Professor Negroponte points out: ‘all things digital are simultaneously local and global, large and small, inside and outside of any given boundary. The digital world is not crisp. It is porous and diffuse. It brings together previously separate worlds, like those of discovery, invention and expression. It does that because it has become the DNA of each. The natural world and the artificial world are becoming the same. Change will happen very rapidly. Fasten your seatbelts.’

The Digital X Public Debates were developed in two blocks. Each block will consisted of keynotes and a subsequent debate between the three speakers followed by a questions and answers session.

With the participation of several practitioners working in different fields interrelated with the digital world, including Amber Case, Co-founder of CyborgCamp, Cambridge, MA, USA; W. Daniel Hillis, Co-founder of Thinking Machines Corporation and of Applied Invention, Cambridge, MA, USA; Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder of Openwater, San Francisco, CA, USA; David Moinina Sengeh, Chief Innovation Officer at the Government of Sierra Leone, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and former director of MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA  and Ben Vickers, Chief Technology Officer at the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK.

Tim Stonor, Managing Director of Space Syntax, London, UK, and part of the Advisory Board of the Norman Foster Foundation, chaired the debates.