Summer is over. It’s time to work on new amazing projects but first we would like to tell you a summer experience of two of us.

We (Michele Mauri and Giorgio Uboldi), went to Copenaghen for 2 weeks of summer school at the CIID (Copenaghen Institute of Interaction Design), attending the “Computational Design” and the “Physical Computing” workshops with participants from all around the world.

The workshops followed the ‘learning by doing’ philosophy of the School, encouraging participants to discover the potential of generative design and the fascinating world of programming (through the use of Processing and Arduino).

During the first week, held by Patrick Kochlik of The Product*, we experimented the potential of Processing through a series of really process oriented assignments. The aim of the exercises was to translating simple data from an input medium (usually an image) to a series of static and interactive outputs exploring their aesthetic. A new way for us to think about data and how to visualize them.

Then we faced the “Physical Computing” workshop with Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of the Arduino project. During five intensive days of work we played around with sensors, motors, cables and code discovering the possibilities of tangible user interfaces. We learned how to hack and reusing existing hardwares to build small “living” objects. It’s been a great opportunity for us, used to moving pixels on a screen everyday, to use our hands to build “real” products able to capture data from the environment…and after all how Banzi says “I’ts easy!!”.

We would like to thank :

our teammates (Michael-Owen Liston, Gijs Huisman, Kostadinos Frantzis and Claus Cramer-Petersen, and all the wonderful people we met during the workshop)

Patrick Kochlik and Massimo Banzi

the CIID and especially Alie Rose for the perfect organizations of the Summer School