ThingsCon

ThingsCon is a two-day conference about the future of the hardware business ranging from Internet of Things, wearables and connected devices to 3D printing and new manufacturing techniques. ThingsCon is for designers, engineers & researchers, for founders, startups & VCs, for marketing & brand people, for tinkerers and innovators from all kinds of backgrounds. You want to build the next generation of hardware or connected device? Then ThingsCon this is for you. In talks, workshops and intimate sessions, an international line-up of top notch speakers will cover everything it takes to grow a hardware product from prototype to scaling business - and help participants build the companies of tomorrow. Additionally, a city-wide Hardware Day Berlin will provide ample opportunity for satellite events, meet ups and other ways to foster community, collaboration and exchange of ideas in Berlin as one of Europe’s top emerging hardware hubs. Let's take the Maker Movement to the next level!

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ThingsCon talks: Simon Höher

To build and make use of the products of tomorrow, we have to join forces in interdisciplinary teams, use diverse tools and resources - and re-think concepts like openness, design, innovation, and scaling in the realm of hardware. And just like your local maker space, the big challenge we’re facing here, is providing the right tools to to make the ideas, blueprints, and skills for tomorrow’s products accessible for those who could use them. knowable is the attempt of building such a 'global maker space', that allows for global collaboration on hardware. In his talk Simon will share the thoughts, learnings and questions he encountered throughout the past two years building it.

Simon Höher co-founded and chairs ThingsCon. He is co-­founding knowable, a collaborative platform for makers to join forces in building hardware products together. Simon is a facilitator of communities and projects, that explore concepts of technology and culture in a global context and he mentors at Seedcamp.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

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ThingsCon 2014 talks: Jessi Baker

Joining the physical with the digital: The future of creating, selling and owning things

Every product has a story. A journey of people, places and raw materials. This story of design and making is often missing when we buy a product. The story of ownership is often unknown when we inherit one. This talk looks at how we might start to embed physical objects with meaning by joining them with their digital story. It looks at the rise of open product data, the Internet of Things and small scale manufacturing and how all these movements might change the way with create and own things forever.

Jessi Baker is a Designer & Creative Technologist exploring concepts for the future of the Internet, particularly pervasive computing and open data and how a union of the two can inform citizen choices. A true blend of art and science, Jessi has a Masters in Engineering from Cambridge University and a Masters in Design from the Royal College of Art. She is co-founder and CEO of Provenance and a PhD researcher at the Intel Institute for Sustainable Cities.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

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ThingsCon 2014 talks: Miquel Ballester

Miquel Ballester takes care of the product and strategy in Fairphone's action areas. Originally from Mallorca, he studied industrial design engineering and strategic product design. At Fairphone he participated in the exciting process to go from non-profit organization to a social enterprise, and believes in brave companies that are ready to think ahead and try new ways of doing to positively impact society.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

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ThingsCon 2014 talks: Alasdair Allan

Everyday objects are becoming smarter. In ten years’ time, every piece of clothing you own, every piece of jewellery you wear, and every thing you carry with you will be measuring, weighing and calculating your life. In ten years, the world — your world — will be full of sensors. The problem? The things are becoming smarter, but they’re also becoming selfish. Your lightbulbs aren’t talking to your media centre, your media centre isn’t talking to your blinds, and nobody is talking to the thermostat. Instead of talking to each other, everything is talking to you—you’ve ended up as a mechanical turk inside someone else’s software.

That situation can’t continue, we need to fix the Internet of Things. As our computing continues its diffusion out into the environment we need our things to work together. The things have to become not just smarter, but more co-operative, they need to become anticipatory rather than reactive.

Alasdair Allan is a Scientist, Author, Hacker and Tinkerer, and co-founder of a startup working on fixing the Internet of Things.

He is the author of a number of books, and from time to time he also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them. Last year he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensors motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O. He's still recovering.

He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary in 140 characters or less. He is a contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and a contributor to the O'Reilly Radar.

