As already
mentioned on this blog, Social Spaces (and more precisely Maarten, Selina, Kris, Katrien & Niels) is participating in a European research project called
Open Garments. Open Garments is a European Commission funded research projects where
academic and industrial partners in the textile industry collaborate. The aim of Open Garments is amongst others to create an online system and a new business model that will enable the consumer to act more directly in the garment supply chain: end consumers are empowered to work in close collaboration with the textile industry to buy, design, produce, share and sell fabrics, clothing or accessories.
Social Spaces was invited by the
Rooms for Free-project which also (indirectly) participates in the Open Garments project. Rooms for Free is a network of textile and fashion design academies. Rooms for Free is a meeting point and a community of practice for textile and fashion design students and professionals. Moreover, it stimulates professionalism for the design students by setting up various design contests. At the
HeimTextil fair, Rooms for Free presented
a sample of the creations of 15 textile and fashion academies and the results of last year design contest (see picture). Besides this, Rooms for Free organised a workshop on “
Online Design Communities and online Production Networks“.
This week – from the 16th to the 19th of December – Tom Heene and his colleagues artists, developers and scientists show the results of the project Dark Matter in art centre iMAL. The research project investigates the way data from the web and our physical world can be merged and presented in a user experience. It is supported by the Art&D programme of Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology. Partners are the Center for User Experience Research – CUO (KUL), WICA (UGent), NODEBOX and LAHAAG.
Since we – BAM, Virtueel Plaform and Media & Design Academy – are now researching methods and tools used in cross-disciplinary media art and design processes, we will go to Brussels and talk to the Dark Matter team. Using a mapping method we will analyze what critical tools were used to engage publics and other disciplines in the creation process of Dark Matter. The results will be published in a book in 2011, but in the meantime we keep you up to date via this blog.
Last week we mapped the work of the Alcatel team in the Smarttouch project. A report will follow soon.