The Future is Messy

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The first speaker is Dr Genevieve Bell , Intel Fellow, Digital Home Group Director, User Experience Group, Intel Corporation, talking about technology and the ways people use it in their everyday lives.

Genevieve is originally from Canberra and gave an entertaining insight as to how culture and technology interact. One insight was that the people in the growth areas for Internet use in Asia live much more densely and that English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. Western, and particularly American, ideas of how information is organised, meaning is expressed will not necessarily continue to dominate the Internet.

Genevieve argued that old forms of media, such as television, will live on. Rather than television being subsumed as a VOD service, TV is influencing the design of computers and the Internet. It would be interesting to see how this apply to the book.

The room is packed with about 400 people, about one quarter of who I know by sight from other e-events. The organisers encourage live blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) from the event, making for a lively discussion. You can read my notes from last year .