A few years ago he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what the time was the most distant object yet discovered.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

Please note that due to a mistake of ours, the recording of Alasdair's talk is incomplete. We apologize sincerely for this inconvenience. -- The ThingsCon Team.

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ThingsCon 2014 talks: Usman Haque

Canary or the coal mine - data, meaning and the internet of things

Just as it is with making sense of people, so it is with making sense of data. We need to be able to converse with and interrogate data in order to make any sense of it. A canary that offers one bit of information (alive or dead) as a means to understand a coal mine disguises the mine's beautiful complexity and can only answer one specific question; and so too is it with internet of things data unless specific attempts are made to break out of one-dimensional silos. This talk proposes some strategies for doing so.

Usman Haque is founding partner of Umbrellium, founder of Haque Design + Research and founder of Pachube (now known as Xively.com, acquired by LogMeIn Inc in 2011), a real-time data infrastructure and community for the Internet of Things. Trained as an architect, he has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and dozens of mass-participation initiatives. His skills include the design and engineering of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia.

As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He received the 2008 Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum, UK, a 2009 World Technology Award (art), a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

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ThingsCon 2014 talks: Martin Spindler

Mind the gap, please. Connected products and their context. It’s self-evident that connectivity is coming to more and more devices. But what does that mean for individual products and product categories? How does longevity and complexity factor into the design process? Looking at the abstraction layers that made the internet so successful (and taking quite a bit from architecture), this talk is trying to establish an classification and abstraction of things.

Martin Spindler is a speaker, writer and strategy consultant on the Internet of Things and Smart Energy. He is Co-Founder of the Internet of People consultancy network, and member of Council, an international Internet of Things Think Tank. He used to work on strategy and market research into Renewable Energies and Smart Metering and Smart Grids in Germany until he got fascinated with the wider Internet of Things. He studied Political Sciences and Economics at the University of Heidelberg and currently lives in Berlin.

Recorded at ThingsCon 2014, Berlin.

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Memories #10 - Reto Wettach: Fritzing and some lessons learned from Open Source Hardware

Reto Wettach is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam/Germany, where he teaches Interaction Design with a focus on tangible, ambient and mobile interaction as well as service design.

He is also founder and design director of IXDS, a strategic design company based in Berlin and Munich. IXDS applies a hands-on and user-insights-driven approach to help their clients transform business opportunities--primarily based on digital technologies--into sustainable services.

In 2007 Reto Wettach initiated Fritzing, an open-source project that makes electronics accessible to almost anyone. Fritzing has been widely adopted by the maker community and serves thousands of users and contributors worldwide.

Reto served as an advisor to ThingsCon 2014. Watch his talk on Fritzing and the lessons they learned from building Open Source Hardware here:

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Memories #9 - Marcel Schouwenaar: Get your hands dirty: a crash course into prototyping for connected products

Watch Marcel Schouwenaar talk about The Incredible Machine, prototyping, their approach to building connected products and the workshop they held at ThingsCon 2014. Enjoy: 

Designing connected products is quite different from current industrial, product and interaction design. Internet connected things transcend our current notion of what a product is. A connected product can consist of a constellation of sensors, touch points, remotely controllable things, services, and digital agents. So how would go about designing such a complex product? Unlike of making schemes, charts, wireframes, sketches and power points - prototypes can provide incomparable insight into the value of ideas and applications.

Prototyping is an essential part of the process of developing connected products. Prototypes are very useful to understand the user’s experience, but also the process of building is an exercise from which much can be learned as technical challenges appear and unforeseen use cases emerge. In recent years, the barriers have been greatly reduced to build an experiential prototype in the earliest stages of the creative process. Nowadays, platforms for connected products have been added to the ever expanding prototyping toolkit.

In this workshop we’ll dive into the quickest of experiential prototyping: hacking. We’ll hack together a chain of connected appliances and electronics into a Rube Goldberg machine. The links in the chain will interact virtually or physically. Join this workshop if you want to get your skills up with building something working fast, learn from other attendees, learn about new prototyping platforms, or just have a whole lot of fun.

