Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Q&A - Humans, Labour and Technology

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:22:56 GMT

Q&A with Guy Standing (University of London) and Sha Hwang (Nava) about humans, labour and technology.

Q&A - A Future City

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:20:25 GMT

Q&A with architect Liam Young (Tomorrow's Thoughts Today)

Moderator: Anders Mildner

Q&A - The Future of Food

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:18:12 GMT

Q&A with Isha Datar (New Harvest), Charles Spence (University of Oxford) and Arielle Johnson (Noma).

Moderator: Anders Mildner

Q&A - Being an Empathetic Company

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:16:02 GMT

Q&A with Leah Reich (Slack), Marcela Sapone (Hello Alfred) and Lain Shakespeare (Mailchimp)

Moderator: Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

Q&A - Online Harassment

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:09:15 GMT

Q&A with designers Caroline Sinders (Independent) and Michelle Mederos (Facebook).

Moderator: Paulina Modlitba Söderlund

Q&A - Getting real with virtual reality

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 09:59:15 GMT

Q&A with VR Filmmakers Jessica Brillhart (Google) and Gabo Arora (United Nations VR) and Creative director David Eriksson (North Kingdom).

Moderator: Anders Mildner

Angela Oguntala - Exploring alternative futures

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 19:09:44 GMT

”Visions are powerful because they inspire us, but also limit us”

The future is a place for our hopes and fears. For Angela Oguntala, thinking about the future is her job. In her talk, she shows us how different stories, from different parts of the world, can change our perspective and improve our understanding of each other.

How do we imagine the future? And most importantly, how will we get there? Angela shows how we can envision and create the best future possible.

Michelle Mederos - Online Harassment

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:49:48 GMT

”There is no magic way to get rid of all the internet trolls”

What can you actually do in a concrete fashion to design in order to decrease online harassment?

Michelle Mederos, Product Designer at Facebook, reminds us that in order to combat online harassment such as impersonation on social media platforms, design solutions need to be created with people, not for people. There is no perfect solution to solve a complex problem such as online safety, but by respecting the complexity of these issues, it is possible to make an impact on the systems allowing them.

Leah Reich - Being an empathetic company

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:34:53 GMT

”Empathy has morphed into a sort of catch-all for our collective desire to give a shit”

When one of Leah’s bosses made her cry she was taught that under no circumstances was she allowed to cry at work and that the office was no place for emotions. It’s out of this premise that she talks about the importance of empathy at work in order to be able to look at things from different perspectives. This gets even more relevant when we’re nowadays expected to bring our whole selves to the office.

At its most basic, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This ability is well needed if we effectively and meaningfully are to understand people that are shaped out of other norms, cultural preferences and experiences other than our own.

Leah also talks about how empathy within a company is not merely the process of identify a need and fix it with a new product or service. It runs deeper than that. Empathy can give you a completely new regard for others, and by being truly empathetic at work, open up a world for better understanding. One concrete proposal from Leah to better our ability to practice empathy in our workplace is to engage in a feedback session with someone you’d struggled with. By that, you are forced to listen and understand that person and take that understanding and do something with it. Leah, PhD in sociology, consider herself as a perspective counselor.

Marcela Sapone - Being an empathetic company

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:34:45 GMT

”What’s your formula? Make it stupidly simple so you will dream about it”

Marcela Sapone is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Alfred who has built a business model based on empathy. In the "Being an empathic company session" she talked about how to generate maximum value for your customers, employees and yourself.

Hello Alfred is a part service technology company who have managers visiting their customers to take care of things for them on their behalf so that they can make the most meaningful use of their time. Hello Alfred been described as “a fixer for your life”. The trust between company and customer is so strong that Marcela states that they’re the only company in the world who have the key to its customer’s home. In order to achieve this relationship between company and customer you must be able to master what it is that you do and in a ridiculously clear way communicate it to the public. In other words, what you do is compounded by how you do it. Marcela talk us through five things on her journey with Hello Alfred that she learned by having empathy as one of the company’s cornerstone.

