augmented_studio: collaboration, interactive media and urban space

Ian McArthur
School of Design Studies College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

Brad Miller
School of Design Studies College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

Andrew Murphie
School of Arts and Media University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

Abstract. This paper concerns the potential for participatory and interactive data visualisation to help develop practices, research trajectories and models for inter-cultural design collaboration. It situates this design research in the context of the problem of sustainability, especially with regard to the urgency of rethinking design in urban settings. The paper describes a specific project, RARE EARTH: Hacking the City; an ongoing research trajectory, augmented_studio; and a series of models and concepts that allow us to link design research with research into both inter-cultural collaboration and sustainability in design. Based around an Interactive Media Platform (IMP) augment_me, developed by artist and academic Brad Miller, RARE EARTH was the second collaboration between architect and artist Professor Richard i Goodwins innovative Porosity Studio and The ii Collabor8 Project (C8) , and the Institute of Fashion, Art and Design, Donghua University (DHU), Shanghai. RARE EARTH established an ongoing research trajectory (augmented_studio) that explores participatory and interactive data visualisation to create accelerated communication pathways for building shared vision around complex problems in urban environments. This has led to the development of a model for Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Collaboration (CCIC). CCIC uses the potential of IMP as intercultural communication and collaborative tools to explore a pliant methodology advocating sensitivity to divergent institutional and community expectations, language difference, and culturally based assumptions about learning and creativity. CCIC highlights the crucial role for open, technologically augmented laboratories in creating adaptive, interdisciplinary design processes and pedagogy, In these laboratories we may be empowered to reflect on meaningful ways designers,

researchers, governments and citizens from different cultures might work together in a joined up way to envisage our as yet unimagined collective urban futures. The city and its inhabitants are central in this research in combination forming a crucial site for thinking about collaborative action concerned with the transformation of design practice, design education and re-visioning what a sustainable urban-centric future means. However, collaboration is often complex and hard to explain and difficult to understand from the outside. The themes discussed in this research encompass questions about interactivity in public space; how IMP mediate and re-modulate relations between people and between people and machines; and ideas about how people from different cultures might collaboratively use interactive media to think about complex global problems using cities as labs for the future. Keywords: interactive media, urban labs, design, China

I.

RARE EARTH

i Professor Richard Goodwin established Porosity Studio in 1996. ii Ian McArthur instigated The Collabor8 Project in 2003 to enable design students in Australia and China to collaborate.

RARE EARTH: Hacking the City was conceived at The College of Fine Arts (COFA) in Sydney, and staged in a large space in the creative precinct Bridge 8 in the heart of downtown Shanghai in September 2011. It was an intensive collaborative design StudioLAB. It was also the second collaboration between The Collabor8 Project (C8), architect and artist Professor Richard Goodwins innovative Porosity Studio, and the Institute of Fashion, Art and Design, Donghua University (DHU), Shanghai. It used the Interactive Media Platform (IMP) augment_me, developed by artist and academic Brad Miller. Over two intensive weeks during September 2011, students and researchers from The College of Fine Arts (COFA) at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Donghua University (DHU) engaged in creating dynamic content together using a live database. RARE EARTH engaged these students of art, design and other creative disciplines in workshops, presentations, site visits and journeys

interrogating a range of urban, social and cultural issues in Shanghai. The StudioLAB worked first with themes that emphasised experimental improvisation (the hack) and contingency and second, reflections on how artist, designers and researchers might use interactive media to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration. The participants uploaded and tagged their iterative responses to the studio brief creating a audio visual database that describes the creative processes, social and studio encounters, and the outputs of the project. In accentuating the use of interactive media and experimental improvisation RARE EARTH created unique opportunities for the participants to explore their ideas for the future of cities, immersive environments, and transcultural collaboration. The project also strived to create a open space to think beyond possibilities [1] while experiencing the significance of culture amid the emergence of Asias rapid urbanisation, and this centurys reconfigured geopolitical relationships. II. RARE EARTH AIMS

difficulties of challenging the status quo when it comes to the role of designers in social events. We then discuss the history and design philosophy (including the concept of metadesign) that informs The Collabor8 Project (C8). We will then give a more detailed account of the IMP. After this, we return to a detailed account and analysis of RARE EARTH, followed by an outlining of implications and future possibilities at the junction of design research, interactive media, collaboration and sustainability in urban contexts. III. THE CITY AS URBAN LABORATORY

