I&IC Workshop #6 with Sascha Pohflepp at HEAD: ongoing

workshop_pohflepp

The workshop is still ongoing and the students are busy working on various field explorations. As explained in the brief, their purpose is to observe and document everyday practices with the cloud. More specifically the focus is on gestures and representations people build about this technology.

We formed three groups, each working in different directions.

I&IC Workshop #6 with Sascha Pohflepp at HEAD: brief, “Cloud Gestures”

Note: as mentioned by Patrick last week, the I&IC project moved further and we’re now doing additional workshops. Here is the brief of the one proposed by Sascha Pohflepp to Media Design students at HEAD – Genève this week.

 

Cloud Gestures

Workshop brief, November 2015.
Sascha Pohflepp (plugimi)

 

Cloud6

Photo by Hanna Elisabeth

All that is solid melts into Airbnb

– title of an event at the Swiss Institute, September 2014

 

Brief

We are being ever more permeated by clouds. This migration of aspects of our life into the digital is only going to speed up as more and more aspects of it is being captured as data and mediated by services. But what is the cloud? Does it have a physical presence? What is its language? Can we resist it? Do certain people use it in certain ways? Are users always human? Does it ever rain? What are gestures of the cloud today ?

In this project we are asking you to assume both the role of a cloud ethnographer and speculative documentarian.

In the first step you will do field work to find out how exactly our lives that are evaporating into the cloud. Formulate a research question, position or hypothesis and observe people, focussing on gestures and metaphors. Ask them to describe how they imagine the cloud, how they conceive of the objects they are creating and the machinery that is running it. How they feel it is affecting their life and where it may be going.

Importantly, do not just consider what is in front of you, also think about the vast cascade of actions that a simple touch on a display might initiate. Some gestures may be invisible, some may take the shape of cities.

Collect as much as data as you can, this is important. Give thought to your method before you go into the field. Consider some of the examples you’ve seen during the introduction and adapt their techniques to your needs and interests.

For the second step we ask you to turn your data into a document of what you observed and its cloudiness. You are fairly free in terms of medium and what aspects you focus on. There will be something in your data that will serve as a focal point. Present your research in an unconventional way.

 

Suggestions

Elaborate on a small gesture and expand it or focus on the whole and distill it into one gesture. Be a true documentarian or reflect on our world by situating your insights in a speculation.

Re-enact (and document) behaviors; make the invisible visible or embody it; describe what you see in language or pretend you are observing a new language; pretend everything is the other way around; consider the largest gesture involved in what you have observed, consider the smallest; consider who is gesturing and towards whom; are users human?; create maps or destroy them; re-/assign gestures; reflect the all-too human; draw.

 

Schedule

MONDAY Presentation + brainstorming session
TUESDAY Ethnographic fieldwork & data collection, processing
WEDNESDAY Data presentation and work on presentation
THURSDAY AM Finalizing presentation
THURSDAY PM Final presentation

 

Related work & reading

Slides of Sascha’s presentation (PDF)
Versuch_einer_Phaenomenologie by Vilem Flusser
Drawing a Hypothesis (video) by Nikolaus Gansterer
A Simple Introduction to the Practice of Ethnography and Guide to Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Brian Hoey

I&IC workshop #5 with Random International at ECAL: output > “The Everlasting Shadows” / Ghost Data Interfaces

Note: the post I&IC Workshop #5 with Random International at ECAL, brief: “The Everlasting Shadow” presents the objectives and brief for this workshop.

 

The fifth workshop we ran in the frame of the design research I&IC ended up on November the 20th. It lasted for a week (16-20 November 2015) under the creative direction of our guest researcher and interaction designer Dev Joshi (rAndom International‘s creative technologist), with the help of research assistants in interaction design Lucien Langton and Laura Perrenoud. It involved 3rd year Ba students in Interaction Design from ECAL, so as one 1st year student in Mas Design Research from EPFL-ECAL Lab.

 

The Everlasting Shadows – a workshop with rAndom International at ECAL from iiclouds.org design research on Vimeo.

 

The title and subject of the workshop was “The Everlasting Shadows“, as explained by Dev Joshi in a previous post, and commented by myself later on to the students that would be involved, before the week of work started.

The aim of the workshop was to address the (now common) situation of the data we leave or disperse behind us in clouds and online services of all sorts. Data that will then remain, sometimes dormant or even forgotten for a long period of time and to consider these traces as literally (forgotten) parts of ourselves –fragments? shadows? or even ghosts?– The purpose was to select a set of exemplary shadow data and then experiment how one could develop “interfaces” to connect (again) with these “shadows”, make them “speak” (“what would they say if they could speak ?“), visible or “alive” again. These interfaces could likely be spatial, immersive or “sheltering” in some ways. We chose to realize the workshop in the big cinema studio of the school for that reason.

 

855A6037_FullM

random_03_M

Dev Joshi presenting rAndom International’s work at ECAL during his research workshop week (top) and talking to the students at the beginning of final presentations (bottom).

