January 19th, 2010
L-R: Nicolas Myers, Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Ann Light, Dr Apurba
On Friday, 15 January 2010, Fair Tracing project team members
Dr Apurba Kundu,
Dr Dorothea Kleine and
Dr Ann Light met again with Nicolas Myers, the designer who selected our project as his inspiration for his contribution to the
EPSRC Impact! Exhibition.
The grand surroundings of the British Museum’s Great Court lent an inspirational air to our discussions about how Nicolas understood our research project, including its founding ethical concerns, and what particular aspect(s) he might focus on to motivate his own artistic design. Nicolas also described some very interesting ideas as to how his work will be presented at the Impact! Exhibition.
To see the results for yourself, be sure to visit the the Royal College of Art, London, from 16-21 March 2010.
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January 18th, 2010
The latest news about the Fair Tracing project was reported in a brief “Fair Tracing project chosen for Impact! Exhibition” article by principle investigator Dr Apurba Kundu that appeared in the Anglia Ruskin University Bulletin of January 2010, 7:1, p 9.
The appearance of the article has already led to a colleague in the Anglia Law School contacting Apurba to see if the project’s research outcomes are relevant to the rule of nemo dat quod non habet (i.e., that no one can pass title to goods they do not already have), and its potential solution via unique identification marks on goods, thereby allowing a chain of title to be validated. Watch this space!
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January 18th, 2010
Fair Tracing co-investigator Dr Ann Light has just had her paper, ”Barriers to Bridging: Can we cross Global Divides with Trac(k)ing Technology?”, accepted for publication in a special issue on “Labelling the World” of the IEEE journal Pervasive Computing. As she writes:
Product tracking technology is increasingly available to big players in the value chain which connects producers to consumers, giving them new competitive advantages. Such shifts in technology do not benefit small producers, and especially those in developing regions, to the same degree. This paper looks at the practicalities of trying to level the playing field by making a form of tracing technology available for any producer to use. In doing so, it goes beyond considering engineering solutions to examine what happens in the context of use, reporting on work with partners in Chile and India and reflecting on the potential for impact on business and community wellbeing. Reporting on the results of the “Fair Tracing” project, the paper argues that a generic trac(k)ing tool for use with the different commerce systems employed across developing regions is not likely to be useful as such. It concludes with some insights into the tensions that arise in designing a viable socio-technical system around this type of tool and considers what the wider implications may be.
We will keep readers informed as to when the publication appears.
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December 2nd, 2009
A quiet moment during the workshop
Fair Tracing principle investigator Dr Apurba Kundu attended the Impact! Exhibition Particpant Workshop hosted by NESTA on 1 December 2009.
Unfortunately, Nicolas Myers, the designer working with Fair Tracing on the Impact! Exhibition, was unable to attend due to illness. However, he did submit his initial thoughts on how he would represent an aspect of the project.
While the text is available on the Impact! Exhibition social network site at http://impact-art.ning.com/, the visual presentation remains private at this time. Suffice to say that the project management team is very impressed with his take on our research, and very much looks forward to assisting Nicolas in any way we can to realise this work for the Impact! Exhibition to be held from 16-21 March 2010 at the Royal College of Art, London.
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November 29th, 2009
The Fair Tracing project has been selected from among thousands of EPSRC grants to be included in the EPSRC Impact! Exhibition that will take place at the Royal College of Art, London from 16-21 March 2010. As stated in communications from EPSRC:
Engineering and physical sciences research has huge impact on the economy, on public policy, on culture, and on our everyday lives. However, the value of scientific research is not always communicated effectively to the general public – and often it can seem abstract or complex.
To communicate the impact of the research we fund, EPSRC is working with NESTA [National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts] and the Department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art [RCA], to co-ordinate a mixed media exhibition of original design proposals which explore the relationship between science and society, looking at the different types of impact engineering and the physical sciences have on the world.
[The RCA and EPSRC] compiled a shortlist of projects from the entire EPSRC remit (thousands of grants), of about 30 projects. The designers were then offered this list and chose the one that interested them the most. The designers will be exploring the possible social, political, economic, cultural and ethical implications of the research.
The primary audience [at the Impact! Exhibition] will be the general public, but also the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, other government departments, Ministers, business leaders and others… EPSRC will also use the Impact! Exhibition as a resource for producing print and online material which will ensure we can communicate the impacts of your research to an even wider audience.
Left-right: Nicolas Myers, Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Ann Light, Dr Apurba Kundu
Three members of the Fair Tracing management team met with designer Nicolas Myers in October to discuss our project in depth. Nicolas, who graduated from the Design Interactions course of the RCA, also has an MA in graphic design from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and a degree in computer science from the Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris.
