Unsworn Industries sent a massive delegation to Alnarp the other day. We lectured, workshopped and exhibited at the annual Movium conference, this year themed “Life in the City”. Some 200 people who work with “everything between the buildings” - from landscape architects to cemetary caretakers - attended.

Prototyping the city

Following prominent speaker like Martha Schwartz Erik and Magnus sharpened their powerpoint to the max and delivered a snappy presentation on prototype-oriented city development. The key message: by making potential futures more visible, audible, and tangible they are possible to discuss and evaluate, also for non-professionals. If we are seriously working towards a citizen-dialogue within city-planning we need new “prototyping” formats. The Parascope and its sibling projects is one experiment in searching for such formats.

Post-lunch panoramas

After a hearty lunch all participants were invited by Elisabet, Terje and Magnus to remain seated and get their hands dirty with pens, post-its and panoramas. The brief: turn the space outside the conference venue, “Bobos plats”, into a better meeting place. In one hour. The resulting panoramas were uploaded into a Parascope on-site for swift comparison. Thanks everyone for eagerly joining in!

Stainless steel showcases

Besides two Parascopes, we exhibited a fully functioning Megaphonebooth. Back from duty in Helsinki last summer the Megaphonebooth presents unexpected action spaces and new public communcation modes. It also proved a invaluable tool for the moderator to announce the upcoming lectures to espresso-busy, mingling conference-goers.

Malmö´s Western Harbour area sports a number of state-of-the-art, sustainable solutions for its energy, waste and water systems. These systems are mostly invisible to the untrained eye. Visual storyteller Arlene Birt created a “Behind the scenes” panorama for a Parascope during her residency at Medea.

“Wow, I’ve lived here for three years and I still didn’t have a clue how it all works”, exclaimed one of the locals.

Magnus calibrates the Parascope for perfect alignment with the Turning Torso.

Unsworn Web designed and produced www.mobilsyjunta.se - a crafty website for a series of ambulating SMS-embroidery sewing circles.

Slow embroidery and fast tech

Digital communication meets traditional craftmanship in Threads - a mobile sewing circle, a workshop that tours Swedish rural community centres throughout 2010-2012.

www.mobilsyjunta.se is the online extension of the sewing circles. It documents what is produced in the workshops, offers new trajectories through the material, and invite others to share their SMS-embroideries.

Collaborative development

The site was developed in close collaboration with initiators Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström and producers Swedish Travelling Exhibitions. This allowed us to design a site that tightly integrates with the pyshical exhibition series.

Behind the eternal clotheslines a heavily customised WordPress installation powers the site. We created fresh plugins to allow a new type of “thread-based” navigation as well as custom uploads of SMS-embroideries from the web and mobile phones.

Fowl-curious people gathered at the hugely popular Unsworn Visuals-designed Social Birding tent at Falsterbo Bird Show this weekend.

Perhaps you’re curious about birds (with wings) and bird-watching, but you don’t own a pair of tube binoculars and you’re unsure of how and where to direct your gaze? At Falsterbo Bird Show this weekend you could converse with bird experts while observing live video footage of circling sparrowhawks, honey buzzards, and hobbies on a large screen in a custom designed tent.

Other screens displayed Flickr photos and Twitter messages contributed by fellow festival participants.

Vital components of this Unsworn Social Birding setup are:

• a steady-handed, bearded cameraman with awesome optics
• an exhaustive bird image database ready-at-hand to pedagogically assist the conversation
• nimble google-fingers to conjure up images when the discussion meanders beyond the image database and turns to Chinese cormorant fishing or guano production
• daily film reports from the local bird ringing station
• 200 inches of plasma to fight of the bright sun outside

Stay tuned for more unsworn ornithological experiments!

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!