Hot Topics

Hot Topics are a series of Nesta events driven by ideas and technologies. They aim to introduce the technological tools that will change how we do things in the next few years. The events aim to bring together the best of business, academia, start-ups and investors. We hope you will find these events thought-provoking and will take away these ideas to your company, your clients or a project of your own.

Each event comes with a pool of resources that inspired the event, and will have a follow-up article and video that captures the discussion.

Upcoming events

Garden Drones: New possibilities in personal aerial vehicles

31/1/13

Copter technology is now close to mass market; over 300,000 units of an iPhone-controlled quadrocopter have been sold to private users around the world. The opportunities for future applications of UAV technologies seem to be limited only by our imagination (and by national air space regulation).

We usually think of drones as hostile military vehicles striking targets in distant conflict zones, but civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have also been developing rapidly right over our heads. There is a long history of passionate enthusiasts for aerial vehicle development, and engineering laboratories have increasingly sophisticated methods for controlling groups of small UAVs. Combined with easy access to GPS trackers, video cameras and portable computing, there has been an explosion of ingenious new uses for these technologies, from disaster and traffic monitoring to new forms of journalism or aerial artistry. One day soon they might be as common as garden gnomes.

This exciting new area throws up some bigger questions too - what happens to the data collected? Should we need licenses to fly these drones? In the UK, recent flooding damage was reported to the BBC by a local resident's quadrocopter; in the US, a father follows his son to the school bus stop every morning tracking a sensor in his child's backpack via a UAV; but in New Zealand, a quadrocopter recently flew into a skyscraper and set on fire.

Please join us and our specialist panel on 31 January including Noel Sharkey (Professor of Artificial Intelligence at University of Sheffield), Liam Young (designer, futurist and critic at Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) and Steven Hailes (Professor of Wireless Systems at UCL and the SUAAVE project) as we push ourselves to imagine what we can do with UAVs in the future.

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Local bioeconomies: Can we drive cottage industries with DIY biology tools?

7/2/2013

In the same way that 3D printing is revolutionising product manufacturing, low cost biological equipment is changing how we produce novel biotechnology. Microbrewing was the first industry to grab this opportunity. Experimentation with brewing techniques led to a renaissance in local breweries. But what could be next, and how do we develop the skills to work with these technologies outside the lab? 

There are now several open biolabs facilities around the world, aiming to help anyone experiment with biological techniques. There are also echoes of the open source computing community, with the same emphasis on shared tools and collaboration. But there are good reasons why this could be a lot harder than programming a 3D printer or producing a website.

Biological organisms do not follow the neat logic of a software program. They interact in unpredictable ways; they need care and time to grow; and, fundamentally, they come with the unknowns of natural systems rather than the order of manmade technologies. The complexities of biology might limit the potential success of amateur initiatives.

As biological tools become part of the armory of today's innovation, is there a new set of skills and norms that come along with these? How does the routine of the lab mash with a creative hack culture? And what level of understanding do you need to do something truly inventive with a petri dish rather than html?

Nesta have teamed up with Manchester's MadLab to run an event on 7 February at their facilities. The event will start with an afternoon workshop (introducing biohacking in a biolab space), followed by an evening panel discussion on the theme of biological literacy. The panelists include; Asa Calow, DIY Biologist and Founder and Director of the MadLab in Manchester; John O'Shea, artist and creator of the world's first bio-engineered football; Philipp Boeing, UCL iGem and London Biohackers; and Rod Dillon, lecturer in biomedicine, School of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University.

The workshop is designed as a taster for those with little knowledge of these techniques, but more experienced users are also welcomed for the panel discussion.

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