Nicolas Myers’s work, greatly influenced by his studies in graphic design and computer sciences, investigates the implications of digital technology through the filter of design. In a context where almost all physical objects, living organisms and phenomena are described in a digital manner his projects question the neutrality of these representations, while focusing on aesthetic and visual representations and interactive experiences.
We are next scheduled to attend an Impact! Exhibition full day workshop in London on 1 December with members from the other selected projects and their designers. It promises to be a most interesting day!
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October 23rd, 2009
“Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. The site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially – and environmentally – conscious products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones.” (Article source: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=708#)
The SourceMap website at http://www.sourcemap.org/beta/stage/ offers users the opportunity to make their own product, travel and/or food maps. Note that this open source site is optimised for the Firefox internet browser.
Posted in Data Visualisation, General, Open Source Software, Supply Chains | No Comments »
September 30th, 2009
Ann Light (center) participating in a small discussion group
Fair Tracing’s Ann Light and Dorothea Kleine, representing the EPSRC Bridging the Global Digital Divide Network, organised together with Mike Powell (IKM Emergent) and Mark Thompson (Judge Business School, Cambridge University) a workshop on “Good Planning or benign imposition? Innovation, emergence and risk in Development research: learning from ICTD” in Cambridge from 17-18 Sept 2009.
The idea was to have a broad mix of academics, practitioners and funders talk about innovation and emergence in development research. Challenges, conceptualisations and future strategies were discussed.
Twenty-one participants attended, among them well-known experts such as Ineke Buskens, Geoff Walsham, Shirin Madon, David Grimshaw, Anita Gurumurthy, Robin Mansell and Henk Molenaar. The discussions in groups were fascinating and continue in a network online. General summaries will soon be made available on the IKM website
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September 13th, 2009
Greetings from Lima!
I, [Fair Tracing project manager Dr Dorothea Kleine], am at Congresso HDCA 2009, the annual conference of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, in Lima, Peru. This is an interdisciplinary conference interested in human development as freedom (Amartya Sen).
I presented a paper called “Applying the capability approach to the ‘medium of choice par excellence’: Using the Choice Framework for a holistic analysis of internet usage”. In it, I used Fair Tracing as an example to show how action research can help consumers and producers in their choices. I argued that one can use Sen’s capability approach, translated with the Choice Framework, to theorise what we did.
The conference is also a great opportunity to draw the attention of Latin American academics to our work, including our participatory work with producers in Chile.
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September 2nd, 2009
At this year’s Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Conference in Manchester (26-28 Aug 2009), Fair Tracing’s Dr Dorothea Kleine teamed up with Dr Ian Cook (Exeter University) and Dr Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute) to host three sessions on “Follow the thing: New Cultural and Economic Geographies“. The idea of the session was to bring together value chain research conducted from cultural geography and economic geography perspectives (see also the full programme).
Our sessions had 13 papers (one of which was on the Fair Tracing project) running from 09:00 to 16:50. Thanks to the great interest in the topic, sponsorship from two research groups, the quality of the papers (and the lucky coincidence that our session info was printed in the front section of the programme at a busy, multi-strand conference with several sessions in parallel) we had audiences of over 30 people throughout the day, consisting of mainly cultural, but also some economic geographers.
The quality of questions were outstanding. One question on the Fair Tracing project was whether we had spoken to workers directly, or whether we had, just like much of the Fair Trade research, merged the categories or producers and workers. I was glad to be able to explain that our focus groups in Chile had been conducted with vineyard owners, bodega employees and workers separately. I also remarked how at the time one of us (ie Dr Ann Light) succeeded in involving the foreman in conversation and distracting him sufficiently while Macarena Vivent and I had unsupervised focus group time with workers…
Ah, we were a great team!
Posted in Chile, Events, Fair Tracing presentations, General, Supply Chains, Wine, conferences | No Comments »
August 26th, 2009
The 22 August 2009 edition of The Economist includes the article “Snap it, click it, use it” which describes how mobile phones are increasingly being used to read bar codes on products which then present detailed information to consumers. The article begins:
NEGOTIATING his way across a crowded concourse at a busy railway station, a traveller removes his phone from his pocket and, using its camera, photographs a bar code printed on a poster. He then looks at the phone to read details of the train timetable displayed there. In Japan, such conveniences are commonplace, and almost all handsets come with the bar code-reading software already loaded. In America and Europe, though, they are only just being introduced.
See the full article at http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14257721
Posted in Mobile Devices, Technology, UI | No Comments »
