Workshop for UNESCO, ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) University Forum, Amsterdam, June 2019. The workshop was part of an ongoing collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures and AHRC Heritage Futures project. How to inhabit a future and explore a time and a place where heritage can end with sustainability, dignity, and…
As part of a book in honour of the late, great John Urry, I wrote a low-carbon science fiction around the concept of ‘Liveable Data’ – those who know Urry’s work will hear the conversation with his concept of ‘Liveable City’. This is a Speculative Fabulation, which draws on my experiences working with John Urry…
Latest news Shortlisted for Saltire Research Book of the Year 2019. Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019. “The greatest contribution of Watts’s book, and it is a striking one, is that the Orcadian idiom for talking about energy infrastructures is… relationships – and relationships necessarily involve pasts, presents and futures.” – The Times Literary…
As part of our Mozilla Research Grant funded project, Orkney Cloud, I am really excited to announce the publication of our first Orkney Cloud magazine. The magazine is an anthology of Orkney Cloud incubated projects and inspirations; a weaving together of people and possibilities that could become an Orkney Cloud. And it is not comprehensive.…
New book chapter from International network for Social Studies of Marine Energy (ISSMER). As a result of a workshop with representatives from marine energy communities, industry, and policy, we summarised the key ways in which social science and humanities research has a crucial role to play in the development of marine renewable energy. The workshop…
Orkney Cloud Forum is a living laboratory for cloud services at the network edge. Instead of distant, centralised data storage and processing, how might local cloud services support socialised, shared, and distributed data processing? In a community forum on Orkney, we are imagining and creating community-led managed cloud services at the edge, where the internet…
IT Communications and Energy convergence, or ‘ICE’ as I like to call it, seems to be here. The data industry is an energy industry: data centers are benchmarked and marketed by their Power Usage Efficiency (PUE), and the major data players (Facebook, Google, Apple etc.) are all busy building renewable energy-powered data centers with reduced…
A new book has just been published, authored by members of the International network for Social Studies of Marine Energy (ISSMER). The book is titled ‘Ocean Energy: Governance Challenges for Wave and Tidal Stream Technologies‘ and provides a series of in-depth chapters on the legal, economic, and social concerns around wave and tidal energy technologies.…
This visual poem has just been published in the journal of Cultural Anthropology, as part of their special collection ‘Our Lives with Electric Things’. View the published poem. “Why was the first Pelamis scrapped and not displayed on a plinth?” he asked me. So here is a plinth, perhaps not quite the stone block with…
In June 2017, myself as part of the ‘Reconstrained Design Group‘ (which includes James Auger and Julian Hanna at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute M-ITI), Eday Renewable Energy Ltd. and Community Energy Scotland, won the International Cultural Innovation Prize 2017, from the prestigious art gallery, CCCB in Barcelona. Our project is a design manual and prototype…