Bending Time and Space

Tristan Ferne

For our fourth speaker, we've asked Tristan Ferne, the lead producer at BBC Research & Development to discuss how he uses technology and design to prototype the future of media and the Web.

He'll be exploring more about stories, their form, structure, beginnings, middles, endings, people, places, things, setbacks, climaxes and conflict. The Web also has form and structure, pages, links, javascript, audio, video, text, control, personalisation and adaptation.

When we take stories onto the Web we can do things that haven't been possible before. Giving you control over how much detail you get in the news, adapt a podcast to fit your commuting time, present fiction in different forms and across different media.

Through a series of examples from the BBC and elsewhere he'll look at some experiments with storytelling on the Web and explore some of the future directions we could take.

Meet Tristan — get your ticket today!

2D Graphene Formed in 3D

PHOTO: MELANIE GONICK/MIT

A team at MIT have been looking very closely at their material. They've been experimenting with Graphene in new ways. But shaping this 2D structure into 3D they have managed to get 10x the strength of steel at only 5% of the density.

The more interesting thing they've found is that small changes in the geometry have large impacts. It might be possible to tune the mechanics of any material simply by changing its geometry.

Watch a short video about the compression tests on YouTube.

As we explore the web, we should consider its shape, both literally and figuratively. Literally it is a series of interconnected lines of copper, fibre, packet switches and tubes. They form a densely connected web. That topology is what the original DARPA plans set out todo, to prevent any one node from being the bottleneck and weak link in the chain.

What if we changed the geometry of the Web? How would that affect the sorts of things we can do with it? Projects like Loon and others are changing the way we think about connectivity and how we access the Web.

Join us for Material 2017 — $159 only

CORCRETE©

You got peanut butter in my chocolate! No, you got chocolate in my peanut butter.

Sometimes, two things you never thought could work, do. Nina Ruthe-Klein and David Antonin of design studio niruk, have been experimenting with combining cork and concrete into interesting furniture. Together, they produce a mixture of natural warmth and modern coolness.

When exploring your material to the fullest, it might best blossom in the context of something else. As we explore the Web as a material, does it only come into its best along with another material? For decades we've assumed that was via a screen. Now others are experimenting pairing the Web via voice to produce the natural warmth with modern coolness. What other pairings are there?

Happy to help!

Did you know? We have setup a Slack team (https://visitingiceland.slack.com) for anyone to jump into and ask questions, plan their trip or sharing thoughts. Please come visit us and request your invite on our website.

Material 2017

A conference exploring the concept of the Web as a material

August 17th, 2017 — Nordic House, Reykjavík, Iceland