In the first week, the main objective was to get to know the faculty, our co-students, and the area around IAAC.

To become familiar with the faculty, Guillem talked a lot about MDEF, the FabLab here as well as FabLabs all over the world, and projects of all sorts. Also, we got an overview of all the workshop areas the IAAC has to offer: 3D printing, CNC milling, laser cutting, woodworking, electronics, and robot arms, to name a few.

We were also welcomed with a spontaneous visit by Nadya Peek, who gave a presentation about “Making machines that make,” with a strong emphasis on concepts like open-source frameworks and democratizing access to digital fabrication, to immediately inspire us with awe and creativity.

In order to achieve the second goal, we had to bring some pictures of objects, a community, a background and a “more-than-human” aspect that influenced our live in some way and tell a few stories along those pictures.

Also we went out for some drinks.

Then, for the last objective, we took a leisurely stroll around Poblenou, visiting community workshops, community gardens, and community spaces for art & culture.

I don’t think I have ever seen so much community engagement in a single place.

Later, we extended, digitalized and added more items to our design spaces. A current version of my design space is live at the top of the page.

For me, the design space was probably the most helpful exercise that we have done up to this point. In the beginning it took me a while to understand what it was supposed to look like, so i struggled finding pictures at first, but i am very happy with the result.

The Atlas of Weak Signals is a toolkit designed by Mariana Quintero, transforming the research of weak signals into a practical space to navigate and understand possible emerging scenarios based on underlying trends in our current world.

After familiarizing ourselves with the cards, playing a (pretty chaotic) round and adding some of the cards to our design spaces to integrate possible upcoming trends and areas of opportunity, we were tasked with contributing a weak signal by oursleves:

Thanks to the advancement of understanding in neuroscience, we know that thoughts and ideas change the biochemistry of our brains. Given this, future generations might learn to alter their habits and behaviour by performing mental exercises, or capabilities like conscious control over nervous system and body temperature will develop and become widespread.

Another way of understanding this could be a direct interface between the mind and the internet or any other sort of computer.

Reflection 1

The first weeks at MDEF have already been a diverse, challenging, and perspective-broadening experience in many regards.

First of all, I am thoroughly happy with the people at the whole IAAC faculty. When I decided to come here, I imagined IAAC to be a place where people with open minds, a vision for a better future, and great technical skill come together, and I have not been disappointed. Additionally, my classmates at MDEF are much more than I could have hoped for, and I am excited to see what projects we are going to do together.

The first two weeks of classes at MDEF offered very new ways of thinking about design for me. The design space method helped me visualize, organize, and interconnect different fields of interest within my practice, and I have started to enjoy it as a complementary tool that will be changed and expanded alongside to reflect my own changes and developments throughout my education.

The number of communities and projects connected to IAAC was overwhelming at first, but I am excited to see what opportunities will arise from that during the program.

During these first weeks, we have had many introductory classes on hardware, electronics, and coding. Since this is probably the sub-field of design where I have the most experience, these classes are not too challenging for me, but I still feel like I can learn a lot. I have done some hardware hacking in the past, but never to the extent where I had a whole disused high-tech SLA printer to disassemble and then invent an entirely different functionality for the technical components. This is an awesome opportunity, and I am grateful to be able to participate in classes like these.

In class, we had to craft a quick prototype. We were supposed to take a past project from one of our classmates and then try to make a prototype around that topic.

Bélen had a project where she experimented with a fabric that could generate electricity when it was warm on one side and cold on the other.

In turn, I wanted to experiment with a way to wear this fabric in an unrestrictive fashion so that it could be worn over clothing and on different parts of the body.

Reflection 2

The last two weeks of MDEF felt very intense and a lot more draining than the first two. Maybe that’s just because I was a little sick, and it was hard for me to keep up.

Nevertheless, the design intervention was an interesting thing to do, and I want to see which other questions can be answered in this fashion. I am not entirely sure how scientifically useful I consider the information gathered in this way, but I can’t deny that I like the honesty of answering questions by taking action.

I very much liked the other content we were working with during these last two weeks. The Living with Your Own Ideas workshop was not what I expected, but I think it opened a new field of interest for me that I had not been aware of yet. I consider myself to be an open-minded person, but some of the ideas we were presented with are more profound, speculative, and progressive than anything I have encountered up until this point.

The Companion Species Manifesto, for example, presents a way of thinking about interspecies relations

that is entirely new to me, but it resonates deeply, and I am eager to read some of the book recommendations I received this week.

At first, it was hard for me to engage in the prosthesis we prototyped during the week. In the past, I needed a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve by building a prototype. The different prostheses we built during Living with Your Own Ideas had the goal of building something to experiment with the notion of self, encouraging a shift in one’s own perspective. I quite enjoyed this after I got over my initial difficulties.

Collective design space

To start our getting together in groups for a bigger intervention, we composed a huge design space on the wall of our classroom, trying to connect several of the core interests and topics each of us have contributed. This was interesting and fun, but also pretty overwhelming.