Marcel Schouwenaar is an industrial designer, maker, developer and a technophile. Two years ago he co-founded The Incredible Machine, a design consultancy focusses on connected products. He and his team help companies invent new concepts that explore opportunities in connecting products, spaces and services. Because this novel field has yet to establish its archetypes and interaction patterns, they prototype their ideas in the earliest stages of innovation. If seeing is believing, then experiencing is understanding. Marcel and his team worked on next generation play experiences that blend the border between toys and games, the challenge of bringing brick and mortar retail to the 21st century, and the very concept of modern day air travel. Their clients include Lego, Philips and Rabobank.

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Memories #8 - Emily Brooke: The story behind BLAZE

Today it's Emily Brooke sharing insights from building BLAZE:

Emily Brooke traded Physics at Oxford University for Product Design in Brighton, where she created an innovation set to drastically improve cyclist safety and started her own company to realise it. BLAZE launched with the LaserLight this Winter - a beautifully designed front light, that also uses a laser to project the symbol of a bike down onto the road ahead. It tackles the greatest cause of cyclist fatality, being caught in the blind spot, by alerting road users ahead of the bike of its presence, preventing them turning across its path.

Laserlight is the flagship offering in a range of products for urban cyclists from this London based startup. They launched it as one of the first UK Kickstarters and one year on are in full-scale production in China.

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Memories #7 - Sami Niemelä: Designing Discreetness

Our homes, workplaces and vehicles are being saturated with glowing rectangles, all competing from our attention. We augment ourselves on pieces of glass we carry, and we are at the dawn of a era where all the worlds' data is accessible to us everywhere, all the time. There must be a better way. I believe the answer to cracking this is creating and experimenting with smart, connected things that are silent, behave well, and play nicely with others. How to approach connected physical objects and the attached services as a medium for something larger, instead the thing itself? Join me in 90-minute workshop where we will discuss and sketch the new frontiers and behaviors for the post screen world ahead of us. Because someone has to.

Sami Niemelä is a designer driven by the curiosity towards the world, for making sense of things new & better. He has made and broken things on the web since the 90s, mobile since 2000 and feels is just starting to get the hang of it all. In his work, Sami enjoys most the space in between the abstract and concrete. He is driven by the passion for making sense of things that are new and hard. Currently Sami is the creative director and one of the founding partners at the Helsinki based award winning design firm Nordkapp.

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Memories #6 - Peter Troxler: The state of play in Open Source Hardware

Watch independent researcher Peter Troxler talk about FabLabs and Open Source Hardware. Here it is:

Peter is a long standing Fab Lab researcher and activist. He has been in and out of academia and works currently as a research professor at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, studying the third industrial revolution and its main ingredients: the Maker Movement and Open Source in design and hardware. Peter has had a fringe theatre company, co-organized festivals and conferences, and has recently co-founded Fab Lab Zürich. Globally he is working on connecting the loose ends in the Maker Movement.

In this talk, I will try to take stock of the state of play of Open Source Hardware (OSH) from a variety of perspectives: What does the current OSH landscape look like? What are the basic legal aspects of OSH (protection vs. “licensing”)? What are the dimensions of OSH practices? Then I shall highlight the important challenges and opportunities that OSH is confronted with currently — branding, tiered business models, dual licensing, and an incumbent patent industry to name a few. Finally, I shall sketch a few preliminary patterns for designing business models with and around OSH.

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Memories #5 - Nikolaj Hviid: The Hardware Revolution: Sensors, Devices & Consumer Products

Nikolaj Hviid is the founder of Bragi, the company behind Germany's most successful Kickstarter campaign to date, the Dash. Before, Nikolaj was the CEO of an award winning design agency and former Head of Design at Harman.

