Joe Tankersley – Keynote
(Walt Disney Imagineering, Expert on the Future of Storytelling)

Joseph Tankersley is a writer, communication futurist and producer of immersive experiences. For nearly 25 years he has helped organizations create compelling messages about themselves, their goals and visions for their futures. He has worked with national and international corporations, NGO’s and national governments.

Joe is a passionate believer in the power of story as a tool for creating positive futures. He has led workshops in North America and Europe where he has taught diverse groups how to use narrative tools to create and implement visionary strategic plans.

Joe is both theorist ad practitioner. His media credits range from feature films and educational documentaries to immersive physical learning environments and games. This extensive hands-on experience has given him the ability to test and refine the communication theories he shares with his audiences.

Much of his work involves exploring new forms of story-telling. For the past ten years Joe has led teams developing new immersive experiences for a major entertainment company that employ cutting edge story-telling technology to “entertain, enlighten and empower.”

The ultimate goal of all his work is to share with others the best practices for effective communication and positive change in the digital age.

David Merrill
(MIT, co-founder of Sifteo Labs, TED Speaker)

David finished his Ph.D. in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab and is now co-founder of Sifteo, based in San Francisco CA. His research interests revolve around expanding human capabilities with technological tools that take advantage of our existing skills.

His primary research project was Siftables. Siftables is a distributed gestural user interface that couples interaction affordances of tangible interfaces (TUIs) with some functional capabilities of a sensor network. Siftables aims to empower people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approximate interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives.

He is also interested in amplifying our ability to access relevant information in the wild, when we are away from our desktop and laptop computers. For a long time we could blame the large size of computers for our difficulty in seamlessly integrating them into our daily existence. Now that computational power comes in such tiny packages, he believes it is just our design understanding that must catch up in order for our computers to facilitate amazingly great, useful, and sociable interactions.

A final area where his enthusiasm runs deep is in the creation of new musical instruments and experiences. We have only scratched the surface of understanding how technology will change the human ability to create, understand, and appreciate music. For his masters thesis with Joe Paradiso in the Responsive Environments group he created an adaptive musical instrument – instead of you learning the instrument (as is usually the case), this instrument learns you! More recently, he has been collaborating with a group of artistic technologists to build the future platform for musical interactivity.

David Merrill’s TED Talk

Bruce Sterling
(Italy, Science Fiction Author / Thinker)

Bruce s a world-renowned American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on theMirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre. He is, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, as well as its chief ideological promulgator. Bruce is a close friend of Plutopia, having shared the stage with its founders on numerous occasions, as well as being the opening speaker for the past three years.

He won Hugo Awards for his novelettes Bicycle Repairman and Taklamakan. Recent works have included Shaping Things, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, Visionary in Residence. Beyond his SF novels, he wroteTomorrow Now, with Bruce at his chatty, global-headed best. Here he writes about the future with skill and heartfelt exuberance. In addition, he has undertaken a number of projects, such as:

• The Dead Media Project – A collection of “research notes” on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s.
• The Viridian Design Movement – his attempt to create a “green” design movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design. The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling’s Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky athttp://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular “bright green” environmental weblog Worldchanging.
• Embrace the Decay – a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003.

In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School where he is teaching Summer Intensive Courses on media and design. In 2005, he became “visionary in residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He is now living in Turin, after a spell in Belgrade.

Bruce Sterling Website