Dr Laura James's writings

Friday was Playful09 , a day of talks about play, games and related subjects. The tagline was "a day of cross disciplinary frolicking" which sounded fun, whilst leaving me without much idea of what to expect. It turned out to be around 16 talks, of the "no audience questions" format which allows good content to be packed in, in the relaxing setting of Conway Hall . The audience was almost all white, mostly 25-40 I would say, and at least 2/3 male, which was a worse proportion than I might have anticipated, for an event with a strong design/art/play theme. There were 4 female speakers out of 17. And there were balloons. Kareem Ettouney spoke about leading creative teams, and I have blogged this separately - it was one of the best talks of the day. Roo Reynolds spoke about the difficulty of converting games into films - and the comparative ease of the opposite path. It's all about storylines, and one's ability to dream about playing another character: to put

Definitely not drowning, in fact, as the number of my friends on Google Wave is still exceptionally small. The invitations seem to take many days to get through... The original fuss about Wave was around the merging of email and instant messaging. Personally, now I'm actually using it a little, all this seems to give me is a confusing, messy interface. The key elements I think may make this a really interesting system are open federation - the ability to run your own server and keep your data out of the Google monolith - and bots, which are already appearing, and offer a wide range of functions. A recent workshop with senior academics at the University highlighted email administration as a key challenge, with a "virtual PA" being the ultimate technology advance sought ("as smart as someone with a PhD in my field"), and I can imagine Wave, with a range of quality bots to deliver filtering, automatic responses and so on, delivering part of this quite soon. In th

On Thursday I took advantage of one of the perks of working for the University of Cambridge : a free place at one of the regular Horizon conferences. This one was about Energy and Environment, and provided a nice overview of some of the issues, whilst of course beautifully showcasing the best academics in the field. Professor Dame Ann Dowling kicked things off, as newly appointed head of the Department of Engineering . She presented the work of the Energy Efficient Cities programme, taking a holistic look at the connected areas of buildings, transport and energy. In cities, it's all about tradeoffs (even just in the engineering space - once you pull in the socio-economic factors too, it's worse again). Low density buildings mean you can use natural convection, vegetation for shade, distributed power and so on; but they may increase the demand for heating and transport. There is a need to consider local air quality, as well as climate change effects, and the layouts and green s