Dakar Live is the result of a project i worked on in 2009 with the Ibrahima Niang’s team from the Centre de Calculs at the Cheikh Anta Diop University  of Dakar, Senegal.

Today, there is no up-to-date map of the whole city of Dakar. You won’t find any tourism office or not many local communication booklets in the senegalese capital that is one of the most important destination and business place in Africa.

Dakar Live is a mobile application that allows the reading and the editing of dynamic geolocalized informations on Dakar’s activities. This application can be set up on basic mobile phones and the cost to access to the service is the one of a SMS. The interface displayed by the application consists in a system of layers of information: the user can superimpose the name or the outlining of the main Dakar’s streets with personal geo-tags or seeked activities. Dakar Live is a space where the city dweller as the tourist can discover new specific activities and places and receive their programmings. He can build its own msds of Dakar.

Senegalese touristic operators, guides, craftsmen, territorial collectivities, communities can list and offer their services through this application in an easy way. They don’t have to localize the exact place on the reduced screen but they just have to indicate shared landmarks linked to the place they want to register like a neighbourhood, a shop, a mosque, etc. In a city where the majority of the streets don’t have names, you identify places in relation to others.

This project relies on the technical platform Ibrahima and his young engeneers have developed and  that allows offering mobile applications at low cost.

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

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I was in charge for this event of the design and animation of the Innovafrica website (www.innovafrica.org). I also had to perform a current awareness on the IT networks and projects leaders in the area. I localized the different initiatives on an interactive map embed on the website.

I animated during the event and especially during the barcamp several workshops around existing tools fostering innovation (brainstormings, use cases etc.), IT design, new medias and blogging activity.

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It tries to relate the actual Senegal through the practices of telecommunications its inhabitants have. This work lets the reader see how the appropriation of these new medias and objects is inspired by traditional and cultural practices. This use of the familiar face to the unknown, this « bricolage », illustrates ways of doing and thinking whose « sauvage » nature in the C.Levi-Strauss’s meaning, is not what stops african countries in their development but is what that projects them definitively forward.

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We aimed through this project to promote a sustainable and responsible consumption of digital music.

Today,  it’s no longer possible to make true choices through large music lists. Broadcasting models are massive. The musical diversity isn’t represented. Digital process has transformed music into an hackable product, accessible for free. Our question was : how could we use the technology as a mean to add value to music more than a mean to unrespect and uniformize it ?

UsicUp is a digital service and aims to change relations between music consumers and music. It relies on attention & rarety economy. It positions robotic and collective intelligence to the service of the emergence of a new approach of music and of its broadcasting. Music files become intelligent & autonomous robots. Users become the core of the service through pick ups widgets they install on their computers or on their mobile devices. These pick ups allow them receiving & listening to music files for a limited period. They are both a welcoming platform and a player.

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

Our proposed scenario is the following :

First step – one configure one’s pick up choosing 7 tags. First 7 music tracks arrive on one’s pick up.

Second step – one can listening the music files. Depending on the listening frequency, music files stay and bloom, … or leave.

Third step – one share the 7 files created (because of his enjoyment of a specific music file) with others UsicUp members.

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The African avenues are free spaces of expression created for those who don’t have it in traditionnal media. They display the african people’ everyday life and what’s hot through the different countries’ regions and cities. « Avenues Africaines » is also a training project on new media. Its goal isn’t just to inform people but also to train african new generations to these new publishing tools and multimedia productions.

You could follow « Avenues Africaines » project’s news soon on : http://www.avenueafrique.com

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The goal of this project was to enhance the African craftsmanship by creating a label of singular and of high-quality artefacts. These products will be delivered by the African museums and other cultural places through the world.

The form of the project was the one of a one-month workshop between local craftsmen and designers in each country involved. This moment was the opportunity of sharing knowledge ad experimenting. At the end of each workshop, an exhibition was organized to present the craftsmen and designers’ works.

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]]> http://www.aude-on-the-spot.com/afrikatelier/feed/ 0 http://www.aude-on-the-spot.com/team-exploration/ http://www.aude-on-the-spot.com/team-exploration/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:58:46 +0000 aude http://s301846506.onlinehome.fr/?p=120 Team Exploration was my first IT research project. I collaborated on it with Orange, Thales and 3IE.

