Kilma Lattin (OurWorlds), Catherine Eng (OurWorlds), Dominique Rissolo (UC San Diego) & Falko Kuester (UC San Diego)

*Aligning with UC San Diego’s COVID policies, this talk is hosted entirely online. Please register via Zoom.

Abstracts

Cultural Design: A 21st Century Model

OurWorlds, Inc. is a new company pioneering emerging technologies to preserve culture and to transform knowledge transfer practices within Native American communities. The platform presents a network of place-based, immersive experiences that innovate traditional forms of storytelling and culture sharing. Join Kilma Lattin and Catherine Eng as they discuss their design process and execution. Check out a brief preview here.

The Future of Digital Twins in Archaeology: Challenges and Opportunities

Emerging and expanding workflows in digital archaeology – from data-capture to visualization – have proven transformative. Indeed, technologies that enable archaeologists to digitally document both landscapes and artifacts at high resolution and with remarkable color fidelity have effectively changed the game. However, when such approaches are uncritically adopted, they can actually distance us from a more meaningful understanding of the past. In our pursuit of accurate geometry, we often unintentionally privilege the surface attributes of heritage objects and essentially ignore the intangible and nonvisual phenomena with which cultural materials are imbued. The low barrier to entry that structure-from-motion photogrammetry affords, for example, has been something of a pandora’s box, resulting in the proliferation of textured meshes that are presented as reliable representations of objects and are often difficult to critique. A more measured path forward, based on an appreciation of the opportunities and limitations that technology presents, can involve the embracing of new tools without the abandonment of what is tried and true.

About the Speakers

Kilma Lattin is a Native American Futurist who’s work is helping to build the future of his civilization. Since 2006, Kilma’s work has helped preserve and transform Native American Culture in the 21st Century. In 2007, he digitally preserved tribal archives and established DNA testing procedures to safeguard tribal enrollment practices. In 2013, his TV project documenting Native Americans in the military, won an Emmy Award. In 2015, his digital project, OurGames, transformed the ancient game of PEON from a game played for thousands of years in person, to hand-held mobile. And in 2022, his project, “OurWorlds Inc.” is digitally transforming Native American storytelling and culture.

Catherine Eng is an award-winning designer, developer, and filmmaker, with projects spanning mobile, extended reality, film, scientific applications and data visualization. Her apps have been featured in Apple’s Top 10 with over 3MM cumulative downloads. She is CTO and Co-Founder of Our Worlds and holds a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art.

Dominique Rissolo is an archaeologist and associate research scientist with the Qualcomm Institute where he co-leads the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI). He has worked closely with UC San Diego students – in the lab and in the field – since 2015. Dominique is actively involved in the development of digital workflows for the analysis and visualization of multimodal data from cultural heritage sites and has enabled collaborating researchers to expand their technical capabilities. He is also a co-director of the Hoyo Negro and Costa Escondida Projects and is involved in number of digital heritage efforts in the US, Latin America, and Europe.

Falko Kuester holds appointments as Professor in the Departments of Structural Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering (JSoE) and serves as the director of the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI), the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), the Calit2 Center of Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality (GRAVITY) and the DroneLab. Prof. Kuester focuses on methodologies and techniques for cultural heritage diagnostics and preservation, including diagnostic and analytical imaging as well as visual and cultural analytics techniques that provide engineers, scientists, art historians and restorers, with a means to intuitively and interactively explore historic artifacts. This research is creating the foundation for the development of digital twins of world cultural heritage sites and artifacts, providing a means for researchers and the public alike to study these artifacts and facilitate their preservation.

About Design@Large

Design@Large is a speaker series hosted by The Design Lab at UC San Diego, where each quarter we examine a topic in society and the relevance and implications through the lens of human centered design.

Our theme this quarter is “Winter Polar Reversals ~~~ from the Future to the Past~~~~ from the Sky to the Ocean Floor”.

Follow along as speakers in ocean media, maker, and mapping cultures shift your geopolitical orientation. It’s cold on Zoom. Bring your life jacket. Hourlong lectures will be followed by workshops, walks, immersive experiences, and/or hands-on making and doing, to be performed on Zoom when pandemic circumstances bring us together remotely.