Digital Assembly 2018

ExhibitionJune 25 and June 26 201810 a.m. - 2 p.m.
Sofia, Bulgaria

The Digital Assembly 2018 will take place on 25 and 26 June in Sofia, Bulgaria. The event is co-organised by the European Commission and the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

The Digital Assembly is a major annual forum that gathers more than 1,000 stakeholders and high-level policymakers to debate the EU digital policy and the implications of recent technological developments.

This year’s edition comes at a crucial time as the European Council has called for the full implementation of the Digital Single Market strategy by 2018.

STARTS Initiative will be presenting a STARTS Exhibition 7 projects

Solemaker (Wear Sustain)

Solemaker.io is a platform for creating a new way to think about shoes. Starting from a scan, the wearers information is encoded into the online design software. The wearer chooses from a parametric shoe model designed by one of today’s top young shoe designer. The generative shoe software brings the scan along with sensor data from the user to algorithmically create a shoe for the specific wearer. This shoe is ultra personalised to the wearer using parameters such as foot shape, pressure density and kinetic movement. The shoe is then materialised using digital manufacturing techniques and a wearable sensing system is added to the shoe. A profile of expected use is created for the wearer based upon need and style. As the shoe is worn, a wearable sensing system periodically activates to measure use and movement. At the end of life, the shoe is sent back so that the materials and sensor can be recycled up to twenty times.

Airlief (Wear Sustain)

Airlief revolutionizes the way citizens protect themselves from air pollution. Airlief is our vision of an effective air pollution mask, which is comfortable and is rather perceived as a fashion accessory than a complicated air filtering device. It should bring positive connotations while alerting about the unhealthy levels of the air pollution. The nose-mouth area is freed from bulky parts and made of transparent material. This novelty design aims to enhance the face of the wearer instead of covering it. The transparent area also opens a possibility to customize the mask and to apply different patterns depending on the users’ will. To achieve this, we shifted the exhaust air valve under the chin and the air filters to the side of the face. The filters are redesigned in a fashion, inspired by the beauty of nature seen in the wing of a dragonfly. Airlief affixes to the head in an innovative way, inspired by the ancient head jewelry, e.i. Golden Wreath.

Audio Gait (STARTS PRIZE)

by Agnes Rosengren and Bernardo Aviles-Busch sonifies movements to aid the understanding of body balance while walking. The portable system is an easy learning aid for shin prosthetics training, which translates walking movements into auditory feedback.

Visible Strenght (STARTS PRIZE)

by Lisa Stohn and Jhu-Ting Yang proposes a flexible, creature-like textile surface that, like an octopus, changes its color and pattern in various ways through muscle stimuli.

Deep Time Machine Learning (Platform 12/Bosch)

Deep Time Machine Learning was developed collaboratively with the laboratories of robotics and surface analytics at the Bosch Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering Campus and received support from the Natural History Musuem, Stuttgart and the Phillip Matthäus-Hahn Museum, Kornwestheim. Jol Thomson’s experimental film elaborates a deep history of tool use from the Paleolithic era to the not-too-distant future of algorithmic, AI governance. The explorations of this work contribute to a contemporary media ecology, a history and philosophy of technology in machine vision, and underpins the symbiotic relationship between agential forms of geology, technology, and »intelligent beings.«

Thero: Device to (physically) manage online privacy

Created by Román Torre and Ángeles Angulo (Rotor Studio), THERO is an object exploring the concerns surrounding online privacy by the means of an apparatus designed to allow users to manage and be aware of their data traffic in a (literally) physical way.

Witness you World (Leroy Brothers)

An internet-based platform producing artworks, mashed-up by automated algorithms. Users submit pictures and messages, which can be voted on by other members of the network. The highest-voted submissions are mashed up into a new piece of art.