iBeacons at Kew Gardens

Jon Little is a Product manager at Royal Botanic gardens at Kew. For the past two years he has been helping Kew to adopt a user first approach in their IT projects.

Jon will talk about the challenge of building apps in the age of beacons, outlining the experience at Kew and Wakehurst and talking about the challenges and efforts to overcome them.

UX in virtual and augmented reality

Eugene Nadyrshin is an innovator/hacker/maker/roboticist and a trustee of the London Hackspace. He recently co-founded a hardware startup that is bring the sense of touch to the virtual reality worlds. In his spare time he tinkers with robots, digital installations and advices startups on solving technological challenges.

The mouse and keyboard are the main means with which we control the computers around us, but with virtual and augmented reality technology how can we reach a similar level of control without either of them? Eugene’s talk explores the current state of technology, the problems that it introduces and common solutions.

Solveiga Pakštaitė is the founder of user-centred design company Design By Sol, where she is working on a way to bring more intuitive information about food to the market to enable us to use resources in a less wasteful way. The product championing this goal is Bump Mark, a responsive food freshness checker that knows exactly when your food goes bad.

Solveiga will talk about influencing behaviour and making information accessible to all ability levels. She will also discuss the challenges in developing and introducing a new system and her learnings in overcoming these.

Matching technologies to cities

Tim Brooke is Head of Making at Future Cities Catapult. Tim has worked on a diverse range of projects from multiuser museum exhibits to self-organising wireless networks for viticulture (for IDEO, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia). He is currently Head of Making at Future Cities Catapult.

Tim will be talking about why cities can be slow to adopt new technologies and how they are trying to understand the best way to do it, helping cities work more efficiently and be a better place to live in.