I’m so excited about this years SXSW which is chockfull of great individual talks and panels that cover topics from the Quantified Self to Wearable Technology. For those of you who can’t make it, don’t worry, I will be covering the event daily on FT.
I’ve scoured the entire SXSW site to highlight a list of panels that are not to be missed. Unfortunately, some of these presentations overlap so you’ll have to pick one that best suits your interests.
If you’re going to SXSW, please ping me and let’s connect. After all, that’s what this great conference is for.
Friday, March 7
2 pm
Opening Remarks from Bre Pettis
Presenter: Pettis, CEO MakerBot Industries
Makerbot co founder and CEO Bre Pettis talks about the present and the future of the ongoing 3D printing revolution. Pettis will also cover one of the lessons he has learned via many years of attendance at SXSW Interactive. Kick off your 2013 SXSW experience with an inspiring talk from this amazing entrepreneur!
3:30 – 4:30 pm
Designing Habits: From Big Data to Small Changes
Presenters: Jeffrey Holove, Michael V Copeland, Steph Habif, Tim Chang
We all know there are vast amounts of data about our lives – our spending, our browsing, our activity – being collected daily. With the recent explosion in inexpensive sensors and self-tracking apps, we can capture new insights in personal health and activity data. However, the data is only truly valuable if it can be turned into positive behavior change. A panel of leaders in venture capital, health technology and the research world, discuss the key enablers to tackling this challenge: the use of visualization to make volumes of data easily understandable to the average consumer, leveraging gamification and social mechanics to keep users engaged, and the science of habit design to actually create behavior change. The panel will be moderated by Michael Copeland, Senior Editor at Wired, who has a particular interest in Big Data and the implications for entrepreneurs and consumers.
5:00 pm
Quantified Year: 365 Days of Tracking Everything
Presenter: Leslie Ziegler
365 days. Dozens of digital health devices, apps, blood draws and genetic testing. So why would anyone voluntarily commit to such a high-maintenance, tedious and occasionally painful lifestyle? To understand more about my health in general, as well as the physiological consequences of the choices I made (and let’s be honest: to try cool QS gear.) So whether you’re interested in quantified self, the sweetest new tracking gear, or even just how I maintained this crazy lifestyle and what I learned, you’re covered.
Saturday, March 9
11:00AM -12:00 pm
The Next Frontier of Interactive: Smart Fashion
Presenter: Jennifer Darmour, User Experience Designer, Artefact
Google Glasses, Apple iPods on our wrist, the smartphone as your fitness coach – wearable technology is on the verge of becoming mainstream. It also has the potential to change our relationship to technology altogether by making it more discreetly and smartly integrated into our lifestyle. However, right now the experience is still disconnected and clunky. Artefact’s wearable technology and user experience expert Jennifer Darmour will discuss how an integrated ecosystem of hardware manufacturers, software and service providers and developers, designers and fashion experts can work together to deliver on the potential of wearable technology. She will highlight specific opportunities, emerging trends and business models that will allow wearable technology to become the next area for growth of the technology industry.
12:30 – 1:30 pm
The Skin as Metaphor: Fashion, Technology & Body
Presenter: Sabine Seymour, CCO, Moondial Inc
Technologies enrich and amplify the cognitive characteristics of our human skin and stimuli of our senses. The skin manages temperature fluctuations, transforms into shapes, interfaces with the environment, changes color, and reacts to pollution. Computational smart textiles as our second skin adopt these functionalities metaphorically to re-create, modify or extend them by using technology. The sensations created through computation and the manipulation of data can create visual, tactile, tangible, and sensory experiences for the wearer that can be transferred easily over distance. The garments manufactured with computational smart fabrics are nodes in a larger network. They capture data for the possible adaptation to the environment or body data that might lead to the transformation of human behavior. The next generation of computational smart textiles shall become self-contained energy systems that derive energy through the sun, movement, or temperature fluctuations.
3D Fashion: Nonstop Innovation in Production & Fit
Presenters: Daniel Stillman, Liz Bacelar, Mary Huang
3D technologies of all forms are evolving at a rapid pace and quickly expanding its uses in the Fashion industry. This panel will show, not just discuss, how constant advancements in 3D is revamping the world of Fashion & Retail. It all starts with printing: dresses, bikinis, shoes and a variety of metal accessories. But it also includes the design process and the 3D projection tools for perfect fit. We’ll set our discussion with super-interactive demos, in which the audience will get the experience the power of 3D.
3:00 – 3:20 pm
Dr. Sabine Seymour will appear at the South by Bookstore to sign copies of “Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology” following her solo session.
Dr. Sabine Seymour is described as being an innovator, visionary, and trend spotter in her work as researcher, conceptual designer, economist, professor, and entrepreneur. She is the Chief Creative Officer of her company Moondial (based in Austria and New York), which develops prototypes and consults on fashionable technology. She is Assistant Professor of Fashionable Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and lectures worldwide at numerous institutions. Dr. Seymour serves as a jury member and chair for many internationally renowned institutions and conferences. She frequently presents and exhibits for instance at Ars Electronica Festival, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and Smart Textiles. She has received numerous grants and awards and was awarded the Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design Fellowship in 2010. Dr. Seymour is an editorial review board member for the International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction and is widely published.
