Here and There

The global pandemic has forever changed how we work, learn and play, making virtual communication the primary form of human interaction. Here and There is a new digital pedagogy that enables students to create networked physical interfaces with limited material resources and tools, while being away and stripped from a traditional in-person studio and workshop setting.

Initiated during a week-long workshop in Cambridge (USA) in March 2020, it brought together students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design from ECAL and students from MIT’s Undergraduate Design Minor and Bachelor of Science in Art and Design programs. During the 2020 spring quarantine, a series of open source software and hardware tools were developed to allow students to build electronic objects from simple and readily available materials. These objects were then dynamically routed and connected to each other to physically augment video chatting and to allow students to extend their virtual reach into each other's tangible spaces.

For the first phase of this project, students had to imagine, design and implement two interfaces, whose design and behaviour allowed and suggested a new form of communication between two people, in two separate places. Notions of remote presence, simultaneous actions, shared experience and telepresence were explored, fundamentally expanding the ways through which we interact and communicate.

Open to other academic institutions and the public at large, we plan to continue improving the software routing interface, the techniques for documentation and sharing prototypes, as well as the remote interfaces that we hope will help foster a more human and connected post-pandemic world.

Project page: www.hereandthere.io

AbouttheHUB

The HUB is a circuit board with eight RJ ports, designed to connect various projects through them. The only constraint is the communication: it allows a strict protocol containing only numbers from 0 to 99. This allows to connect projects from very different forms together. Then a HUB is connected to other HUBs over the internet, enabling long distance interactions. This project is open-source, you can find all the details on how to make your own on the GitHub link below.