Prototyping Futures gives you a glimpse of what collaborating with academia might look like. Medea and its co-partners share their stories about activities happening at the research centre – projects, methods, tools, and approaches – what challenges lie ahead, and how these can be tackled. Examples of highlighted topics include: What is a living lab and how does it work? What are the visions behind the Connectivity Lab at Medea? And, how can prototyping-methods be used when sketching scenarios for sustainable futures? Other topics are: What is the role of the body when designing technology? What is collaborative media and how can this concept help us understand contemporary media practices? Prototyping Futures also discusses the open-hardware platform Arduino, and the concepts of open data and the Internet of Things, raising questions on how digital media and connected devices can contribute to more sustainable lifestyles, and a better world.

Participatory design (PD) has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work-oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and ‘innovation’. What ‘democratic innovation’ entails is often currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratised through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative ‘innovation’ practice more in line with the original visions of PD based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs – an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom–up long-term collaborations among diverse stakeholders. Three cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts ‘agonistic public spaces’ (as opposed to consensual decision-making), ‘thinging’ and ‘infrastructuring’ (as opposed to projects) are explored in relation to democracy, innovation and other future-making practices.

This paper investigates how artistic explorations can be useful for the development of mobile haptic technology. It presents an alternative framework of design for wearable haptics that contributes to the building of haptic communities outside specialized research contexts. The paper also presents our various wearable haptic systems for mobile computing capable of producing high-order tactile percepts. Our practice based approach suggests a design framework that can be applied to create advanced haptic stimulations/situations for physically embodied interaction in real-world settings. 

This article reveals a multi layered design process that occurs at the intersection between postcolonial/decolonial theory and a version of digital sketching called Embodied Digital Sketching (EDS). The result of this particular intersection of theory and practice is called Bitter & Sweet, a Mixed Reality design prototype using cultural heritage material. Postcolonial and decolonial strategies informed both analytic and practical phases of the design process. A further contribution to the design field is the reminder that design interventions in the current political and economic climate are frequently bi-directional: designers may enact, but simultaneously external events intervene in design processes. Bitter & Sweet reveals intersecting layers of power and control when design processes deal with sensitive cultural topics.

In this work, we investigate how visualization techniques could address the challenges of transportation simulation data analysis in order to facilitate the decision-making process for transportation simulation users. For this purpose, we have applied the visualization methods in a real implemented agent-based transportation simulator called TAPAS as a case. We have analyzed the visualization related requirements of users using a user-centric approach and an interactive visualization toolkit has been designed and developed based on the identified requirements. This paper presents a description of the visualization toolkit which will be used to investigate how the actors in a transport chain are expected to act when different types of governmental control policies are applied, such as, fuel taxes, road tolls, vehicle taxes and requirements on vehicles.

Information visualization, as a way of presenting different data types in an understandable form, has the potential to support the analysis of transportation data. Visualization can often help decision makers to efficiently analyse large amount of information. One application area of information visualization is to support the analysis of the transportation data and thus facilitate the decision-making process. Most of the previous studies in this area have focused on visualization of transportation infrastructures such as roads, bridges in order to enhance the public awareness regarding upcoming projects which makes it easier to reach a consensus on the high-level decisions. However, the main focus of this article is on methods for visualization of data generated by transportation simulation systems to support analysis of the consequences of applying different transport policy measures, such as the introduction of road user charging or investment in new infrastructure. In this work, we investigate how visualization techniques could address the challenges of transportation simulation data analysis in order to facilitate the decision-making process. For this purpose, we have applied the visualization methods to a real implemented agent-based transportation simulator called TAPAS. In this case study, we have analysed the visualization related requirements of users using a user-centric approach and the visualization tool has been designed and developed based on the identified requirements.

