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On The Digital Life this week, we explore designing bioinspired products with special guest Nic Hogan, a computational designer focused on the creation of design and fabrication techniques that emulate or implement biological processes. Nic’s work includes projects with Harvard iLab and bioinspired technologies currently being developed at the Wyss Institute.
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On The Digital Life this week we discuss the future of UX as envisioned in Dirk Knemeyer’s article “Understanding Us: A New Frontier for User Experience” which was published in the recent UXmatters relaunch.
It seems like today is a good time to be a UX professional, but what does the landscape look like professionally, and how is it going to change in the future? In the article, Dirk considers neuroscience, in particular, as an area that UX will both influence and be influenced by, as it converges with the world of science and biotech.
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Understanding Us: A New Frontier for User Experience
On this episode of The Digital Life we discuss Google’s Sidewalk Labs and its radical plans to design a smart city from scratch. Sidewalk Labs wants to work with cities to build applications that solve big urban problems and accelerate innovation around the world. However, in their pursuit of these solutions, the company is seeking autonomy from many city regulations, so it can build free of the many constraints that come with the design of streets, parking, and utilities.
Sidewalk Labs already has two solutions in progress: Flow, a transportation coordination platform in partnership with the U.S. Department of Transportation; and LinkNYC, kiosks with gigabit fiber connections delivering WiFi, USB charging, free voice calls, and a tablet for access to the Internet.
On The Digital Life this week, we chat about the intersection of computer science / engineering and synthetic biology and Cello, a programming language for living cells.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University (BU) synthetic biologists have created software that automates the design of DNA circuits for living cells. This software, called Cello, has the potential to help people, who are not necessarily skilled biologists, to quickly begin designing useful, working biological systems. Using Cello, oil companies, for example, could develop smart bacteria that could clean up oil spills. Cello, which is open source, can be downloaded from the online repository GitHub or accessed via a Web interface.
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A Programming Language for Living Cells
On The Digital Life this week, we chat about the evolution of artificial intelligence in light of recent public failure and success by tech giants in the AI space. First, Microsoft had to terminate Tay, its teenage chatbot, after the bot started tweeting neo-Nazi propaganda and other abusive language at people. Meanwhile, Google’s DeepMind has created an AI capable of beating some of the very best human players in the world at Go, the Asian strategy board game.
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Microsoft Terminates Its Tay AI Chatbot after She Turns into a Nazi
In a Huge Breakthrough Google AI Beats a Top Player at the Game of Go
