We are trying to follow up every Cumulus institution relating to the goals and purposes of the working group. Suggestions are welcome ! Join the conversation…

What is the state of Digital Culture in Shanghaï 2010 ? We need inner feedback from players in the local market. What are the trends, opportunities and threats in the vastest area in Asia concerning digital services, applications and media ? With the introduction of case studies (success stories, failures and errors also), explanation and analysis of creative processes & key factors in this specific context will be brought. Invited speakers Itamar Medeiros and Lynette Chan will be provide us with their vision for the future, and maybe tell us a bit about expectations and wishes for the evolution of design education in the field of interaction design, service design, digital media.

Session will be divided in two parts :

- Digital Culture in Shanghaï 2010 : case studies

Invited speakers :

Itamar Medeiros
Itamar Medeiros, from Brazil, currently lives in Shanghai, where he works as User Experience Manager of Utilities Design Solutions at Autodesk ®, and helps promote Interaction Design as a local coordinator for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar Medeiros has developed <>  several websites and interactive media campaigns, both as art director and, later, as creative director. As an Information Design specialist , served as board member of the Brazilian Society of Information Design , and held a lecturing position as Assistant Program Director of the Visual Communication Department of Raffles Design Institute at DongHua University, China.

Lynnette Chan
Human centered industrial designer at rénnovate
Former Lead of Creative Studio at Asentio and industrial designer at IDEO Shanghaï.
Lynnette Chan, born and raised in Singapore, currently curiously observing daily living surprises in Shanghai. Prior to setting up rénnovate, she was an industrial designer with IDEO and Creative Studio Lead at Asentio Design. Her project portfolio includes wide range of products, from Chinese youth media behaviors, health care, oral care, home electronics, future handheld computing to cooking stove for rural China. During the design process, she collaborates very closely across multi-disciplines (human factor specialists, mechanical engineers, and interaction designers).

- State of the art and relaunch of the DC activity : who’s in, who shall be in, what for ?

About Cumulus Digital Culture

Cumulus Digital Culture is a working group bringing together members of the CUMULUS Association dedicated to new media and interaction design.

For a while now, digital technologies and services have appeared all around us on a worldwide scale. Art, design and media higher education institutions have taken into account this emerging and challenging trend pervading our societies.
Many courses, curriculums, degrees and research projects have come to life over the past ten or fifteen years: “new media, “interaction design”, “multimedia/hypermedia” etc…
Depending on each institution’s own history, on the personal interests of the pioneering founders as well as on national and local contexts, many different options have been explored. It’s now time to identify and to gather the various players in our institutions interested in what can be called a “digital culture” in a broader sense.
This working group is meant to be both a platform for discussion and exchanges about existing experiences and a framework for future collaboration, including the quite contemporary issue of research.

Typically, information is shown in a classical template; a bar chart, line graph, pie chart, etc. Such methods of displaying data have become so common that we often use them to communicate ideas, without first searching for a more successful means.

The goal of this project is to take you through the process of information visualization. Information design and visualization is a form of narrative. Each student approaches the information in their own way and generates a new and interesting concept to communicate traditional data sets.

The process of understanding data begins with a set of numbers and a
goal of answering a question about the data. The steps along this path
can be described as follows:

“The process of understanding data begins with a set of numbers and a
goal of answering a question about the data. The steps along this path
can be described as follows:

1. Acquire - the matter of obtaining the data, whether from a file
on a disk or from a source over a network.

2. Parse - providing some structure around what the data means,
ordering it into categories.

3. Filter - removing all but the data of interest.

4. Mine - the application of methods from statistics or data
mining, as a way to discern patterns or place the data in math-
ematical context.

5. Represent- determination of a simple representation, whether
the data takes one of many shapes such as a bar graph, list, or
tree.

6. Refine - improvements to the basic representation to make it
clearer and more visually engaging.

7. Interact - the addition of methods for manipulating the data or
controlling what features are visible.”

Ultimately this is fun, really. Data is surprising in its flexibility and overall squishiness as a design problem. There are so many ways to approach information presentation. Whether it is the friendliness of the illustrative style of Richard Saul Wurman, or the precise regulation of Edward Tufte, or the elegant intelligence of Minard, ultimately you are end up expressing your authorship as a designer and your understanding of your target audience though very subtle graphic cues that guide without getting in the way of illumination.

- Concept by Ben Fry

Project: Data Visualization, Class: Experience Design at RMCAD
Student Designers: Andrew Alger, Jenn Doe, Andrea Kilness, and Grant Miller
Instructor: Fred Murrell

See the projects here:

Andrew Alger, Andrea Kilness, Grant Miller, Jenn Doe

• A web platform where you can define and edit your personal profile and your points of interest,
• A mobile service, enabling you to get appropriate information about upcoming events within the area you’re located in, wherever it is, in relation to your own profile and personal interests.

Box’n'Grow by Samuel Juving : what would be the best way to store and to manage one’s own personal digital memory ? Samuel Juving has chosen the metaphor of the garden as a guideline for a series of tools for personal data management. Each souvenir is therefore a seed that needs to be shared to grow and to blossom… It is meant to be a web platform and a desktop widget.

* Proche by Jules Leclerc : what would be the most convenient services for the population currently NOT using the Internet at home ? Jules Leclerc designed three different solutions for day-to-day interaction, that can be used as separate modules or combined altogether :

• “Je te vois” (I can see you) for videoconferencin,
• “Je t’entends” (I can hear you) for voice based communication,
• “Je te lis” (I can read you) for text messaging.

All modules are based on a simplified access to the service, based on RFID. It is meant to be fully interoperable with existing hardware and services. It provides a better ease of use by exploiting wireless home technologies, providing mobility and seamless connectivity.

Get a demo video of the project on YouTube !