dConstruct: where the future comes to life
Last week, Team Deeson set forth to Brighton. In addition to the pier, the rock and the seagulls, what also awaited us was a thing of true wonder: dConstruct.
For the uninitiated, dConstruct represents everything that is great and wonderful about humans: our creativity, initiative, collaboration and ability to approach some challenges in silghtly leftfield yet genius ways. And hundreds of others from around the UK and beyond agreed.
Part of a month-long Brighton Digital Festival (running throughout the whole of September), dConstruct’s theme this year was 'communicating with machines'.
Portland-based Amber Case delivered an historical analysis of wearable technology which she gave while wearing Google Glass. Naturally. Her talk specifically focused on the idea of making the 'visible invisible' – in other words, how we can make the technology around us disappear. Not out of use, but out of sight: a seamless interaction between humans and our inventions.
The rest of the lineup was nothing short of stellar, with speakers including Luke Wroblewski and Maciej Cegłowski. We had talks on non-visual augmented reality, fandom, interface design and hackers. All within seven hours. Phew.
While the standard of talks were excellent, there were also sobering moments. The talk on trolling by Nicole Sullivan a case in point; often not so much a harmless bit of banter, but more relentless bullying with sometimes shocking results. In contrast, Simone Rebaudengo entertained the audience with a talk on connected (aka emotional?) toasters. Yes, toasters.
As the organisers of dConstruct say themselves, you had to be there to fully appreciate the wonder. But we hope we can at least go a little way to open your mind to it. So, here’s a video of one of the talks by Sarah Angliss. She’s a musician and uses robots as her instruments. Enjoy.