Southern States - Karnataka-Bangalore   

A peep into future of communication

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE Dec. 8. Sixty leading designers, design managers, and technologists from 15 countries have landed in Bangalore for "DOORS EAST 2003", a unique international conference on Avant-Garde information design, all set to come alive at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) on Thursday and Friday.

The conference, organised by Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS), is geared towards "bringing a new way of thinking on design and create a worldwide network of visionary designers and technologists."

New service opportunities that emerge from mobile access to wireless networks will be examined.

Diverse scenarios involving text-to-speech, location-based information (GIS/GPS), unit-to-unit broadcast, short audio messaging, WiFi networks, and other innovative approaches will be presented from both South Asia and Europe.

Here is a thinking behind the conference objectives: "In order to move from business-to-business software development and IT-enabled services to a new position in the global value chain, Indian industry must now acquire more sophisticated capabilities in design, usability research, product planning, and marketing."

The Indian and international delegates on Monday began a pre-conference workshop focussing on 19 case study projects.

Among the projects were Moblogging (what does it look like when you can stand in a given location, press a single button on a mobile device and avail yourself of the collective experience of everyone else who has occupied that same spot); Fluid Time (a delegate, Prof. Kieslinger, believes that networking technology can be utilised to connect people to real-time information, allowing them to plan and adjust their daily activities in a new more flexible way) and May Your Neighbourhood (a project which involves young people creating communication and knowledge maps of households and other places of interest).

Among other interesting projects being explored and readied for presentation at the conference is: "Auto-Mobile."

This project concerns a multimedia presentation about the role autorickshaw drivers play in the city culture.

In general, these drivers are labelled as kamikaze pilots and polluters, but they also add a certain value to life in the city by the way they use their mobile phones.

"They keep in close contact with their client base, so they can, for instance, do their shopping for them or take their children to and from school while the parents are at work," explained a delegate.

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