Alternative Design Capital – the first steps

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The first ADC meeting

The first ADC meeting / Photo: Antti Ahonen

Some time ago I wrote a critical blog posting about the upcoming Helsinki World Design Capital year. This posting generated a lot of public discussion and now for some weeks there has been an on-going process to set up an Alternative Design Capital.

What will this Alternative Design Capital aim for and how will it function? We don’t know yet, the discussion about this has only begun. And it’s even unclear how decisions are made. The challenge is to find a healthy ratio between talking and doing, to keep the process open for new ideas but also to fix some key points that can help the project to focus and develop. ADC as an organisation strives to be open and democratic but in contrast to this, in context of design, democracy is most often not the best way to make decisions – this often leads to boring and safe solutions.

There was good energy and great discussions in the first meeting, please join us the second one on Wednesday 19 October 18:00 at HUB Helsinki.

Alternative Design Capital planning wiki can be found here.

Open Helsinki @ DMY MakerLab

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I was invited to curate the Open Helsinki & Pixelache Helsinki programme for this year’s DMY MakerLab in Berlin. This was the second edition of DMY MakerLab, dedicated to open design and maker culture.

DMY festival is pretty similar to many other big design fairs, but DMY tries to stand out from the others by emphasising critical and experimental approaches to design, as well as highlighting work done by graduating students and emerging designers. The venue is the amazingly massive Tempelhof airport and this year’s event attracted more than 30 000 visitors. So, it was noisy and busy, but the mood was friendly and relaxed. Most of the MakerLab workshops were well attended and especially the quick drop-in workshop worked very well, people were happy to stop for an hour or so to learn and do something.

Below you can find some glimpses of the Open Helsinki section (YKON Game, Low2No School of Activism, We *Love* Open Data and Massimo Menichinelli / openp2pdesign.org) and Pixelache Helsinki section (OHANDA open hardware initiative and Temporary photoElectric Digestopians Worklab by Bartaku).

Temporary photoElectric Digestopians [TpED] are experimental e-tapas designed to provide an electric tickle on a heliotropic tongue. Fusing cooking with solar cell design, light energy is harvested by edible power plants and transformed into electrical energy. After the e-tickle has enriched the taste, the left over energy (kJoules) powers the body and flows further into nature as nutrient for the plants. The TpED worklabs are a node of Bartaku’s ongoing research ‘PhoEf: The Undisclosed Poésis of the Photovoltaic Effect’. Bartaku is a Brussels based artistic researcher and member of transdisciplinary lab FoAM. Here are some TpED photos and Bartaku’s interview at WMMNA.


OHANDA is an initiative to foster sustainable sharing of open hardware and design. It was first drafted at the GOSH!-Grounding Open Source Hardware summit at the Banff Centre in July 2009 and one of the first goals of the project is to build a service for sharing open hardware designs which includes a certification model and a registration. More information at www.ohanda.org.


The YKON Game was one of the nominees for the DMY 2011 Award. YKON Game is a world simulation game for up to 30 -50 players, inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s World Game. The game is based on a simple thought experiment: Imagine that the world is brought to a complete halt. Everything stops. No more business as usual. With the world being frozen, you and your fellow players can tinker with the world as you please. What will you change? How do you convince others to go along with your changes? And what about the consequences? In short: The YKON Game is a workshop, party and therapy session in one. 


The Low2Now Camp by Demos Helsinki project brought a busload of urban activists from Helsinki to Berlin. During three days they hosted the Low2No School of Activism and explored the local scene in Berlin. More information and great examples of urban grassroot initiatives can be found at Low2Now Camp blog.


Massimo Menichinelli from openp2pdesign.org gave two presentations: ‘Open P2P Design’ and ‘Open P2P Design & Markets and business models for Open and DIY projects’. You can find the presentation slides here.


We *Love* Open Data is a bunch of open data researchers and enthusiasts from Helsinki. This informal collective was formed for the occasion of DMY MakerLab but has continued its activities afterwards as well. During DMY the group managed to collect and visualize information about rental prices in Berlin. In addition, Miska Knapek presented some of his sculptures which visualize/materialize long time spans of weather data. More info at weloveopendata.com blog.

You can find more information about these and other MakerLab projects from DMY Berlin website. Some additional photos can be found from my DMY Berlin photoset and I also made a short walk-through video of the DMY MakerLab area.

