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.

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!