Orchid Project

This future scenario is the result of people bunkering down into defensible spaces while globalization fails or is abandoned. It is a scenario of permanent ‘war on terror’. Nation-states close their borders, cities are divided by blast-walls, ethnic neighbourhoods are patrolled by militia-men and policed by helicopters. Here is world of gated communities, identity checkpoints, […]

On the BBC now (and on iPlayer): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wyr3c Daniel Kahneman speaking on human ‘irrationality’. Gopal–Dr. Sarvapali D. RamchurnLecturer (Roberts Fellow),Agents, Interaction, and Complexity Group,School of Electronics and Computer Science,University of Southampton, SO17 1BJt: +44 (0) 2380599309w: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/sdr

If you haven’t seen it yet, this is a fantastic video by Jeff Howe explaining the origine and the essence of crowdsourcing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-UtNg3ots

This future scenario is the result of stalling globalisation combined with the nomadic wanderings of displaced ethnic groups, semi-corporate tribes and tech guilds in search of opportunity. Here is a world of pilgrimages and festivals, local green initiatives, border camps and special development zones. Imagine start-ups in rust belts, tents in the suburbs, open-air markets […]

While taking a break from searching for the New Forest cicada, Davide Zilli has been working as the project lead on the ‘One Country Two Lungs’ project for the MIT Senseable City Lab - http://senseable.mit.edu/twolungs/.

This future scenario is the result of increasing globalization combined with the free movement of people. International trade surges, borders become porous, nations shrink their states, public services disappear. Here is a world of rising inequalities, polarised between a tiny elite of superannuated non-doms living in island tax shelters and piles of migrants pressed into […]

Opower – the energy efficiency company that motivates users to reduce their energy consumption through peer pressure, have filed for IPO apparently (http://www.utilitydive.com/news/opower-files-for-ipo/226769/). That shows they’ve been very successful at applying their incentivisation techniques to get individuals and groups to reduce their energy consumption. In the US where critical peak pricing is well known, they […]

This future scenario is the result of increasing globalization, but decreasing migration. In other words, the flight of capital around the world intensifies, but barriers are put up to stop people from following suit. Here is a world of controlled borders, artificial cities, robot factories, codified social hierarchies and barbarians at the gates. Its determining […]

There are transport accidents, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Concorde crash. And then there are “transmission accidents” or failures of electronic media and information technology. The most extreme transmission accident to date is the Flash Crash of May 6th, 2010. This financial crash saw the biggest single day fall of the Dow […]

Continuing with the recent success of ORCHID affiliated researchers at this years Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2014), we are happy to announce that our paper – “Measuring the Effect of Think Aloud Protocols on Workload using fNIRS” has been accepted at the prestigious conference. Below are the associated bibliography entry and abstract: […]