Exploring adhoc wifi potentials
The Transhumance project was to explore ad hoc wifi potentials.
A middleware that supported collaborative applications with a fully distributed solution, event communication and data sharing robust to disconnections was set up by the team of engineers. In order to demonstrate the specific technical features of the platform and to put into perspective the services that could be based on it, we designed a pervasive game, TEAM EXPLORATION.

Specific game design for MANET : Team Exploration
Team Exploration embodied the technology we focused on: ad hoc wifi.
The game put the technology in perspective so as to make it easier to define contexts in which it would have empowering applications.The experimentation was set in a specific urban environment and observations were focused on how ad hoc communications and networks would impact people’s ability to interact with each other, with their surroundings or the city it-self.Team Exploration was a treasure hunt played in la Butte-aux-Cailles (a picturesque part of Paris) on Nokia 770 PDAs, with wifi cards in ad-hoc mode. Players were lead to imagine and build team strategies. Divided in two teams and having to find as many artistic tags as possible through the streets, they had to deal both with mobility, connectivity loss and validations of their findings back in the group.

Observations in mobility: the challenges
Both observations and interviews we made reinforced the different qualities of the technology and of such a game inside the city. They also pointed out differences in pace between a treasure hunt and a site discovery activity, which were both part of the game. It eventually made appear a series of new services that could be supported by ad hoc wifi platforms.

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Publications
>> Gaming on the move: Urban Experience as a New Paradigm for Mobile Pervasive Game Design, Annie Gentes, Aude Guyot, Isabelle Demeure, Springer ed.
>> Transhumance: a Platform on a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork Challenging Collaborative Gaming, Isabelle Demeure, Annie Gentès, Julien Stuyck, Aude Guyot-Mbodji, Ludovic Martin, CoGames’O9 Proceedings, IEEE.

The PLUG project dealt with the way pervasive computing could change our experience of the museum. We designed for this project a pervasive game for the Musée des Arts et Métiers-Paris, “Plug- the secrets of the museum”. “PLUG – the secrets of the museum”, was a game which applied the RFID technology on the environment of a specific museum. Indeed, this game took place in Paris in the Musée des Arts et Métiers dedicated to the history of sciences. It aimed at delivering information about exhibited objects by playing.

I designed the different game interfaces: screens of the phones and stations with RFID tags. I also participated on the gameplay design: each phone contained four cards representing items of the museum and was used to collect, exchange and also explore RFID tags dispersed throughout the museum. Each player could move the cards between a phone and a station or between two phones. Thus the gameplay proposed an original application of the RFID. The players had to develop different qualities and strategies to win. They had to be curious, to answer quiz, to collaborate with each other, to sort out and collect cards of the same “family”. We used a narrative approach, personifying chosen items and reinforcing links between the place and the game and between the visitors-players and the objects.

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More on: http://codesignlab.blog.telecom-paristech.fr/category/research-projects/plug/

Doing oneself’s accounts isn’t simple. You have to manage a large number of scattered datas, and moreover, datas of different kinds. Technologies don’t make it easier ! With the increasing number of services proposed on the web, it has became a nightmare ! How could technologies and devices simplify oneself’s daily money management  ?

I proposed a web application : H.EY ! which is actually a financial mash up. It aggregates all your money datas, processes  them and offers a clearful and graphic visualization of these informations.

The singularity of this project is to propose to use the mobile phone as a smart bill-fold, considering the prospects around it as a new mode of payment. After having paid, one’s mobile phone receives the bill from the payment terminal. Bills become digital. H.EY! proposes to tag these buyings, taking pictures or choosing a picto as graphic reminders.

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L’objet de ce projet était de valoriser les savoirs-faires artisanaux africains en créant un label d’objets singuliers et de grande qualité, de belle finition. Ces produits seront distribués dans les musées africains et autres centres culturels à travers le monde.

La forme du projet était celle d’un workshop d’un mois organisé entre artisans locaux et designers dans chaque pays concerné. Ce moment devait être l’occasion d’échanger et d’expérimenter. A la fin de chaque workshop, une exposition des travaux réalisés a été organisée.

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