Matt tells the story of his 15 year journey through the tech industry which began with departure from a Buddhist monastery in 2004 and concluded with return to contemplative life in 2019. He shares a bit of optimism based on lessons he learned by setting aside plans for a 3-year meditation retreat, starting an open source software company, striving to achieve positive impact through good design and ethical leadership, and eventually concluding that the ancient tools of meditation and mind training are the most important technology to deploy in the face of today’s global challenges.
Matt Zumwalt is not a monk, though he seriously considered it. Instead of taking a monastic path, he has spent decades threading together disparate activities such as Buddhist philosophical study, meditation retreat, making queer performance art, founding small companies, crafting open source software and building empowered communities of practice.
Drawing on a BA in Comparative Religion from University of Washington, an MSc in Human Computer Interaction from University of York, and 3 years of life at Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery in New York, his 15-year career has been driven by a wish to make workplaces more compassionate, a fascination with the ways people arrange information, a curiosity about the role of data curation in the information economy, and a deep concern that people’s ability to possess and own their data is constantly being eroded. He's helped many libraries and archives create software to curate their digital collections and in 2016 he joined Protocol Labs, creators of IPFS and libp2p, to advocate for decentralization of the web. This unexpectedly put him near the center of the storm of blockchain enthusiasm that roared through 2017. Matt now focuses his energies on meditation retreat, contributing to community-based work in Philadelphia, and creating opportunities for people to participate in meditation retreats.
Moritz Stefaner is constantly chasing the perfect shape for data — how can we create intriguing, expressive, and elegant information experiences? He shares some of his recent works centered around **citizen science and ecology** — from ambient data meditations over data sculptures to dynamic data artworks for monitoring his bee hives.
After more than 10 years of freelancing in the data visualization world, Moritz will reflect on his approach and process. This talk will unpack different types of challenges he's been confronted with — both in commissioned as well as self-initiated projects — and the methods he came up with to meet them.
Moritz Stefaner works as a “Truth and Beauty Operator” on the crossroads of data visualization, information aesthetics and user interface design. With a background in Cognitive Science (B.Sc. with distinction, University of Osnabrueck) and Interface Design (M.A., University of Applied Sciences Potsdam), his work beautifully balances analytical and aesthetic aspects in mapping abstract and complex phenomena.
In the past, he has helped clients like the OECD, Google News Lab, Salesforce, Deutsche Bahn and the Max Planck Research Society to find insights and beauty in large data sets. He was nominated for the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany and is the record winner of the Kantar Information is Beautiful awards. His work has been exhibited at Venice Biennale of Architecture, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica and the Max Planck Science Gallery.
He also publishes the Data Stories podcast together with Enrico Bertini.
truth-and-beauty.net
instagram.com/moritz_stefaner
twitter.com/moritz_stefaner
People at eyeo are innovators - they make futures. In this talk Catherine invites you to try on some feminisms for your futures. She talks about two projects: a book that charts a course for feminist data science and a hackathon to make the breast pump not suck. There is power in challenging power. There is power in design to empower. There is power in feminist imaginations and feminist futures.
Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and software developer who focuses on data literacy, feminist technology and civic engagement. She has designed global news recommendation systems, run women’s health hackathons, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & the social change has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI).
D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization at Emerson College, a Senior Fellow at the Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media & MIT Media Lab. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science and visualization practices.
Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Sasha will talk about Design Justice, a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of benefits and burdens between various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices. They will conclude with the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, and invite people to get involved.
Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio. Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice.
Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects(AMP); AMP convenes the annual Allied Media Conference and cultivates media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world.
In the course of participating in and studying the decentralized social web, Darius has noticed a pattern: purveyors of decentralized services want people to place trust in math instead of in people. But robust communities are built on human trust. He talks about his experiences building real social network services based on more traditional notions of trust and discuss some potential futures for how people interact online.
Darius Kazemi is an internet artist under the moniker Tiny Subversions. His best known works are the Random Shopper (a program that bought him random stuff from Amazon each month) and Content, Forever (a tool to generate rambling thinkpieces of arbitrary length). He has a small army of Twitter and Tumblr bots that he builds because they make him laugh. He founded NaNoGenMo, where participants spend a month writing algorithms to generate 50,000 word novels, and Bot Summit, a yearly gathering of people who make art bots. He cofounded Feel Train, a creative technology cooperative.
tinysubversions.com
friend.camp/@darius
twitter.com/tinysubversions
