A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
By fabric | ch
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Along different projects we are undertaking at fabric | ch, we continue to work on self initiated researches and experiments (slowly, way too slowly… Time is of course missing). Deterritorialized House is one of them, introduced below.
Note: while reading last Autumn newsletter from our scientific committee partner Ecocloud (EPFL), among the many interesting papers the center is publishing, I stumbled upon this one written by researchers Hao Zhuang, Rameez Rahman, and Prof. Karl Aberer. It surprised me how their technological goals linked to decentralization seem to question similar issues as our design ones (decentralization, small and networked data centers, privacy, peer to peer models, etc.)! Yet not in such a small size as ours, which rather look toward the “personal/small” and “maker community” size. They are rather investigating “regional” data centers, which is considered small when you start talking about data centers.
Note: Nicolas Nova and I will be present during next Lift Conference in Geneva (Feb. 4-6 2015) for a talk combined with a workshop and a skype session with EPFL (a workshop related with the I&IC research project will be finishing at EPFL –Prof. Dieter Dietz’s ALICE Laboratory at EPFL-ECAL Lab– the day we’ll present in Geneva). All persons who follow the research on this blog and that would be present during Lift 15, please come see us and exchange ideas!
Via the Lift Conference
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Workshop description : Since the end of the 20th century, we have been seeing the rapid emergence of “Cloud Computing”, a new constructed entity that combines extensively information technologies, massive storage of individual or collective data, distributed computational power, distributed access interfaces, security and functionalism.
In a joint design research that connects the works of interaction designers from ECAL & HEAD with the spatial and territorial approaches of architects from EPFL, we’re interested in exploring the creation of alternatives to the current expression of “Cloud Computing”, particularly in its forms intended for private individuals and end users (“Personal Cloud”). It is to offer a critical appraisal of this “iconic” infrastructure of our modern age and its user interfaces, because to date their implementation has followed a logic chiefly of technical development, governed by the commercial interests of large corporations, and continues to be seen partly as a purely functional,centralized setup. However, the Personal Cloud holds a potential that is largely untapped in terms of design, novel uses and territorial strategies.
The workshop will be an opportunity to discuss these alternatives and work on potential scenarios for the near future. More specifically, we will address the following topics:
The joint design research Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) is supported by HES-SO, ECAL & HEAD.
Interactivity : The workshop will start with a general introduction about the project, and moves to a discussion of its implications, opportunities and limits. Then a series of activities will enable break-out groups to sketch potential solutions.
Note: an interesting “documentary” project/resource for our project is this recent work by designer and researcher Timo Arnall. It was published last May on his website and on different blogs. The focus is obviously here on the data center as a (fascinating?) contemporary artifact, in which the search for technical efficiency, rationality, security, redundancy, clean air, modularity, etc. leads to a specific spatial aesthetic. It is this aesthetic that seems to become the “main character” for this movie that mixes techniques, even so the idea is to reveal/desacralize the “hidden materiality of our data”. This project is planned to be displayed as a multi-screen installation.
While I didn’t have the occasion to see the movie yet, we should keep it in mind and try to display it in the frame of our own research, in particular to the students that will take part to the different I&IC workshops.
Via elasticspace
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Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.
Film: 6 min 40 sec, digital 4K, 25fps, stereo.
Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m.
Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.
We are currently conducting a series of 10 semi-structured, open-ended interviews (based on the following interview guide. They last approximately an hour and are conducted in face-to-face or via Skype depending on the location of the participants.
It seems that practices related to Cloud Computing are not so commonly investigated. Here’s a short list of papers about user research, sadly mostly focused on professional practices:
England, D., Randles, M., & Taleb-Bendiab, A. (2011). Designing interaction for the cloud. Proceeding CHI EA ’11 CHI ’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2453-2456
Farnham, S.D., Turski, A., & Halai, S. (2012). Docs.com: Social file sharing in Facebook. In Proc. ICWSM 2012. Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press.
Marshall, C. & Tang, J.C. (2012). That syncing feeling: Early user experiences with the cloud, in Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2012, ACM, 11 June 2012.
Muller, M., Millen, D.R., & Feinberg, J. (2010). Patterns of usage in an enterprise file-sharing service: Publicizing, discovering, and telling the news. In Proceedings of CHI 2010. New York: ACM Press, pp. 763–766.
Rader, E. (2009). Yours, mine, and (not) ours: Social influences on group information repositories. In Proceedings of CHI 2009. New York: ACM Press, pp. 2095–2098.
Shami, N.S., Muller, M., & Millen, D. (2011). Browse and discover: Social file sharing in the enterprise. In Proc. CSCW 2011. New York: ACM Press, pp. 295–304.
Tang, J.C., Brubaker, J.C. & Marshall, C.C. (2013). What Do You See In The Cloud? Understanding the Cloud-Based User Experience through Practices, in Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2013, Springer, 2 September 2013.
Voida, A., Olson, J.S., & Olson, G.M. (2013). Turbulence in the clouds: Challenges of cloud-based information work. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013). Paris, France, April 27–May 2. New York: ACM Press, pp. 2273-2282.
Interestingly, when it comes to experimentation with hardware and The Cloud (or more generally with servers), the most interesting and almost crazy examples are made by the hobbyists and makers who are building and customizing their own data (Bitcoin) mining farms.
It happens in their houses, caves, bathrooms, bedrooms, closets, etc., it seems their are no limits to experimentation. A “house miner” even hacked his own swimming pool to cool down his servers (Portrait of a Bitcoin Miner, link below).
It is almost a subculture of home-brewed personal data-centers, built at home (or at the small office).
A few notable examples in pictures above (where we can verify that the questions of cooling and cables organization are for real…)
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More insane rigs:
https://99bitcoins.com/20-insane-bitcoin-mining-rigs/
http://www.thinkcomputers.org/insane-crypto-currency-mining-rigs/
A portrait of “Eric”, a Bitcoin miner:
“Eric built a custom cooling system using water from his swimming pool.”
And more “mining rigs” of all sorts on Google Image…
... 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 ...