In the last decade, we witnessed the rise of the sharing economy featuring the emergence of platforms, services and interfaces that enable the sharing of goods, infrastructure, from cars to houses and work equipment. The project “Untouched” addresses the key issues of a post pandemic sharing society, namely the interactions in public spaces with tangible technologies and sharing services.

This project aims to face the Covid19 crisis by focusing on how the paradigm of sharing and touching based interactions could be the subject of a fast redesign to activate more socially and culturally acceptable interactions with technological devices and services in public spaces.

The project addresses this challenge through a series of distance Research Through Design activities and the set up of two P2P connected libraries, namely twin repositories of resources and the blueprint of a streaming lab for supporting the collaborative design and fast prototyping of ML based solutions.

Activity 1: Machine learning for creatives workshop

February 24-27 2021

The workshop Machine learning for creatives involves a group of students, researchers, Ph.D. students and citizens in the process of ideating and fast releasing prototypes and proofs of concept of untouched interfaces for public spaces. The untouched solutions support interactions in public spaces by avoiding touch and physical contact. A special focus will be given to the evaluation of the cultural and social acceptance in two different countries, Switzerland and South Korea.

Activity 2: Open ML toolbox

April 2021

The open ML toolbox includes the instructions for the set-up of P2P libraries, namely online repositories that document the blueprints of distance collaboration labs for supporting research sessions and a digital collection of resources to collaboratively design ML based solutions.

Activity 3: Enabling workshop ****

June 2022

The Enabling workshop brings the topics, the knowledge and the solutions generated during the previous activities in context of a community engagement workshop. The workshop consists in an offline event in South Korea.