Salvatore Iaconesi

HER: She Loves Data

Speculative design practice questions the practice of design and offers some alternatives that are essential for the world of today and more importantly, the world of tomorrow. Based on the urgent need for an upgrade related to speculative design educational practice, the SpeculativeEdu (Speculative Design – Educational Resource Toolkit) project is...

We present the case study of a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture in which the partners were selected to experiment an urban regeneration process using AI and Big Data, together with art and design. A consortium was formed to introduce IAQOS, an experience in community AI which was connected to the local primary school and to the mul...

What is a research center? How does its role change in the age of data and computation? The article describes the theoretical and conceptual foundations that in 2020 led to the redesign of the research center HER - Human Ecosystems Relations, founded in 2013 by the artist duo Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, to create a new type of organizati...

The methodology and technique used to design and develop an Emotional Compass, a device for orientation in urban environments which uses geo-located content harvested from major social networks to create novel forms of urban navigation. The user-generated content harvested from social networks is processed in real time to capture emotional informat...

In this chapter we will understand how to use the Relational Ecosystem to perform Digital Urban Acupuncture. The chapter starts off from the definition of Urban Acupuncture, and from all its supporting theories and methodologies, to then define Digital Urban Acupuncture: its goals, methodological approach, assumptions, and operative strategies. By...

Expanding our understanding of ecosystems: This chapter introduces the concept of the Relational Ecosystem. The urban ecosystems, with all its actors of the multiple human and nonhuman types, seen from the point of view of the relations which emerge and form in its daily life. The chapter introduces the concept and moves on to the description of ho...

This chapter introduces a series of features which are characteristics of this book, which comes under the form of the expanded book. A series of special contents are disseminated throughout it, such as databases, videos, artworks, and interactive experiences, under the form of Internet resources which can be accessed through a variety of devices a...

In this chapter, we will temporarily end our journey through Digital Urban Acupuncture by making some remarks about the origins of this research and about its future directions.

There are multiple cultures in the city of Turin. In one year (2011) of observation of the city of Turin through social networks, we have been able to detect the many languages spoken in the city, as evidence of the multiple cultures which inhabit it. In places, crossings, emotions, communication, opinions, the city is different according to the cu...

A Real-Time Museum of the city of São Paulo, dedicated to creating an iconic, engaging, inclusive experience of the Relational Ecosystem of the city, built together with SESC, the Brazilian federal agency in charge of managing the nation’s museums and cultural installments. The museum (which is currently being built at the time of writing) has been...

This chapter focuses on the ways in which non-human entities can be included in the Relational Ecosystem of the city, such as plants, trees, infrastructures, organizations, sensors, and devices. The methodologies, approaches, technologies, and modalities according to which these scenarios can take form are examined using a variety of approaches and...

This chapter sums up all the observations narrated in the previous sections to describe a series of philosophical and methodological results which are central to the Human/Relational Ecosystem and Digital Urban Acupuncture approaches. These can best be synthesized as a shift in focus: away from the idea of the necessity of consensus and toward the...

Understanding the roles in the Relational Ecosystem, this chapter introduces a methodology according to which the nodes of the Relational Ecosystem can be classified according to their characteristics, and the ways in which it is possible to define further classification schemes to achieve different goals. The types of relations described in Chap....

Greater Kansas City’s innovation ecosystem, as observed in 2012–2013. The chapter explores Kansas City’s innovation ecosystem, as observed for two full years through major social networks. It begins by explaining what motivated the authors in choosing to observe Kansas City (its lively, young and growing innovation scene, its startup and technologi...

Starting from the definition of the Third Infoscape, this chapter introduces a vision of cities’ ecosystems as a network of interconnected human and non-human entities establishing flows of communication, information, knowledge, emotion, and opinion. Cities are shown as a polyphony of expressions interweaving human and non-human communication, sens...

This chapter provides a general introduction about the research process which brought to the writing of the book, and then synthesizes the its contents describing them on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

This article describes their biopolitical implications for design from psychological, cultural, legal, functional and aesthetic/perceptive ways, in the framework of Hyperconnectivity: the condition according to which person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication progressively shift to networked and digital means. A defini...

The Third Infoscape is a concept which originates from Soja's Thirdspace, Clèment's Third Landscape and Casagrande's Third Generation City. The Third Infoscape deals with the ruins of digital communication just as the Third Generation City deals with the ruins of the industrial city, the Third Landscape deals with ruins of gardens and Thirdspace de...