The more formal intent of the producers of the StudioLAB was to further extend and refine the adaptive pedagogic model for Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Collaboration (CCIC) established in earlier C8 research projects. The previously developed StudioLAB process would be augmented with a database driven IMP. Specific aims for the studio included: meshing the thinking of artists, designers and other disciplines in contemporary problems associated with cities; stimulation of strategies promoting collaborative practice and cultural literacy in real and digital spaces; mitigation as far as possible of issues related to language, culture, assumption, prejudice in order to re-language/co-language collaborative practices between actants from diverse cultural backgrounds; integration of online and social technologies as armatures for conceptualisation, communication, collaborative interaction, documentation of ideation, design propositions and processes, and display and archiving of deliverables; using the IMP to create and exhibit a collective data visualisation of the StudioLAB process at the conclusion of the program; deployment of objects, the body, community, digital networks, public space and architecture as sites for transformations taking into account issues of social construction, politics and sustainability.

Cities are crucial sites for research concerned with the transformation of design practice, design education and a re-visioning of what a sustainable urban-centric future means. Chinese megacities, of which Shanghai is the most populousiii , have a particular significance for the planet given current trends and the forecast for future urbanisation. The McKinsey Global Institutes report Preparing for Chinas Urban Billion (2009) forecasts a scenario where there will be 8 megacities, 11 economic clusters of on average 60 million people each, and over 900 smaller cities in China by 2050. Predictions that by 2050 75% of all people will live in cities confirm the need for urgent collaborative action around the role of the designer in urban environments [2]. The complex challenges and opportunities emerging from this extraordinarily rapid urban development are unprecedented in scale and have profound global implications socially, economically, environmentally and geopolitically. Our activities as practitioners and educators must reflect the joined-up nature of our relationships to the world and be cognisant of the organic, biologic nature of the cities humans create. In contrast to this metabolic conception of design, Modernism has catastrophically treated the world as if humans (and their cities) existed outside nature as omnipotent overseers. However, the human position, defined outside nature and controlling nature is a religious construct and fraught with problems [3]. Rejecting Modernisms mechanical-object ethos frees designers to approach cities as complex living systems and to tend them accordingly. IV. CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

The role of designers in society has evolved into a multidisciplinary hybrid characterised by ubiquitous networked digital processes that permeate industry and societies around the world. Within industry, strong disciplinary skills are taken as given and problem solving abilities, communication skills, collaborative strengths, creative and innovative thinking have all become mandatory within information economiesiv. These professional qualities as they pertain to contemporary design are most commonly deployed within contexts aligned to the global industrial goals of ongoing economic growth, capital, GDP, and
iii The 2010 Census recorded Shanghai Municipality had a population of 23,000,000 inhabitants. iv This was identified in a study of FTSE 200 companies (Gillingson & OLeary 2006)

The project outcomes were also intended to strengthen existing links between COFA and DHU and promote a sustainable COFA presence within China. We will now give a little background to the project, both to the notion of the city itself as laboratory, and the

shareholder returns. To meet the demands of industry and the global economy, design education programs educate graduates to adopt the appropriate values, skillsets and practices in order to enter the workforce in the service of this system. The now highly visible consequence is that most design produced within the dominant, market-driven, economic framework has proved itself unsustainable. Capitalisms overt predisposition to commodify tends to disregard the diversity of life [4]. Burketts (1999) often cited [5, 6, 7] assertion that the, ecological threats emerging, through the ever-expanding essence of capitalism are also seen to trigger a crisis that will lead to the moment for change, proves redolent of collapsing social, economic, political and environmental systems in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Nolan [8] claims that driven by the extremes, contradictions and consequences of wild capitalism China, Islam and the West are on a collision course. Unless these diverse models of culture and capital find constructive engagement, economic, social and ecological collapse are realistic scenarios. The implications for cities globally depend on how well our cultures learn to understand and work with each other. C8 aims to demonstrate how immersing design students in collaborative, situated and networked cross-cultural learning and teaching, creates a transformational space for sharing knowledge, culture, wisdom, visions and aspirations. This is important in nurturing the desire for change. If there is no desire for change because of distance, ignorance, lack of interest or fear of the unknown, change cannot occur. By manifesting Borges powerful declaration that, the Other often turns out to be no other than the Self, [9] immersive, crosscultural processes challenge limiting perceptions of cultural otherness and prejudice. Such approaches create environments where people from diverse cultural backgrounds begin to realise their common ground as a basis for collaboration. We argue that it is vital that this process is instigated within the design school because, as Manziniv asserts [10], design schools are the laboratory of the new and if this project of social transformation does not happen in the design school where will it happen? Being complicit in the creation of a plethora of wicked social and ecological problems [11], designers and design educationalists are confronted by the ethics of the design professions servitude to industry. There is now abundant evidence confirming that industry in too many instances has an agenda that is not in the interests of humans and other species inhabiting our increasingly fragile ecosystems. Recent high profile industrial controversies such as the BP Gulf oil spill and Foxconns worker suicides underline the realities of capital-driven agendas to prioritise and increase brand and shareholder profit while simultaneously depleting our natural, social and cultural cosmologies. Industrialist delinquency contributes significantly to
v Ezio Manzini made this statement several times when speaking at different venues at the 2010 Cumulus Conference in Shanghai.

