Lab session

"Firstlab" work day in the Presence Lab.

Firstlab instructions:

The FirstLab is an initial exercise where you will get acquainted with presence thinking, focusing on how users can relate to each other in a distributed setting, an informal social space that you will create together as a group and in which participants interact with each other via an architectural interface and where a communicating element will be used to prompt a reaction from far away. After getting acquainted with different tools, such as the Arduino and some examples of its use in “presence devices” such as the Little Polyhedron, each group will design a mediated space where participants can experience ambient presence. Besides screens, speakers and image manipulation, we are going to be looking at other forms of communicating closer to the related concepts of Ambient Intelligence , Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things. These often emphasise forms of communication in which information is embedded in the physical reality of environments, and it is presented in non-intrusive ways. In Mark Weiser’s words “The best user interface is the self-efacing one, the one that you don’t even notice”. While we will not necessarily follow this advice, the objective of this first lab is to think about other possible ways of communicating, of being remotely present somewhere else and complementarily making the remote to be present here and now.  We will consider in this context different amounts of information and bandwidth, from those involved real-time video communication to those of a twit, a stock market quote or a temperature sensor reading. We will thus develop different forms of engaging and interacting with this information, from actively responding to it as in an online video conversation, to perceiving it only peripherally at a lower level of awareness and engagement, as one may in the physical world be a aware of the neighbour’s presence by the light in their window. We will use for this different types of media and concepts that we have been becoming familiar with during the first lab sessions, such s webrtc or the Arduino.