Dr. Serena Cangiano - KR

What made you decide to apply for a grant at the Leading House Asia?
"Untouched karaoke" is the prototype of an application that supports a karaoke experience where the music stops if the singer doesn't wear the mask and holds the microphone at the right distance. “Mask traffic light” is an interface that, through the metaphor of a traffic light system, manages the consumption of drinks between groups of people in bars or cafés. "If the light is red, you have to hold the mask while someone else in your group drinks with their face uncovered. When it turns green, you can pull the mask down and consume your drink.
What did these prototypes teach us about the novel paradigms of interaction in public spaces in a post pandemic society? The project Untouched involved a group of researchers and designers from Switzerland and Korea to analyze the restrictions brought by the pandemic and use them to redesign our everyday life interfaces in urban space.

What role did the Leading House Asia play in the programme?
Thanks to Special COVID-19 Call for Projects Grants with Asia, SUPSI Design Institute (Mendrisio, Ticino) collaborated with Hongik Intelligence Design Lab (Seoul, South Korea) on a series of research exchange activities aiming at designing and prototyping of interfaces through the use of machine learning tools and technologies.

What were the impacts you made through the project/partners/individual?
During the online workshop in February 2021, the Swiss-Korean teams met to co-ideate and design solutions using tools such as P5Js and MLjs and to program interactions based on face and gesture classification. The goal was to start using AI and machine learning with a design approach with the purpose of humanizing these technologies before integrating them into society.
Many of the prototypes have been realized on the basis of common cultural experiences in South Korea, but one part of the exchange focused also on the cultural differences, in particular, on the adoption of advanced technologies in public spaces or the privacy issues.
Moreover, the collaboration allowed work on experimental set-ups and hardware equipments for managing remote research sessions: one output of the project, in fact, is a streaming lab equipped with open source cameras that has been released together with a collection of resources to support non expert people in approaching the use of AI and ML for design projects.

Testimonial: what were your personal experiences/thoughts on the bilateral cooperation experience?
Thanks to this project, we had the chance to present during the "Science Club" event in March 2021, organized by the Office of Science and Technology of the Swiss Embassy in South Korea.
The external page documentation of the project results is available to anyone to share and replicate. We will be happy to provide more information to other researchers and to support the reproduction of the streaming lab to facilitate future remote exchange with research organizations interested in the topics tackled by our project.