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!
Posted in Events, Fair Tracing project activities, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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
Posted in BGDD Network, Events, Fair Tracing project activities, conferences | No Comments »
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.
Posted in Fair Tracing presentations, Fair Tracing project activities, General, conferences | No Comments »
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 | 1 Comment »
August 8th, 2009
Ivan Antipov, who has developed a Fair Tracing prototype for Android, has now posted his software on SourceForge. That means you can download the code and will hopefully feel inspired to develop it further!
Posted in Fair Tracing project activities, Mobile Devices, OII, Open Source Software | No Comments »
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 »
July 6th, 2009
Last but not least, we have Vishal Shah’s MEng report on his Fair Tracing Facebook application. Vishal has done a really good job in exploring the social media potential of fair trade — looking at how users can discover new ethical products through friends’ recommendations.
Vishal has been working with the project for two years, previously as an EPSRC summer student, so he deserves special thanks!
Posted in Coding, Fair Tracing project activities, OII, Open Source Software, UI | No Comments »
July 5th, 2009
Ivan Antipov has been working on some Fair Tracing software for his BSc Computer Science degree. He has written an Android application both for accessing information on the consumer end, and to allow producers to upload information into the FT database. This is a great demonstration of how small-scale farmers could interact with this kind of ethical product information system. You can read more in his report — thanks Ivan!
Posted in Coding, Fair Tracing project activities, Mobile Devices, OII, Open Source Software, UI | No Comments »
