A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
Note: a message from Matthew on Tuesday about his ongoing I&IC workshop. More resources to come there by the end of the week, as students are looking into many different directions!
I’ve started a github repository for the workshop so I can post code and tips there.
Please share with the students:
In the context of the workshop being held by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez this week at ECAL, Raspberry Pi’s will be available to students.
The Pi’s have already been set up with a basic layer of software / harware, the OS installed is Raspbian (on 8Gb SD’s for the Raspberry Pi B and 16Gb SDxC for the Raspberry Pi B+), the keyboard system is standard International Mac US and the wifi-dongle enables to access the Pi via SSH from another machine. Here’s how we did it from scratch:
Note: I publish here the brief that Matthew Plummer-Fernandez (a.k.a. Algopop) sent me before the workshop he’ll lead next week (17-21.11) with Media & Interaction Design students from 2nd and 3rd year Ba at the ECAL.
This workshop will take place in the frame of the I&IC research project, for which we had the occasion to exchange together prior to the workshop. It will investigate the idea of very low power computing, situated processing, data sensing/storage and automatized data treatment (“bots”) that could be highly distributed into everyday life objects or situations. While doing so, the project will undoubtedly address the idea of “networked objects”, which due to the low capacities of their computing parts will become major consumers of cloud based services (computing power, storage). Yet, following the hypothesis of the research, what kind of non-standard networked objects/situations based on what king of decentralized, personal cloud architecture?
The subject of this workshop explains some recent posts that could serve as resources or tools for this workshop, as the students will work around personal “bots” that will gather, process, host and expose data.
Stay tuned for more!
Botcaves
Algorithmic and autonomous software agents known as bots are increasingly participating in everyday life. Bots can potentially gather data from both physical and digital activity, store and share data in the ‘cloud’, and develop ways to communicate and learn from their databases. In essence bots can animate data, making it useful, interactive, visual or legible. Bots although software-based require hardware from which to run from, and it is this underexplored crossover between the physical and digital presence of bots that this workshop investigates.
You will be asked to design a physical ‘housing’ or ‘interface’, either bespoke or hacked from existing objects, for your personal bots to run from. These botcaves would be present in the home, workspace or other, permitting novel interactions between the digital and physical environments that these bots inhabit.
Raspberry Pis, template bot code, APIs, cloud storage, existing services (Twitter, IFTTT, etc) and physical elements (sensors, lights, cameras, etc) may be used in the workshop.
Bio
British/ Colombian Artist and Designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez makes work that critically and playfully examines sociocultural entanglements with technologies. His current interests span algorithms, bots, automation, copyright, 3D files and file-sharing. He was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for the project Disarming Corruptor; an app for disguising 3D Print files as glitched artefacts. He is also known for his computational approach to aesthetics translated into physical sculpture.
For research purposes he runs Algopop, a popular tumblr that documents the emergence of algorithms in everyday life as well as the artists that respond to this context in their work. This has become the starting point to a practice-based PhD funded by the AHRC at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a research associate at the Interaction Research Studio and a visiting tutor. He holds a BEng in Computer Aided Mechanical Engineering from Kings College London and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art.
Although data centers are unevenly distributed, but it’s intriguing to observe the way they’re located spatially. It’s difficult to find world maps but here are some examples I found interesting, but it’s totally not exhaustive (lots of them are not documented). Also note that any queries on image search engine about data center geography leads to weather-related visualizations (which generally influence energy/water consumption for this infrastructure).
The largest US data-centers (by Nicolas Rapp, data by Dave Drazen at Geo-Tel)
Note: another interesting service for declaring and sharing data… through the cloud. Possibly the most simple we went through. Dweet.io.
Also to be mentioned with a similar goal but more complete/complex, OpenRemote.
Note: Thingful is a “search engine” (beta version) for data and artifacts/sensors that produce data (the coming “Internet of Things” so to say, but also and mainly weather stations, aircrafts and Rastracks at this day). Already quite loaded, the content of the search engine and its map will with no doubt explode in the close future. It is a project by former creators of Pachube (in particular Usman Haque), which was an open webservice to “store, share and discover” data from realtime sensors, now sold and therefore private… It was sold to LogMeIn in 2011 (which is somehow a sad destiny for an open data project, but this is a different story) and became then Xively.
Echo is a connected object for your home which is activated by voice recognition. It’s a loud-speaker connected to the “cloud” via Wifi, so it’s main use seems to be streaming music. It’s apparently able to understand and answer queries said in “natural language”, like “Play some Henry Mancini” (activates your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn or IHeartRadio account). Of course, it’s main features are shopping-oriented but a few aren’t: you can ask for information about say, Ronald Reagan and it taps into Wikipedia and reads the page, it’s linked to weather prediction pools so you can ask about tomorrow and you can manage personal to-do lists. Unsurprisingly, “Echo’s brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time”. The object’s also got a dedicated control app, which runs on Fire OS, Amazon’s new smartphone Operating System.