Starting out from something as broad and abstract like our collective design space - that included all the major and a multitude of minor topics of interest to the MDEF course - was very helpful to make connections between the topics of interests of different students, but it also made it pretty difficult to boil something down into small actionable steps.

In smaller groups formed by the connections of interests on the big collective design space, we assembled another, smaller collective design space. This felt pretty chaotic and some of the reasons could be that we are inexperienced with making design spaces, especially collective ones, and in the future it might help to stick more to the basic variety of nodes that belong on a design space: Objects, Materials, Projects, Methodologies / Technologies, Contexts and Experiments that represent or otherwise relate to an Issue that we are interested in, more than just plugging thoughts on post its.

In any case, it remained difficult to get within an actionable scope to do something that can actually be done in so little time, while still teaching us something meaningful, and by the time we arrived at that conclusion, we had even less time left.

So my second total and first group intervention ended up being about long-termism. Lucretias phone is 5 years old and the battery as well as the charging are not the best anymore. However, this phone has an inductive charging interface, so we thought we could use a solar panel to maintain some more battery during the day, as well as use the inductive charger to make the charging process itself less tedious.

From that, we started to think more about our daily usage of our phone batteries. How could we change our habits in regard to our energy consumption on the phone? In earlier times when phones weren’t as good, it was a very normal practice to turn off wifi, bluetooth and mobile data respectively when they weren’t being used. Would there be a noticeable difference if we used less services on our phones that consume a lot of energy? What are the most energy consuming applications on a phone anyway? Luckily this can quickly be answered by looking at statistics recorded on iOS: What seems to consistently consume the most energy for me were instagram, audible and WhatsApp.

To inquire if we could make a noticeable difference by a change of habit, I started using my phone in battery save mode and on minimum brightness, turned my network services on only when i needed them, and also reduced my time on instagram.

The difference was a lot bigger than i expected it to be. With this routine, I could easily use my phone without charging for two days instead of only one, which effectively doubles the lifespan of my phones battery, because I only use half the charging cycles.

I am surprised at the result eventhough I feel it seems pretty obvious, sometimes action and consequence seem removed from eachother even if they are clearly not. I will continue to use these small adjustments, since it feels like no big deal at all to change them and the result seems disproportionately beneficial.

Reflection 3

I think these weeks I started to feel the MDEF characteristic “lostness” that some of the people around me talked about. The intervention we did during the last two weeks was interesting enough, but it also took us some time to finally decide on the topic. It appeared to be quite difficult at first to find a course of action that we all felt comfortable with and that was sufficiently interesting to all of us. It ended up being very specific: about what actions we could take to make our phone batteries last longer.

While this is a topic that seems to be very well aligned with questions from my design space, and I feel like we explored a good range of different approaches—from just changing our own habits to using the phones for more energy-intensive tasks less, to building a little portable solar-powered phone charger—it felt like something was missing.

When I did my intervention on water consumption, I felt very comfortable tackling a small and specific topic.

In the second intervention now, we worked as a bigger group while our focus felt even more specific, which left me questioning how what I am doing fits in with the general direction of my practice. This problem, of course, is probably very closely related to me, in fact, having no idea where to go with my project at this moment.

At this time of the course, I still feel very much like I am being stuffed with a multitude of problems, facts, technologies, and philosophies. A lot of these are very fascinating to me, and I can see myself incorporating them into my practice, but I cannot keep up with processing them all, drawing connections as well as I would like to, and assembling a sort of framework to make my interests work towards a common goal.

The third intervention was, and actually still is, a lot of fun and very interesting to me. I finally got around to making a project with mycelium, which I had wanted to do since the start of MDEF.

Just as in the last group intervention, we struggled to find a group, a topic, or a course of actionable steps, and by the time we were all satisfied with our plan, the first week had already passed. In the second week, we started growing mycelium on different substrates: coffee grounds, cardboard, textile, and sawdust, which are all organic waste materials we produce in our daily lives. The basic idea was to make the mycelium grow throughout the substrate, gluing it together and enabling us to recycle discarded material scraps into a new solid shape.

To gather some data on the growth of the mycelium and to give us additional information to compare the different substrates, we wanted to hook the growing chambers up with some sensors. Since the outside temperature is going to be about the same for all the different substrates, we wanted to see if there would be

differences in the temperature caused by the mycelium growing in the different substrates. We also wanted to monitor the humidity of the growing chambers as well as the electrical resistance of the substrate to see how it changes as the mycelium grows.

Unfortunately, our mycelia were all contaminated by mold, so we got new, clean spawn grain and will try the same process again next week.

Reflection 4

So, my last two weeks were full of very new experiences. Not only did Laura further our education in IAAC philosophy and introduce us to some art collectives around Barcelona who are doing some very cool things, but Jana also had a very helpful insight for me as well: from now on, I will be treating my interventions as explorations of different ideas that can contribute to or benefit the exploration of my umbrella topic, communal living. This feels natural to me since I have thought about living in some communal way in the future and because of the unconsciously central placement of this idea in my design space. This allows me to frame my many different fields of interest within this larger topic and focus them through an overarching context, emerging from their connections.

