6th of November: The work done was presented at iWeek

After twelve days of busy work, the #mc2020 students had to pitch the outcomes of their projects (6th of November, 2013). They presented seven digital innovative concepts: 

EQ: Emotion as a universal language, an interactive, immersive and multi-sensory experience through augmented reality that connects humans through emotions. 

KUPLA: Get to know what you see, contact lens connected to the web side.

PARTICLE: Environment, our hidden heritage, an interactive hologram installation, that analyzes and visualizes real-time data of particles in the air through sensors and a projector installed in the real environment.

HAPP: Human hardware, wearable software, a removable software that you wear, because you are the connection.

HAPTIC ART: A urban communication system, that allows the creation of global realtime visual art by a simple touch.

LIFE SENSE: A guide for life, a life-enhancing application that works towards making you faster, smarter and more efficient by using Smart Data.

FEELINK: Understanding each other through inner feeling,  a sticker software placed on different parts of the body that lets people communicate with each other without language.

The pitch of the FEELINK team

The audience posed questions and made comments to all the teams, showing a strong interest in the new concepts and technologies proposed. The feedback will be very useful to develop the next steps.

5th November

Graham Cooper, Lincoln lecture, talked about a festival celebrated in Lincoln where art was displayed around the city: Lincoln’s Digital Culture Festival. Different artists took part of this interesting project and it was targeted for any age.  This festival is celebrated every two years, the next one will be in 2015 and it is going to be named Liberation. Graham gave us a pin of this festival and he set a challenge: Who carries the pin further will win a price!

Afterword we gather with our teams.  Tomorrow is the presentation so we have had to work really hard, there was much to do.  Everybody had a task designated: for example we (Anna and Clara) have been working on tomorrow’s speech, Emilia editing the demo and Aivis working on the design of our concept. At 1 o’clock the pizza arrived, we had the opportunity to taste delicious food again; it was also a nice break after a morning of working. Later we kept working with our concepts.

At 4 o’clock we attended to talk about immersive technology multimedia.

Then an unexpected thing happened: we hadn’t had potatoes for dinner, feels like since we been here we just have eaten potatoes…

After dinner we went to the iWeek, and it was pretty interesting but to be honest we were a little bit tired after a whole day of working. 

4th of November

Monday November 4th

After the free weekend today we have come back to the work routine. Meanwhile we were taking our first coffee, Lenno finished Rosa's presentation about preparing brief speeches to present our projects in a very short time (30 seconds). 

Lenno

After that we applied it to ourselves and prepared our own short speech. Then we keep working in preparing our presentations. This last days are focused in finishing it all so there is not a fixed schedule. To lunch we had free pizzas (!!!) to avoid the loss of time we had the last week going to lunch out (here most of the restaurants are really slow). 

We also spent the afternoon finishing the presentations. After dinner we attended one speech from the iWeek parallel conference that was presented by the MC2020 lecturer Graham Cooper. After it we went to the hotel and went to sleep early because we were really tired of the weekend.

3th November - Karosta Prison

Today we went to Karosta Prison. At 10:30 we all met in the parking,we took the bus and went to the Prison. When we arrived, the Prison was closed, but a few minutes later… one man appeared, an officer, and started our visit. He started the visit with some specials tasks in order to live in the same way that they do in prison. 

 

For a while he explained to us about punishment and the things that they had done. After that, we went to visit another place, and another man explained to us the city was only for the army. Then, we took the bus again and we went to Sant Nicolas Church. Later, we went to the beach where there was a bunker and we took some photos. This was our morning. We came back to the hotel and had lunch. 

    Rachel Hagreen- Karosta

In the evening, we stayed in the hotel room. At 5:45 we went to dinner. At 7 o'clock some people and a few teachers went to an opening of E-week. This is an annual festival where you can see different performances and media Works. Some students had participated in this event. Finally, we could enjoy some concerts while we were eating.

2th November 2013

FREE TIME DAY

Today it was a relaxing day because we have had free time, so we decide to visit all the places of Liêpaja.

