society

Originally from India, Anab Jain is a London-based interaction designer with skills and experience in technology foresight, service design, people-centred research and filmmaking. Her work is about people and everyday life today by informed visions and design, but also about how to best design for an uncertain future in a complex world. Until recently she was design lead on a project at Microsoft Research Cambridge, which attempted to rethink notions of machine intelligence by developing product and service scenarios around biotechnology and RFID. Currently she works as a service and interaction designer at Nokia Design in London, while developing her emerging design practice ‘Superflux’. Her work has received international awards including the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, Design for our Future Selves Award and Award of Excellence, ICSID and DuPont Inc and has been shown at Mattel Toys, Apple and Intel headquarters.

She looks at LIFT as a convergence of ideas and interesting people. It is a platform for conversations and debates, a space for sharing and reflecting on our own current practices and where they intersect with other disciplines. She says “Within the context of the larger world ‘economic and environmental’ crisis that we find ourselves in, the theme of this year’s LIFT is very timely. I am hoping that it becomes a platform for not only discussing ideas around alternative, sustainable ways of building our futures, but also an opportunity to find collaborators and initiate projects that could influence collective change.”

Find out more about Anab Jain at http://www.anab.in/

From April 2-4 more than 800 bloggers, netizens, and media creators will gather in Berlin for the 2nd edition of the Re:publica conference. The 2008-theme will be "the critical mass". In over 100 talks, panels and workshops the conference will address the social and cultural impact of blogs, wikis, and social networks and discuss social media that rely on the interaction between people. The conference will be held mostly in German. If you are in Berlin these you can register here.

Time to muse a bit here on this corner of the blogosphere, this corner of Switzerland. I am sitting here and pondering a few embryonic ideas for an interactive workshop at lift08. Here are some of these ideas:

- The Art of Digital Identity
- The Business of Freedom
- Speed, Time, Money and Sex (I can not be serious about this, can I?)
- Waiting for Godot on the Matrix
- What happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin?

What do you think?
What is it that as a lift08 participant you want to spend a few hours exploring?