“really, data is just craft.” (Usman Haque)

Usman Haque (Pachube, Connected Environments) says: “When authoritative sources does not exist (or cannot be trusted) then bottom-up data acquisition is one of the crucial means of making sense of a situation, whether that's through making maps, or observing phenomena, taking notes, making drawings, graphs or whatever. How about the idea of developing a citizen-built map and schedule of electricity outage around Karachi? Building a system that enables quick/cheap scalability of electricity sensing, whether this is a little device that sat on the mains and sent an SMS, or whether it is just a person sending an SMS where and whenever they noticed the electricity was off?

  • to understand whether there was a pattern  to the load shedding that was not being discussed in public (e.g. do  the neighbourhoods of the power plant owner's relatives miraculously  avoid outage?)
  • in order to be more accurately predictive  of near-future outages (i.e. better, and higher-resolution than the newspaper schedule).

One of the most important issues we would have to tackle in the workshop is this idea that data is "out there" for us to use or to find... data manifestly *isn't* out there: it's constructed; it's selected; it's refined; it's critiqued -- whether that's done by scientists, by authority figures or, as i would submit, by members of the public.”

DRC WORKSHOP #01
22 – 27 March, 2010, 9 am - 5 pm
Workshop Studio, DAP-NEDUET, Karachi

Architecture, interaction, systems
Smart Design: making data, making sense through ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ design

Usman will talk about his design and research practice Haque Design + Research and discuss how architecture, cybernetics and interaction  design influence his methods of working.

Conducted by

Rob van Kranenburg (RvK)
(The Internet of Things, Bricolabs)
Usman Haque (UH)
(Haque Design + Research Ltd., Pachube)
Fariha Amjad Ubaid (FAU)
(Assoc. Prof., DAP-NEDUET

The objective of the workshop is to introduce new practical, organizational and technical concepts to the participants and to develop technological, sustainable and socially relevant solutions for the  Karachi and broader regional context.   What does this mean for architecture?

Building will become once again the core unit of design. For something has fundamentally changed; the very nature of information itself, no longer analogue, no longer   digital, and not hybrid neither: buildings, cars and people can now  be defined as information spaces.  In such an environment, - a truly magic   one - people themselves become information spaces. Building, cars and people become information spaces.“ (van Kranenburg, Rob. Towards Designerly Agency in a Ubicomp World, In: Tales of the   Disappearing Computer, Kameas A., Streitz, N. (eds), CTI Press, 2003,  pp. 119-127. https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-July/000486.html)

 



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