We woke up at 9 AM and we have a big breakfast, then we walked across the fame rock boulevard, which there were the hands of all celebrities who were born in Liepaja.

Then, we came in all churches of the city (really nice!) and we visited the outside market. In the afternoon, some of us went to the beach, but it was really cold! After that, we returned at the hotel in order to rest a little bit. 

At 6:00 PM we have dinner all together to the restaurant and then we went to take a drink.

Tomorrow morning we will go to Karosta. In the afternoon we will go to the i-week opening presentation.

GOOD NIGHT!!

Church

Market

                 

Old house

Friday 1st November

We keep developing the projects

Today we have started at 9.30 am, Lenno has made a short workshop based on creating a flowchart of the projects. It was the continuation of the presentation, which the Dutch teacher started on Wednesday 30th November. Lenno has been very brief and around 10 o'clock the teams were already working on creating their flowchart.

We would say it has been a really productive day because with the flowcharts the teams have come up with the main structure of their projects. This kind of diagram has been very useful in order to detect downsides of the concepts and it has lead us to think about solutions.

Flowchart

After working on the flowcharts the teams received some feedback from lecturers and even from fellows of other concepts. 

Then the teams could decide how they would organize the rest of the day until six o'clock. Some teams 

stayed in the working space and others went to work in the hotel. Today some teams have already started recording the demo. 

Last cultural evening

After our dinner at the restaurant Pastnieka Maja the Dutch evening was waiting for us. It started at around 7.30 pm. All the dutch were wearing orange clothes, there were Dutch flags and some typical Dutch food.

We did a quiz and some games such as eating a hanging cake with eyes blindfolded, hanging from a pair of jeans and the last who stands win or trying to put a nail inside a bottle with waists movements. The cultural evening ended with more food from The Netherlands and some typical Dutch beer.

Thursday 31st October

Today it is not a normal day, it is an especial one. Today at 19:00 pm we are going to celebrate the Catalan party. So the Catalan team is very excited. We are going to show to our mates how our culture and traditions are. We have planned games, a presentation about Catalonia and some delicious food.

At 9 am Carita, a Finnish teacher, has done a really interesting workshop where we had to think evil and write down all the bad things that could happen here (in the places nearby where we are working o developing the projects). After walking around in groups, we came up with many horrible ideas like:

• ·         Meteor shower
• ·         Third world war
• ·         Alien invasion
• ·         Russian bomb
• ·         Earthquake
• ·         Electric storm
• ·         Violent seagulls
• ·         Glacier
• ·         Trees get angry
• ·         Poisons
• ·         We are eaten by cats
• ·         A cray old lady flashing her nacked body blinds everyone
• ·         Tree falling on someone
• ·         All women give birth to dinosaurs and dinosaurs eat the men
• ·         Cai’s camera runs out of battery, he gets angry and kills us
• ·         Crazy mothers take over the park

Later all, the groups had to present in front of everyone what they have written down, it was  quite a funny presentation because we all came up with crazy and evil ideas.

Afterwards, Cai made us sit in a circle to discuss why WE ARE ALWAYS LATE! After a little democratic discussion, we have decided that we will start everyday at 9:30 am, so we don’t waste other people’s time (and we can sleep a little bit more). The English girls weren’t happy with the decision; they wanted to sleep until 10 or 11, but that’s not going to be possible according to Cai! Sorry British girls!

At 12:00 am every group explained out loud how the concept is developing so the teachers could give some feedback in order to improve the concepts

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Anna Trapenciere, a Latvian teacher and the main coordinator, introduced next week activities during the International Week at Liepaja’s University: Iweek. Iweek will start on Sunday, 4th of November. There will be workshops, performances and exhibitions that we can join every day after dinner.

At 5:00 pm we (the Catalans) started to prepare the cultural night. We made a quiz about Catalonia to see how much they know about our country, we also made them play some games and we brought from home some typical food such as: Ham, bread, wine… They loved it! Overall we had a really fun night and we are looking forward what the Holland team has prepared for us tomorrow night.