* * *

About DMY MakerLab:
The DMY MakerLab serves as a public experimentation space for accessing new technologies, communicating and exchanging concepts. Inaugurated in the 2010 DMY design festival, the lab is the first large maker platform in Germany and was enthusiastically received by the press, public and professionals alike. The lab unites inventors, designers and visitors in a workshop area fitted with some of the finest techno­lo­gies and materials available, side by side with low-tech instruments and applications. Visitors may learn how to grow medicinal mushrooms, experience seasonal influences while working with fabrics, access and visualise open data and collectively map ideas. Moreover, they can engage in full day workshops on open hardware, benchmarking of environmental case studies or Cradle to Cradle principles.

 

Tactical Media in 2001 <> Tactical Media in 2010

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EPIDEMIC art installation in D.I.N.A event, 2001

This posting is an attempt to explore some connections between tactical media and citizen activism in 2001 and 2010.

2001

Some more or less nostalgic memories from year 2001 –

In May 2001 I participated an event called D.I.N.A (Digital Is Not Analog) in Bologna, Italy. The event had been announced just a few of days before it took place, probably because the organisers didn’t actually want to attract too much audience, due to a very unusual lineup of presenters. Many of them had never revealed their real identities, they had only become known via their websites and alias names.

NETOCHKA NEZVANOVA

The ‘person’ I was most curious to meet was Netochka Nezvanova. ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ is Russian and means ‘nameless nobody’, a title and the main character of an unfinished novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The writings of the online Netochka gave an impression that she was one female person – even though it was quite certain that there were more than one person involved in her projects.

Netochka was famous/infamous for sending a huge quantity of emails to many international lists, using her own cryptic language. The postings were a mix of shameless self-promotion (for herself and her nato.0+55+3d software), philosophical ramblings and provocative comments about some well-known individuals in the net culture scene. Some of her websites were eusocial.com, membank.org and m9ndfukc.com, and her writings gave an impression that she had her own anarchistic wordview and political agenda, but it was impossible to figure out what it was. Here is a small sample:

aprez - az laughtr g!vz ua! 2 konzum>tearz.
 + memor!ez r sk!nd al!v - ch!ldhood !z bloun
 through dze ruztle ov autumn leavez +
 celz [ue] reg!ztr !n un!zon dze magn!tude
 ov a s!ngl !mprec!z!e.
nn. tu!rl!ng. out ov s!ght. u!th!n u.
akt!vat!ng d!zturbansz !n sod!um-potass!um
 eku!ll!br!um akross neuron membranez.
apropoz = 01 apple.com agent = ov op!n!e ur =cw4t7abs reklama
 = luvl!. != made !t ultra publ!k tzo = muzt !osc!lat u!ldl!.
 he = thought ! = uaz tr!zte + angr! auss!. naja.
 !ch b!n ganz gluckl!ch + fre!. salut.

When it was Netochka’s turn to give a presentation, she sat down on a chair and placed some living snails on her gray dress. She continued by reading a poem and meanwhile the snails ‘drew’ an abstract ‘painting’ on her dress.

Netochka’s snails

ZAPATISTA AIR FORCE

Another invited presenter was Ricardo Domingues, one of the members of Electronic Disturbance Theatre. Ricardo gave a presentation about Virtual Sit-Ins, a method for organising online protests. The participants of a virtual sit-in would download an application that would send a large amount of requests to a certain website, eventually causing it to crash.

Ricardo also told about the Zapatista Air Force. The Chiapas government had been spreading a false rumour that the Zapatistas were planning ‘new acts of violence’. This rumour was used as an excuse to increase the governments’ military force in Lacandon jungle where the Zapatista army was supposedly hiding.

The local people responded by organising a demonstration, or rather an act of political theatre, by throwing paper planes over the fence of the military camp. They wanted to break the ‘sound barrier’ which the government had established between them and the soldiers. One of the messages said “Soldiers, we know that poverty has made you sell your lives and souls. I also am poor, as are millions. But you are worse off, for defending our exploiter”.

Inspired by this event, the Electronic Disturbance Theater released a software called “Zapatista Tribal Port Scan” which would repeatedly send a poem about the Zapatista struggle for peace to government’s servers, through the “barbed wire” of internet.

Ricardo Domingues

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Mining in Congo

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congo2
(Original posting on Pixelache site)

A couple of months ago I wrote about the new law related to mining in the conflict areas of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The minerals from these mines are important for various consumer electronics companies (Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, Nokia, etc.)