3:30 – 4:30 pm
How Electrical Signals Can Give You Superpowers
Presenter: Olivier Bau, Researcher Walt Disney Imagineering Research
This panel will address new types of emerging wearable technologies that control the human body or augment it with new capabilities by building upon our body’s electrical properties. Such devices use electrical signals running through the body to control muscles, provide force feedback, control perception or create new sensing technologies. For example, Revel is a wearable device we developed at Disney Research. It injects a signal into the body to modify our tactile perception of the environment by providing artificial tactile sensations almost anywhere; this includes displays, walls, objects and human skin. The human body and hardware are interdependent; the technology augments the body’s capabilities, while using it as a fundamental functional component. After presenting a brief history of human augmentation in art and science, I will present the state of the art of such emerging research efforts, discuss future work and applications, and their potential implications.
3:45 – 4 pm
Wearables: Moving from Niche to Mainstream
Presenter: Sarah Rotman Epps, Sr Analyst Forrester Research
Sensor-laden wearable devices, with their unique ability to capture data generated by the body, will fuel the next wave of growth and innovation in personal computing—part of a larger phenomenon we call Smart Body, Smart World. Today, wearables like the Nike+ FuelBand are proliferating in the health and fitness space, but they occupy a relatively niche market. The tipping point for wearables will come when they break out of health as a vertical into health as a horizontal, applying body-generated data to diverse scenarios like social networking, gaming, navigation, commerce, and productivity. Winning products will mash up data from disparate sources, deliver insights that support more informed decision-making, and enable new forms of extra-sensitive communication and self-expression.
Sunday, March 10
12:30 – 1:30 pm
How Self-Tracking Geeks are Shaping our Future
Presenters: Gary Wolf, Lisa Kennedy, Peter Zandan, Sonny Vu
Imagine a world in which everything you say and do, and how your body responds, is tracked and analyzed.
Our panel features speakers who have imagined that world and worked to create it as entrepreneurs, executives, investors, organizers and fanatics. Aided by new technology, more people than ever are using data to truly know everything about their well-being – even down to their amino acid levels. If you are interested in learning the latest thinking in the Quantified Self movement, whether or not you collect data about yourself, do not miss this panel.
The trend goes beyond athletes recording training data and dieters logging calories. Innovators are making it easy for all of us to measure the seemingly immeasureable. The future of self-tracking may help us understand and conquer the most devastating diseases, or it may waste our time and take away privacy.
What seems like a geeky concept right now has the potential to change how we live.
Monday, March 11
3:30 – 4:30
Designing Wearable Technology & the Augmented Self
Presenter: Ahmed Riaz, Principal Designer frog
Wear a watch, or glasses? Perhaps you run with a pedometer in your shoe, or a heart rate monitor on your chest? These are all ways we humans have started to augment our senses with wearable technology.
These technologies have one thing in common. They allow humans to augment their senses. Greater sense of time, improved hearing, passive awareness of distances, greater sight. These are all ways we are starting to shape our view of the world. With advances in data sciences, biometrics, reduction in cost and size of sensors, we have only begun.
In this meet up we are going to discuss a future of the augmented self that is both meaningful and beautiful. We think design can help us envision and craft that future.
Join us in a facilitated discussion around designing wearable technology and the augmented self. We’ll be making stuff, share stories and have an awesome time.
3:45 – 4:00 pm
Wearables: Moving from Niche to Mainstream
Presenter: Sarah Rotman Epps,Sr Analyst Forrester Research
Sensor-laden wearable devices, with their unique ability to capture data generated by the body, will fuel the next wave of growth and innovation in personal computing—part of a larger phenomenon we call Smart Body, Smart World. Today, wearables like the Nike+ FuelBand are proliferating in the health and fitness space, but they occupy a relatively niche market. The tipping point for wearables will come when they break out of health as a vertical into health as a horizontal, applying body-generated data to diverse scenarios like social networking, gaming, navigation, commerce, and productivity. Winning products will mash up data from disparate sources, deliver insights that support more informed decision-making, and enable new forms of extra-sensitive communication and self-expression.
5:00 – 5:15 pm
Apps of the Future: Instagram for Cyborgs
Presenter: Prerna Gupta, Chief Prod Officer, Smule
Just six years ago, most of us had never encountered an “iPhone app”. Today, we spend the majority of our online time interacting with them. What will mobile apps mean to us in another six years?
The advent of futuristic technologies like artificial intelligence and wearable computing will have profound implications for mobile software. In this session, I will discuss the technological advances that will shape our lives over the next two decades, and how mobile apps will evolve as a result. We’ll travel forward through time in 5-year increments, with predictions of the fundamental technologies that will become widely available at each step, and the apps that will leverage these advancements to enhance our daily lives.
