If a “smart” coffee machine knows about its user’s heart problems, should it accept giving him a coffee when he requests one? The system will be designed to take into account certain inputs, to process a ‘certain’ type of information under a ‘certain’ kind of logic. How are these “certainties” defined, and by whom? How are these autonomous systems going to be able to solve problems without objective answers? And, moreover, as the nature of ethics is very subjective, how will machines be able to deal with the variety of profiles, beliefs, and cultures?

The Ethical Things project looks at how a very mundane object like a fan, might face complex dilemmas, and can source answers and determine its behaviour by asking to crowdsourced workers. Rather than focusing on creating complex and possibly erroneous algorithmic smartness, we outsource the choice to people and allow users to set the ethical parameters chosen to find the right remote “Ethical Agent”.

FabAthens is a platform for developing ad hoc city interventions in a continuous urban transformation. FabAthens is a productive and shareable by the citizens’ platform. It uses Urban Innovation Ecosystems as a tool and refers to Adhoc Tinguely’s NTUA workshops / courses for a modelization of its “from meta-mechanics to post-digital” dimension (https://metamechpostdigital.wordpress.com). It relates to the ad hoc conceived courses, as being the modelization of its “post-digital” dimension.

Urban Innovation Ecosystmems comprise localized small-scale innovations distributed in the urban field, which through their interconnection, accelerate strategies related to a Senseable, Creative, Productive contemporary city. The aspect of urban production is central in the research roadmap, rendering the transformation of Athens into a FAB CITY as an ultimate goal. Senseable City is equipped with intelligent systems, in order to collect urban data in real time, allowing open access for all users. Large sensor networks provide critical information about natural and built environment. Creative City promotes new types of synergies among users, local institutions, academia and businesses (4P: public-private-people partnership), aiming at innovation and knowledge creation. Productive City is a network of interconnected small-scale producers, applying open fabrication with the contribution of FabLab Athens (Cf HUM(erus), humerusrobot.wordpress.com).

The works we presented from Tinguely v.1 course of the School of Architecture NTUA dated from 2014. P. Vasilatos, A. Stavridou, and M. Papavasileiou participate also in the 2015 course.

As in the traditional Native American ceremony, all discarded materials are gathered together in a metaphorical celebration of the ritual, in which remnants of production are donated and consumed, to give them a new meaning. Potlatch is based on gift economy and proceeds without any speculative logic: the result is an infinite virtual landscape of waste, accessible to everyone. Through Potlatch, these sterile fragments are released, and the beauty of the disposition sublimates our condition of immaterial workers with thoughtful detachment. Fosbury Architecture, as recipient will limit itself to assemble a temporary composition. Playing with these scraps the aim is to build up an open source platform carrying out a huge apotropaic drawing, as an opportunity to reaffirm our fragile status. The platform is conceived as a flea market, a collective form, proliferating and permanently under construction. The Potlatch flea market it is not designed, but it is a unified whole composed by multiple individual memorabilia.

Divergence is an open-source project that deals with the question of how to create physicality in order to sense the invisible forces that surround us, through the use of wearable technology, e-textiles and creative coding. It proposes the creation of a wearable electromagnetic field detector that provides the human body with the ability to feel and listen to the electrically and magnetically charged particles that propagate around us. The wearable detector consists of a soft-circuitry garment with an embedded microcontroller that provides haptic and sonic feedback to the user. The haptic feedback is experienced in the form of vibration patterns and the sonic feedback in the form of tones that variate in pitch depending on the strength of the signal. The detection takes place through two embroidered coils that are incorporated in the wrists of the garment and serve as antennas for sensing EM fields. The project’s schematics and code are available in Github, accessible by anyone interested in creating their own version of an EMF detector wearable.

Divergence forms part of The Soft, The Hard and The Wet performances cycle curated by Shu Lea Cheang that took place at Linz in Austria during Ars Electronica 2014.