When in Shanghai, don’t forget to drop by Malmö’s exhibition at the World Expo. Peek into a Parascope to check out how Malmö’s Western Harbour area was radically transformed from an industrial site with its heydays long over into a fancy-yet-sustainable-and-accessible residential neighbourhood (with plenty of great ice-cream spots).

Unsworn Visuals also helped the City of Malmö with a flexible exhibition design for their huge-wall-of-monthly-changing-exhibitions.

If you can’t go there in person, Magnus went to great heights to bring you these snapshots. Wo hun hao!

In June, Megaphonebooth Kiasma-nurmi, a coin-operated megaphone station, is available for public use in the Kiasma lawn in central Helsinki. For one euro per minute anyone can speak into the handset and have their voice instantly amplified and projected into the local environment.

Megaphonebooth Kiasma-nurmi is the latest product of Unsworn Telecom – a series of poetic telecommunications services by Malmö-based interaction design and innovation studio Unsworn Industries.

“The Megaphonebooth presents unexpected opportunities but also raises questions about responsibility, control, and democracy”, says Erik Sandelin of Unsworn Industries. “It offers a platform from which people can speak their mind, loud and uncensored. Yet, when compared to the loudness, plentitude and persistence of other messages in our everyday, urban lives, the mighty megaphone seems peculiarly powerless. The Megaphonebooth is a functional yet slightly tragic tool that brings focus to an unbalance while feebly attempting to correct it.”

Photos of the Megaphonebooth in potential but rejected locations were exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, earlier this spring.

“We tried to get permission to install the Megaphonebooth in many locations in Helsinki but our proposals were turned down one after the other. Although the sound is not any louder than that of an unplugged, shouting man, the city authorities were afraid of possible ‘sound pollution’”, explains Unsworn Industries’ Magnus Torstensson. “This decibel discussion merely scratches the surface of larger issues of public action spaces and personal responsibility: What happens when you insert your €1 coin? What rights do you acquire? What responsiblity is transferred from you to the machine (and its creators)? What additional freedoms do you expect to enjoy?”

Drop by the Kiasma lawn Tuesday 15 June at 18:00 for a Megaphonebooth picnic! Erik and Magnus from Unsworn Industries will be around. Pixelache will provide some picnic basics, but bring your own drinks, thoughts, and coins!

Megaphonebooth Kiasma-nurmi is conceived and designed by Unsworn Industries. It is produced in collaboration with Pixelache and is supported by Nordic Culture Point. The work is a part of Kiasma’s collections exhibition It’s a Set-up. For more information please contact Unsworn Industries.

We’re on our way back from Gothenburg, after four days of public city-prototyping workshops and urban planning conversations with the Ingrepp research group.

Dead dialogue

A few years ago when a major, central throughway was diverted through a new tunnel, a large slab of land on the southern riverbed area (Södra Älvstranden) in central Gothenburg was suddenly opened for redevelopment. In a (then) much applauded gesture the reponsible quango Älvstranden AB invited teams of citizens to come up with proposals for their future vision of the area. But, as the teams entered politically sensitive proposals that didn’t fit the wishlist of quango, the process was slowly quieted and bottled up.

Keeping up the conversation

The Ingrepp (Intervention) research group has been exploring artistic interventions in city planning in general, and the collapsed Södra Älvstranden process in particular. Ingrepp invited Unsworn Research to host panorama-making workshops at four different locations along the riverbed.

In our custom-made panorama studio passers-by as well as the participating researchers, artists and architects created new versions and visions of the location at hand. The panoramas were uploaded to a Parascope where the different scenarios could be explored and compared to the present milieu.

Learn more about the Ingrepp project through the Ingrepp Tabloid or their rhizomatic Politics of Magma publication.

A megaphonebooth is a public, coin-operated megaphone. Insert one euro, speak into the attached handset. Your voice is instantly amplified and projected into the local environment.

Megaphonebooth Kiasma-nurmi will be available for public use from May 2010

It’s a set-up

Photos of potential - some of them rejected by the city authorities - Megaphonebooth Helsinki locations are currently displayed at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary art as part of the It’s a Set-Up exhibition.

Big thanks to photographer Laura Vuoma for shooting all the Megaphonebooth locations and to Pixelache for their valiant efforts in dealing with difficult Helsinki authorities.

Unsworn Research hotwires Helsinki’s street lights to visualise the city’s energy consumption.

Helsingin Energia is the main provider of power and district heating in the Helsinki area. Radically, they have decided to publicly publicise Helsinki’s energy consumption data in real time.

Together with a few other artists and designers we were invited to propose novel ways of using and visualising this data. The proposals are presented and discussed at the Pixelache festival right now.

Here’s ours:

Hot Lights

Hot Lights connects Helsinki’s use of district heating to its outdoor lighting system. When heat consumption is high, street lamps will pulsate slowly.

The city breathes slightly heavier when the heat is on.

“Our individual actions are increasingly closely connected to global issues”, says Erik Sandelin, at Malmö-based interaction design and innovation studio Unsworn Industries. “The personal is indeed political, not least regarding energy consumption. When I turn on my sauna at home I’m partaking in international geopolitical struggles, whether I like it or not. We envision Helsinki as an ecosystem, with several essential infrastructures that are so entangled in our everyday lives that they have become invisible to us. We take them for granted. When Hot Lights ‘hotwires’ two of them – district heating and outdoor lighting – we become aware of the underpinnings of our current way of life. The pulsating “hot lights” are less of a warning signal than a subtle and beautiful reminder that we’re all part of the same urban ecology.”

Helsinki has 79,000 light spots, administered by Helsingin Energia. In the first phase of Hot Lights a pilot area would be selected to try out and evaluate the concept. Through workshops with the local community the desired level of heat consumption would be established.

A positive side-effect of the project is that it can act as a catalyst for Helsingin Energia to continue experimenting with dimming technologies and exchanging old mercury lamps for newer, more effiecient lamps. Many European cities have saved energy and money by switching to dynamic lightling systems that reduce lamp power at certain times and places – without compromising safety in the streets.

One lucky Parascope is heading east for the World Expo in Shanghai.

The City of Malmö is one of 48 cities invited to partake and exhibit in the Urban Best Practices area of the World Expo 2010. The expo theme is Better City, Better Life. The Parascope will be used to visualise pasts, presents and futures in Malmö’s transformation from industrial harbour-town to a university city with high sustainability ambitions.

Beefed-up Parascope engine

For the Expo, the Parascope will sport brand panorama software that makes installing, using and administrating the Parascope a piece of Chinese cake. Unsworn C++ gurus are busy brushing off their OpenGL skills to produce solid code that can handle the pressure of the expected 70 million visitors.

Unsworn exhibition assistance

Unsworn Visuals is also helping the Environment Department and the Streets and Parks Department in designing their parts of the Malmö pavilion. 18 metres of white wall is to be put to informative, pedagogic and occasionally interactive use.

“Hello hello Uudenmaankatu. I am a Swedish scientist and I’m testing this new Megaphonebooth…”

Unsworn Telecom headed east to pick up the mighty Megaphonebooth at the metal workshop.

Unsworn Telecom’s latest sublime telephone service is ready for deployment! After intense prototyping sessions in Helsinki and Lisboa we handed over the blueprints to our favourite steel-worker Jörgen Bladh at Kylprodukter i Kivik. A couple of weeks later this solid steel beauty emerged.

