Social
Spaces

The game Pong was released in 1972 by Atari. It showed two bats and a little ball and was inspired by the game ping pong. Later – in 1975 – it was designed as console version, so it could be played, making use of a television screen. After that, many variations were released by the computer industry, like Breakout. Not only the industry, but also “users” on the internet have adapted the game many times. The game is an exchange device, a social object (MacLeod, 2007). It is an object around which many people have gathered, all over the world. My own students have adapted the game for very different goals.

Yesterday, nursing students and occupational therapy students of Hogeschool Zuyd and products design students of KHLim Media & Design Academie Genk presented their concepts for a new bed pan. Various design solutions were shown during this meeting. This innovative project was initiated by Arion.

The synergy of three different study programs was very efficient. Students involved had a very positive experience. Working in
multidisciplinary
groups enabled the students to explore the current bed pans from various perspectives. The three groups used a human centered design method in their approaches to design a new bed pan. Students learned to be critical towards resources and processes in health care.

The concepts designed by the students were part of a first brainstorm phase. Arion will present and evaluate their concepts with field specialists to create a final list of demands concerning the productdevelopment of the future bed pan.

By ROB VAN KRANENBURG

The question of how to store, interpret, and use relevant information will be one of the most important in the coming decades with the increasing merging of analogue and digital situations, systems, and contexts. Pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), sentient computing, pro-active computing, Disappearing Computer, Digital Territory, Ambient Intelligence, all these terms point to a shared 21st century vision on computing as running in the background.

Not only computers, but our whole environment is becoming smarter because computing power and connectivity disappear into it. What will business and cultural industry look like in such an environment? How will this changing environment be translated into educational concepts?

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar changed? The oral literacy – dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall – was made redundant because the techniques could be externalized via the pencil.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century,” Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991). With changing tools, power changes.

In this workshop we will brainstorm about what a master in an IOT is. Does it visualize changing tools and relating power structures? Does it help to manage and/or reconfigure those structures? Can it be internationally organized? And if it can, how? Is it a mash-up of existing programs? Is it a new program? For who? Can Council provide a set of core modules that are generic to a global situation and by linking up with local institutions make these relevant for real everyday transactions, exchange, services?

The workshop will be moderated by Dan Calloway, Liesbeth Huybrechts, and Rob van Kranenburg

You can register here