The workshops have been held so far at:
- the Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden, in 2004 (website)
- the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in collaboration with the NIME conference in 2005 (website)
- the University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK, in collaboration with PLAN (Pervasive and Locative Arts Network) and Futuresonic (Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas) in 2006 (website)
- STEIM and the Waag Society in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2007 (website).
- and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria in 2008 (website and blog entry).
The next edition of the workshop will take place in October 2009 in Santiago de Chile, in collaboration with Medialab-Prado (ES) and the 9th Bienal de Video y Nuevos Medios (CHL). This workshop will be 2 weeks long and follow the Medialab’s production workshop format.

Output from the workshops have been presented outside of the context of the workshop itself, among others places at the Futuresonic and Conflux festivals. A report about the first three workshops was published at NIME’06 (see publication list). The workshops were also at the origin of a panel debate about the future of music at SIGGRAPH 2005, which included former workshop participants (and myself).
A book (which I co-edited) has recently been published by the University of Vienna as a retrospective of the first 5 years of the Mobile Music Workshop.

Website: Mobile Music Workshop
Permanent Steering Committee: Kristina Andersen (STEIM, NL), Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex, UK / Rhode Island School of Design, USA), Lalya Gaye (Dånk! Collective, SE), Atau Tanaka (University of New Castle, UK)
Previous Local Organisers: Drew Hemment (Lancaster University and Futuresonic, UK), Robert van Heumen (STEIM, NL), Lars Erik Holmquist (formerly at the Viktoria Institute, SWE), Ronald Lenz (Waag Society, NL), Nicolaj Kirisits (University of Applied Arts, Vienna, A)
Publications
- Gaye L., Holmquist L.E., Behrendt F., Tanaka A. Mobile Music Technology: Report on an Emerging Field. NIME’06, Paris, France (2006) [pdf]
- Creative Interactions – The Mobile Music Workshops 2004-2008. Eds: Kirisits N., Behrendt F., Gaye L., Tanaka A. Die Angewandte Press, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria (2008).
The workshop’s very own category on we-make-money-not-art: Mobile Music Workshop – We-Make-Money-Not-Art

(2nd picture: “Hearing Sirens” by Cathy Van Eck)

The mechanical and optical constraints specific to analogue cameras have disappeared with the advent of digital technology but still limit the way we conceive photography. Context Photography was a Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute) project, part of the Picture This! project that aimed at taking digital photography to the next level by developing new types of physical interactions with cameras, of visual representation, and of hybrid picture-viewing (see also BashoCam). Picture This! contributed to gathering knowledge about the potentials of ubiquitous computing in enabling new creative behaviours and aesthetic practices.

The design of the context camera was published in [1], its implementation on cameraphones in [2], the user study in [3] and our lessons learned about the implications for designing ubiquitous computing systems for creative purposes discussed in [4] (see publication list below). Context Photography was demoed at various venues such as UbiComp and DIS [pdf]. It was also featured in the press, most notably in leading Swedish newspapers such as Göteborgs Posten and Ny Teknik (see press list below).

The project started in 2002, I joined it in 2003 and co-led it together with Maria Håkansson and Sara Ljungblad. I participated in the development of the last two versions of the context camera prototype, in evaluation workshops and in the longer-term user study that took place during summer 2005.

Project website: Picture This! Context Photography – Future Applications Lab
Project lead: Maria Håkansson, Sara Ljungblad, Lalya Gaye (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute)
Project collaborators: Pontus Munck, Panajotis Mihalatos (IT-University in Göteborg), Mattias Rost (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute)
Publications
1. Context Photography: Modifying the Digital Camera Into a New Creative Tool. Sara Ljungblad, Maria Håkansson, Lalya Gaye, Lars Erik Holmquist. CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria (2004). [pdf]
2. Context Photography on Camera Phones. Mattias Rost, Lalya Gaye, Maria Håkansson, Sara Ljungblad, Lars Erik Holmquist. UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan (2005). [pdf]
3. More Than Meets the Eye: An Exploratory User Study of Context Photography. Maria Håkansson, Lalya Gaye, Sara Ljungblad, Lars Erik Holmquist. NordiCHI 2006, Oslo, Norway (2006). [pdf]
4. Bringing Context to the Foreground: Designing for Creative Engagement in a Novel Still Camera Application. Maria Håkansson, Lalya Gaye. DIS 2008, Cape Town, South Africa (2008). [pdf]
Press
- Context Photography project featured in Sweden’s largest technology magazine Ny Teknik in the article “Så ser ljud ut på bild” (2004)
- Article in newspaper Göteborgs Posten (2004)
- Context Photography – along with other Mobile Life projects – featured in the mobil.se article “Bäst i Världen?” (2007)

As the user was walking through the city wearing sensors on the body, the prototype sensed the user’s urban contexts and actions, mapped this information to the audio processing of live urban sounds in real time, and output the resulting music through the user’s headphones.