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Memories #4 - Siert Wijnia

3D printing is generally considered the 3rd Industrial Revolution (or just a new bubble). We believe this revolution will express itself in many different ways: in the way we produce (obviously), in how we work together (less obviously) and even in the way we do business (perhaps the least obvious). We believe and see evidence that the world will change from a traditional pyramid production model, to a distributed production network supported by communities. The formula N=1, R=G redefines the way we work together in a P2P way. The required infrastructure to make this revolution come true is being built now .... and in an open source way! This will enable all of us to join efforts in giving the world a boost! We want to share with you the way Ultimaker and its community function in this open source era.

Siert is the co-founder of Ultimaker. As a creative philosophical engineer, he started at a large industrial player, but rediscovered his passion for making, collaborating and sharing when he had the opportunity to help start up ProtoSpace, the FabLab in Utrecht. He wants to make the internet physical again. Changing bits into products closes the loop of connecting people. He envisages that by sharing globally and producing locally we can redefine our behavior towards our environment.

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Memories #3 - Louisa Heinrich: "Where the Brick Breaks: Augmented Humans and the Internet of Things"

And here we go, part 3 of our ThingsCon Video memories. Without further ado: Louisa Heinrich!

Louisa Heinrich is the founder of Superhuman. She brings over 22 years’ total experience (17 in Digital), working with businesses and governments to design strategies, products, services and organisational structures that use digital technology to improve individual lives, make a positive contribution to society, and achieve commercial results.

She has held many titles, including Design Director in the first dotcom boom, Executive for Future Platforms at the BBC, and most recently Head of Strategy for international Service Design agency Fjord. She has led teams worldwide for multi-national businesses, is a thought leader and a recognised speaker on the intersection of people, technology and business.

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Memories #2 - Bethany Koby

Have fun with the second video! This time it is Bethany Koby. Here we go:

Bethany Koby is a mom, CEO, designer, art director and an artist. She is interested in developing brands and experiences that inspire a collaborative future. In 2011, Bethany co-founded Technology Will Save Us. TWSU teaches people to interact with the technology around them and to become makers through educational DIY kits. The kits are for everyone from beginners all the way up to the already technology savvy. Great for families, educators or those just curious, these kits are aesthetically charming whilst providing the skills to tinker, hack and create. TWSU uses real components and electronics in all of their kits in order to inspire users to understand their own devices better, and even create new ones. This is technology that anyone can become a part of.

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Memories #1 - Matt Webb

Hey! It has been a while, right? Still thinking about all the interesting, smart words you heard at ThingsCon? We are, but we also forgot some bits, and did not get to hear and see everything anyway.

Thats why today is our lucky day: Here is the first video!

Over the next days we will release the rest one by one. Today we start with Matt Webb, and the story of the Little Printer and BERG. We hope you enjoy it!

  Matt Webb is BERG’s CEO, and co-founded the company in 2005. BERG are creators of BERG Cloud — the friendly and complete platform for web-connected devices, from prototyping to production. The company began life as a design consultancy working with clients including Google, Intel, Bonnier and Dentsu, with work in the New York MoMA and recognition by Fast Company as one of the world's 50 most innovative companies.

Now a tech startup, BERG also designed and manufactured a connected consumer product, Little Printer, which has charmed and delighted families and social media addicts with its cute demeanour and handy functionality.

In this talk, Matt shares his experiences and insights building a connected product and switching from a consulting to a product company.

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WDYT?

ThingsCon is now almost two weeks ago, but are still dreaming about it. It was amazing to have you here, hear your talks, see you build stuff, and we are grateful for it all.

But we are not only dreaming about the past ThingsCon but also about the future. While preparing the conference, and especially during the two days we have learned a lot about how to put on a hardware conference. We have quite a few ideas on what to do better and can't wait to get busy planning. But in order to do it right, we have to meet the most important benchmark: your opinion.

In order to find out what you liked about ThingsCon and what not we have prepared a little questionnaire. By filling it in you would help us a great deal and will help you to make ThingsCon 2015 what you want it to be. You can access it here: https://t.co/TK0vfSODDg

Thank you.