1. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com @suethomas Professor Sue Thomas Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012 #technobiophilia

2. What is this place?

3. Electricity Is it a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?(Nathaniel Hawthorne,The House of Seven Gables. 1851)

4. The Domain of Cyberspace Internet of Things 1999 Materiality World Wide Web 1984 Software Arpanet/Internet 1969 Hardware

5. The Internet of Things

6. Ninja block

7. Going organic

8. lo

9. Biophilia The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes Edward O Wilson 1984

10. Cyberspace A consensual hallucination... Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... Gibson 1984

11. Terrain

12. FrontierYour legal concepts of property, expression, i dentity, movement, an d context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Barlow 1996

13. FarmingTopsoil grows at a rate of an inch every 100 years. You can grow fabulous plants quickly in that soil, but the soil itself is a product of slow time. OReilly 2000

14. Bugsthe wolf spider is active at night and catches its prey by pursuit rather than by creating a web and waiting. The Lycos search engine emulates this by skipping from server to server gathering documents as it goes.

15. The Stories Creation, Birth, Parenthood Wilderness, Frontier, Camping, Navigation Physicality, Flora, Fauna, Body Settlements, Farms, Gardens, Tools Mind, Spirituality, Buddhism, Shamanism

16. But what does it mean?

17. Biophilia The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes Edward O Wilson 1984

18. Bjork Biophilia app album Bjork, 2011 Voiceover, Sir David Attenborough

19. Biophilia ResearchExperimental Psychology (Kaplans) Social Ecology (Kellert) Behavioural Science (Ulrich) Biology (Wilson) Zoology (Orians)

20. How biophilia soothes us

21. Directed Attention Without directed attention you may be rash, uncooperative and less competent But too much directed attention leads to DAF Directed Attention Fatigue. Symptoms include aggression, intolerance, and insensitivity to social cues. Such people have also been found to be less likely to help someone in need.

22. Resting Directed Attention Increasing specialisation has meant that each of us spends longer hours pursuing a single activity, as opposed to the variety of tasks pursued by our ancestors. Such persistence requires discipline, which depends heavily on directed attention. The solution is to find ways to rest your directed attention with the use of restorative settings

23. Nearby Naturepromises a continuation of the world beyond what is immediately perceived

24. Nearby Nature Screensavers?

25. Being Awayin which the setting is physically or conceptually different from ones usual environment

26. Soft FascinationA setting which evokes mental processes which engage attention effortlessly but still leave room for reflection

27. Drifting in the stream

28. Interval Shifts

29. So where are we? We (unconsciously) brought nature into cyberspace as it evolved The reason may lie in biophilia Biophilia seems to influence the way we inhabit cyberspace. It makes us feel more comfortable. In a technological environment, this could be reshaped as technobiophilia

30. Technobiophilia (2013) The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology

31. So what lies ahead?

32. Bionanoprotonics?Digital devices from bacteria & DNA Transistors from protons

33. The Singularity?I set the date for the Singularity - representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability - as 2045. Technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it Kurzweil2005

34. Gaia? It may be that one role we play is as the senses and nervous system for Gaia. The earth is more than just a home, its a living system and we are part of it. James Lovelock

35. Hylozoic Architecture

36. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com @suethomas Professor Sue Thomas Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012 #technobiophilia

37. Links from the talk The Internet of Things IBM http://youtu.be/sfEbMV295Kk Ninja Blocks http://ninjablocks.com/ Biophilia, Bjork, promo video http://youtu.be/o8AELvVUFLw iPhone app: http://bitly.com/biophiliaapp Net Smart, 2012, Rheingold, H. http://rheingold.com/netsmart/ Book: http://amzn.to/JvxufB Scientists create computing building blocks from bacteria and DNA, Imperial College News Release, 18 Oct 2011 http://bit.ly/JvxH2e Breakthrough: proton-based chips that communicate directly with living things, Angelica, A., Kurzweil Blog, 21 Sept 2011 http://bit.ly/JvxOuJ Hylozoic Ground at the Venice Biennale 2010, Philip Beesley http://youtu.be/v86B9Nz_LVU

38. Sample Biophilia BibliographyIve found the following helpful in beginning to understand biophilia: Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J. H., & Mador, M. L. (2008). Biophilic Design. Hoboken: John Wiley. Kellert, S. R., & Wilson, E. O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington DC: Island Press. Orians, G. (1986). An ecological and evolutionary approach to landscape aesthetics. In E. Penning-Rowsell, & D. Lowenthal, Landscape meanings and values (pp. 3-22). London: Allen & Unwin. Ullrich, R. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science 27 April Vol. 224 no. 4647 , 420-421. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press