1. Lalya Gaye Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute Göteborg, Sweden
Research Focus: Ubicomp triggering new aesthetic practices by enabling people to transform their everyday life into a raw material for creation and personal expression
Design for Hackability: Using Ubicomp to enable everyday resources available at hand to be repurposed for participating in people’s aesthetic practice >>> Providing entry points to hacking everyday life

2. Projects: Context Photography Maria Håkansson, Sara Ljungblad, Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute) Panajotis Mihalatos (Art & Technology program, IT-University in Göteborg)
A context camera captures the invisible context (e.g. noise level…) of a scene with sensors (e.g. mic) and translates it visually into the resulting still picture, as you are taking it

3. Projects: Context Photography Maria Håkansson, Sara Ljungblad, Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute) Panajotis Mihalatos (Art & Technology program, IT-University in Göteborg)
Adding a new dimension to digital photography by providing more parameters to play with than the ones characteristic of analogue photography
Parameters are available resources originating from the photographer’s immediate surroundings or from herself: e.g. loud noise or... scream!
Elements of serendipity

4. Projects: Sonic City Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute), Ramia Mazé (Play, Interactive Institute), Daniel Skoglund (8Tunnel2), Margot Jacobs (Play, Interactive Institute), Lars Erik Holmquist (FAL, Viktoria Institute)
Walker creates a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments
Technology: Wearable using sensor-based information to control real-time processing of urban sounds and turn them into music

5. Projects: Sonic City Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute), Ramia Mazé (Play, Interactive Institute), Daniel Skoglund (8Tunnel2), Margot Jacobs (Play, Interactive Institute), Lars Erik Holmquist (FAL, Viktoria Institute)
Everyday urban environments turned into an interface for creating live electronic music – remixing urban sounds
Mobility as musical gesture: - paths become scores: context >>> musical structure - music is articulated by ad hoc bodily interactions
Walker improvises to engage in duet with everyday settings

6. Projects: Tejp Margot Jacobs (Play, Interactive Institute) & Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute)
Low-tech experiments with means of creating location-based personal layers in public space
- Audio tags: audio traces whispered to by-passers when leaning towards a wall; space of intimacy in public space
- Glitch: loud interference glitches reveal hidden layer of mobile phone communication in public space

7. Projects: Tejp Margot Jacobs (Play, Interactive Institute) & Lalya Gaye (FAL, Viktoria Institute)
Towards more embodied interaction, away from PDA screens >>> more context-specific & personal expression
Physical space mediates interaction between users and information layers
Parasiting: re-using elements of physical environments as intrinsic part of functionality; acting on the fringe

8. The Everyday as Hackable Creative Resource
Designing for Hackability: Using Ubicomp to enable everyday resources available at hand (right away, in context) to be repurposed for participating in people’s aesthetic practice
>>> Providing entry points (technically & conceptually) to hacking everyday life

9. The Everyday as Hackable Creative Resource
Designing for Hackability: Providing entry points by approaching everyday activities, artifacts & environments as resources to:
sample&hold – e.g. I/O brush (Ryokai et al – CHI2004)
use as controllers/interface – e.g. Sonic City
parasite – e.g. Tejp
reveal – e.g. Context Photography (at DIS2004!)
amplify – e.g. Activity Wallpaper (Skog – at DIS2004!)
modify ?

10. Opportunities & Challenges
As end-user, the hacker needs to improvise on the spot to overcome and exploit the immediacy, heterogeneity and sometimes unpredictability of everyday resources >>> creatively dealing with constraints
As designer, how do you take into consideration aspects of:
urgency
contextuality
heterogeneity
effort
personal meaning
embodiment ?

11. Thank you!
Lalya Gaye
Future Applications Lab Viktoria Institute