This feels natural to me since I have thought about living in some communal way in the future and because of the unconsciously central placement of this idea in my design space. This allows me to frame many different interests within this larger topic and enables me to ask many questions that I find very interesting: How could different kinds of sustainable materials be cultivated inside a commune, and how could they be used to build different things? How much energy, water, and trash would such a community need to manage, and what would be the best ways to do so? Which philosophies and ways of co-living should or could be applied in such a commune, and how would they look in day-to-day life?

This framework allows me to work with my classmates who are interested in similar topics but for different reasons or in different contexts. For the intervention over the last two weeks, I worked with biomaterials for the first time, together with Andrea, Bel, Kevin, and Vitti. We used four different substrates that we generate as waste: wood scraps or sawdust, coffee grounds, cardboard, and fabric to grow mycelium.

The idea was to figure out how well the mycelium would grow on different substrates and whether it would bind them together well enough to form a new shape that could be useful in a different way, effectively recycling waste material. We also wanted to hook up the growing mycelium with temperature, humidity, and galvanic sensors to gather information about their growth, enabling us to better compare the growth across different substrates.

Even though we didn’t quite finish the intervention (mycelium takes a long time to grow, our samples got contaminated, and figuring out a way to measure the conductivity of mycelium took some time), I am very happy with the direction of this exploration. This is especially true because I finally experimented with something completely new to me, which has been a goal since the start.

For the design dialogues, we will now focus on getting uncontaminated batches of mycelium to grow, hooking them up with sensors, and getting them ready for the design dialogue.

Prosthesis 1 - Becoming the best version of ourselves

I would not say I am a very lazy person, but I think few things are as hard for me as leaving the bed in the morning. However much I enjoy my life or not, the cozy warm bed always feels like the better option. Often I think about how much happier, more productive and downright better a person I were, if I could start every day with energy and ease. Hence, my prothesis shall provide that!

It’s a little chip that is injected under the skin. Every morning, like an alarm clock, it will pump an amount of adrenaline into my blood that would wake a gorilla.

Prosthesis 2 - Becoming something non-human

This was difficult at first, I think I have never wanted to be something non-human before. My approach here was to get inspired by the considerable amount of e-waste that occupies most of our classroom. I just started crafting something from scraps I liked and thought about a story as I went.

I ended up with a device that would connect my brain to the consciousness of nature itself. I don’t know what that would mean, but it’s an experience I wouldn’t miss out on.

I imagine that, for a more experienced observer, the conclusion would have been crystal clear. She rolled out the string in a controlled and orderly fashion while talking on the phone during a quiet moment on the roof, with only one other person. Later, in a larger conversation about MDEF topics, she tangled the thread into a messy jumble. She intended the string to represent the way her thoughts varied in different situations, visualizing her mind’s activity during different interactions.

It was hard for me to really empathize with Paula’s actions, as I often felt distracted by things she was doing that were outside my own experience. I didn’t know what she was working on, so I felt like I was missing an important component. I didn’t know whom she was talking to on the phone, or what the conversation was about, so I couldn’t make much sense of it. During her later conversation with our classmates, I felt disconnected in my role as a detective and didn’t want to participate in the conversation.

In conclusion, I realize I still have much to learn about what to focus on when trying to understand someone’s thoughts through observation. Still, I found the experience very insightful, and I think I’d like to incorporate this practice more into my own approach.

Reflection 1

The second term starts off with a lot more purpose than the first. After having formed a narrative that encompasses my previous projects and leads into a direction that I am looking forward to very much, I now have an easier time finding a starting point and a direction for my following interventions.

In my upcoming work, I want to explore different scales of communal living, from small community gardens to whole independent eco-villages in the context of three core aspects:

Human aspects of co-living, Technology to facilitate it and areas of self-sufficiency. The goal of these interventions is to experiment with as well as gather and share knowledge about the following areas of inquiry:

How to take away power from global conglomerates and put it into the hands of individuals situated in a community? How to rebuild relationship between the origin of resources and their consumption through closer engagement with the production of resources?

How to build a strong sense of purpose and belonging through encouraging close and deep human connections?

For the next steps I want to build a relationship with community gardens within Barcelona by contributing and documenting the work there, directly situating myself inside a living communal practice.

Reflection 2

The past two weeks, Andrea and I started going to community gardens in the hope of finding someone there and with the plan to make ourselves useful in some way. This was a slow process: Espai Germanetes was empty the first two times we visited, so we sent an email to find out about their meeting times. That worked pretty well, so the next Tuesday, we went there and had a wonderful evening tying beanstalks together and systematically ripping out bucketloads of undesired plants between the plots. We were both very pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome we received there. We got an extensive tour of the garden and were presented with some possibilities for making an intervention:

They have a water collection system I would like to learn more about, the garden has a big white wall that reflects too much heat into the garden in summer, and they also have a temperature and humidity sensor where they manually write down the data on a regular basis—to name just a few of the project opportunities there.

