These excursions demonstrate some of the topics addressed in the CU seminar. Instead of traditional academic writing, they have been realized in our own media - audio, visual, and interactive. We hope you enjoy them!

What you see is what you need

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This excursion is a dialogue that probes the paradoxical relations of transparency and opaqueness in user interfaces. The issues of usability, goal-orientedness, customized views are brought up in the context of a military aircraft's control interfaces. We invite you to question things that seem 'obvious' and play the game of 'hide and see' with us.
Giedre Kligyte
Markku Nousiainen

Thanks to:
Friedrich Kittler ('stimuli targeted to the task at hand')
Bruno Latour('technology making society durable')
Sherry Turkle (the notion of functional transparency in interfaces).
Special thanks to Socrates for the art of critical questioning.

Mobile Actors

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This opera in one act, for several actors was inspired by two things: the team's participation in the 3GSMWorld Conference in Cannes, February 2001, and Bruno Latour's idea of the controversies involved in technologies-in-the-making. We have tried to listen to a lot of voices around the 3rd generation of mobile communications and dramatize the scene from a designer's point of view.
Jokko Korhonen
Cilla Lönnqvist
Minna Tarkka

Thanks to:
Ville Martin - sound design
Mika Pantzar - ideas + Tulevaisuuden koti. Arjen tarpeita keksimässä (Otava, Helsinki 2000)
Timo Kopomaa - The Birth of the Mobile Information Society (Gaudeamus, Helsinki 2000)
Bruno Latour - Science in Action (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1987)
Hewlett-Packard mobile e-services bazaar
Nettime-l http://www.nettime.org/

A Game of Imaginary Beings

Requires Shockwave8 plug-in

The Game of Imaginary Beings engages the user in a critical poetic reflective design practice. Who are designers imagining in the place of the user? Themselves or somebody else? How do they cope with that which is different, with the "others" of design? the purpose of the game is to construct an imaginary being. It invites the designer-user to play with associative taxonomy of wish images as well as hybrid identities and prompts her to win and loose beyond the dichotomies of design.
Andrea Botero
Ellen Kotanen
Riikka Pelo
Heidi Tikka

Thanks for inspiration:
Donna Harraway
Katherine Hayles
The early surrealists
Jorge Luis Borges