evidence that the material abundance promised in unending global economic growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Petter Nss points out that, there is a fundamental contradiction between a profit-oriented economic system and long-term environmental sustainability. The solutions that are proposed by mainstream environmental economists as well as their ecological economy colleagues do not solve the central problems, but serve to further highlight the difficulties of changing capitalism towards sustainability. In a profit-oriented economy, capital accumulation is a prime driving force, and non-growth for the economy at large tends to result in serious economic and social crises [12]. To many designers the deep structural challenges to sustainable practice seem too complex to deal with so they continue as they have done. Others take refuge in denial. Design education largely remains focussed on preparing students to enter industry as a unit of production within the ailing business-as-usual economic environment. However, as actors within broader socio-cultural and geo-political contexts responsible designers must change, responding decisively from a position of ethical optimism tempered with a sense of reality, or risk redundancy as the miscreants of the profession. Before we can see how to change we must want to change. V. BECOMING ACTIVE: A TRAJECTORY OF INTERCULTURAL ENGAGEMENT

It was in the context of these urgent issues that C8 was initially established in 2003 as a platform for collaborative transcultural design education between students in China and Australia. The first C8 studios were online and used email and basic websites to foster collaborations between project participants. Over the course of a decade the research has evolved to develop insights pertinent to a matrix of cultural and communication issues encountered during online and face-to-face studio interactions between students in China and Australia. C8 research relates the global significance of Chinas re-emergence to a concomitant need for forms of cross-cultural design education reflecting the networked future of practice in what has been referred to as the Asian Century vi . The research design has increasingly focused on orchestrating situated experiential learning where students and faculty from Australia and China inevitably confront troublesome knowledge and difficult threshold concepts together and individually, in what become symbiotic, liminal transformation spaces [13].

vi The expression Asian Century gained prominence during the late 1980s, and is attributed to a 1988 meeting with People's Republic of China (PRC) leader Deng Xiaoping and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Its earliest appearance dates to a 1985 US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing and has been subsequently reaffirmed by Asian political leaders, and is now a simplistic but popularly used term in the media.

This has contributed to advancing pliant methodologies for facilitating Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Collaboration (CCIC) in design education. The research indicates ongoing mutually beneficial, trusting collaborative relationships in crosscultural academic environments are often elusive but remain vital to progressing a constructive engagement around Metadesign as a realistic global design ethos. VI. METADESIGN

circumstances...we become one kind of being or another according to how we live. [14] Maturanas inference is that although we become the kinds of people we become because of the way we live within a culture, as reflective beings we can also choose to become aware of the way we live and the kind of human beings, or in our case, the kind of designers we want to become. C8 posits that conversations between students, faculty and institutions based in the sharing of images, stories, experiences and culture itself begins to enable the requisite levels of trust that can create the conditions for cross-cultural collaboration to emerge. Should we desire, design educators have the capacity to individually and collectively facilitate outcomes reflecting a diversity of optimistic countervailing strategic positions in relation to the dystopia of the catastrophic consumption machine the profession feeds. With all this in mind, one of the aims of the project is to rethink the role of technical platforms in the context of collaboration and design. VII. THE INTERACTIVE MEDIA PLATFORM (IMP)

