A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
In September 1982, the youths of Stockholm had discovered a specific way to meet each other: they used a bug in the routing of the city’s phone cabins to communicate through group calls, for free. This story is relevant as an ethnographical example of the influence of communication technologies on the behaviour of social groups, specifically through their misuse.
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Via Magnus Eriksson
Note: I had the opportunity to lead a workshop last year for fabric | ch at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, for the student of the Tsinghua Art & Sciences Media Laboratory. The workshop took place during a residency at the university and we developed the idea of revisiting the computer cabinet, possibly inhabiting it and developing a symbiotic environment between human and computers. The workshop was short and ideas didn’t have the occasion to unfold very far unfortunately. It even became later an open call during the last Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Yet this workshop undoubtedly constituted the preliminary work before the redaction of this research project and it could continue to be a line of thinking during this project.
Below are the storyboard little sketches I made at that time to introduce this workshop.
Via fabric | rblg
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I came back from Beijing more than a month ago now and before Christian Babski will return next week to China for fabric | ch during another month to finish our residency at the Tsinghua University (until mid July), I’m taking a bit of time to write a follow-up about the short workshop/sketch session I headed there with the students of Prof. Zhang Ga, at the Tsinghua Art & Sciences Media Laboratory.
The Open Compute Project was initiated by Facebook. They decided to fully open the specifications of their data center in Prineville, all specs (from hardware to software, through cabinet and building design, etc.) In this way, Facebook pioneered the open source approach that many major players are now adopting.
This resource will undoubtedly serve our project when it will come to think about the infrastructure.
Other projects that seem worth mentioning are these mini mobile, “all in one” modular units that look very infrastructural. The Mobile Data Center Solution by Avnet was launched in 2013, the C3 – S.P.E.A.R. by Eliptical Mobile Solution too (which seems to serve as the base for the Avnet one btw).
Certainly another key conceptual element of cloud computing. At least on the infrastructural side. A highly secured (yet paranoid) approach of hardware and software.
As we were speculating in our I&IC – Preliminary intentions about a very versatile/mobile and distributed versions of the cloud infrastructure (datacenters), almost a physical bittorrent so to say, we are interested into the existing versions of mobile data centers.
Founded in 1993 by Kenneth G. Brill, the Uptime Institute was acquired by The 451 Group[6] (named after the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury) in 2009. Since then, the Uptime Institute has been an independent division of The 451 Group[7] which is headquartered in New York with offices in locations including San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Boston, Seattle, Denver, São Paulo, Dubai, and Singapore. The 451 Group also owns 451 Research, a technology-industry syndicated research and data firm.
Wikipedia (2014)
… “named after the book Fahrenheit 451″ … no need to invent it!
... 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 ...