Swedwatch and Finnwatch have just released a new report about the effects that this law and other similar measures seem to have. Here are some quotes from the report:

“A lot of attention has been given to the fact that we all, as consumers purchasing personal electronic devices, are linked to the conflict in Eastern DRC. Many argue that we must demand that companies stop buying conflict minerals and so cut off  the funding of armed groups. Skeptics of the idea that ending the trade will stop the violence say it will only hurt an already extremely weak economy and make the local population suffer even more. They underline the fact that more than two-thirds of the revenue of a province like North Kivu is from mineral exports. Even though none of the NGOs or the legal initiatives actually promote an embargo in the sense of ending the mineral trade from the whole of Eastern DRC or even the whole of the DRC, many point out that it is likely to be the effect, especially before initiatives for a trustworthy certification schemes are in place. The local research-based Pole Institute is of the opinion that the dilemma becomes even greater when the mining industry is criminalized without offering an economic alternative to a possible boycott of these minerals.”

“One important question is whether it is actually possible today to source ‘conflict-free’ minerals from Eastern DRC. There are varying degrees of involvement from armed groups, just like there are also varying degrees of legality. IPIS estimates that for the time being is that there is not a single mine in Eastern DRC where there are no security problems at all. In other words, if there are very strict requirements regarding taxes to armed groups and no involvement of armed groups in the mineral trade at all, at the moment, it means it is not possible to source minerals from Eastern DRC at all. This is an option that Karen Hayes foresees could lead to more insecurity in the region: “Potential exclusion of mines from the traceability system with resulting loss of their legitimate market could have major impacts. This could leave mines with the options of (a) closure – resulting in loss of livelihoods, migration forced by economic need, new resource confl icts as miners try to find new sites, new debt as new sites are developed, etc; (b) continued mining and trading but with only illegal actors or buyers who are unscrupulous about their sourcing; (c) a move away from the restrictive tin/tantalum/wolframite market towards the more lucrative and secretive gold mines and markets where traceability is a huge challenge.””

“Although most of the interviewees were pleased with the fact that the three main parties in the debate on mineral resource exploitation in Eastern DRC – the Congolese authorities, private companies and civil society groups – were finally talking about solutions to the problems of conflict minerals and illicit mineral trafficking, there was some resentment about the fact that policy makers seemed to pay almost no attention to the socio-cultural context in which mining activities take place. A recurrent criticism of policy makers at the national and international level was that the latter seem to care more about the reputation of foreign companies interested in buying Congolese minerals than in the well-being of the people living and working in and around the mines. There was a widespread feeling that it was high time to tackle problems such as the use of physical violence, the establishment of predatory taxation systems, and the creation of illicit trade monopolies by military actors. In addition to this, it was also felt that policy makers need to do something about other mining related issues such as land rights, forced labour and sexual violence against women, that had only received scant attention.”

Consumer Electronics Industry and Mining in Congo

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(Original posting on Pixelache site)

Coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a rogue industry that produces financial profit for the various factions of the on-going civil war. This issue has been discussed in artist/activist circles for some years already, but there have been no signs for any solution to this problem.

This situation unexpectedly changed last week, when US Senate passed a new bill that requires companies to disclose whether they are sourcing coltan or other minerals from the DRC or adjoining countries. Companies have to provide details about the measures they have taken to avoid sourcing these minerals from DRC armed groups, which are guilty of massacres and other atrocities. This means that companies like Apple, Dell, HP, Intel and Nokia can no longer wash their hands of this issue.

The move by US lawmakers can perhaps be partly explained by commercial motives. The fact that China has become the number one supplier of many important metals has recently raised concern in US and Europe (see article in New York Times). Increased transparency in mineral industry is likely to increase the mineral prices, and this might turn mining and other related industries into profitable business again in Europe and US.

Although the new law can be seen as a positive first step towards more fair consumer electronics, it can also have negative side effects. The new law might result in a complete boycott of minerals from DRC, which might make the local situation even worse. Also auditing the supply chains is a complex task and probably prone to corruption.

According to a report by Finnwatch, the raw materials from Congolese mines are traded by Belgian trading houses to ports in Kenya and Tansania. From there the materials are transported to Thailand, Malesia, India and China where the worlds biggest foundries are located. In the case of Nokia, after the foundry has extracted the metal, there are still 4 or 5 more middlemen before the metal ends up in a ready Nokia product. According to an article in Taloussanomat (in Finnish), Nokia requires their material suppliers not to use minerals from conflict areas, but the new law will require Nokia to do more extensive auditing.

