Quotes from the Speeches

Feedback from FLOW participants:

by Jane Szita

“Please don't use the word pervasive any longer - this is about FLOW!”
- anonymous; written on one of the doors in the men’s toilets

“Flow is getting to accomplish things, and feeling good.”
- Chris and Paul (Interaction, Visual Interface and Customer Experience
Designers, from Orange, UK)

“I don't know about the flow here, it's actually pretty bad. I went to the bar at the front for coffee, and after a while they sent me elsewhere. When I got there, it said coffee cost E 1.60, but when I ordered it I didn't have to pay, and now I'm constantly defending my coffee cup from being removed.”
- Jeroen van Mastrigt (teacher of Digital Media Design at HKU, the Netherlands)

“I think flow is to do with the flow of ideas in the mind. For instance, in the future, architects will have to design not in 3D, but in 4D: how a building changes over time. For instance, the mood of a building changes, but also the way people move through it during different times of the day.”
- Tomas Arnold (Assistant Professor of Architecture at Berlin Technical University)

“I think flow is the information exchanges and relationships among people. I especially liked Marco Susani’s presentation, which dealt with ways of representing relationships. Future computation will be in a different form, but it’s hard to predict what. Italy needs its own Doors of Perception. . .”
- Donatella Astrologo (Knowledge Manager at Isvo Fiat Spa, Italy)

“The tendency towards pervasive computing is scary, because it’s going too fast. We don’t have any control over it, because we don’t have the cultural and practical tools to deal with it. These cultural tools need to be developed.”
- Max Bosio (Brand-Experience Designer, Shot Design, Italy)

“Flow is the optimal experience of well-being, the optimal state between activity and environment. This can be a static state - just sitting down, you can be in flow as well.”
- Jacques Payer & Philippe Lemacy (Professors at the University of Montreal)

“Computing is already pretty pervasive - we came here by car, using satellite navigation on CD-Rom. We got lost in The Hague, when the computer said there wasn’t a road ahead of us, even though we could see it clearly. In the future, these sort of systems will be integrated with GPS, traffic forecasting and updateable street information.”
- Richard Blyth and Ron Bird ( British Telecom, 2birds)

“Flow is what happens next after the e-crash. The flow stopped. Now it’s starting again. The interface of the future will look and function like an organism.”
- Julian Wong (Mobile Interaction Designer, Australia)

“Flow is, for example, the place where a talk between two people takes place. I’ve heard lots of talk about i-mode here. This is a big success in Japan, but not a very good thing because young people have adapted to the technology to such an extent that you see couples sitting next to each other in the park, not communicating with each other at all.”
- Hiroshi Imaizumi (Professor of Art, Japan)

“The interface of the future will depend much more on the culture. We’ll have different interfaces for different cultures.”
- Rena Patwary (IT Product Designer, Denmark)

“Flow is about shifting and interconnected processes. The future of the interface will be designing systems for people to design systems.”
- Jonas Rumberger (Architect, Sweden)

“Flow is about inter, vertical and horizontal hierarchy system building. Flow can be planned, but not totally determinate.”
- Mr Barai (National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad, India

Quotes from speeches

Pervasive Computing magazine compared the world today to the Wild West. I guess that makes us the Indians – and we all know what happened to them.
- John Thackara

I don’t think any technology is unnatural. We are biological, and we created technology, after all.
- Janine Benyus

Forecasting is a very difficult thing, especially when it concerns the future.
- Luis Fernandez Galliano

Pervasive computing should always be equalised with pervasive humanity.
- David Rokeby

Could everyone smile please? (takes out camera) Because I’ve never spoken to so many people before, and no one’s going to believe me.
- Michael Awad

Somebody showed me a smart flower stick, to monitor plants’ wellbeing. Actually, it was just an ordinary flower stick painted silver. This is what I call presenting a fetish object while praying to the gods of technology to sort out the problems.
- Lars Erik Holmquist

It doesn’t seem to be working. I think maybe the light is out of range of the MP3 player.
- Irene Mavromati demonstrates an ‘extrovert gadget’ (it did work, subsequently; and very good it was, too)

There will be 1 billion bluetooth devices by 2006; 60 per cent of them mobile. By 2006, most mobile devices will use Java 2004.
- Marko Ahtisaari

Computation, plus new materials with sensors and so forth, make it easier than ever to make designs based on nature.
- Axel Thallemer

Computing has been based on books and libraries – know what, in other words, rather than know how. Ubiquitous computing can improve on this by showing how, rather than what – as in intelligent devices which replace manuals for instructing us on putting IKEA furniture together, for example.
- Jakob Wejchert

The application of technology to rural India is not even 2 per cent yet.
- Aditya Dev Sood

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
- John Berger (quoted by Felice Frankel)

I am not an artist: these images are not eye candy but hard fact. . . . I do digitally enhance them, however. Should I? I don’t know . . .
- Felice Frankel

It is not down on any map. The true places never are.
- Herman Melville (quoted by Marco Susani)

With computer-augmented reality, it is not so much the computation that is important, but the social aspect, the shape of communication. . . Knowledge is the fluid management of flows which we (at Motorola advanced research) call auras . . . if knowledge is aural, than sociology is the meteorology of auras.
- Marco Susani

Much of our mental activity goes into building up a kind of nebulous information cloud, a space for half-formed thoughts, which is pre-logical, pre-verbal, playful. I think we need a ‘daydream engine’ for this space.
- Philip Tabor

For the sake of control, we are prepared to make our whole world artificial . . . The disappearing computer is the new eye of God.
- Patricia de Martelaere

I design systems which make art. Then, every time I push the space bar, there’s a different perception. It’s changed how I feel about art and design. I’ve let go of the control, and the computer comes up with the ideas – often ones I would never have thought of.
- Joshua Davis

Online games give a vision of how it will be when every object is live and smart . . . end-users will programme the objects, and trade their innovations.
- J C Herz

In my opinion, 60 to 70 per cent of software failures are due to ‘waterfall’ methodologies, which are neither agile, nor people-oriented.
- Massimo Banzi

Corbis controls three-quarters of the world trade in digital images.
- Franziska Nori

It was enlightenment to me to realise the importance of the whole body in interacting with technology.
- Open Doors winner Jussi Angesleva

The space of flows is highly stratified.
- Felix Stalder

Where steady crossovers between flows occur, places emerge.
- Malcolm McCullough

In my opinion, minimalising fear now comes second only to enabling sustainable forms of life as a design objective. When fear is distributed and flows though the nets, it changes the way people think – so that 60 per cent of US people now favour war on Iraq. Fear is linked to flow – of people and information.
- Ezio Manzini

Design creates a space for language to flow between disciplines.
- Gill Wildman and Ellie Runcie

Low-cost, locally-assembled technologies and networks foster the sense of belonging, and can therefore stabilize the planet.
- Neil Gershenfeld (on teaching Kashmiri women how to build networks)