Eric Paulos
Intel Berkeley Lab
Trash Talk: Deconstructing Situations across our Emerging Technological Urban Landscape

Urban Atmospheres captures a unique, synergistic moment – expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes.

We argue that now is the time to initiate inspirational research into the very essence of these newly emerging technological urban spaces. We desire to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. We propose the adoption of Urban Probes – a lightweight, provocative, intervention technique designed to rapidly deconstruct urban situations, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces, and guide future long term research into urban computing. This talk will feature an overview of several probes.

Eric Paulos is a Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he leads the Urban Atmospheres (www.urban-atmospheres.net) project – challenged to use provocative methods to understand the future fabric of our emerging digital and wireless urban landscape. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley where he researched scientific, and social issues surrounding internet based telepresence, robotics, and mediated communication tools. Eric has developed several internet based tele-operated robots including, Mechanical Gaze in 1995 and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs) such as Space Browsing helium filled tele-operated blimps and ground based PRoP systems (1995-2000).