The prototype was an open-ended platform for iterative prototyping of sound content and musical interaction and for testing in real-world settings. With this prototype, we could explore new uses of public space and everyday behaviours for creative purposes, for instance the city as an interface and mobility as an interaction model for electronic music making: bringing together perspectives on interaction from ubiquitous computing and from interactive music, Sonic City investigated the idea of everyday embodied movements and gestures – such as walking – as resources for aesthetic digital interactions and experimented with notions of creative affordances of everyday physical artefacts and environments – such as urban space.

The concept behind Sonic City and its early implementation were described in [1], and the complete design process and final implementation in [2]. The results of our user study – which showed how music making can weave itself into everyday urban behaviours in a novel and creative way – were described in [3] and further discussed in [4] (see publication list below).

Realised between 2002 and 2004, it was one of the pioneer projects of the mobile music field and contributed to establishing it. The project has been well-published and well-cited in academia, received a lot of attention in the new media arts scene, and has received extensive media and blog coverage (El Mundo, Receiver, We Make Money Not Art, Metro, Danmarks Radio, etc). Among other places, Sonic City was presented at NIME and Cybersonica, and was demoed at UIST and the EU’s IST 2004 event. It was featured in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac special issue on locative media, discussed in a number of academic articles about sound and urban space, and was included in the book “Worldchanging: a User’s Guide to the 21st Century” as an example of future technologies for urban living (see website below for more details about presentations and coverage).

Sonic City was a collaboration between the Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute) where I was working at the time, and the PLAY Studio at the Interactive Institute. It was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) through the Mobile Life SSF project, by the European Union IST program through the Smart-Its project, and by VINNOVA through the IT+Textiles project. The project was realised in a multidisciplinary team that combined competence and perspectives from architecture, engineering, acoustics, product design, sound-art, sociology, cognition psychology, fashion, human-computer interaction and an cultural studies. I was the project’s initiator and co-lead it together with Ramia Mazé. I am responsible for the concept development, implementation, and user study. I also actively participated in the sound mapping design and in the wearable design.

Project lead: Lalya Gaye (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute), Ramia Mazé (PLAY Studio, Interactive Institute)

Project collaborators: Margot Jacobs (PLAY Studio, Interactive Institute), Magnus Johansson (Interaction Design programme, IT-University in Göteborg), Sara Lerén (Cognitive Science Programme, IT-University in Göteborg), Daniel Skoglund (Sound-artist, formerly part of 8Tunnel2)

Project website: Sonic City – Future Applications Lab

Selected publications
1. Gaye L., Holmquist L.E., Mazé R. Sonic City: Merging Urban Walkabouts with Electronic Music Making. UIST 2002, Paris, France (2002). [pdf] [poster pdf]
2. Gaye L., Mazé R., Holmquist L.E. Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface. NIME 2003, Montréal, Canada (2003). [pdf]
3. Gaye L., Holmquist L.E. In Duet with Everyday Urban Settings: A User Study of Sonic City. NIME 2004, Hamamatsu, Japan (2004). [pdf] [poster pdf]
4. Gaye L., Holmquist L.E. Performing Sonic City: Situated Creativity in Mobile Music Making. Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), Special Issue on Locative Media (2006). [link]

In this project from 2003-2004, we focused on using simple mock-ups with some working functionalities that prototyped possible interaction modalities. This resulted in the conceptualisation of new types of interaction with locative media in public space: with a design approach based on the notions of parasiting and of situationist détournement, physical urban infrastructures become intrinsic parts of the locative media system; and interaction with the digital information overlaid on urban space develops on the periphery of everyday activities in a discreet, poetic and physically embodied way (see publication list below). Tejp was one of the first project to introduce the notion of physical interaction with information spaces in locative media, as opposed to screen-based interaction relying on virtual positioning. Other projects, such as Yellow Arrow, Grafedia or [murmur], have also successfully explored this concept. Tejp has been well-cited in the areas of locative media and urban computing, and has been featured in the press, among others in Wired News.

