Paul Miller

A few weeks ago I visited Biosphere 2. If you haven’t come across the project before, it was built as a test of whether we could recreate the support systems we have on Earth (or Biosphere 1 as the project’s supporters call it). To test this idea they built a $150 million airtight greenhouse in [...]

This is roughly what I said in a talk I gave at the Designers Accord London Town Hall meeting at the Design Council on 19th January 2012.   I don’t know about you but when I read, watch or listen to the news at the moment I get pretty depressed. The Today Programme seems to [...]

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam for the first Quantified Self Europe conference which follows on from an event in Silicon Valley earlier this year (written up by the FT here). I learned a lot and thought I’d pop some notes up so you can see what’s been going on. First presentation of the weekend [...]

There’s a great metaphor in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine which they in turn take from Ray Kurzweil: In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor [...]

What if the jobs crisis we’re seeing across the western world isn’t just because of the financial meltdown, but is also due to technology? That’s the argument Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson make in Race Against the Machine. They point out that the last decade was the first since the Great Depression with no net [...]

There’s an interesting debate happening at Roundtable about entrepreneurship and public policy that includes some of my favourite people in the tech world such as Esther Dyson and Anil Dash. I generally come down on the side of public policy being able to help startups and create jobs, but only if it does things sensibly. [...]

It’s been a day of sad news. I guess I knew it was coming but I woke up this morning to find out that Steve Jobs had died. I’m glad that his commencement address at Stanford is doing the rounds – it is a fantastic talk. It’s filled with emotion and insight but I also [...]

The way we read and absorb information has changed dramatically over the past decade and I’ve been wondering for the past few days whether the ideal style of writing has changed too. Ten years ago I was still reading a daily newspaper in print format. While the newspapers and big media organisations had websites, they [...]

I spent a wonderful three days last week in Derbyshire talking about how we could use everything we’ve learned about creating and supporting digital technologies to start a renaissance of making things. Instigator-in-chief was Russell Davies who wrote a little bit about why we were getting together in his Wired column last month:

I’ve been watching the quantified self movement gather pace for the last year or so with increasing fascination. If you haven’t come across it before, it’s a group of people making the most of technology to measure elements of their life so they can better understand themselves and hopefully improve. There are a number of good talks about the subject, including this introduction by Gary Wolf of Wired Magazine in the form of a short TED talk, and a few good feature articles, the best of which is this one from the FT Magazine which covers the first big conference on the subject held in Silicon Valley in May this year.