John Gero, an influential design researcher, is holding a workshop in Aix en Provence, France, looking at "cutting-edge research on studying creativity and designers."
The conference is invitation only but papers are available for download from the conference website:

NSF International Workshop on Studying Design Creativity'08

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Julian Vincent pops up again on the BBC website, as they look at biomimetics being applied to space exploration. Other members of the biomimetics team at Bath get a mention in the article, titled Space designs from ants and squirrels.

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Prolific writer Bruce Sterling has recently published Shaping Things through MIT Press, covering (amongst other things) the future of sustainable design. This is non-fiction, although he deals with a lot of the same ideas in his sci-fi.
Sterling also has a blog on Wired, where he's outlined what he sees as the principles of how nature designs (although he does say at the outset that he's distilled them from, among others, Buckminster Fuller and the network's Julian Vincent).

Shaping things

Wired

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The deadline for abstracts for this conference, sponsored by the Wessex Institute of Technology, is October 13th The deadline for full papers is January 24th.
The conference will be held in the new forest on 24-26 May 2006.

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Practising artists in the UK are getting the chance to undertake university-based research, thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The Council’s Fellowships in the Creative and Performing Arts scheme is being re-launched with a new emphasis on making research more accessible. Creative writers, architects, poets, choreographers, visual artists and musicians are among the groups being encouraged to apply.
The scheme will pay the Fellow’s salary costs of between £25,000 and £40,000 pro rata, enabling them to work in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) for up to 3 years full-time or 5 years part-time. Successful applicants will then be eligible to apply to the AHRC’s other schemes for funding for specific research projects during their Fellowship.

More information here

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NASA has announced another design competition as part of its Centennial Challenges program, this one to come up with a glove for astronauts.
The ability of astronauts to carry out assembly tasks in space is seen as crucial for NASA (and presumably everyone else) to further their manned activities. At the moment astronauts can't work very efficiently because their gloves hinder them. Two big problems seem to be the volume changes when they flex (meaning the air inside is trying to return them to their original position) and all the other stuff that has to go in there as well as air and a hand, for example heating and cooling equipment.
There's a $250,000 prize for the winners in November 2006.
There are a few other current challenges, of which the 2 most relevant are both related to the space elevator concept: A payload-carrying climber competition and a tether strength competition.

Glove Competition
NASA Centennial Challenges
Climber/tether competitions

Thanks to Slashdot.

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TEDGlobal is underway in Oxford, with "300 leading scientists, musicians, playwrights, as well as technology pioneers and future thinkers " (BBC) in attendance.
TEDGLobal is the first venture outside California for the long-running TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) series, usually held in Monterey. TED is a select, invitation only event with tickets costing $4400, and it's drawn people like Bono, and more recently Richard Dawkins and Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghan finance minister.
The first TED in 1984 apparently included the first public outings for the Mac and the Sony CD.

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CUPUM- ECiD Joint Workshop: Design out of Complexity 02/07, UCL

The Embracing Complexity in Design cluster, one of our sister networks out of the Design 21 initiative, ran a very interesting workshop in conjunction with the Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management group, looking at what we mean by design in the context of complex systems. Speakers highlighted some different types of complex systems, ranging from politics and the social sciences to traffic flow and the regeneration of Bilbao.

Presentations from the workshop can be found here (go to 'view papers').

Speakers included:

Robert Geyer (University of Liverpool, School of Politics and Communications Studies)
Robert is head of Liverpool’s Centre for Complexity Research, and opened the presentations with a talk focussing on the social sciences and policy, with the latter in particular generating a lot of discussion.

Tim Smithers (VICOM Tech)
Tim raised several interesting points, asking whether we lose some important information when we talk about analogues of complex adaptive systems. For example, is a city a CAS, or is it like a CAS (an analogue)? If the latter, what is lost in the analogy? Tim went on to ask whether we should even try to design complex adaptive systems, arguing that they can only be constructed, not designed. This raised some interesting points about whether we can ‘tune’ existing CAS, or add new ones to produce a desired result.

Jeffrey Johnson (Open University)- The Multilevel Multidimensional Networks of Complex Urban Systems
Jeffrey runs the Embracing Complexity in Design cluster, and is also a key a member of our own cluster.

John Woodward (University of Birmingham)- Design Complexity and Abstraction

Chengling Gou (Oxford)- Individual Performance versus System Efficiency.

Theodore drew the morning’s proceedings together nicely, posing the question ‘Does design ‘stop’ complexity? Why do we see it that way?’

Arnaldo Cecchini (University of Sassari)- ?
Ricardo Sosa (University of Sydney)- Studies of Creativity and Innovation in Complex Social Systems
Stephen Marshall (UCL) – The Probabilistic Generation of Characteristic Urban Structure
Stephen spoke about how the patterns found in urban street layouts can arise without any conscious design process, comparing them to patterns produced by a 'T-tree' program.
Richard Coyne (University of Edinburgh)- The Net Effect: Design, the Rhizome, and complex philosophy

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Vivid is a Birmingham-based 'creative incubator', commissioning new works, artists residences and publications. They are launching 2 new programmes to support collaboration between the media arts and other disicplines, both only available to residents of the West Midlands.

The first is the ISP (Interdisciplinary Support Program), offering bursaries to practitioners from a range of disciplines to support their research activities.

The second is the hasu-guest International scheme, an exchange scheme for artists between the West Midlands and the Czech Republic.

Details from Kaye Winwood (kaye@vivid.org.uk). More details on Vivid here.

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The 2005 Congress on Evolutionary Computation is this year running 5 competitions with an evolutionary theme, one of which is an Evolved Art contest (the others are for Virtual Plants, Binary Series Prediction, Remote-control Car Control, and Paper Enhancement).
The deadline for entries is August 22nd, and while the organisers expect most entries to be generated by evolutionary computation they will accept anything if you can successfully argue that it has been created by an evolutionary process! Although the £100 prize might be useful, the chance to add victory to your CV is probably the real draw.
Details here.

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