Yo-Yo machines

Yo-Yo Machines are playful communicators you can easily build yourself to keep in touch with friends and family.

From the website

Made by a team of designers and technologists at Goldsmiths, University of London, the concept of having connected devices that can connect people on a distance can easily been seen as a IoT-archetype. There are well-known design cases too, like the Good Night Lamp. This Yo-Yo Machines are nicely designed with the fun of making as part of the process and will be able to create some bespoke connect-from-distance machines that will fit the remote working very well!

The website shows 4 basic interaction concepts: Light Touch, Flutter By, Knock Knock, and Speed Dail. It comes with the instructions and software for Arduinos.

https://www.yoyomachines.io/

Databrick

This sounds interesting: “Whether you own or rent, Databrick helps you learn from the former occupants and green your home even after you exchange keys. It combines different levels of data, secured cloud service, and local data storage in your home (a smart meter or a broadband router).”

Documentary: The Internet of Everything

Documentary film maker Brett Gaylor recently launched a new documentary series titled The Internet of Everything. Brett describes it like this: “The future will either be a surveillance nightmare or an eco-utopia, the outcome determined by startups in Silicon Valley and Shenzen. The Internet of Everything captures our present moment, when both futures are in progress.”

Produced with CBCDocs and Arte France, the documentary is not currently available in all regions but keep an eye out for a great overview of issues and opportunities of IoT as we move forward.

Moving to a more-than-human design practise

Twice speaker at ThingsCon Elisa Giaccardi published an article together with Johan Redstrom on Technology and more than human design: “we need to conceptually equip our design theory and methodologies for new alignments, move past the blind spots of human- centered design, and address the expanding universe of algorithms, forms of intelligence, and forms of life that are entering design practice, casting them as partners in a more-than-human design practice.”
https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/69227577/TechnologyAndMoreThanHumanDesign_Preprint.pdf

Dutch court stops use of automated surveillance by welfare authorities

A Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights, in a judgment likely to resonate well beyond the Netherlands.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/welfare-surveillance-system-violates-human-rights-dutch-court-rules

The EU is considering a 5 year ban on facial recognition in public spaces

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses, according to proposals seen by Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-ai/eu-mulls-five-year-ban-on-facial-recognition-tech-in-public-areas-idUSKBN1ZF2QL

Open data on repairs made available to inform policy

Members of the Open Repair Alliance have recently updated their Open Repair Data Standard and  combined nearly 30,000 records from their community events. It is available as open data for anyone to access.“By mapping this data to a common format, we can pool our repair data together and look for patterns and trends to help inform policy.”
https://openrepair.org/repair-data/open-repair-data-30000-records-together-at-last/