The Megaphonebooth is now headed for Finland. You will soon hear more from it…

Thanks Albin Brönmark and Ystads Allehanda for the crisp photos.

For the past three months we’ve had the pleasure of having Lisa Wallin as our intern here at Unsworn HQ.

After miraculously managing to combine the everyday Unsworn chores with studies in Physical Computing, Virtual Reality, and Cognitive Science it is now time for Lisa to focus on her studies full time. We warmly thank Lisa for diligently assisting us with everything from Parascope prototyping to designing the web interface for the Telemegaphone backend.

We had Unsworn muckrakers brush off their Sawatsky-skills to get the intern emeritus to reveal the dirty details of everyday industry life:

UI: How come you chose Unsworn? Is it becuse of the great camraderie, international flair and amazing leadership? The exquisite lunch catering? The clean, well-organised and healthy office environment?

Lisa: Besides all those great things I like the way you explore public space, both in cities and in nature, through communication, curiosity, and playfulness.

What’s a typical day like at UI HQ?

Oh, there is no typical day. As an intern I have been to meetings at the bank, doing cable-sloyd in Kivik and looking for prototype material in the streets. One thing that’s typical though are the morning meetings and the lunches with all kinds of people interested in Unsworn’s work.

On your first day you mentioned that Unsworn personnel are not as hip as the website suggest. Could you take a couple of minutes not to elaborate on that?

Of course it depends of how you define hip. My definition in this situation hip was cool and tough. So I got a little surprised at my first meeting when I meet these nice and caring persons that was Unsworn. Their generosity and kindness is something that has been present throughout the whole internship.

Do you have any advice for future Unsworn interns?

Yes, to do a full time internship for a short I think is ultimate because you then can focus all your energy on the intern work. But also I think it depends on which level you are at and what your goal with the internship is. Think about that first.

Any advice for future Unsworn endeavours?

Keep on going!

You’re doing your second year of the Interaction Design bachelor program at K3, Malmö University and you said you wanted to get a better understanding for what an interaction design practice could be like. So, after three months here, do you still want to do this? Where do you want to go from this?

It has been great doing the internship at Unsworn. I learned a lot about how you can work as an interaction designer and yes, this is really something I want to do in the future. My next goal from here is to find out more about what my role is going to be and what other ways of working there are in this area. And to have fun while I’m doing this.

How much taller than Erik is Magnus?

Hmmm, that’s a tricky one. If I would estimate roughly I would guess about 2 or 3 metres depending on which shoes Magnus has.

I’m in Helsinki talking about Burma with participatory art people at KUVA, and discussing Megaphonebooth practicalities with Pixelache prominents Nathalie and Ulla. Minus 15 degrees and biting Siberian wind make the COP15 heat seem very far away. But, back home in Malmö everyone will soon be biking instead of driving.

Bike and Ride

Lucky for them the City of Malmö is planning a new, fancy bicycle hub, codenamed Bike and Ride, next to the new, fancy Triangeln Syd station for the Copenhagen train. Even better, using two Parascopes at Gustav Adolfs torg in Malmö during COP15 you can check out the Bike and Ride facilities and discuss them with city personnel on site.

New feet

For this occasion, Unsworn Visuals designed and produced new battery-powered Parascopes. The new ones are more comfy to use for people of all heights and compositions. They are also easier and cheaper to deploy with no need for 220V hassles. And also, mainly, they are prepared to be powered by solar panels or small wind generators.

Hats off

Thanks to Kylprodukter i Kivik for magic welding skills and to trusty Terje for invaluable, late-night cable-crafting assistance!

As part of the UM Festival, Unsworn Telecom hosted a workshop where we scouted and tested locations for a future Megaphonebooth Lisboa.

While we have already found a great spot for Megaphone Helsinki and have begun implementing it, Megaphonebooth Lisboa is still in its early phase. Together with workshop participants from Portugal, Germany and Brazil we spent a full day in the streets of Lisboa testing where a Megaphonebooth would and wouldn’t work.

We’d like to thank enthusastic and peripatetic workshoppers Saulo, Paul, Torsten, Frederik and Rui and UM Festival and Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, for facilitating and hosting this adventure.

On 21 May 2009, the world’s first Desktop Olympic Games took place in Maribor, Slovenia. This premiere - carried out with due pomp and fanfare - was fuelled by the sweat from a 7-day, intensive, unsworn-academic interaction design workshop.

Contemporary Athletics

Desktop Olympics is an offshoot of the Olympic Summer and Winter Games. Just like the ancient Greeks turned their everyday objects and war tools (spears, discs) into props of olympic competition and play, Desktop Olympians reappropriate artefacts of our times for competitive and playful purposes. In Desktop Olympics, athletes compete with computer mice, qwerty keyboards and office computers in several, new disciplines, ranging from Notepad Fencing to Scroll Racing and Folder Wrestling.

Olympic Challenges

During an intense week in and around Maribor´s old water tower, Unsworn Academy and nine participating students, from various design disciplines, formed the Desktop Olympic Committe. The committee was presented with the dauting tasks of

1. designing and establishing the Desktop Olympic movement and its online presence.
2. inventing, refining and communicating the Desktop Olympic disciplines to local and global athletes and audiences.
3. designing, producing and hosting the Desktop Olympics: Maribor 2009 public competitions.

When the sweaty torch-bearer finally arrived it marked the beginning of the end of a week of hard work, sore keyboard-fingers and science friction:

It turned out to be a beautiful evening at Maribor´s main square:

Designing without producing new stuff

The word design, from latin’s designare, has a threefold etymology: (1) to give shape, (2) to decipher, (3) to assign meaning. Most people think of design in the first sense and connect it to the production and shape-giving of new things. Interaction design brings a fresh perspective that is often more about creating rules and framing situations than adding new stuff to the world.

In Desktop Olympics this is taken to an extreme. Desktop Olympic disciplines are new “computer games” or sports, created without writing a single line of code. We assigned new meaning to contemporary operating systems, by redefining them as stadiums and the applications and icons as athletic props. Similarly by plugging in several USB keyboards and mice into the same computer, we reapproptiate existing interface peripherals into olympic tools.

Design in the Desktop Olympic sense is about crafting invitations and action spaces. In this workshop different invitations worked on several levels: communicating the sports to potential online athletes as well as creating and inviting to the public event in the main square of Maribor.

Mutiny at the Heartwheel

A pivotal moment in the workshop was when the participants literally stormed the post-it wall, grabbed the pens and promptly removed Unsworn Academy from the room. So far the workshop activities had been following a strict schedule but the students felt it high time to take over the rudder.

Of course, this is an educator´s dream. But it also made us question the workshop disposition. Failures are excellent learning opportunities. Had we kept the students in too tight a leash?

The pedagogic dilemma is also connected to a organisational dilemma, as the workshop was part of a public festival. Open, educational processes with plenty of room for mistakes are good for the students, while safeguarding a spectacular final outcome is important for the festival organisers, who need something nice to show to their sponsors and the public.

