Category: workshop

Theo Veltman (1956) is Innovation Rainmaker in Amsterdam.

His experience ranges from being responsible (i.e. CEO small independent governmental body, CEO education) to executive responsibility (i.e. program manager merger six organisations) and consultancy (i.e. digital strategy, trouble shooting). He worked mainly in government, and about 7-10 years in a profit environment (bank, farmaceutics, technology). Internationally he worked in short projects in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, UK. His practical and creative approach is based on this experience and a knowledge base, including technology (BSc), business administration (BBa), business management (MA). He published several articles and books.

Recently an article with Rob van Kranenburg, titled ‘Data makes the world go round’ with an analysis of the present digital safety and some practical proposals contributing to a safe public digital environment.

Together with Rob van Kranenburg Theo will host the workshop on an independent and open digital trust infrastructure.

Thursday 12 December 10:15-13:00 14:00-16:30
Curated by Lorna Goulden
Facilitator: Mariagiulia Benato

Build a responsible business case

After a morning discussing a range of IoT product development strategies and new product innovations this track will shift the focus in the afternoon to the challenge of developing a viable and responsible business case. After a quick introduction to the IoT stack, from a business perspective, then assessing a hands-on example, participants will work together using a specially developed business modeling tool to develop a Responsible Business Case for one of the IoT propositions from the morning session.

The morning presentations are listed below:

Cayla Key | University of Dundee

Living with Things: Alternative human-thing translations

Cayla will talk about a project which explored living with the livelihood of data and connected things in peoples’ homes. As a way to be aware and present with how they are entangled in our home lives, and in what ways that might help us resist alienation and imagine futures where these things are more than mere assets. She will discuss what design challenges and opportunities arise from these findings and ask what other translations might we design for when considering the liveliness of humans and non-humans? What if we were able to translate authority, agency, and empowerment for example.

Sarah Kiden | University of Dundee

Sarah is a technologist and researcher, interested in how technology and society intersect. She is a Marie Curie Research Fellow on Open Design of Trusted Things (OpenDoTT), a joint PhD programme between the University of Dundee and Mozilla.  Through the OpenDoTT project, she hopes to explore possibilities for smaller-scale local Internet of Things (IoT) technology and how communities and neighbourhoods can be supported in making the best use of them.

She has researched and worked on projects that build, deploy, train and advocate for technology solutions and meaningful Internet access for grassroots communities. She was a 2017-2018 Ford-Mozilla fellow hosted by Research ICT Africa and working on broadband performance and Internet measurements.

Megan Anderson and Shay Raviv | STBY

Ask Me Anything (AMA) session about Design Research for Responsible IOT

Pioneering with responsible and ethical tech, and aiming to shape a positive future impact of connected products, also means making sure that the devices and services fit into the everyday lives of the people who will be using them. Design Research is a way to investigate and probe opportunities that make a meaningful, valuable difference in the lives of individual people, communities and society. Design Research integrates progressive understanding with creation and prototyping. There are many methods and tools to step into the shoes of future users for a while and explore how, from their perspective, new innovative and smart products and services could add value.

STBY is specialised in Design Research for Service Innovation. Their insights have informed and inspired many innovation projects, including connected products and machine learning. In this open format Ask-Me-Anything session they will try answer all questions from the IOT community on how to integrate Design Research into prototyping and development processes.

Maarten van Maarschalkerweerd  | Springtime

Geheugendeuntjes (Memory tunes)

New concept for a connected music player tailored for people with dementia.

Johanna Tiffe

Sustainable Open Source e-bike How could a human centered sustainable connected mobility look like? About the challenges of creating a sustainable open source e-bike and introduces the idea of e-bike.brain – wiki and communication platform for developers, supporters, enthusiasts.

Marcel Shouwenaar | The Incredible Machine

House.coop, a start-up that develops a concept for cooperative ownership of houses: WeOwnThisPlace.

Lorna Goulden | Internet of Things explorer

Workshop: Building a viable and responsible Internet of Things Business Case

After a morning of sharing and discussion on IoT product innovation, from user engagement and design research, to service development and prototyping of responsible IoT ideas. Lorna Goulden proposes to take these IoT product cases as a starting point for a hands-on workshop with constructive-critical discussion on the challenges of building a viable and responsible IoT business case.

Lorna has 20+ years’ experience working across a wide range of industries from smart city developments in Eindhoven, Amsterdam and Barcelona to customer-centric strategies and technology-impact innovations for companies such as ASML, Cisco, DAF-trucks, Deutsche Telekom, NXP, Philips and Ziggo. She has written and spoken extensively about the Internet of Things and Smart Cities with a particular focus on the role of people and the impact on society. She organizes the Eindhoven Internet of Things Meetup community (1500+members) in the Netherlands and initiated the Eindhoven The Things Network community, joining a global initiative that is building citywide community-owned LoraWAN IoT urban data networks.

Thursday 12 December 10:15-13:00 14:00-16:30
Curated and hosted by Lily Higgins and Elise Marcus

30 years from now

30 years from now in Rotterdam, the way we design, relate to, and interact in public space has shifted. The interactions between human and non-human, human and human, non-human and non-human, and the grey-area in between will present us with new dilemmas, opportunities, and norms in the public realm.

Part 1: Mapping Implications & Connecting Unlikely Dots

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll map the implications of plausible IoT developments beyond the next few years, and explore the future of the rules, regulations, and norms of public space that will shape how we design and use these spaces. How do we define our desired interactions in and with public space? How much do we want to intervene in defining the rules of interaction, and where is the boundary between public and private? How will we change the built environment and how will it change us? 

