SolarSPELL wins 'best in show' award at South by Southwest
Laura Hosman, an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School, and her SolarSPELL co-founder, Bruce Baikie, an adjunct faculty member at ASU, addressed the crowd after winning "best in show" in the SXSW Innovation Awards on March 10. Photo courtesy of Abigail Johnson/SolarSPELL
Arizona State University professors from a variety of disciplines made a big splash at the South by Southwest festival of technology and culture in Texas earlier this month.
The ASU SolarSPELL Initiative, which started as a student engineering assignment at ASU and grew into a global humanitarian project that provides solar-powered library devices, won “best in show” in the SXSW Innovation Awards. The team won the top honor from among 55 finalists.
SolarSPELL began when Laura Hosman, co-founder and director of SolarSPELL, challenged her engineering students to create a solar-powered library that would fit into a backpack. Hosman, an associate professor with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School, co-founded the initiative with Bruce Baikie, an adjunct faculty member at ASU.
The devices, made of recycled plastic, create a Wi-Fi hot spot, so no electricity or internet connection is needed for users to download the locally specific content to a smartphone, tablet or laptop. More than 600 devices have been deployed in 14 regions around the world, as well as in Arizona.
After winning, Hosman told the SXSW crowd: “Thank you for believing in the power of libraries to empower everyone around the world.
“I'm so excited for the future because of this recognition and how we'll be able to bring localized libraries to hundreds of millions of people around the world, building empowering skills and improving people's quality of life.”
Here are some other Sun Devil showings from the annual event:
1906 Atlanta Race Massacre
“1906 Atlanta Race Massacre,” an augmented-reality production, had its world premiere in the SXSW XR Experience competition on March 9.
Nonny de la Peña, director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program and a professor of practice in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School, is also the founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, which creates extended-reality works.
She was the director and co-producer of “1906 Atlanta Race Massacre,” as well as the screenwriter, along with Alton Glass, an immersive storyteller, and Retha Hill, executive director of the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The piece describes the events of September 1906, when a white mob attacked a Black community in Atlanta. The experience was created using 120 cameras in a volumetric 4D stage in California, which recorded the actor Bryonn Bain performing the words of the magazine editor Jesse Max Barber, who documented the massacre, in which more than two dozen people were killed and many homes and businesses destroyed.
Emblematic Group made “1906 Atlanta Race Massacre” in collaboration with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Science-fiction prototyping
Greg Lindsay, senior fellow in the ASU Threatcasting Lab, led a panel discussion and workshop called “From Bullet Points to Belief: Rapid Foresight Prototyping.”
The panel members described the concept of “threatcasting” and talked about how science-fiction prototyping is an important way of using narrative thinking to add detail and authenticity to the threat model.
“I would describe threatcasting as basically sitting around and sketching out the outlines of ‘Black Mirror’ episodes and then taking them all together and surfacing the themes out of it,” Lindsay told the crowd.
After the panel, the participants led a workshop using a generative AI tool called WOLF to simulate a crisis and devise responses.
Watch the panel here.
A constellation of scholars
Nicholas Pilarski, interim director of the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience Center in Mesa, talked about how ASU prepares students for careers in extended-reality production during a panel discussion titled “Building Tomorrow’s Worlds: How Academia Teaches XR Creation.”
“Ultimately, how we’re thinking about our degrees is making sure that young people are very entrepreneurial in the process,” said Pilarski, an associate professor in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School.
He described how students learn to fuse the technical with the creative.
“We think, ‘Gosh, you created this thing. What industry are you going to be growing into?’
“It’s not a one-pathway experience. We produce a river that goes out to streams.”
Pilarski and the other panel members discussed the new Immersive Experience Alliance, a coalition of universities dedicated to advancing the field of extended reality.
“This type of media we’re all engaging with — is it computation? Is it design? Is it architecture? We have a constellation of all of these scholars,” he said.
“How do you broaden the conversation? Because it won’t be in one specific university, it will be in many.”
Listen to the panel discussion here.
More ASU represenation
Other ASU faculty who shared their expertise at SXSW included:
• Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, who discussed the carbon-capture technology he’s developed.
• Mary Matheson, faculty in ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program.
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