Loose ends, language laxatives, lessons

• Interaction design is perhaps more an attitude of shameless throwing-yourself-into and tinkering with other disciplines rather than than a set of methods and materials.
• USB-exploitation rules!
• Never underestimate the enthusiasm and self-organising skills of a highly motivated posse of Bosnian, Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian design students!
• Too many roles? Next time we will avoid confusion by not hovering silently between our roles as organisers, helpers, tutors, team members, tech-support, mentors…
• Thanks to the communications team, the desktop olympic hype amassed quickly through photos, videos, friends/fans and tweets.
• Check the official Desktop Olympics site at www.desktopolympics.org for more info, and rules for all disciplines. Play at home with your competitive friends!
• Brian Eno once suggested that more design should be carried out by removing things than adding more. This is a promising topic for the next Unsworn Academy workshop.

Love and credits

Respect to the Magdalena Festival, the Brain Working workshop, the Maribor mayors office, and Rotovž restaurant for supporting the event. Hats off for Ivica and Sara for super-smooth organising. Big hugs to our Olympic heroes: Sarah, Mia, Damir, Klemen, Spela, Ana, Dora, Oleg, Mirko.

In Basel, Unsworn Sound are poster-boys for the Pronto! On Telephony exhibition at the über-friendly plug.in gallery.

Besides convivial ophone-jamming and exciting downstream-floating in the river Rhein we brushed off our academic German skills to attend the dis/connecting/media conference on telephonic idiosyncracies in art and science.

Thanks Raffael, Andy, and the rest for a great time!

Also, you might want to check out the subtle differences in French and English media coverage.

After doing a inspiring presentation of his extensive research into Scifi interface at dconstruct 09 together with Nathan Shedroff, our old friend Chris Noessel went to Sweden to visit, decompress and relax for some days before returning to San Francisco. How well did that plan turn out? Not so much. Always industrious Unsworn Academy soon created a Mini-Conference of their own and convinced Chris to do the premiere presentation. The Show’s on tomorrow at 6PM, Tuesday, September 8, 2009.

This is what’ll happen:

Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two, and use this as a scaffold to investigate how the depiction of technologies evolve over time, how fictional interfaces influence those in the real world, and what lessons interface designers can learn through this process. This investigation of science fiction television shows and movies has yielded practical lessons that apply to online, social, mobile, and other media interfaces.

Welcome everybody for presentation, snacks, small beers and small talk at the Unsworn Industries Headquarters!

Unsworn Telecom went to Helsinki to scout and test locations for a new, loud initiative: Megaphonebooth Helsinki.

Megaphonebooth Helsinki is a coin-operated megaphone to be located in a public space somewhere in Helsinki. To use the megaphone you just have to insert one euro per minute, speak into the attached handset and have your voice instantly amplified and projected into the local soundscape.

Why on earth?

A Megaphonebooth presents unexpected opportunities but also raises questions about responsibility, control, and democracy. Who are allowed control of public space and to what price? What citizen expressions and actions are sanctioned and encouraged by city authorities? In what world would Megaphonebooths be part of the everyday urban infrastructure? What does it mean to buy a megaphone minute? What rights can you actually acquire?

A small hammer

The Megaphonebooth offers a platform from which people could speak their mind, loud and uncensored. Yet, when compared to the loudness, plentitude and persistence of other messages (commercial, cultural and political) that we are exposed to in our everyday lives, the mighty megaphone seems peculiarly powerless. The Megaphonebooth is a deliberately tragic solution meant to bring focus to an unbalance while feebly attempting to correct it.

Scouting and shouting

Finding a good spot for the Megaphonebooth is essential. The location shouldn’t be too obvious, nor too odd. Not too practical for political polemics, nor too romantic and secluded. Thankfully, we got Pixelache organisers Nathalie Aubret and Juha Huuskonen and many other helpful locals to suggest interesting spots for us to try along with important background information.

With our tourist map cramped with circles, x-marks-the-spots and notes, we dug out some cardboard from the Pixelache dumpster and taped together a rough, somewhat portable, mock-up of a Megaphonebooth. Stuffing it with our handy travel-megaphone we had a working full-scale prototype in no-time.

For a full day we stuck to our prototyping itinerary, walking all over Helsinki, setting up and trying out the prototype every now and then.

In the end we managed to thoroughly test:

• The Kauppatori (market) Pier facing the sea
• The Esplanade
• The Railway Station Square
• Kamppi
• Hakaniemi Square
• Kiasma
• The Parliament
• The Mannerheim Statue
• The Long Bridge
• The Curve in Kalio
• Sörnainen Metro Station

Of all these, Kamppi is our favourite spot. It provides ample opportunity to engage in quixotic quarrels with commercialism represented by the Kamppi mall. The Finnish bureau of patents is also conveniently within earshot for those with a penchant for copyright conundrums. There is also plenty of space for a voluntary and involuntary audience.

Did we miss a spot?

Where do you think Megaphone Helsinki should be located?

With her startling composition One day without disgrace and crutches-toting choreography Malmö-based ophoniste Unbelivia charmed her way into the hearts of the stern Jury.

Last day of the station

It was a beautiful August evening at Spångatan yesterday. Ophoniste Grand Prix 2009 became a truly fitting finale for the Ophonestation Malmö installation. International stars mingled with neighbourhood kids. The Unsworn hosts sported their finests denim skirts.

Ophone veteran

Unbelivia is an experienced ophoniste. Under her North American alias La Livia she place 2nd in American She came 2nd at American Ophoniste Idol 2006? in New York. She was also a juror at the spectacular Ophoniste Grand Prix 2006 held at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Big-ups

Unsworn Sound cordially thanks the exceedingly competent jury members: Cindy Lee - art magnate at KRETS, Erik-Mikael Karlsson - sonic connoisseur at SR Monitor, Cecilia Nordlund aka Cilihilli, and radioman extra-ordinaire Tor Billgren.

We also extend loud and proud hurrahs to all the contestants: Olle, Majiker, Unbelivia, Woopededoo, Malmökids, Text och Textil, Serpens Caput, Daniel, Inventor, and Smiling Pause.

Off to Basel

After a tune-up in the Unsworn garage the Ophones will be sent to Switzerland for the Pronto! exhibition.

Three Parascopes are back in the streets of Malmö for the Malmö Festival and beyond.

Festival Parascoping

During the Malmö Festival there’s a lot of people out and about. It’s the perfect time to discuss what Malmö could be like with less cars. The Parascopes, and the various future panoramas they display, act as conversation catalysts to keep up a dialogue between the city-planners, politicians and Malmö citizens.

On-site and on-line

Check out possible Malmö-futures at Stadshuset, Folkets Park and Kungsgatan/Amiralsgatan (until August 21) or explore and discuss on-line at www.malmo.se/framtidskikarna. Hopefully the Parascopes will become permanent and recurring in Malmö, and will come to act as signs that a place is put into play, is in flux and open for debate.

More Parascope reading

Read more about the Parascopes and Unsworn Visuals’ collaboration with the City of Malmö in this article published in Danish landscape architecture magazine Landskap a few months ago.

Future futurising

This autumn we will continue working on formats, tools, and processes for envisioning and discussing potential futures. We’re gathering a dream-team visualisers, citizens, and city-planners.

What places do you think would need a Parascope?

Four Ophones are at your sonic service for a week at Spångatan in central Malmö.

Ophones in the streets of Malmö

During Malmöfestivalen, August 14-21, Unsworn Telecom offers festival-goers of all ages and preferences an unruly infrastructure for musical communication and co-creation.

