History or background of award
A scholarship, supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, is available for a Master’s student to work in the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, in Wellington, New Zealand.

This fully-funded 2 year position in the new Master of Design Innovation programme supports Dr Anne Galloway’s Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things research project.

Purpose of award
The Counting Sheep project aims to create near-future digital media and/or physical computing scenarios that can support public debate on the use of pervasive computing in agriculture, and the future of merino production and consumption.

The student will form part of a small team led by Dr Galloway and will conduct design research in the area of human-animal-computer interaction.

Selection criteria
Applicants require a Bachelors degree in design or computer science, with a focus on digital media production and/or pervasive computing.

In addition to the scholarship application form (pdf), applicants are required to submit a one-page statement of interest that:

1. identifies potential research areas or questions that are compatible with the larger project;
2. describes any relevant experience that supports the successful completion of this research.

Preference will be given to projects dealing with pervasive computing and NZ merino sheep, but other animal-based agriculture topics will be considered. An interest in the cultural contexts of new technologies and experience with ethnographic research methods would be considered an asset.

Number of awards offered
One.

Value
NZ16,000 annual stipend.

Tenure of award
Up to two years.

Closing dates for applications
Monday 27 February 2012.

Applications will be reviewed as they come in and the start date is 5 March, 2012.

How do students apply?
Please submit a completed application form (pdf) plus a one-page statement of interest to:

The Scholarships Office
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington
New Zealand
Phone: (04) 463 5113 or (04)463 5557
Email: scholarships-office@vuw.ac.nz

Additional information
Please contact Dr Galloway (anne.galloway@vuw.ac.nz) with any questions.

Just a reminder that abstracts are due 20 Feb 2011 for the Fibreculture Journal special issue on networked utopias and speculative futures. I find the description a bit opaque, but if you’re interested in such things, the list of possible topics seems to leave quite a bit of room to manoeuvre.

Important dates
Abstract deadline: February 20, 2011
Article deadline: May 30, 2011
Publication aimed for: November, 2011

Happy New Year! I’m told the Year of the Rabbit should not be as difficult as last year, and that I can expect to face the days ahead with self-possession, gentle grace, calm strength and quiet persistence.

Sounds quite good, doesn’t it? And just what I need to take back to work with me tomorrow.

This year, the Counting Sheep project begins in earnest and that means things are about to get really busy and exciting. Officially, there are 141 weeks of work for this project and I’d like to find a way to keep track of our progress. Our friends at BERG keep “weeknotes” as a way to reflect on what’s been done and what comes next, and I think I’ll try it on a fortnightly basis. We’ve been working on some videos over the summer and I’ve got a few papers in the pipeline, but mostly this year is dedicated to fieldwork in the South Island’s high country.

In terms of research-related activities, I’m also really looking forward to our Ethnographic Fiction and Speculative Design Workshop (the official CFP will go out this week and position papers are due 1 April, 2011). And as if that’s not enough, next week I’m off to Baa Camp and the following week to a Webstock workshop on visual communication with Scott McCloud.

It also seems that even after a year in NZ, I’m still a bit thrown by the southern hemisphere academic schedule. I can’t believe that classes start at the end of the month, and there’s still so much to prepare! I teach two courses this year, both for the second time but both with substantial revisions. First up is a third-year core course in our Culture+Context programme, called Cultures of Design. The syllabus isn’t finalised yet, but this is what I’m going for:

CCDN 371: Cultures of Design is divided into three separate, but overlapping, themes. First, we will address connections between creativity and professional design, and between collaboration and cultural innovation. Special attention will be given to the relationship between design and society, and what might constitute socially and culturally responsible design practice. Second, we will assess connections between design and the production and consumption of visual and material culture. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the “amateurisation” of design is reshaping cultural understandings of aesthetics and experiences of making. Third, we will connect these cultural issues to concepts and practices of critical design, interaction design and experience design. Students will learn to analyse and express these complex connections through a research paper and a photographic essay, and the course will culminate in a group exhibition that presents a critical and creative vision of cultural issues facing the future of design.

The other course is Design Anthropology, a second-year elective in our Bachelor of Design Innovation (BDI) degree. First time around, the content was successful but the projects… not so much. I’m still trying to figure out how to fix that, so it’s good the course doesn’t start until July. I’m also really looking forward to continuing work with current PhD students, and seeing what kinds of applications come in this year. The year’s first deadline for applications to VUW’s PhD in Design programme is 1 March, 2011.