The form of lived experiential studio learning encouraged in C8 is deeply congruent with the theoretical approach to design activity and thinking described as Metadesign. Wood (2010) has described Metadesign as, an emerging conceptual framework within which designers will be able to work together in a more coherent and holistic wayWe need more joined-up ways to feed, clothe, shelter, assemble, communicate and live together. This will mean re-thinking the way that designers are taught, practice and organize themselves [1]. Jones and Wingfield [2] affirm that, Metadesign is a systemic, interdisciplinary and emergent design process aimed at transcending existing specialist boundaries to create more joined-up solutions for the benefit of society and nature. Building on these theories, C8 research argues that development of holistic approaches to all aspects of the designers role and its relationship to the world presents an ongoing global design project in design education. This proposition is modeled in our prototyping of optimistic open environments where students are encouraged to co-vision the unthinkable a culturally inclusive, socially and ecological sustainable future for all. In his essay Metadesign, Maturana [14] reflects that the changes we want or need to make are in our own hands. Maturana [14] argues, our conscious and unconscious desires, determine the course of our lives, and the course of our human history. We are not the victims of circumstance and change is in fact up to us to choose. We live a culture centered in domination and submission, mistrust and control, dishonesty, commerce and greediness, appropriation and mutual manipulation ... and unless our emotioning changes all that will change in our lives will be the way in which we continue in wars, greediness, mistrust, dishonesty, and abuse of others and of nature. [14] Our desire and our desire to be responsible for our desires is absolutely central to the question of whether as designers and design educators we are willing to begin the transition from design as status quo towards design as Metadesign. We cannot blame technological evolution, structural determinism, the market, or our cultural context. We human beings live in conversations, and all that we do as such we do it in conversations as networks of consensual braiding of emotions and coordinations of coordinations of consensual behaviors. In these

The IMP uses a database of images, sound and videos to display content as an immersive environment. As participants upload their tagged content to the database, the IMP is updated and evolves. These data moments are animated by custom software and a live video camera feed and then sequentially embedded into strips of images presented as a dynamic horizontal flow. The platform employs synchronised projections in a large-scale installation format supported by multichannel sound that responds to a machine-vision tracking system. The interactivity of the system enables users to control the display of individual visual elements of content by slowing and enlarging an image or video in response to audience movement and position. The IMP in this context leverages research from previous studios suggesting that, within online and blended collaborations, sharing of experiences, information, images and media is instrumental in building the level of trust required for collaboration. Participants have demonstrated an innate capacity to engage with the act of sharing which fosters mutual understanding and curiosity about each other and each others lives, interests and practices. VIII. WHAT HAPPENED? DOES IT WORK - OR NOT? Transcultural collaborations between individuals are challenging at the level of the institution it is even more complex to co-ordinate and communicate clearly. During our search for a space in Shanghai we found the managers of local creative clusters interested in our proposal and willing to assist us if possible. A viable location was identified at Bridge 8 (Phase 2) in downtown Shanghai and rented for a nominal fee for two weeks. A carpenter was employed to construct a large screen in the space for the purposes of large-scale projection. However, despite these promising initial conditions there were significant communication challenges. The intercultural process is as noted by McArthur [15] fraught with our mutual capacity for assumption, language and cultural misunderstandings,

Figure 1. Screen grab of the RARE EARTH studioLAB data visualisation illustrating curated outputs.

structural and institutional constraints. Moving projection equipment across borders we found to be particularly difficult. Responding to this the hack and the theme of contingency introduced by Professor Goodwin [16] as a provocation played a more complex role than anyone involved had imagined. Conceptually, in the context of the RARE EARTH brief hacking is seen as an undocumented procedure or a creative solution to a technical (or social/urban) problem that is in need of an urgent temporary fix. The brief encouraged the participating undergraduate and postgraduate students of Environmental Design at DHU and visiting students from range of disciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate programs (sculpture, design, art theory) at COFA to collaborate in investigating and improvising around ideas for the future of cities. Collaboration is not compulsory in the StudioLAB but it is encouraged through an initiation phase designed to allow the agents involved to become comfortable with each other through the sharing of experience in two preliminary presentations. The first presentation was a Petcha Kutcha-style self-introduction, and the second outlined their individual thinking in response to the studio brief. Collaboration emerges aligned with the concepts students developed rather than placing students in teams and compelling them to work together. The first week involved a diverse range of lectures, site visits, workshops and presentations with representatives of Shanghais creative industries. Entities and practices covered in these encounters included: urban farming (Good to China), maker-culture (Xinchejian, Shanghais Hackerspace), design thinking and innovation (IDEO), collaboration and co-working (Xindanwei), interactive digital art (aaajiao), and local design practices were showcased during an evening of mini-presentations (Bee or Wasp). This provided a rich palette of inputs informing the studio. The StudioLAB work focused on conceptual development through individual and small group work with tutors and mentors. The focus of the second week was on realising

