"In our studio, we try to balance thinking about the future with making in the here-and-now, exploring the possibilities of new technologies while tinkering with laser cutters, 3D printers, and similar – getting stuck into the process of making prototypes for a wide range of projects."

"We are no longer going to be able to separate ourselves from these technologies, tools and phenomena, remaining detached – aloof – from the manufacturing and distribution processes. Where will we, as designers, makers, and futurists be best placed to situate ourselves?"

"While it may be more common for men to refer to themselves as ‘futurists’, there are many influential women whose work focuses explicitly on the future – Wendy Schultz, Heather Schlegel, and Danah Boyd, among many others. Then there are those who are exploring the edges of the future field, without necessarily calling themselves ‘futurists’, women like Fiona Raby, Natalie Jeremijenko, Paola Antonelli, and Vandana Shiva."

"1. Each age has its presiding metaphor. Ours is aerial bombing.

2. Drone warfare and the IMF are variations on a theme: decisions taken from a great height, with disregard for consequences on the ground.

3. Downton Abbey’s popularity is about a nostalgia for class superiority, and the desire to watch those who act from a great height.

4. Virgin Atlantic’s obnoxious designation of First Class as “Upper Class” is about the same idea: that class is benign and charming.

5. One question links the IMF, drones, Virgin’s “Upper Class,” Limbaugh’s violence and Strauss-Kahn’s, and the mania for “Downton Abbey.”

6. The question is this: those people down there, are they really people? It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.

7. Someone in soft, casual clothes in a featureless building in Nevada presses a button, and the question disappears."

"And then if you want a little bit a speculation about drones, you pick up the paranoid defense blogging of Danger Room  or the design-fiction of sousveillance and cyborg specialists like Tim Maly . And then you—<br />
<br />
Okay. I thought it was clear, but if you want me to spell it out for you, I will. You are obsessed with drones. We all are. We live in a drone culture, just as we once lived in a car culture. The Northrop-Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk is your '55 Chevorlet. You just might not know it yet.<br />
<br />
I have thirty-five browser tabs open, and each contains a fragment of the drone-mythos. Each is a glimpse at a situation, a bird’s eye view of the terrain. So many channels, showing me the same thing: near-infinite data collection. With the help of Google, I’m drone-spotting—I'm turning a new critical perspective that I'm calling Drone Ethnography, back on itself."

"Javier Arbona, Nick Sowers & Kate Chandler present an experimental live slide-, sound- and video-show on the emergence of drones as America’s killing machine of choice. PLUS Steev Hise’s American Business Adventures and Code Pink’s confrontation with the Blackwater mercenaries. Free bread and roses!"

"Accompanying Napoleon's expeditionary force was a kind of secondary army of "savants": scientists, researchers, archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars who were there, ostensibly, to produce a scientific record of Nile civilization, but who, conveniently for Napoleon, also "offered moral cover for the invasion." ... "what would the 21st-century equivalent of these savants be? How interesting, I'd suggest, to imagine an army of Artificially Intelligent, wireless translation drones sent into the ruins of ancient temple complexes; they descend through otherwise inaccessible partly collapsed passages and domed vaults beneath hillsides in order to interpret the walls around them, narrating for the first time a vast and unfolding dream of gods and ancient earthquakes, their LEDs reflecting in colored glass mosaics on the floor. Maybe they'd even use Twitter."

"as sometimes happens, I got obsessed, while he moved on to other things. In the past two years, I've made cellphone UAVs, Basic Stamp UAVs, autonomous blimps, and a true gyros+acellerometers+GPS autopilot version of the Lego Mindstorms UAV that's now in the Lego Museum in Billund, Denmark. We set up an amateur UAV community at DIYDrones.com, and get thousands of people each day exploring this new dimension of aerial robotics. Now this project has gone pro. Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it's $24.95!"

"This is a site for all things about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): How-to's, videos, discussion and more."