NEWSLETTER 007

Neo-nomad had 142.810 visits the past year! [1]

Neo-nomad is a research blog enabling the collection and organization of thoughts and findings, and the connection with researchers investigating the relationship between people, object and space, the digital, and mobility. In scrutinizing the neo-nomad ecology, the goal is to understand and develop theoretical frameworks, propose scenario of usages and work on implementing meaningful spaces and projects related to our contemporary sociality.

In 007, neo-nomad will initiate the NID, “Neo-nomad’s ID” tags, insightful dialogues with researchers and practitioners who experiment with and explore the production of spaces in the age of multiple mobilities!

Forthcoming event, the 4th Monday of January, video-conference discussion on the impact of mobility Between Dr. Ben Croxford, Lecturer MSc Environmental Design and Engineering, and me; intended to students enrolled in the Master of Science Adaptive Architecture and Computation program, Digital Space and Society module taught by Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, The Bartlett, London, UK. The event is hosted by Critical Digital at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

I look forward to a fantastic year!

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See below what happened in 006, the milestones and achievements:

March. I invite Adam Greenfield to give a talk and present his book Everyware, the Dawn of Ubiquitous Computing at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

I have met Adam Greenfield at the Digital Civilization Forum 2005; the Digital Civilization Forum was “dedicated to the future of the digital revolution and designed to evaluate its social, cultural, and economic impacts”. We were both invited experts at Ci’Num 2005.

April. I write a short essay, via Chronos, for JCDecaux, Mobilités: la Clé des Villes (St-Amand-Montrond, Clerc: 2006) p. 98-99

May. I am now a Doctor of Design, Graduated from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (DDes 2006).

At Harvard, I have researched the identity of contemporary spaces in the Digital Age. I focused on how these neo-nomads, digitally geared people on the move, reclaim a sense of belonging to places in the age of multiple mobilities, mental, physical and digital.

July. I team up with Cati Vaucelle, PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media group, to work on a touch-sensitive wearable for massage and sensory therapy.

September. I teach a Design Studio at Wentworth Institute of Technology (Sophomore, first studio) and a World Architecture History class at Northeastern University (Freshmen, Honors students).

I invite Carlos Cardenas, DDes candidate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Sotirios Kotsopoulos, PhD, MIT Design and Computation, Professor at the Boston Architectural College for the Design Studio reviews.

For the first project of the semester, students abstracted design principles from a quilt and produced a model exploring a ‘dynamic’ aperture. Here is an example: (student: Tony Nguyen)

For the second project students produce an interactive site analysis of Chinatown and a Performance Space. Below is Sara kanoo’s proposal for the third project of the semester, a Sacred Space on the Wentworth Institute of Technology campus:

For the World Architecture History class, at Northeastern University, I give students hands-on projects to augment their learning experience. One project concentrates on the making of a set of flash cards around the theme and material of their choice. Below is the set of flash cards that Christa Heffron produced. The theme is “light”:

Dankwa Osseo-Assare, March I at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design gives a presentation on Earth Architecture. Dankwa has build a “mud house” in Ghana and traveled extensively in India. Professor Robert Cowherd, PhD, MIT, currently faculty at Wentworth Institute of Technology offers an insightful lecture on Critical Regionalism. Prof. Cowherd has spent 4 years in Java studying architectural hybridism.

September. Women in Mobile # 16. Interviewed by Rudy De Waele for m-trend
I owe Rudy the inspiration for the NID (Thank you Rudy!)

October. I team up with Miranda McGill, User Experience Designer at Oracle to work on the HOmeTEL project.

November. I give a presentation to students enrolled in Digital, a class taught by Michael MacPhail: at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

November. Not yet in its finalized form, neo-nomad.net goes live…

December. I am writing an article for a European journal. The title in French is: Environnements néo-nomades, système écologique?

[1] webalizer: “log file analysis program,” I note that “Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remote sites that link to graphic and other non-page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.” Summary Period: Last 12 Months Generated 31-Dec-2006 21:18 CET