After a few trips to the other garden, l’Hortet del Forat, we met a guy named Joan, who introduced us to the different parts of the garden and invited us to an assembly that we understood to be the next Saturday. When we showed up, we found the garden empty, and after waiting a good while, nobody came. It turned out Joan was talking about February, and we had misunderstood each other.

From these experiences, I learned that these community gardens operate on a rather slow timescale but are also very accessible and open to new people joining in. I was very happy with my experiences and greatly enjoyed getting to know the people involved in these communities.

On the side, I am still struggling to find a clear definition for my overarching project. The input about distributed design and the commons from the Collective Intelligence course was very valuable to me, but I definitely want to do something practical as part of my project rather than focusing purely on research. However, I think that getting involved in the affairs of one or another community garden around here will help me get hands-on with something soon enough.

Reflection 3

The last two weeks of MDEF were definitely intense. In the first of these two weeks, we had the micro-challenge, where we developed an artifact that we would ideally later use in our interventions. We went through some serious ups and downs throughout this week. In the beginning, we quickly developed our idea of the community garden task board.

On Tuesday—which was also the first day of the micro-challenge—the community garden Andrea and I have built some ties to in the last week meets up for a gardening work session. We were very excited to go there, present our rough sketches, and co-create the board with the garden community during the micro-challenge week.

Unfortunately, it was not the right time to present this idea, and it was difficult to convey it well through the language barrier, so we were told to present it at the assembly that would be the Saturday of the next week.

We were a bit disappointed at this, but in the end, we thought it would be nice to present our project at the assembly, so we set out to create a tangible prototype that could communicate our idea well despite the language barrier.

The last two days of the micro-challenge, Andrea was sick, but we managed to split the work and develop our prototype anyway. In the end, I think we both felt slightly disappointed because we spent a week building a very simple board, but we decided to go to the assembly anyway to present it, which turned out to be great because everybody there immediately understood the idea of our project, and we got a very enthusiastic general reaction from the assembly.

I keep being surprised at how incredibly lovely, inclusive, and welcoming all the people at this garden are. Even though we didn’t understand everything they were talking about, the people there were eager to translate the important points in great detail for us.

I am especially interested in the water recycling project that is going on there and definitely want to participate if I can. The idea is to collaborate with surrounding schools and institutions to utilize their wastewater for the garden in summer to navigate the droughts more easily.

Our task management board proposal was received very well at the assembly and I hope to be able to develop it to a point where it is actually being utilized in the garden.

I am very happy that I reached out to the community of Espai Germanetes together with Andrea, and even though I am not yet sure if it will stay the main focus of my project for the rest of the master's, it feels great to actually explore being part of a community and working with people from different cultures, backgrounds, and age groups on common interests. At this point, I feel like my project is finally gaining some traction, and the connection I have to the garden community is starting to open doors to interesting projects, which is very exciting.

Reflection 4

A lot of things have been going on in the last two weeks. In the Extended Intelligence II course, it was very nice to be introduced to a few useful ways of applying Artificial Intelligence in a project. I am especially interested in the generation of 3D models. Even though it is not quite useful yet, I believe it has a lot of potential.

The Responsive City Symposium was definitely a nice experience. It was good to be in an actual lecture hall for once. I particularly enjoyed the second part of that week, where we had the Sensing and Sensation Symposium, combining the continuation of the H(n)MI course with a visit from Filipo Rosati and a few other students who are interested in the topic. I had a lot of fun working on the project and very much enjoyed the projects of the other groups as well.

I think, the computer vision technology I used in the H(n)MI project has a lot of potential.

Using a program that filters pixels of a video input by color, I was able to access data about the growth pattern of a slime mold digitally by looking for yellow pixels in each frame of the video.

In my opinion, this can be an approach to monitor the availability of resources in a deposit in a very low-tech way by just looking for the number of pixels in a certain color.

Regarding my interventions, I have continued to work with Andrea and the garden on the task management board: we have collected feedback, decided on a place where it will be hung in the garden, applied some linseed oil to weatherproof it a bit, and prepared a new iteration of garden cards and fabricated another panel, which we will bring to the garden on Tuesday.

In the context of the garden community, they are currently starting a project that plans to collaborate with two schools in the neighborhood of the garden to collect wastewater from their kitchens and bathrooms, filter it, and then use it to water the plants in the summer during droughts. I have participated in two meetings regarding this project so far and am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in co-creating this neighborhood-scale project regarding the optimization of water usage, which is a topic I am particularly interested in.

For the research around my main project, I am currently reading *Governing the Commons* by Elinor Ostrom, which provides a lot of helpful information on how common-pool resources can be governed through community-organized efforts. Working on purpose statements and technical frameworks for my project has helped me a lot to define my focus in certain areas. I feel that I am slowly arriving at a well-defined project, but I am not quite there yet.

