Expand Your Mind! Or, 8 Reasons We Went To Malmö
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To Do List headed to Malmö in August for The Conference 2015 – an annual event which aims to explore complexity and trends in the digital world…
There are worse places to spend a few days of summer than Malmö – but when our heads weren’t clouded by akvavit and pickled herring, we were mingling at The Conference and checking out some inspirational and informative talks.
We’ve picked out some highlights, so stick Learning & Thinking on your To Do List and check out the talks below…[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]
Anita Sarkeesian | Hate & Heroism
Anita Sarkeesian created video webseries Feminist Frequency in 2009 – a platform for exploring representations of women in pop culture narratives.
Anita’s work “focuses on deconstructing the stereotypes and tropes associated with women in popular culture as well as highlighting issues surrounding the targeted harassment of women in online and gaming spaces”.
Perhaps before watching Anita’s The Conference talk below, you should dip into her series Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs Women in Video Games.
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James Haliburton | Connecting to the Internet of Things
James Haliburton is the co-founder and CEO of Malmö-based strategic design consultancy Topp.
He talked about how the Internet of Things is not so much about the Things, but more about the concepts and the implementation – and that the most important innovations will only be recognized when they go wrong!
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Alexandra Deschamps-Sosino | Connecting to the Internet of Things
Alexandra Deschamps-Sosino is the founder of London-based designswarm, who specialise in agile hardware prototyping, research & community building.
In contrast with James (above), Alexandra thinks that the Internet of Things is ALL about the things, and talked about how to design connected products that are truly meaningful to humans.
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Nick Gray | Finding & Using Stories
Nick Gray is the founder of New York-based Museum Hack, which has one very simple message: MUSEUMS ARE FUCKING AWESOME!
Nick talked about how he stumbled into the idea behind Museum Hack: a service for those who love (or could love) museums but hate how most museum tours are given.
If you’re in New York, Washington D.C., or San Francisco, you should check out the Museum Hack tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the DC National Gallery of Art, and the de Young.
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Nina Åkestam | The Future of Work
Nina Åkestam is a researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics. In this frank but inspiring talk, Nina shared her experiences of burning out, followed by advice on how to avoid doing the same.
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Roland Paulsen | The Future of Work
Roland Paulsen is a sociologist whose published works include Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance.
Roland talked about the increasing meaninglessness of work, and “the ever-decreasing need for human labour and how it affect humans and the society we live in”.
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Kate Darling | Robots, Humans & Artificial Intelligence
Kate Darling is a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and the Yale Information Society Project.
Kate talked about the growing role of robots in our everyday lives, and her research on people’s instinctual and emotional perception of robots.
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Mike Hearn | Robots, Humans & Artificial Intelligence
Mike Hearn, formerly of Google and now a Bitcoin developer, presented a talk provocatively titled “Fighting for the right to be ruled by machines”.
He puts forward a vision of the near future where people might conceivably decide that only computers or robots can be trusted to control the critical infrastructure of society…
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Intrigued? Check out the rest of the talks from The Conference 2015 at http://2015.theconference.se/
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I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like: nice pubs, film marathons, not doing real marathons, bad comedy, plays/musicals with shorter second halves, and the Oxford comma.
