London, ergens in november. Het is koud. Nederland zeurt over harde wind. Hier is het gewoon altijd waterkoud aan de Thames. De omgeving maakt veel goed. Het is en blijft het land van de praktische Interaction Design.

Ik mag een van de meeste coole I-design girls interviewen over haar Undersound.org project. Een p2p Social Networking-project dat veel exposure kent.

How did you get involved into this ambitious project?

– Basically we’re 3 main designers, all PhD students from different schools. The design of the application is quite complex and, as you say, ambitious. It followed an ethnographic study that one of the designers, Johanna, conducted over last summer. As we do research this is important as it makes the design more grounded and situated, and also easier to be integrated with the environment it targets (in this case, the London Underground).

What is the basic Social Networking-idea behind Undersound?

– Our basic idea is to provide a platform for emerging musicians to distribute the music they’ve produced, and for commuters to be entertained during their trip, and engage more with both the space the traverse and other people sharing it. You can find more information about the design on our website ( http://www.undersound.org), which you’ve probably already seen.

Could tell something more about the practical side and webtech integration?

As far as the practical side of the project is concerned, we’re now working on the undersound prototype, mainly in connection with a EU-funded project under which part of the project has been funded. The project is called BIONETS and is researching the next generation of wireless networks, which are decentralised and bio-inspired. As Nokia is part of this project we’re also talking to them to receive support as far as the mobile phone client is concerned. One of the main issues that we’ve found so far has in fact been the choice of the platform for implementation, as it is still challenging to create applications for mobile phones that are stable and compatible with various models. As we’d like to reach a wide coverage of people using the application, we decided to implement the prototype in J2ME, the lightweight version of Java that allows applications to run on various mobile phone models. In this case the application is only able to share data using Bluetooth, and this is why we’re planning a different version developed in C for Symbian phones, which will allow us to use its WiFi functionalities.

We’ve also carried on various conversations with some representatives of the London Underground as far as the actual installation of the application is concerned, and this has also proven to be a quite challenging task, mainly because all the security measures that are applied there. It seems that the most suitable option for us would be to run undersound as an art installation within the programme called ‘Platform for Art’. Once we have a stable prototype we’ll try to run it as a test in just a few stations, hoping to get interesting results from this trial and encourage further developments. Obviously undersound is one of those applications that becomes fun and interesting once it’s been used by a great number of people.

Even if it is targeted to the Tube, we find that undersound has a great potential in general, and could not only be ‘exported’  to other transportation networks around the world, but also adapted to become an alternative way for artists to distribute their content and for consumers to download and share music within an urban environment.

Tot zover deel 1. 

Meer over webtech designer Arianna:

Arianna Bassoli holds an MSc in Communication Sciences from the University of Siena, Italy, where she is specialized in mass media. She then worked as a researcher at Media Lab Europe for three years, in the Dynamic Interactions and Human Connectedness groups, mainly focusing on the application side of mobile peer-to-peer and ad-hoc networks. She is currently a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in the Department of Media and Communications. Her main research interest is the design of mobile proximity-based applications, technologies that support communication and data sharing among co-located people. Her work has been sponsored by the EU funded project Bionets.