After two days in the street, we’ve already heard teenagers regurgitating their childhood hardships, mad hatters improvising rampageous kletzmer masterpieces, neighbours threatening to cut-the-cables-if-the-racket-doesn’t-stop-immediately, subtle bicycle-bell interferences, and a friend lovingly turning his rent bill into a crumpled lump in the process of composing a paper-crackling poem.

Ophoniste Grand Prix 2009

Last Friday of the Festival, August 21 at 9pm, new ophone-virtuosos will battle it out with local rockstars, noisemakers and loopaholics at a sparkling, juried event hosted by Unsworn Telecom suits: Ophoniste Grand Prix 2009.

Ophones and Ophonestations?

Ophonestation Malmö is a group of public loop-machines: ophones. Each ophone is made up of a speaker with an attached telephone receiver. By depressing a button on the receiver, ophonists can record sounds which are repeated forever, until another sound is recorded into the same ophone.

The Ophonestation is a space for collaborative and playful sonic experiments that blurs the border of passers-by, composers, musicians and audience. Ophonists from Tokyo to Brösarp have for the last five years created everything from minimal mumbling-poetry to massive chants and rump-shaking beat infernos.

Bora Yoon in 2007 Pophorn action.

Our favourite New York omni-sonic audio architectress, Bora Yoon, just sent us this video of her 2007 ( (( PHONATION )) ) performance at Lincoln Center in New York City: A unique rendition of Kaki King’s ‘Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers’ with cell phones, voice, turntable, and Pophorns.

Let’s sit back and remember those pre-Iphone days while we’re waiting for Unsworn Mobile’s batch of new Pophorns…

I just received a video from Pata de Perro of Pixelazo that took me back two years in time and all the way back to Communa 13 in Medellín. Together with Åsa Ståhl Unsworn Academy hosted a crash course on making an audiovisual installation out of hacked keyboards, lots of metal junk and recorded sounds with memories from the rough(er) days of the neighbourhood.

Read more about Unsworn’s Colombian adventures here.

We’re in Copenhagen enjoying bright sun and dark beers at the (not so Danish sounding) Zum Biergarten. We just finished playing with mighty THUTO in the nearby Axeltorv.

Fingerlicking Good Interactions

THUTO (The Human Touch Orchestra) is to equal parts an interactive sound sculpture and a science project. With THUTO visitors can create different kinds of sounds by connecting various hand-shaped terminals on the surface of the sculpture. Visitors connect the terminals by touching them and allowing a control current to flow through their own bodies.

The electric resistance of their bodies control the pitch of the resulting sounds. A single person or a long chain of people holding hands will thus generate different sounds. There are four pairs of terminals that are mapped to both melodic and percussive sounds, allowing crude music compositions to be performed.

And for those sweet synthesizer falsettos? Wet hands, it seems, create the most high-pitched squeals.

Much ado about THUTO?

THUTO is built to allow people to learn more about electric conductivity in a playful manner and spawn interest in Danfoss Universe Science Park. The project is produced by Studio Total with technical assistance from 1scale1. Unsworn Research helped Studio Total nail and clarify the concept in a rapid idea and concept workshop earlier this spring. Go THUTO!

Why can’t your average forest-walk be as exciting as the latest David Attenborough flick? Last week Unsworn Industries brought fuel to Region Skåne’s workshop to fire up new ideas on technology-augmented nature experiences.

Seminar in the sticks

Our poor human senses miss out on a lot of the exciting stuff that goes on in nature. Our hearing is weak and our vision is limited. We often lack the knowledge on where to direct our attention. New technologies could bring more natural phenomena within reach of our experience-organs.

Region Skåne (The regional council of Southern Sweden) sees a great potential for innovative products and services on this them, and decided to organise a full-day seminar, inviting ICT-companies, tourism representatives, park-attendants and many more from Southern Sweden.

Unsworn Industries was hired to host a concept development session in the field. For this, we developed and demonstrated a series of functional, inspiring prototypes, conducted a mind-boggling lunch lecture and facilitated an intense idea workshop on site in the woods of central Skåne.

Experiential prototypes

For the seminar Unsworn Research developed a series of tools for technology-augmented nature experiences. These were prepared on site by Snogeholmssjön. Erik and Magnus took the seminar-participants on a guided tour where they could try out, experience and discuss the various prototypes.

The concepts were chosen to be inspiring, provocative and to involve different senses, technologies, and situations. They were crafted to act as fruitful points of departure for the participants’ own reflections and idea-processes, regarding experience, technology and business models.

Discovery and BBC have spoilt us with nature action. We’re used to get close up and personal with the animals. The Burrow Surveillance kit offers a way to peek into shy badgers or foxes in their dens, even without the nature-filmer’s professional equipment and patience.

A number of battery-powered surveillance cameras are placed in and outside the den. The cameras wirelessly transmit video to a portable receiver screen which the visitor brings with her. The visitor can observe the activity in the den from a distance, without disturing the animals. With the flick of a switch the visitor can select a camera or choose to automatically jump between cameras.

The Anthill Radio system consists of a battery-powered radio station: contact microphones are buried in an anthill (after asking permission from the inhabitants) and connected to a short-range transmitter. Visitors can tune in to 100.0 FM to listen in on the curiously, milling life of busy ants. The visitors can use any radio receiver, for example an FM-equipped mobile phone with headphones.

The Robocop-o-scope is made up of a hand-held, electronic mini-microscope and a pair of video-goggles. When wearing the goggles you can explore your surroundings amplified a hundred times. Using the Robocop-o-scope is an immersive (possibly nauseating) experience. Tiny movements of the microscopic hand takes your eyes on a dramatic voyage through an otherwise invisible terrain.

We consider it a bonus feature that Robocop-o-scope users in action are quite spectacular to observe themselves.

Do we need more video goggles on our quiet walks through the woods?

While field-testing the prototypes in nearby forests we’ve encountered numerous, bird-watchers, botanists, strollers, and flower-pickers urging us: “Please don’t bring technology out here! We come here to escape all the stress and tech from the city.” Interestingly enough, these nature-lovers were themselves augmented with everything from glasses to loupes, binoculars, cell-phones-with-the-latest-bird-sighting-sms-system, digital cameras, and wheelchairs.

It seems new technology needs a few years of quiet ageing before it’s accepted and assimilated into the nature-user’s arsenal and becomes… natural.

Enjoy these visuals from the seminar and sweaty preparations:

Telemegaphone Dale will reopen August 3 as a permanent landmark and grandiose communications channel of Fjaler in western Norway.

Fjaler municipality acquires Telemegaphone Dale

Telemegaphone Dale was open for two months during fall 2008. People from all over the world - including Dale - called and found their own uses of the service. Word of the Telemegaphone spread like bushfire throughout the blogosphere and generated a lot of buzz in both old and new media (see the film above). When we returned to Dale in October we learned many stories about life with the Telemegaphone, both disturbing and amazing. Check the movie below for a quick summary of the Telemegaphone test period of 2008.

Most Dale-ites were proud of their Telemegaphone. They missed it and the municipality has now finally decided they want to keep Telemegaphone Dale as a permanent landmark and an experimental everyday communications channel.

The project has spurred interest, controversy and debate all over the world. It brings up contested issues of democracy, communication and control. There is also something painfully beautiful in the service offered and the many ingenious ways that people use it.

