The Boundaries to human Enhancement conference was a part of the RSA’s Ethical Futures project. Here’s a few words from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) website:

The RSA works to remove the barriers to social progress… We drive ideas, innovation and social change through an ambitious programme of projects, events and lectures. Our work is supported by 27,000 Fellows, an international network of influencers and innovators from every field and background. ( more here)

The conference opened with Oliver Morton and Cory Doctorow, and their talk of podcasts, ebooks and astroturfing sounded strange amongst the grandeur of the Great Room.

Morton is features editor at Nature, and spoke of the infant “bio-social sciences”, a convergence of bioengineering and social-sciences that is reflected in and articulated as an interest by institutions, but not yet borne out as a broad conversation. Can design offer something to help build this conversation?

Doctorow mentioned Bruce Sterling’s description of cyberspace as being like a phone conversation. Here is a larger quote from Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, :

Cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. _The_place_between_ the phones. The indefinate place _out_there_, where the two of you, human beings, actually meet and communicate.

I regularly see evidence of this type of cyberspace as I cycle around people who’ve wandered into the road cradling their mobile phones.

Other speakers included Oliver Morton, Andy Miah, Hugh Whittall, Atsuo Takanashi, Takao Takahashi (some interesting comments about John Rawl’s effective equilibrium), Nigel Cameron (with bold statements on the US presidential position on bioethics), Andrew George, Julian Kinderlerer (some excellent commentary on EU council’s position on ITC implants and nanomedicine), and Noel Sharkey and Kevin Warwick – who seemed to have plenty of common interests, yet between them managed to provide the richest debate of the day with their emotive opinions about the intelligence of robots.

There’s a nice presenter’s-eye-view of the conference venue on Cory Doctorow’s Flickr page

This look great – Zoe Laughlin joins the Materials Library at the Wellcome Collection for an evening exploring the theme of flesh:

An experimental and experiential insight into the materiality of flesh and its connection to the human body, culture and medicine. Touch, feel, smell, cut, drill and even taste flesh with experts such as surgeons, body builders, butchers, artists and scientists.

It runs late until 10, so bring your camp stove in case you feel peckish…

On Monday October 15th Material Beliefs is taking part in a debate hosted at Cafe Scientifique in Newcastle. Cafe Scientifique is an international and ad-hoc network of venues for discussions and drinks. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Cafe Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology. Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants and even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.

Ah, it’s nice to get out of the academy. Find out more about Cafe Scientifique on this page.

Patrick Degenaar – from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering – will be talking about prosthetic vision systems. Patrick is accompanied by Tobie, who will be joining Manel Torres (Fabrican) and and Dan Stiel (MIT) for the evening, to explore the Cyborg theme. A mail-out from the event organisers expands on this:

As part of the Cyborg Future exhibition at the Discovery Museum, we take a look at the shrinking divide between us and the technology we use, from prosthetic body parts to smart textiles and wearable body extensions.

The Newcastle venue is hosted by PEALS, the Policy, Ethics And Life Sciences Research Institute, details on how to get there are here.

Yesterday saw the first of a series of evening seminars exploring Design and Social Sciences, hosted by Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths. Here’s a snippet from a poster (download it here) describing the seminar series:

The CSISP seminar series on ‘Design and Social Science’ aims to explore these points of contact through a range of discussions that address such key topics as theory, practice, research, user, object, product, audience etc. Though the immediate objective is to enhance mutual understanding across disciplinary practices, it is also hoped that this series can serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.

The series has been convened by Mike Michael from Sociology and Bill Gaver from Design, who both kicked of the series with some initial observations about commonalities and differences between approaches to research within their disciplines.

Material Beliefs is interested in drawing upon the criticality and methodology of the social sciences, and is particularly drawn to writing from the science and technology studies community. This is of interest not only as a way of discussing what happened after the project has finished, but as a way upon reflecting upon the practical features that arise from ‘doing’ the project, and being attentive to what and how outcomes emerge.

With this in mind, Elio and Tobie will be talking about Material Beliefs at the fourth session in this series. This takes place on November 21st from 16:00 to 18:00. It’s a fairly small venue, but please contact Natalie Warner if you would like to attend any of the sessions described on the poster.

From a poster to accompany the series, designed by Alex Wilkie.

Elio and Tobie visited Dr Adrian Bowyer, senior lecturer in theDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, at the University of Bath . Adrian is based in the Biomimetics Research Group and he spoke about the research coming out of this group, and some of the broader issues that motivate his approach to engineering. See full documentation of the interview here, and previous interviews here.

On 17th September Andy and Tobie attended an the launch of a study into perceptions of engineering, at the Institute of Physics. The full title of the report is “Public Attitudes to and Perceptions of Engineering and Engineers”, with the research carried out by BMRB and jointly commissioned by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Engineering and Technology Board. This is a fairly hefty report which mainly confirms in a statistical form what was already felt – that engineering is not very well understood (as a descriptive term and as a set of professions) by the general public, and by 16-19 year olds in particular. I can’t yet find a PDF of the report, but some details of the launch event are available here. This in itself is best considered in the light of a later comment from the floor by Lyndal Gully from the Science Media Centre, who asked for less press releases about detailed changes within the infrastructure of engineering institutes, and more news about engineering innovation.