Lain Shakespeare - Being an empathetic company

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:34:38 GMT

”Define your core values. Your product is not your values”

Lain Shakespeare like to compare empathetic companies to the best kind of neighbors. They have a good grasp on others perspective, are service orientated and partner with others to make a change for the better. With his role as Corporate Citizen Manager at MailChimp, Lain steer the company in the direction of acting as a good neighbor.

Lain stresses the importance of defining your values and have clear examples of what your core values are. The product or service of the company isn’t necessarily its core value. Lain take Mailchimp as an example, where the words “email” and “marketing” don’t constitute their core values. Instead when they express their values for the community they speak about humility, creativity and independence. According to Lain most companies lead with what they know instead of what they are. The former tends to take on a condescending perspective which from an empathetic perspective is not optimal. Out of his own experiences, Lain talks about how companies can make a holistic beneficial impact in the community.

Caroline Sinders - Online Harassment

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:34:19 GMT

”I think people are allowed to be dicks on the internet, but people should have the choice to opt out”

Designer and researcher Caroline Sinders breaks down the concept of online harassment and the legal regulations that are making it possible rather than impossible.

Attempts at regulating how we behave on the internet usually clash with the will to conserve our right to freedom of speech. But in reality, bad design is what lies at the core of the issue, and the only way to solve it might just be to tackle it from a design perspective.

David Eriksson - Getting real with virtual reality

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 17:25:00 GMT

”VR is one of the six technology innovation accelerators that will transform the way we live, the way we play, the way we communicate”

The notion that VR could make humans evolve into something better is not uncommon. But have we seen the peak of VR already? As a business revolving around VR this is a completely legitimate question because no one really knows how VR will play out, how we’ll profit from it. Mass adoption is still far away. So as a business where should you place your bets?

David Eriksson speaks about VR with a business perspective. He means to make VR meaningful as a tool for businesses and humans we need to create experiences that people want rather than just making people wanting experiences. So when creating VR experiences we have to design for humans, not features.

Gabo Arora - Getting real with virtual reality

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 17:22:37 GMT

”What is one person's horror is another person's revenge”

Can we change people’s minds and make them act for humans in crisis with the help of new technologies?

Gabo Arora from UN’s VR department believes so but you have to take a different approach than traditional mediums. VR creates opportunities for this but for people to act you need to make them feel empathy. It doesn’t work to just show people pain and suffering, because it doesn’t give you the chance to fantasize. Fantasizing is part of feeling greater empathy and that is why Gabo find ways to integrate more chances to fantasize for the user and he’s doing it through real storytelling in VR, not just pictures of pain and suffering, but with real people and real problems.

Jessica Brillhart - Getting Real with Virtual Reality

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 17:20:19 GMT

”The world that you build has to reflect the identity of the person in it”

How do we allow persons to actually feel what’s it’s like to sit in solitary confinement? VR has this possibility but VR is different from normal storytelling mediums, because what it does is changing the idea of a story. So how do we create good and meaningful VR film with this in mind?

Jessica Brillhart is the principal filmmaker for VR at google, before that she joined Google’s Creative Lab and has won numerous awards for her shorts and documentaries. She finds different ways of approaching VR by figuring out where people look, what’s engaging and who the user is, all this to create meaningful universes and good stories in VR film.

Interview: Isha Datar - Kristin Nord

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 16:34:22 GMT

Interview with Isha Datar (New Harvest) by Kristin Nord (HD-Sydsvenskan)

Matt Orlando - Worms, sustainability and innovation

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 16:31:39 GMT

”You can teach a skill. You can't teach personality”

The less you change, the less relevant you will be in any industry. Making a commitment to sustainability does not have to mean a sacrifice of quality.

Matt Orlando, Chef and owner of Amass restaurant in Copenhagen, explains his view on running a business responsively, while having a positive impact on both employees and on the industry.

He gives examples of how his team at Amass restaurant have found ways around one of the biggest problems of the industry; the problem of food waste. Through minimizing, re-refining, and redefining, they have discovered how to find the forgotten flavours of by-products.

Arielle Johnsson - The future of food

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 15:44:21 GMT

”Chefs are becoming autodidact researchers and scientists”

The future of food is going to be about flavor. Smell taste, touch, vision and hearing is super important when eating food. Is there some way we can enhance the flavor of food more than using traditional ways?

