Philip van Allen

I’ll be speaking about The New Ecology of Things and our NET Lab tools at the flashbelt conference that runs from June 8th to June 11th, 2008 in Minneapolis, MN. This conference focuses on the in-depth issues of designing and developing real interactive applications. Sessions range from experience design from Motion Theory’s perspective, to animation design, sound design, developing in Adobe’s AIR, programming in processing, physical computing, to working with the Papervision3D library in Flash.

On April 25th 2008, Anne Burdick (MDP Department Chair), Nik Hafermaas (Dean of Communication Design @ Art Center) and I gave a talk at the USC Interactive Media Arts and Practice Program to discuss the MDP’s New Ecology of Things research initiative. This talk was webcast, and the web recording of it can be seen on Adobe’s education site.

The Media Design Program’s new transmedia publication, The New Ecology of Things, is complete. The book, website, poster and mobile phone content address the design and educational issues related to ubiquitous computing and is an ecology of essays, glossary, forum, interactive works, video, and a short story by Bruce Sterling. You can order the book here: The New Ecology of Things (NET).

My visit to the Maker Faire was briefly covered on coolhunting.com

I’ll be at the Maker Faire this weekend (May 19th & 20th 2007) demoing the new version of the NET Connect software. This software allows designers to create interactive objects and spaces projects without programming, using the familiar enviroment of Flash. I’ll be in a booth with Moto Development, and we’ll also be showing re.moto, an open-source wireless sensor system. For more info on NET Connect, see the website:

newecologyofthings.net/netconnect/

See you at the show!