Nottingham

Doing
There was a conference at Horizon in Nottingham, there were some great speakers. Bellow is the poster that I presented there, It went down well, I had some good discussions with carious members of different and diverse sectors.

list of speakers from Horizon Research  conference (full list of speakers)
Caroline Leygue – Communal energy displays
Some great research about behaviours to energy monitoring and how people respond to different displays and HCI values.
Gabriella Giannachi, Rebecca Sinker and John Stack – Art Maps 
a great project looking at mapping for the art world, this was engaging the TATE

Sarah Martindale and Stuart Reeves – Interpreting Biodata in the Contexts of Production and
Reception. A very interesting project explaining the Vicarious project this is definitely worth a look if you are interested in behaviour, environments, fear, sensing and looking at live data.
Jon Crowcroft – From the Panopticon to A Fresnel Lens - Dispelling A False Sense of Security
interesting view on how people will opt out of giving up very piece of information and how we need to think about security and the freedom of information. There were other great speakers but these were the ones that were the most interesting.

One of our researchers also presented a paper that we co wrote at the RP national conference in Lancaster, How open is open design? What potential is there for open design through digital technologies? Smith P, Tooze J, Phillips R, Silve S & Baurley S Brunel University. this is the conference list, when I know the proceedings have been fully published then I can post it up... yes open design?


There was some great progress in the field, we collected a swarm and sited it in the persons garden, the only suitable site was a strange location... but worked well.

 There is always controversy when and if you should feed bees. But when you have picked up a swarm, they are hungry and they need it. This is always an issue discussed by various beekeepers.

 Spotting the queen... can you?

 Checking the base board.

A home made incubator, this is for collecting queen cells and to incubate them for the duration.

A tailored environment for a hive, this was a tortoise house found at a car boot and converted into a hive, a very good piece of kit! Below... the reason for keeping bees, first top bar extracted that has capped honey!

Reading
Science in a free society, Paul Feyerabend half way through it to be honest, will let you know, interesting and well written though.

Preparing
There has been a great deal of work going into a project with Wolf Olins and the Honey club, they are a fantastic group to be involved with. I really look forward to telling you more about the opportunity. They have a great set of values that they are conducting the project to.