Jyri Engestrøms talk was nice The gem at the center of the talk was the notion that much current technology (his example is the phone) only addresses and supports the very last stage of the cognitive process that leads to actions, i.e. it simply helps us perform actions. His idea was that we should
work to move the usefulness further back the train of thought to the preconscious sensing part of cognition.
I think (maybe everyone does?) that there's a deep relation between this idea and the other currently hyped idea about networked objects
where we 'untool' our technology and turn it into more of a goalless but information rich environment, but I'll get back to that a little later.