IoT Week 2015 Lisbon June 16th 18th

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1 IoT Week 2015 Lisbon June 16th 18th Towards Large- Scale Internet- of- Things deployments IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT. of the Roundtable Discussion held at the IoT 2015 Forum in Lisbon Lisbon, 17th June 2015 IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 1 de 7

2 REPORT IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT This document reports on the roundtable discussion entitled: IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT, held within the IoT Week Lisbon 2015, June 16 th deployments, on June 17th from 15:50 to 17:20. The preamble for the discussions was as follows: to 18 th, Towards Large- Scale Internet- of- Things "For centuries a discussion has been going on about if Art imitates Life, or if Life imitates Art. Did George Orwell predict or did he create the Big Brother? Oscar Wilde would possibly be in favour of the latter as he thought that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. The artistic movement Fluxus was all about breaking all barriers between life and art. Industry seems to start being aware that business is not in better technology but yet in better life. The roundtable will discuss the role of artistic practices in making better lives where technology is always present. It will open with a short presentation of STARTS to establish the context. STARTS is a new initiative of DG CONNECT on bringing the Arts along with Science and Technology in ICT research. The main presentation to trigger discussion will be on the experience of Telefonica R&D and LABoral and at its 4th edition of NEXT THINGS CONDUCT, a grant programme supporting artists to create new IoT products and services." The roundtable agenda: Peter Friess (Senior Expert for IoT, DG CONNECT, Brussels, Belgium) - IoT under the vision of ICT and Art; Ovidiu Vermesan (Chief Scientist at SINTEF, Oslo, Norway) - Interoperability - Connection between IoT and Architecture Luis Miguel Girao (STARTS, Brussels, Belgium) STARTS - DG CONNECT's Science, Technology and the Arts Initiative. Rob van Kranenburg (IoT Council, Netherlands) - Lessons Learned: The use of Art and Technology Pere Obrador Espinosa (Telefonica R&D, Barcelona, Spain) IoT and Artists António Câmara (YDreams, Lisbon, Portugal) Printoo: A way to create things The roundtable begun with more than 20 people present. IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 2 de 7

3 IoT under the vision of ICT and Art, Peter Friess. Peter Friess opened the session with a short presentation about the role of artistic practices as a catalysts for innovation in IoT. IoT will be part of our daily lives. Discourses on IoT tend to be very technological. The life aspect of IoT must be balanced. How we can make the bridge between better life and better technology? The Large Scale Pilots Projects financed by the EC will bring IoT to life by focusing in technological uptake and in the development of new businesses. It in this context that artistic practices have a significant say as part of the creative embracement of IoT developments. Art can bring life to life. Engaging artistic practices in Large Scale Pilots Projects will bring new life to IoT. However, these sort of projects are not necessarily most suited for traditional painters or sculptors but yet for artists that already deal with technology as their medium of expression. IoT is about growth, sustainability and coherence. IoT is an innovation ecosystem, made for the end user, where development is open to all, not a single person or a single company. Iot is for all. The IoT challenge is a collective effort for consistent growth. Creative minds interacting with the systems of tomorrow are catalysts for human acceptance of technology beyond pure business. For example, the Nokia tune rings and everybody associates it with Nokia. Art practices apply different ways to approach technological questions: artists do not think on platforms, protocols, etc. Artists think in the form objects, video projects or paths to installations. The arts are not the solution to all IoT challanges. They convey, however, a different sensibility, a different way to approach and represent life. The arts provide simple ways to make technological systems more robust and humanized. Interoperability - Connection between IoT and Architecture, Ovidiu Vermesan How can we promote the connection between IoT and Architecture? This question becomes particularly relevant in the context of smart cities and smart spaces. Smart environments will be able to express themselves. It is here that artists can be useful in creating those expressions. Nature is an artist. Nature creates fantastic landscapes, fantastic ways to support life. Nature creates ways to interconnect lives. IoT applications will build upon interconnectedness to create new services and products. IoT ecosystems are analogous to natural processes, therefore their are intrinsically artistic. Nowadays, a large number of the available ways to enable communication between different devices are vertical vectors that do not support interoperability. Interoperability enabled by interconnectedness is key for new and emerging IoT ecosystems. Future IoT interconnected solutions will bring new models and concepts to architectural design as well as to everyday uses of interconnected designs of light, sound and movement. They will make available a broader palette of technical options for architectural design of interactive buildings. IoT will enable as well as it will be enabled by artist creation, opening up new opportunities for an architecture of things. IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 3 de 7

