MNEMOSTREETS by Liana Lessa

MAID Master of Arts in Integrated Design Master Thesis Project Winter 2016/17

MNEMO STREETS Prof. Hermann Klรถckner Prof Carmen Luippold advisers

Liana Lessa author

1. INTRODUCTION PREFACE THE PROBLEM PERSONAL MOTIVATION THESIS GOALS & AIMS METHODOLOGY CRITICAL DESIGN

2. RESEARCH & FINDINGS MEMORY MNEMONIC DEVICES

ARCHIVE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

MEDIA THEORY

COMPUTER VISION KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTARION REASONING AND PLANNING

PHYSICAL WEB SMART CITIES PERVASIVE MEDIA 3. CONCEPTUALISATION SPECULATIVE DESIGN EVIDENCES TOUGHT EXPERIMENT

4. MNEMOSTREETS SERVICE DESIGN CONCEPTUAL MAP

5. DESIGN VISUALIZATION VIDEO PROTOTYPE 6. CONCLUSION 7. REFERENCES 8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODU

UCTION

PREFACE Technology enables us, it opens unlimited possibilities. At the same time its design can prevent individual expression when homogenized by the uses and needs of its devices. Artificial intelligence is a tool that will eventually be common within the built environment, making the Internet a physical entity of Smart Cities. During this project, related to the above premise, I would like to talk about the role of memory and archives, in particular the future implications of technological advances on these topics.

THE PROBLEM Media have become as ubiquitous as their designs are mobile and transparent. Latest technical developments had also made them connected, pervasive, and embedded into the natural environment. The increased footprint of digital technology and advances in application of AI technologies are building detailed databases not only of companies but also the end user. The invisible algorithmic editing on the web is brought to the physical world and with the discourse of having highly efficient megacities, brings together a behavioral targeting of the population. Once the city is standardized, no place is left for individual difference and subjectivity.

PERSONAL MOTIVATION With a background in film, what attracted me before starting this MA in Integrated Design was, besides the Bauhaus site, the multidisciplinary approach of the course. If I had an idea of focusing on exhibition design and media environments that have the ability to tell stories about the visit of the spectator, the course of my studies events show nothing is certain. While I got interested in German Media Theory and wanted to do research on obsolescence of media through design, I found myself creating a wearable necklace for connecting distant lovers. The media came to my hands to prove itself ubiquitous. The Internet of Things are a reality already and with the advent of Smart Cities the urban informatics is the media environment itself.

But in my point of view efficiency, the smart city motto, shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rule neither a life nor a city. It was then during an intensive workshop on Critical Design that I found myself confortable with the title of Designer. More a tool or a technique, but an attitude towards society. Whereas I bring memory and archive concepts from film studies, I took the challenge to explore representation and matter in these new media. Under the light of the post-structuralism thinking and the material multure perspective, I found the subject. Albeit highly personal, archiving is increasingly getting digitally external and therefore many issues are raised. Who owns this data? How does one access and retrieve this data? Who is allowed to access this media? How to curate media in ever more designs in ever more circumstances? These are the types of questions that motivated me to write this thesis. With time, the number of questions rose and some answers are yet to come.

THESIS GOALS & AIMS In face to the challenges of contemporary society, the present research intends to highlight how dependent we have become on technology and how unconscious we are of the processes behind most of the technologies and devices our everyday lives rely on. Corporate systems are closing the once promised borderless internet and, once claimed by governments, the commodification of user profiles are subject to undergo political pressures as well.

To address the values expressed in the digital memory archive and the cloud hosting structures is also a goal of this thesis. Neither a technophobic nor technophilic appraisal, but a social and critical reflection on alternative possibilities for our technologically mediated lives. The Research and Findings section focuses on the outcomes of my research, starting with a definition of scientific notions of Memory, followed by remembering techniques, and how this is related to Archives, expanding from an individuals memory to the community. After a presentation of the mechanisms involved on intelligent automation systems and its application on the physical web and pervasive media devices, this chapter leads to my argument that Smart Cities are a politicised site of contention between individuality and community, especially related to capitalism.Â Along Conceptualization, the choice for a speculative design approach to this research is explained as well as are brought to the surface the evidences of the memory decay in the contemporary world, which leads to the problem of this research. At this point the reader is encouraged to become an imaginer and is invited to a thought experiment that will serve as the futuristic scenario for the final design of a service. The MNEMOSTREETS section presents the detailed design of this service, which explores the storyteller vocation of the smart cities for assisting people remembering their past. It draws the actors and the touchpoints involved in this offering. Next at the Design Visualization part, a user case scenario is provided in the form of a video prototype for envisioning some potential applications of this service. While not yet completely feasible this social

fiction discuss the ethical, cultural and social ideas following the dazzle of the Smart Cities.

METHODOLOGY CRITICAL DESIGN The ‘Critical Design’ term was first used by Anthony Dunne’s book Hertzian Tales1, from which the present research takes the attitudes and propositions to explore design beyond solving problems. It involves playing between rationality and reality, reinterpreting purposes, challenging concepts until the ‘infra-ordinary’ from the use and misuse of ordinary objects arises. After having their unexpected functionalities revealed, the author describes the result of these disrupted interfaces as radiogenic objects. Poetic aspects emerge from new contexts of use and need and the designer becomes an "author" creating rather than representing experiences. With intent to unsettle the present assumptions concerning archival processes and future applications of media technology in the smart cities, this work takes a speculative approach to design a service stimulating a new attitude in the application of omni-channel user experiences. As the research inhabits the ubiquitous computing era and applies intelligent automation as a technology enabler , the result is a post-optimal object, thus, not 1 DUNNE, A. (2001). Hertzian Tales Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design . London, England: The MIT Press.

so much a tangible object, but a story told through a series of objects materializing the electronic spectrum. Whilst the functionality is not yet attainable, it operates through a ‘material tale’ creating a social fiction by employing the city as a platform and urban appliances as storytellers to shape new experiences on everyday life. EXPERIENCE DESIGN

JOY OF USE

EMOTIONS

Responding to the user‘s emotional needs

CONTEXT

Responding to the user‘s objectives and needs

USE

FUNCTION

Communicating the brand offering and user advantage

Making the product or service available to the target group

BRAND EXPERIENCE PYRAMID (JOY OF USE) traditionaleconomy hierarchy ofof needsBrand (top)experience has been pryramid As society shifts from aMaslow‘s materialistic adapted for use with branded interactions to create this Maslow‘s goods and services to a post-materialistic experience brand experience pyramid. The lables on the lefttraditional show hierarchy of needs (top) has been adapted for use relevant of the consumer cycle. the society, Experience Designthe refers to stage the research and lifewith brandedmore interactions to create the consumer is drawn in and accommodated this brandemotioexperience pyramid. design of experiences created and shaped through nally, the faster we attain joy of use and therefore brand Redrwan from "Branded interactions : technology. It goes beyondloyalty. the material to deal with creating the digital experience" book. the form and functions of experiences, targeting emotional needs in order to archive the customer’s joy of use.