the collaborative and individual projects and the staging of an exhibition of the work produced. In its elicitation of urban interventions the brief directs participants to: (1) find collaborators; (2) explore Shanghai to find a situation, social context, site and scale to work at and (3) identify a problem or process with which to interact, respond to or address. The brief challenges participants to journey into the city to enact the interventions they have conceived and to document this. Returning to the studio with detritus from the urban environment, equipment, experiences and encounters and raw digital data in the form of photographs, video footage and sound files the agents begin to edit, refine, discuss, argue, clarify their responses to the city. This is in many instances a confronting and transformative process of discovery of both otherness and of self, of new techniques and unfamiliar ways of framing their idea and their place in the urban environment. Encouraged to document everything and iteratively develop a narrative around their activities via a process of uploading their evidence of engagement to a dedicated Flickr account, participants tag their digital material simultaneously forming a collective and searchable database of the unfolding process. Although encouraged to engage with the parallel process of live coding and production underway as the system is built by programmer and production team, participants invariably focused on development of their particular responses while grappling with what it means to produce a creative work that exists as part of a larger unfolding work (see Figure 1). IX. SPECULATIVE DESIGN, EXPANDED MEDIA AND INCLUSIVE SCREENS

Discussing the syntax of images, Lester [17] cites the photographic historian Helmut Gernsheim who argued that, Photography is the only language understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures. Linguists resisting the notion of image as language generally do so on the basis that

images do not contain common components that are similar to the written languages alphabet and the lack of a recognizable syntax. However, considered as a collection of signs, images possess qualities that are assembled by the viewer to create meaning within a particular context. Within the syntactical theory of visual communication we find that when words are combined with images powerful associations are formed, explaining, shaping, and stimulating the imagination. Lester remarks that, Despite occasional problems in discerning the meaning from pictures and words the combination of the two symbolic systems is one of the most powerful communicative strategies known [17]. In this research words take the form of tags functioning as units of language articulating concepts attached to an image, signifying intended meanings that can be interpreted, compared and discussed. RARE EARTH participants create, tag and upload content to a Flickr database. The act of research in this context includes capture of initial site references, locations, situation and circumstances as digital images, static and moving, including sound, along with written notes and observation and audio narratives. After initial post-excursion discussions a tagging schema was developed by the participants and posted to all. During the next 24 hours images started to appear on the Flickr accountvii . The naming protocol developed was simple and easy to implement, based around whom and where, followed by descriptions of colours, objects, situations. The limitation that became apparent was that tags should include reference to the urban problem being considered and other environmental conditions (light, atmospheric pollution, etc.) More than 1400 images and video were uploaded to the project Flickr account, and an additional 576 images and videos exist on Millers Flickr account. The IMP consists of a suite of software and hardware. The software includes a number of components: (1) preparation and editing of pre-exhibition content is conducted using a custom designed online interface we have called FlickrTool. Using a web browser FlickrTool facilitates search and retrieval from the Flickr account using tags that the Flickr interfaces supports. This helps the editing and sorting process before committing the search calls to the main visualisation system. Flickr supports a standard set of search expression, for example, ALL and ANY. FlickrTool also renders a preview of a search. This single sequence of images we call a TileStream. (2) Tracking software (a) RAREEARTH used 3 near infrared video cameras and a number of IR illuminators, each was attached to a mini computer via Firewire and a custom built application VideoTracker developed using Processing and OpenCV library. These cameras are positioned overhead and placed equidistance along
vii http://www.flickr.com/photos/rareearthStudioLAB/

