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Oracle, Bastien Girshig & Martin Hertig’s workshop #3 project at Milan Furniture Fair 2016

By Thursday, March 31, 2016 Interaction Design, Publications, Schools, Workshops Tags: 0129, Data, ECAL, Hack, Interface, Networks, Object, Robotics, Situated, Smart, Things Permalink 0
oracle_ecalmilano_01 oracle_ecalmilano_02 oracle_ecalmilano_03 oracle_ecalmilano_04 oracle_ecalmilano_05 oracle_ecalmilano_06 oracle_ecalmilano_07 oracle_ecalmilano_08 oracle_ecalmilano_09

Glad to see that Oracle, the project that Bastien Girshig and Martin Hertig made in the context of the workshop organized with Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, will be exhibited during next Milan Furniture Fair.

The project will be part of a group show entitled Poetry, organized by Logotel Italy and curated by Sefano Maffei.

Faced with the complexity of modern art, the design world tends to seek certainty and comfort. Producing, as a result, reassuring uniformities and unvarying expectations. Landscapes, environments, behaviours, democratic and functional objects that feed desire yet fail to surprise and often leave us cold.
They lack the transgressive energy of a détournement.
Or a stroke of originality bringing with it the power of poetry.

Curatorial statement.

 

More about this exhibition on www.designpoetry.it

 

Old web today, by Rhizome

By Monday, January 18, 2016 Interaction Design, Resources, Sciences & Technology, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0126, Clouds, D, Interaction, Interface, Links, Networks, Users, Web Permalink 0

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/nov/30/oldweb-today/

(…) Today’s web browsers want to be invisible, merging with the visual environment of the desktop in an effort to convince users to treat “the cloud” as just an extension of their hard drive.

In the 1990s, browser design took nearly the opposite approach, using iconography associated with travel to convey the feeling of going on a journey. Netscape Navigator, which used a ship’s helm as its logo, made a very direct link with the nautical origins of the prefix cyber-, while Internet Explorer’s logo promised to take the user around the whole globe. (…)

By Rhizome.org

“Pictures of Clouds”, 1995

By Wednesday, October 21, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0114, Clouds, Computing, History, Infrastructure, Networks Permalink 0

I found this quite funny yet revealing diagram related to the paper “A brief history of cloud computing” (already mentioned earlier on this blog), by Maximiliano Destefani Neto. It describes the time, back in 1995 according to Mr. Neto, when “Pictures of Clouds” started to appear in technical drawings about networks and the then emerging network computing (grid computing started to be a buzz word around the same time).

The purposes of these schematic “clouds” were to synthesize “too complicated for non technical people to understand” parts of the infrastructure into one image/logotype. It was the icon of the cloud! And it revealed to be a clever choice, because it probably helped to keep the whole infrastructure “blurry”, “hidden”, “invisible” or “un-understandable”… “It happens in the cloud“, this fuzzy technological arrangement and therefore you don’t really need to explain it.

 

clouds_of_1995

 

Now in 2015, we’re almost fully immersed into these “clouds”. Literally living in them, through them, … but they still remain blurry!

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OpenCloud (Academic Research) Mesh

By Wednesday, March 4, 2015 Resources, Schools, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0099, Academic, C, Clouds, Computing, Infrastructure, Mesh, Networks, Open source, Research, Software Permalink 0

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?

 

OpenCloudMesh_4.0_150dpi

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I&IC Workshop #4 with ALICE at EPFL-ECAL Lab, brief: “Inhabiting the Cloud(s)”

By Saturday, January 24, 2015 Architecture, Schools, Workshops, X-Posts Tags: 0092, A, Architects, Data, Datacenter, Documentation, EPFL, EPFL_ECAL_Lab, Housing, Interferences, Networks, Print, Teaching, Territory, Urbanism Permalink 0

Note: we will start a new I&IC workshop in two weeks (02-06.02) that will be led by the architects of ALICE laboratory (EPFL), under the direction of Prof. Dieter Dietz, doctoral assistant Thomas Favre-Bulle, architect scientist-lecturer Caroline Dionne and architect studio director Rudi Nieveen. During this workshop, we will mainly investigate the territorial dimension(s) of the cloud, so as distributed “domestic” scenarios that will develop symbiosis between small decentralized personal data centers and the act of inhabiting. We will also look toward a possible urban dimension for these data centers. The workshop is open to master and bachelor students of architecture (EPFL), on a voluntary basis (it is not part of the cursus).