Valise Pédagogique – teaching methods

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During the past days, I have been impressed by the teaching methods that Jean-Noël and Olivier Heinry use in the ‘Valise Pédagogique Création Interactive’ workshop.

During a break I did a very short interview with Olivier, here is a brief summary –

The workshop began with a history of interactive art, starting from cave paintings, continuing with automatons in ancient Egypt and during the Enlightment era, presenting the work of Nicolas Schöffer and finally examples of interactive art done by artists today.

The workshop lessons about interactive tools and programming are divided into three parts: 1. Data capturing, 2. Data filtering and 3. Action – what are the effects that system can generate. This is an autonomous, interactive system, and also a basis for a methodology for creating interactive art. The purpose is to offer a simple approach that anyone can learn.

But this workshop actually aims for much more than just teaching these theoretical and practical lessons. The approach is holistic – the workshop teaches ‘how to be an artist who uses interactive technologies’. This means, for example, that the participants are educated about the financial aspects related to interactive technologies, so while they are learning about the tools they should also think about what kind of economical logic (not only in the sense on money, but use of time, and other resources) could work for them in future. The students learn the basics of Cybernetics through various simple examples.

In his teaching, Olivier is using the methods he has learned in working as a member of various dance projects (especially via working with Good Work Productions), and also partly from his knowledge about collective software development. Olivier studied fine arts and learned his computer / software skills himself, and he was particularly impressed by a method called Scrum. This method is an iterative process, which assigns roles to people (instead of building a top-down hierarchy) and allows the teacher not to be the ‘boss’ but rather a facilitator of activities. For Olivier, it’s important to aim for the autonomy of the participants. The participants themselves occasionally become teachers themselves – once they have mastered a skill they can assist others, or they can give a presentation about related projects that they have been previously been working on.

Here are some examples of what this approach means in practice: Every morning, the students and teachers sit in a circle and repeat each others names, so that everyone would learn all the names more quickly. In the space where the lessons are given, all the chairs and tables have been removed, the projector is also placed on the floor, to remove all the physical signs of hierarchy. Ideas are collected into a big colorful cloud of post-it notes on the wall. Etc, etc…

>> More information about Valise Pédagogique Création Interactive in French

(>> original posting on Pixelache blog)

Digital Craftsmanship

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Photo: Pulse by Markus Kison (DE)

According to the participants of Pixelache09 Digital Craftsmanship seminar, Digital Craftsmanship involves:

  • Thinking with your hands
  • Developing digital media cookbooks and recipes
  • Getting different people to share same focus, taking steps in the areas where they are not comfortable
  • Contributing back to the community of teachers
  • Being cross-over artists and designers, enough skills to 99% of things needed
  • Allowing non-specialists to enter, make technology itself culturally diverse
  • Building spaces for learning that reflect the culture that we have online

The discussion involved people from UdK Berlin, Culture Lab Newcastle, Taik Media Lab, Konstfack Stockholm, Kitchen Budapest and other schools/labs. It was evident that digital craftsmanship is difficult to compare with traditional master-apprentice relationship. It seems to be more about a specific approach (or one could even say attitude) to working with digital media. All the basic building blocks (physical parts, hardware, software) are kept open for modifying and one should have enough skills and confidence to work on all different aspects of the project. A key for successful learning and development is to be connected to a network of peers and knowledge / resources that can be shared.

(>> original posting on Pixelache09 site)

Climate Hack workshop

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During the three days that our brave Cotton Candy experimentation team spent enclosed in a small room in Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, we learned quite a few things:

– Cotton candy is a challenging material to work with. The temperature has just high enough for the sugar to melt but low enough for the plastic candy machine itself not to melt. If one wants to use color effects, these need to be applied beforehand – once sugar is reached its fluffy and flying cotton candy form, it’s very difficult to apply any extra effects to it. Refilling the machines on the fly (when they are hot and rotating sugar at high speed) was also not a very easy thing to figure out.

– Cotton candy is great material for art about environmental issues – it’s made of pure white sugar that gives us pure solid energy to burn. Very efficient and very unhealthy. The sugar we bought in Germany said ‘Made in Germany’ in the package while it’s obvious that it has been grown by some low-wage workers in Africa or South-America. Eating cotton candy is also a ritual, a ceremony associated with places such as circuses or fun fairs –  places that have been designed for the kids to have fun and for the parents to… pretend to have fun?