the length of the projection and approximately 5 metres from the surface. The software discriminates changes in the video cameras field of view (blobs) and passes those differences as a set of co-ordinates used to create a centroid (an ellipse centered around the co-ordinates) to a network socket (b) How it interfaces with the display: As actant walk into the range of the overhead cameras, centroid data passed into the visualisation software. (3) Display software (a) How content is displayed and rendered and how the feedback is made visible: The tracking data is represented as a magnifying lens displacement map distorting the images when positioned over the TileStreams acting as a feedback. (b) Individual TileStreams move horizontally in response to the location of the magnifying lens feedback and hence the real location of the change in the field of vision, typically a person. This movement follows a simple mapping, if you move the left from the centre-line the TileStreams over which the magnifying lens feedback move to the left, and similarly the opposite is true. (4) Audio software utilising granular and generative synthesis, mobile recording technologies, open source platforms and protocols including PureData (PD) and OpenSoundControl (OSC) are used to create experimental, documentary and expressive sonifications that are responsive to audience position and movement within the space. The audio consisted of a four-channel system located at each corner of the room and supported spatialisation of sound influenced by participants location within observable camera range. The RARE EARTH hardware and exhibition configuration was a 20-metre continuous projection screen, consisting of 4 x 5 metre side by side projections. We use three over-head near infrared video cameras with supporting array of infrared illuminators as input sensors. Forming sequences in response to audience movement and position, the data moments gathered are animated by the augment_me software according to a set of rules applied to a live video camera feed, and then sequentially embedded into a strip of images presented horizontally. Muller observed of the IMP that, The audience is implicated in Miller!s work, reconfiguring the relationship between artist, audience and artwork, creating complex systems of data flow in which the audiences actions have a shaping effect the participant becomes inescapably implicated in the complex dynamics of cause and effect constructed by each work, one source among many in an open system of flowing data [18]. The platform inevitably merges digital architecture with traditional architecture creating an electronic space preserving the affordances one normally attributes to physical media but augmenting this with digital media increasing flexibility and adaptivity. Pang suggests that immersive digital spaces are physically engaging, support rich social interactions and tacit knowledge, and can handle a truly three-dimensional vision of collaboration [19]. This provokes models of interaction

and design studio methods using machine vision as a basis for collaborative innovation in networked environments with these dynamic screens encouraging ongoing transformation, play, reflection and engagement. In this transcultural context these visual and technological elements combine as a prototype for intensive co-languaging alluding to new ways to reach shared understandings, mapping responses to a brief, and (importantly) highlighting each others similarities. The links between intensive sharing and recombination of images, video, tags and sound are seen in this research as an accelerator of communication and interpersonal engagement as the foundation of successful collaboration. Sharing introduces and amplifies disclosure within the studio interaction. This is significant because disclosure establishes a basis for interaction and trust. Guo-Ming Chen [20] acknowledges that between people from different cultures the act of disclosure carries a dual significance regarding signaling a willingness to be open and an essential component of relationship building. It is a foundation for building trust. We rarely collaborate successfully with those we do not trust. In Confucius Heritage Cultures interpersonal norms emphasise trust, holding significant status as a foundation on which relationships are built [21]. For many students exposure to such experiences are threshold concepts transforming their understandings and potential prejudices toward the others they encounter in the StudioLAB environment. Despite our best efforts to communicate clearly, collaboration between people from different cultures is inevitably subject to communication breakdowns because our realities are comprised of differing norms, symbols, and representations reinforced through education [22,23]. The most bilingual students in C8 projects have consistently been those based in China. However bilingual students still face issues because terms and concepts dont necessarily correspond to their understandings. Cognitive structures are affected by cultural cues as well as language, and have significant impacts on the potential for complexification of designed solutions. Sharing experiences, interests and ideas through images or sketching (video sketching) provides a powerful mechanism and we maintain that the sketch, the video and the photograph emerge in this context as boundary objects [24]. These are shared objects to talk about and to think with that different cultural groups can use in differing ways that reflect the multiple realities represented in the StudioLAB. Large-scale, urban, networked, immersive, screens used to facilitate collaborative, speculative and participatory expressions of place and identity, mapping and storytelling in StudioLAB contexts enable us to conceive new understanding of what screens are for, and what they can do. The strength of the intercultural mediated StudioLAB is the opportunity to evaluate previously untested collaborative relationships for

sustaining creativity/creating sustainability by combining the communication and data visualisation capabilities of computer systems with the creativity and high-level cognitive capabilities of people [25]. X. CONSTRAINTS AND SOLUTIONS