We present Mediated Body, an exploration into designing for engaging experience in embodied interaction. Mediated Body entails a Suit worn by a Performer engaging in social play with a Participant. The Performer and the Participant each wear a pair of headphones, and when they touch each other’s bare skin, they both hear a complex sound pattern. Our approach, which we call research-through-explorative-design, is a combination of experimental design in the lab and explorative design in the field, where qualitative assessments are used to elicit transferable knowledge contributions. This paper represents a case study of this somewhat innovative research approach in action. On the topical level, our results include three artifact-level elements that contribute to engaging experience: connecting touch and audio with the right balance between direct and emergent responsivity, justifying bare-skin touch between strangers, and providing open-ended action props with non-trivial internal complexity. Moreover, we suggest three experiential qualities as analytical tools pertaining to engaging experience in embodied interaction: the duality of performative immersion, the "magic circle" of transformative social play, and the explorative nature of emergent meaning-making.

We present five design cases as an annotated portfolio, exploring ways to design for intimate, interpersonal touch and social intimacy in interaction design. Five key qualities are elicited from the cases, including novel connotations sparking curiosity; providing an excuse to interact; unfolding internal complexity; social ambiguity; norm-bending intimacy. The work highlights novel interaction design approaches fostering social play, turning participants into performers of their own narratives.

Reclusion and openness—an oxymoron, one might think. However, in the course of this essay, I attempt to test these notions on the life trajectory of the African-American classical pianist, Eugene Haynes, who befriended an even more well-known artist, the Danish writer Karen Blixen (also known under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen). Haynes crossed continents for work and adventure in the midst of the Cold War, and now with a base in Denmark, he continued to nurture his friendship with Blixen and her secretary, Clara Selborn, from 1952 and over the next ten years until Blixen’s death in 1962. Over many holidays and work trips in Denmark, he used Selborn’s house in the small fishing village of Dragør, located south of Copenhagen (while Selborn stayed with Blixen in Rungstedlund), to practice the piano, study music, and in between, travel around Europe giving concerts.

This paper is located at the juncture of philosophical and artistic research, offering the second in a series of phenomenologically informed methods relevant to the design and creative use of mobile digital devices called the Intuitive Improvisation method. It is also part of a larger philosophical and artistic project in Social Choreographies which contributes to the ever developing field of social aesthetics by providing a perspective uniquely coloured by dance and phenomenology. Philosophical reflections upon relational aesthetics (Rancière, Bourriaud), method and intuition (Deleuze, Bergson) are contextualized by discussing the IntuiTweet project in dance and networked social media.

This collection brings together academics, archivists, artists, and activists whose thought and practices make critical intervention into cultural phenomenon of open data. The sub-title of this publication – politics /practices / poetics – reveals a close entwinement between thought and practice, between thinking and making. The contri-butions offer critical perspectives combined with implications for practice, or they in themselves are practices (such as performances, discussions, acts of care, or visualisations). Each contribution is an open data project in action. Openness is part of the Living Archives research project.http://livingarchives.mah.se/ https://medium.com/the-politics-practices-and-poetics-of-openness

A political, performative and affective landscape is revealed in this chapter as a way of approaching the topic of performing the digital: from the macro of the upheaval caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass data surveillance to the micro of a phenomenological account of a crisis following an artistic performance using mobile media. “Performing Encryption” is a response to working as a dancer and philosopher with mobile networked digital media that can be read as a part of a larger narrative of transitioning from one state to another. The state of viewing the fine interweaving of mobile technologies in our lives as a positive expression of social choreographies gives way to a state where it is impossible to regard the potential for surveillance and capture of daily activities as anything but provocative, troubling or even threatening. The risk is not just the “capture all” aspects of dataveillance, but of increasing control over gestural and affective exchanges in urban life. In saying networked technologies, I point not just to mobile phones but also to the Cloud and the Internet-of-Things which, in combination, are potentially devastating from the perspective of embodied agency. This narrative of questioning and transition is typical of others arising at the beginning of a century, let alone a millennium. It is no longer possible to avoid asking what we have created. And how we can respond to the technological and cultural conditions of our world.

