Designtheorie | Sustainable transition by mobile services
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19 Aug Sustainable transition by mobile services

by Prof. Dr. Brigitte Wolf, Prof. Eero Miettinen (4th Sustainable Summer School)

The “Sustainable Transition by Mobile Services” workshop focused on how information can now travel with the speed of light. This is made possible by the “net” that covers the earth, which, although invisible, is omnipresent. It connects everyone to any other person at any time anywhere in the world and immediately delivers any available information. Mobile services have enabled communication to become borderless. The possibility of the rapid exchange of data has changed our lives in recent years and affected social, cultural, political, economical, and environmental behavior. Both the net and mobile services are neutral tools in and of themselves that can be used for both good and bad. There is no CEO in charge who can control global streams of data. Control of content is a very difficult challenge—who might decide what is good or bad? We all very much enjoy the advantages of mobile services, but we realize that there are also disadvantages. Many users rely on self-regulation by mobile services that is based on fairness and trust. Usually it seems to work. The 4th Sustainable Summer School took place on Suomenlinna Island near the city of Helsinki. The island played an important role in Finnish history and was a strategic location in the defense of Finland during the Russo- Swedish War in the eighteenth century. Today the island is under the protection of UNESCO and is a designated World Heritage Site. Finnish schools frequently take students to this important Finnish historical place. Recently the Finnish government decided that Finnish schoolchildren should begin working with new media and mobile services from a very early age. A pilot project will soon be initiated that will hand out iPad’s to first-grade pupils in order to determine how this media can support and update the learning process from the earliest stages. A cooperative project with a Finnish design studio that has developed the appropriate software for these purposes is in the works. Taken together, these local conditions form a perfect basis for our summer school project. The students’ task was determined in cooperation with the city of Helsinki: to design a project which encourages school children to explore the island and playfully learn to handle the iPad device. … read the complete publication here >>