Ethics

Currently, I am thinking a lot about the related research areas and narrative of my project. Central to this project is the sharing and encouragement to utilization of knowledge that allows a group of people to gain partial independence from long and abstract supply and production chains by cultivating their own supply systems for food, water and energy. The goal is to take power away from corporations and remove layers of abstraction between origin and consumption of a resource, forging closer relations between the resources and people. This can happen on many layers and concerning many different resources. Depending on which area I choose to focus on, the ethical implications that need to be considered in detail will change significantly.

I will allow myself to dream a bit about the goals of the project to facilitate deriving more general conclusions about the ethics that are necessary to guide the project. The far-off goal is to enable people or communities through knowledge-sharing, encouragement and possibly funding to organize themselves in a way where they can gain full independence of organizations that are fully oriented towards exploiting workers for power and profit. Instead, the opportunity is presented to become dependent on a distributed collective of independent communities that share knowledge.

If people are to rely on each other, the goal is to keep the difference of wealth, status and power between different people as small as possible. After the basic needs are met, equality is the biggest influence of contentment within a community of people. To achieve this form of co-living, common values and guidelines need to be cultivated.

This can be facilitated by common rituals, frequent exchange and close collaboration. A relevant challenge could be that of coordination of effort and agreeing on common goals–a challenge for which we need to co-design solutions.

Modern self-sufficiency in terms of energy requires or is greatly facilitated by technology like solar panels and batteries. Many more technologies can be employed for the sake of self-sufficiency: Heat pumps, soil monitoring, farming robots & data analysis and water recycling systems to name a few.

The questions that needs to be asked here is: Can these technologies be sourced sustainably? If not, can we justify the production of these artifacts when we are aware of the extraction and destruction we know it entails?

A possible approach to this is to encourage using technological components that already exist and have been discarded or outdated and to emphasize sharing how to hack, repair, reuse and upcycle these components.

Similar questions can be asked about topics like rapid prototyping and distributed localize data storage and sharing:
Is it ethical or sustainable to constantly fabricate artifacts that we use to quickly understand a research question or to test a hypothesis, if we never use them again and we cannot reuse the individual parts?

Is it problematic to store large amount of data and use energy to cool down computer chips that could be used for something more urgent?

Is the current heavy usage of ChatGPT or other energy-intensive generative AIs in creative practice unethical?

In my opinion, there are very solid and constructive approaches to each of these problems: A lot of the technical components used in prototyping can be reused without any problem; furthermore we can and should develop and adopt circular prototyping practices like actively and regularly recycling PLA and the usage of other materials that can easily be broken down and reused. Instead of ChatGPT we could shift more towards using specialized and locally operating AI systems that are optimized to require little energy and we could use waste water to cool down our processors, to name some examples.

The important thing is, that the effectiveness of the solutions to all of these issues regarding technology is evaluated: If there is no way to source the usage of a technology sustainably, then that technology has to be used less or not at all in the long run. Convenience can no longer be collectively and without question be accepted as an excuse for unethical action.

In parallel, I am getting in touch with a community which gives me the space to experience elements of my project in person, as well as experiment and test ideas in a relevant context. My current line of intervention in this community is to co-design a task visualization board for the projects of the community. Delicate topics in this context are to recognize the significance of what the dynamic relationships in the community require, to propose ideas to inspire the community to come up with ideas.

In this way, the project that develops is part of the community and was not designed by an external source, imposing itself onto the space.

Design justice challenges traditional power structures in design by prioritizing community impact over individual intent and by viewing the designer as a facilitator rather than an authority. This perspective resonates deeply with the collaborative, non-hierarchical approach I envision for my project. Instead of imposing external solutions, the goal is to co-create with the people involved, ensuring that knowledge and tools are not only accessible but also empowering.

At the same time, cognitive assemblages remind us that agency is distributed—not just among humans but also across technologies, materials, and ecosystems. This expands ethical responsibility beyond human decision-making to include the unintended consequences of our technical interventions. The interconnectedness of systems means that sustainability cannot be considered in isolation but must account for the entire lifecycle of materials and the energy flows they participate in. A more just and sustainable future requires recognizing and respecting these complex entanglements.

By integrating these perspectives, my project aims to cultivate ethical design practices that move beyond convenience and efficiency toward accountability, resilience, and shared agency. Ethics, then, is not only a question of intent but of material and social interdependence—one that must be continuously negotiated in collaboration with both human and non-human participants.

In this workshop, we broadened our horizons on bio-based material science. Materials that are made of organic components are all around us: wood, fabric, cardboard, and paper, to name the most ubiquitous ones. It turns out that there are a lot of organic compounds that can be used to create materials with a myriad of different properties.

I liked a lot how crafted materials have a more or less strict framework and relatively straightforward rules for their recipes:

You need a biopolymer, a biolasticizer, and a solvent to form a base, and then you can add all sorts of additional components, like algae, charcoal, or organic food leftovers, to name only a few.

