A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
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As we prepare to relaunch the design research and announce a couple of new workshops next November, I take the occasion to publish and archive additional useful tools and resources regarding OwnCloud (our open cloud platform of reference and of work).
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And “forks”on Github. In particular, the following Shell script for installing and updating OwnCloud on the Raspberry Pi by petrockblog (and by extension, its incoming fork on Beaglebone) might be of interest to us.
Note: fabric | ch, one of our partner on this project, has developed an open source data sharing tool that tries to simplify the procedures of declaring/logging and sharing data (from “connected sensor things”, mainly). This is Datadroppers. The service is somehow similar, yet slightly more versatile than the now vanished Pachube, or the contemporary, but proprietary, Dweet.io (that we’ve already mentioned in the resources section of this blog).
One of the interesting points in this case is that the new web service has been created by designers/coders that are themselves in need of such data service for their own work, promising in some ways that it won’t be commodified.
The other interesting point is the fact that they are formally involved in this design research project as well (through Christian Babski, developer), which should help us match the functions of Datadroppers with OwnCloud: through the use of the documented OwnCloud Core Processing Library and the one of Datadroppers, new paradigms and artifacts in file/data sharing and cloud operations could be envisioned, implemented and tested.
But moreover and mainly, projects made by the design community could be developed that will take advantages of the open resources of Processing (later on, Javascipt as well), OwnCloud and these libraries. Designing tools remains one of the goals of this design research project. Designing artifacts that will use these (improved) tools will be the work of the coming year in our design research…
Via fabric | rblg, via datadroppers.org
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At the occasion of the first peer reviewed conference we’ll take part with the I&IC project (Renewable Futures in Riga) and following the exhibition at H3K last Summer 2015 (Poetics and Politics of Data), Lucien Langton edited and produced a short teaser about our design research that dive into misunderstandings and paradoxes that concern the “Cloud(s)”!
Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s), can “weather affect cloud computing”? from iiclouds.org design research on Vimeo.
Note: in the context of previous workshop (Networked Data Objects with M. Plummer-Fernandez a.k.a #algopop), we’ve been working with a combination of Raspberri Pi’s and sensors. We will continue with this hardware choice, even increase it during a coming exhibition at H3K, Poetics and Politics of Data. But for this, we will switch to the GrovePi solution when it comes to sensors, which will ease the prototyping part.
Here is a good resource about Pi’s and Grove sensors on Dexter Industries’ website.
Or should we start thinking about tiny clusters of Raspberry Pis?
It seems that they’ve already done some debugging and Lego constructions at the Southampton University! (for a “supercomputer” though).
Using excess heat generated by data centers to warm homes isn’t a new idea. Earlier in our research we stumbled upon Qarnot, a french company proposing to decentralize the data center into meshed radiators to distribute computing resources across people’s homes (we’re guessing they took their name from Carnot’s Limit ;). They announced a partnership with the city of Paris to heat 350 low-income housings in 2013.
However, they are not the only rats in the race…
... Along the design research, we are going through many different types of references that we don't necessarily post or document ...
The website presenting the downloadable results of the joint design and ethnographic research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) is now ...