Jonas Löwgren reports from CHI ’12 where three papers written by Medea researchers were presented.

When I was starting my academic career, I went to CHI every year from 1989 to 1995. After those years, my research interests had developed in directions that deviated from main CHI topics, so I kind of gave it up. I went to one conference in 2006, and came back quite disappointed. My sense then was that the CHI community was still mostly concerned with making more efficient interfaces for individual use, and that more mature notions of design, experience, communication and sociality were largely missing.

In May 2012, however, there were five of us from K3 and Medea going to this year’s CHI conference in Austin, Texas. Bo Reimer and I gave a paper on collaborative media and how that challenges CHI notions of design processes and designer roles; Pelle Ehn and Per Linde together with a few co-authors gave a design-theoretical paper on things and infrastructuring. Both of those were in the same session, which was quite well attended and received. Finally, Mads Høbye presented his Touchbox as part of the exhibition and it was selected part of the “permanent collection”, which basically meant that Mads got the opportunity to show it throughout the conference.

Pelle and Per giving their talk, performed as a conversation.

Invited speaker Richard Shusterman and technical program chair Kia Höök enjoying the Touchbox.

Summarizing a four-day conference with 2500+ attendees and 100+ sessions is very hard, of course, but I do have a few general impressions that might capture some of the essence.

The mainstream of the CHI conference and community is still mainstream. Meaning that much research is devoted to the individual user doing her tasks and how new digital technology can help her do those tasks in more efficient ways. Mainstream CHI also implies that the way to validate a new design idea is to test it with users and preferably collect quantitative data on the improvements.

Having said that, this year’s CHI conference showed clear signs of opening up towards approaches that would feel more familiar to us in Malmö. For one thing, there is a slowly but steadily growing interest in design research and in questions of what it means to do design as part of academic knowledge construction processes.

Another growing trend in the CHI community seems to be experiments in interaction technology, oriented towards exploring materials and opening design possibilities rather than solving existing problems. There were several presentations and demonstrations, mostly originating from Asia, that were clearly “no no pah-puss” (i.e., of no purpose in the mainstream, instrumental sense).

Bo and I claimed in our paper that for most people, most of the time, the computer today is a medium for communicating with other people (as opposed to a tool for doing individual tasks). This is clearly still a fringe perspective at CHI, but we found the occasional nugget of support in the conference program. For instance, the opening keynote was given by Margaret Gould Stewart, who is the Director of User Experience at Youtube. Her talk, called “Connecting the world through video”, was a terribly one-sided and romantic marketing version of how Youtube empowers creativity and liberating expression, but still the topic was there (and we were able to latch onto it in our talk later on the same day).

Margaret Gould Stewart giving the opening keynote on Youtube user experience and, essentially, collaborative media.

Finally, it was interesting to walk around the exhibition looking for ideas that we have covered at K3 during the last decade. At times, I felt like I was back at graduation week at Beijerskajen in the mid 00s; there must have been at least ten pieces in the exhibition that I immediately recognized from our excellent students’ and colleagues’ work from way back. Here are three examples: A vending machine for local crowdsourcing of expert work, an installation with cashier slip printers printing tweetstreams, and a system for projecting and sharing mobile phone content.

A vending machine for local crowdsourcing of expert work.

An installation with cashier slip printers printing tweetstreams.

A system for projecting and sharing mobile phone content.

My conclusion is that we have actually done a fair bit of pioneering work in interaction design over the years, as was our original intention, and that this work is now increasingly validated in terms of academic mainstream acceptance. That seems like a promising takeaway for the years to come.

Image credits: CC-BY Mads Høbye, Jonas Löwgren.

Related publications
- Designing Collaborative Media: A Challenge for CHI?
- What is the Object of Design?
- Touchbox: Intriguing touch between strangers

So far, the Malmö organizers have focused on three areas: web development, game development and physical computing/Internet of Things. They have also been using the Arduino platform to build light controlled robots.

See below for two videos illustrating the concept, by Medea’s Bo Peterson.

