Tag Archives: local

open data process + design workshop

What’s the taste of corruption?

DC_Kosovo

The next Data Cuisine Workshop will focus on ‘Corruption’ and take place in Pristina, Kosovo. If you have questions about it, please contact us. You want to participate? Simply register at here. Let’s find out together how corruption tastes!

Corruption remains one of the most significant problems Kosovo faces today. UNPD Kosovo fights strongly to make corruption a problem of the past. We are happy to be invited by them to tell stories of corruption through data dishes that we will create during this two-day workshop on February 25-26, 2017.

open data workshop

What’s the taste of data? The Data Cuisine workshop in Barcelona

How does a tortilla taste whose recipe is based on well-being data in Spain? Would you rather like the cake based on the science funding 2005 or in 2013? Can you imagine how a fish dish can represent the emigrants from Spain to countries across the world?


The second Data Cuisine workshop took place in Barcelona on June 10-13, 2014 as part of the Big Bang Data exhibition at CCCB, and in coordination with Sonar.
For the culinary side of the project, we collaborated with Sebastian Velilla, a fantastic chef who has worked for the Alicia Foundation and is currently involved in the activities of the Torribera Food and Nutrition Campus of the University of Barcelona.datacuisine_BCN1
On four afternoons, twelve participants explored data of Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain with culinary means.
The first two afternoons were about getting into the methodology and coming up with quick ideas how to represent topics and data with dishes. We got some inspiration from our exclusive visit to Ferran Adria’s BullipediaLab, an emerging space dedicated to the research of food creativity.
datacuisine_BCN2We spent the second half of the workshop in the kitchen, where the participants refined their recipes and made first tests and prototypes. On the last day, the participants, of which many worked in groups of two or three, produced their final dishes. The workshop ended with a presentation and tasting of all data dishes.
datacuisine_BCN3
Thanks go to Jose Luis de Vicente and Olga Subiros for bringing us over, and our fantastic participants, especially Luis Fraguada, who brought a food printer, which we will surely hear more of in the future.
All results of the Barcelona workshop and more images can be found on the Data Cuisine website. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter
. The Data Cuisine workshops are led by prozessagent Susanne Jaschko and Moritz Stefaner.


 

book process + art

Autopsy of an Island Currency published and available online

MoneyLab-digiflyer

Autopsy of an Island Currency was launched last weekend at Camp Pixelache in Helsinki. The book documents and reflects on the Suomenlinna Money Lab project — an artistic research project that tried to create an experimental local currency for the small island of Suomenlinna near Helsinki.

You can download the free PDF of the book here.

The general aim of the Money Lab was to engage with the specifics of a local setting by working with local people and creating a project that would generate interesting research and be beneficial to local dynamics. It was an ambitious attempt to explore and affect a unique place and its social dynamics through participatory art and design practice. The project was initiated by Susanne Jaschko / prozessagenten and produced by Pixelache, a cultural organisation in Helsinki, who together invited artist Christian Nold to develop a project for Helsinki.

The book describes the project’s process in detail trough a combination of first-person narration and ‘artefacts’, a wide selection of documented materials in the form of emails, notes, sketches, announcements and reflections. The publication also analyses the project’s challenges, such as the internal social dynamics and power structures of the island, which the Suomenlinna Money Lab project rendered visible. In addition, commissioned essays by authors Jaromil, Chris Lee, Pekko Koskinen, Antti Jauhiainen and Suzana Milevska contextualise the project and discuss subjects such as the challenges of participatory art, the value and hybrid nature of participatory projects, and the potentials of alternative money systems. The book is aimed at practitioners who work at the intersection of art, research and social action. It should be particularly useful for people working on alternative money models or on participatory projects that request a high degree of people’s commitment.

open data process + design workshop

2nd day: It’s all about food

On the second day of the Open Data Cooking Workshop in Helsinki we moved to Aromi Kitchen, a kitchen for cooking classes, and started to get our hands dirty. The workshop participants had selected their topics and data the day before. They also had done most of the shopping and thought out their recipes.

So Sunday was all about working with the ingredients and learning from Antti how to create delicious and good looking dishes while Miska, the data hunter, helped to find the last bits and pieces of missing data and Moritz and I were busy documenting what was going on.

Symeon makes his dough for the Lasagne called Spiced Foreigners Between Pasta that compares Finland’s population with and without immigrants.

Rossana mixes her Suicide Cocktail based on Finnish, German and Italian data on suicide rates, monthly average wage, alcohol consumption and average temperature.

Dimitrii gets ready to cut beet roots for his Criminal Herring in Fur Coat based on Finnish Crime Rates in 2011.

Hero shot of Jen’s Happiness Cocktail visualising the amount of smiling Facebook friends…

…and of Nathalie’s and Melinda’s Lakmoussetikka showing the amount of harvested blueberries (jelly on top) in relation to the amount of blueberries that are not picked in Finland (white chocolate mouse).

 

open data

Getting emotional about Open Data

Open Data is a hot topic. Almost everybody seems to agree that making local data available to the public makes perfect sense. No doubt, citizens benefit from the increasing transparency of processes in their city, but the publication of this data also brings up some questions that are uncomfortable for those private corporations that gather all our individual data and use it without our explicit permission. One of the core question is who should own the data that we produce as citizens and individuals: The institutions collecting the data that we generate through our use of their systems and services or we, the data producers, ourselves. Shouldn’t those banks, phone companies, credit card services, doctors, shops, network providers, internet retailers, search engines at least provide transparency of what they actually do with the data, thus giving us the chance to decide whether we want to use their services under those circumstances or not. Should they not provide us with access to the data produced by us, so we can monitor ourselves better and maybe improve our own recording systems and simplify our tax statements for example?

At the same time, we already suffer from such an overload of information, that perhaps only a minority of people would actually access ‘their’ data and make use of it. The same applies to the public data that is already accessible. Who but those who have an affinity to data are looking up public data sets that are made available and even make use of them? This is where data visualisation can help. Data visualisation is a medium which emphasises specific aspects of the given data and offers a particular reading of it. Thus it becomes an expressive an powerful communication tool, that can even create a new reality. Numerous groups like WE LOVE OPEN DATA and individuals worldwide have started to visualise open data for the public good, driven by their own curiosity and philanthropism.

Translating rows of data into easy-to-read maps or comprehensive diagrams is one way of bridging the gap between dry numbers and the public. But why not going one step further and translating data into an even more sensual experience that we are all familiar with – like food? This is the basic idea of the Open Data Cooking Workshop. People who like to cook (and eat) are given an opportunity to explore both the local cuisine as well as local data by translating data into cooking recipes and meals. As much as this sounds fun, this collaborative research is supposed to give people concrete insights into the quality and diversity of the locally available data and teaches them principles of data representation. Through the very personal, emotional and sensual activity of cooking food they get involved with the material, be it vegetables or numbers.

After all, it looks like one of the challenges of the Open Data movement–next to opening up relevant data that citizens can relate to in a personal way–is to give people tools, methods and media enabling them to interpret, individualise and express data in an emotional way.