The wildly renowned restaurant Noma's resident scientist Arielle Johnson is a flavor scientist and right now she works on turning the knowledge and ethos of the kitchen into new inquiries and avenues for research, usually through the lens of flavor. She collaborates with chefs, designers, engineers, and other scientists around the world to dismantle the boundary between the kitchen and the laboratory.

Isha Datar - The future of food

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 15:42:11 GMT

”We can collect the cells and produce something like a hamburger or steak”

Our current systems for producing animal products are a threat to public health, the environment, and animals. There a lot of alternatives to animal products but somehow it’s just not the same. How do we solve this?

Isha Datar is the CEO of New Harvest, a company which uses cellular agriculture - the making of agriculture products from cell cultures rather than whole plants or animals. Imagine making eggs without hens, beef without cows and milk without cows, all this without the dangers from animal products.

Charles Spence - The future of food

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 15:39:46 GMT

”When food gets plated centrally people is willing to pay more”

Adding music to your eating experience could seem like a novelty, but its value has been scientifically proven by psychologist Charles Spence from Oxford University. We know that we eat as much with our eyes, as with our tongues and noses. We revel in sharing and browsing through gastroporn with our phones, but actually all of our senses are involved in the aesthetic experience of restaurant food. Charles presents research that shows how sound, colour – indeed the entire backdrop of the event affects what we prefer.

Food companies are beginning to take an interest in these result, be it what colour plate to use or what sounds go best with seafood. And it’s not all about selling at a premium, eg. finding the ideal colour combination to convey sweetness could reduce our requirement for calories. Augmented reality could even help us recreate food products that are becoming, or already are, scarce.

Interview: Sha Hwang - Kristin Nord

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 14:32:27 GMT

Interview: Sha Hwang - Kristin Nord

Indy Johar - Democratizing cities

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 13:17:18 GMT

”Every human is a phenomenally powerfully intelligence machine, yet we all treat them as bad robots who won't get it”

Indy Johar is not only the co-founder of Zero Zero, he’s also an architect. By studying not only houses, but also structures and cities, he’s learned how to see the bigger picture. A picture that reveals how we can view cities as places for collaborative innovation.

How do we make buildings that both look good and do good? By focusing on civic architecture and transforming real estate to real value, we can reinvent and create better cities.

Sha Hwang - Humans, Labour and Technology

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:59:46 GMT

”Resist taking the path of least resistance”

Sha may have helped set up the American portal for health insurance enrollment and his own startup Nava – but he’s not your regular tech guy. Sha believes we live in a time of protests, talking to us about the infrastructure of protest as well as the protest of infrastructure.

Inspired by the movement behind visionaries like Rosa Parks, he stresses the importance for designers, writers or engineers not to forget the cruel gaps that appear in this lavish period of tech unicorns. He set up Nava as a public benefit corporation with the goal of counteracting the volatility seen in finance and technology today. Remember that sometimes, protesting simply means doing the work itself and resistance is a measured struggle in the long term.

Guy Standing - Humans, Labour and Technology

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:59:40 GMT

”Never before has debt become a systemic part of the economy - it's a system working to increase debt for you and me”

We want to revolt, but we don’t know how, Guy explains in an inspiring talk about the new social class: the precariat. So-called because of its precarious situation in-and-out of employment – it has now replaced the proletariat as the new, potentially revolutionary, class. It is born out of the global market system, which our increasingly liberal and populist leaders has set up as the most unfree system ever – paradoxically, in the name of freedom. A small elite are profiteering on rents and debts, and they want you to go further into debt.

What characterizes the new class is not only that they have to work for labour, but that they lack any occupational identity. The man or woman who can no longer say ”I am…” could be likened to a person climbing up a razorblade. A new income distribution system is not only necessary – it’s a matter of social justice.

Liam Young - A Future City

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:40:46 GMT

”In a smart city, virtual and real no longer apply”

Architect Liam Young presents the smart city through an audiovisual storytelling performance. Working between documentary and fiction in order to explore the possible future, he has created an eerie fictional documentary consisting of surveillance, drone and satellite footage, depicting the fears and wonders of a city in our near future. Speculating on the effects that the immersion of new digital systems will have on our urban environments, he narrates this talk about a city that operates on smart technology.