1 November 2011
Product Design students exhibit their ability to get physical with apps
Product Design students from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design have been invited to exhibit at this year’s Mozilla Festival, the world's leading open web technology showcase.
Internet giant Mozilla describes itself as a global community dedicated to improving the online experience for people around the world by building free, open source software products and technologies. They are perhaps best known for creating Firefox, one of the world’s most popular web browsers.
The Mozilla Festival is a yearly celebration of technology and design that brings together hundreds of passionate people from different disciplines to explore the frontiers of the open web. The theme of this year’s event, which takes place in London from 4th-6th November, is 'Media, Freedom and the Web', and will explore how the web can make people more creative, collaborative and connected.
Product Design director Dr Jon Rogers, along with programme tutors Tom Metcalfe and Ali Napier, are taking the whole seven-strong cohort of students to London where they will join world-renowned designers, technologists, journalists, and inventors from some of the world’s biggest media companies at the festival.
The students are currently putting the finishing touches to their exhibition, a display area which imagines four iconic companies - BBC, Skype, Twitpic and SoundCloud - as physical objects. They are setting up their exhibition in the form of a Physical App Store, a pop-up shop that aims to change how software developers view web technology by asking the questions 'what if the web were physical?'
Using open technology developed on the web and harnessed by the students at DJCAD, the Physical App Store aggregates live community information from the festival, such as that posted on Twitter and other social media, and prints out the details so that visitors can be pointed in the direction of where event of interest to them are taking place.
The exhibition goes beyond conventional event displays and newer innovations such as Twitter Walls by using sensors and physical interfaces to tell new stories. It constantly prints information about the latest events and hot topics arising at the festival in order to keep attendees up to date.
Dr Rogers said he was delighted that the Dundee team had been selected to join the world-leading talent lined up to attend and present at the festival.
'Put it this way, you have pretty much every open web organisation, company, and individual in one place for three days,' he said. 'These are people that have the potential to completely change how we all go about our lives. Putting the University of Dundee in this mix is something rather special.
'What we wanted to do was develop a physical app that can help people find out where the conversations they want to join in are taking place. Information usually flows in pockets and through different channels.
'We’re seeing tension between emerging and dying models of communication, but the physical world is a universal mode of communication whereas digital technology is not so people are always going to use different channels.
'This creates an integration problem which the students are trying to solve by adding an everyday-ness to digital communication. There will never be a perfect digital platform, but the perfect platform for communication does exist in the real world.
'What we need to do is build a physical manifesto of the internet to enhance the technology, and this is where our imagining of physical representations of these web giants comes in.'
Apps have become a well-known phenomenon in recent years, particularly in relation to their use in smart phones and other forms of digital technology, but physical apps are another - possibly the next big - iteration of web technology.
Dr Rogers continued, 'Think of every app, and then think of it as a physical product that could be in your home, at your workplace, on your body or somewhere in your community. If you are asked to imagine a clock - do you see an app? What about a radio? A TV? A book? A newspaper? All of these now exist as software applications, but are valued because they are part of our physical world - not just our virtual one.
'Now do the same for BBC news, the same of Sound Cloud, the same for Skype - and where do you end up? You end up with a set of demonstrators that show how we at the University of Dundee can design for the future.'
The invitation to Dundee Product Design students came after the programme had hosted a Knight-Mozilla Idea Jam, an event offering artists and designers the chance to change the way the world engages with news, earlier this year.
Dundee students and graduates impressed the judges with the quality of their ideas, and this has led to the invite to take part in next week’s event, which promises to be 'three days of passionate people using the web to bend, hack and reinvent all forms of media and how we communicate with the world.'
More information about the DJCAD exhibition is available at https://mozillafestival.org/2011/09/08/physical-apps/.
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