A surfboard made of mycelium because why not?

The “Eyelash straightener” from S-Biotica.

The casting of the popsicle.

Some leftovers of our Agar-garam-material before drying.

The materials fully dried. It is not sticky anymore, surprisingly firm and still elastic, except for the dried popsicle (top center), that one is very solid. Thanks to the spices, the material actually smells somewhat pleasant.

For the second video, I wanted to work with Kombucha since I already had some – very limited – experience with mycelium. It was great to get a feel for the material, since I already liked the way the dried Kombucha felt at S-Biotica. In the end however, it really didn’t taste as good as I made it look like in the video and I am not sure if it was safe to eat, but it’s been a few days now and I still feel alright.

Since the only materials i have gotten really familiar with so far are wood and PLA, this course was a lot of new input for me. I think biomaterials present a great variety of opportunities for the production of all sorts of objects by enabling more localized, personalized and most importantly regenerative fabrication. Even though I find all of this amazing, working with these sorts of materials will probably not be very central to my practice. Nevertheless, I definitely want to keep in mind what I learned in this course because I find it incredibly valuable and you never know when you might need something like this.

Deep insights on what design is, can and should be, input on communal organization of data, time, resources and fabrication and intense discussions about values and to practice them – this course concerned itself with topics that are very interesting to me.

Here are some insights that stuck with me from the introduction of the course:

Design has a lot of power and needs to be evaluated, so this power is not used without aim.

A designed object is not fully only influenced by and through us, but it also influences us in return: the phone designs us through the capabilities it offers us, which is a capacity of design that we need to consider.

Collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity that is created when people work together. It emerges when contributions are combined to become more than the sum of their parts.

Bauhaus influences what is seen in all the world as good design. That is complicated, because there is and should be more than one truth. Form follows function has become the holy grail of every design choice. It needs to be contested for diversity reasons, there cannot only be one good school of design from Germany in the 1950s that still dictates to this day what good design is here.

Women were allowed in the Bauhaus, but not to be Architects. They were forced to take the Crafts or Textile design classes.

Does Design really always have to go back to the roots of Bauhaus? Maybe the much more important question is how design emerges from a situated space naturally and grows to fit the situation.

Every-body is a designer and therefore everyone has valuable knowledge and experience that can contribute to the design process.

In groups, we tried to define a firm grasp the value Humility and on some other related values:

To get to it’s core, we tried to define it by answering some questions:

Perhaps most easily, what is humility not?

→ Humility is something that expresses itself most obviously in things that are lacking: The lack of boastfulness, the lack of overruling each other in conversations, the lack of mobbing, the lack of gatekeeping and self-centeredness of individuals within a community.

How is Humility made real and put into practice? How is it recognized in others?

→ Humility is most effectively cultivated by carefully listening to other opinions, by lifting each others opinion and expressions up and at the same taking a step back, creating a space for each other to express their feelings and ideas. To put it very simply: Humility shows itself in acts of kindness that come not from debt but from an open heart.

How does Humility support your community structure?

→ Humility put into practice creates a safe space. Every opinion and expression is valued. This builds trust between the members of a community and forges a deeper bond, enabling and empowering a more richly varied pool of contributions. The people inside the community feel valued, respected, integrated and in turn themselves inspired to act more humbly. In this way, Humility is strongly connected to Integration: Integrating others is an act of humility, and practicing humility in a community will lead to a strong feeling of integration.

Humility is an awareness of our limitations and a recognition that we are part of something larger—whether it be a community, nature, or the vast universe. It doesn’t mean thinking less of oneself but rather thinking beyond oneself. Humility allows us to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers, that we depend on others, and that there is always more to learn.

Gratitude naturally follows humility. When we acknowledge that we are not entirely self-sufficient, we become more aware of the people, experiences, and circumstances that support and enrich our lives. Gratitude shifts our focus from what we lack to what we have, creating a sense of fulfillment rather than entitlement.

Awe arises when we encounter something vast and beyond our usual understanding—whether it’s a breathtaking sunset, a resonating piece of music, or a moment of deep human connection. Awe has the power to dissolve the ego, reinforcing humility by reminding us of how small we are in the grand scheme of things. At the same time, it fuels gratitude by making us appreciate the beauty and mystery of existence.

Awe inspires humility by reminding us that the world is awesome and aweful at the same time, by reminding us how small we are, giving us perspective beyond the self.

Humility and Gratitude deepen each other: by accepting that we are not the center of the world, we become more open to appreciating what we receive from the world around us, and appreciating the beauty around us makes us more comfortable not being the center of the world.

Through cultivating gratitude we become more attuned to the wonders of the world, deepening our sense of Awe.

Defining Humility together with Ramon, Kevin and Flavio was a great experience. Before that I haven’t really thought through my own values all that much, and even less discussed them with other people. I already felt a strong connection to my MDEF classmates and was pretty sure that we had a mostly homogenous valuebase, but it was amazing to deepen this common understanding in discussion.

