School in the Cloud

Can Metaverse today replace reality? As the global COVID-19 pandemic distanced humans from each other, an expedition for new ways of communication began to rise. The concept of ‘Metaverse’ became widespread as a solution. However, VR interaction methods developed so far are biased toward audiovisual aspects. There should be more elements to reproduce for actual communication. Considering the early concept of VR suggested in Stanley Weinbaum’s 1935 SF novel <Pygmalion Glasses>, which included vision, hearing, touch, heat, and smell, humanity is still half as successful.

Earth Bits is a data-driven journey to raise collective awareness around the environmental crisis, allowing visitors of maat - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon - to experience climate change from scientific evidence. Earth Bits stimulates reflection on the relationship between science, humanity, nature, and technology in a very objective way. It shows the energetic transition and the current crisis, inviting visitors to explore the intrinsic relationship between people and the planet, understanding the repercussions of our choices and the impact of our actions. As designers, we facilitate the flux and translation of data as fuel for creating knowledge, cultural value, and critical thinking. Not merely providing information or solutions, but creating a new grammar of understanding, to read the complexity of our fast-changing time. Visitors can explore and experience knowledge with all their senses in the storytelling of four parts: four digital and interactive installations, graphics, animated videos compiled with data based on scientific evidence. An example of this approach is a digital wallpaper “painted” with data from the ESA – European Space Agency’s Copernicus program Sentinels (satellites to monitor our planet) that visually translates the scientific information for the public. The video – updated every month – shows the correlation between CO2 emissions by human activity, global warming, and natural phenomena such as floods, ice melting, rising sea levels.

We Remember invites visitors to tell their 9/11 stories as part of the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Visitors to the site enter a sound-proof booth, locate themselves on a world map and record and contribute their stories for use in the introductory exhibition of the permanent museum opening in 2012. These stories are also used to make the Explore 9/11 iPhone application, a mobile guide that features a seven stop walking tour of the area around the World Trade Center, accompanied by audio and photo narration, as well as an augmented reality mode in which photos from the site overlay the phone’s current camera view.

Owlet is a simple, easy-to-use baby sock that includes wearable and removable electronics using the safe, reliable hospital technology of Pulse Oximetery to measure the oxygen saturation in infants’ blood and to detect heart rates.

What The Block is a project which is all about engaging people through design to learn and discover the potential of new technologies. We started out with Blockchain, since designers working with Blockchain, we had been inundated with requests from colleagues, peers, clients, family, and friends to explain Blockchain – the problem was we couldn’t find any good existing material out there.

Xiangyang Xin, PhD, founder of XXY Innovation, Professor at Tongji University. Xin holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University with interests in interaction, experience, service, and organization design, and looks at how design contributes to transformations of lifestyles, businesses and cultures. He had founded MDes Interaction Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and served as former Dean of Design at Jiangnan University and acted as a guest professor in both design and business schools at several universities.

“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser, Poet. Everything in the world has already been discovered. But for a child, that’s not actually true, everything has to be discovered from the start. Today, urban children are spending time indoors more than ever before. Parents and educators are concerned that young children are not using their senses actively and don’t have enough possibilities for explorative learning. Current play experiences invite children to look at new, fictional worlds, which causes them to stop using their wild imaginations. With this project I wanted to ask, instead of providing new things for children to look at, what if we could equip the children with new ways to see and explore the world with?

Plug-In-Play is an interactive installation consisting of an architectural scale projection and a series of networked input platforms representing a playful take on the future of the connected city. It was the central installation of the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, CA by the LAB at Rockwell Group.

Jury Chair May-Li Khoe nominated the Feminist Coalition to honor their mission to champion equality for women in Nigerian society with a core focus on education, financial freedom and representation in public office, and to recognize how the Coalition was able to create a financially-transparent food, water, medical, security, and legal aid services system in a record-breaking amount of time under extreme conditions of duress.

Peer is a Mixed Reality platform that uses a combination of physical and digital elements to engage students by making abstract concepts and complex forces visible and tangible. Traditional education relies on textbooks, videos, memorization, testing, and instruction in order to teach students about “hard to see” and “invisible” science topics. Although this method of teaching was successful in the past, new teaching methods like S.T.E.A.M. and maker education are making impact in the classroom by changing the way students learn—by doing.