nothing beats winning at sport and then celebrating afterwards my team Manchester United won the Premier League again this year and last Monday hundreds of thousands of fans from all over the world came to the streets of Manchester to join the parade and celebrate to be there in the moment you can see just how much it meant to them from their body language from their gestures and from their facial expressions it was special sadly I couldn't be there but one of my friends was lucky enough to get there and she sent me a text and it
said wish you were here and that really got to me sometimes we forget just how important it is to be there um and we often just slip into our digital bubbles does do this look familiar you're Landing um on the runway and you've been chatting to the person next to you having a nice conversation with a stranger and then suddenly you both whip out your mobile phone desperate to get those missed tweets emails and texts it's as if you'd never um had a conversation gone in an instant you don't even smile to say goodbye well
it doesn't just happen on planes it also happens in restaurants and in parks and also in our own homes and here you see a family they may be sitting together in the living room but they're all using their own devices even the pet dog has got her snout in her own tablet and then in the most beautiful places like this Japanese Garden in Spring this couple should be looking fondly into each other's eyes being romantic but no what they're doing is they're totally immersed in their own mobile devices oblivious of the other one so we
can live in our digital Bubbles as we shown you um and seemingly being together whether it's strangers or family or lovers but in truth that's not the case and it's not just mobiles but also we have data that is streaming at us about our bodily functions there are not lots of devices that are coming out like wearable devices that will tell you how stressed you are how many steps you've taken and there are um shoes that will tell you how lazy you are and we all know that in a few weeks time there are going
to be some augmented glasses that will tell you how many calories there are in that food in that bun in front of you and tell you whether you can eat it or not do we really want to be in this world where we are just in this technological trance well you have a choice you can can either be continue retreating into your mindless um digital bubble or you can be connected with others being there how can we bridge the gap between mindless isolation and mindful connection such that it's meaningful and the trick is to think
about how we can use and design digital technology to connect more when we're together and if we can do that we can do all sorts of things we can enhance um life we can um amplify cognition we can extend what we do and I'm going to show you some examples of what happens when you do that and one way in which we can do that is simply by sharing our devices so here you see teenagers who are learning together by sharing one tablet and one person takes a turn and then the other we've all done
that when we looked at photos sharing them together just how much that means to you but we can also think of other ways and one way in which we can do that that is to have different devices but you have to use them together in order to collaborate and one project I started in 2000 was looking at how we could get kids to take their own initiative in learning and be excited by learning and what we did was we wired up some Woodland nearby to where we were working a team of psychologists designers and computer
scientists came together and put all sorts of devices into this Woodland and we got pairs of 12 year olds to go out there and discover for themselves to do scientific inquiry and have a field trip with the difference and two of the devices we gave to them one of them was a probe and another was a digital display and each of the devices did different things and what we wanted them to do was to come together using these so one device you can see here was intended to support curiosity and what it does it's a
handcrafted probe device where you probe something and it will give you a reading of how light it is and the moisture so this kid will go probing but he doesn't know what the result is but this kid over here has the mobile display and on it simple visualizations of those probes um are appearing so you can see at the top how light and below it how much moisture and you can see his puzzled face looking over to his friend thinking about it well what happens when they come together and here's two boys that are coming
together and you can see on their faces sheer Delight the one on the right Aron has put the probe device under his armpit and Felix on the left can't believe just how damp his armpit is as you can see by the sheer level of moisture there these boys just really had fun we couldn't stop them probing everything they wanted to find the wetest the lightest the driest the darkest and what's more was that they came up with hyp hypotheses before they looked at the reading as to what might be wet and why they did um
scientific inquiry in the wild and as I said we just couldn't stop them probing 10 12 years on I've met Felix and he came up to me and he said you know one of the most memorable days at school was that day you took us into the ambient wood that speaks volumes but it's not just um children that we can think about how we give them devices to share when they're together we can think of everyone of all all ages and here we have three women who retired in their late 60s and what we did
was we gave them uh an inventor's toolkit some of you might know which is called Makey Makey and we wanted them to think about what they could do um with it and what they did was they created um a musical system whereby with the Makey Makey kit you have input devices that you use everyday objects around and here they're using bananas potatoes corett cucumbers celery and so on and these represent keys so the banana could be a c the potato a b and the cucumber and a and what these three women are doing is that