Within the Experience design, the service design field focus on the creation of complex experiences using a combination of intangible and tangible mediums, aimed at providing a holistic service to the user. Because human experience is complex and mostly intangible, services are a series of interactions between customers and the service system through different touchpoints during the customer journey. Understanding the value and the nature of interactions between the stakeholdes in a service, between people and things, between people and organizations, and between organizations of different kinds, is now understood to be central to designing services. It connects the actors involved in the whole service and distributes the valuable elements across the different touchpoints and, through the offerings of the service, considers the user needs to create a desirable experience. Desirability is the emotional dimension of the experience and three main factors are to be de considered: Usability, in terms of frequency, sequence and importance; Utility, or the understanding of the offeringâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s functional benefits; Pleasurability, how the whole solution makes you feel. A pleasurable experience is recognized as central in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s markets.

PRINCIPLES OF SERVICE DESIGN THINKING by Marc Stickdorn2

USER-CENTRED Services should be experienced through the customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes.

CO-CREATIVE All stakeholders should be included in the service design process.

SEQUENCING The service should be visualised as a sequence of interrelated actions.

EVIDENCING Intangible services should be visualised in terms of physical artefacts.

HOLISTIC The entire environment of a service should be considered. 2 STICKDORN, Marc, and Jakob Schneider. This is service design thinking : basics--tools--cases . Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2010.

MEDIA THEORY Computers and computer-enabled networking play a key cultural role in society. The speed of hard drives and network pings are examples of temporalities that machines impose on the human world, generating new rhythms and spaces. Digital media, given itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refresh cycle and the dynamic flow of information in cyberspace, turns images, sounds, and text into discrete instants in time, defining it accurately as a time-based medium. The intensity of connections between people, technologies and imaginations in popular technoculture are consequently transformed by these media technologies.

Over the last twenty years, theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Vilém Flusser and others shifted the focus of research from communication to media studies. The ‘German media theory’ attempts to identify theoretical approaches distinguished itself by the emphasis on the materiality of media as well as the long historical perspectives they offer. Understanding media materiality as a discursive framework of archiving, transmission and technological translations, these theories investigate the artifacts and its interfaces as modes of perception to promote new experiences between the man and the machine. 3 Opposed to Friedrich Kittler statement “Es gibt kein Software”, Lev Manovich defends that “Software takes command”. He offers a perspective on the intangible interface of softwares as the agent of our every digital experience. He discusses the synthesis of cultural forms and computer software, in particular, of Human Computer Interactions, highlighting the shift from older visual representations to the new conventions of data. “As particular type of media is turned into digital data controlled by software, we may expect that eventually it will fully obey the principles of modularity, variability, and automation.” 4

3 KITTLER, Friedrich. Gramophone, filme, typewriter. Standford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

4 MANOVICH, Lev. "New Media from Borges to HTML (excerpt)." In Introduction to The New Media Reader , by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Massachussets: The MIT Press , 2003 .

RESEARCH

& FINDINGS

MEMORY First taken as a human brain capability of storing and retrieving information, great developments have been made in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to access the complexities of the memory processes. While many of the exact mechanisms involved remain elusive it is known that the coding principle of transforming the short-term into long-term memories occurs through electrical signs correlated directly with the level of hippocampal activity. During this process, that happens mostly but not exclusively during sleep, the brain places values on the data, deciding to keep or discard each piece of information. Declarative memory is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled (or "declared"). It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved,

although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Declarative memory can be further subdivided into episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory represents our memory of experiences and specific events in time in a serial form, from which we can reconstruct the actual events that took place at any given point in our lives. It is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions and other contextual knowledge) that can be explicitly stated. Individuals tend to see themselves as actors in these events, and the emotional charge and the entire context surrounding an event is usually part of the memory, not just the bare facts of the event itself. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is a more structured record of facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge about the external world that we have acquired. It refers to general factual knowledge, shared with others and independent of personal experience and of the spatial/temporal context in which it was acquired. Semantic memories may once have had a personal context, but now stand alone as simple knowledge. It therefore includes such things as types of food, capital cities, social customs, functions of objects, vocabulary, understanding of mathematics, etc. Much of semantic memory is abstract and relational and is associated with the meaning of verbal symbols. 5 At the moment of recalling a previous episodic memory, we re-immerse ourselves in the experience. By remembering the city we were in, the film that was playing, the person we were talking to, and how we felt. At the first experience of an event, all these different aspects are manifest in different regions of the brain. 5 MASTIN, Luke. 2010. http://www.human-memory.net/ (accessed 10 01, 2016).

Through a process known as "pattern completion" we are still able to remember them all later on. The associations formed between singular aspects of an event permit one aspect to evoke a wave of memory that includes other aspects. These aspects are presented as clues to the brain to retrieve memories. The smell of tobacco might remind one of a smoker parent from childhood. Conversely some experiences can hinder the retrieval of certain memories. The memory of a parent’s anger at our childish wrongdoing might block out the memory of what was in fact done. But surely the lack of use can lead a memory to fade. “The retrieval and rehearsal of memories has been shown to enhance their storage. Interestingly there’s no actual evidence in humans that memories which remain unrehearsed or unretrieved actually do dissipate over time.” 6 Perhaps all memories indeed are there, but the access to them might be denied or blocked. This memory’s shortcomings affect our daily lives and although our memories are the basis for most of our decisions, we can’t trust them absolutely. Though often reliable, human memory is also fallible, not only by forgetting but also believing something falsely. A misleading, trusted memory could be problematic as modern technologies expand their powers to neurologically and psychologically alter ones memories. “Our memories are already being altered. We just don’t realize it.”, says the Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg on memory-editing drugs. 7 While mostly used in medical treatments for 6 SCHACTER, D. L. "The seven sins of memory. Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience." American Psychologist, no. 54 (1999): 182-203. 7 KEIM, Brandon. The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs. 04 10, 2009. https://www.wired.com/2009/04/memoryedit (accessed 10 24, 2016).

amnesia or post-traumatic disorders, the editing of a memory can cause side effects not yet studied. The challenges of defining the importance of a memory or how long shall it lasts can undeniably change the behavior of the individual. Once altered, it isn’t possible to determine definitively whether an episodic event actually occurred and, consequently, whether and to what extent a particular memory is "true" or "false." Schacter summarizes in the article “The seven sins of memory” the ways in which human recall can fail, and despite the complications these problems can cause, they are side-effects of positive features of memory. They are the following: The transience of memory is how memory degrades over time, the decay of recalled information over time; The absent-mindedness occurs when we’re not really concentrating in the first place. However, a good deal of forgetting likely occurs because insufficient attention is devoted to a stimulus at the time of encoding or retrieval or because attended information is processed superficially; Blocking constitutes one of the most subjective of memory's failures. When people are provided with cues that are related to a desirable item, but are nonetheless unable to recall it, a retrieval block has occurred; Misattribution is a situations in which some form of memory is present, but is misattributed to an incorrect time, place, or person; Suggestibility in memory refers to the tendency

to incorporate information provided by others, such as misleading questions or false memories occurring from a current situation similar to a previous one. This indicates that suggestions made at the time of memory retrieval can lead to the creation of false memories of autobiographical episodes; Bias of recollection refers to the distorting influences of present knowledge, beliefs, and feelings on recall of previous experiences. Bias may also take the form of subtle influences of past experiences on current judgments about other people and groups; Persistence involves remembering a fact or event that one would prefer to forget. It is revealed by intrusive recollections of traumatic events, rumination over negative symptoms and events, and even by chronic fears and phobias. MNEMONIC DEVICES Mnemonic devices are practices used to improve ones ability to remember something. Expressly, it’s a memory technique to aid the brain in better encoding and recalling important information. Cues of information could be an image, a sentence, or a word. Mnemonic devices date back to ancient Greek times. Effectively everybody uses them on a daily basis, even without being aware of it. It’s simply a way of memorizing information so that it prevails stronger within our brain and can be easily recalled in the future. Popular mnemonic devices includes: The Method of Loci, a mnemonic device based on the association of each piece of information to familiar places. Later, revisiting each place in the order of access retrieves the information;

Acronyms, used as mnemonic devices by taking the first letters of words or names that need to be remembered and developing an acronym or acrostic; Rhymes, easier to remember because they can be stored by acoustic encoding in our brains; Chunking is a way of breaking down larger pieces of information into smaller, organized â&#x20AC;&#x153;chunks helps our brains remember more, and more easily;

ARCHIVE Another aspect related to memory is the archive. The archiving of artifacts or information produces as much as it records the event. Through archives, the history is built. While some stories are fortunate to be archived, others are relegated and left to forget. Archivists are the relevant part of this process. In the design of record-keeping structures, the archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the past. This represents a great power over memory and identity; depicting how society keeps evidence of its values. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed. The power of archives, records, and archivists should no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability".8 Historically, budget constraints prevented archive and library institutions from literally overflowing. As the archive goes digital, the volume of data storage has loosened up the judgments on the preservation 8 SCHWARTZ, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Netherlands: Archival Science 2.

or disposal of the digital artifact. More items are collected and the personal archives grow to the size of former libraries. “It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement”. 9 Accordingly, Jacques Derrida reflects in his essay Archival Fever over the power of the archive and its consequences on society. He is concerned with the inscription technology and the psychic apparatus since the technical structures also determine the structures of content. Derrida is interested in the conditions for truth, and archives position themselves uniquely to truth and to evidence. The archival’s cultural expressions have been profoundly affected by the expressive change technology has imposed.The computer age introduced the database, a structured collection of data. Substantial archives that incorporated books, audio recordings, DVDs, editions, letters, postcards, magazines and journals seem quaint in today’s digital age. But it is necessary to consider the algorithmic encoding through which technical media is directed. Instead of narratives, history is told through an efficient procedural operationalization; a body of records now transformed into a mathematical notation. Instead of localizations and binders, the archive works in processes of information. The ways we deal with the archive shapes the relations that are established with the memory. In our archival practices the powers of materialism – 9 DERRIDA, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. Archive fever : a Freudian impression . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 .

platforms, media and storage media, are constantly shifting meanings from memory to data. Reflecting upon system designs of digital archives, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in the article The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory investigates the ways in which the ephemerality of memory is made to last. She emphasizes the memory as the greatest characteristic of digital media, from content to purpose, from hardware to software. Memory makes digital media an ever-increasing archive in which no piece of data is lost, for instance, Internet is always there although specific content may not be. Constantly while searching online, a digital source just disappears. Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, erasable. The difficulty supposedly lies in accessing the data, not in reading it. As well, the complications of forgetting and degradation are turned into technological obsolescences and the following medium becomes the “memory” of the next. “If our machines’ memories are more permanent, if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are constantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures, so that they may store the programs that seem to drive our machines.” 10

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, Artificial intelligence is the use of computers to perform computational processes normally associated with human intellect and skill. 10 CHUN, Wendy Hui Kyong. "The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory." Critical Inquiry 35 (The University of Chicago), 2008: 148-171.

Intelligent Automation refers to the application of artificial intelligence and related new technologies, including computer vision; cognitive automation and machine learning to robotic process automation. This convergence of technologiesÂ gather massive amounts of data from unrelated systems andâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;by weaving systems, data, and people togetherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; offers a intelligent ambience for organizations, corporations and governments. The main technologies behind an intelligent automated system are Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Knowledge representation and Reasoning and Planning. Next, a brief introduction of the possibilities they open for designing more efficient processes.

SIGNALS - References to artificial intelligence on wsj.com have quadrupled since 2010. -

Since 2011, venture capital investment in ventures

related to robotics and artificial intelligence has grown more than 70 percent per year, exceeding $600 million. - An exchange-traded fund that tracks the global robotics and automation sector was listed on NASDAQ. - Google acquired eight robotics start-ups in six months. - Littler Mendelson, a major employment and labor law firm, has formed a practice group focused on robotics and personal enhancement technologies. - Facebook acquired a speech recognition and machine translation company and is creating an artificial intelligence laboratory. - Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volvo plan to introduce autonomous vehicles. - IBM announced a $1 billion investment to commercialize its Watson cognitive computing technology. Source: https://goo.gl/7Rnlq4

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING NaturalÂ language processing (NLP) emerged from the famous Turing Test in 1950, when Alan Turing published his paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, from which he states that a computer could be considered intelligent if it could keep on a conversation with a human being without the human realizing they were talking to a machine. Since then, this field works on allowing any user to obtain useful information from interfacing with computing systems. Instead of specialized languages such as Java or Ruby or C++, there would only be human language.11 One example is Mitsuku, a chatbot developed by Steve Worswick, an 18 years old girl that won the 2016 Loebner Prize. It awards every year the AI that is most human-like in conversation.

www.mitsuku.com

11 PHILLIPS, Winfred. Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Illinois State University. 2006.

COMPUTER VISION Computer vision is concerned with how computers can be made to gain high-level understanding from the physical structure of three-dimensional world by the automatic analysis of images digital images or videos. It includes many techniques as image processing, the transformation, encoding and transmission of images; pattern recognition, also associated with machine learning; and more significantly it includes techniques for the useful description of shape and volume, known as cognitive processing. 12 DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

input

hidden layers

output

Important on this front is the machine learning techniques called Deep Neural Networks. DNNs are pattern matchers that consist of multiple interconnected layers of simple processing units inspired by the neural networks in the brain. DNNs are able to classify a broad variety of inputs — speech utterances, images, sequence of recognized words, location and speed data — and classify these into desired categories — words, objects, meaning representation.

12 VERNON, David. Machine Vision. Pearson Education Limited, 91.

KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTARION The fundamental task of representation is describing the natural world. It is fundamentally a replacement, a substitute for the thing itself, which is used to enable an entity to determine consequences by thinking rather than acting, that is, by reasoning about the world rather than taking action in it. It is a medium for pragmatically efficient computation, that is, the computational environment in which thinking is accomplished. But also a medium of human expression, that is, a language in which we say things about the world. REASONING AND PLANNING Reasoning is the ability to make inferences, and automated reasoning is concerned with the building of computing systems that automate this process by logical deductions. Planning is a key ability for intelligent systems, increasing their autonomy and flexibility through the construction of sequences of actions to achieve their goals, often by visualizing all possible futures and enacting the most beneficial one. This becomes more difficult when other agents can affect the future Together they act under an Artificial Intuition, as described Douglas Couplands in the Bit RotÂ book: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyze it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking -

even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks and, connected together, form even larger artificial neural networks. It sounds scary … and maybe it is (or maybe it isn’t). But it’s happening now. In fact, it is accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s true and definite and undeniable human future” 13 Some intelligent automation technologies, such as those powering a new generation of collaborative robots and Google’s self-driving cars, analyze and respond to a stream of situational data from sensors. Others, like IBM’s Watson, ingest and analyze massive amounts of textual information to respond quickly to complex inquiries, such as a request for a medical treatment plan. Intelligent automation is sometimes used to streamline business processes and make complex decisions faster. Commercial examples include a marketing system that presents offers to customers based on their profile and market basket analysis, a credit card processing system that identifies and blocks fraudulent transactions, and an e-discovery system that classifies documents according to their meaning and relevance to ongoing litigation.14 The developments in machine learning techniques, expansions in sensors, and constantly increasing computing power is creating a new generation of hardware and software robots with applications in all industry sectors, in both physical and information systems, setting new standards of quality, efficiency, speed, and functionality. 13 COUPLAND, Douglas. Bit Rot: stories + essays. Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.

14 SCHATSKY, David, and Vikram Mahidhar. Intelligent automation: A new era of innovation. 01 22, 2014. https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/ focus/signals-for-strategists/intelligent-automation-a-new-era-of-innovation. html (accessed 01 26, 2017).

PHYSICAL WEB The Physical Web is an approach for connecting any physical object to the web. It enables users to navigate and control physical objects in the world across mobile devices. Alternatively, it is possible to execute proximity-based context-aware applications on mobile devices, depending on the surrounding physical objects. One of the connected services based on the surrounding of a physical object are the Quick Response codes. The QR-code is a 3d barcode, mostly used for mapping URLs to physical objects. The documentation of this thesis project can be found also online through the QR code on the left. For network proximity-based context-aware applications, any existing or even especially created wireless node could be used as a presence sensor that can play the role of a trigger. This trigger can open access to some content, discover existing content, as well as cluster nearby mobile users. Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and Wi-Fi modules are present today on every smartphone, smart watch and with the advance of wearable technology everyone will have a sensor following their movements. As the module is moved, the associated data moves together. Their visibility is linked to the current position of the network module. So, the context information will â&#x20AC;&#x153;followâ&#x20AC;? to the moved object. 15

15 NAMIOT, Dmitry, and Manfred Sneps-Sneppe. "The Physical Web in Smart Cities." 2015.

lialessa.com/mnemostreets

SMART CITIES Cities are an important platform on which tech solutions are being created. The term Smart Cities first emerged in the field of urban informatics not long ago. In 2006 at a conference on urban computing organized by the U.S. technology research journal IEEE Pervasive Computing with the theme of “urban computing”, the urban informatics field emerged. Over the last decade, hundreds of labs have produced thousands of street level applications and big technology corporations have entered the field as well. As cities keep being a system of systems, integrating core services in health care, transportation, public safety and education, the APIs16 are at the center of the idea of Smart Cities: they are enabling an automated, responsive data architecture that reimagines city management and government services as a platform creating the interoperability to connect them all the systems. An example is the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting project to retro-fit 140,000 white light LED lights in its street lamps, each with smart connections and sensors feeding back to a command centre. Individual lights can be dulled or brightened, handy for crowds leaving a major event or illuminating areas so pedestrians feel safer, so they don’t have to drive. Richard Sennett notes the commercial attitude toward the application of Smart Cities as a phenomenon of capitalism. Monopoly goes hightech and turns the city into a closed system, only 16 Application Program Interface is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. it specifies how software components should interact.

with fewer players designing it. Smart Cities are intersected with an economic system that is closing things down by disabling fundamental properties; that is cognition, or inductive reasoning. When inductive reasoning on big data takes a corporate approach to cities, the technology which allows cultural ambiguity, because of its capitalist mindset, discriminates and represses. 17 Instead, he advocates for a city as an Open System, which means a dynamic rather than just an efficiently distributed urban space. He sees the role of Smart Cities as an array of complexities and synergies; 17 SENNET, Richard. "RE:PUBLICA." Richard Sennett: the City as an Open System 2016. https://re-publica.com/en/file/republica-2016-richardsennett-city-open-system.

PERVASIVE MEDIA Pervasive media is comprehended as the convergence of media production, pervasive computing and design. Sensors, databases and live content streams are built within the physical web to deliver rich and context-sensitive digital media at just the right time and place. Fundamental to location-based media experiences is the context data used to trigger the right services around it. Context may refer to physical, virtual or social circumstances. Context derives from physical sensors such as GPS, from digital resources such as electronic presence services, and from user input. It may be used raw, such as in the form of pressure or audio data, or processed to create higher-level context data such as identified human presence in a known location. 18 The elements of a pervasive media system are sensors that input data, computing that processes data, actuators that produce an audio-visual or mechanical effect, and connectivity to join them all together. 18 FLEURIOT, John Dovey and Constance. The pervasive media cookbook. London: Print on demand book , 2014.

CONCEPTU

UALIZATION

SPECULATIVE DESIGN InÂ Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose an approach to critical design that is not about create things for solving problems butÂ speculating how a probable future could be completely different. They challenge designers to consider design as a unique mode of social critique. From imagining and building alternative scenarios, designers can play with viewers expectations to create deeper engagement over a social, economic and political issues. At these atmospheres of strangeness the user is an imaginer in a world of making-believe. This approach is most often centered on the question what if ?, examining the potential outgrows from the proposal on the technological development and social relations. By speculating more about the world, reality would become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the chances of achieving desirable futures.

PLAUSIBLE

PROBABLE PRESENT

FUTURES

PREFERABLE

redrawn from Speculative Everythign redrawing Stuart Candy

The diagram above draws a cone from the present to the future, where the Probable future is the traditional design space. Plausible are the alternative futures, linked with the todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world. The Possible future cone includes all extreme scientifically possible scenarios. Preferable futures uses speculative design to debate and discuss what is the preferable future. Designs situated beyond the cone falls into fantasy. While designers mostly inhabit the world of the probable futures, the request is to explore preferable ones.

EVIDENCES DEGRADATION OF COGNITIVE BURDEN The tendency to rely on technology for memory tasks is leading to cognitive consequences as people have less activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in the memory formation. Freeing up cognitive burden that otherwise would have been used to remember specific information is driving us to a constant state of absent-mindedness. People used to remember huge quantities of knowledge — recipes, music lyrics, street maps and family trees — but technology has eliminated both the need and the drive to do so. With ubiquitous online access, at first doubt many people first do a smartphone search rather than calling a friend. The Scientific American has associated the Internet to an external hard drive for our brains, as we outsource an increasing amount of information to the web. 19 The use of the save word in common language in the context of archiving files on external drives is already a transfer of human memory. This belief assumes the machines are more stable and permanent and, thus, better record holders than human memory. Though these ideas suggest a technologically enhanced mind to augment and access human records is better, one problem arises from it. If we keep believing blindly in digital media as memory, what would we think without these devices?

19 WEGNER, Daniel M. , and Adrian F. Ward. The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories. 12 01, 2013.

DNA ENCODING TEXT TO BINARY CODE Binary ones and zeroes represent the ASCII code fo part of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. ...10001000010101110011110000001001100010001... BINARY TO TRIPLET CODE The binary file is mathematically converted into ‘trits;” the zeroes, ones and twos of a three-digit code. ...2011220200021101000202212011121010111022... TRIPLET TO DNA CODE A synthesis machine creates strands of DNA using the trits as a guide. At each step, the next zero, one or two is translated to one of the three cases that differ from the base just used.

...TAGATGTGTACAGACTACGCGCAGCGAGATCGACT... DNA FRAGMENTS The machine makes a large number of strans with overlapping segments of 100 bases each, offset by 25, 50 or 75 bases. This guarantees four copies of each section of code, making it possible to isolate and correct errors. End sequence describe how the strand fits into the total file

25 bases

STORAGE LIMITS Estimates based on bacterial genetics suggest that digital DNA could one day rival or exceed today’s storage technology.

Read-write speed µs per bit Data retention years power usage watts per gigabyte data density3 bits per cm

> > > >

Hard disk

Flash memory

Bacterial DNA

~3,OOO 5,000

~100

<100

>10

>100

~0.04

~0.01 - 0.04

~1013

~1016

~1-

-10

~1019

~1Kg WEIGHT OF DNA NEEDED TO STORE WORLD’S DATA

MEDIA AVALANCHE "Humankind produces in two days the same amount of data it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to generate, and as the Internet of Things become a reality and more physical objects become connected to the internet, we will enter the Brontobyte (1027) Era.” 20 Memory has been taken as a quantifiable data to refer to the capacity of storage devices. How much capacity can a hard drive store? Or how much cost s 5Gb on a cloud service? The cheaper storing data goes, the more people archive. The fact that electronic storage devices are not improving as quickly as the amount of data we produce grows has motivated the research on molecular data storage, in other words, DNA archiving. “DNA is a good storage medium because data can be written into molecules more densely than the basic elements of conventional storage technologies can pack it in”, says Karin Strauss, Microsoft's lead researcher. Another feature is its longevity. As long as the DNA is held in cold, dry and dark conditions it can hold information at times that range from thousands to millions of years. Additionally it resists to obsolescence, as DNA is a universal and fundamental data storage mechanism in biology.

On the left: Nature© - How DNA could store all the world’s data1 https://goo.gl/9CX2e1

While the greatest obstacle to making DNA data storage practical is the cost, Strauss is confident that the costs of reading and writing DNA will drop significantly in coming years. It costed about $10 million to sequence a human genome in 2007 but in 2017, Illumina, a DNA sequencing company, hopes to bring the price of sequencing down to less than $100. 20 LORENTZ, Alissa. With Big Data, Context is a Big Issue. 04 2013. https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/04/with-big-data-context-is-a-bigissue/

STRUGGLE TO ACCESS RECENT PAST Navigating linked documents, sending a text message in the middle of a conversation or taking multiple pictures during a museum visit disrupts concentration. Information takes a cognitive effort to pass from working memory into long-term memory in order to be stored. A lack of attention causes a break in this process and memory can erase information from the mind even before that transfer occurs. Once the archive of memories is outsourced to the internet, another challenge is accessing this past as the majority of documents and media stored online are locked on company servers.Â Personal, collective, public and private memories are increasingly mediated by corporate instances, which can decide on the maintenance of an archive based on business models.

On the right: In 2009 Yahoo!Â switched off the servers for GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services, after offering its former users for a paid service instead. On the left: Phototrails is a research project that uses experimental media visualization techniques for exploring visual patterns, dynamics and structures of planetry-scale user-generated shared photos. http://phototrails.net/

Also browsing through the millions of emails, photos and videos that are easy and free to create today will be the biggest challenge, as for today it is already an arduous mission finding a picture posted on a social media just about three months ago.

TOUGHT EXPERIMENT Beginning in the mid-1970's, after analysing images of the future in many cultures, Jim Dator of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, proposed that all futures stories can be categorized into Four Futures21: Continued Grow, often as a continued economic growth; Collapse, from one or more of a variety of different reasons. Economic, environmental, resource, moral, ideological, or a failure of will or imagination; Disciplined Society, in which society in the future is seen as organized around some set of overarching values, ancient, traditional, natural, ideologically-correct, or God-given. Transformational Society, usually either "high tech" or "high spirit," or both, with the end of some current patterns/values, and emergence of new ones, rather than the return to older traditional patterns/values. This research becomes now a Though Experient, a mental assessment of the implications of a hypothesis. On this Gedankenexperiment the project selects the Transformational Society for imagining a futuristic scenario and invites the viewer to take the following assumptions as factual. 21 DATOR, Jim. "Alternative Futures at the Manoa School ." Journal of Futures Studies , 2009 .

EVER INCREASING ARCHIVAL DESIRE

BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE TO SAVE ENERGY LEADS TO LOSS OF CONTROL OF THE MIND

DNA STORAGE GOES TO MASS CONSUMPTION

MEMORY AND HISTORY ARE SHAPED BY GOVERNMENTS AND COMPANIES;

DISRUPTION OF MEMORY IN STORING AND RECALLING EPISODES.

WHAT IFâ&#x20AC;¦ Based on these assumptions the question arise: What if we couldn't remember episodes of our lives without the aid of technology? Jointly with this main problem further extents become uncertain. Will we have native memories in our minds or will they be in the vault? Is the lost of control over memory enslaving or liberating? Can we appropriate the technology provided by companies to save our memories in our own terms? Will the algorithmic efficiency provide us sensible experiences?

MNEMOS

STREETS

Memories remain embedded in the digital form, remain to be unearthed, read, and decode in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment, the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind. In the book The Art of Memory Frances A. Yates follows the history of mnemonic systems. As she explains, the rhetoric treated architecture as a writing surface, on which images, associated to objects to be remembered, were inscribed. The city working as a mnemonic devide. “The artificial memory is established from places and images, . . . The art of memory is like an inner writing. Those who know the letters of the alphabet can write down what is dictated to them and read out what they have written. Likewise those who have learned mnemonics can set in places what they have heard and deliver it from memory. “For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading.” 22 Awareness to surroundings matters more in a life in the smart city as the rise of mediated information and urban informatics replaces passive amusement.

22 YATES, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

SERVICE DESIGN The service design of MNEMOSTREETS aims to provide the recall of a desired memory while the user moves around the city. The city working as a storyteller for its citizens. Accordingly, the it acts by displaying curated content on unexpected places, using screenbased media, space-based media, and ubiquitious computing and surprising the user of the system works when this getâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s his moment of joy. The adaptive strategy of this service consists in identifying one userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s digital footprints, the data they themselves leave behind, and their digital shadows, information about them generated by others, and dynamically predict the most likely future actions. SERVICE SYSTEM

SPACE-BASED MEDIA

USER SCREEN-BASED MEDIA

UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

After feedback loops of internal & external synchronized data from the physical web touchpoints and the user’s API, the MNEMOSTREETS service react appropriately triggering specific media content on the user’s surroundings. Through a curated serendipity process the memories are exposed as a sensory cartography and while walking by these memorized places, one revives the fact to be recalled. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and serendipity was coined by the english author Horace Walpole after the title of a venetian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not expecting. The visual structure of this media flow interface remembers the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne from Aby Warburg, a spatial collection organized in photographic panels, files and texts about artworks. The result is not just the display of the archive; they are result of a new idea within the archives.

Today, Warburg’s working style would be categorized as researching ‹visual clusters›. Only these are not ordered according to visual similarity, evident in the sense of an iconographic history of style; but rather through relationships caused by an ‹affinity for one another› and the principle of ‹good company,› which let themselves be reconstructed through the study of texts (as for example, contract conditions or biological associations).

CONCEPTUAL MAP

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION

API OF THE SELF Hybrid Cloud Arousal Metrics Natural User Interface

USER

Natural Language Processing Computer Vision Knowledge and Representation Reasoning and Planning

SMART CITY

TOUCHPOINTS

DLP PROJECTOR STREET LAMPS

RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE

iBEACON MESSAGING

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

MEDIA FACADES

AUTONOMOUS CAR

INTERACTIVE WALL

DISPLAYS

CONCEPTUAL MAP For a better understanding of the operation of the MNEMOSTREETS service, a conceptual map is provided for visualizing the relationships among different concepts and actors. API OF THE SELF Seeing all the patterns of a user's life allows you to target their behavior and personalize the experience. While building it the user becomes a meaning producer. The body of information of the user's API comprises three branches of input data. HYBRID CLOUD While the service does not provide storage, the user allows access to the data stored on different cloud services as well as from social media, email services, blogs, among others. The public data from newspapers, books and periodics are also embedded in it. NATURAL USER INTERFACES The use of intermediary devices for interaction with computers bringing the user to operate through intuitive actions related to natural, everyday human behavior.Â Gesture and speech recognition as well as brain-machine interfaces are responsive to the environment and suggest what the next interaction should be.

