Dr. Duncan Hay, currently a Research Associate at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London, has an extensive experience at the intersection of linguistics and technology. He received his PhD in 2012 in in English Literature from Manchester University, where his thesis looked at the writing of the London-based writer Iain Sinclair in relationship to the theories of urban space developed by the 20th Century European avant-gardes.

He is currently under contract with Manchester University Press to write a ‘detourned’ cultural history of the relationship between Manchester, the birthplace of industrial capitalism, and ‘psychogeography’, the revolutionary, utopian spatial practices developed by the Situationist International. He has also been working with digital since 2006 and he is skilled with a range of front- and back end technologies including html, CSS, JavaScript, PHP (WordPress is a speciality) and Python/Django. At the moment he is interested in exploring cities and culture using mapping technologies like leaflet.js.

In today's episode we talk to Duncan about the definition and origin of the IoT (Internet of Things) concept, about Alexa and Amazon Echo and about what makes it difficult for people to understand how it operates data. We talk about security and trust around IoT in public urban spaces through an urban space project in East London.

Duncan and the team he was a part of explored what happens to a conversational object (a 3D printed garden gnome) when you give it agency and how to make transparent to people the interconnectedness and communication between IoT objects. Lastly we talk about IoT governance and trust. Last week we released part 1 of this interview where we talked to Duncan about his work with the Survey of London, the White Chapel Initiative, a technological experiment in the creation and dissemination of urban history.

Mentioned in Podcast:

Bruce Sterling - IoT definition and traceable items

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects

Donna J Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the....pdf

Duncan’s work:

http://walled-city.net/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/dr-duncan-hay

Social media or other links:

https://twitter.com/walled_city?lang=en