MoDe Workshop

I participated in the MoDe (Mobiling and Designing) workshop, which was conducted by the team from Initiative Information Studies, University of Tokyo lead by Professor Shin Mizukoshi at Media Lab on the 20th March 2006.

MoDe project is an experimental project to investigate a new type of media research linking analytical humanities and social scientific research to creative experimental research in fields such as media literacy, information design and media art. This project includes efforts to nurture public media literacy on mobile media, as well as the development and implementation of practical programs (educational materials, curricula, workshop) in order to reinvigorate public communication.

This research group has been developing their own framework of methodology that is called “media probe”, which combines activities, such as information design, workshop program, media literacy program and ethnographic research. Starting from designing media, they have been experimenting new ways of media communication based on critical views to the current mode of media. They design a new media and gave it to the users to be tested. The new media aims to provoke user reaction so that they may express themselves through that media. After a period of time, they gather the traces of the users' activities left in these medias. Redesign media based on the information from the probes and iterate the next cycle are the next steps of the design process.

In this workshop, they particularly introduce the Cambrian game. Cambrian was a combination of old and new methods. Renga, which is considered as an old method, is an old Japanese series of poetries, which link as inspiration of emergence and whose space focused in sessions. The new method that they use is blogging.

In Cambrian game, renga was used as inspiration to share interesting digital images to the the community. The game allows players to submit their own "leaf" in form of pictures, images, music/sounds, movies, commentaries to a virtual tree using their mobile devices or PC. The players can link a new leaf to any inspiring leaf. A leaf can trigger some leaves which will grow the tree explosively.

Playing Cambrian game has a lot of similarities with blogging. The game encourages individual to share their personal thoughts, memories and favorites in public spaces, in particular using their mobile devices.

From learning point of view, I think the game has a lot of potentials in supporting the process of idea generation, mind mapping, data gathering, etc.

Moreover, the game can be used as means to start communication in the community. People start to get to know each other by playing the Cambrian game. In one of their workshop, the research groups extended the format of file sharing from digital pictures to movies and music. Combined with other technology, such as QR-code and RFID, further interaction and sharing information techniques can be developed further.

Creative communities and innovation

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) is a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which is to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability.

At UIAH, we had the EMUDE seminar held on the 10th February 2006.

Professor Ezio Manzini, from Faculty of Design, Milan Polytechnic explained that in the Emude project, they worked together with eight design schools in Europe to study creative communities of present societies in Europe and act together with these communities to develop technological and system innovation. In his opionion, creative communities consists of people who are active and cooperative, auto-organize and practical, with high degree of initiative and entrepreneurship. Their consortium aims to reinforce present creative communities and implement its capabilities to maximum.

The EMUDE project sounds inspiring, however, it was not clearly explained the sustainability of the project. I hope that this project wil not end only on some conference or research papers and individual's portfolios.

Manzini's presentation was supported by “Overview on Promising Cases and Scenarios” by Anna Meroni and François Jegou from Milan Polytechnic. Anna Meroni presented a sample of cases in Milan, Italia, where they studied and worked with elderly communities to create public vegetable gardens in the busy city of Milan for the pensioners, housewife and unemployed people who do not have their own garden space. They have been employing user-centered and ethnographic approaches to understand the stakeholders and contexts.

Public garden owned by communities itself has been already common in some places in Europe. In this particular case, it is not clearly mentioned that Orti del Parco Nord (Parco Nord vegetables garden) has already been a public garden or it has just started to be a public garden during this project. However, from this case sample, I learnt that the EMUDE project is not only a matter of creating a brand new solution, but it often recycle and re-engineer the existing solutions and then use and adapt them creatively in a new context or in other geographical areas. In my opinion, ability to use different sources of inspirations to translate them into innovative and useful solutions is so called innovative creativity, which is crucial for the design process as well as for the communities of practices.

François Jegou explained that from their research, they concluded 6 ways of doing, 5 personas and 30 evolved solutions.
There are many interesting design ideas to build the communities evolving from the the design process, however, it was not mentioned, which design ideas are really implemented in the real world and what kind of feedbacks they got from the people they studied. I think it is important to present the stage of implementation of the ideas in the real world, otherwise, those great ideas will only be academic research ideas.

In the seminar, there were several Finnish organisations presenting their activities and what kind of roles they have for the communities. It was very interesting to see the real examples how communities could help certain segments of people in different ways. Some of them started very small, but they developed significantly during the last few years. The followings are the organizations that presented their community projects during the seminar: TYÖ & TOIMINTA ry, ORANSSI ry, and KANAVA ry.

Harri Niukkanen from TYÖ and TOIMINTA ry explained that the aims of the organization were to give opportunities for long-term unemployed, disabled and immigrants and to support local economics and sustainable development in means of re-using and recycling.

Oranssy ry started in 1980 started in 1980 when there was lack of reasonable priced housing. The organization targets young people in their mission. They aims to help people to get low-cost housing in Helsinki.

Kanava ry is a communities to help young Somalian imigrants who live in Finland to be able to adapt and integrate in the Finnish society well. They have a lot of education and sport programs. Sometime they send young Somalians living in Finland to go to Somalia so they can learn about their culture as well as appreciate their life in Finland.

After coffee break, John Thackara from Doors of Perception, presented “Innovation and Design in Complex World”. In his presentation, John Tackara mentioned that the EMUDE project should give back to people capacity to resolve their problems within network of their own relationship. There are several things to consider in selecting valuable design problems, which include: vision, strategy, project, creative communities and platforms. During the process, the committee chose ten general themes which they worked on it through Opportunity Map, where people and projects were identified, linked and combined.

The selected projects should have the following factors: scalability, success potentials, meaningful question and tangible benefits. The design and development team should consists of multidisciplinary stakeholders with various tasks that compliment each other. It was not clearly explained that the design concepts resulted in the project met the needs and answer the real problems of the people in the community. The use of advanced technology was showed in the concept
design and it is not clearly mentioned if the projection of the realization of the project.

Kari-Hans Kommonen from Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki gave his presentation on “The Right to Design in a Digital World” . Kari-Hans aimed to answer three main questions in his presentation, which are:
1. Is it important to design?
2. Is there any relationship between the world become digital and rights to design?
3. What should we strive before?

He tried to answer those questions thoroughly from philosophical point of views. Starting from what design is, he then explained evolutionary framework for design. In his point of view, everyday life were design activities and everyone was a designer. Furthermore, he explained about digitalization process, where there was a transformation from electronic devices into multipurpose digital computer that loose their identify and definition. As an example, camera used to have one purpose to take a picture, but nowadays camera is part of a mobile phone. Within a mobile phone itself, there are also different applications that used to be an individual electronic devices.