Experimental Museology

Experimental Museology scrutinizes innovative endeavours to transform museum interactions with the world. Analysing cutting-edge cases from around the globe, the volume demonstrates how museums can design, apply and assess new modes of audience engagement and participation. Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and research-led professionals, the book argues that museum transformations must be focused on conceptualizing and documenting the everyday challenges and choices facing museums, especially in relation to wider social, political and economic ramifications. In order to illuminate the complexity of these challenges, the volume is structured into three related key dimensions of museum practice - namely institutions, representations and users. Each chapter is based on a curatorial design proposed and performed in collaboration between university-based academics and a museum. Taken together, the chapters provide insights into a diversity of geographical contexts, fields and museums, thus building a comprehensive and reflexive repository of design practices and formative experiments that can help strengthen future museum research and design. Experimental Museology will be of great value to academics and students in the fields of museum, gallery and heritage studies, as well as architecture, design, communication and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to museum professionals and anyone else who is interested in learning more about experimentation and design as resources in museums

Addressing climate vulnerability : promoting the participatory rights of indigenous peoples and women through Finnish foreign policy

Julkaistu versi

My boy builds coffins. Future memories of your loved ones

The research is focus on the concept of storytelling associated with product design, trying to investigate new ways of designing and a possible future scenario related to the concept of death. MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS is a gravestone made using a combination of cremation’s ashes and resin. It is composed by a series of holes in which the user can stitch a text, in order to remember the loved one. The stitching need of a particular yarn produced in Switzerland using some parts of human body. Project also provides another version which uses LED lights instead of the yarn. The LEDs - thanks to an inductive coupling - will light when It will be posed in the hole. The gravestone can be placed where you want, as if it would create a little altar staff at home. In this way, there is a real connection between the user and the dearly departed

Smart Specialisation as an Engagement Framework for Triple Helix Interactions

The Triple Helix (TH) framework is a well-established theoretical concept and a basis for portraying patterns of industry-science-government interactions. The TH framework provides a useful depiction and description of what might take place in what are commonly described as ‘regional innovation ecosystems’. There is a presumption that interactions will evolve around the convergence of missions concerning creation and utilisation of knowledge, regional networks, government regulation and venture finance, and decisions of multinational corporations and international organisations. However, like the regional innovation systems model itself, the TH model offers little in the way of practical guidance about how interactions can be nurtured and developed, what and where new public and private innovation investments should be made, the most appropriate way to go about building and strengthening engagement between institutions to achieve innovation outcomes, and most significantly, the governance and intermediary arrangements appropriate to guide planning, budgeting and resource allocation at a regional level. This paper addresses the extent to which the Smart Specialisation framework can address those investment, engagement and governance issues

The artists’ footprint: investigating the distinct contributions of artists engaging the public with climate data

This thesis investigates the distinct contributions of artists who engage the public with climate data, exploring the role of the artists and the value of their contributions by focusing on two studies of artist-led projects. The first investigates how the author’s own artist led collective, Active Ingredient, engaged the public with climate data through a touring interactive artwork. The second study explores the design of an online platform for capturing, authoring and ‘performing’ climate data. This platform was developed and tested by Active Ingredient in collaboration with researchers from the University of Nottingham, and then used by other artists to engage with climate data. The studies reveal how the artistic projects were designed and experienced, through a mixed methods approach requiring the author to shift perspectives in order to investigate her own arts practice alongside the work of other artists in this field. The findings from these studies suggest that the artists adopt a distinctive voice that fosters an emotional engagement with climate data, rather than an informative or persuasive one, that goes beyond ‘environmental knowing’ towards human-scale, embodied, localized and personalized sense making. This research reveals how the artists use the key strategies of performing data, sensory experience and multiple interpretations to provoke these emotional responses. Highlighting the challenges and opportunities of engaging temporal structures and narratives to represent climate data; treating the data as a new material that is embedded into the artworks and embodied in various sensory forms; abstracting and juxtaposing multiple, contrasting and yet related datasets so as to invite comparisons, while opening up spaces between them for interpretation and dialogue. This results in a discussion of the role of technology within the artistic process, how the artists walk a line between authenticity and emotional engagement in their interpretations of climate data and the importance of an ongoing dialogic collaboration between the artists, researchers and climate scientist that support authentic and meaningful engagements with climate data. The research presents rich descriptions of the artists’ strategies for engaging the public with climate data and revealing that artists have a distinctive and powerful role to play in relation to climate change and sustainability; one that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Climate Science need to understand as they continue to move into this territory, and where HCI in particular might ultimately learn about how to bring an emotional treatment to many other forms of data

A service-oriented middleware for integrated management of crowdsourced and sensor data streams in disaster management

The increasing number of sensors used in diverse applications has provided a massive number of continuous, unbounded, rapid data and requires the management of distinct protocols, interfaces and intermittent connections. As traditional sensor networks are error-prone and difficult to maintain, the study highlights the emerging role of “citizens as sensors” as a complementary data source to increase public awareness. To this end, an interoperable, reusable middleware for managing spatial, temporal, and thematic data using Sensor Web Enablement initiative services and a processing engine was designed, implemented, and deployed. The study found that its approach provided effective sensor data-stream access, publication, and filtering in dynamic scenarios such as disaster management, as well as it enables batch and stream management integration. Also, an interoperability analytics testing of a flood citizen observatory highlighted even variable data such as those provided by the crowd can be integrated with sensor data stream. Our approach, thus, offers a mean to improve near-real-time applications

Proceedings of the 3rd Open Source Geospatial Research & Education Symposium OGRS 2014

The third Open Source Geospatial Research & Education Symposium (OGRS) was held in Helsinki, Finland, on 10 to 13 June 2014. The symposium was hosted and organized by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aalto University School of Engineering, in partnership with the OGRS Community, on the Espoo campus of Aalto University. These proceedings contain the 20 papers presented at the symposium. OGRS is a meeting dedicated to exchanging ideas in and results from the development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education.  The symposium offers several opportunities for discussing, learning, and presenting results, principles, methods and practices while supporting a primary theme: how to carry out research and educate academic students using, contributing to, and launching open source geospatial initiatives. Participating in open source initiatives can potentially boost innovation as a value creating process requiring joint collaborations between academia, foundations, associations, developer communities and industry. Additionally, open source software can improve the efficiency and impact of university education by introducing open and freely usable tools and research results to students, and encouraging them to get involved in projects. This may eventually lead to new community projects and businesses. The symposium contributes to the validation of the open source model in research and education in geoinformatics