they're playing tunes together and they're making a circuit so you see one of them holding the arm of the other to complete the circuit so one will squeeze the the potato to play the sea and another will squeeze the plum to play the A and they played all sorts of tunes including Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at first they said this is a bit childish it's not really for us but you can see on their faces just how much fun it was to be playful and to do things like this and then afterwards we couldn't stop
them talking about technology about the possibilities about being creative it's okay if you're 60 70 80 90 to be playful and use these types of um Technologies so what else can we do perhaps we can go up another level to the community and think about how we can get a Galvanize a community to do things together when they are together and this is what we did with the Tidy Street project in Brighton which is where I live we thought about how we could get the community involved and the project we were interested in was how
can we get them to reduce their energy consumption and rather than just think about individual families or householders about how they reduce their electricity and giving them Smart Meters we got the whole street involved and this is a typical house in Brighton which is terrorist so they live quite close to each other so what we did was we asked them to read the electricity meters and then put it into the the reading each day into a web um application that we' built and with that information we were able to average how much the street was
using and they could see how much electricity they were using relative to the rest of the street they could also see how much they were using relative to the rest of the city Brighton and even the rest of the world even Barcelona now the real Innovation wasn't that but it was putting a graph onto the road and you can see on here we got a graffiti artist and every day he sprayed what the average was relative to Brighton and the people in the houses came out and they talked to each other about this but they
didn't just talk to each other about how they were changing their own habits they talked to passes by about it and those passes by talk to other people in in the city and those people talk to others and it just went viral everyone thought this is a great way of sharing information and we had a documentary maker from New York come all away Gary hustwit to make a video of this and I hope this works because what he shows is very [Music] powerful we're interested in making people more aware of their patterns of behavior so
that potentially they can change them in this project we were interested in electricity usage we actually went for a very low Tech method of recording electricity usage so rather than using smart sensors each day we got the participants on Heidi Street to go down to their electricity meter knock down the reading and then they went to our website and they put that number in we were interested in doing a public display so we decided that we would turn the street essentially into a big graph on the street we show how the average usage of the
participants compares to the Brighton average it's 500 ft long we record it for 3 weeks and each day we show how they compare so if you're looking down the street you can see how their electricity usage has changed over time it's woken us up I'm not very technological was it so I did my best and I'm try to unplug things and so on but it has made us very conscious of what we you know what we use what we waste it wasn't really so much about the numbers as where your wiggly line was going in
relation to the streets wiggly line seeing the information graphically really focused you into thinking about things that you leave on that you don't need to mine was quite high so I needed to in the community Spirit try get that down rather than bring the street average up and above um so I started changing the way I did things one other piece of technology that we gave the participants was um an appliance meeting I think that was really important for them because once they got an idea of how their overall electricity was changing they then wanted
to identify which particular appliances were were using more electricity we'd see just how greedy some of the devices we had in the house were hallogen lighting very very greedy uh television not so bad the kettle you know we have to ration the number of Cups of Tea that we have every day uh because it uses up so much electricity but it does make you very aware of what you're using everybody that walked by you could see them examining the street art trying to understand what it was there was a lot of conversation that went on
in the street you know when you met something you were always talking about the project when people were walking down on Saturday they wanted to talk about the project so I think it genuinely raised the profile having this thing in the road over the first 3 weeks of the project the average electricity usage of the participants came down by 15% so it's promising and we're hoping that that change will be sustained I thought about energy usage in general but I hadn't thought about how I would change my behavior I didn't do anything about it by
participating in the project what it did was just just made me act on it as opposed to think nice thoughts about perhaps doing something the main lessons we can learn about sustainability from this project is that although it starts with individuals a really important factor in people's behavior is e Community people are influenced by what other people are doing around them so if you can engage them as a community they seem to be more motivated and more likely to change their behavior so to conclude technolog is going to continue to proliferate and it doesn't mind
how you use it you can continue to retreat into your digital bubbles looking at your um uh phones and having um mindless interactions or you can be more mindful of others and the environment around you mindless or mindful the choice is yours thank you
