Munich Tech Fest

More than a hackathon – this year’s Techfest once again attracts creative, techies, innovators, designers, coders, hackers and makers from all over the world to Garching from 14 to 17 June 2018. The Techfest this year is particularly exciting for art and culture professionals and other players from the cultural and creative industries in Munich, as the Kulturreferat München and UnternehmerTUM are jointly awarding 15 participants for the Techfest Munich.

CREATE Your IoT Series – 16th june

Speaker: Luis Miguel Girao (ARTSHARE)

The present result of the work undertaken in the context of the EU Initiatives STARTS and IoT Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) is a series of works entitled CREATE Your IoT. Drawing inspirations from the title of the coordination and support action to the LSPs, CREATE IoT, the series aims at expanding it by pointing out ways of how other innovative actions can be implemented on top of the developments made available by LSPs. It emphasizes the co-creative aspect of the all LSPs but in an alternative sense than that of citizen participation as promoted by the U4IoT CSA. In the series, artworks are the core and are motive for dialogue between all actual and potential stakeholders in use-cases.

The CREATE Your IoT Series is at the moment composed of two artworks under development. Connected Hennery and Migrant Home. The artworks are being designed to allow the integration of multiple technologies made available by the LSPs. For example, The Migrant Home could host technologies from SynchroniCity, Autopilot and Activage.

Connected Hennery is a reflection about the use case of the Poultry chain management of IoF2020. Inspired by the motto of that use case to respect animal welfare, the artwork starts by giving the chicken the control of the location of their home. It follows recent tendencies of permaculture, within which mobile henneries are substitutes for tractors in the cleaning of agricultural land. In permaculture, chicken inhabiting a defined piece of land clean it and fertilize it. Farmers, by simply moving the hennery around their land, make it ready for cultivation. The digital system of the Connected Hennery analyses the position and movement of chicken inside the hennery and predicts in which direction they would like to progress next, freeing the farmer from that work task. Furthermore, other sensors implemented in the hennery allow easier monitoring for the farmer in order to simplify and more effectively manage her/his intervention in the maintenance of the hennery.

The Connected Hennery is looking at decentralized models of production of chicken and at its potential as added value for the associated use cases of the LSPs. Food suppliers are looking at how consumers are more and more interested in biological and organic products and how can they adapt to keep their leadership of the supply markets. This leads these suppliers to create their own production experiments in order to better understand how to create new products the fit customers’ demands. It is for this sort of context that works such The Connected Hennery are being developed in order to promote the LSPs towards end users.

The Migrant Home is still in the early phases of concept development. At this stage it is looking at how an IoT mobile house can be transformed into a home for migrants for short-term jobs/enterprises connected with urban and rural niche developments, for instance recovery of rural and urban cultural heritage.
Preliminary experience of the development of the CREATE Your IoT Series reveals that Open Standards and Architectures in the LSPs are crucial to make the technologies developed accessible and allow for the development of new business models.

About Luis Miguel Girao