You can read more about the concept on malmo.coderdojo.se and coderdojo.com.

Image credit: @peterneubauer and Oskar Neubauer

Related articles
- Arduino for kids in Mexico
- Kids’ experiments with robots
- Open Prototyping for schools: a presentation

Høbye, M. (2012). Mediated Body: Designing for embodied experience. ACM Computers in Entertainment Video Article, http://cie.acm.org/articles/mediated-body-designing-embodied-experience/, accessed May 7, 2012.

This video article, published in the Video Journal section of ACM’s Computers in Entertainment (read more about the Video Journal), discusses the experiential qualities of the Mediated Body concept developed by PhD student Mads Høbye.

Mediated Body from ACM Computers in Entertainment on Vimeo.

EXCERPT
Mediated Body is a symbiotic system consisting of a human (the Performer) wearing custom-built technology (the Suit). The system offers a play session to a single Participant at a time. The role of the technology is to sense physical bare-skin connection between the Performer and the Participant, where the sensing yields analogue values in a range starting from a few centimeters from actual touch, via light touch, to full contact. The values are converted into a relatively complex soundscape which is played back in the headphones that both the Performer and the Participant wear. Thus, from the Participant’s point of view, the Performer is a human theremin: a musical instrument that she can play by touching. However, due to the design of the system, the instrument can also play its player: When the Performer touches the Participant, the soundscape is affected in the same way.

View the full video article.

Related publications
- Touchbox: Intriguing touch between strangers
- Touching a Stranger: Designing for Engaging Experience in Embodied Interaction

The video journal presents video articles, which consist of a video part and a text part, where the video part concentrates on experiential issues and the text part contextualizes and reflects. Video article contributions are assessed in double-blind peer review and the forum is considered to be of scholarly archival standard.

The first video article has been written produced by Medea’s Mads Høbye, PhD student in interaction design, titled Mediated Body: Designing for embodied experience.

Two more articles have been accepted and are due for publishing shortly.

Currently seeking submissions
The Video Journal is currently seeking submissions from scholars in interaction design and new media who thinks that text and images aren’t sufficient to communicate their work, but who still want to publish their work in academically reputable fora. See CIE’s submission guidelines.

Image credit Flickr user ragv CC:BY-ND

Related publications
- The Need for Video in Scientific Communication – in this article, prof. Jonas Löwgren elaborates on the concept of video in scientific communication
- Read more about Høbye’s Mediated Body project

Submission deadline June 1, 2012.

This call for submissions is for the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) 2012, taking place in Roskilde, Denmark, August 12-16, 2012. Workshop date is August 13. Participants interested to contribute to the workshop should no later than June 1 announce their intent to the organizers, makingfutures@sand14.com, by sending a short description of your case (2-4 pages). The workshop is organized by Medea’s Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M Nilsson & Richard Topgaard, and Laura Watts from Copenhagen IT University. Early registration fee for just the workshop is 300 DKK 600 DKK and for the whole conference 3000 DKK (half the price for students).

PDF version of this call.

THEME AND CHALLENGE
Participatory design has always been about alternative futures: in the practice of (often marginalized) groups in society it has, through design practice, tried to support democratic changes. This started as actions research oriented collaboration with local trade unions at the workplace challenging the use of technology and the management prerogative to define what may count as innovation (Bjerknes et al. 1987).

Today participatory design is more and more taking place beyond the workplace: in public spaces, as engagement with NGOs, and other often marginalized groups. This is in line with its democratic tradition, but it also opens up new ways that we might re-conceptualise innovation as a form of invention (Barry 1999), and challenge the particular, often hegemonic, approaches to future-making in the corporate workplace.

Contemporary managerial ideology embraces ‘the crowd’ as a source of innovation. For example in the form of ‘user driven innovation’, ‘crowd-sourcing’, and focus group testing, with a strong rhetoric of accessible and participative design as a key to ‘democratizing innovation’. All this is often, however, within the perspective of the successful corporation and an unaltered market logic, which privileges particular crowds and particular places as centres of innovation (Suchman 2002): frequently the urban crowd or the perceived exotic.