 

The ongoing work has been shortly documented along the process by Lucien Langton, but we can now take more time to come back to the proposals made by the students and document them.

All in all, most of the projects didn’t really develop experimental interfaces per se or tried to reformulate the cloud paradigm as it was envisioned, at the exception maybe of Bits and Tweets of Former Self, but focused on comments or narratives about the described situation. The overall week of research triggered engaged discussions among the students and seemed to focus – one more time – on the need to “make visible and graspable” in some ways the” invisible” cloud based processes and data.

The fact that the students experienced difficulties to develop concrete proposals, which is a situation observed since the beginning of the research project and in particular its workshop period, underlines and confirms our initial hypotheses (centralization, “putting things at a distance” that need to be further questioned).

As the “cloud” technological construct and metaphor is dedicated to become the main paradigm and future of (online) computing, at least for the coming decade(s) if we consider the amount of money investments made in this sector by big companies, it stresses the needs for simpler, graspable infrastructures and tools.

 

Pyro42 - (Benjamin Botros)

Benjamin_Full

Benjamin_FullM

Pyro42 intro screen (top). Benjamin Botros introducing his “data narration” during final presentation of the workshop (bottom).

 

Based on the public data and statistics about a particular gamer who played during 3854 hours since 2005, data mined from the platform STEAM and its online gaming community, Benjamin Botros decided to built up one gamer’s digital life narrative. If Pyro42 didn’t really suggest any interface or ways to interact with such data, it nevertheless proposed a story in the form of a quite “surrealistic” and imaginative gaming life about this particular gamer “who collected a fair number of achievements” before “peacefully retiring” after having built “4 bio farms and 4 organic ranches”!

All of a sudden, data about wins and losses, flags stolen, cities and countries “built”, etc. take a different flavor full of heroic but also depressing moments…

 

Anamorphic Memory - (Edina Desboeufs, Pierre Georges)

Cafeteria_Full

Anamorphic Memory, the proposition made by the two students was more of a personal interpretation and metaphor than it was a concrete interface proposal about “ghost data” kept online in “cloudified” services.

Regarding the theme of “shadows” and past identities that would be left online in the form of data, Edina and Pierre decided to record moments of life taken in the cafeteria of the design school (ECAL). These recordings were made with a video camera without sound, shot under a unique point of view while sitting on a chair. Their project then developed a way to navigate these visual memories while overlapping their projection to the current state of the same location.

The project ended up in a form of anamorphic projection installation, in which the video shot in the cafeteria were beamed on a screen to be seen from the exact same position and visual deformation as from where they were taken at a different period in time. The seemingly overlapping of past and present times was the purpose of the work.

 

Embodied Archive - (Alexia Léchot)

Alexia_FullM

“Tempo_B” is a temporary folder in the school (ECAL) where all students from different faculties can leave temporary files during their day of work, until they are erased at the end of the day. Alexia Léchot proposed to keep and curate some of these files so to give view and memory to what happens in the school during a week of workshop.

The installation she proposed took the form of a corner projection, immersive and diptych projection of these files which happened to look a bit like a big open book. A tracking camera was observing the x-y movements of any spectator on the floor within this corner and use them to navigate the archived content (old-recent).

 

Abandoned Lil_sug4r_92 - (Julie-Lou Bellenot, Lara Défayes, Pablo Perez, Karen Pisoni)

sugar_M

Sugar_FullM

The pile of colorful waste (top) reminding us of F. Gonzalez-Torres’ pile of candies. Catapult on the left that throw paper on the pile (bottom).

 

A forsaken email account that had not been opened for years but continued to receive emails (mostly spams and publicity) – and therefore be filled, served as the base for this project. The email account was in function years ago when it was used by one of the four students involved in this proposal. A teenager at this time then.

Abandoned Lil_sug4r_92, only partly realized in the short time at disposal, proposed a kind of automated machine linked to that account and that would fold a piece of colored paper (spam = red, promo = yellow, newsletter = “blue”, etc.) for each email received, then throw it away on a nearby pile. It was a way for Julie-Lou, Lara, Karen and Pablo to show the waste associated with such accounts, rather than any meaningful identity or construct. The pile of colored paper eventually acted as an information design, showing by the colors in the pile which was the dominant type of useless emails/data kept online.

 

Bits and Tweets of Former Self - (Mylène Dreyer, Jasmine Florentile –from EPFL-ECAL Lab–, Lina Vozniuk-Berzhaner)

Twitter_Medium

tweets_bits_FullM2

tweets_bits_FullM

Lina Vozniuk-Berzhaner and Mylène Dreyer playing with their interface, the semi-transparent screen and tweets superimposing to their faces in front of the mirror (top, middle, bottom).

 

Probably the most developed proposal at the end of the workshop and the closest to the brief, Bits and Tweets of Former Self was a program that dug into the past content of a (potentially any) Twitter account (you would have to grant access and then login).