This Preface to the Living Archives publication on Openness raises questions and controversies around open data and publication as an academic and expressive process. It begins by asking: why produce a publication on openness? Or, rather 3 versions, because the collected articles appeared as a series on medium.com (1/3), as a freely downloadable PDF (2/3), and finally as a limited hand bound print run of approximately 30 volumes (3/3). These are iterations on openness comprising 18 peer-reviewed contributions existing, to cite Jean Luc Nancy, “between exposed thought and knotty intimacy” within a Commerce of Thinking (Nancy 2009, 3). These 3 versions travel across materialities. They are re-mediated, but to me it feels like a sort of de-mediation – a stripping away – as we moved over time from the digital versions toward the print version. Video had to be unspooled into image frames, audio into fragmented text transcriptions. These iterations render Nancy’s argument multiple both in form and in voice, without a doubt “born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form” (ibid) but not in search of anything as unified as a coherent style or position. The contributions demonstrate the political groundedness of research data, and its cloudiness, rather than the collective fiction of the transparency of data in the Cloud.

Change is the goal of much somatic practice. Yet, in the worlds of art, design, and cultural discourse change, or transformation, are simultaneously contested and desired outcomes: change for whom? empty or authentic? at what cost? I will locate the possibility for change, for contingency, within the body and say that we can access and understand it by means of a phenomenology of affect. In this article, I begin by expressing just how difficult it is to write about affect, I then locate affect in an artistic project called AffeXity (part of the Living Archives project and a collaboration with Jeannette Ginslov). I then expand upon the sticky boundaries between affect and the senses, while offering brief phenomenological descriptions of the liminal affective experience of Rosen Method. Finally I posit that sense data can be replaced with affective intensities when doing a phenomenology of affect. This is a response to those Speculative Materialists who seek to escape the limitations of the body: Somatic Materialism reveals that the unknown can be located within the body.

This article considers archival performances rather than archives as places or repositories. This is done by expanding reflections on affect and by framing three specific archival performance practices: re-enactment, affective doubling, and surrogacy. The topic of The New Human is approached through the complex materiality of contemporary memory practices. This is the scholarly publication associated with the presentation of the same name given at The New Human Symposium co-curated by Medea of Malmö University and Moderna Museet Malmö in August 2016.

IntuiTweet (2009-2010) was a dance improvisation project using Twitter as a platform for movement exchange: tweets were written by small group of dancers to promote kinaesthetic and corporeal exchanges in public spaces. Geographically disparate bodies were linked only by a set of improvisatory practices and by Twitter on their mobile devices. The improvisations left traces in the form of words. Making sense of this project in the context of mobile media narratives, two questions fold back on each other: why consider mobile media narratives through a project based in dance? And why consider dance through the lens of mobile media narratives? In pursuing these parallel but inverse lines of questioning, both the sense of narrative and the understanding of the movement practices are transformed. Yet, the scope of this chapter extends beyond narrative and dance: in exploring the qualities of these embodied micro-narratives and what happens when they are exchanged, we can learn more about how we live in the world with our mobile media.

The MEDEA Studio was a research centre founded at Malmö University. It focused on collaborative media and design to promote research and practice in connection with its surrounding environment for better innovation and outreach. During its history, MEDEA has undergone several changes leading to diverse challenges. This field report examines MEDEA’s development from the perspectives of knowledge acquisition and learning with the aim to analyse factors for success and failures. As society and especially academia struggle with understanding how to innovate and connect, reflecting on the different instantiations of the MEDEA studio can bring insights for researchers, practitioners, administrators and the studio’s future development.

The formation of hydrides in zirconium alloys will cause degradation of the materials. Despite extensive study, the mechanisms and effects of hydrogen embrittlement have remained unclear. In this report, we had presented the calculation results of mean-field strain by different hydride phases in zirconium alloys, like δ-hydride and γ-hydride. The results of δ-hydride are compared with experimental data obtained by X-ray diffraction method by Bai et al.\cite{Baib} and note \cite{Ali} of Massih. The result of δ-hydride is identical with Massih but have some differences with Bai et al. We had also compared our calculated mean-field strain by γ-hydride with δ-hydride. The γ-hydride showed lower value than δ.