In the workshop we challenge this logic of innovation by exploring the potential of participatory design cases and fieldwork perspectives that demonstrate a repertoire of differently situated practices of ‘future-making’– futures made locally, in heterogeneous communities, and with marginalised publics (Björgvinsson et al. 2010).

The organizers of the workshop invite participants to share their stories of alternative future making. The first part of the workshop will create a relational map of such cases, and in the second we will explore common themes, relations, and resistances, as well as practical and theoretical challenges.

FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP
Early participatory design was strongly influenced by the Future Workshop as developed by Robert Junk, a way to collaboratively envision and plan for locally grounded particular futures (often in opposition to a hegemonic view and practice) (Junk and Müllert 1981, Greenbaum and Kyng 1991). This workshop draws on that tradition, but with a shift of scope and form to also draw on current re-conceptualisations of innovation in anthropologies of design (Calvilo, Jiménez et al. 2010; Suchman 2011).

Whereas the Future Workshop provides a local ‘democratic’ alternative to centralized bureaucratic planning, this workshop gathers an assembly of local (often marginalized) participatory initiatives of future-making practices, and hopes to challenge generalized strategies for technology and market-driven innovation in multiple, diverse and creative ways.

The workshop uses a different format, focused on map-making and storytelling as a process for forming a landscape of multiple futures. During the workshop participants will create and map a landscape of futures – not a single utopian future but an ‘archipelago of futures’ constituted by all the participant’s cases. What they will construct is not an ideal, no-place, nowhere Utopia of Thomas More, but an assemblage of local, now, here futures. Once mapped they will then explore their encounters with these manifold cases and futures-in-the-making.

The expected outcome of the workshop will be a participatory crafted “guidebook” to these islands of the future and their connections (and distances) as sites of diverse forms of innovation.

MAPPING – ‘THE ARCHIPELAGO OF FUTURES’
Participants will bring cases, initiatives and fieldwork experiences of ‘futures being made’ to the workshop. This could be participatory cases of new collaborative public interventions, or sustainability projects, local social innovations, open and free production, maker spaces, do-it-yourself activities, etc.

These cases are initially seen as unique places or ‘islands’ (or another topological forms), and participants are asked to prepare invitations, a tour, of their respective case. These invitations should address the practices of future-making, and the hopes and challenges to the future of their island case. We suggest bringing pictures, samples and stories. (Instructions on format will be sent out on acceptance of workshop participation).

In the morning session of the workshop participants will give a guided tour of their island case, and collaboratively construct, and map as they go along, the archipelago of futures. During the session we will shape an emerging landscape of futures, mapping an archipelago of futures, searching for connections, collaborations and controversies.

STORYTELLING – ‘TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE FUTURES’
During the afternoon session participants will collaboratively engage in documenting the archipelago of futures by producing a ‘Travel Guide to The Futures’. This part of the workshop will explore the proximities of some futures, and distances of others; the shared challenges both within the cases themselves and of the experiences of the design practice. It will also consider the connections and resistances between these multiple forms of innovation practice. Through these discussions and sharing of stories, images, and texts from the cases, participants will generate a travel guide.

Drawing on avant garde mapping approaches such as psychogeography, and other situational interventions into mapping, the ‘Travel Guide to The Futures’ will include guides to participant’s cases (from the morning) and a series of cross-cutting themes that express the diversities and similarities of the cases (from the afternoon).

The travel guide will be produced as a bound book in a participatory low-tech DIY zine format, in a limited edition print run. There will also be an open and free version of the travel guide, free to download and open to redesign, and addition of new islands to the archipelago of the futures.

PARTICIPATION
Participants interested to contribute to the workshop should no later than June 1 announce their intent to the organizers, makingfutures@sand14.com, by sending a short description of your case (2-4 pages). The description should, as mentioned above, take the form of an invitation to “visit” your “island”/case including an outline of the specific (design and innovation) future-making practices in the case as well as hopes and challenges of those involved.

