Hardware, Software & the Internet of Things
June 23–25, 2015 • San Francisco, CA

Thinking It There, Doing It Here: Networked Playscapes

Edwina Portocarrero (MIT)
10:55am–11:10am Thursday, 06/25/2015
Keynote
 Location: Herbst Pavilion
Average rating: ***..
(3.30, 33 ratings)

As a PHD student at the Media Lab, we are trained to try and think and build the impossible and to believe we are good at most anything, supported by amazing infrastructure and social capital that it is easy to take for granted. But what happens when you step out of the bubble and into the “real world” to make your grand ideas a reality? This talk is a story of a personal journey of what it has been like to go back home to Mexico City, to work with and for the city in the design, construction and future implementation of Networked Playscapes.

Photo of Edwina Portocarrero

Edwina Portocarrero

MIT

Edwina Portocarrero is a PhD Candidate at MIT’s Media Lab. She designs hybrid physical/digital objects and systems for play, education and performance, blending the evocative and intimate qualities of objects and object interaction with the affordances of digital systems. She previously studied Design and Production with a focus on Lighting and Set design at Calarts. She has traveled extensively; lived in Brazil working at a documentary production house, as lighting designer in her native Mexico, hitchhiked her way to Nicaragua, lived in a Garifuna village in Honduras and documented the soccer scene in Rwanda. Currently telepresence and telepistemiology, cognitive development and what is play? in the 21st century occupy her mind while trying to imagine and reinvent the playscapes of tomorrow.