4 STARTS - DG CONNECT's Science, Technology and the Arts Initiative, Luis Miguel Girao The arts have a critical approach to technology. This is what fundamentally distinguishes them from other technology based practices such as design and engineering. In order to properly integrate artistic practices in frameworks such as Horizon 2020, works of art and exhibitions should be accepted as research outcomes, deliverables. The recognition of artistic research as a valid practice in the production of knowledge, i.e. on the same level as recognised scientific and engineering practices, is instrumental to enable open and disruptive innovation processes in the EU. On the other hand a community including, but not only, new players in Horizon 2020 funded research projects has to be built. The community outside of the H2020 framework has been delivering results to industry and society, as made evident by the ICT ART CONNECT.study. Those innovators are highly educated and skilled. They are used to collaborative and project based work. They are potential key players but are often not aware of the available opportunities in the EU. Why should artists integrate teams in ICT research projects: Critical Approach to Technology To think out- of- the- box is a well known objective in innovation processes; Close- To- Market Outputs Results of art and technology research projects are in their majority in the form of proof of concept; Innovating Artistic Practices The innovation of artistic practices can be instrumental to increase competitiveness transversely in the digital single market; Information Visualization Artists have been engaging in very productive ways in dealing with the visualization of data; Creating New Technologies Many artists have been at the origin of new technologies; Science Communication The context of science museums is where a relevant number of art, science and technology collaboration have been taking place; Social Innovation Artistic practices at the basis of technological development have a concrete impact on growth with not only economical but also social impact; Innovation in Research Abstraction, a skill enhanced by artistic practices, is considered to be the main enabler of innovation in science and technology; Collaborative Context Introducing artistic practices in the field of ICT stimulates a context in which the experiment with new ideas, technology and materials brings advantages. Lessons Learned - The use of Art and Technology, Rob van Kranenburg Rob noted the actual opportunity to talk about IoT, ICT and the Arts: the Arts as catalysts of special interfaces; the Arts engaging us in different scales of time and money. But other attempts happened in the past of EC funded projects and Rob was involved in them. Doors of Perception, in 2002, was a knowledge network, and cultural accelerator bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs, educators, and designers who wanted to imagine alternative futures (sustainable ones) and take design steps to realize them. i3net, started in 1996 and operated until It was the European network for intelligent information interfaces exploring visionary, human- centred interactive systems for people in their everyday activities. Based on the understanding of basic structures and trends i3 focuses on research lines that investigate new relationships between technology, people and design. These couple of examples represent lessons learned on how the influence of artistic practices in technology development is immense. IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 4 de 7

5 Smart gadgets existed already in 1995 but at the time it was not possible to integrate them globally. People in the 90's develop only locally. Nowadays, the complete environment for the global integration of gadgets exists and is ready to be used. The Arts influence daily practices. The Arts have alternative ways to perceive and construct realities. The Arts influence the need to put pieces together: holistic approaches. Artistic processes can influence business models. Artists can help technical people to reduce the gap to the market. Rob concluded by stating that him and other artists involved in the above described artistic integrated projects - such as Régine Debatty, author of the We Make Money Not Art blog use as their artistic medium the economic and financial system. The reason why, for instance, Rob was coordinating at in the same IoT Week Lisbon 2015 a workshop on retail. From his perspective that is where their artistic practice can have concrete impact in society and economy. IoT and Artists, Pere Obrador Espinosa. The research and innovation laboratory of Telefonica in Barcelona integrates the development of artistic concepts as part of their research process. This happens in two forms. One where artists create ideas with Telefonica's technological solutions. Another where artists create new technological solutions with artistic processes. Pere's main vision is that it has to be very clear to the ones engaging with artists that artists do not think or behave as engineers do. Therefore, applying engineering based operation models in artistic based technological development does not work. He reported on a number of lessons learned during his 6 years of experience in this integrating artist in technological research. The aspect of licensing was referred as a relevant one. Artists prefer the open source model of licensing in opposition to the IP sharing model. For Telefonica, the open source model is fine because the outcomes of the artistic driven projects will not reach the market in the form of art objects. They have to be transformed into products. Telefonica will then gain property of the resulting product or service during the productization. For the artists involved, this model is fine as well because they are in general not interested in following the productization process. They just want to make their ideas open and accessible to everybody and engage in a new project. In this model, artists inspire the market of Internet of Things. Pere believes that the ideal time- frame to achieve a new prototype in programmes that are lead artistically is divided in 2 parts. A first period of 2 months within which artists further develop the concept before meeting the development team. A second period where artists integrate the development team delivering a prototype after 4 months. Anything bellow 6 months does not work. Pere stated that artists that have no technical background such as basic programming or fast prototyping skills are very difficult to integrate in development teams. He gave examples where the process of integration took 12 months in order to achieve the indispensable common ground for discussion and communication of ideas. Pere presented 6 selected projects of the programmes of Telefonica that integrate artists: Things Open, VIDA and NEXT THINGS. Thinking Telefonica I+D and LABoral are seeking researchers/artists/designers who are working on artistic and research projects exploring the modulation of human behaviour in groups of people through new IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 5 de 7

