frans

assembly won the grand prix

Another moment of glory to the Finnish digital culture: Assembly, the key event of demo scene won this year’s MindTrek Grand Prix, the largest Nordic new media price. In this shot from yesterday’s Gala, Pekka Aakko (Pehu of Accession) and Jussi Laakkonen (Abyss of Future Crew) accept the price from Risto Linturi, a veteran of Finnish computer scene and one of its leading telecom and futurology consultants. Great to see the computer fandom getting recognition! The impact of Assembly events has been major indeed.

new publication in proactive, ubiquitous technology & smart home design

A new publication has come out in the Human Technology journal, summarising the key findings and methodological conclusions from our three-year-long Morphome project, funded by the Academy of Finland. As the external evaluators for Academy recently gave their estimates of all work done within the Proact Programme, they gave credit to our work, claiming that “design research should be a key aspect of human-centered computing research” and that “the kinds of work represented by this project should be supported in the future. This group, in the brief time of their project, became a leader in that regard. The Academy should consider supporting this and like-minded projects in the future at levels appropriate for sustained work.” Now that is what I call nice feedback, indeed! 🙂 You can yourself download our article from this address: http://www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/current/abstracts/mayra-et-al06.html

ubimedia & media adventure seminars

Next week it is again the time of MindTrek mediaweek, the new media festival. I will be presenting in two different seminars, Mediaseikkailu (Media Adventure) is focused on educators, and I will be talking about kids and games; the second one is titled Ubimedia, and there my talk will be on pervasive games. Links: http://www.opeko.fi/mediaseikkailu/ & http://www3.hermia.fi/in_english/ubimedia_seminar/

cfp: gamers in society

We have published the call for papers for a new seminar in our annual series of game studies seminars — Gamers in Society, Play in Culture. See: http://gamelab.uta.fi/socialgamer-seminar/

stuck in a snowstorm

stuck in snowstorm
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Even though Finland is a northern country, our climate is one of the steady ones. Thus, when a snowstorm hits the country, it is something of a spectacle. Irritated, bemused, thousands of Finns struggle today to access their meetings or seminars (me supposedly heading for Ubicom in Espoo) as the physical infrastructure suddenly stops functioning. Nature strikes back?

upj week, jenkins on distributed cognition

Phwww. This week has been dedicated to the UPJ process, this mysterious, this transcendentally beautiful, illuminating and ambiguously ambidextrous rite of salary classification on the basis of work requirements and personal achievements that we need to go through, meek, alert and ready to prove our worth, every year, from now on, as employees of the Finnish university system. This is why we are, what we are, how we are, as the scholars, as the servants of wisdom, sophia, as academics.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the free world.

Henry Jenkins has participated in the new MacArthur Foundation initiatives and blogs about the white paper where they discuss the concept of distributed cognition, among other important things:

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of
individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that
intelligence is distributed across “brain, body, and world”, looping
through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. [link]

wikis and anarchism?

All over the world, political systems and worldviews are in crisis, and many people seem to express their political choices in their consumer choices, in clothing or musical taste. Anarchism is presented as one of the few genuine alternatives to global capitalism, and it also fits well with much of the new collective and anti-hierarchical spirit of the ‘information age’ and ‘network society’, apparent in blogs and wikis as new grassroots media. As it happens, Anarkismi.net, the Finnish umbrella website of various anarchist groups also sports a wiki on anarchism. Visiting it today, it displays a front page loaded with wiki spam (“buy darvocet, generic darvocet, order darvocet…”) and comment areas covered with over one thousand porn advertisements. Even while deeply sympathising with philosophical anarchism as the fundamental ‘good life philosophy’, there is something symptomatic in the obvious lack of care or disregard that this wiki displays. As I understand, media and society are rather similar phenomena as you go deep enough. Having a good, open wiki requires similar preconditions like a good, anarchistic society: an active, functional community who actually cares about each other and their surroundings. Not really having that care, you end up with a failed experiment, filth-covered wikis, and streets with broken windows.

finnish nature photos 2006

Janne Heimonen's 'Pomppu' The association of Finnish nature photographers organises its annual competition, regularly attracting some top-quality work. The gallery on selected photos is located in here; the winner this year was “Lumisade” (Falling snow) by Esa Mälkönen (here).

call into mapping global game cultures

I presented a short paper as a keynote in the Medi@terra Gaming Realities conference, inviting international collaboration on mapping the global game cultures — into gathering reliable information on who is playing, what, how, and how much, and perhaps even why. If you are interested, take a look at the version available in my home page, and lets be in contact.

autumn photos: Tampere, Berlin, Athens

Laura’s birthday party in Näsinneula: sparkling
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

I have uploaded some new additions of photos both into my Flickr albums and into into www.unet.fi/pics collections; from Tampere (Laura’s birthday in Näsinneula), Berlin (IPerG EB workshop) and Athens (Medi@terra/Gaming Realities conference).