This article describes their biopolitical implications for design from psychological, cultural, legal, functional and aesthetic/perceptive ways, in the framework of Hyperconnectivity: the condition according to which person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication progressively shift to networked and digital means. A defini...

Starting from De Certeau’s Practice of Daily Life, the chapter describes how the theory of (Digital) Urban Acupuncture is connected with the concept of Third Space (Soja), Third Landscape (Clément), Third-Generation City (Casagrande), and Third Paradise (Pistoletto), arriving to a definition of Third Infoscape. The chapter ends with an interview wi...

The Human Ecosystems and Digital Urban Acupuncture approaches have been used by Rome’s Public Administration to gain better understandings about the city’s cultural ecosystem, to enact public engagement directed to promoting participatory decision-making and policy-shaping processes, to foster the emergence of peer-to-peer self-organization pattern...

This book explores the possibility to observe the lives of cities through ubiquitous information obtained through social networks, sensors and other sources of data and information, and the ways in which this possibility describes a new form of Public Space, which can be used to define new forms of citizenship and participated city governance. The...

The Third Infoscape refers to the information and knowledge generated through the myriads of micro-histories, through the progressive, emergent and polyphonic sedimentation of the expressions of the daily lives of city dwellers. To all effects, with the development of wireless sensors, of smart dust1, and with the possibility to engage human beings...

Different people and cultures associate different emotional states to different parts and spaces of cities. These vary according to individuals, their cultures and also to the time of day, day of week, season, special occasions and more. Recurring patterns may occur in correspondence of the places in which people work, study, entertain themselves,...

The concept of Urban Acupuncture as applied to a contemporary vision of cities, between ubiquitous technologies, social networks, sensors and cloud computing. From the possibility to listen in real time to the digital life of the city to the opportunity to design and implement novel models for participatory, co-creation practices for city governanc...

The methodology and technique used to design and develop an Emotional Compass, a device for orientation in urban environments which uses geo-located content harvested from major social networks to create novel forms of urban navigation. The user-generated content harvested from social networks is processed in real-time to capture emotional informat...

We have radically changed our perception of what is public and what is private. While using social networks, search engines and websites determining who has access to our information, our personal details, our habits and preferences is often complex or not easily accessible. Each person's information is sold hundreds of times each day, while surfin...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel mo-bile interface under the form of an emotional compass. The interface has been created using the possibility to access large number of geo-located user gener-ated contents across multiple social networks, which have then been processed using Natural Language Analysis techniques, to und...

When I was diagnosed with brain cancer, I opened up my medical records to the Web, asking for help. The response was incredible: a global source of crowd-generated information about how to cure my own cancer. This work explores the many issues involved in handling such a peculiar form of information (including privacy, preserving the complexity of...

A research process lasting from 2009 to 2012 has conceptualized, designed and implemented multiple tools and strategies to experiment novel forms of technologically-supported urban interaction. The goal of this process has been to understand the rituals which have started to shape contemporary citizens' perception and performance of urban public an...

Is it possible to imagine novel forms of urban planning and of public policies regulating the ways in which people use city spaces by listening to citizens' expressions, emotions, desires, and visions, as they ubiquitously emerge in real-time on social networks and on other sources of digital information? This chapter presents the theoretical and m...

The possibility to listen to the ideas, visions, emotions, and proposals, which are expressed each day by citizens –either explicitly or implicitly by the ways in which they use their cities, workplaces, and malls– suggests the emergence of positive scenarios. It is possible to create multiple layers of narratives which traverse the city and which...

This paper explores augmented reality as a set of technologies and processes that weave hypermedial content into printed publications thus fostering new educational practices. The idea was to implement a platform fostering what has been defined as 'Mode-2' knowledge production practice. This is a practice that involves multi-disciplinary teams, bro...

As we move through cities in our daily lives, we are in a constant state of transformation of the spaces around us. The form and essence of urban space directly affects people's behavior, describing in their perception what is possible or impossible, allowed or prohibited, suggested or advised against. We are now able to fill and stratify space/tim...

While we perform our daily tasks we reinterpret space and personalize it, according to tactics which reveal significant information about ourselves. We are now able to fill and stratify space/time with digital information layers, completely wrapping cities in a membrane of information and of opportunities for interaction and communication. Mobile d...

This paper presents a prototype for an educational toolkit (DIY GIS) to learn and teach some important elements of urban design, planning and management. The project aimed at developing a platform that addresses geographic mapping as a process that is subjective (of a projection of the user-inhabitant's imagination) as well as objective (of the ter...

