Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks (i) to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and (ii) to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

Alain Renk describes "Unlimited Cities", a participatory platform used by architect to enable citizens to change their neighborhood. A rapid prototyping tool, this service aims at allowing people to bring their ideas and react to architectural or urbanistic proposals in a situated way.

Cities were once constructed by the efforts of individuals, until the grand plans of master architects, and then city planning departments took over, making sense of the "chaos." The city of the future will be both globally connected and highly local and customized -- once again shaped primarily by the individuals living within it. This new power will include sustainable local economies and be thanks to the miracle of the Internet combined with fast, easy access it to through ubiquitous mobile devices and sensors throughout our environment.

In this speech, Tobie Kerridge describes the "Material Beliefs" project, a design research project with a focus on a speculative approach to biotechnology as a form of engagement with the public.

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:

Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters

Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world

Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.

Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

Carpooling consists in sharing a car on a similar trip. Drivers publish their available seats with a price, and passengers buy seats for home-to-work carpooling (on a day-to-day basis for a distance of around 20km) and long-distance carpooling (one-off trips or week-end round-trips for distances of 300km in average). The speech focuses on how to forecast car traffic based on car-pooling platforms with visual representations.

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

In this February 2008 presentation, David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, talks about the new business models created by mobile channels. Zong lets people use their mobile phones to buy virtual goods. The system is easy to use: enter your number, go through the verification process, and pay on your monthly cell phone bill. Zong, which works with 250 mobile network operators in 45 countries, was acquired in July by ebay, and David is now VP Mobile for Paypal.

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

A designer and researcher at Oslo School of Architecture, Timo Arnall offers here his perspective about networked objects and ubiquitous computing. His presentation, and the intriguing design examples he takes, highlights two phenomena. On the one hand, he describes how sensors and RFIDs can enable to "make things visible" as the title of his presentation expresses. On the other hand, he shows the importance of going beyond screen-based interactions.