IMD Forum for 2/4/09: Warren Sack
Speaker: Warren Sack, Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Time: Wednesday, February 4, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
TITLE: Technologies of Community, Conversation by Design: How should networked public spaces be designed?
ABSTRACT: In the United States, public space is splintering into shards. Poor urban planning and the demise of many institutions of civil society are two factors that are to blame. But, media technologies, like television, are usually, also, seen to be destructive forces in this shattering of public space. Can new media technologies be designed to engender community rather than undermine it? I outline “discourse architecture,” an approach to designing software for community and then present a few examples of technologies that my group and I have designed in the last several years.
BIO: Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and, in the exhibition "The Art of Participation: 1950 - now" currently open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.