Futuresonic

Futuresonic
Urban Festival of
Art, Music & Ideas
Manchester, UK

Creative Contribution

What was the significant innovation in approach or thinking behind the project/artwork? How can this be recognisably attributed to the involvement of creative practice?

Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors. It can be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) and it can enable any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can "talk" and "respond" to each other. Part of the Pachube vision is to create a real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.

Recent developments include a carbon footprint calculation application that makes it very easy to take any Pachube feed that measures electricity consumption in watts or kilowatts and convert it into a Pachube feed that shows a realtime estimated carbon footprint for the last 15 minutes, the last hour and the last 24 hours.

This puts new technology to creative use- often as an addition to existing arts projects or science projects. The software is designed for distribution outside of traditional hierarchies that control pubic access to software- a little like youtube but with data.

Through pachube, Haque translates his architectural and artistic practice to a concern with changing relationships between devices and spaces around the world and facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Collaboration

What were the disciplinary contributors to the project? What model of research / development was followed? What were factors leading to success / problems?

Haque is an architect who works closely with designers and has realized a number of public art projects using data visualization. For Example his project Sky Ear from 2006 responded to EMF in the atmosphere and allowed the public to interact via their mobile phone. He is interested in how individuals relate to both the built environment and in what he calls the 'software of space' how factors such as light and temperature influence this.

The Pachube team is headed by Haque and supported by his team:

Chris Leung (EEML developer), photoshopped laptop

Chris Burman ("example-maker". e.g. SL code and Google SketchUp plugin)

Ai Hasegawa (graphic designer)

Sam Mulube (technical producer and website development).

Haque seeks advice from a number of key supporters in the science and technology industries including Dr. Paul Pangaro who has been the CTO at a number of start up technology businesses and is a Distinguished Market Strategist.

Values

What were the outcomes of the project? How were these disseminated to outside stakeholders? What models of value are implied by this project? What was the Impact of the work?

Pachube has been integrated into a wide range of projects to aggregate data across the globe in organisations such as i-Dat university of Plymouth, an automatic weather station in Ross Sea and the National Wind Technology Centre near Colorado. Potential uses are vast.

Pachube is distributed via the Pachube community on the website. The intention is for amateurs and experts alike to be able to integrate this into their own projects. Individuals have to apply to use the software and must be approved by the puchube team before they can begin to use it. There are pachube tutorials available on the website- a measure intended to extend usability.

Uniting spaces and groups of users via data visualization is very much a part of the pachube ethos.

Links and Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things

http://www.pachube.com/

http://www.haque.co.uk/pachube.php