A few months in..
February 7, 2012 by stefankueppers
Wow, how time flies:
Starting my Proboscis experience began only in October and already it seems like a distant past as so many things are happening at the same time here:
The Proboscis team, Giles, Alice, Hazem and Mandy have been really warmly welcoming me into their fold and I have been getting to know all the many friends and collaborators in the various projects we are working on. It is a great experience getting into a totally different scale (much smaller!) and horizontal way of working; a big change from my previous Higher Education job! I have come needing to juggle wearing many hats: design, research, technology development, etc. and I am really relishing it. It is really great when you can mix up the strategic and the practical and a few things in-between.
All this took some time getting used to but what is great is that a lot of excitement in this involvement is already showing: There is the new thinking about the technology stack that we are evolving for our Public Goods Lab work, the authoring and (successfully!) bidding for new commissioned work (e.g. Exlab) with other exciting work in the pipeline. Then we have been rearranging our studio space to accommodate more fabrication space for our various projects. Now there is a corner for electronics prototyping with a kit bench that is slowly expanding for our circuit design and production.
We are slowly growing more capacity not just to fabricate electronics but in fact a wider range of components in house. At the moment we are adding ideas around 3d printing (rapid fabrication) and textiles to embedded electronics. We are also exploring motion capture technologies and the production of data landscapes using sound environments! This is very exciting also as we are re-interpreting ideas and processes previous Proboscis work to expand our exploration and play with notions around physical knowledge artefacts. We are looking to experiment in our various projects where we can take the ideas around them and what they could spark for different uses..
All the above is tied in with ongoing conversations with friends and colleagues I had made in my various previous places of work in an HE context (UCL & The Bartlett Faculty of the Environment & Central Saint Martins, The University of The Arts) where I was for example involved in projects around
- Co-Presence & collaboration technologies with digital artefacts in virtual environment visualisations
- Mapping, understanding factors and strategies producing higher quality urban/city spaces
- Digital archives for architecture student works & new means of portfolio building, sharing and learning
- Collaborative research knowledge spaces and archives
- 3D printing in architecture design
- Parametric modelling and Arduino / Embedded electronics driven installations
- Platforming of shared work spaces and collaboration environments
Being here as part of Proboscis is an exciting way for me to bring a lot of this experience of setting up and operating Learning & Knowledge Spaces in the public realm. Watch out for our new works!