A second workshop will also be organized by ALICE during the same week on a related topic (see the downloadable pdf below). Both workshops will take place at the EPFL-ECAL Lab.

I introduce below the brief that has been distributed to the students by ALICE.

 

Inhabiting the Cloud(s)

IMG_9021_m

Wondering about interaction design, architecture and the virtual? Wish to improve your reactivity and design skills?

Cloud interfaces are now part of our daily experience: we use them as storage space for our music, our work, our contacts, and so on. Clouds are intangible, virtual “spaces” and yet, their efficacy relies on humongous data-centres located in remote areas and subjected to strict spatial configurations, climate conditions and access control.
Inhabiting the cloud(s) is a five days exploratory workshop on the theme of cloud interfacing, data-centres and their architectural, urban and territorial manifestations.
Working from the scale of the “shelter” and the (digital) “cabinet”, projects will address issues of inhabited social space, virtualization and urban practices. Cloud(s) and their potential materialization(s) will be explored through “on the spot” models, drawings and 3D printing. The aim is to produce a series of prototypes and user-centered scenarios.

Participation is free and open to all SAR students.

ATTENTION: Places are limited to 10, register now!
Info and registration: caroline.dionne@epfl.ch & thomas.favre-bulle@epfl.ch
www.iiclouds.org

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Download the two briefs (Inhabiting the Cloud(s) & Montreux Jazz Pavilion)

 

Laboratory profile

The key hypothesis of ALICE’s research and teaching activities places space within the focus of human and technological processes. Can the complex ties between human societies, technology and the environment become tangible once translated into spatial parameters? How can these be reflected in a synthetic design process? ALICE strives for collective, open processes and non-deterministic design methodologies, driven by the will to integrate analytical, data based approaches and design thinking into actual project proposals and holistic scenarios.

 

http://alice.epfl.ch/

 

Mejias, U. A. (2013). Off the Network, The University of Minnesota Press.

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, Society, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0088, ABCD, Books, Data, Internet, Networks, Research, Thinkers Permalink 0

IMG_9024

 

Note: Off the Network, a book by Ulises Ali Mejias that is interesting to read when it comes to objectify and question the network paradigm. Beyond the praise about participation and inclusiveness that was widely used by network advocates and now also by marketing companies, Off the Network brings a critical voice and addresses the centralization, or in some other cases the “nodocentrism” that is at work through many global online services, so as the commodification of many aspects of our lives that comes with them.

While we are looking for alternative “architectures” for cloud infrastructure, nodes and services, this is a “dissonant” point of view to take into account and a book that we are integrating into the I&IC bibliography.

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Towards a new paradigm: Fog Computing

By Thursday, January 15, 2015 Sciences & Technology, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0081, C, Computing, Data, Engineering, Infrastructure, Networks Permalink 0

Data-Gravity_big

 

The Internet of Things is emerging as a model, and the network routing all the IoT data to the cloud is at risk of getting clogged up. “Fog is about distributing enough intelligence out at the edge to calm the torrent of data, and change it from raw data over to real information that has value and gets forwarded up to the cloud.” Todd Baker, head of Cisco‘s IOx framework says. Fog Computing, which is somehow different from Edge Computing (we didn’t quite get how) is definitely a new business opportunity for the company who’s challenge is to package converged infrastructure services as products.

However, one interesting aspect of this new buzzword is that it adds up something new to the existing model: after all, cloud computing is based on the old client-server model, except the cloud is distributed by its nature (ahem, even though data is centralized). That’s the big difference.  There’s a basic rule that resumes the IT’s industry race towards new solutions: Moore’s law. The industry’s three building blocks are: storage, computing and network. As computing power doubles every 18 months, storage follows closely (its exponential curve is almost similar). However, if we graph network growth it appears to follow a straight line.

Network capacity is a scarce resource, and it’s not going to change any time soon: it’s the backbone of the infrastructure, built piece by piece with colossal amounts of cables, routers and fiber optics. This problematic forces the industry to find disruptive solutions, and the paradigm arising from the clash between these growth rates now has a name: Data gravity.

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