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Impact! Exhibition opens

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The Impact! Exhibition poster

The Impact! Exhibition — featuring  the Fair Tracing project represented as “Smells like Fair Trade? – has now opened at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London.  The exhibition is free and open to the public in the RCA’s Darwin building from 1100-1730 from Tuesday to Sunday, 16-21 March 2010. Follow this link to a map.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) collaborate with the RCA Design Interactions department to create an exhibition that sees 16 designers teamed up with groups of EPSRC funded researchers from Universities across the UK [selected from a shortlist of projects from the entire EPSRC remit of thousands of grants]. The mixed media exhibition will explore the relationship between science and society and will show how research is making a huge impact on our everyday lives, such as healthcare, crime prevention and climate change. Participating designers include Onkar Kular, Noam Toran, James Auger and Revital Cohen.

L-R: Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Ann Light, Nicolas Myers, Dr Apurba

On Monday, Fair Tracing’s pricipal investigator Dr Apurba Kundu fielded interviews from a number of media organisations (details will be blogged as they are published) in the morning, and attended the Gala Opening in the evening along with co-investigator Dr Ann Light, research fellow Dr Dorothea Kleine and designer Nicolas Myers (see his other work here), and hundreds of guests from academia, industry and the media. (Unfortunately, co-investigator Dr Ian Brown could not attend.)

“Does it smell like Fair Trade?”

Additional photos will be blogged as they become available, but a sneak preview of the work appears to the left.

Do be sure to visit the exhibition!

Posted in Design, Events, Fair Tracing presentations, Fair Tracing project activities, Media | No Comments »

Fair Tracing goes to the Impact! Exhibition Participant Workshop

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
A quiet moment during the workshop

A quiet moment during the workshop

Fair Tracing principle investigator Dr Apurba Kundu attended the Impact! Exhibition Particpant Workshop hosted in London by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) on 1 December 2009. A brief video of the day is available at http://vimeo.com/9126124

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.

Posted in Events, Fair Tracing project activities, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Fair Tracing project chosen for EPSRC Impact! Exhibition

Sunday, 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.

Meeting

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!

Posted in Events, Fair Tracing project activities, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Debating emergence with diverse stakeholders

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Working group

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

Posted in BGDD Network, Events, Fair Tracing project activities, conferences | No Comments »

Fair Tracing at the Royal Geographical Society Conference 2009

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

University of Manchester

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 »

Feral Trade Cafe Exhibition

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

The exhibition features retrospective display of Feral Trade goods (2003-present) alongside ingredient transit maps, video, bespoke food packaging and other artefacts from the Feral Trade network.

The exhibition notes tell us:

“The term ‘feral’ denotes the project’s wilful wildness (as in pigeons) as opposed to romantic or nature-wildness (wolves): it offers street-wise survival tactics for urban environments. Since the first registered Feral Trade import of 30kg of coffee direct from the growers in El Salvador to the Cube Microplex in Bristol in 2003, Kate Rich has used social networks to traffic edible produce from around the world. Feral Trade participants become mules, carrying food items with them on trips they would have taken anyway and delivering them to depots (usually friends’ and colleagues’ flats or workplaces) in the growing network.”

“The process is facilitated by an online database, handcrafted by the artist, where couriers log their journeys. This forms the sole physical infrastructure for an alternative freight network, which operates without any material assets (vehicles, staff, communications devices, depots). It enables producers, couriers and buyers to track not only the transit of their own produce but all grocery movements in the network; outputting waybills that document the details of sources, shipping and handling with the kind of microattention that ingredient listings normally receive.”

See/eat it at:

http://www.http.uk.net/exhibitions/FeralTradeCafe/index.shtml

Posted in Events, General, Supply Chains, Tracing & Tracking | 1 Comment »

Fair Tracing’s demo at ICTD2009 in Doha, Qatar

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Fair Tracing’s Research Fellow and Project Manager Dr Dorothea Kleine represented the project at ICTD2009, the international IEEE/ACM conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development held in Doha, Qatar from 17-19 April 2009, with over 300 delegates in attendance.

