You are warmly invited to the third School Seminar:
Speaker: Jon Rogers
Title: There’s plenty of room in our communities: Rethinking computational scale through open hardware
Abstract: The dominant business model of Big Tech is built on scale. Scale to outpace competitors, capture global markets, and consolidate control. Today, just a handful of companies mediate most online interactions, reaching billions of users across devices and platforms. This logic of exponential growth, rooted in Moore’s Law and reinforced by Thiel’s 10x principle, now drives a global race to develop increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence and the gigafactory-scale infrastructures needed to support them. Infrastructures that require resources that contradict plans for net zero. Is this a trajectory that is either sustainable or desirable? What might it mean to pursue scale in the opposite direction, towards smaller, more sustainable, and community-oriented forms of computation? The coming of age of open hardware offers new possibilities for computing that comes from, is made by, and is stewarded by local communities. The challenge of reimagining computing at a community scale is not primarily technical, but one of design and our ability to be more creative with technology. In doing so, we could be offering alternative digital futures that are supportive of the people and the places that we make computation for.
Bio: Jon Rogers is Professor of Creative Technology at Northumbria University , Newcastle. With a PhD in Neural Networks from Imperial College London (2001), he spent seventeen years at the University of Dundee developing research at the intersection of design and technology. His hands-on practice explores how making can reveal new stories about our relationships with emerging technologies. A former Mozilla Senior Fellow (2016–2019) in Berlin, he led the Horizon 2020 OpenDoTT doctoral programme on trust and the Internet of Things. His current research reimagines digital futures through open hardware to enable more open and self-determined technological practices within communities.
Date & Time: Tuesday 11/11/2025 10am-11am.
Location: JC 1.33A
Note: Jon has kindly agreed to stay until 2 p.m. If you’d like to talk to him, please come see him after the talk.
Please do come along and join us! 🙂