Part 2: Speculative Sign-Making & Urban Intervention

Building on the insights from mapping implications, we’ll explore the archetype of the mundane street sign to create tangible speculative artefacts. With speculative signs in hand, we’ll hit the streets of Rotterdam to install our artefacts in public space. Where do the signs of tomorrow find a space in today’s city? What do these new rules mean for the next 30 years of city-making? We’ll reflect on the results of these inquiries in order to deepen the dialogue around future rules of public space within and beyond Thingscon.

Making IoT Design Methods Work

Thursday 12 December – 10:15-13:00 14:00-16:30
Curated and moderated by Arne Berger (HS Anhalt, Germany), Albrecht Kurze (TU Chemnitz, Germany), Dries De Roeck (Studio.Dott), Ivan Ayala (Futurice), Gijs Huisman, Dan Xu and Youngji Cho (Digital Society School)

Aim and Outcome: In this workshop participants will collaboratively use different IoT Design Methods to ideate novel IoT objects or services. Participants will become familiar with existing design tools for IoT, explore how they can be combined, and brainstorm how existing tools could be improved. Participants will learn which workshop method works best for which context.

Who Should Attend: Designers, developers, and researchers from all backgrounds, schools, and industries, who want to learn how to conduct IoT ideation workshops and who want to have some fun in creating novel IoT objects or services.

Session #1 Understanding and Using IoT Design Methods: For the first session of the workshop we invite participants from industry, design, and academia to try out IoT design methods and to ideate imaginative and novel IoT objects and services. This session will be guided by four experts in conducting workshops for IoT idea generation. After the session you will know a number of IoT design methods and how to use them to come up with new ideas for your company, clients, or students. If you the creator of an IoT design method, we invite you to present your own method, so that we can try it out as well.

Session #2 Frankensteining IoT Design Methods: For the second session of this workshop we invite people with expertise in using any kind of design methods. If you have conducted a design workshop before, please join us for this second session to connect the IoT design method community. In this session, we want to do some frankensteining of our existing IoT design methods. To do so, we will discuss the overlaps and crossovers of our methods and collaboratively think about how to mashup our toolkits in new and imaginative ways.

Funda is a Research Officer at the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics. She holds a DPhil in Sociology (Uni.Oxford, 2015) and MSc in Comparative Social Policy (Uni. Oxford, 2010). She is a sociologist with an interdisciplinary background and studies a wide variety of subjects in the field of sociology of knowledge, including statistical representation of vulnerable groups, gender, labour and migration and technology for social good. She works on issues of visibility and invisibility in data, and the ethical underpinnings and implications of them. Her current publications cover a wide variety of topics, such as public policy and refugee statistics, women in informal employment, media representation of vulnerable groups, bottom-up data and ethical and responsible innovation in emerging technologies.

Annelie is an interaction designer and researcher. She works across disciplines, from ethics to data technologists. She is currently specialising in how to structure and visualise futures in collaborative and open ways – from workshops to exhibitions to tools. She often uses the medium of interactive and playful data visualisation. She is a faculty member and researcher at CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) where she teaches programming and data visualization. Together with her team at CIID Research, she runs projects that span from researching and designing tools for dialogue on sensitive topics to tools for ethical decisionmaking among IoT developers to designing an interactive exhibition of future energy choices.

This session will be filmed for research and dissemination purposes by Barbara Nino Carreras and Carolina Némethy who are research assistants working on VIRT-EU. Before the event, participants will be asked for consent and deliver a research information sheet regarding the
project.

Co-host of the workshop ‘Unforeseeable Futures‘ on Thursday 12th of December

In our interactive panel, we will challenge people to think about ethics in different and more proactive ways. We will explore ideas around designing for flexibility, for different points of view, for different kinds of futures. Our goal is to provoke and question the very notion of ethics, asking, why do we even care about ethics in relation to technology? Through our various perspectives, we will tell stories and encourage story-telling in order to bring concepts down to earth and into practice. To achieve this we will run a series of provocations with our participants around such questions as what do we mean by ethics? Why is it relevant to technology? What is ethical technology and unethical technology? What do we mean by tools for ethics?

Join us in this session to create a space and a structure for people to talk with one another about ethics, and to share practical viewpoints on ethics as it relates to IoT and connective technologies. We aim to enable our participants to question assumptions of what ethics means and how it relates to their life and work.

In this session we will also share our work on project VIRT-EU. It combines research and design in new technology and ethics, as well as our project’s framework for thinking about ethics in relation to building new technology.

This workshop is part of track ‘How to shape a responsible society’ (Thursday 10:30-17:30h) and lead by Irina Shklovski, Annelie Berner and Funda Ustek-Spilda.

An independent and open digital trust infrastructure, case study The Netherlands. How do we get there?

The key question of how to safeguard (digital) autonomy has no simple answer. The time to act is now. It is necessary to act ‘now’ in order to continue to make the most of the benefits of technology without jeopardizing individual autonomy. It would be wise to limit the monopoly position of large organizations, the digital platforms, and to strengthen the position of the individual, while this is still possible. This will require a concerted effort, including at the international level. 

Read more:
Data makes the world go round; Proposal for research into three policy instruments designed to strengthen (digital) autonomy
The white paper (Dunnen et al., 2019) can serve as a starting point

Workshop by Theo Veltman, Rainmaker Innovation/Program manager gemeente Amsterdam and Rob van Kranenburg (NGI Forward) on Thursday December 12, 14-16:30h as part of the track ‘How to shape a responsible society’.