Our demonstration, “Understanding the Provenance of Ethically Produced Goods”, showed the early Fair Tracing computer screen version with the Google Earth map, and used the Upcode application to demonstrate the tool on a mobile screen. We were able to let people use the Nokia N70 or N95 to scan a barcode on a bottle (in Qatar alcohol is banned so we had to go for a water instead of a wine bottle) or a coffee package. The mobile could then go online and link directly to key information from our Fair Tracing data set. Information on offer included the pie chart of “Where does the money go?”, the producer’s website, and the YouTube videos which we have produced in partnership with the Chilean producers.

There was great interest the Fair Tracing demo stand which was up for two days. Over 70 people came to talk to us and try out the demo, including development practitioners from Ecuador, Pakistan, Australia and Egypt.

Tags:
Posted in Events, Fair Tracing presentations, Fair Tracing project activities, Technology, Tracing & Tracking, conferences | No Comments »

Fair Tracing presentation at BASAS Conference

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

BASAS logo
Ashima Chopra, a research student on the Fair Tracing project, will be presenting a paper on aspects of the project’s India case study at the forthcoming British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) conference to be held in Edinburgh from 30 March-1 April 2009. She will also be hosting the panel in which the paper will appear. The full details are as follows:

Monday, 30 March 2009, 4.45 pm – 6.15 pm
“Technology and Development” panel
Convenor: Ashima Chopra (University of Bradford)

  1. Vincent Bagiire (University of Bradford) Improving livelihoods in the south through technology: M.S.Swaminathan’s contribution
  2. Bidit Lal Dey (Queen’s University, Belfast) An overview of the use and appropriation of mobile telephony in rural Bangladesh from the perspectives of farmers
  3. Ashima Chopra, (University of Bradford) Is technological innovation necessary for socio-economic development? Designing a digital traceability solution for coffee growers in Southern India

For further information, see the BASAS website or the conference homepage, or contact Ashima directly at  a.chopra@bradford.ac.uk

Posted in Coffee, Coffee Traceability, Events, Fair Tracing presentations, Fair Tracing project activities, General, India, Technology, Tracing & Tracking, conferences | No Comments »

Call for papers: “Technology and Development” at BASAS

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Due to a late cancellation, there is now place for an additional two papers in the ‘Technology and Development’ panel at the forthcoming British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) conference to be held in Edinburgh from 30 March – 1 April 2009. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PAPERS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY FRIDAY, 6 MARCH 2009.

The panel on “Technology and Development’ may include a number of areas, such as development studies, computer science, HCI, networks, mobile systems, satellite and/or telecommunications, and multimedia. Topics might include:

  • new and emerging technologies (both hardware and/or software),
  • ICTs for development (including those used in education, governance, health or livelihood systems), or
  • web-based gadgets or applications that can be used by communities.

The paper/presentation should demonstrate the actual or potential application of technology/technologies for development scenarios within the South Asian context. Presentations must last no longer than 20 minutes. Both established academics and/or research students are encouraged to apply.

The panel will include the paper “Technological innovation and development: the case of Fair Tracing in India” by A Chopra (University Bradford).

Full details on the BASAS conference are available at http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/BASAS2009.php?menu=3. Early registration is £95 (by 9 March 2009), and there are few bursaries available for postgraduate students – see website.

To discuss your papers/presentations, please contact Ashima Chopra (Fair Tracing project research student) me via email at a.chopra@bradford.ac.uk

Posted in Events, Fair Tracing project activities, General, India, Technology, conferences | No Comments »

Third BGDD Conference

Friday, December 19th, 2008

The network of researchers involved in the four EPSRC-funded projects will meet at Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 5-6 January 2009 for a third “Bridging the Global Digital Divide” conference. The aim of the two-day meeting is to bring the project teams together to share news and information about our ongoing work, as well as plan for the final months ahead. 

Confirmed as attending on behalf of Fair Tracing are Dr Ian Brown, Dr Dorothea Kleine, Dr Apurba Kundu. In additional, selected research students who are contributing to the Fair Tracing Project may also attend. 

Posted in BGDD Network, Events, Fair Tracing presentations, Fair Tracing project activities, conferences | No Comments »

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