Jan Benjamin

NRC Handelsblad

25 October 2003

One of the leading daily newspapers/broadsheets in the Netherlands, comparable to the Independent, circulation 275.000, this article was on page 2 of the economy section of the Saturday paper, covering almost a full page.

Digital emotion

Creative sector has more to offer ICT

ICT companies should do more with the ideas from the creative sector. This week a fair was held in Amsterdam to show what media labs and other new media researchers have to offer.

The hip, acid green sofa in the upper room of the Melkweg in Amsterdam is strongly lit. Suddenly the sofa moves. Somewhere in Berlin someone has just sat down on the same piece of furniture. The sofas are linked by Internet. They’re part of the Remote Home project, which looks at new ways of living. This was one of the fifty projects and installations on show yesterday and the day before at the e-culture fair. At three venues around the Leidseplein in Amsterdam designers, artists, scientists and computer experts showed the latest trends in and applications of information and communication technology (ICT).

Why should the mobile phone be the only way to stay in touch with your loved ones, wondered the maker of the ‘e-sofa’, a German architect. Communication through furniture is much more subtle. You feel someone’s presence. And this was not the only holy cow of ICT that the presenters in Amsterdam put into question. Do we use new media in the most ideal way? Is the computer the only digital learning tool for children? Why don’t more appliances use senses such as touch or smell? The big software and electronics companies are only very marginally interested in such issues. The ‘creative sector’ has many innovative ideas – some of them useful and some just funny,as the fair in Amsterdam showed – ideas that might better match what the consumer wants.

The creative sector is made up of all the designers, companies and organizations that do multidisciplinary research into new media. Some of these are famous names such as MIT and Media Lab Europe, but also relatively unknown, smaller organizations. In the Netherlands there are dozens of active media labs, including V2_ in Rotterdam and Waag Society, Steim and Submarine in Amsterdam.

“One of the big problems when you’re developing new media”, says Cathy Brickwood, “is that all this modern technology usually only reaches the consumer if a company sees a commercial advantage in it”. Brickwood is director of the Virtueel Platform, the association of nine Dutch new media organizations, and organizers of the e-culture fair. The aim of the fair was not only to show examples of new ICT applications but also to ask the question how creative organizations can play a role in shaping the knowledge economy. And vice versa. How can the software and electronics industries profit from young, independent researchers? Specialists from the field, the world of research, industry and policy makers at the fair called for co-operation . They see a great deal in interdisciplinary research from the different sectors involved in new media. “Currently this is happening far too little”, says Brickwood. “And that’s a pity, because the creative sector is more focused on what users want. And media labs are more socially aware.” Her colleague Martine Posthuma de Boer emphasizes the point that young designers often let the users get involved in the design process from an early stage and continue playing a part in the process even after something is ‘finished’. “ It’s not only about highly advanced equipment. Some of the projects on show at the fair are examples of innovative use of existing technology’.

The Virtueel Platform has been lobbying for the past four years for more recognition for the media labs. Among its activities has been the co-ordination of more facilties for developers of new media, including high bandwidth. Recently two organizations were linked to Surfnet’s Gigaport network . The Virtueel Platform is also active in applying for funding, one of the most important forms of financing new media research. Brickwood:” Co-operation between smaller, innovative organizations is essential in this process. This is the only way they can gain access to subsidies from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, for example, or from the European Union.”

House of the Future

In the house of the future the inhabitants won’t be communicating with traditional computers, but with cleverly applied ICT. “Houses won’t be full of plasma screens, but will have intelligent furniture”, according to German architect Tobi Schneidler.

In Amsterdam he demonstrated the project Remote Home, a living room with a sofa and a plastic tapestry with sensors that react to the people in the room. The furniture passes on the information – who’s walking around the room; who’s sitting where on the sofa – to another sofa and tapestry in a room that might be thousands of kilometers away. “It’s a way of keeping in touch with your loved ones”. The equipment is still in the prototype phase, but Schneidler hopes to have a smart sofa in his own flat in the near future.

The theme ‘mobile home’ looked at new ways of communicating that ‘explore the experience of the physical and the tactile’. Smart furniture could even intensify our consciousness of place and location.

Habitat, one of the projects from the Media Lab Europe in Dublin, uses the act of drinking coffee as a way to bring people in contact with each other. Two coffee tables are linked by a network. If one person drinks coffee the other person sees a projection of the coffee cup on their table.

The Spanish researchers of NetObjects showed ‘intelligent’ objects, such as the Net Umbrella. The umbrella gives you the weather forecast through a screen in the handle . There’s just one problem: there’s no plastic rain screen as yet.

User friendly playing and learning

“Grab your mobile phone, prepare for your driving test and improve your spelling and maths at the same time”. The European project M-learning aims to motivate young people who don’t want to go to school to get back into learning. The researchers use innovative computer games and educational material made for portable gadgets such as mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants). In doing so, the British, Swedish and Italian researchers try to adapt to the world of the young people they aim to reach. According to the organizers of the fair, the project is a good example of a new look at learning with digital media.

On Thursday and Friday more projects were on show which used user interfaces that bear no resemblance to the average Windows programme. Take Kijdradio for example, an internet application which allows children aged between eight and twelve to set up their own radio station and use a simple console to broadcast their own shows. Marjolein Ruyg, who made Kijkradio, won the Kids and Tools prize at Cinekid [the annual showcase of media for children held in Amsterdam in October, ed]. Her website has already attracted thousands of young radio makers.

The project Amicitia from V2_ and the Netherlands Institute for Image and Sound, offers people the opportunity to make their own digital films using news coverage from a number of European broadcasting companies. V2_ designed an intuitive user interface which allows you to place the video fragments in sequence easily.

The Dutch organization Butterfly Works from Amsterdam designed an online learning programme for the World Population Foundation which gives young people and their teachers in Uganda information about sexual education and social behaviour. Virtual friends Rose and David help the teachers pass on sensitive information about issues such as AIDS prevention and sexual violence. Butterfly Works hopes to expand the project to other developing countries, but the availability of internet, computers and electricity are limiting factors in their plans.

Smart underpants

Wearable technology isn’t only useful, it can also be fashionable. During the e-culture fair there was a ‘fashion show’ of clothing fitted with digital gadgets. Some dozen designers showed their ‘smart clothing’ in Paradiso, clothes that react to bodily signals. The Thai designer Sompit Moi Fusakul for example showed jewellery that reflects the emotional state of the wearer. If your heart beats faster, the jewellery changes shape and colour. The clothing designed by Jenny Tillotson, focuses on the nose. The British designer is working on a dress that can check whether someone is sweating and if neccessary spray some deodorant.

The project Inside/Outside by American designer Katherine Moriwaki uses handbags with sensors to measure air pollution. People wearing the bags can form a network that registers environmental factors. Moriwaki: “ in a normal handbag you collect physical objects. In mine you collect digital objects”.

All rather functional, concluded one visitor to the fair, but above all, fun. But clothes with chips can also save your life. Electronics company Philips, who weren’t at the fair, came out this week with smart underwear for heart patients. If the wearer has a heart attack, the underpants use a mobile phone to call an ambulance.