Grand reopening in Dale

August 3 is the planned date for a grand and much-awaited reopening of Telemegaphone Dale. New York-based omni-instrumentalist Bora Yoon will perform a new Telemegaphone concerto live from Chicago, created especally for this occasion.

More Telecom

Unsworn Telecom is a division of Unsworn Industries dedicated to creating products and services for beautiful and suprising telecommunications. We’re happy to announce that we have just been awarded a generous grant from Nordic Culture Point to expand our range of unexpected infrastructures.

All these good news call for a mango-lassi in the Malmö sun…

In a two-day workshop at the PixelIST festival in Istanbul Erik (Unsworn Academy) and Åsa (å+k and Malmö University) asked the participants: How to communicate, share, and distribute local knowledge in a digital and networked world?

In creating the workshop we started from Åsa’s previous attempts to learn how to drive in Istanbul, despite the fact that she was in Malmö:

From the official workshop description:

The workshop “How to drive in Istanbul” deals with the potentials and problems with translations of local knowledge into digital packages. A number of examples will be presented and a short exercises will be carried out before the students start working with the main brief. Through audio recordings of voices the participants will be asked to translate their record of local embodied knowledge into a format that fits the digital channels of communication. The workshop ends with a reflective discussion where everybody is expected to contribute with experiences and ideas of how these recorded learnings could be distributed via the Internet. What format is appropriate? Do we need a new format? What would it look like? What gets lost in the translations from oral, embodied story of local knowledge into edited sound clip – and from local sound clip to global knol?

Local knowledge

Using a sound recorder, the participants were asked to capture sonic slices of local knowledge and then interpret and edit it into a short sound piece, accessible to the world. (Read the full workshop brief here.)

Listen and learn:

More sounds to be added here as they arrive in our mailbox…

Reflections

A workshop is a learning situation. It demands planning and also a readiness for the unpredicted, since it involves people and people are unpredictable.

This workshop had some added challenges and ‘unpredictednesses’, such as last minute changes in the schedule.

It all started on the Wednesday with a presentation by E+å and some thought-provoking discussions that started off by Nathalie saying that there is control involved in recipes and manuals. It continued by a connection to the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, born in Constantinople (talking about local knowledge…) in 1922, who wrote in ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’ about autonomy of people and our relation to laws. He articulated a difference in thinking, on the one hand, that laws are given by god and unchangeable and on the other hand that we are autonomous and that we can work on changing the laws gradually.

This workshop demanded the impossible: to make an instruction of something as complex as knowledge. And no matter what knowledge a description of it will always end up short of some aspect. Short of the situation, short of the body, short of the time, short of the place.

In comparing the workshop theme with the participants’ previous experiences of following tutorials on the web one person made the comment that “sometimes you miss steps”. Yes, it might be that simple!

Some students appeared on the second day saying that they were forced to go to the workshop. In trying to change that attitude into something that reflects a more self-driven approach to learning, we tried to make the students figure out what they are interested in themselves. One girl said Playstation. She went off to explore how to get to play on expert level on Guitar hero. When hearing the call for prayers we started to discuss how to train your voice to become a good muezzin? One participant suddenly remembered that her dad had been a muezzin (the person, so far always men, who call for prayers) at the age of 11. She decided to start by asking her dad and then continue by asking professionals that are doing it now. Another question arouse from an aching knee: “How to sit down without bending your knee?”

Other questions that were being worked with during the workshop were: How to make a flying carpet in Istanbul? How to love somebody you don’t love?

One less obvious ‘learning’ that can be made in a workshop like this is how to benefit from the others in the workshop group. When one participant said that she was always working alone, a challenge for her could be to collaborate while making the sound piece as a way of understanding local knowledge: to recognise that there are more resources in a group than in one individual.

bell hooks wrote a book in 1994 titled Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom where she uses her own educational experiences in connection to pedagogue and activist Paulo Freire and the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh as well as feminist critical pedagogy.

In the introduction she writes that ”…the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices. Agendas had to be flexible, had to allow for spontaneous shifts in direction. Students had to be seen in their particularity as individuals […] this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement.

bell hooks sketches out strategies for participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge. It isn’t enough to talk about things, it also has to be done, by the teachers as well as the students, LIVED in order to succeed in reaching state of practice and contemplation, action and reflection as well as awareness.

Knowledge and teaching situations, in her mind, is something that requires that the teacher see the students “as whole human beings with complex lives and experiences rather than simply seekers after compartmentalized bits of knowledge.” (page 15) hooks contrasts with “… the objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seemed to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalization.” (page 16)

Mayday, Friday 1st May, made an already cut-up workshop schedule even more cut-up since the Taksim area in central Istanbul, was blocked off and shuttle buses were cancelled. It became a workshop without workshoppers. Or, more optimistically: it became a distributed workshop where those who could work from home did so. Some tutoring was done via email.

We were wondering if this was a consequence of lack of local knowledge in the planning process of the workshop.

The top story of the day in http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/home:

2009 becomes historic year for Turkey’s troubled May Day past

ISTANBUL – The year 2009 is set to become a very important turning point in the history of Turkey’s May Day celebrations that have traditionally been dominated by violence with the government’s declaration of May 1 as an official holiday and the limited opening of a symbolic square for celebrations.

Hurriyet Daily News, 01 May 2009

While starting to edit her recordings one participant said that she was very conscious of the tone, the formatting, how it gives an authority to the knowledge, recognition of knowledge, and what is considered knowledge. Perhaps it’s more in the packaging than in the actual content…

Warm thanks to the participants who made great efforts in trying to learn something and communicating their knowledge! And thanks Pixelache and VCD/Bilgi for inviting us!

More Istabul pixels

Here’s a bonus gallery from our PixelIST week:

/Erik and Åsa

Unsworn Industries celebrated 55 weeks at their Norra Grängesbergsgatan HQ with pomp and pastries.

We promised mammalian dolphin drumming but delivered ophoniste battlegrounds, sourdough megafood, locally produced beer, foamy farm animals, and the occasional jumpstylee beat.

Thanks to all friends and colleagues for the assistance in turning NGBG4 into a smattering epicentre of excellence!

(Red eyes are purely due to a fire in a Malmö recycling-plant earlier in the day.)

To the rest of you who could’t make it: You should have been there. It was great. See you at the next numerological feast…

What would daily life be like in a future Malmö with less cars? In an attempt to engage its citizens in a discussion on how to redesign the city to favour other means of transport, the City of Malmö collaborated with Unsworn Industries. They created three Parascopes – public viewers that show future panoramas based on citizen proposals.

Like many other cities, Malmö needs to reduce the negative environmental impact caused by motorised traffic. For the past five years the Traffic Environment Unit at Malmö’s Streets and Parks department actively promotes the use of sustainable forms of transportation, through campaigns aimed at changing attitudes and behaviours among politicians, businesses, and the general public. The goal is to get people to re-think the way that they use their cars; to encourage them to walk, bike, and use public transport, in order to create a sustainable urban environment.

In a campaign in the autumn of 2007 the City asked its inhabitants:

What should we do in order to reduce car traffic in Malmö?

The response to the question was overwhelming, with more than 1000 suggestions posted on the web forum at www.malmo.se/vagvalet. Suggestions ranged from extravagant sky-trains, to €100-per-hour parking fees, better bicycle infrastructure and free public transport. One proposal suggested canal taxis in the city waterways. Others called for a total ban of cars in the city centre.