Tejp was a collaboration between the PLAY Studio at the Interactive Institute, and the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute where I was working at the time. It was funded through the Mobile Life SSF project and the Public Play Spaces project. In this project, I participated in the development of the design experiments, in a street-art formative study and in the overall design process together with Margot Jacobs. I also implemented the electronics in the prototypes and refined the conceptual framework that resulted from the projects. In my research, I eventually used this framework as a basis for the Bricolage project.

Project website: Tejp – Interactive Institute

Project Team: Margot Jacobs (Play Studio, Interactive Institute), Lalya Gaye (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute)

Publications
1. Jacobs M., Gaye L., Holmquist L.E. Tejp: Designing for Embodied Interaction with Personal Information Layers in Public Space. Physical Interfaces – Workshop on Real World User Interfaces, Mobile HCI 2003 symposium, Udine, Italy (2003). [pdf]
2. Jacobs M., Gaye L., Holmquist L.E. Tejp: Ubiquitous Computing as Expressive Means of Personalising Public Space. UbiComp 2003, Seattle, USA (2003). [pdf] [poster pdf]

Press
- Tejp project featured in Wired News: “Balancing Utility With Privacy” (2003).
- Mentioned in NY Arts Magazine: “Interactive Media Art Web Reviews” (2004)
- Mentioned in FORM: “Längtande kuddar, lysande gardiner” (2004).

BashoCam was developed while I was working at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute. I was the project initiator and leader and was responsible for the concept development, design process, and testing with users. BashoCam was part of the Picture This! project that aimed at taking digital photography to the next level by developing new types of physical interactions with cameras, of visual representation, and of hybrid picture-viewing (see also Context Photography). Picture This! contributed to gathering knowledge about the potentials of ubiquitous computing in enabling new creative behaviours and aesthetic practices.

Project website: Picture This! BashoCam – Future Applications Lab (to be updated)
Project team: Lalya Gaye (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute), Svante Hermansson (Art & Technology programme, IT-University in Göteborg), Mattias Rost (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute)
Publication: Gaye L., Hermansson S., Holmquist L.E. BashoCam: Collective Photographic Sequencing in Wireless P2P Networks. CHI 2006, Montréal, Canada (2006). [pdf] [poster pdf]

A project by French architects Metipolis and Dånk! Collective. The “Festival of Lights” (5-8 December 2008 in Lyon, France) attracts over 4 million visitors annually and is one of the biggest international outdoors festivals in the world. The installation was re-created in August 2009 for the Flow Festival in Helsinki, Finland.

Dånk!’s role in the project was to make the initially static and silent installation, dynamic, spatialised and sonic. My specific role was to conceptualize possible user experiences and technical solutions together with the architects, to set up and coordinate the collaboration between the French and Swedish team across geographical and linguistic differences, as well as take part in the sound interaction design, dynamic sound mapping and electronic construction of the installation.

Project team:
- Metipolis: Thibault Girardi, Florian Guidetti, Alexis Martin, Antoine Petitjean
- Dånk! Collective: Alexander Berman, Lalya Gaye, Richard Widerberg (and Olle Huge in Helsinki).

Webpage on the festival’s site: Yelloooow Splitch* (official website for project documentation coming soon!)

With the support of: GTM (Grands Travaux de Marseille), CNR (Compagnie Nationale du Rhône), Forclum (Lyon), l’ENSAL (Lyon National College of Architecture), the Collège Ampère, Alain Petitjean (structural engineer).

The goal of my artist residency is to develop new small projects in which I further explore aspects of creative integrations of electronics in materials (textiles, wood, metal…) and everyday behaviours; the idea of creative urban affordances central to my research; as well as study the opportunities that this brings to design and art practices, in particular in the context of mobile and locative media. (About which I held a workshop at the Ars Longa gallery in Paris during the Futur-en-Seine festival in June 2009).