As a follow-up to the scenarios produced in our second workshop, we decided to specify the type of user interfaces that could emerge from the projects proposed by the participants. More specifically, we took each of the context they worked on and created a set of graphical user interfaces to show how the cloud computing service might appear. They are not meant to be exclusive but they illustrate the functions and possible usage discussed during the workshop. To some extent, they summarize the findings in a pragmatic way. Each of the contextual category features 2 or 3 interfaces that reflect on different types of target groups: user, system administrator, priest, sport coach, etc.
Note: an interesting project /book by Space Caviar about the “house” under the pressure of “multiple of forces - financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical -”, to read in the frame of I&IC. Through its title, the book obviously address the question of domesticity immersed into technologies and the monitoring of its data.
While our project is gravitating around “networked objects/spaces”, the question of their monitoring, so as the production or use of data (“pushed” into to the cloud?) immediately comes into question, of course.
In this context, we must also point out Google and Apple efforts to tap into the “quantified house” with Nest and Homekit.
Via Space Caviar
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Based on the concepts and scenarios produced in our second workshop, we decided to work on the design implications of such projects. More specifically, we realized the set of contexts (religion, music, etc.) the workshop participants worked on share common traits: the needs for a cloud infrastructure was fairly similar and let to the idea of a basic “data unit”. Such a mobile system would act as a mini-data center.
Note: the post I&IC Workshop #2 with James Auger at HEAD, brief: “Cloudy” presents the objectives and brief for this workshop.
After last week’s workshop at HEAD – Genève, we learnt that addressing Cloud Computing from a design perspective requires to take a detour. Instead of looking at data centers and cloud computing directly, we asked students to choose a domain of everyday life (religion, cooking, communication, etc.) and work on how this technology may influence it, the kinds of practices that may emerge and what kind of implications would surface. The projects reflect this diversity and we also push the student to adopt both a critical and speculative angle. Such requirements mean that the output of the workshop largely consists in a set of short scenarios/usage strategies exemplified by sketches and pictures. Each of them provides a subtle perspective on cloud computing by showing that the limits and the opportunities of these technologies are entangled.
Cloudified Scenarios – a workshop with James Auger at HEAD – Genève on Vimeo.
Two posts have been added later as follow-ups to this one that propose an update to the direct results of the workshop:
- http://www.iiclouds.org/20141112/iic-workshop-2-at-head-design-implications/
- http://www.iiclouds.org/20141112/iic-workshop-2-at-head-ui-proposals/
At HEAD – Genève today, we started the first workshop of the research project with James Auger (from Auger-Loizeau design studio and the Royal College of Arts in London). We’re going to spend this week with the first year students of the Media Design MA exploring cloud computing, personal cloud systems, objects and user interfaces.
In order to address this, the workshop started with a background description of the project’s purposes, the evolution of computers and network infrastructures, as well as an introduction to the current state of design objects and architectures related to cloud Computing: NAS systems, servers combined with heater, speculative projects related to such technologies. From this broad list of material we wondered about the lack of artefacts that go beyond purely functionalists goals. Cloud computing systems, especially in the context of people’s context is generally a commodity… hence a need for design interventions to re-open this black box.
Following Eames’ quote “A plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose” (as a definition of design), we asked students to start with a basic activity: to create a map of “elements” related to cloud computing. They had to choose a domain of everyday life (cooking, communication, etc.), begin by compiling “their” elements (material scale, cultural, historical, list people’s motivations, objects used to achieve it, situations, behaviors, etc.), sub-themes.
From this we discussed this ecology of elements and what aspects or user contexts they could focus on. Interestingly, students chose very broad topics: religion, communication, cooking, art performances, animal-computer relationships or music-making. Based on this map, we then asked students to explore the role of cloud computing into these elements by looking at these questions:
The (many) answers to these questions led the groups to highlighting design opportunities to be discussed tomorrow.
The purpose of the OwnCloud Core Processing Library is to give the possibility to program “cloud functionalities” within a well known and simplified designer oriented programming language (and community): Processing.
Therefore, the OwnCloud Core Processing Library linked with our personal cloud merges the Open Collaboration Service (OCS) Share API with higher level functions in order to implement seamlessly “search&share files” applications written in the well known designers oriented Processing programming language. This will soon become available to everyone on the I&IC website. The workshops we are currently running / will run during the coming weeks are helping/will help us fine tune its functionalities.
The OwnCloud Core Processing Library allows the automation of the action of sharing files and the action of file tagging within an open source OwnCloud environment. Search&Sharing tasks can be threaded and/or interdependent, everything depending on the kind of results expected from one application to another. Thus, these actions can be driven by unmanned processes, decision-making (copy, delete, share one or several files) based on related metadata (i.e. metadata relation/link) or based on external data, dug from the Internet or networked/connected items/things.
While setting up our own small size data center and cloud infrastructure, we’ve tried to exemplify the key constitutive ingredients of this type of computing infrastructure, as of November 2014. But we’ve also tried to maintain them as much open as we could, for further questioning, developments and transformations.
The first key ingredients are software parts and we’ve described them in the previous post about the same topic.
