What is the most urgent need that you have?
Positioning ourselves in relation to the open source movement and in the world of business and the creative industries.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
We’ve recently finished developing a prototyping toolkit for electronics aimed at complete beginners in the creative industries. This was in response to demand in the traditional world of museum installation design (University of Arizona in this case) which is an area is great development. Our client was keen to internally develop skillsets around new technologies to rapidly develop interactive installations. Our objective was to develop a platform that would reduce the learning curve dramatically for creative people and programmers alike to engage with new technologies as well as make it hackable by more advanced users and compatible with the Arduino platform. We have completed a first set and are now looking to sell this platform to other markets.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
The support of open source platforms is still something that lies under the surface of the political and policy-based spectrum. The world of open source software has proven its validity and the creation of business ecologies around it but these are still only valid on an industry level. The OLPC is a first example of open source software being driven through a very politically driven project.
We believe that open source hardware will become more and more instrumental in allowing people to construct and create their own answers to everyday problems, enabling rapid de-centralised innovation across industries based on grass roots knowledge sharing. With the urgency around around sustainability and global warming on a global level, we believe this might have an impact on helping us transition away from the industrial society that has run its course. Good provision needs to change and enabling people through the creation of easy tools that use everyday technologies is a way forward.