With the help of a mirror, selected past messages and sentences were beamed into air at the height of the face of the user of the device, reversed and scrolling. You couldn’t really see these messages until this person, facing another mirror placed on the wall  “catched” these “flying messages” with a sort of “mesh-screen” (semi-transparent) with which she was equipped and that she could move. While displacing this “mesh-screen” in front of her face, the messages started to appear… ephemerally. Further more, they became readable and superimposed to the user with their reflection on the facing horizontal mirror on the wall.

 

Acknowledgments:

Many thanks to Dev Joshi for his involvement with the students, his personal interpretation of the Cloud theme and for the interesting exchanges we had about the subject of the research in general; Laura Perrenoud for helping the students, Lucien Langton for its involvement, pictures and documentation. A special thanks to the students from ECAL and EPFL-ECAL Lab involved in the project and the energy they’ve put into it: Julie-Lou Bellenot, Benjamin Botros, Lara Défayes, Edina Desboeuf, Mylène Dreyer, Jasmine Florentile (EPFL_ECAL Lab), Pierre Georges, Alexia Léchot, Pablo Perez, Karen Pisoni, Lina Vozniuk-Berzhaner.

I&IC Workshop #5 with random International at ECAL: work in progress

855A6065_med

Our workshop with Dev Joshi from rAndom International is going on well during the week, with different ideas cast into the direction of digital shadows, traces and footprints.

The students are encouraged to produce objects, although it has been suggested that they take advantage of space as well (installations), as the workshop takes place in a large studio (cinema studio at ECAL).

I&IC Workshop #5 at ECAL, tips: RaspberryPi’s and the GrovePi+

By Monday, November 16, 2015 Tags: 0120, ECAL, Hardware, Tools Permalink 0

If you are not familiar with the Raspberry Pi and remote access, a previous post was written here and here.

 

School’s specials:

Your RaspberryPi is preconfigured with an updated version of wheezy (2015.03.20_Dexter_Industries_wheezy.img) specifically designed to work with the GrovePi+.

If during the week you need to re-run updates just type in the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Note also that you can access a few tutorials and “how to’s” on the same Dexter Industries website. “Get Started with the Grove Pi” and “Example Projects” have been already linked on our resources section out here.

However beware, the school network might not let you do this, you might have to choose another network for that (like your phone’s).

 

The easiest way to access your Pi is via VNC with an Ethernet connection. First you need to install VNC viewer for your mac. During the installation process just check install viewer, no need to install server.

Once done and your Raspberry booted, you should be able to VNC into it through Ethernet connection:
169.254.0.2:5901

Note that :5901 indicates to connect to shared-screen number 1, if you configure other screens the number 2 would be :5902, and so on.

Once connected, to configure wifi go to wpa_gui on your desktop and configure the wifi network details (with your wifi-dongle plugged in ;).

Your RaspberryPi was configured for remote access, to ssh it via Ethernet (if it doesn’t work, unplug your wifi  dongle and plug it back in once done):
ssh pi@169.254.0.2

 

Once connected you can check if you have an active connection:
ping www.google.com

If you don’t, you can check if you Raspberry Pi is at least scanning the right networks:
sudo wpa_cli scan && sleep 5 && wpa_cli scan_results

For more wifi troubleshooting follow this guide

 

To set screens, or kill them via the command line there are these commands:

sudo tightvncserver :1
sudo tightvncserver -kill :1

If for some reason you need to change the static IP set for ethernet connection, you can edit it via a simple card reader by editing the IP set in cmdline.txt situated in the root folder of your card. (if it doesn’t work, check if your computer has a dynamically allocated IP for ethernet connection, in this case we’ll check it out together)

As the week goes on I’ll update this post with new ressources. Enjoy!

I&IC workshop #5 at ECAL: (esoteric) comments about the cloud (about the brief)

Following the publication of Dev Joshi‘s brief on I&IC documentary blog yesterday, I took today the opportunity to briefly introduce it to the interaction design students that will be involved in the workshop next week. Especially, I focused on some points of the brief that were important but possibly quite new concepts for them. I also extended some implicit ideas with images that could obviously bring ideas about devices to build to access some past data, or “shadows” as Dev’s names them.

What comes out in a very interesting way for our research in Dev’s brief is the idea that the data footprints each of us leaves online on a daily basis (while using all type of digital services) could be considered as past entities of ourselves, or trapped, forgotten, hidden, … (online) fragments of our personalities… waiting to be contacted again.

How many different versions of you are there in the cloud? If they could speak, what would they say?

 

Yet, interestingly, if the term “digital footprint” is generally used in English to depict this situation (the data traces each of us leaves behind), we rather use in French the term “ombre numérique”  (literally “digital shadow”). That’s why we’ve decided with Dev that it was preferable to use this term as the title for the workshop (The Everlasting Shadows): it is somehow a more vivid expression that could bring quite direct ideas when it comes to think about designing “devices” to “contact” these “digital entities” or make them visible again in some ways.

 

ph_ramette2_2007

ph_ramette_2007

Philippe Ramette, “L’ombre de celui que j’étais / Shadow of my former self “, 2007. Light installation, mixed media.