The City then approached Unsworn Industries to come up with ideas for a follow-up campaign based on these suggestions, to provide action spaces for a continued dialogue with the public.

Imagine the Future

Together we decided to manifest the ideas and visions of the Malmö citizens in the form of future panoramas. These snapshots of possible, not so distant, futures, were to be experienced on site with special Parascopes (also called Future Binoculars) and on the campaign website.

We selected three busy Malmö spots and contracted five groups of architects, artists, graphic designers, and cultural geographers to create future panoramas for each spot. All panoramas were based on the suggestions of the citizens, but each group was given slightly different briefs and different themes to explore, think through and visualise.

The Imagine the Future campaign took place from 15 January to 8 February 2009. Using the Parascopes curious Malmöites could explore Triangeln (the traffic-congested heart of downtown Malmö) without cars, check out the car-pool hub by the Mobilia shopping mall, and get a glimpse of the canal taxi at Amiralsgatan (the most polluted street in the city).

Parascopes

Parascopes resemble traditional scenic viewer binoculars but instead of showing the here-and-now, they display visualisations of how things might be in the future, in a particular place. By changing the orientation and tilt of the Parascope you can peek around inside panoramic visualisations of a particular spot, and compare them to the present reality. A set of buttons allows you to switch between different visualisations, zoom in, and view a short text about each panorama.

Parascopes are designed to help people imagine, compare, and discuss many potential futures. Each Parascope therefore shows several varied, and sometimes contradictory, visions. Parascope panoramas are not presentations of a future plan but constructive provocations to engage citizens in debating and shaping a place.

It takes practice to learn how to decode a map and envision the terrain it describes. Unlike development plans and architectural models, the Parascopes give you an eye-level experience of future environments, on location in the city space. The Parascopes further blur the distinction between map and terrain by seamlessly aligning the panoramic future visualisations with the present terrain. You can experience and get an immediate feel for many different versions of a place.

From peeking to posting

We designed the campaign to cater to many levels of participation: from passive peeking into a Parascope to actively discussing the topics at hand on the campaign website and through other media.

City personnel regularly manned the Parascopes. Thousands of users took the opportunity to discuss Malmö’s traffic future with them, over a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Few people, however, took the step to commenting on the panoramas further on the website. Shortening and simplifying the gap from peeking to posting is one challenge for future campaigns.

In contrast, a local newspaper article that featured some of the Parascope panoramas generated hundreds of comments and a heated debate. Instead of creating a separate discussion space and trying to move people there, we should increasingly embrace existing media spaces where people are already discussing local topics.

Expectations and promises

Some people thought the panoramas showed changes that had already been decided. They were disappointed to learn that what they saw were mere suggestions. This is partly a communication issue. More interestingly, it shows that many inhabitants of Malmö regard a future with radically different traffic priorities as a plausible and desirable development. Also, people are not used to being asked about their opinion in city planning matters. At best, they are informed about coming changes after decisions have already been made.

Many Parascope users said they would have liked the Parascopes to stay up for a longer time. Several also suggested other locations for the Parascopes – both places that are under current reconstruction and places they would like to get some more attention or that they would like to see changed.

Over time and with frequent usage, we believe Parascopes could become physical and symbolic markers that designates that a particular place is “put into play”, is in flux and open for discussion. Keeping up a constructive dialogue with the citizens requires patience and commitment to building long-term, mutual trust.

New roles, new formats, new tools

The Imagine the Future campaign is a modest step towards redefining the role of the citizen as a potential city and traffic planning visionary. To support this role we have utilized a layman-friendly panorama format for expressing and creating future scenarios. The Parascope is a new tool for experiencing such scenarios on-site.

Parascopes are only one type of tool for more open city-planning processes. We hope to further explore the democratic potential of this initiative by creating a series of tools for citizens, not only to experience and comment on existing scenarios, but to create their own vision panoramas.

What does it mean, what is at stake, and what are the consequences of seriously considering citizens as not only users of, but as visionaries and co-creators of our urban environments?

—
This is the English version of a forthcoming article in Danish landscape architecture magazine Landskab/Landscape. It was written by Tina Giannopoulou, project manager at the Streets and Parks Department in Malmö, together with Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson, co-founders of interaction design and innovation studio Unsworn Industries in Malmö.

Hot chocolate and possible futures at the Parascope premiere in Malmö tomorrow.

It’s not a belated Christmas tree - it’s 860 kilos of envisioning possible Malmö-futures with less cars.

Soon there will be lots of information about the Parascopes; here at the Unsworn Visuals Blog, at www.unsworn.org/parascope and at www.malmo.se/vagvalet. But for now we would just like to invite you to the inauguration tomorrow Thursday 15 January at Triangeln in Malmö. 1 to 2 pm.

The local papers are early birds as usual.

For all you Scandinavian-tongued, here is the official invitation from the City of Malmö:

Hur skulle Malmö se ut om vi hade mer utrymme för fotgängare och cyklister?

Hur skulle det vara om vi hade spårvagnar eller trådbussar? Imorgon kan man kika in i Malmös framtid! På Triangeln, vid Mobilia och i korsningen Kungsgatan/Amiralsgatan står framtidskikare som visar möjliga framtidsbilder. Bilder som bygger på Malmöbornas egna idéer om hur vi ska gå tillväga för att minska biltrafiken i Malmö.

Framtidskikarna, som är unika och väl värda ett besök, öppnas på fredag men redan imorgon, torsdag 15 januari, är du välkommen att tjuvkika in i Malmös framtid!

Klockan 13 ses vi vid framtidskikaren på Triangeln. Med oss har vi kunniga samarbetspartners och kollegor som informerar om framtidskikarna och arbetet med att skapa en bättre trafikmiljö i Malmö. Vi bjuder på varm choklad så att du slipper frysa i januarikylan. Hoppas att
vi ses imorgon!

Welcome!

(Magnus sees months of hard labour and vast todo-clouds finally coming to an end in an elegant yet frantic unwrapping choreography.)

Unsworn Visuals provided a sparkling fireworks-drumkit for the New Year’s party at Norra Grängesbergsgatan.

I like cows. They are big, heavy and probably dangerous - but if you approach them in a slow chicken-race they will always move out of your way.

If you’re in a small boat, passing by a bunch of cows grazing by the river, you can throw some water at them with your bailer. They like that kind of stuff.

Cows usually notice you when you pass by them. That’s good. There is something eerie about animals that don’t acknowlege your presence. Cows will definitely stop what they’re doing and greet you with a stint bovine stare.

I hope no cows are reading this, but the stakes are extra high this year.

Happy new year!

For five weeks this summer people from all over the world could call up Telemegaphone Dale and project the sound of their voice across the small village of Dale in the beautiful Dalsfjord Valley in western Norway.

A few weeks after turning off the installation we went back to Dale to meet with the local villagers and authorities to learn what life with Telemegaphone Dale has been like, and discuss if and how the project could continue.

After Erik and I left Dale, early the morning after the opening ceremony, we’ve had a massive response from the rest of the world, but we have learnt very little about how life with the Telemegaphone has been like in Dale. What have they thought about the experience? What have they heard? How have they themselves used it?

