonald will describe some of the social and technological challenges that have emerged during the past 18 months as the Lab has begun to implement the charter. The broad objective is to show how these challenges are in fact opportunities for revising and expanding education in computer science and engineering design.

During the Q&A session, Dale will be joined by technologist Anne Balsamo and Scott Minneman, two of his former Xerox PARC collaborators to reflect on and describe the process of collaboration among designers, engineers, computer scientists, artists, and humanists.

Bio: Dale MacDonald
Dale MacDonald is the Technology Manager for the Annenberg Innovation Lab. He is in charge of enabling the Lab’s projects through managing a team of student and professional designers and programmers, developing and maintaining a world-class suite of foundational technologies, and developing deep connections with technologists and designers in Lab sponsor- and USC partner- organizations. He comes to the Lab after 17 years at the famed Xerox PARC and 10 years of deploying ground-breaking interactive exhibits into museums, trade-shows and other public venues as part of Onomy Labs. His background ranges from semiconductor device physics and electronic music to hypertext research and installation and performance art to interactive exhibits
and theatrical lighting design.

[graphic: Public interactive from "XFR-The Future of Reading," an exhibition that launched at the Tech Museum in San Jose, California and toured the United States from 2000 to 2003. Balsamo, MacDonald and Minneman were principal co-creators of the project. Caption: "'RED, the Reading Eye Dog' loves to read out loud to you! Put any printed text in front of his eyes and he will pick out the text and put it together on his tummy screen. Then not only does he read the text but he points out to you which word he is reading. RED is a special friend to those young visitors just learning to read and to those with special reading challenges."]

Save the Dates! DSPH will be hosting a visit to The University of Iowa by technology researchers and theorists Anne Balsamo, Dale MacDonald and Scott Minneman, April 2-3. Below is preliminary information on two public talks, both scheduled for 5 pm in the newly reopened Art Building West. We will be publishing more complete information on their visits shortly.

Monday, April 2, 5 pm
Art Building West 116
Talk: “Just Can’t Stop It: Confessions of a Serial Innovator” | Scott Minneman

Starting way back, Scott Minneman has done multidisciplinary projects spanning rehabilitation and assembly robotics, physical chemistry, human-powered vehicles of various sorts, workplace communications, museum exhibits, and public art. While crafty engineering and novel technologies are often involved, the role of setting, exposure to needs/opportunities, specific people, good collaborators, and utter happenstance also need to be considered. Inventions and innovations are a real booby-prize if they’re not made real, and many developments only fully blossom as they encounter the challenges of the real world and the people that inhabit it. The landscape of innovation and invention have recently undergone significant changes as emerging technologies of production are giving ordinary people capabilities once reserved for only the best-funded university and corporate labs.
On the other hand, the legal hurdles of protecting work and dodging patents (most that should never even be granted) add a challenging texture to that landscape. Through a sequence of examples, perhaps a recipe of sorts will emerge for technological innovation

Bio notes: Scott Minneman is an engineering designer whose work probes the intersection of collaborative practices, emerging technology and new forms of storytelling. Scott was named a Presidential Scholar, and holds degrees from MIT and Stanford, as well as 12 or so US patents.

Dale Mac Donald and Anne Balsamo will contribute to the presentation.

[graphic:screen grab from Vimeo video of "Tilty Table." Caption: The Tilty Tables were designed as a way of involving a group of people, all using their whole bodies, in an exploration of a large 2-D information space. The interaction happens by physically tilting the tabletop -- the projected content flows of whatever edge of the table is lowest, and new information flows on to replace what's gone. Shown here are early Tilty Tables built at Xerox PARC for the eXperiments in the Future of Reading show. Since then, Onomy Labs has continued to develop the Tilty concept, adding the Twisty Table (where torque is instrumented) and the Spinny Table (where the table surface is round, and the spin axis is instrumented). See these models in my other videos. Content developed includes the GeoConnecTable (a good group interface for satellite map datasets) and the AstroTable (an amazing self-guided tour of the universe).]

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Tuesday, April 3, 5 pm
Art Building West 240
“Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination At Work” | Anne Balsamo

Anne Balsamo asserts that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination. In her recent book, “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination At Work,” she discusses specific examples of technological innovation that began, not with questions of technology, but rather with question of culture. She offers several “lessons” about the nature of innovation in contemporary culture. Some of the material in the book draws on her participation in an cross-disciplinary research-design group at XEROX PARC called “RED: Research in Experimental Documents.” In her talk, Anne will be joined by interactive designer Scott Minneman and Computer Scientist Dale MacDonald, two of her former RED collaborators, to reflect on and describe the process of collaboration among designers, engineers, scientists artists, and humanists.

The broad objective–of Balsamo’s work and her collaborations–is to support the cultivation of a “culturally attuned” technological imagination and to encourage collaborations among humanists, technologies, artists, and designers on technological innovations that take culture seriously.

Bio Notes: Anne Balsamo
In her new book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke, 2011), Anne Balsamo offers a manifesto for rethinking the role of culture in the processof technological innovation in the 20th century. Based on her years of experience as an educator, new media designer, research scientist and entrepreneur, the book offers series of lessons about the cultivation of the technological imagination and the cultural and ethical implications of emergent technologies. She is a full professor at the University of Southern California, where she holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC where she created one of the first academic programs in multimedia literacy across the curriculum. In 2002, with Dale MacDonald and Scott Minneman, she co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies.

[graphic: cover of "Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work"]

DSPH is delighted to announce the launch of the website for the upcoming April 12-14, 2012 University of Iowa conference, “Visions of the Future: Global Science Fiction Cinema.”

DSPH developed the site for the conference, working with organizers Sarah Ann Wells and Jennifer Feeley, and assistant conference coordinator Beverly Vu.

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more | earlier post

Conference Website

Following up on February’s DSPH Workshops on Presentation Technologies and Best Practices we’re delighted to announce the launch of a bi-weekly Jelly. Our first session will be on Thursday, March 8 from two to four pm at the studio. Students, faculty and staff with an interest in developing or working on a project are welcome to attend.

From workatjelly.com: “Jelly is a casual working event. It’s taken place in over a hundred cities where people have come together (in a person’s home, a coffee shop, or an office) to work. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.”

While DSPH is short on sofas at the moment, our researchers will be available to provide technical assistance, conceptual support and general guidance. We will also have a computers to work on, although we recommend that people bring laptops if possible.

DSPH Jelly’s this semester:
Thursday. March 8
Thursday, March 22
Thursday, April 5
Thursday, April 19
Thursday, May 3

All DSPH bi-weekly Jelly’s from 2 to 4 pm.
Main Library NW corner on the ground floor.
1015 LIB

“No project too big – or small.”

Last Thursday and Friday, as part of our efforts to support and encourage public digital humanities at Iowa, we presented workshops on presentation technologies at DSPH | DRP in the University’s Main Library.

The workshops were presented in conjunction with the Obermann Institute for Advanced Studies Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. A small but spirited group blazed the trail, looking at a range of technologies and approaches including the use of online shared authoring environments, and recording audio in PowerPoint presentations for display on YouTube.

We’re hoping to offer five more bi-weekly sessions during the rest of the semester. Stay tuned for dates and times!

[l-r standing: OCAS 2012 Institute Fellows Jen Shook and Melody Dworak, and DSPH Researcher Nikki Dudley. seated: OCAS Assistant Director Jennifer New.]