During the Frontiers of Interaction IV conference that took place on July 1st at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin this year Elizabeth Churchill, the Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo spoke highly of the Bassetti Foundation during her Keynote speech.

The theme of the conference this year was “the evolution of the relationship between humans and technological systems”, and included another key note speech by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling as well as interventions by amongst others the social commentator David Orban, and Nicholas Nova of LIFT conference.

Churchill’s keynote speech entitled “Frontiers of Interaction, the business of the socio-technical” addressed issues of trust, safety and ethics with her main focus upon information management.

She raised the issue of the awareness of cultural differences during the system design process and broached the thorny problem of data loss and damage. Here her focus was not only upon the loss of the data, (the example used was of photographic data stored within public sites on the internet), but also of “restoring the social footprint” when data is lost (and partly re-traced), how can the service provider re-create the original social meaning with the surviving data.

During here wrap up while addressing the problem of taking responsibility for storing other people’s data she sited the Bassetti Foundation’s “long term work on the cultural consequences of storing our ‘stuff’ in ephemeral formats of which we may not have control” and also touched upon ideas here elaborated surrounding glocalism and boundaries and frontiers before inviting the audience to go away thinking about net neutrality and responsibility.

Elizabeth Churchill’s keynote on frontiers.dolmedia.tv (spoke about the Bassetti Foundation at min. 48″):

Visit the site of Frontiers of Interaction IV and see the photos of the conference.