We’re going to Casa Jasmina

At ThingsCon, we had a chance to learn at more depth about Casa Jasmina thanks to Bruce Sterling, one of our keynote speakers there.

And we’re headed there, next month.

Casa Jasmina a very interesting experiment – a living lab for connected home things, especially those that are open source (in other words, that can be hacked and modified). You can find details about Casa Jasmina here, but let me quickly copy & paste the current description right here rather than me trying to sum it up:

“Casa Jasmina” is a two-year pilot project in the business space of domestic electronic networking, or, “the Internet of Things in the Home.” Our goal is to integrate traditional Italian skills in furniture and interior design with emergent skills in Italian open-source electronics. The project is a showplace inside the large industrial building already shared by Toolbox Co-Working, Fablab Torino and Officine Arduino.

Casa Jasmina showplace has three main functions:

  • A real-world testbed for hacks, experiments and innovative IoT and digital fabrication projects.
  • A curated space for public exposure of excellent artifacts and best practices. < – A guest-house for occasional visitors to Toolbox, Officine Arduino and Fablab Torino.

Although it resembles an apartment home, Casa Jasmina is actually a combination of lab, gallery space and B&B, so it needs dynamic management. Casa Jasmina is not merely a kitchen, library, bedroom, and bathroom. It’s a public interface for a larger Internet-of-Things process of building things, acquiring installing things, removing things, repairing and maintaining things, storing things, recording and linking to things, and, last but very importantly, getting rid of things.

We are building Casa Jasmina in order to encourage industries that will create tomorrow’s living spaces. Casa Jasmina is an incubator, and its purpose is industry-boosting in the Torino and Piemonte IoT space. The successors of the Casa Jasmina project will be real homes with real, innovative products inside.

It’s both profoundly interesting and highly relevant. As connectivity comes into our homes, we need to understand what’s going on, negotiate ground rules, learn to design the kind of interactions and power dynamics we want to encourage/allow/avoid…

I’m very excited to be heading down there for a few days alongside Michelle Thorne and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino to check it out, spend a couple of nights there and discuss what’s going on there with our lovely, kind hosts Jasmina Tesanovic, Bruce Sterling, Massimo Banzi and Lorenzo Romagnoli.

The Casa Jasmina team will kindly also host a spontaneous IoT meetup with the three of us as guests/speakers (Theme: “The role of Design and Open Source in the IoT development process”).

Can’t wait.

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