There is an internal, self-balanced stress known as residual stress (RS) that exists in all alloy systems without any external applied forces. Depending on the compressive or tensile nature and magnitude of the RS, it significantly affects the mechanical properties of the materials. Therefore, it is crucial to know the nature and magnitude of RS in material for safe and economical operation. In this work, we used unique, multipurpose, high energy (50-150 KeV) beamline I12-JEEP (Joint Engineering, Environment and Processing) at Diamond Light Source in UK with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Diffraction (EDXRD) setup to map up the RS states in one of the most popular titanium alloys with a code name Ti6Al4V. This type of titanium alloy is widely used in biomedical and aerospace industry because of their excellent combination of a high strength/weight ratio and good corrosion resistance. The Ti6Al4V which we were investigated are produced using electron beam melting (EBM) technique as a function of EBM processing parameters. In addition to relation between RS and processing parameters of EBM, the hydride formation versus processing parameters and as well as the effect of residual stress to the hydride precipitation in EBM built Ti6Al4V were investigated. To find out the effect of EBM processing parameters to the residual stress development, various samples produced with different beam size, scanning speed and different building thickness were investigated. From each type of the sample four specimens were prepared and three of them loaded with hydrogen in different concentrations, i.e. the hydrogen concentration of the various samples are 262, 772, 951 and 1410 ppm. Other than these alloy samples we also measured clean and hydrided original powder samples which are used for make these solid samples in our studies. After data collection, the whole pattern fitting method Rietveld and Pawely were performed with structure analysis software package Topas-Academic and GSAS. .

Zirconium alloys have a strong affinity for hydrogen which leads to hydrogen pick-up during a corrosion reaction when exposed to water. The hydrogen is readily in solution at higher temperature but precipitates as Zirconium hydrides at ambient temperatures. At least three phases are known to exist at ambient temperature depending on hydrogen concentration and quenching rate. However, some controversy exist regarding the exact nature and stability of the γ-ZrH phase, which is closely related to the δ-ZrH phase through ordering of the hydrogen on tetrahedral sites in the matrix. In this report, we give short introduction to our experimental work at FRM II in September 2010. In this work, we use high-resolution neutron powder diffraction on deuterated samples to re-determine and verify the reported structures which essentially date back to the 1960s [1].

Zirconium alloys are widely used in the nuclear industry because of their high strength, good corrosion resistance and low neutron absorption cross-section. However, zirconium has strong affinity for hydrogen which leads to hydrogen concentration build-up over time. It is well known that the formation of hydrides will degrade the material and leads to, for example, delayed hydride cracking during high burn up. Even though zirconium hydrides have been studied for several decades, there still remain some controversies regarding the formation mechanisms, exact crystal structure, and stability of various hydride phases. This study uses high resolution synchrotron radiation as a probing tool to observe the precipitation and dissolution of hydrides in highly pure zirconium powder during in-situ hydrogen charging. The experiment enabled the direct observation of the hydride formation and phase transformations. It, also, provided high quality data for crystal structure determination.

This short paper presents the initial steps in the establishment of Fabriken (the Factory) which is an open maker-space, and lab space for creating and experimenting with technologies. The space also provides a platform for peer-to-peer learning, and networked learning that goes on beyond the physical walls of the lab space. From a research perspective the development of Fabriken is a research intervention exploring how platforms for learning and innovation can be co-designed, and established in collaboration with the users. The aim of this paper is to present strategies behind this co-design process. To position Fabriken in a societal and cultural context some words are also said about the theoretical assumptions guiding this work, that is, socio-cultural theories on human action and learning.

