college update
Future of Technology The Future of Technology Conference invited critics, designers, practitioners, and academics to speculate on issues facing technology and development. Speakers addressed topics such as Digital Publics, Technology of Empowerment, the Nature of Technology, and Smart Technology, resulting in a crossdisciplinary dialogue as well as considered reflection on the past as well as the future. Speakers including Julian Bleeker, co-founder of Near Future Laboratory and designer at Nokia Design, and Anna Dyson, Program Director and Associate Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture, acknowledged the multiple and potentially parallel futures of technology. Dyson reflected on energy flow, understanding the effects of actions and coexistence with materials in a material society.
18 portico | fall 2010
How we create environments will be different than what we’ve done in the past. Leah Buechley, High-Low Tech Research Group Director at MIT’s Media Lab, examined how gender is a factor in technology use and development, noting that out of the 2008 Bachelor of Science degrees awarded to women, lower percentages were in technology-related fields: 11 percent computer science; 9 percent computer engineering; and 12 percent electrical engineering. Buechley experimented with Arduino technology, an open-source electronics prototyping platform, mainly used by men. Utilizing Arduino, she designed LilyPad Arduino, a toolkit of electronically-conducted thread to embed electronics and computation into clothing. The result: LilyPad’s technology users are 65 percent women.