6 technologies, particularly ideas and techniques involving data mining and pattern recognition, machine learning, collective group behaviour and wearable technologies and biometric data and similar. Keywords for projects are: Quantified Self, Behaviour, self- tracking, aggregate data, machine learning, wearable tracking. The example considered the most successful was the Flone project: a 100 EUR drone structure to host a smart- phone as is operational core. The Flone is controlled via an application on another smart- phone. When the Flone gets out of range and reaches grounds it texts to the controlling phone its exact location for pick- up. Printoo A way to create things, António Camara A bottle of water was the trigger of the discussion about IoT and Art. A client asks for ideas regarding bottles and packing in general. To properly respond to the client's demand it was necessary to create a team including artists and people from research and business. The research question was: What can be done to a bottle to make it more saleable? IoT is about things that are intelligent. How can we bring intelligence to things? If we look to the bottle, the only existing way to communicate with the world is the bar code. If we read the bar code we get all the information about the bottle, but that is very limited. A bottle with technology to communicate allows it to become alive in the shelf of the supermarket. From this starting point one can mix an infinite number of ideas. The shelf becomes the bottle, the bottle becomes the shelf. The bottle example was to open the discussion about multidisciplinary. In the near future, everyone will be an inventor. We have to deliver tools for people to invent. Everyone can be creative. The major transformation is the basic creative commons. A very important part of creative commons is crowdfunding. In crowdfunding processes the appeal of the project to the market is easily tested before deployment and further investment. Printoo is an Arduino compatible flexible electronics series that allows people to easily become creative and produce their own internet of things. IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 6 de 7

7 RECCOMENDATIONS to the European Commission after IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT The Large Scale Pilot Projects of DG CONNECT should properly integrate artistic practices as horizontal actions in order to significantly boost creativity in IoT in the EU. The European Commission should acknowledge that the contemporary artistic practices relevant to open innovation in ICT go much beyond pure aesthetics. The contemporary artists that have a significant contribution for innovation engage with social, financial, economic, scientific and technological systems as mediums of expression and impact. For IoT, a special focus should be put in the integration of artists in the development of interoperability of connected objects in machine- to- machine, human- to- machine and machine mediated human- to- human communication. The main trend in Creativity for IoT is on providing modular solutions and easy to learn development modules, such as Printoo or Thinking Things Open, allowing every citizen to create their own net of connected objects. Engaging with the arts is indispensable to achieve robust development modules and operation modes. Artists to be engaged both in CSA, R&I or Innovation actions in Horizon 2020 should demonstrate to have a basic technical background such as programming or fast prototyping skills. The time frame of development tasks in R&I or Innovation actions that are artistically driven should not be smaller than 6 months and should dedicate 1/3 of its total duration to concept development previously the following 2/3 for development. The European Commission, more specifically DG CONNECT, should accept as deliverables in CSA, R&I and Innovation type actions artworks involving any sort of ICT application, including exhibitions and installations. The European Commission should engage in extensively promoting the STARTS initiative in order to engage with the key stakeholders that are currently unaware of the effort but that will indispensable for the success of the initiative. IoT IS LIFE, LIFE IS ART: The role of artistic practices as catalysts of innovation in IoT Page 7 de 7