Cover image is by Charlie Egalie Tjapaltjarri (Australian, b. ca. 1940–2002)Possum Dreaming , 1994 In my last blog post I wrote about the Pintupi community from Australia’s Outback that is the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) video from 1988. In this post I will delve deeper into this community around that time to …
Category Archives: Innovation
Innovation: its not what you know but who you know
In this post, I am looking at technological innovation from a critical perspective, covering appropriating technology, hacking and the process by which the name “innovation” is bestowed, or not, using a video from 1988 as provocation. In 1988, the national Australian public broadcaster ABC and journalist Jill Emberson produced a short 7 minute story on …
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Interacting with Technology- hacking vs appropriation
A thought provoking task given to me in class this week was about comparing the practices of hacking and appropriating technology. Tim Jordan’s Introduction talks about hacking, the hack and hackers and outlines his research in order to justify his definition of the hack. His definition is “a hack is a material practice that produces …
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Innovation is not society’s silver bullet
In today’s society, pursuing innovation is a cure for many ills, and sometimes a end in itself. In the concluding week of my innovation course, we looked at a couple of themes of dissent against the cult of innovation: that innovation is a hegemonic practice (Lilly Irani) and that innovation is has many downsides and …
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Smart Cities and the Importance of Public Trust
A critical review of the Waterfront Toronto Smart Cities Project UPDATE: On May 7, 2020 Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Waterfront Toronto https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/why-were-no-longer-pursuing-the-quayside-project-and-what-s-next-for-sidewalk-labs-9a61de3fee3a There are places I’ll remember All my life, though some have changed Some forever, not for better Some have gone, and some remain The Beatles, “In My Life” Over the last …
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Lilly Irani’s Entrepreneurial Citizenship in India
Lilly Irani conducted a multiple year critical study of design schools and entrepreneurship in India, participating as a designer and an ethnographer with one particular design studio for a number of years. Irani is both a researcher and an tech professional. In her book, Chasing Innovation, she coins the term “entrepreneurial citizen” to explain how …
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Shenzen, Shanzai and Maker Culture
Reading Wen Wen, and Gu and Shea and a preview of work by Lindtner about Shenzen, I was asked to reflect on what is Chinese maker culture and who or what forces are cultivating it and why. These works put forward a picture of Chinese maker culture as a hard-working ethos, that has arisen from …
AI for Audio Description Generation?
I have a product idea to use artifical intelligence to create audio descriptions for film and television. It was a winner at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center’s Immersive Media Challenge. Here is the 3min pitch, it includes a section of The Lion King which maybe I will get asked to remove due to rights, but its …
Fashion Image Search
Playing around with Python and Keras to create a fashion image classifier I. INTRODUCTION Those who shop for fashion online know the frustration of searching and trawling through multiple sites looking for something in particular, and when you finally do find it, it’s out of stock in your size, and you must start all over …
Tracy Keys 