Later we discussed our findings with the other groups. The groups that took on Friendship and Co-creation seemed to have shared very similar ideas to ours: Mutual benefit, cultivating safe spaces, sharing knowledge and reciprocity. Only the group that concerned it self with the value of change had some tensions, which makes a lot of sense in my opinion considering that change is a really big topic. In the end however they could find some common ground.

Talking about values and what makes them so important is a great exercise, but talking about a value is a very different thing from putting it into practice. So the next day in class, we talked in the same groups about developing practices that would cultivate our chosen value.

I liked this a lot because it felt more concrete than the discussion on the day before. My group tried to come up with ways to cultivate humility in the scenario of the MDEF Fest at the end of the first year. We talked about that it would be not very effective to pressure someone into feeling humble, so we tried to figure out how we could inspire humility in more subtle ways. The most noticeable ideas we came up with in my opinion were: First, to make the visitors write down something they are grateful for on a board when they enter the MDEF Fest, trying to open a pathway for humility through the related feeling of gratitude; Second, we wanted to prepare little gifts that we could give away to each other and to visitors to show our own humility and gratitude, inviting others into our shared practice.

Commons

The last day of our course was about the commons and how to distribute knowledge, resources and time. I liked this part and I want to go deeper into it since it is very closely related to my current project. Here are some more insights from the lecture:

Cooperation is way more likely to work than Competition.

When we have common resources, there needs to be distributed governance. The concept of the Commons is to integrate communities that already know how to manage their resources and allow them to contribute.

Considerations and Complexities when it comes to managing common pool resources:
Uncertainty and complexity of global systems reinforce the need for local, collective intelligence and action, rooted in adaptive practices.
If you cannot open a product and understand how it works, you do not own it.

“Building on these uses of commons as a noun, the verb commoning draws attention to the dynamic actions required to co-create commons in ways that contribute to opening up possibilities for how we care for eachother”
E.T. Smith, the Practice of Commoning.

DAOs and DACs

DAOs and DACs are Blockchain based systems that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed by a public blockchain. This was a bit hard to understand for me honestly since I don’t know a lot about blockchains, but it did sound like an interesting way for a community to organize itself, so I might have to look into it.

DAO
- gives shape to an improvised conversation
- ongoing reflection
- log of history that informs decision making

Why blockchain?
- transparency
- trusted handling of funds
- immutable record of project
- project runs autonomously

Finding common ground

In the end of the last day, we played a game called Finding the Common Ground 2.0. We were split into 5 groups, one of the groups being guests from the UK that participated through a Zoom call.

We were told very little of how the game works in the beginning, only that we can take up to 10 coins from a community pool with and either take them for our own project or invest them back into the community pool where they would increase after a while. In the first few rounds we couldn’t talk at all with eachother, only communicating with hand language and pen and paper. After a few rounds we were told about the community project we needed to fund alongside our own, so now we could also spend coins into different categories to make this community project work. Between the groups we could only communicate once at a 5 minute convention where we tried to figure out how much we all together had invested invested into the different categories, and our group was shocked to find out how much the others had all taken for themselves.

In the end we had to stop the game early because the lesson was over, but it was definitely an interesting simulation of the uncertainty and chaos that occur in distributing common resources.

In this course, we were introduced to some more ways of practically utilizing AI models.

With Dottod, we got together in a group (Paula, Maithili, Carlos, and I) to take pictures. We then used Dottod to have an AI describe the picture, modify this description with a prompt, and then use the modified description as a prompt to generate a new image.

Our game plan was to go to the park, interact with objects we found there in strange ways, and then ask Dottod to replace the actors while keeping the interaction as a kind of low-precision motion capture.

Exchanging Paula and me in an A Space Odyssey: 2001-inspired fashion for apes around a futuristic monument worked surprisingly well!

The plan here was to replace me with a dinosaur. For some reason, the first few pictures that were generated were actually two in one, split right down the middle. Also, in those, there was no dinosaur in sight.

After a while, we managed to get the prompt right and were rewarded with a dinosaur wearing clothes resembling mine.

But, again, it turned out to be T-Rex-shaped.

On our last picture, we wanted to replace the bench with an animal that Carlos and Maithili would ride.

The closest we could get was a picture starring a slightly disturbing half-centipede thing. Dottod really seemed to struggle with replacing an inanimate object with a living one, and it didn’t quite grasp the distinction between riding and sitting on something, even though we clearly stated that in the modified prompt.

A cereal bowl

A desk lamp

The kitchen knife collection

A bluetooth speaker shaped like a moai statue

ZooCAD seems to generate simple geometric shapes easily, but as soon as it is asked for more complex composite or organic shapes, it quickly struggles. As with every tool, it only works well for some things. However, I’m so used to being blown away by AI that this felt like a bit of a letdown.

However, considering that ModMatrix labels the CAD output as experimental—and that it will probably improve soon, as these things tend to do—I definitely want to keep up with it because it seems to have a lot of potential.

