‘Playful Identities’ research blog

Yesterday evening I went to a Cyberspace Salvations lecture at the Waag Society for the second time. I was with my collegue Jeroen Timmermans, Yuwei Lin, a researcher from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Mylene, my girlfriend. To my surpise, there was no Mark Pesce in the flesh, but only a projection of him on a piece of cardboard and his voice through the PA speakers. However ‘high-tech’, it wasn’t as good as the real thing, a bit hard to follow sometimes due to bad sound quality.

Read full notes below
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Wednesday evening, September 21, I was at the second Cyberspace Salvations lecture (missed the first one) at Waag Society, Amsterdam. Cyberspace Salvations is a cooperative project by several Universities in the Netherlands, together with Waag Society that researches the “re-enchantment” of the world under influence of new technologies.

Talked to two members of the research team afterwards and made some sort of vague promise with Stef to work together on some fronts. Could be useful, as our projects look alike a lot. They also organise a couple of smaller meetings which I hope to attend.

Below the full notes of the meeting.

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Monday, September 19, I was in Delft for a meeting with researchers from the Technical University Delft and two Australian researchers. Present were:

Seumas Miller - Australian National University - Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics; privacy issues
Cathy Flick - Charles Sturt University - ICT industry, codes of ethics, policies, trust, privacy
Jeroen van den Hoven - TU Delft; prof. Ethics of Technology; privacy issues, moral identity
Alper Cugun - MSc student TU Delft; social issues, online communities
Noëmi Manders - PhD researcher TU Delft; ethical aspects of identity management
Bibi van den Berg - PhD EUR; ambient intelligence
Jeroen Timmermans - PhD EUR; playful identities
Michiel de Lange - PhD EUR; playful identities

There were some interesting topics discussed. Read the full notes on the meeting below:

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BoingBoing posted an interesting article about an MIT project called Mobile Landscape that maps the way people move around in the city (in this case the city of Graz in Austria).

The project raises questions around the changing ways people may experience (urban) space under influence of new (pervasive) technologies.
BTW, it is certainly not true that ‘”For the first time ever we are able to visualize the full dynamics of a city in real time,” said project leader Carlo Ratti’: Waag Society has already done a project in 2002 called Amsterdam Realtime.

Here’s the MIT project site.

Steven Clift, initiator of the political activation & internet project E-Democracy.org was in Amsterdam yesterday at the IPP (Institute for Public and Politics). About 15 people - amongst them researchers from Radbout University Nijmegen and the Amsterdam School of Social Research - were present to hear about the project and the way it has recently switched to an open source mail/web-politics system.

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Hello everybody, my name is Michiel de Lange. As from September 1, 2005, I am doing a PhD research at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam with the Faculty of Philosophy. The research is about the way new information- and communication technologies shape the construction of personal and cultural identities.

For those of you who are interested in the background of the research, here’s the link to the research programme ‘Playful Identities’. The application advertisement for PhD students can found here.

I plan to keep track of the literature at www.bijt.org/wikindx. This is a nice open source tool I’ve discovered on Sourceforge when looking for a method to manage a literature database.

So this is me: