Comments: (0)

2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting: Digital Networks and Physical Space. Call for papers and projects

Category: events

Medialab-Prado issues a call to participate in the Second Inclusiva-net Meeting: Digital Networks and Physical Space, directed by Juan Martín Prada, that will take place from 3 to 14 March 2008.

The purpose of this open participation meeting is to explore the relationship between digital networks and physical space in the context of the increasingly widespread use of portable technology and Web applications in connection with the production and management of geographic information.

Through and open call, projects to be collaboratively developed during a production workshop and papers to be publicly presented will be selected.

Submission Deadline: 30th January 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 8th February 2008
More information and application guidelines at www.inclusiva-net.org

Comments: (0)

2º Encuentro Inclusiva-net: Redes digitales y espacio físico

Category: ⚐ ES+events+internet+tecnologías

*Medialab-Prado *abre una convocatoria para participar en el  *2º Encuentro Inclusiva-net: Redes digitales y espacio físico *dirigido por *Juan Martín Prada*, que se llevará a cabo *del 3 al 14 de marzo de 2008*.

El objetivo de este encuentro es abordar la relación entre redes digitales y espacio físico en el contexto de la generalización progresiva del uso de tecnologías portátiles y aplicaciones web relacionadas con la producción y gestión de información geográfica.

A través de una convocatoria abierta se seleccionarán *proyectos* para su desarrollo colaborativo durante un taller de producción, así como* trabajos teóricos* para su presentación pública durante el encuentro.

Fecha límite de recepción de comunicaciones y proyectos: *30 de enero* de 2008
Notificación de aceptación de comunicaciones y proyectos: *8 de febrero* de 2008

más info en: *Más información y bases de la convocatoria en  www.inclusiva-net.org

Comments: (7)

We are one of the 400 more influential blogs in Spain

Category: ⚐ EN+ecosistema urbano

It seems that nowadays everything is measured with a ranking. Even blogs have their own rankings. In Spain there are about 500 000 blogs. When we started, we never imagined we position ourselves, in just a few months, within the 1000 most influential blogs. Last week we checked the Alianzo ranking to find, to our great surprise, that we were among the top 500! To be precise,we were number 394 more influential blog in Spain…. Great! This is a fantastic news to end the year with. This is working and growing! Thank you all for reading us and thanks to all who take active part.

Comments: (0)

Do you know what a Makeador is?

Category: findings+sustainability+the environment

We can all be Makeadores. Anyone who can find valuable what others discarded is a Makeador. The alterego of the person that appears at the very moment he/she is about to make the action of reusing.

It comes and goes, it shows in temporary situations when we are looking for something. Makear comes from “make up”, mending, customising, personalising, repairing, tuning, adapting, sorting out… you make it pretty.

In today’s consumer society, brands are any word, name, symbol or object used for identifying and distinguishing articles by a particular producer from those made by competitors. They infer certain personality and image to the products, so that they become dependant on the brand.

Now MAKEA is born. An alternative to the “use & dispose” culture. MAKEA is a brand that doesn’t sell anything. It represents an attitude of resistance.
MAKEA is the collective intelligence and creativity that turns into useful again what the consumer society has rejected. The idea is to bring back the motto “do it yourself”, extending the useful life of products, going back to knowing how to make things, breaking with the “empty wasting commodity” that sells in boxes the consumer culture.

I bet you are curious to see what we are talking about… well, then, check out this website: makeatuvida.net

Comments: (0)

Do you know what SUSTAINABILITY is?

Category: ⚐ EN+eutv+sustainability+video

Here is a spot made by Surconsciente. These guys never stop amazing us with their original proposals.

Comments: (2)

Summary of round table: new spaces for diversity?

Category: ⚐ EN+design+technologies+urbanism

Last Wednesday, I (Domenico) had the chance to attend the event held at Medialab (Madrid) about Wikis and Knowledge Standards. I could only watch the round table chaired by Adolfo Estalella, who was joined by Antonio Lafuente, Platoniq and Juan Freire.

Antonio Lafuente talked about the capacity of new virtual communities to generate knowledge that would never be possible without the use of new technologies, such as wikis. He talked about the production process of lay knowledge, which obtains a percentage of “error” of 6%, that is, lower than what is obtained in normal scientific processes.

Platonig talked about some of their most interesting projects, such as the BCC Banco Común de Conocimientos (Shared Knowledge Bank), concerned about favouring free broadcasting networks and free contents (education p2p).

What I most liked about Juan Freire (who I finally met) was his thoughts about the wiki technology: it allows us to generate knowledge while we design it, something that previously couldn’t be done. I’d like to add that it also allows us to associate a static element (design) to a dynamic element (knowledge). He also talked about the concept of standard, describing it as something arbitrary, something that doesn’t depend on nature and that isn’t inevitable.

Talking about Wikipedia, he pointed out how the whole debate about its functioning is taking place with full transparency, thanks to the very essence of the wiki system. All this is new, very new. We were used to standing aside this kind of debates between a few “chosen” ones.

Wikis are introducing transparency standards never seen before. I think we could take example and start thinking about the possibility of similar standards applied to public spaces. Is there a public space where one can enjoy the same transparency standard as in wikis? What would this space be like? I will carry on thinking about this topic, see if something interesting comes up… what do you think?

Ps. I met Marilo from La Fundacio, who told me about a very interesting project: http://projecte3.pbwiki.com/ I will write more about this in future posts.

Comments: (0)

Visualizar: showing the results – Medialab – Madrid

Category: events

4th December 2007 to 5th January 2008
Medialab Prado – Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda 15, Madrid
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 to 20:00h
Saturday: 10:30 to 14:30h and 17:00 to 21:00h
Sunday: 11:00 to 15:00h

Medialab Prado is hosting an exhibition with the outcome of 10 projects developed during the workshop Visualizar, a creative space that brought together, for more than two weeks, international authors, collaborators, lecturers and outstanding figures of the field of data visualization.
The audience will have the opportunity of exploring the transformation process and current situation of the projects in an interactive and dynamic exhibition.
Human Flows (Miguel Cabanzo, Colombia): migration flows in the 20th Century; Mail Garden: Human Centered Data View (Kjen Wilkens, Alemania): personal data contained in digital communication applications; tweedPad (Elie Zananiri, Canadá): Twitter feeds, modifiable in appearance and meaning by the reader; Spamology (Irad Lee, Holanda): spam in an email account throughout 10 years; Barriblog (M Luz Congosto, Madrid): neighbour relationships between blogs; Cascade on Wheels (Steph Thirion, Barcelona): trafic in streets in Madrid and interaction with levels of acoustic pollution; Casastristes.org (Mar Canet, Reino Unido): number of empty houses in large cities and economical impact on mortgages, renting policies, etc.; foodcultura.org (Natalia Muñoz, Colombia): data base for works included in the virtual museum of culture and food; Memory Islands (Miguel Albadán, Colombia): connections between cave paintings and indigenous legends in South America; Metabolicvisualizer.org (Ricardo Carvalho, Hernani Dias, Miguel Cardoso; Portugal): representation of the bio-chemical reactions within a cell.
More information at http://medialab-prado.es/visualizar

Comments: (0)

projecte3* – como innovar la educación

Category: ⚐ ES+educación+eu:abierto

La educación es fundamental para el buen desarrollo de una sociedad. Hoy os presento un proyecto educativo que me parece espacialmente innovador. Se trata del projecte3, que conocí en una mesa redonda en el Medialab-Prado de Madrid. Para los que quieran saber más le invito a visitar la pagina de la Fundició que promueve el proyecto.

projecte3* propone llevar a cabo junto a los estudiantes una investigación sobre la relación entre las disposiciones espaciales y la distribución del poder de manera que se desactiven las relaciones jerárquicas entre profesores y alumnos, estableciendo una red de trabajo auto-gestionada en la que estudiantes, artistas, profesores y arquitectos puedan compartir su propio bagaje en un proceso colaborativo, horizontal y mútuo de construcción de conocimiento.

El proyecto propone ensayar nuevos modelos educativos y en este sentido, los estudiantes ha seguido diferentes procesos y estrategias de aprendizaje auto-organizado:

*Lecturas en grupo y grupos de conversación: Tanto estudiantes como miembros de LaFundició llevaron a clase textos o materiales audiovisuales relacionados con varios aspectos del sistema escolar. Los textos, canciones y clips fueron abiertamente discutidos en la clase de un modo dialógico e informal. Algunos de los asuntos que salieron a relucir fueron: “distribución de mesas y sillas”, “conocimiento legitimado exclusivamente por el profesor”, el sistema de vigilancia al que están sometidos, desde la distribución de los espacios hasta las reglas que les prohibían permanecer en los pasillos o la sirena que regulaba la entrada a clase, la “prohibición de teléfonos móviles y mp3 en la clase”, la escasa representación de sus intereses dentro de la escuela, un currículum impuesto que nos les interesa…

*Proyectos personales de investigación: Proyectos de investigación centrados en temas de su interés personal que van desde la cultura popular juvenil hasta asuntos de macropolítica como: series de televisión para adolescentes, bandas de pop-rock, el tuning, la agoge, las relaciones de pareja, la ocupación, el G8, la pornografía…; esta investigación, así como todo el proceso de trabajo, noticias y otros materiales relacionados con el proyecto son publicados en un sitio wiki (http://projecte3.pbwiki.com/). El wiki ha sido también un punto de partida para integrar el proyecto en una red más amplia de iniciativas educativas, culturales y/o sociales a escala local y global.

*Peer learning: En colaboración con el colectivo de arquitectos Catarqsis, los estudiantes han desarrollado un completo estudio de los usos del espacio tomando en cuenta parámetros tales como la vigilancia, el estudio, la libertad, la oportunidad, el odio, la diversión/placer o la prohibición, trazando una especie de cartografía psico-geográfica de la escuela.

Comments: (0)

Pallet house – building with pallets

Category: humanitarian architecture+research

Last week, I (Domenico) had party at my house. It was pretty good, I met a couple of really nice people. I also had a surprise. I suddenly bumped into Eduardo from BiciMad. He happens to be a friend of a friend. We hadn’t met before. I had been wanting to meet someone from BiciMad for some time. We talked about the bike lane in Madrid and other possible projects… however, this post is about something else. Eduardo told us about this project he is doing using pallets. Jana, from our office, has done some search and has found this site with a few examples of architecture built using pallets: pallet house. Hope you like it….

Comment: (1)

More than 6000 visits a month

Category: ⚐ EN+ecosistema urbano+internet

This month we have received a nice surprise: our blog has more than 6000 visist a month and we have reached the number of 4000 visitors a month. We are also happy to have 140 people subscribed to the Spanish version and 59 to the English version – they receive our news daily in their mail or in their favourite feed. This is really a wonderful surprise. We are very happy with the blog. We would like it to become even more participative, a catalyst for creative and innovative people, ideas and projects. We are open to all your proposals – just write to us. We want to offer this space to (interesting) people for publishing their ideas and projects.
I also want to introduce some new projects. We are very interested in the new phenomenon of Social Network, specially sites like Facebook, which we are already using for our community (eu:abierto). Well, we have just launched another community in facebook for students. All students are welcome to join (write in English as you please!!).