During spring 2009, I was teaching two studio courses where advised student projects:
- Mobile Technology Workshop [pdf] [website]. This course received sponsorship from Apple and Nokia, and collaborated with the Earth University project and with the RISD museum.
- Digital + Media Technology Workshop [pdf] [website]

I also shared the D+M special projects room with artist Kelly Dobson during the spring, as part of my artist residency.


In the fall of 2009, I am teaching two studio-based courses:
- Playing Games [pdf]. An interdepartmental studio course sponsored by Hasbro and in collaboration with Industrial Design and Fine Arts at RISD.
- Sound, Media and Urban Space: Playful Interactions [pdf] [website]

Other appointments I have had at RISD include a thesis committee at Industrial Design, guest lectures, and end-of-term critiques at Digital + Media.

Although also taken by students from the highly technical Intelligent Systems Design programme, the “Ubicomp” course is part of the Interaction Design Programme and mainly focuses on design methods, user experience, and impact on society and everyday life in general of implementing the ubiquitous computing vision. It aims to give insights in the theory and philosophy of ubiquitous computing as well as practical skills in developing such systems. The course, which welcomes a variety of students from different academic and cultural backgrounds, consists of both theoretical and practical parts:

- The theoretical part presents the history and development of ubiquitous computing from research to applications. Lectures and literature seminars provide theoretical grounding and reflection, with in-depth discussion of classical ubiquitous computing projects, critical approaches to the field, and design methods. This part also includes a series of design exercises.

- The practical part of the course consists mainly of a large 5-weeks-long project. Students in small groups apply the prototyping skills acquired during the Physical Computing course to define and develop a working prototype of an embedded computer system with novel interface components using sensors and actuators, in combination with user studies. Applications developed during this phase are usually of playful nature and put an emphasis on enjoyment of interaction. Students also have to write a report (in 2008 also a conference short paper or a submission to a design competition), document their project on a website, present it publicly during an exhibition, and pass a home exam about topics of ubiquitous computing.

In 2007, my role in this course was to contribute with my theoretical, methodological and practical knowledge of the field, assist Dr. Olof Torgersson in structuring the course and deciding its theme, outline, content, and activities, as well as set up a literature list for the seminars, give lecture about locative media and sustainable design (theme of that year’s course), and compile a database of relevant information about “locative media and sustainable design” on a website specific to the course, in order to make it available to the students together with the powerpoint slides of my lecture [link]. I also contributed to the discussions during the literature seminars and supervised design exercises. My duties within the practical, project-based part of the course was to supervise and assist the student projects (design-wise, process-wise and technically), thereby helping the students get embodied understanding the field of ubiquitous computing and its technical and design issues. The projects (some of which received sponsorship from the industry and public service organs) were presented publicly during an exhibition at the university, which I helped setting up and advertize (see projects list here). The exhibition received press coverage from the biggest local newspaper and from national Swedish Radio. I also contributed to the evaluation of the project reports and presentations, and helped evaluate and grade the exams.

In 2008, as course responsible, my duties in the course included all those from the previous year but with a greater level of autonomy and responsibility, including administration aspects and all course content and communication. The theme of the 2008 course and final exhibition was “interactive furniture and ubiquitous domestic environments”. For one of the lectures, I invited Dr. Johan Redström (head of design at the Interactive Institute) to describe his institute’s research in the field. Student projects (some of which received industrial sponsorship this year as well) ranged from an augmented coffee-table that displays digital properties of everyday objects, to furniture that prevents you from over-using your computer, to various augmented everyday objects, home automation systems or ambiant displays of power consumption in the home (complete list of projects here – projects documentation currently in progress). I also tightened the continuity between the course and the Physical Computing course taking place earlier in the term and that is meant as a preparation for the Ubicomp course. Finally, I continued to develop collaborations between the programme and the C:Art:Media programme of the Valand School of Fine Arts and with the School of Design and Crafts (HDK) – collaborations which I had initiated earlier in the term and that has so far resulted in shared seminar, exhibition invitations, study visits, up-coming workshops in commun and hopefully future collaborations between the different students in their projects.