The first part of the event saw key data from the report presented by researchers from BMRB, followed by some questions from the floor. Of interest for Material Beliefs was the empirical underlining of the role of online resources as an information source about engineers (see page 24 of the report) and some description of “Drivers of engagement” (page 32) – that is interesting, relevant and socially responsible issues. That there was nothing particularly surprising or insightful offered by the report is perhaps made up for that we now have something to point to when we talk about what we are doing, and why – and indeed in the course of the session it was described as a much needed “baseline”.

The second half of the programme saw some more personal testimonial about the theme of the report, with some concise deliveries on how to “Change the face of Engineering”. Of note was a passionate call for awareness of engineering’s impact and material ubiquity by Peter Wilkie of Arup. Particularly well chosen was his slide of a tailless dog, haplessly leaping a show-jump as a symbol of curtailed engineering graduates emerging into the world. This sentiment was later reinforced by Andrew Lamb from Engineering Without Borders, another relatively young attendee who is looking for changes in undergraduate syllabuses to link the practical and process based elements of engineering education to the social and ethical contexts that surround engineering. This would in fact drive an uptake in the discipline by making it relevant, as well as better preparing graduates for the demands of a career in an industry that has increasing demands for accountability and understanding within a broader and increasingly politicised society (“everyone has an opinion” we heard earlier from an assailed Scott Steedman).

I want to finish with another comment from the floor by Mark Miodownik who is based at KCL and also runs the magnificent Materials Library with Martin Conreen and Zoe Laughn. A recurring theme of the event was a collective dismay at the perceived sterility and inaction of engineering. Richard Knight offered a seductive case for how the design industry has stolen engineering’s thunder – the husk that we have been left with as the subject of this report into perceptions, might be reinvigorated by learning a few tricks from the designers, and gradually shifting the aura of the very work engineering so that it becomes a signifier of something more creative, ingenious, and er, cool. This marketing insight became moderated and refined by Mark’s comment, which had more in common with the frustrations “on the ground” that were felt by Peter and Andrew. That is, there is something to be changed in the way engineering is permitted to conduct itself, of the associations it makes with other forms of knowledge. Mark sees something exciting happening within art and design education which is absent from engineering – a playfulness, vitality and culture of creative experimentation. There was something entrenched and life-suckingly formal about the delivery of what should have been a blueprint for renewal that makes me agree. New drivers of engagement needed.

The report with additional inky finger marks on the cover

Elio interviews Professor Kevin Warwick about his research in the Cybernetics group at theUniverstity of Reading. Warwick also gave a keynote recently at the Minds Bodies Machines conference, where his work on human to machine interfaces was set against nineteenth century representations of mechanical bodies. Click here to see the interview, and look out for more interviews soon…

Elio spotted a research group called Mind Bodies Machines, here’s how they describe themselves:

Minds, Bodies, Machines brings University researchers from the humanities and social sciences together with professionals from the IT community in order to explore questions that are central to our highly technological age: what is life, what is mind, can machines think and be self-aware, what does the human imagination bring to hard science?

There is a conference in London, on 6-7 July 2007 with a focus on androids in nineteenth century.

I’m curious to see how earlier representations of our relationship with machinery compare to more recent images of our cyborg selves.

Ben Hanson works in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London as a lecturer and researcher. I visited him in may, to hear about his work, which includes developing a device which will attach to damaged hearts, to help them pump effectively.

I’ve documented the interview, and this is the first in a series of research visits that will be shown on this site. The aim is to present the detail and process of engineering research, the enthusiasm of researchers, and the wider role the research has.

Science & Public 2007 took place on Saturday 19th May at Imperial College. It was organised and hosted by the Science Communication Group, with the aim of bringing together “diverse strands of academia that consider science as it intersects with non-scienfific cultures” (reference from the welcome pack).

There was indeed a broad range of papers, including a short presentation I gave on Biojewellery. I was excited by a session called “Constructing pasts and futures” which included papers from David A. Kirby, Mark Erickson and Alice Bell.

David A. Kirby’s paper was fascinating, exploring the role of technical advisers in Hollywood. These advisers were drawn from science and engineering communities, translating the detail of current research into a “realistic” narrative about technological futures. Kirby describes these expert-curated representations of technology in film as “diegetic protoypes”.

I argue in this essay that for Hollywood technical advisors cinematic depictions of future technologies are actually “diegetic prototypes” that demonstrate to large
public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability. I show how diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes: in the diegesis these technologies exist as “real” objects that function properly and which people actually use.

Kirby showed a clip from Destination Moon (1950), a space rocket launch sequence with the actors cheeks wobbling realistically, and another clip of a high-powered military meeting where the race to the moon is gravely revealed to be a race for a lunar weapons launching base. Powerful arguments for the mechanisms through which potential applications of science and technology become described by film, and imbibed with cultural value.

Still from Destination Moon (1950) referenced in Kirby’s paper.