AROUSAL METRICS Synchronized data from multiple body modalities shape a cognitive-emotional picture of the user. Based on the observation and evaluation of eye-tracking and subtle changes in facial expressions associated with biometrical values such as electroencephalogram (EEG), muscle activities, galvanic skin response and other sensors present on the smart city or on wearables, get insights into both the valence (quality) of an emotional response as well as the amount of arousal (intensity) it triggers on the person.

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION Simultaneously presents an overview, the context and the details of the location and emotional state of the user. Machine learning recognizes the patters on the requested information and triggers the proximitybased touchpoints.

TOUCHPOINTS On the design of this system's interface, the sight, sound, touch and smell are modes of interaction to designing dialogs with buildings. RETINA PROJECTOR DRONES Retina projection as the name suggests is the technology to directly project images on the eyes of the user. Attached to a drone, the lamp can reach the user at any place autdoors.

DLP PROJECTOR STREET LAMPS

RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE

iBEACON MESSAGING

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

MEDIA FACADES

AUTONOMOUS CAR

INTERACTIVE WALL

DISPLAYS

DLP PROJECTOR STREET LAMPS

MEDIA FACADES

CTOR DRONE

OCAEBi

ECTOR AMPS

OUS CAR

A RETNI

CADES

JECTOR LAMPS

CTOR DRONE

ACADES

iBEACON MESSAGING

ENORD ROTCEJORP ANITER

RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE INTERACTIVE WALL

RAC SUOMONOTUA

RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE

AUTONOMOUS CAR

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

iBEACON MESSAGING

AUTONOMOUS CAR

AUTONOMOUS CAR Autonomous cars are able to choose routes for different routes around the city proposing a specific location to pass by or a special landscape. INTERACTIVE WALL

DISPLAYS

STREETLAMPS DLP projection replaces the halogen and LED streetlamp and is capable of projecting images, writing or drawing graphics on the floor surface. ADVERTISEMENTS DISPLAYS Content from existing advertisements can be altered to propose cues on its pictures or videos without misleading the announced product. SCENT SYNTHESIZER

DISPLAYS

SEDACAF AIDEM

INTERACTIVE WALL

MEDIA FACADES

RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

ROTCEJORP PLD SPMA L TEERTS

DLP PROJECTOR STREET LAMPS

AUTONOMOUS CAR

iBEACON MESSAGING

INTERACTIVE WALLS Games are shortly custom-made to reach the street walker. RETINA PROJECTOR DRONE

iBEACON MESSAGING

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

MEDIA FACADES DISPLAYS Far reaching more people, the rules for media facades avoid sensitive content

INTERACTIVE WALL DISPLAYS INSTANT MESSAGING IBeacons spread around the city push notifications.

AUTONOMOUS CAR

SMELL SYNTHESIZER Placed on autonomous car or public indoor spaces, it releases different olfactory notes, like a sound speaker delivers music. SCENT SYNTHESIZER

SCENT SYNTHESIZER

INTERACTIVE WALL

DISPLAYS

DESIGN VISUALI

IZATION

VIDEO PROTOTYPE

Whatch it here: lialessa.com/mnemostreets

The visualizations of the service is made through a social fiction. This heterotopic novel happens on a futuristic zone of rupture where alternative uses for these technologies and the data they generate are taken in the direction of a smart city that is more than efficient, moreover it is capable of dreaming.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;MNEMOSTREETSâ&#x20AC;? Liana Lessa

SERVICE INTRODUCTION

SEQUENCE 01 VOICE OVER: As fast as our personal and public archives goes digital, runs the research for the storage capacity to become unlimited. VIDEO: Images of note-taking, journals, books, photo albums, floppy disks, VHS tapes, Blu-ray, LTO tapes, hard drives, flash memory disks, uploading progress, servers. SEQUENCE 02 VOICE OVER: With DNA storage available to mass consumption, the archival fever reaches its peak. VIDEO: CGI of DNA storage transcription explained

SEQUENCE 03 VOICE OVER: But when memories gets saved as data storage of moments, retrieving any episode from this overflow of media becomes as harder as finding that picture you posted three months ago. VIDEO: CGI of different data extensions piling up and filling the screen. Screen recordning of scrolling of archives, many different interfaces (Finder, web search, social media posts, cloud services).

SEQUENCE 04 VOICE OVER: The Mnemocic City assists you on that! VIDEO: Logo reveal SEQUENCE 05 VOICE OVER: Media technologies have always generated changes in the everyday environment; We are seeing today a significant qualitative shift in the intensity and characteristics of connections between people, technologies and imaginations. VIDEO: Radio listeners, Newspaper stand with people around, magazine reading people, lines at theaters, family watching tv at home, Ipad user, people talking over skype, taking pictures and posting tosocial media, media facades, mapped projections, Iot, interactive exhibitions, etc.

SEQUENCE 06 VOICE OVER: While the smart city thinks, the mnemonic city dreams. The space is your storyteller. It unearths, reads, calculates and decodes the memories you wish to retrieve by curating real time omni-channel experiences. VIDEO: Smart city projects depicting efficiency on transport, traffic, energy. These images fades leaving blurry and colorful accents. Conceptual map is explained and presents some of the touchpoints.

FILM

APARTMENT – NIGHT SCENE 01 MAN helps WOMAN to pack her stuff at her place. While they decide over pack or trash items. MAN shows her some magazines, shaking his head on a negative that he doesn’t like it. WOMAN agrees as well shaking her head. MAN is browsing a book and sees a scene of a man on the floor. He has an strange aspect. Puts the book on the box. WOMAN: And after finally finding an apartment, all this moving process… can’t wait to finish it! MAN gets next a wacky sheep Sardegna snowglobe. MAN: Wow, how about this? No way you’re taking this to my place, right? WOMAN has takes a curious look and immediately refuses to leave it. WOMAN: No I can’t! MAN: Why?!

