Even if unfortunately Bergcloud is a dead project now (and that it sadly brought down the design collective Berg too), I mention it here on our research blog as it probably has some connections with our own research project and what we might try to develop later as tools. The unsuccessful commercial approach of Bergcloud to connected objects should also be taken as a question toward this big “buzz” though.
One of our interest would be to develop a link (api) that could help designers tap into an (their own?) open cloud infrastructure, so to help them develop design artifacts that will take advantage of such third parties data/processing services. Providing such tools would certainly contribute in a large increase of alternative contributions that would go far beyond simple data/file storage or exchange…
You would possibly need then: an open, small scale yet scalable data center architecture (hardware and software), an open api in a programming language that would be accessible to designers and possibly a service or something similar to help play/share with (open) data.
Workshops that will be organized later in November with designer students at ECAL and HEAD, then later in January 2015 with architects at the EPFL, could help us fine tune the needs that such a API should try to cover.
