7-10pm Tuesday evenings
@ Innovation Campus, UOW (Ground floor of iAccelerate building)
$40 (per week)
To express interest in this lab please contact us (by phone or email)
We start by making a LED light blink by sending an email, and continue on to design / make / explore what a more ‘open’ social network might look like, and we ask uncomfortable questions such as: What would happen if Facebook was ‘plugged into’ our home.
Thanks to the network, everyone is connected to everyone else. Soon, every thing will be connected as well.
It sounds exciting and empowering, but the reality is that this connectivity is now largely controlled by private enterprise. Our patterns of social interaction are massaged by large organisations whose principle concern is placing advertising on our screens. And we can be pretty sure that the impending network connectivity of all things will also be captured by private enterprise which might, for example, use them to drive increased consumption. Imagine receiving the email:
“Hi, your fridge tells us that you only have 2 bottles of Gaterade left. Reply to this email within 24 hours to get another dozen bottles delivered to your door in time. Click here to learn how important it is to replenish your salts! “
Of course, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with commerce, but what would our networked lives look like, how would they change, if the underlying connectivity platforms we used were open, flexible, extensible and independent?
At Polygon Door, we have been working on designing and developing that platform. It is called HackySoc, it runs on a cheap Arduino micro-controller, it uses WiFi for network connectivity, it can send and receive messages to/from anyone and it can be plugged into almost any electronic device.
In this course we introduce you to HackySoc. We explore the potential of connecting things with other things, people with people, people with things and things with people in new ways. We ask the questions: What makes a network social? What happens when our things start speaking and listening to us? Does the nature of things change, does the nature of communication and the culture it supports change?
You might bring a project idea with you for controlling, listening, or networking things over wifi and email, you might simply use this as an opportunity to get introduced to the modern world of coding, electronics and networks, or you might be interested in exploring the big questions about the contemporary world with us – Hopefully all three….
Once you can send and receive emails, completely autonomously via Arduino, a whole array of possibilities open up. Sure, we can send messages to each other, but we can also program an Arduino to send an email when an event occurs, or trigger an event when an email is received. Any number of Arduino's can interact and share information this way allowing autonomous distributed networks of anything controllable via Arduino to act as a distributed network without a single centralised server.
By participating in this project you will also have the opportunity to participate in our research project. For example, you might like to join us in thinking about whether or not Facebook would be better if it offered more than a "Like" button. Alternatively, you might prefer to pursue your own agenda and project ideas.