Since I’ve also got a full administrative load, it looks like time management is going to be key. To be honest, this is a real challenge for me because I find the whole creativity/productivity imperative to be more than a bit oppressive–I’m really not the GTD type–and yet I still need to keep things sorted. So I’m happy to report that OmniFocus is the first application I’ve used that actually seems to help me do that; in fact, between it and Scrivener I think I’m pretty much good to go. Of course, VoodooPad is still where all my notes go and I’m curious to see how Everyday Lives actually works in the field. But enough about software.

2011 is going to be exciting!

Best wishes for a joyful and relaxing holiday. We’ll be back to work in the new year.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be keynoting Kiwicon 4 in a few weeks. (How could I say no to an event with a logo that frakking awesome?!)

What? “Kiwicon is New Zealand’s Hacker con, organised by and for the hacker community, their whitehat chums, and any curious bystanders who are interested in the very very thin veneer of robustness spackled over our technological world.”

When? 27-28 November, 2010

Where? Rutherford House, Victoria University of Wellington, Pipitea Campus

This is what I’ll be talking about and I hope that people will want to talk to me afterwards:

RFID (In)Securities
Few contemporary technologies raise as many security-related issues in the public consciousness as radio-frequency identification (RFID). Currently used in areas as diverse as commodity-chain management, building access, banking, livestock traceability, public transit and passports, RFID is promoted by government and industry as a reliable, efficient, convenient and secure communication technology. In contrast, mass media regularly report the relative ease with which signals can be boosted, viruses transmitted, databases hacked, privacies violated and freedoms denied. These kinds of utopian versus dystopian debates commonly accompany the introduction of new technologies, but rarely give people the conceptual and material tools needed to critically and creatively engage the social and cultural concerns at hand. By taking a closer look at some of the expectations, hopes and fears associated with RFID, this presentation aims to open new spaces of collaborative and collective action in the development and implementation of RFID and related technologies.

Cummunities & Technologies 2011 will take place 29 June – 2 July 2011 at QUT in Brisbane.

Paper proposals are due by 10 December, 2010.

The first workshops have been announced, including ours (below) and others on digital cities, semantic ambient media experience and making sense of Twitter.

Ethnographic Fiction and Speculative Design: Supporting Community Participation in the Development and Implementation of New Technologies

Anne Galloway (Victoria University of Wellington), Ben Kraal (Queensland University of Technology) and Jo Tacchi (Queensland University of Technology)

“In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

While pervasive technology development and implementation proceed apace, the potential social and cultural implications—including the ways in which end-user communities can be active participants in these processes—remain thoroughly underexplored. The inherent invisibility of the technological infrastructure required to support these emerging networks makes it difficult to identify which objects around us might have computational capacities, or what those capacities might be. Without that sort of tangible knowledge, it is also difficult to imagine how such networks stand to reconfigure individual identities and social interactions, or how access, data privacy and ownership might be managed. Manifesting this knowledge in concrete, but not necessarily real, ways can be seen as a crucial first step in providing communities the means to productively engage such issues and concerns. This full-day workshop aims to explore how grounded ethnographic and action research methods can be transformed into fictional and speculative designs that provide people the kinds of experiences and tools that can lead to direct community action in the development and implementation of new technologies.

Hope to see you there!

I’m very privileged and excited to announce that “Counting Sheep: NZ Merino Wool in an Internet of Things” has been awarded a three-year research grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand‘s Marsden Fund Fast-Start programme.

“The Marsden Fund invests in investigator-initiated research aimed at generating new knowledge. It supports excellent research projects that advance and expand the knowledge base and contribute to the development of people with advanced skills in New Zealand. The Marsden Fund encourages New Zealand’s leading researchers to explore new ideas that may not be funded through other funding streams and fosters creativity within the research, science and technology system.”

The $300,000 award will be used to support multi-disciplinary international research activities and fund a student in the School of Design’s Master of Design Innovation programme.

Special thanks to the Research Office of Victoria University and the School of Design for their support. I’d also like to thank Dr Jean Burgess for her unfailing encouragement and valuable feedback on my proposal, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and thought-provoking questions. I hope to do everyone proud in the next few years. Thanks again.

Update: 2010 Marsden Fund Awards