Stanford Humanities Lab: 2/25/07 - 3/4/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 2/25/07 - 3/4/07


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The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

SHL believes that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere.

We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation

• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property

• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes

• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

Behavioral researcher Jan Chipchase of Nokia Design Team to speak

SHL and the Stanford Center for Critical Foresight will be hosting:

Jan Chipchase
Human Behavioral Researcher, Design Team, Nokia

Time: 4pm, 5 March, 2007

Location TBA, contact cockayne@stanford.edu to get on the list

What will Jan be speaking about?

"Firstly my team travels to the ends of the earth to explore and understand the way people do things in the real world this is at the core of our very human centered approach to design. When I talk about design I mean design in the broadest sense of the word; not simply how things look, but in deciding what to design, whether they are features, applications, services, products or even platforms.

"Secondly, that in emerging markets we’re starting to see mobile phones enable leapfrog technologies, a simple example being that it brings banking services to people with limited access to the regular banking infrastructure.

"And thirdly, that the scale of the opportunity is huge; that we're
exploring solutions that can connect and benefit everyone on the planet."