Course websites (including lists of student projects, teachers, etc):
- Ubiquitous Computing Course 2007 (more information on this webpage)
- Ubiquitous Computing Course 2008
Press:
- Spread about the 2007 student exhibition in Göteborgs Posten: [link]
- Interview about the course on the national Swedish Radio
- Articles about the 2008 student exhibition in Göteborgs Posten: [link]
- Interview about the same exhibition for the home decoration magazine Villa & Fritid

This course had only been given once before at the IT-University, as physical computing used to be part of another course. It had been decided that it needed to be its own course in order to better prepare students to the following Ubiquitous Computing project course, in terms of giving them proper technical skills. However, the course as it had been previously given needed improvements, so I was more ore less given free hands to re-design its content and approach. Therefore, I changed the focus of the course from being electronic engineering oriented to design-oriented, as it belonged to a design programme: although most of the students had more of a computer science background than a design one, I considered that the very purpose of such a course should be to make them approach electronics as a design material among others. I also switched microcontroller platform from the tedious BasicX-24 to Arduino, because of its flexibility, robustness, quick learning curve and important community of users. Students also got to experiment with LilyPad, the “textile” Arduino.

The course essentially consisted of lectures and laboratory exercises (most of which I had redesigned and all of which I supervised), as well as various extra activities aimed to broaden the students’ experience of physical computing. Students were also required to study at home and hand in assignments. The development of the course was highly organic and experimental, as it had not been given in its current form before.

During laboratory exercises, student practiced working with materials of various kinds. Lab exercises were organised by themes, with one theme a week (e.g. basics of electronic circuitry, intelligent textiles, locative media, etc) and accompanied by weekly lectures about relevant physical computing projects and by home assignments (consisting mostly of writing about related projects on the course blog). While most of the week was dedicated to tutoring-style exercises, its last part consisted in the students prototyping interactive applications in groups, using the knowledge they had gained during the week and during the previous ones. This was meant to develop the students’s design skills, learn how to quickly prototype their ideas and to see what can be done with the various design materials. Another goal was to prepare them for progressively bigger and more ambitious projects. The last three days of the course therefore consisted of mini group projects where each group got to implement a working prototype of an interactive application. Resulting prototypes were demonstrated to an audience of visitors from outside of the school.

Lectures gave an in-depth understanding of the subject of physical computing by giving an overview of the field, of various key projects as well as design approaches to the combination of computing and material. They were completed with a resource database and blogging activities meant to make students learn how to research about the field by themselves.

Extra activities within the course included “soldering for dummies” and circuit bending workshops, a guest lecture by an international physical computing specialist, and attendance of relevant artistic events. Time was allocated each week for optional individual study and extra-curricular experimentation, and the labs being open 24 hours a day making equipment and material available at all time.

Besides the teaching and taking care of most of the administrational part of this course, I also initiated contact with the C:Art:Media programme of the Valand School of Fine Arts and with the School of Design and Crafts in order to nurture collaboration between our programmes, as all three of them are concerned with design, technology, materials, humans and aesthetics, and could benifit from one another’s different competence in these areas. This has so far resulted in shared seminar, exhibition invitations, study visits, up-coming workshops in commun and hopefully future collaborations between the different students in their projects.

Course website: Physical Computing 2008
Course blog: Chalmers Physcomp ‘08
Students final mini-projects: Student blog entries as mini-reports

Main teachers: Morten Fjeld, Lalya Gaye
Guest teachers: Lena Berglin (School of Textiles Borås), Taku Lippit (STEIM)
Lab assistants: Ole Ravnsborg, Pooya Keshtiari, Annika Lindstedt

Dorkbot-GBG is a series of dorkbot events that my collective (Dånk! Collective) and I have started and have been organizing in Göteborg, Sweden since 2008.

Dorkbot is a group of affiliated organizations worldwide that sponsor grassroots meetings of artists, engineers, designers, scientists, inventors, and anyone else who loves to build things, hack things, play with things, do whatever strange things you can do with electricity.

Just like in all the other dorkbots around the globe, the purpose of Dorkbot-GBG meetings is to nurture the local electronic arts and interaction design community. They are meant to allow both emerging and established artists/designers/hackers/scientists/bricoleurs – local or international – to present new works and freely exchange ideas about arts and design of electric nature.

Dorkbot-GBG events take place regularly but at different frequencies and locations. Certain events also include performances, workshops, or club nights. All events are free of charge (except for potential material costs when taking part in a hands-on workshop) and open to anyone who is interested in the topic.

Website: Dorkbot-GBG

(Picture: Kanta Horio)