This chapter discusses attempts to involve stakeholders in the co-production of Future Internet (FI) services in a smart city living lab. We outline the experience of five European cities using an open innovation approach to citizens’ engagement in the co-production of smart city services. Recent practice and emergent trends in five urban ecosystems, called ‘Arenas’, are analysed by drawing on the results of detailed case study research. These results are set against ‘good practice’ expectations about how co-production should occur as set out by the European Network of Living Labs as well as in open innovation strategic policies. Based on the case studies, a set of propositions are explored about what needs to be done to build the stakeholder innovation networks required to shape future smart cities. The study suggests that if smart cities are to deliver a better quality of life in more attractive urban areas, new ways of engaging with the stakeholders are necessary to provide them with not just better access and inclusion but also to empower them to act as a catalyst in transforming the dynamics of city services as well. In light of the demands of delivering the FI, cities also need to redefine what they mean when they claim to be a ‘smart’ city and to reconfigure what they take to be the underlying role of stakeholder engagement in service co-production. 

These guidelines are intended for team members and managers of urban labs and, more generally, for civil servants and facilitators in cities working with experimental processes to tackle complex challenges. They aim to support the everyday practice of collaboratively experimenting and learning how to create more sustainable and inclusive cities.

This report aims at evaluating the Co-Lab about circular economy and reuse, organized within the frame of Social Innovation Skåne project between March and June 2016.

This paper aims at exploring different ways in which cultures of opening production can be performed by comparing two events (two Hackathons) organized by two Swedish labs oriented towards opening production.

Purpose This paper compares two boundary organizations situated in Malmö (Sweden) and oriented towards opening production. Particularly, it looks at how the two organizations tried to establish and communicate their boundaries during their official opening events, which were structured according to the format of Hackathon. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted an ethnographic approach and followed the two events, observing and interacting with organizers and participants. The findings reported here draw upon data collected through direct observation, the authors’ experience as participants, unstructured conversations, email exchanges. Findings This paper analyses the two events in order to show how different cultures of opening production lead to different ways of performing Hackathons and, consequently, how these events affect the process of establishing and communicating the organizational boundaries. Originality/value The paper looks at the potential of events structured according to the format of Hackathon as a way for boundary organizations to position themselves

Medea Vox, an academic podcast. Episode 21: Fiction holds the ability of imagining alternative futures. Through comics, novels and videogames, we can explore social and technical “What If’s.” In this Medea Vox episode, we discuss how fiction can contribute to our thinking about the future in ways which other schools of thought – such as the scientific – cannot.

Background:  The Internet’s potential as health care tool should be explored. Aim:  One objective was to determine the feasibility of constructing a digitally based tool through an iterative design process in cooperation with potential users. The tool’s purpose is to alleviate hardships in daily life of relatives of persons with depression. An additional aim was to explore motivation and hindrances to using the tool as a basis for design decisions. Method:  An iterative design approach, including data collection through focus groups and with paper and web-based prototypes, was used. Results:  Cooperation with potential users, using an iterative design process, was valuable in developing the digitally based tool. Motivations (i.e. to create understanding and rehabilitate oneself) and hindrances (i.e. lack of time or energy) to using the tool were illuminated. Design decisions were based on consideration towards participants’ privacy concerns, needs of support and the depression’s influence on the relatives’ daily life. Conclusion:  Prototypes and cooperation with potential users were essential and valuable for the iterative development of the website.

The phase evolution in a zirconium–50 deuterium (Zr–50D, at.%) alloy system during thermal cycling has been investigated using in situ high-resolution neutron powder diffraction. The results showed that the peritectoid reaction α-Zr + δ-ZrD → γ-ZrD previously suggested to occur at high temperatures does not take place in the system. Slow cooling, from high temperatures (≥520 K) to room temperature at a rate of 5 K min–1, promoted the γ-hydride formation rather than fast cooling as reported earlier. In contrast to the observation that the δ-hydride present in the system remained at temperatures up to 740 K, the produced γ phase transformed to δ-hydride in the temperature range of 370 K to 559 K, with the transformation completing at approximately 559 K. It is confirmed that the formation of the γ-hydride was reproducible with slow cooling, and a diffusion-controlled sluggish δ-to γ-hydride transformation is suggested to be responsible for the favorable development of γ-hydride during slow cooling.