Although, as organizers we would like to assemble an archipelago of hundreds of futures, the active workshop format is a limit. So for making this zine of a ‘Travel Guide to the Futures’ at the workshop a maximum of 15 cases can be accepted (though there can be more than one participant per case). If forced to limit participation in the workshop we will, besides quality of description, especially look for diverse and promising cases and initiatives that address the theme and challenge of the workshop and involve groups in the margin of (or marginalized) by contemporary mainstream innovation theory and practice. Accepted contributions will be announced no later than June 6 (to allow for early bird registration).

We are looking forward to collaborating with you in this challenge to innovation design practice by investigating, mapping and communicating promising local, diverse, and multiple alternative futures.

REFERENCES
Barry, A. ‘Invention and Inertia’, Cambridge Anthropology 21.3. 1999. 62-70.

Bjerknes, G., Ehn, P. and Kyng, M. (Eds.) Computers and Democracy – A Scandinavian Challenge. Aldershot: Avebry. 1987.

Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P. and Hillgren, P-A. Participatory design and “democratizing innovation. In PDC’10: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, 41–50. New York: ACM Press. 2010

Calvilo, N., Jiménez, C.A. et al. Prototyping. Prototyping cultures: social experimentation, do-it-yourself science and beta-knowledge, Madrid, Spain, ARC Anthropological Research on the Contemporary. Available at http://anthropos-lab.net/studio/wp-content/uploads/ARCEpisode3-Prototyping.pdf. 2010.

Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (eds) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA. 1991.
Junk, R., and N. R. Müllert. Zukunjfrtwerkstätten—Wege zur Wiederbelebung der Demokratie. 1981.

Suchman, L. ‘Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World’, The Information Society 18, 2002, 139-144.

Suchman, L. Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 1-18. 2011.

Image credit: Flickr user Uncleweed CC:BY-SA

Related posts
- Book project Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design and Democracy

Jeanette Ginslov is Medea’s Artist in Residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet. Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.

On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gives a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.

Medea Talk with Jeanette Ginslov
When: Monday, May 14, 16:00-18:00
Where: at the MEDEA studio, Östra Varvsgatan 11, Malmö
Whom: The Medea Talk is for free and open to everyone. It is followed by Q&A and conversation.
More info about Affexity: affexity.org
Sign up: Limited availability, sign up here

More about AffeXity
AffeXity is a two year long research project. The first phase of research was conducted during Ginslov’s residency at the Laboratorium, Dansehallerne Copenhagen in November 2011. In the project’s final phase, they wish to see the project becoming a “social choreography”. Anyone will be invited to shoot and upload short screendance videos, using their “body in city” as a location of affect, archive their material onto a social media dance and technology platform and finally use Argon to facilitate a “performance” in their own city. These should reflect our premier of AffeXity in Malmö, November 2012.

More about Jeannette Ginslov
Her roots are in Performance Art, protest theatre and contemporary dance theatre within the context of an Apartheid South Africa as a performer, choreographer and artistic director. The classical and contemporary dance training in South Africa, New York and France afforded her the tools to practice and research sites of resistance through the body and movement. In 1998 she studied a Master of Arts in Choreography based on the Body and the Dance Factory as sites of Resistance, exploring postmodernist feminist dance practices and choreographic strategies.

She left South Africa in 2008, in order to study for an MSc in Media Arts and Imaging Screendance, at Dundee University Scotland. In 2009 she started exploring other sites and modes of production with the use of online platforms and became associate producer dance-tech.net. She is a moderator for content on dance-tech.net that uses the most advanced social software platforms and internet rich multimedia applications. She is also the creator of MoveStream that provides an interdisciplinary platform that investigating the crossover between the boundaries usually found in media/dance/cinema/video and the internet. It provides a fresh and adaptive evolving domain for the public to engage with culture, choreography and performance. As a networked phenomenon, it encourages a much needed flow and exchange in Screendance discourse.

