I&IC at Unfrozen, Swiss Design Network 2016 Conference

Christophe Guignard and myself will have the pleasure to present the temporary results of the design research Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) next Thursday (28.01.2016) at the Swiss Design Network conference.

The conference will happen at Grandhotel Giessbach over the lake Brienz, where we’ll focus on the research process fully articulated around the practice of design (with the participation of students in the case of I&IC) and the process of project.

This will apparently happen between “dinner” and “bar”, as we’ll present a “Fireside Talk” at 9pm. Can’t wait to do and see that…

 

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The full program and proceedings (pdf) of the conference can be accessed HERE & the conference can be followed at a distance on Twitter with the #unfrozen2016 hashtag.

 

As for previous events, we’ll try to make a short “follow up” on this documentary blog after the event.

I&IC at Renewable Futures Conference in Riga

The design research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) will be presented during the peer reviewed Renewable Futures Conference next week in Riga (Estonia), which will be the first edition of a serie that promiss to scout for radical approaches.

Christophe Guignard will introduce the participants to the stakes and the progresses of our ongoing work. There will be profiled and inspiring speakers such as Lev Manovitch, John Thackara, Andreas Brockmann, etc.

 

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OpenCloud (Academic Research) Mesh

Note: When we had to pick an open source cloud computing platform at the start of our research, we dug for some time to pick the one that would better match with our planned activities. We chose ownCloud and explained our choice in a previous post, so as some identified limitations linked to it. Early this year came this announcement by ownCloud that it will initiate “Global Interconnected Private Clouds for Universities and Researchers” (with early participants such has the CERN, ETHZ, SWITCH, TU-Berlin, University of Florida, University of Vienna, etc.) So it looks like we’ve picked the right open platform! Especially also because they are announcing a mesh layer on top of different clouds to provide common access across globally interconnected organizations.

This comforts us in our initial choice and the need to bridge it with the design community, especially as this new “mesh layer” is added to ownCloud, which was something missing when we started this project (from ownCloud version 7.0, this scalability became available though). It now certainly allows what we were looking for: a network of small and personal data centers. Now the question comes back to design: if personal data centers are not big undisclosed or distant facilities anymore, how could they look like? For what type of uses? If the personal applications are not “file sharing only” oriented, what could they become? For what kind of scenarios?

 

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