Wednesday 30th October

Yesterday we did many different things. When we arrived at the workplace, Lenno (the Dutch teacher) showed us different ways to brainstorm. We applied the methods to our concepts and presented our results to the workshop. This took mostly all the morning. 

Lenno Verhoog

At 1pm we had lunch and started preparations for our Catalan party we would host the following evening. In Liepaja there are lots of dishes with potatoes but you can find different kinds of food. In fact some of the students ate sushi from a wooden ship for lunch! 

We spent all the afternoon working on our concepts. The focus this week is mainly on idea development, and in the next few days we will work  results. We will present next Wednesday during the iWeek conference to a public and professional audience. Then we attended a workshop about electric bicycles and also had the opportunity of trying one. 

We ate dinner at 6pm, which we find a little earlier than we are used to! The restaurant is the best reviewed by TripAdvisor users of the entire city, and serves a range of dishes, deserts and soups. In the evening, we went to the British party and sampled traditional cakes and tea, and learnt English traditions and phrases.   

Tuesday 29th October

Hello Everyone!

Today Tuesday 29th October has been a different day. We woke up in the same time that the other days and we went to have breakfast in the same hotel. At nine o'clock all the students were in the school and we started to do a workshop with Andris. He is teacher in Lieapaja. 

He talked about a method “six hats”. Each colour means a different thing. For example, the red colour represented the feelings, the yellow colour are positive's ideas, the Green colour are the original and creative part. The objective of this workshop consisted in use that in the concepts and we presented in front of the students.

At 11:15 Martin Thayner the teacher of Lincoln explained the applications and the technology and we have done that for designed application with our group. At two o'clock we have gone to lunch. Each group a different place. 

At three o'clock everyone was in the school for continued the Project and changed or modify these ideas. 

At five o'clock the classes finished. At six o'clock everybody was in the restaurant to have dinner. At Finally at seven o'clock until nine o'clock we went to school to celebrate the Finnish night. We were doing different activities, we watched a video, a Quiz and Pau sung a song in Finnish. We have enjoyed to the typical meals as Finland as salmon, beer, Vodka...

We liked a lot the day, was very funny and the time passed too fast. We enjoyed a lot and improved our english.

We are Alba and Ares.

GOOD MORNING!

Today we woke up at 8:00 a.m. and then we had breakfast all together.

When we arrived at the School of Art&Design, we surprised a curious art exhibition!

University of Liepaja, Latvia

Fontaine Hotel Royal, Liepaja

Sex Shop under our hotel 

Unexpected art exposition

Students presenting their stereotypes

9:00 a.m. – Self awareness of multicultural matters 

by Rosa Pons

Rosa Pons, our teacher, started the first presentation of the project. She did an interesting workshop about the multicultural stereotypes. Every team said different types of stereotypes like: “Catalans are prides “, “British drink a lot”, “French are rude”, etc.

Students presenting their stereotypes

12:00 p.m. – BREAK of 15 minutes (a necessary break, after a hard work)

When we came back to work, Rosa continued her workshop until a lunch time. At 13:00 p.m we had lunch in a fantastic restaurant, like a Spanish people says: “Bueno, Bonito y Barato”.  

Students presenting their stereotypes

14:00 p.m. – Smart things, smart homes, smart cities. Smart people? By Anna Trapencierce

She explained how new technologies influence society. Then, we shared our ideas to the MediaCulture 2020 team. There have been some ideas like: Network social privacy, the recommended minimum age, if technologies are necessary or not, etc.

Each group have applied the workshops on their concepts until at 17:00 p.m. After, we have rested until a dinner time.

18:00 p.m. – DINNER TIME (usually potatoes!)

19:00 p.m. – 1th EVENING PARTY:  LATVIAN PARTY!

The Latvians prepared a party with a typical Latvia customs: they project a video explaining his country, after that they show a couple game. Before eat the typical food from Latvia, we play a guessing game and the Catalan people wins the “consolation award”!

Typical food: milk Kaiser, sweet drink, some biscuits, candy and “burn peas”.

23:30 p.m.- NOW

And we, Maria and Meritxell, are writing this blog while we take a beer.

Good night and see you tomorrow!