Related articles:
- Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies – article published in Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
- Medea’s residency program
- The AffeXity project

Granny’s Dancing on the Table – a GRANNY-INVASION! promo video by Hanna Sköld

The granny-stories will be used in the #granniverse, a storyworld based on the myths, characters and oddities of the Granny’s Dancing on the Table film script. The granniverse will manifest itself as a feature film, an online adventure game and the International Granny Day (and probably more!).

The $50,000 from the Kickstarter campaign will be used to start the shooting of the film in the fall of 2012. Your granny-story can be submitted on granniverse.com.

Medea has been involved in this project since its inception within the framework of Living Lab the Stage.

The list of speakers are impressive and the topics range from Social Media and Transforming Audiences, to cases about Broadcasting in Crises, The Utöya massacre and the challenges that the BBC faces at the Olympics in London this summer. Take a look at the conference programme

The Conference is free of charge.

Date: May 17-19
Venue: Orkanen, Malmö University
Conference fee: Free of charge
Sign up: All you need to do is sign up here
Web: http://www.circom-regional.eu/
Twitter: @CircomConf

The conference is hosted by SVT and arranged together with following partners: Medea, Malmö University, Media Evolution, Malmö stad and Region Skåne.

Arabic Game Jam, Bambuser and Transmedia
Elisabet M Nilsson, Måns Adler and Asta Wellejus – all associated with Medea – will speak at the conference:

Arabic Game Jam (Friday May 18, at 15.10-15.50)
Yasemin Arhan Modéer, Media Evolution, Elisabet M Nilsson, Malmö University and Victor Ollén, Malmö city, Sweden.

Arabic Game Jam is a new method to visualize and acknowledge unutilized competence among the citizens of Malmö while developing and strengthening the already established industries with new skills and knowledge. It is also an example of the triple helix model, in which the city of Malmö, Media Evolution and Malmö University collaborated to create sustainable development.

During the last weekend in January this year, about 40 people participated in a Arabic Game Jam at Malmö University. The participants were professional game developers mixed with game enthusiasts, and people with knowledge of Arab culture that has never before created games. Together, they developed six innovative game concepts especially for the Arabic speaking markets. The event received a lot of media attention.

The background was an initiative from the City of Malmö, whom through interaction with external parties, aimed for creating new development processes in the different city neighborhoods. Representatives from the media cluster Media Evolution, and the research environment Medea at Malmö University was engaged from the start to see what needs and capabilities was found in the neighborhood Rosengård. A process based on trust and confidence in each other’s different skills took shape and resulted in a number of focus groups and workshops with Rosengårds citizens. The result was a long-term project on development of games as social innovation, which culminated in the gaming event Arabic Game Jam.

Read more about Arabic Game Jam and about the winners.

Watching the watchers (Friday May 18, at 13.00-13.50)
Måns Adler, Bambuser

Five years ago, Bambuser set out on a journey trying to democratize the technology of live video broadcasting. By stating the question: what would happen if everybody had a broadcasting bus in their pocket? Today, Bambuser has played a central role in the distribution of major political events like the Arabic spring and right now in Syria, where major media outlets like CNN, BBC, SkyNews and Al-Jazeera are re-broadcasting Bambuser users’ videos. But, the long term goal is even larger; when everybody affords to broadcast, people will also change what they will view. This will fundamentally change the overall business model of broadcasting. If it becomes a marginal cost to broadcast live video you will not be forced to get as many viewers as possible for your broadcasts. And a father will hopefully always watch his own daughter playing a game of soccer rather than premier league if they would compete.

Key tendencies in world broadcast and transmedia (Friday May 18, at 16.10-17.00)
Asta Wellejus, transmedia developer and producer

What are broadcasters doing in Europe? What is the talk of the town in Canada and Australia? What has changed in USA regarding alternate reality games in the last year, and why have some broadcasters fixated on webpages and others on games and others again on visualization of data generated by the users? Thes are a few of the topics being touched on in a talk about what is transmedia becoming, from a broadcast side of view, what seems to work and what doesn’t?

