*Well, this exciting British-Italian collab should settle the pressing matter of who has the *coolest and most chic* Internet-of-Things.
"You will have heard a lot about smart cities and the Internet of Things. What you won't have seen is that many genuine products, services and projects in those areas. You will, of course, as there is immense potential after all, but these ideas are clearly something we have a sense of, a hunch about, without the evidence to test it. It's a logical conclusion of a set of cultural and technological drivers, but then people, objects, experiences, buildings and cities are not logical, nor do they conclude.
"Given this, BERG and Fabrica have been working together to create a condition where these ideas may be played out, in an open, transparent and legible way, and tested on real projects, in real spaces, with real people. Or as close as we can get to that, anyway.
"And that's what we're announcing today. Sandbox is a collaboration between BERG—and specifically the maker kits based on their BERG Cloud platform, as well as their general expertise and creativity in this area—and Fabrica—and specifically, our team of multi-disciplinary researchers and staff, our clients and collaborators, and our building and environment.
"At Fabrica, we are creating a campus-wide BERG Cloud network across our extraordinary building, and will be working with BERG's dev boards (with which they recently created Flock, for Twitter) in situ and across client projects, as well doing workshops with BERG to understand their possibilities and collaboratively prototype them. Further, as BERG open up these kits and platforms to other organisations, we'll be getting together to share experiences and collaboratively produce using the platform. This is the beginning, then, of a global network of connected spaces, across schools, studios and research centres (Fabrica is a bit of all three of those) which becomes a community of makers, coders, designers and producers collaborating together to move this area forwards. (((And would that prospect interest us on the ol' blog here? Why yes it would.)))
"A Fabrica interaction designer at work
"Jack Schulze came to Fabrica in December, as one of the first in our new series of lectures (more on that later) and he, I and Matt Webb had been talking since about how we could make a project that tests BERG's "dev boards" in the wild, as it were, and how we could take research and development around connected things and spaces beyond Fabrica's interaction team into some of our other studios. I'm interested in transdisciplinary, hybrid projects emerging at Fabrica—what happens when you throw a problem or opportunity at a studio comprising a coder, a graphic designer, an industrial designer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a musician, and external collaborators?—and think we might be uniquely placed to prototype interesting and valuable things as a result of our rich diversity of people, talents and cultures. Our recent COLORS News Machine is an example of this approach to some extent, to quite some acclaim, but we want to do more, across all fields...."