– Compared to the English words cotton candy and candy floss, the Finnish and French equivalents ‘hattara’ and ‘barpapapa’ are more interesting and versatile. The word hattara can be applied to all kinds of fluffy things (clouds, hairdos, etc) and it has a connotation of superficiality. In addition to Barpapapa comic book characters, barpapapa also means ‘daddy’s beard’.

Some of the concrete results (see photos above) we achieved were the Cotton Candy Tornado (Aleksi Pihkanen was the main chef), Cotton Candy Crystals (by Christopher Baker) and the ‘redemption ritual’ (design by Tuomo Tammenpää). These were the side effects of the main purpose of the workshop: to bring an interesting bunch of people together to hack, chat and have fun for a few days. Thanks a lot for crew of Kitchen Budapest and Tinker.it for the good times and for Transmediale 09 for hosting us!

>> More thoughts + photos in Tuomo Tammenpää’s blog
>> More photos by Miska Knapek
>> Climate Hack wiki

(>> original posting on Pixelache09 blog)

Self-organisation survey

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Boxwars @ Pixelache 2008 (photo by Antti Ahonen)

In connection with Pixelache 2008 festival, we made a survey about organisational strategies of some prominent grassroot initiatives. We received replies from these people / organisations:

– Ben Fry & Casey Reas / Processing
– David Cuartielles / Arduino
– Douglas Repetto / Dorkbot
– Damien Deadly / Boxwars UK

The questions were:

* What are the aims of the project you are involved in?
* How is the project organised?
* How do you support the work financially and what impact does this have on your project?
* What do you feel you have achieved, and what are the problems you face?
* Are there any past projects/models which have inspired you?
* What are your hopes for the future?

Some excerpts from the survey:

* How do you support the work financially and what impact does this have on your project?

Casey Reas & Ben Fry / Processing: We’ve made a conscious effort to keep money out of the project. We don’t take donations, sell anything, or put ads on the site. We don’t make money directly for working on it and we hope that sets the example for others to contribute. We both have other jobs to pay for our food and rent. We were fortunate to receive a grant early in the project that was used to pay for a few developers to write key components of the software. Last year, Ben received a personal grant that provided some concentrated time to focus on the project. Our web hosting is thankfully donated.

* Are there any past projects/models which have inspired you?

David Cuartielles / Arduino: Before I was member of a design collective called Aeswad, based in Malmo, Sweden. There we had a pretty anarchic way of dealing with projects, deciding how to be paid, etc. The financial model we had was really thought through and helped me to understand that distributed organizations need of a completely different degree of freedom that corporations do. On the other hand I could learn how to make (a lot of) money making the things I like the most and letting the others do the same.

Distributed strategies for world-wide organizations can actually provide a way of living to their members. It is just that nobody will explain you how to make it happen. There is no business school focusing on that. Corporate is a cancer we gotta eliminate from society if we are about to make this new way of thinking/living/working possible.

* What are your hopes for the future?

Douglas Repetto / Dorkbot: I try to stay kind of neutral about the future of dorkbot. As organizations grow they often develop self-protection mechanisms, and sometimes maintaining the organization becomes more important than the actual activities of the organization. If dorkbot is no longer useful or interesting in a particular city, then we just let it die. Sometimes it comes back in another form, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t try to revive meetings or put any pressure on people to continue meeting. I will keep doing dorkbot in New York as long as it’s interesting and people keep volunteering to give presentations. But there are lots of other organizations doing similar things to dorkbot, so I’m sure that if we go away other things that are just as useful/interesting will take its place.

I’m constantly working to understand how something can seem to be both the most important thing in the world and also completely inconsequential. That’s my primary organizational strategy!

– – – –

The self-organisation survey can be found here:
>> http://university.pixelache.ac/prog/selforgsurvey

 

Interferenze Festival

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DSCN3100The theme of Interferenze 2006 was ‘Naturalis Electronica’, the encounter of nature and electronic art. I was invited to curate the interactive/software art section which eventually featured following artists/projects: Casey Reas (Process 6, 7, 8), LeCielEstBleu, Ralf Schreiber, Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski (Aquatic), An Earful of Italy (Jean-Philippe Renoult, Kate Sieper, Dinah Bird ) and IMPROVe (Zeenath Hasan, Richard Widerberg).

Alessandro Ludovico wrote a report of Interferenze 2006 in Neural and there are plenty of photos on Interferenze site,  below some of my own photos.

– – – – – –

Photos from the valley, from the city of San Martino Valle Caudina:
DSCN2948
DSCN2953
DSCN2973
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