– The idea of ​​our model is to give more power to the people. It’s the fans who take the initiative, Wiklander says.

The website Emues.com has been around since last fall and has this far resulted in a handful of local events – including concerts at Stapelbädden and Moriska Paviljongen in Folkets park in Malmö.

– Currently, we work on a regional level. But this fall we’ll get more international. The platform is built for that, says founder and entrepreneur Markus Wiklander, when we meet in the building in which The Emues Group has its minimal and simply furnished office.

The digital platform Emues is a venue meant to benefit all who are interested or involved in live music – music venues, performers and fans. Through emues.com, fans are encouraged to suggest an artist they would like to perform in their city. When a predetermined number of tickets are sold, the concert will be organized. This is for the arrangement to be carried out without financial loss.

– The traditional way to organize concerts involves great financial risk. You book the band, you pay for marketing and hope to get enough people to show up. With Emues.com, you only go through with the concert if you know that the economy is secured. At the same time, the audience and the fans get a new role, as concert promoters.

From a fuzzy idea to a working concept
Markus Wiklander has developed the platform in a co-production project with Professor Jonas Löwgren and media developer Richard Topgaard at the Malmö University research centre Medea. Financial support has been granted through the innovation agency Vinnova and the Knowledge Foundation.

– We worked with system development and design, and could turn a rather fuzzy idea into a concept that works. This development period was very valuable to me, says Wiklander.

Thanks to this work, Markus Wiklander can finally combine his two great interests: new IT technology and music. He has over the years played bass in several bands while studying for a BSc with specialization in computer science at Malmö University and graduate level courses in Sydney, Australia. Since then he has also worked as project manager for a mobile phone company for several years.

– Pretty early I realized that there was a link between music and the new technology. I therefore took leave from Sony Ericson to work with the idea.

Where does the revenue of Emues.com come from?
– We are ticket agents and have the same price range as other ticket agents.

What’s the next step?
– We have a solid base for investors to invest in. We will also market ourselves through social media and music festivals, says Markus Wiklander.

This is how emues.com works
# Artists, venues and fans register as users on Emues.com. Artists and venues then specifies the dates they are available for Emues concerts, as well as their costs and requirements. Fans create their profile with details on artist, genre and venue preferences. Where available dates and other requirements match between artist and music venue, anyone can propose a concert, and you will see what the ticket price will be and how many tickets need to be sold. After the concert proposal has been accepted by the artist and the venue, everyone can purchase tickets to the concert. When enough tickets have been sold, the concert is on. If the concert doesn’t sell enough tickets, or is canceled for any reason, the user will receive a refund.

# Currently, some 50 artists and six music venues are using emues.com, including Debaser and Babel in Malmö and Mejeriet in Lund.

This text was originally published as Konsertsajt ger mer makt åt publiken on the Malmö University main website, written by PM Eriksson.

Related articles
- Emues: crowdsourcing concerts – a project description
- Exploring, sketching and other designerly ways of working – a keynote presentation from Interaction ’12.

Image credit: Flickr user Emanuele Rosso CC:BY-NC-ND

This question is explored in this lecture by Kristina Höök, KTH/SICS, David Cuartielles, Medea/Malmö University and Martin Thörnkvist, Media Evolution. See the presentation embedded below or go here for the Bambuser broadcast.

Place-holders:
Kristina Höök’s presentation starts at 55 secs
David Cuartielles’ at 39 mins 30 secs
Martin Thörnkvist’s at 1 h 7 mins 10 secs

About the lecturers
Kristina Höök, professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science. David Cuartielles, research fellow at Medea, Malmö University and co-founder of the open-source prototyping platform Arduino. Martin Thörnkvist, Media Evolution

This lecture is part # 123 in the lecture series Skiften at Malmö University: mah.se/skiften

Related articles and lectures
- How Electronics Connect Us to the World – A Medea Talk with David Cuartielles
- Comic book explaining 25 internet-of-things concepts
- Internet of Things from a Design Point of View. The Reading List.

Image credit: Flickr user cgti CC:BY-NC-ND