Renaissance Panel: The Roles of Creative Synthesis in Innovation

I’m pleased to announce that Leonardo Bonanni and I are organizing a panel this year at CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy (on Monday, April 7th). CHI’s theme this year is “Art, Science, Balance” and we hope that the theme of the panel fits this pretty well. CHI is being held at the fascinating fortezza da basso which, having never been to, I look forward to checking out.

Information about the panel will be archived on this page: but we’ll likely have some updates about what’s going on.

Abstract

The Renaissance ideal can be expressed as a creative synthesis between cultural disciplines, standing in stark contrast to our traditional focus on scientific specialization. This panel presents a number of experts who approach the synthesis of art and science as the modus operandi for their work, using it as a tool for creativity, research, and practice. Understanding these approaches allows us to identify the roles of synthesis in successful innovation and improve the implementation of interdisciplinary synthesis in research and practice.

Panel Participants

We’ve assembled quite a nice collection of truly fascinating people, here are some short bios for all of them but I encourage you to look them up yourself.

Hiroshi Ishii

Hiroshi Ishii’s research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment.

Hiroshi Ishii is a tenured Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab. He joined the MIT Media Laboratory in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group to pursue a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): “Tangible Bits.” His team seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by giving physical form to digital information and computation.

Ishii and his students have presented their vision of “Tangible Bits” at a variety of academic, industrial design, and media art venues including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, and Ars Electronica, emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. A display of many of the group’s projects took place in “Tangible Bits” exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000. A new, two-year-long exhibition “Get in Touch” that features the Tangible Media group’s work opened at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) in September 2001.

Since July 2002, he has co-directed the Thing That Think Consortium at the MIT Media Lab.

He served as an Associate Editor of ACM TOCHI (Transactions on Computer Human Interactions) and ACM TOIS (Transactions on Office Information Systems). He also serves as a program committee member of many international conferences including ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, SIGGRAPH, Multimedia, Interact, ISMAR, and ECSCW. He received B. E. degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively. He was born in Tokyo in 1956, and started to play with PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) in 1958.

Maurizio Seracini

Maurizio Seracini is a pioneer in the use of multispectral imaging and other diagnostic as well as analytical technologies as applied to works of art and structures. He joined Calit2 at UC San Diego in 2006, more than thirty years after graduating from UCSD with a B.A. in bioengineering in 1973. Seracini returned to Italy for graduate school and received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Padua, where he went on to study medicine. From 1975-77, he participated in the “Leonardo Project,” to locate the long-lost fresco, “The Battle of Anghiari” (a project sponsored by the Armand Hammer Foundation, Kress Foundation and Smithsonian Institute). In 1977, Seracini established Editech, a Florence-based company that was the first to provide art and architectural diagnostic services, and in 1979 he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Center for Ultrasonic Diagnostics in Medicine, also in Florence.

He has studied more than 2,500 works of art and historic buildings, ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and Botticelli’s “Allegory of Spring”, to Da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi”. In 1983, he investigated 19 paintings by Raphael on the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth, and in 1991 he analyzed 19 paintings by Caravaggio in his role as scientific director of an exhibition in Florence and Rome.

Seracini – whose work was exhibited as part of “The Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci” at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery in 2006, and later at the U.S. Library of Congress – believes the Renaissance artist-scientist-inventor would be among the first to appreciate scientific analysis in the cause of understanding art. “We do justice to Leonardo,” says Seracini. “We are using technology to understand his masterpieces. I think he would have been happy about that.”

Paolo Galluzzi

Paolo Galluzzi is the Director of the Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza in Florence. He is President of the Commissione Vinciana, of the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica of the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale. He is a member of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences. He is presently on the scientific committees of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana and of several prestigious Italian and foreign cultural institutes. He also chairs the International Scientific Committee for the realization of the Nobel Museum instated by the Nobel Foundation of Stockholm.

In 2001 he was nominated Member of the Advisory Board of the Deutsches Museum, Münich. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Stockholm and of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. He is socio of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 2003 he was awarded by the President of the Italian Republic the Gold Medal for his outstanding contribution to the promotion of scientific heritage and to research in the humanities. In 2005 he was decorated as Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

His numerous publications focus on the activity of the scientists and engineers of the Renaissance (Leonardo and thereabouts), on several aspects of science during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, on scientific terminology, on the activities of Galileo and his school, on the history of the European scientific academies and on the birth and history of the historiography of science. He has devoted studies to the history of scientific instrumentation, of scientific museums, and of scientific heritage.

During the last 15 years, he has been involved in the preparation of multimedia applications, conceived as tools to promote research, to improve access to important sources for the history of science and techniques and to facilitate the public understanding of crucial issues of the history of science and technology and of cultural and scientific heritage.

Sergio Dulio

Sergio Dulio, by training a master in aerospace engineering from the Polytechnic of Milan, joined IBM in 1984 as a member of their first technical support team to the 3D CAD/CAM application CATIA. During this time, he also got in initial contact with the footwear world introducing some of first families of shoe specific CAD / CAM applications. Later, he worked for ATOM, one of the leading companies in the field of shoe machinery, as an expert of leather cutting technology.

In the past decade, he coordinated a number of innovative projects for SINTESI, a footwear research consortium with the Italian National Research Council ITIA–CNR. In 2001 he was appointed by ITIA as the technical coordinator of the EUROShoE project, one of the largest EU funded projects in the footwear field, with 33 partners and a total budget of 17 million €, aimed at the development of technologies for the design and manufacturing of customized shoes. In 2003 he gets a contract with CNR – ITIA to organize, install and activate a Design and Mass Customization Laboratory in Vigevano (the capital of Italian shoe manufacturing), where a pilot factory for the production of customized shoes has been put in operation.

He currently works as a technical consultant for ASSOMAC (Association of shoe machinery producers) and ANCI (Italian association of footwear manufacturers) and helps private entrepreneurs to master the challenges of mass customization in footwear.

Fernanda B. Viégas

Fernanda Viégas is a designer whose research focuses on the social side of visualization, exploring storytelling, collective sensemaking, and online identity. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on visualizing chat histories (Chat Circles), personal email archives (PostHistory and Themail) and Wikipedia activity (History Flow, with Martin Wattenberg). In 2007, Viégas and Wattenberg created Many Eyes, a web site where anyone can upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney in New York City, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, and in galleries in Los Angeles and São Paulo.

Fernanda received her Ph.D. and master’s degrees from the Media Lab at MIT, and her bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Art History from the University of Kansas. She is Brazilian and misses the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.

Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is an author, technology and copyright researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently working full time on research into the application of technologies and lessons learned in free software toward the production of other types of creative works at the MIT Media Laboratory. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the free software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of the Debian GNU/Linux Bible and the Official Ubuntu book.

Hill is known within the hacker community for his essays and innovative package-name poetry. He commonly speaks about free software priniciples and practice, free software development methodology, project management techniques, and best practices, issues around financing voluntary free software projects, free software and free culture and extending free software ideas to the world beyond software.

He currently works in the Computing Culture group of the Media Lab at MIT, the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board, and Ubuntu Community Council. He is on the board of the Free Software Foundation, a speaker for the GNU Project, and the board of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day). Hill was on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation’s vice-president from August 2004.