Hanging out in Dale

The Dale Bakery is a major hub for social life in Dale. People go there to meet friends and family, catch up on the latest gossip, and (of course) enjoy some tasty pastries. We spent most of Saturday there, drinking coffee, eating cinnamon rolls and talking to people about their experiences with the Telemegaphone.

People in Dale are very open and forthcoming and soon we had learnt what parts of the Telemegaphone test-run that had been great and what parts that had sucked. We list a few of these reactions below.

Not before long we had also recieved and accepted invitations to (1) tag along to a story telling event in neighbouring Flekke, (2) have a beer at the local bar and (3) come see Bergen band Babe Rawlins in concert. Naturally we couldn’t resist any of this.

The morning after we led a hike up to the Telemegaphone on unsteady, and a bit hung-overy, flatland legs. A handful of locals and some of the resident artists at Nordic Artist’s Centre joined the expedition providing us with ample opportunity to probe their minds as to what they thought of the project.

Monday afternoon we met with the municipality to present the project, share the findings from our research, and discuss possible future scenarios. We were happy to learn that Fjaler municipality (to which Dale belongs) is very positive to the project. The Telemegaphone idea fits nicely with Fjaler’s vision of itself as the small place in the centre of the world and an open and welcoming community. Together we have begun looking into how to take the project further.

Reactions

A lot of people enjoyed the Telemegaphone greatly and had many funny and touching stories to tell.

Here are few quotes from Dale (in orange) and the rest of the world (in blue):

What do you think?

What are your thoughts and experiences of Telemegaphone Dale? Tell your story in a comment to this post or join the discussion on Facebook

Unsworn Telecom organised a public hike up to mount Bergskletten to discuss telemegaphonic issues and to officially close down Telemegaphone Dale for the winter.

Hiking (at gå på tur) is a popular Norwegian past-time and Dale has plenty of breathtaking hike-trails. After negotiating a ceasefire with the local deer-hunters we set off for a picturesque and misty climb up to Bergskletten to get Telemegaphone Dale ready for winter hibernation and inspect the signatures of the Telemegaphone hiking book.

We also valued the opportunity to discuss life with Telemegaphone Dale with the hikers - a small but brave group of local Dale folks as well as international artists residing at the Nordic Artists’ Centre in Dale. Before putting the installation to a long seasonal sleep we made a few last phonecalls, wishing Dale a happy winter and expressed our hopes for future mountaintop telcommunications collaborations.

Finnish photographer Laura Vuoma shot these scenic masterpieces:

Telemegaphone Dale is no longer available. The test-run is over and the annual Dale deer hunt has begun. We’re hopeful that we can turn the installation back on soon. In the meantime we have begun scouting for other nice locations for future telemegaphones.

During it’s brief existence Telemegaphone Dale has attracted a lot of interest and many people from all over the world have enjoyed its unexpected, poetic services. We have received many inquiries and suggestions as to where we could put the next bunch of telemegaphones.

This far we have had suggestions for as exotic and disparate places as Beijing National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest), Birmingham, Southern Jutland, the jungles of northern Colombia, Downtown Bogotá, Times Square New York, Kivik, the Moon, Lofoten, and M’Goun (the second tallest peak of the Atlas mountains)

All of these are intriguing potential locations in their own right and we wish we could get to do them all.

Where would you like the next Telemegaphone to be?

The interest in Telemegaphone Dale has been simply overwhelming.

The early birds get the news

The Norwegian local papers were first to report and caught Unsworn Telecom already when we were assembling the Telemegaphone in the NKD workshop. Less local Norwegian and Swedish papers as well as Internet editions of various publications from around the world soon followed suit.

Blogs drum up attention

Old media aside, it was the mighty drums of the blogosphere that brought the Telemegaphone to the world’s attention. John Thackara (the design guru’s design guru according to design guru Bruce Sterling) was one of the first to pound out the news, calling Telemegaphone Dale “a sublime piece of communications landscape art, or something along those lines”. Soon, a thousand other blogs picked up the thread. Many posts have spurred vivid discussions, the most common themes being:

• “This is great!”
• “This is horrible! Why haven’t the people of Dale chopped it down?”
• “This is not real - you’re just playing us.”
• “I just called and…”
• “I’m gonna call and…”

This post over at the affable Oddstrument Collection sports 184(!) comments at the time of writing, covering just about all of the above themes. Although we enjoyed the conspiratory qualities of the real/not-real debate we decided to put up an FAQ-page to provide at least some straight answers.

International radio

Radio people seem to love the Telemegaphone. Is it because they are sound nerds or because they sympathise with our take on the classic one-to-many communcation? The last couple of weeks we have been interviewed by enthusiastic broadcasters from Canada, Norway, South Africa, USA, Great Britain, and New Zeeland.

The Telemegaphone was also featured in a photo-captioning-contest over at CBC where people were asked to write a caption to the telescoped photo of the Telemegaphone to the right. Our favourite: Oh dear! Yeti dropped his Personal Listening Device.

Memorable radio moments include the BBC World having to publicly apologise — live both on air and Telemegaphone — to the whole village after calling Dale “a small, sleepy town” during an interview with curator Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir:

Norwegian radio added jaunty musical illustrations to their Telemegaphone interview with Magnus and Elísabet:

Erik enjoyed a long, pleasant conversation with Peter Anthony Holder of CJAD’s Holder Tonight talkshow:

CBC Spark is a highly recommended show on the intersections of culture and technology. Here’s their special show on phones - Telemegaphone action starts at 15:30.

Finally, Eric Miyeni from SAfm in South Africa warmed our hearts when he, after an interview with Magnus, exclaimed: “Wow, this is such a great display of faith in people! This is why I love the project.”

More media

Did we mention the French science magazine for kids? The talk by the Norwegian secretary of state? The concert by Chicago-based band Grun-Tu-Molani? The Swedish dance clubs? The many creative and hilarious uses of the Telemegaphone deserve their own post. Soon.

What’s missing?

Voices from Dale, of course! The BBC interview (above) features some words from Torkil, a Dale local, but otherwise it’s mostly the rest of the world speaking. That’s why Unsworn Telecom will head back to Dale in a few weeks to talk to people there about life with the Telemegaphone. There are many more telemegaphonic stories waiting to be told.

What can you report?

Do you have any interesting stories to share?

Unsworn Sound brought the noise to a new exhibition on urban and regional dilemmas.

We want clean, sustainable energy sources but do we accept our stunning ocean view to be invaded by windmills? We want convivial and vibrant cities with outdoor restaurants, clubs and concerts - but are we prepared to sacrifice our beauty sleep? The County Administrative Board of Skåne deals with these issues every day and in a new exhibition at Form/Design Center in Malmö they try to make visible - and audible - these and similar dilemmas.

Bringing the noise

Being renowned and chronic noise-makers Unsworn Sound was approached by The Board to record quality sounds and provide the necessary electronics for the audience to be able to play back the sounds at the click of a button. How could we say no!?

The opening happened a few days ago but the exhibition will be on until October 10. Cardboardy shout-outs to Testbedstudio for coordinating a fine exhibition.

More buttons

If you can’t make it to the exhibition in Malmö to push our buttons, try these noisy buttons instead. Ah, their prefix brings fond memories of this perhaps-too-forgotten 90’s band. End of parenthesis.