This paper presents the approaches, methodologies and results of a multidisciplinary research project which, over the last 4 years, was able to investigate on the possibility to observe the behavior of city dwellers using information harvested from social networks which was then analyzed using Natural Language Processing techniques to gather insigh...

“A Third Augmented Landscape” is a performative presentation and scientific paper discussing the outcomes of a research project carried out by FakePress Publishing and Università di Roma “La Sapienza”: the creation of an open source augmented reality (AR) system for leaves. This AR system, called LEAF++, is based on a combined series of computer...

Leaf++ is an ubiquitous, interstitial information tool. It is designed as a new "eye" that can be used to look at the natural landscape of our cities. It is designed to help us see and understand the Third Landscape. Leaf++ is an augmented reality system which employs computer vision techniques to recognize plants from their leaves, and allows us t...

This paper explores augmented reality as a set of technologies and processes to weave hyper medial content into printed publications thus fostering new educational practices. In particular this paper focuses on augmented reality as a bridge to extend traditional hyper mediality to paper-based educational tools, analyzing a book recently released by...

This paper presents a prototype for an application based on a CMS (Content Management System) connected to an augmented-reality engine that allows final users to publish, read and experience multimedia content tied to specific components of physical artifacts. When the physical artifacts are placed under a webcam, a pre-trained 3D feature recogniti...

The production of material space and objects has been a key aspect of human activities and in throughout history we have repeatedly been trying to augment our immediate reality (Lefèbvre 1991; William John Mitchell 2005; Aurigi and Cindio 2008; Gregory 2003). Augmented reality technologies define the possibility of reconsidering the ways in which w...

Ubiquitous Anthropology is a location-based application for mobile phones, handheld devices and personal computers, developed to be used as a polyphonic platform for ethnographic research and representation. The system is accessed through multimedia mobile devices that allow all the subjects involved in the research (anthropologists, informants and...

FakePress explores the opportunities for the next-step transformation of publishing practices, designing publications that are disseminated, ubiquitous, multi-author, emergent, open-ended, natively cross-medial, multi-sensorial, relational, emotional. The objective is to disarticulate the form of the book, transforming it into a new form of experie...

NeoRealismo Virtuale (NeRVi) is an innovative approach through which digital ubiquitous technologies are used to create, access and visualize additional layers to the ordinary reality, creating stratified continums in which digital content is interconnected interactively with the physical world. Mobile devices, wearable technologies, interactive ar...

Squatting Supermarkets is an art performance originating from the availability of an innovative technology called iSee. In Squatting Supermarkets product logos become places for multidirectional communication and information: the iSee application uses computer vision techniques to recognize logos, transforming them into gateways for multiple forms...

This paper presents a prototype for an augmented-reality based toy. Toys++ is grounded on the concept that the actual activity of building tangible artifacts can speed up learning processes. Toys ++ aims at assembling a framework that will allow the use of existing physical components of the toy as triggers. When the toy is placed under the webcam,...

This paper presents the iterative design process used in generating several prototypes and proofs of concept for wearable, technological devices which are capable of implementing emotional skins. Reactive layers have the potential to act as visualization surfaces to represent individuals' or groups' emotional configurations depending on the specifi...

"This book chronicles the intense experience of REFF, the RomaEuropa FakeFactory, told through the contributions and works of the wide network of artists, intellectuals, journalists, teachers, lawyers and activists who participated. The fake competition RomaEuropa FakeFactory was an act of artivism, in favor of free culture and non-proprietary righ...

Il paper presenta l'architettura filosofica e logica di un progetto ongoing per la creazione di un'infrastruttura peer to peer per la diffusione dei saperi. Tale infrastruttura p2p vuole essere la base per costruire un framework aperto e orizzontale, che ospiti pratiche innovative di creazione, condivisione e disseminazione di informazioni e conosc...

Questo paper presenta i primi esiti di un progetto di ricerca - ancora in corso - che mira a esplorare nuove forme di scrittura e rappresentazione etnografica.In particolare, la diffusione di tecnologie e pratiche di geo-tagging ha consentito di creare una piattaforma mediale plurale, in cui le tante soggettività€ che hanno osservato un complesso r...

Technology always modified us. The perception of space and time, of our bodies and of our identity largely depends on technology. Electricity, transports, mechanics and chemistry define the ways in which we perceive time, space, physics, and nature. Telecommunications opened up infinite possibilities for our minds to broaden, to freely move in time...

Augmented reality learning tools can give significant contributions to the development of anthropological practices. The steps to acquire a professional vision in a specific research field can be supported and enhanced by ITC applications creating content for students and practitioners. Digital tools can be created and supported by versatile cross-...