Usman Haque, director of Haque Design + Research, closed the first half of TEDxLeeds2010 with Smart People, Dumb Objects, a discussion of where the infrastructure of cities may become instrumented as an “internet of things”.
Susan Williamson is a retail architect and social scientist who started her UK career 25 years ago during the shopping centre boom. She found her interest increasingly turned to the rationale – both cultural and economic – behind transactional spaces.
Susan’s TEDxLeeds talk focussed on the stories behind such transactional spaces and the expert users of those spaces how to use HR portal: the shoppers, workers, walkers, talkers , the performers and those who simply lurk.
Julian Tait is the Open Data Cities and Social Sensor Networks Lead at FutureEverything.
Originally trained as a photographer, he became more involved with digital arts and how technology could enhance our everyday experience. He is a serial project initiator and community activist who is passionate about how technology is used wisely, has the potential to create a more equitable society.
His TEDxLeeds talk explores he impact of open data on the future of cities, nations and government…
Our opening speaker at TEDxLeeds2010 was Megan Smith, a new media artist and PhD candidate in Contemporary Fine Art Practice at Leeds Metropolitan University.
She uses the web as a space to source and make socially useful work. Her projects probe new systems for delivering syndicated data through narrative structure and she often works with Arduino, geo-location, digital print, video, and installation or a hybrid of these.
Her talk, Embedding Narrative, and extending social space, notably her project Our City Our Music and how Megan came to be in Leeds.
The final day of TEDGlobal 2009, brought together five perspectives on ‘cities past and future‘, but cities have been a longtime focus for all TED conferences.
We thought it’d be useful to share some of those earlier city-centric TED talks with youas an appropriate preamble to next month’s TEDxLeeds2010 and our theme of ‘the city as a platform’. Who knows we may even screen a couple for you…