Design Engaged

There’s such a marvelous variety of convergent thought going on out there, to which I feel myself connected. I stumbled into the site for the Design Engaged conference (in Amsterdam, mid-November), perhaps via my feed from Stephen Downes’ Edu_RSS and a posting (by Chris Heathcote) that says

Ubicomp isn’t a box you will buy from your local electronics retailer, plug in, and switch on. It’s lots of really small pieces loosely, sloppily joined – glued together.

So this morning I did a search for ‘design engaged’ and found a wonderful collection of links to papers/presentations in which I rolled gleefully (think: spaniel in dead fish…) for an hour or so. Among the pieces that struck particular chords:

Fabio Sergio’s post-conference thoughts and their associated links
That Syncing Feeling (Thomas Vander Wal)
Elastic Space (Timo Arnall, with many astonishing images of “stickering, graffiti and flyposting”)