Category: Services

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Chronicle Wrap-Up

a cartoon of how chronicle integrates into the services campaign

The Chronicle project was part of the Horizon Services Campaign. It was a cross-cutting project intended to develop a middle-ware platform to support the aims and objectives of four of the other Service Campaign projects; namely: Panopticon, Hybrid Gifting, In My Seat, and Memory Machine. As is the nature with dynamic research projects, some projects made lesser use of the Chronicle platform whilst others made greater use. To wrap up we will finish by describing how Chronicle was used in two of the service campaign projects.

Panopticon utilised the Chronicle platform for storing experiential data from people playing video games that enabled them to then share that data with a 3rd party. Users were invited to play a video game, during which their facial expressions were algorithmically analysed to determine their emotional states during game-play. This analysis data was stored in Chronicle with a unique identifier that the user was given. At the end of this experience, the experiential data was used to generate a souvenir that the user could take away with them. They were also optionally given the choice to take away their data, destroy it, or ‘gift’ it to the experimenters in order to use for future analytical work.

Hybrid Gifting utilised the Chronicle platform to associate digital content with physical gift cards that could be passed on to a recipient and the digital content accessed by that recipient. The project held two gift card making workshops where the participants were tasked with making physical gift cards that incorporated a unique identifier from Chronicle. Amongst the available options for embedding the codes were RFID tags and Artcodes. Digital content could then be associated in Chronicle with these unique identifiers and a phone application could be used to scan the identifiers and retrieve the digital content by the recipient of the physical card.

Chronicle is open source and links to the source code and documentation can be found on the Chronicle website at https://chronicle.horizon.ac.uk/

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Here’s our fabulous new logo

The Horizon ‘Services Campaign’ was recently introduced to a few of our CDT students at an event aiming to bring together academics, researchers and administrators with shared interests, and to identify additional current projects exploring services, and how they might take on increasingly experimental qualities through deeper connections to the physical world or to digital media.

Rikki Marr, creative and live illustration agent and founder Director of HAWK&MOUSE attended the event and helped bring the Horizon ‘Services Campaign’ to life through his rapid drawing, resulting in our fabulous new logo:

Illustrations for Service Campaign projects, both Cross Cutting Themes and Chronicle were also designed by Rikki and we will be unveiling them all shortly.

Written by: Hazel Sayers

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How the Horizon Services Campaign took shape

The increasingly popularity of ‘as a service’ is the driving force behind our Services Campaign.

The ‘as a service’ notion applies within many contexts of our everyday lives – mobility, healthcare, finance and consumer goods. Today in using many of these services we enter into ‘deals’ and in return for these ‘free’ services, we exchange our personal data.

The Service Campaign targets business innovation in online services whether digitally native ones that manage human data, or ones in which digital services increasingly control physical infrastructure to address the many ethical, legal, privacy and security challenges involved in the sharing of personal data.

An initial meeting was held to scope activity and the ideas captured in the diagram below. This served as an overview of the campaign structure, with projects grouped within three categories of services: health and wellbeing, mobility and consumers. Themes that cut across these services include privacy & ethics, personal understanding/decision making (both core to Horizon research), and terms of engagement.

Themed stakeholder workshops took place to share the Campaign vision, identify partner challenges, provide project elevator pitches and identify ideas for projects.  These were followed up with a series of ‘Storyboard’ events to introduce and support development of Chronicle, the proposed system architecture which will underpin projects adopted by the Campaign.  (More will be posted about Chronicle soon!).

To date, five projects have been identified with four presently adopted into the Campaign. Additional activities are under way and involve data workshops with NHS colleagues, and further scoping to identify ‘agile’ projects to feature under the umbrella of the Services Campaign.

 

Hazel Sayers, Knowledge Exchange and Impact Officer, Horizon Digital Economy Research