:
(C) 2014 Matilde Igual Capdevila

ROUNDTABLE

Control Room presentations & The File introduction

The session was organized according to the following steps:
- Control Room student presentations
- Atlas Making: introduction of Mini-Symposium
 
HYUNIFY presentations
 
Coming to the end of the semester, the students that have enrolled on the Control Room project present their ideas. Martin Reinhart and Franz Köstlbacher were present to assist and comment on the students' presentations. The Control Room project has been developed with Karl Salzmann and other interested students in the collaboration. Matilde Igual Capdevila, Ana Daldon, Benedict Endler, Adrijan Karavdic, Sebastian Kienzl and Christoph Perl were the students presenting.
 
Matilde starts. In her presentation she describes the history of control rooms throughout the XXth century till present times and how their design and components have evolved. Matilda developed very elaborated research on interior design and architecture of control rooms, she explains the various forms and shapes these places can acquire, and how the functionality of them has been developed (towards efficiency, economical saving, etc). Matilde eventually presents her proposal on how to improve control rooms towards more efficiency. Her proposals regard issues such as the use of a screen by more than one person, lighting of the control room, the meeting room, the display wall, and the layout of the furniture in the control rooms.
 
Ana Daldon commences by explaining that on a first step she focused her research on control rooms in animation movies, specifically 'Simpsons'. She further reaches the central idea of her research on how energy and control room are related to democracy, hence related to something that is centralised. Ana explains how the central room can be perceived as a power room and those inside it are in a privileged, and therefore powerful position. To distribute this power in a democratic way, Ana proposes the development of an energy cell phone app. The intention is that to transport the energetic power of the control room (centralised) to the individuals.
 
In his "Interaction in ensemble" presentation, Benedict guides us through three approaches in which he foresees his Control Room project. His first intention is of dealing with the issue of how gadgets can interact with the human, or what he refers to as "internet of things". As a second approach Benedict refers to the idea of "Sonification". To illustrate it he presents how a group of scientists and sound artists sofinied solar wind. As a final approach Benedict is interested in exploring how one person can acquire other personas and occupations. He intends to allow other people to experience this by creating a game where one can learn how to work in a control room
 
Adrijan begins by presenting the outcome of his investigation on the simplification of a form or idea, giving the map of Germany as an example. Through simplifying, he believes a better understanding to be possible. Hence the bigger the amount of data that the brain needs to process, the faster it tires itself and the less information it collects. This simplification of Germany's map has been explored deeper through representations of its districts, weather, temperatures, regions, geography, rivers, etc. Adrijan introduces then his idea of "futurization" giving as examples concepts and objects such as motion tracking, kinetic and related, and the projection mapping and the vr-cube.
 
Sebastian Kienzl introduces the three paradigms that compose his problems towards the control room. The first paradigm concerns communication. His second is called prognosis; what he describes as using available data to predict and simulate outcomes of different strategies. As a third and last, he presents us is support; specifying it as the positioning of the software as a helpful partner in sensitive situations. Concerning his personal research, Sebastian presents his ‘Methods of Interface Prototyping’, which refer to the use of low-level prototyping techniques to investigate usability from an early stage. On future plans, he intends to develop the ‘Design of a planning’ software; in other words, what could a planning software for a control room look like?

Christoph presents his time-based project. Everyday since 2010 he writes his every step on a diary, this is a project that he intends to continue until 2020. He intends to apply this dissecting analysis to his investigation for the control room. In the same way that he collects information about himself and his everyday, so does a control room. Christoph describes his strategies in applying this analysis, recollection and processing of information to the Control Room project. He intends to center his focus on the processing of information as energy, to manage data and to produce energy.
 

THE FILE mini-symposium
 
Bernd, Valerie and Brishty announced the mini -symposium that will take place on the 4th of March 2015. The theme for this first symposium shall be "The File: On the temporal dimensions of electronic patient records" and its guests will consist of Ulrike Felt, Giuliu Superti-Furga, Alexander Geiger and one other (still to be confirmed). Bernd shortly introduces the guests.
 
A reader for the symposium was distributed to the students as mandatory preparation. Each text was assigned to two students to present on the 3rd of March during the RT.

ROUNDTABLE
January 20, 2015, 09:30h