Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp last October. Their vast collection of woodblocks are available to dowload in high resolution (and they’re in the public domain).
14,000 examples of true craftmanship, drawings masterly cut in wood. We are supplying this impressive collection of woodcuts in high resolution. Feel free to browse as long as you like, get inspired and use your creativity.
Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.
This is the book plants don’t want you to read…
The illustrations look beautiful too.
The third and final Responsive Day Out is done and dusted. In short, it was fantastic. Every single talk was superb. Statistically that seems highly unlikely, but it’s true.
I was quite overcome by the outpouring of warmth and all the positive feedback I got from the attendees. That made me feel really good, if a little guilty. Guilty because the truth is that I don’t really consider the attendees when I’m putting the line-up together. Instead I take much greedier approach: I ask “who do I want to hear speak?” Still, it’s nice to know that there’s so much overlap in our collective opinion.
Amazing time at #responsiveconf! Learned so much, thank you @clearleft and @adactio for a great event & for supporting @CodebarBrighton :)
— Jacqueline C (@jaxcurrie) June 19, 2015Keep thinking what a weekend, and it’s not even the weekend.Fantastic day at #responsiveconf, too much to tweet, hopefully in longform soon
— Katja Durrani (@kdurrani) June 19, 2015Oops, Responsive day out did it again - what a day! Thank you @adactio and the team #responsiveconf
— ajara (@nagare_ip) June 19, 2015Had a brilliant day at Responsive Day Out 3 - The Final Breakpoint! Thank you to @clearleft for such an interesting & inspiring day
— codebar Brighton (@CodebarBrighton) June 19, 2015Responsive day out was a really inspiring conference with some great talks. Big focus on accessibility and people. The essence of the web.
— Rob Mills (@robjmills) June 20, 2015Despite the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the day, I had a couple of complaints myself, and they’re both related to the venue. My issues were with:
The tiered seating in the Corn Exchange is great for giving everyone in the audience a good view, but the seats are awfully close together. That leaves taller people with some sore knees.
And the problem with having a conference in the middle of June is that, if the weather is good—which I’m glad it was—the Corn Exchange can get awfully hot and sweaty in the latter half of the day.
Both those issues would be solved by using a more salubrious venue, like the main Brighton Dome itself, but then that would also mean a doubling of the cost per ticket (hence why dConstruct and Responsive Day Out are in different price ranges). And one of the big attractions of Responsive Day Out is its ludicrously cheap ticket price. That meant sacrificing a lot of comforts—I just wish that comfortable seats and air temperature weren’t amongst them.
Still. Listen to me moaning about the things I didn’t like when in fact the day was really, really wonderful.
Orde liveblogged every single talk and Hidde wrote an in-depth overview of the whole day. If you were there, I would love it if you would share your thoughts, preferably on your own website.
Guess what? The audio from all the talks is already online. As always, Drew did an amazing job. You can subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcatching software of choice. Videos will be available after a while, but for now you’ll have to make do with the audio.
Oh, and speaking of audio, if you liked the music that was playing in the breaks, here’s the playlist. My thanks to all the artists for licensing their work under a Creative Commons license so that I could dodge one more expense that would otherwise have to be passed on to the ticket price.
Now. The number one question that people were asking me at the pub afterwards was “why is this the last one?” I really should’ve addressed that during my closing remarks.
But here’s the thing: the first Responsive Day Out was intended as a one-off. So really the question should be: why were there three? To which I have no good answer other than to say it felt about right. With three of them, it gave just about everyone a chance to get to at least one. If you didn’t make it to any of the responsive days out, well …you’ve only got yourself to blame.
If we ended up having Responsive Day Out 7 or 8, then something would have gone horribly wrong with the world of web design and development. The truth is that responsive web design is just plain ol’ web design: it’s the new normal. I guess the term “responsive” makes for a nice hook to hang a day’s talks off, but the truth is that, even by the third event, the specific connections to responsive design were getting more tenuous. There was plenty about accessibility, progressive enhancement, and the latest CSS and JavaScript APIs: all those things are enormously valuable when it comes to responsive web design …because all of those things are enormously valuable when it comes to just plain ol’ web web design.
In the end, I’m glad that I ended up doing three events. Now I can see the arc of all the events as one. Listening back to all the talks from all three years you can hear the trajectory from “ARGH! This responsive design stuff is really scary! How will we cope‽” to “Hey, this responsive design stuff is the way we do things now.” There are still many, many challenges of course, but the question is no longer if responsive design is the way to go. Instead we can talk about how we can help one other do it well.
At the end of the third and final Responsive Day Out, I thanked all the speakers from all three events. It’s quite a roll-call. And it was immensely gratifying to see so many of the names from previous years in the audience at the final event.
I am sincerely grateful to:
Many thanks also to everyone who came along to the events, especially the hat-trickers who made it to all three.
I’ve organised a total of six conferences now and I’m extremely proud of all of them:
…but they’ve also been a lot of work. dConstruct in particular took a lot out of me last year. That’s why I’m not involved with this year’s event—Andy has taken the reins instead. By comparison, Responsive Day Out is a much more low-key affair; not nearly as stressful to put together. Still, three in a row is plenty. It’s time to end it on a hell of a high note.
That’s not to say I won’t be organising some other event sometime in the future. Maybe I’ll even revive the format of Responsive Day Out—three back-to-back 20 minute talks makes for an unbeatable firehose of knowledge. But for now, I’m going to take a little break from event-organising.
Besides, it’s not as though Responsive Day Out is really gone. Its spirit lives on in its US equivalent, Responsive Field Day in Portland in September.
This is handy—a month by month list of which vegetables you should be planting right now.
This is a superb talk by Mark Lynas who once spearheaded the anti-GM movement, and who has now completely changed his stance on genetically-modified crops. Why? Science.
You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.
A lovely piece from Matt examining agency and behaviour in the things we surround ourselves with: frying pans, houseplants, pets, and robots.
These are the droids you are looking for.
Check out this cool arduino project: input from the moisture level of a plant sends an SMS to Twitter so you know it needs to be watered.
Kind of disturbing, kind of funny.