The inherent complexity of RARE EARTH presented problematic situations in terms of attracting funding, negotiating bureaucracy across tightly controlled international borders further highlighting the challenges that keep humans apart. We encountered unforeseen complexities, vagaries and opaque undocumented processes of Chinese customs officials that meant that the complete installation could not be exhibited. This irrevocably altered the direction, flavor and nature of the StudioLAB and required an unforeseen hack as a contingent response. Taken to imply an improvisation or response on the fly the producers responded in ways that allowed the process to unfold as intended but in a more disjointed format and at a smaller scale than envisaged using multiple screens. It is crucially important to recognise this impasse as emblematic of the problem of intercultural communication itself. Although constrained by such complexities the outcomes of RARE EARTH are clear despite being unable to be deployed at the anticipated scale of projection during the exhibition phase. The process did for the researchers involved suggests that the IMP and its deployment as an interactive projection in the studio functions as an immersive digital pinboard. This metaphor is redolent of collaborative design processes as traditionally understood but in a format that is augmented by the ability to search, compare, interact, juxtapose in ways that expand the potential of traditional pinboards, paper spaces [19], and the media typically used within these collaborative tools. In the StudioLAB some Australian students faced tensions negotiating the relationship between their own practice and the studio apparatus that was geared to present a larger more social image representing the collective work undertaken. This reveals that further consideration must be given to how immersive technologies might enable richer studio learning serving all creative disciplines and cultural orientations such as individualism or collectivism. What we observed in the outcomes of the StudioLAB suggests the IMP creates a capacity: for sharing information in ways that correspond to the socially mediated life of the city promoting mediated intercultural design learning to observe each individual/component project in progress in ways that allowed for juxtaposition, comparison with the iterative development of the work and against other works underway in the studio to develop a searchable database of research materials (images, audio, video) accessible to all agents in the process

for facilitated discourse around ideas, concepts, responses, interactions for elevated intensity of communal and intercultural involvement in the project/process to engage in a re-languaging of the design process through sharing of data, imagery, experience via a socially mediated process of interacting in the StudioLAB and online for mapping a matrix of sites and points of engagement with the city and it's communities XI. IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, RARE EARTH established an ongoing research trajectory (augmented_studio) that explores participatory and interactive data visualisation to create accelerated communication pathways for building shared vision around complex problems in urban environments. augmented_studio aims to use the components of database, cameras, sensors, interactive spatialised sonification and multi-screen projection to re-modulate participant engagement with complex problems, and for facilitating relational transformation, collaborative attention, and the building of trust via a sharing of experience/memory in order to, quite literally, lead to different, cooperative futures [26]. Via qualitative research gathered during the development of augmented_studio, we make the following associations between the IMP, intercultural design-led innovation and studio practices: 1. Wicked problems require large collaborative teams and throw up complex data: Globally networked urban, social, economic and geopolitical systems mean humans are ever more interdependent, in ever more immediate ways. Internationally, designers such as Manzini, Penin, Gong et al. [27] argue for an urgent engagement in creating positive environments where the likelihood of new ways of living and producing is promoted through creativity, design thinking and codesign processes [27]. 2. Immersive data visualisation can be instrumental in facilitating shared vision around complex problems: Inventing new, immersive accelerated communication processes based on sharing of images, video, sound and other digital media with data visualisation tools creates an emergent culturally diverse hybrid social operating system where previously unimagined design solutions to complex problems can be accessed. 3. Immersive dynamic screens in StudioLAB contexts enable new understanding of what screens are for, can do, and the nature of collaborative interactivity and machinic vision as enablers of intercultural communication: The potential of design futures can be located at the intersection of participatory design (and what are becoming known as participatory IT processes), interaction design facilitated by new platforms, metadesign and urgent and pervasive problems of social, economic and urban transformation and sustainability.

Designed to facilitate authentic relationships and connections as a basis for collaboration the augmented_studio allows intercultural design teams to visualise semantic maps of complex urban design problems focusing attention around contextual factors and iterative phases in ways that accelerate shared understanding. Images allow us to tell stories and in turn to see and hear the world in new ways. Eppler [28] argues there are crucial and multiple roles of images for collaboration, whether they are conceived as visual boundary objects, conscription devices, visual nonhuman agents, trading zones, epistemic objects, or simply collaborative graphics. The power of the image includes a diverse and persuasive facility to focus the attention of a group, identify conflict or congruence, reveal implied knowledge and past experiences, highlight new or unfamiliar ways of seeing and being in the world. RARE EARTH prototypes a sophisticated open networked technology that supports Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Collaboration (CCIC) via dynamic networked and immersive mediation of individual and cooperative creative processes. REFERENCES
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