WOMAN: No… I… I don’t know! But yeah, I must take it! I can’t remember how did I get it, but I can’t leave it… really. MAN: Ahhhrg. Ok. Well, the car is already downstairs. I’ll take the first boxes home. WOMAN: Wait, I’ll go with you, my tabacco is over. He takes some boxes and she grabs her bag;

STREET - NIGHT SCENE 02 They leave the building, say goodbye. She takes one direction and he goes with the boxes to the car. On the street, the streetlamps draws a subtle lucky clover around her. SCENE 03 WOMAN is walking down the street. The bus stop signage she passes in front shows a family picture on an insurance ad. She looks but doesn’t pay much attention. SCENE 04 Leaving the shop, she notices her phone. Gets the phone and it shows a thank you message from the shop and a chance to win a trip to Sardegna.

SCENE 05 Walking back home she passes in front of many sheep in an interactive billboard, they call her. As she comes back to the screen, one sheep give’s her instructions to raise her arms until she gets in the position of the gesture of luck. As she get’s it, her father shows up on the screen doing the same gesture. She laughs. SCENE 06 As he enters the car, he notices a strange smell. The car starts driving. MAN notes the car took the wrong way, the car is passing in front of a building. MAN recognizes the place. SCENE 07 Man is in the car and it stops on a traffic light. Over a building facade there’s an animation of police lights and a gun shootings. The image glitches, changes for a heart beat line. He’s astonished but the car continues. SCENE 08 When the car parks and he goes for getting the boxes out, a drone comes to project on his retina a video of TV news reporting a the rise of heart disease deaths among youth.

APARTMENT – NIGHT SCENE 09 She’s finishing packing. WOMAN The snowglobe! My father gave it me! He always used to do this sheep gesture to wish me luck. MAN is still with a strange face and clears it when gets her confirmation. MAN Hmmm, ok. Anna, was it from heart disease Lukas died? WOMAN Yes, I think so. Why? MAN I just passed in front of his place. Nevermind… (not caring much)

The globe is packed in the next box. The last box is wrapped.

VIDEO REWINDS. Starts over on a fast pace, freezing the frame on each interaction and with CGI explaining the system working through the touchpoints. The full memories are explained. The globe relates to the sheep sound and gesture her father used to make to give her luck. The image on the book reminded the man of a friend who died from a police abuse.

1. streetlamps draws clover 2. bus stop signage changes the ad. 3. phone shows a promoted message. 4. interactive billboard with gesture recognition takes her to make the gesture her father used to do. 5. smell synthesizer releases gunpowder scent. 6. autonomous car changes the route. 7. building facade is displaying a content related to the real memory. While processing, it recognizes that it goes against the systems political regulations. It starts disrupting the memory, contriving that he actually died from a heart attack. 8. drone comes to reinforce the new memory.

CONCL

LUSION

CONCLUSION No memory, no soul, said Saint Augustine. Following the same idea, this research presented how human memory, increasingly aided by technology devices on daily tasks, is getting numbed. The use of the save word in terms of digital storage changes our perception of the values of our memory as well as when we address a storage limit of an electronic storage of memory capacity. As we live in a time of bigger media production and bigger data shadows, either we decide carefully what endures, matters and meaningfully apprehends our receding past or we risk being quietly flooded by todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s growing noise of information.Additionally, the arrival of ubiquitous computing and pervasive media raises the debate over the commodified behavioral targeting as well as privacy concerns.

Design must help admiring the world instead of just operating on it. Form and function are of course high values but the spiritual expression of a product, a service or an experience should lead the man to appreciate his life without boundaries. This demand for sensibility cannot be dismissed as idealism. It becomes a reasonable agenda for designers to care about their work under the profit powers of the market. A human-centric design considers, above all, the user needs and design creations must respects their users specially when using automated intelligence. Predictive programs are only as good as the data they are trained on and unfortunetly systemic inequality is already haunting machine intelligence23. Examples of route maps avoiding poor areas or face recognitions devices unaware of race distinctions are leading to social profiling and redlining. Instead, how to design for a less biased and broader physical web? This project aspires to motivate others designers to reflect on the social changes that are been provoked by technological developments. Not providing a dystopic view of future, instead, by encouraging a heterotopia, a counter-place, a zone of rupture and resistance where alternative uses for these technologies and the data they generate are taken in the direction of a smart city that is more than efficient, moreover is capable of dreaming. Lastly I must agree that not everything could fit on the research. This is not due to a lack of interest on the part of the author, but rather for the sake of brevity and clarity.

23 CRAWFORD, K. (2016, 06 25). Artificial Intelligenceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s White Guy Problem. Retrieved 09 26, 2016, from The New York Times - SundayReview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am seriously grateful to a number of people who helped me develop my understanding of design, and provided suggestions and materials for this thesis. To begin, some people were instrumental in giving me encouragement, confidence, and support. Luana Lessa, Antoine d’Artemare, Bernardo Macke, Alice Dalgalarrondo, Leno Veras and Gilberto Vieira. To the people with who have had a huge influence on my thinking and experience in design, I thank first my advisers Professor Hermann Wolfram Klöckner and Professor Carmen Luippold. As well to those who introduced me to the Internet of Things and encouraged me to face the unknown, all the team at the Creative Coding School in Berlin, especially Nina Valkanova, Martin Ruskov and Achim Meyer. Along the way, a number of people have contributed insights, materials, suggestions, time, and in general, much of which brought this research to life. These include, Konstantin von Sichart , Carolina Woortmann, John Linder, Jo Furch, Lillah Halla, Camila Augustini, Rebecca Duque Estrada, Alexander Kraft, Laura Maas and Julia Schaak, Bárbara Maciel, Farnaz Zamanian, Alejandro Garin, Cecília , Johanna Grau, Fernanda Sá Dias and Anne Sophie Rau. Furthermore, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the help and strong support that I have gotten from teams at different workshops from the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, especially Holger Lohmann, Michael Beckmann, Henry Mertens and Mathias Jüsche. I could not have done it without them.

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FIGURES 01. Paris Kiosk, Jean Béraud 1880-1884; Oil on canvas 02. http://bit.do/hippoc 03. © 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers 04. Mnemosyne, Gabriel Dante Rosetti 1875–1881 oil on canvas 05 and 06. Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov 1929, Experimental film/Silent film

Declaration of Authorship I hereby certify that this thesis has been composed by me and is based on my own work, unless stated otherwise. No other person's work hsa been used withouth due acknowledgement in the thesis. All references and extracts have been quoted and all sources of information, including graphic and data sets, have been specially acknowledge.

ÂŠLiana Lessa, MA Integrated Design, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Dessau, Germany, 2017