Unsworn Academy is commended for an inspiring-yet-practical course on Interactive Flasheries.

Last week Unsworn Academy hosted a two-day inspirational interaction design and Flash programming workshop for the Internet Marketing division of LRF Media, Sweden’s third largest publishing house. We just got an email from them:

We all agree that this was one of the best courses we have ever attended. You certainly deserve to be praised for it.

Why, thank you LRF Media! We’re especially happy that you have already put your new knowlege to creative use in your everyday tasks. So, without further hesitation we embrace this opporturtunity to bask in our own pedagogical prowess. Bask, bask, bask.

Unsworn Web redesigned slapsticky strip-site.

If you’re into the darkest yellows of bana-skid comedy (and understand some Swedish) you will certainly feel at home at www.slapstick-comics.se - the latest creation of comedian Simon Svensson and illustrator Jimmy Wallin.

Unsworn Web helped out with the redesign of the Slapstick site. We used the Wordpress-platform to make it easy to subsribe to comic strips through RSS, as well as providing simple publishing functionality for the comic creators.

Listen to Bora Yoon’s performance - live from Brooklyn via telephone at the Telemegaphone Dale opening ceremony.

Crank up your volume since we’re three kilometres away from the Telemegaphone!

You can read more about the opening here.

Last week the Unsworn Research studio was bustling with activity, as we workshopped with the City of Malmö on how to envision less car-oriented futures.

Ridiculous car trips

Last year the Street and Parks Department of Malmö urged all Malmö citizens to think again before conducting an act of “ridiculous driving”, not referring to people travelling at insane and dangerous speeds but as a response to the fact that almost half of all car trips in Malmö are shorter than 5 kilometres. These trips could, in most cases, just as well have been done by foot or by bicycle. Changing peoples’ attitudes and providing viable alternatives to car-travel before the trip or transport happens is at the core of Malmö’s so called Mobility Management initiative.

Continuing the dialogue

Last September the City asked Malmö citizens for suggestions on how to reduce car traffic in Malmö. People posted more than a thousand proposals and comments to a dedicated web forum. Suggestions ranged from extravagant sky-trains, to €100 parking fees, better bicycle infrastructure and free public transport. The City approached Unsworn Industries to come up with ideas for a follow-up campaign to these suggestions, to conceptualise “an exhibition that’s not an exhibition” - to provide action spaces for a continued dialogue.

Looking at, listening to, trying out, and co-creating possible futures

So, last week we hosted a full-day concept development workshop with people from the City as well as external, invited designers and architects. After the post-it tornado had settled, three clear themes were still standing: The upcoming campaign will be about visualising the proposals from the Malmö citizens as well as actually trying out these possible futures in short interventions. New tools for co-creating the future traffic-landscape of Malmö will also be created.

Good stuff

Ideas from this workshop will be manifest in Malmö public spaces early 2009. We at Unsworn Research have to say that admire the courage of Malmö’s Street and Parks Department in actively encouraging unconventional and provocative ideas. Hopefully we’ll be able to continue collaborating throughout the project.

Battle for the Pophorn Grand Prix 2008 trophy at the Malmö Festival.

This afternoon sports the first of six warm-up sessions for the Pophorn Grand Prix 2008. Battle it out with Rosengård beatboxers and downtown loopaholics to get the trophy at the grand finale Thursday evening! Head for the RGRA-tent at the Malmö Festival or start practicing at home right now by downloading the Pophorns to your mobile phone.

Shout-outs to RGRA and Malmö New Media Living Lab for hosting this sparkling event.

In her opening speech nkd-director Elísabet Gunnarsdottír celebrated the controversial aspects of Telemegaphone Dale and questioned preconceptions of periphery and creativity.

Elísabet’s speech:

I would like to wish you all welcome to this little happening which makes up the grand opening of Telemegaphone Dale.

There is an unorthodox undertone in almost everything connected to the Telemegaphone Dale project and this is how we like it to be.

Dalsåsen has for a long time ­long before the artists center came to be ­ been haunted by “skjulte hemligheter” ­ hidden treasures and bizarre, mystical messages. This is one of the reasons why telemegaphone dale was chosen as the opening event in nkds program to celebrate a decade of creative activity.

It was over 30 years ago that Oddleiv and Thora Fagerheim created the foundation that was later to become Nordisk Kunstnarsentere Dalsåsen or nkd - nordic artists’ centre in dale. At the time their vision received little understanding. Even then the idea of creating a Nordic cultural institution in a remote little village on the west coast of Norway was disliked by many and was certainly not popular with the decision makers of the day.

They said Dale was a remote place – but remote from what?

A great philosopher once said that he always considered the centre of the world to be where he was – that it moved with him – that this was true for everybody.

Another considered the “ends of the world” to be limited only by the bounds of his own skin. Still today we hear voices saying that this region needs to be urbanized – why is this? – to become a smaller copy of a metropolis maybe? – for what reason? – there are countless different ways to accomplish things, and inspiration is all around us ­ right here.

Just imagine what could be done if each and every one of us shed some of the barriers and preconceived ideas we have allowed to build up in our heads – if by turning old ideas upside down and inside out we find ourselves witness to an alternative.

I think that the fate of this centre is in some ways to generate controversy in all its creative forms ­ to provoke, encourage and stimulate reaction and individual response. Our task is to play host to innovative and creative people, to uncover valuable ideas early on, and to help make them happen.

Telemegaphone Dale is an excellent example of this.

I agree with Elísabet’s above points and hope the Telemegaphone will animate discussions on isolation and communication important to rural Scandinavia. Future Unsworn Telecom products will - by offering slots of space, time and sonic amplification for sale - further explore the theme of the commodification of public space and the Right of Public Access (Allemansrätten).

Telemegaphone Dale was inaugurated by the serene sounds of Bora Yoon.

Legs still sore after the amazingly exhausting mounting expedition and subsequent daily mountaintop debugging sessions we were happy to finally slip into our finest suits, cut that ribbon and officially reveal the Telemegaphone Dale’s phone number.

A small crowd of Dale inhabitants had gathered in the garden of the Nordic Artists’ Centre, located on top of Dalsåsen hill between the village down by the fjord and the Bergskletten peak looming to the southwest. The Telemegaphone were visually present as a tiny sihouette in the distance and magnified in a telescope.

Bora Yoon tele-performance

After a poignant opening speech by nkd-director Elísabet Gunnarsdottír the Telemegaphone Dale received a call by Brooklyn-based musician and sound artist Bora Yoon who performed a 5-minute Telemegaphone Concerto, prepared for the occasion. As Bora’s beautiful voice softly filled the valley people stood quiet, watery-eyed and listened. It’s was really quite touching.

A woman said the sounds reminded her kuling (old-style cow calling) and Norwegian traditional singing.

Åsa Ståhl recorded Bora Yoon’s performance onsite at Dalsåsen, 3 kilometers from the Telemegaphone. Crank up your volume, download it, or listen here:

Dale got the number first

We handed out the phone number, written on small business cards, to the people from Dale - half an hour before the rest of the world would have access to it.

People eagerly forwared the number to friends and relatives, and shortly afterward a deep, male voice sang a slow, sad tune. Everyone looked at each other to see who was the caller. Everyone shrugged. The Telemegaphone was no longer in our control.

Half an hour later we clicked the upload button, published the phone number online, and waited for the world to enter.