Giovanni Innella (Northumbria University… by connectedcommunities
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ABSTRACT
The talk describes a project introducing a group of young adults from Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso, to the potential uses of Internet services, discovering how these services would impact and possibly change different aspects of their daily lives. Resisting a top-down or technology driven approach, the team adopted a participatory design approach in order to create a more meaningful training course. Technology Probes were introduced in order to understand to what extent freely available Internet service would fit into the local context and what new services and technologies could be generated in accordance to that.
Exhibition: In many African Countries a revolution is happening. For the first time fast Internet connections are being broadly available. This technology push is creating new opportunities for adoption of Internet services in developing Countries. The book exhibited reports a design research study in Burkina Faso where local people were exposed to Internet technologies and stimulated to generate concepts for local services. Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, with the support of Regione Piemonte, invested in a two months field study in the North of Burkina Faso. In this book Giovanni tells about antennas, guns, gold mines, chairs, mercenaries and other stories. It’s service design, baby!
BIO
Giovanni graduated in Industrial Design at the Polytechnic University of Turin in 2004. Since 2003, Giovanni has been assigned numerous workshops and international cultural exchanges financed by the European Community, in Europe and in Africa.
After freelancing as a graphic designer and visual designer for a many clients, Giovanni began to work with the design sector Area Progetti (e1) of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
From 2005 to 2006 Giovanni has been working for Interaction Design Lab as a designer. In 2008 he graduated from the IM master course at the Design Academy of Eindhoven. His work has been exhibited at the Droog gallery in Amsterdam, the Netherlands Architecture Instituted and the Stedelijk Museum among other places. Currently Giovanni is pursuing his PhD in design at Northumbria University.
[...] encouraged the question “What would you do with this?”, which was inspired by Giovanni’s workshops in Burkina Faso. He gave a tutorial of how to work with a web tool, like Flickr or Google Maps, then there would be [...]