What kinds of connectivity infrastructure would reflect the kinds of futures that people in the Orkney Islands might aspire to?
This digital booklet, commissioned by Intel Labs, is a response to that question. It draws on my ethnographic research (Relocating Innovation) to consider how the future is imagined and made in everyday practice in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the north-east coast of Scotland. It is intended to open up ideas about what infrastructure is, and how it might be imagined and designed differently.
Published on 21/03/2011 15:32.
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Completed 2009
What counts as ‘innovation’ and how does the ‘new’ come to be, in an era when ‘innovation’ is assumed to be an unquestioned good? This research project with Lucy Suchman and Endre Dányi (Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University) reconceptualised innovation through a comparison of three different sites of social, technological and political invention: an internationally recognised centre of technology in Silicon Valley, USA; small-scale high-tech industry on the remote Orkney Islands, Scotland; and the centre of democratic politics in Hungary.
My fieldsite was made through a two year ethnography of how the future is imagined and made in the archipelago of Orkney, Scotland. Here, the landscape is filled with 5000 years of technological invention, from the Ring of Brodgar stone circle to the marine renewable energy test site of the European Marine Energy Centre.
Published on 04/07/2010 20:19.
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Workshop at the international conference on Environmental Interactions of Marine Renewable Energy Technologies (EIMR). 4 May 2012.
This workshop will focus on the divisions (and mixtures) between land and sea, the difference in marine and land governance, and the consequences of this for marine energy development. Two specific issues will be tabled for discussion:
Marine energy projects cross the land sea divide. Will this create conflict between the systems that govern that allocation of marine space and those that control onshore development? How might we reconsider marine and terrestrial planning to support community participation and local ownership?
Workshop is co-organised with Sandy Kerr and Kate Johnson at ICIT, Heriot Watt University, Orkney Campus.
Published on 03/05/2012 15:02.
Filed under: EVENTS_
Billia Croo (from Old Norse krókr, a yard or enclosure) is a shoreline on the Atlantic coast of mainland Orkney, and test site for the European Marine Energy Centre, a world focus for renewable energy. Ten years ago it was a good beach to gather driftwood; a quiet, beautiful place, and layered with its own history. Now the power of those waves is being harvested for electricity, and its narrow road rumbles and bulges with traffic. Still, like the land and sea around, it remains many different places for the people who live, work or visit there, and also as a natural ecology.
‘The Orkney Electron: an Ethnographic Story’ was performed as part of a conference session on Billia Croo at at People Places Stories 2011 at Linnaeus University, Kalmar. It is a set of four sagas on the life of the Orkney Electron as it is made through the waves…
Published on 10/04/2012 06:28.
Filed under: PUBLICATIONS_
This one-day workshop was on 26 September 2011. It aimed to share knowledge and explore potential collaboration between two sites at the leading edge of the Marine Renewable Energy: Orkney Islands, Scotland, and Denmark.
The workshop is focused in two areas: 1) Exploring the different future visions of the marine energy industry in Denmark and Orkney; 2) Understanding the role of the public and local communities who are involved in making the future of marine renewable energy. This initial workshop is intended to identify future initiatives and collaboration.
Speakers include: European Marine Energy Centre, Aquatera, Wavestar, Danish Alliance for Offshore Renewables, Wavedragon, and members of the local Orkney community.
Published on 16/09/2011 16:38.
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Digital Creativity is a peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of the creative arts and digital technologies. We welcome submissions from those involved in both the practical task and theoretical aspects of making or using digital media in creative contexts, from poets to socio-cultural researchers.
Published on 15/08/2011 15:53.
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Conference session on the society and seascape of marine renewable energy in the Orkney Islands. Featuring local islands stories from biology, ethnography, art, archaeology, and renewable energy.
This interdisciplinary session is focused on the seascape of the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. It brings together stories and academic accounts from those people who are living and working at the edge of a new renewable energy industry. As it tries to understand and engage with new demands and opportunities, Orkney has become one of the first communities in the world to have to find common ground between its existing stories (such as farming and fishing, archaeology and art) and these future narratives.
Part of the People Places Stories 2011 conference. Linnaeus University, Kalmar.
28-30 September 2011
Published on 15/08/2011 15:36.
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Designing the Future: fables from the mobile telecoms industry, in 'Thumb Culture: The meaning of mobile phones for society'.
Mam Tor Transect and The Dragon Back, in 'White Peak/Dark Peak: An Audio-Visual Word-Map of the Peak District National Park'.
Orkney Futures: a Handbook
Travel Remedy Kit: Interventions into train lines and passenger times, in 'Mobile Methods'.