For the last part, our task was to give a directive to an AI on the internet, then provide it with some sensor data from an Arduino circuit. The AI would then decide on one of a few possible actions for the Arduino to execute whichever was most aligned with this directive.

I would have really liked to come up with something relevant to my project, but I struggled a lot with this. Usually, I love exercises like this, so I started to second-guess my project a little in this regard.

On the other hand, I don’t want to use AI just for the sake of using a cool, modern technology (that also has its darker sides, as most technologies do).

In the end, instead of doing something silly, I joined Marius in working on an already more or less concrete idea he wanted to implement in his project.

For his project, Marius is developing a platform where communities can upload data that is then analyzed by an AI, so that there will be a model for each community that can answer questions regarding their organization, gathered knowledge, or other related information.

Building on this, he wanted to implement a way of automatically switching between different community AIs, depending on the relative location or proximity to a community.

First, we thought about comparing GPS data, but in the end, we settled on just using different Wi-Fis.

So for our first experiment, we used Ollama 3.2 with 1B parameters, which Marius runs locally on his overpowered Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM. Depending on the SSID of the Wi-Fi that the Raspberry Pi is currently connected to, we would change the system prompt of the AI. For this, we used the Wi-Fi of IAAC and both our mobile phone hotspots.

This worked really well; however, Ollama didn’t seem to know a lot about IAAC, so most of the information it provided was pretty far from being correct. After we specified in the system prompt that it shouldn’t tell us anything it wasn’t sure about, it would only respond with ‘I don’t know.’

if wifi_ssid == "Iaac-Wifi":
system_prompt = f"{base_constraints} You are at IAAC University in Barcelona, Poblenou. Focus on verified facts about IAAC, Poblenou, and Barcelona's innovation district."

elif wifi_ssid == "Helmholm":
system_prompt = f"{base_constraints} You are at home. Be casual and funny. Always answer in spanish."

elif wifi_ssid == "MariusiPhone":
system_prompt = f"{base_constraints} You are in the pocket of a chill dude with a lot of style. Stay Humble! Maintain professional communication and focus on verified, work-relevant information."

For our second iteration, instead of the local model, we used GPT-3.5 Turbo by OpenAI through an API. This worked a lot better since the responses were much faster, and they contained correct information from time to time.

So much for our proof of concept.

The code can be found on Marius’ GitHub.

As a third iteration, because we still had a little time, we tried to convince Copilot to help us get information about the Wi-Fi we were connected to by hacking it as much as possible. Unfortunately, this didn’t work great. We were able to get information like the signal strength, security, and frequency.

Using Mozilla Location Services, we tried to figure out the geolocation of the Wi-Fi we were currently connected to, but that unfortunately didn’t work for any of the three Wi-Fis we used.

AI is a powerful tool, so I am more than happy to experiment with ways of applying it. Oftentimes, it is difficult for me to find a useful application where AI actually provides additional value to the project, but in certain scenarios, AI is the perfect tool for the job. For my bachelor's thesis, my team and I trained a model we could run embedded on an ESP using Edge Impulse to classify how much driving a bike over different surfaces in the city would vibrate using data from an accelerometer.

Realizing this part of the project was greatly facilitated by the fact that we were able to use AI as a tool to achieve our goal effectively.

Because of this, I enjoy keeping up with what AI is capable of. For this purpose, the Extended Intelligence II course definitely helped me a lot, and I was able to file away different methods of applying AI for possible later use.

In the H(n)MI course, we talked about how the behaviours of our bodies generate data by leaving traces in digital space. Visualizing this data can be a powerful tool, so we learned how to use Arduino and a pressure sensor along with visualization tools like Processing or p5js to generate visual or audible outputs with our movement patterns.

The different layers of our homemade pressure sensor.

Visualization of the pressure value over time.

I enjoyed the contents of the H(n)MI workshop a lot. The first part was a bit slow for me personally, but only because I already have some experience with electronics and p5.js. It was still fun to play around a bit and watch the others struggle (;

During the continuation at the Expanding Frames workshop, I had the opportunity to get back into p5.js, which I always enjoy, as well as advance my coding abilities (of course, with the help of Copilot). For me, it was really surprising how easy it was to set up the low-tech computer vision variant that we used for this project, and even more surprising how well it worked—at least in these very controlled circumstances.

Collecting, processing, and explaining data is a process that I have some experience with, and I enjoyed that we had so much focus on that topic this term. The technology I used in this workshop fascinated me a lot and pushed data collection and visualization back into my focus.

Also, working with Paula and her perspective on slime molds was a very enlightening experience, and the shapes, patterns, and even sounds (!) they create fascinated me a lot. I might be leaning out of my main area of interest a bit, but some of the feedback we got after our presentation suggested creating a live-growth surround sound installation, which I think would be amazing.

Hi Saúl,

You can find my reflection here for now.
I'll migrate the content to this website in the next few days.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
I hope you are doing good,
Max