Island of Things

A 2.4 km long island in Tegler See, Valentinswerder, feels like a utopian retreat, so close but so far away. In private hands since 1878 the island has served as an escape to established urbanites, first as a colony of larger villas, and after the Allied bombing and years of returning to wilderness, as a retreat for the berlin cultural scene. Since 2008 connected to the electrical grid, the diesel stank and rumble of generators have dissipated and the feeling of remoteness remains. But as an island, it remains tangibly disconnected from the hectic of city life.

The IIoT – „Island of Internet of Things“ attempts to create a microcosm on the island, using industrial IoT technologies to see the island life under a different lens. With the unambiguous boundaries of the island, the project explores technologies and processes traditionally seen in massive (and inhuman) scale, creating a living lab, where different communities with their drastically different needs and wishes, are included in a dialogue in creating a network of locally connected, networked things.

A single LoRa-WAN can cover the whole island making deployment of experiments and installations feasible in the wild. The utopia will consciously remain disconnected from the internet in general, as the disconnect is its essential appeal.

The portraying of one place, with its different communities, through a local network, and use IoT sensors, actuators and displays to create data driven narratives, sometimes functional, sometimes aspirational and sometimes simply aesthetic, enables design driven research build intuition about the human complexity of IoT within very tight bracket. The aim is to critically reflect on the role of the network; its potential, privacy, efficiency and meaning.