Bodies in Motion: Memory, Personalization, Mobility and Design

Ubiquitous computing and advanced memory capacity provide new possibilities for mobile and rich media that draw on embedded applications. These technologies provide challenging new production models and partnerships. This summit explores the creative, technical, and business potentials of physical interfaces such as wearable computing, sensor based memory devices, location-based rich experiences that rely on ubiquitous computing and mobility. Applications span fashion, personalized media systems, location based games, training applications, security systems, wellness, and recreational technologies.

Memory is now embedded in sensors, textiles, garments, buildings, and the air we breathe. The miniaturization and reduction in cost of digital memory and the proliferation of personal recording devices as well as surveillance technologies provides individuals and societies with a vast realm of memory materials. How can we deploy these capacities?

What are the design and creative capacities of memory rich materials and forms? One of the proclaimed goals of pervasive computing research is to develop invisible distributed sensor networks to record various aspects of our activities. Wearable computing research is similarly concerned with questions of memory, in particular contextually-specific memory. The summit will also examine the idea of alternate display substrates (e.g., walls, garments, or furniture) that recall their “history of use,” or how embodied memory can be communicated through augmented data.

What drives the contemporary desire in the technology world for total data memory? How does data memory sit beside new kinds of memory capacities in other materials? Memory is closely linked to histories and the interpretations of history. Some of the best mobile experiences combine local memory, histories and place. What models of memory and mind are used in designing technologies that remember? What are the ethical implications of memory machines? What does this mean in time of war, increased security? How do we include the need, capacity, and desire to forget? How do we include trauma?

This summit will engage nanotechnology researchers, medical researchers, and historians, and look to psychology, cognitive science, spirituality, kinesiology, machine learning, and artificial intelligence as well as material designers, fashion, and art.

This summit builds on ongoing summits and research in mobile media, wearable computing, responsive environments, emotional computing, and nanotechnology at the Banff New Media Institute. It is co-created with the Am-I-Able Research Network, Department of Canadian Heritage New Media Research Network, and specifically with Joanna Berzowska, Computation Arts, Concordia University, and Am-I-Able co-Principle Investigator.

The summit will be video-streamed live to universities and colleges in Canada and abroad as a learning resource, as well as prototypes demonstrated through the ACCESS grid, desktop audio, and video-conferencing software. Event coverage will be archived for use by future researchers.