Hi my name is Ulrik Hogrebe. This blog contains my CV plus a couple of presentations of projects that I´ve worked on. Feel free to check them out and get in contact if you like what you see. Please distribute, copy, steal, reproduce or pass on anything on this site - just give credit where credit is due. C.V here and informal rants and raves blog here.

I was invited to do a 45 minute talk titled “Beyond Broadcast – New Challenges in a Shifting Multimedia Landscape” for the London division of the University of Copenhagen Alumni Association (I studied Visual Culture at their hallowed halls back in the day). The talk centered around the shift from the broadcast “one-to-many, one size fits all” model to the deeply personalised model that is looming on the horizon. With the web and it’s host of connected devices offering tons of user data, charting everything from a user’s taste, location, history and context of use, the opportunity to make informed decisions as to the type of content one delivers (and even creates) is immense. I argue that this form of personalisation, harnessed correctly, can have an enormous and beneficial impact on the way we consume and engage with content on the web, with ramifications that extend in to learning, entertainment and information seeking in general – and indeed that the cure for “sameness”, paradoxically lies in knowing what people know and what they want – and hence where you might augment, differentiate and ultimately delight.

ASHA created by Anders Højmose, Martina Pagura and my self is up for an INDEX. Long way to go yet, but you can give it a “like” and nudge over at INDEX´page. Amazing!

ASHA is – in short – an experimental application for the iPhone, that uses simple bluetooth technology and human relay-based interaction to gather information about survivors in a disaster situation. There is a longer description and a concept description of what it does on on the INDEX link above + one here if they eventually pull down the link.

I was nominated as one of 38 bourgeoning new media up-and-comings by New Media Days, one of the largest New Media conferences in the north. Quite an honor! Thanks go out to the jury who nominated me – you can check out the rest of the nominees here, including Anders Højmose and Sebastian Rønde Thielke, who I studied with at CIID.

I responded with a comment on PSFK to a post on PSFK about a new service “Stumblesafely” that basically maps out crime areas in Washington, with the purpose of making it safer for people to get home at night. Although I have no intention or wish to bash the project, which I see as serving a noble cause – I did wonder about some of the consequences of this kind of info-mapping. Since I was dealing with a related issue during my own final project at CIID, I wanted to start a conversation about some of the unintended consequences of free information;

From the post: “I think there is a problem with this kind of mapping – mainly that you risk stigmatizing certain neighborhoods and areas, driving down property values, increasing fear levels, spurring people with resources to move out of the area and generally, you risk compounding the problem rather than solving it. While information should certainly be free, we – as creators of that information – also need to be aware that releasing any kind of information into the world can have unintended consequences and work at coming up with solutions to counter them. Sometimes I feel it is too easy to just throw stuff out there under the “information should be free, let somebody else sort it out” banner.”

PSFK decided that my thoughts were relevant enough to include as a post. My own final project deals exactly with the reverse – trying to de-stigmatize low-income areas and areas with high quotas of immigrant populations, especially in a time where the debate on immigrants has reached alarming levels of radicalization. I will write a full post on my finals in the near future. Thanks to PSFK for listening to my ramblings.

I would normally just add this to the growing link collection under the speaker post proper. However, I really think Neural´s coverage actually hits the mark and even adds some aspects which we ourselves haven’t thought of! Plus Neural is a pretty cool magazine too. Read the write up below or go to Neural and read it there!

RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound
Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and Jacek Barcikowski are basically questioning this neutrality. Equipped with RFID tags their classic hi-fi speakers are sensitive to their positions, changing the sound they are playing accordingly. Instinctively they remind of old FM radios that would change their output because of their new reception/location, and “R” stands for “Radio” in RFID… When placed close to each other they play the same song, this time in stereo. But their relationship between sound and position opens different possibilities and generally speaking is significant of how radio waves can carry sound, data and data influencing sound. That old FM radio, if properly modified, would now play a different song, depending on its neighborhood.

The guys at PSFK interviewed us for their Future of Health Report – a project in association with Unicef – on our ASHA app, health, technology and designing for developing countries. Read the interview over at PSFK or after the jump

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