Waag Society, or ‘The Waag, Society for Old and New Media’ as it started out in 1994, has always focussed on the social aspect of technology, with themes like (open) access for all, privacy, empowerment and user-centred design.

Our Design philosophy is called ‘Users as Designers’, as we think that real users should be the ones to define design requirements. In our projects, we therefore always actively seek the social context.

These 20 highlights are far from exhaustive in naming all the projects we have been involved in during the past 20 years. You could say that it’s a careful selection.

We invite you to explore our website to find more examples of our work. Or even better: join one of our hands-on events (more than 150 every year!), workshops or visit our Fablab/Open Wetlab.

Waag Society project overview
Waag Society events
Waag Society’s Fablab
Open Wetlab workshops

Back in 2005, we helped out the Sensornet network of citizens that measured the noise pollution of airplanes flying over. We made proposals to policy makers and official organisations to let citizens help measuring air pollution, but they were not yet ready for it then.

Ten years later the situation has changed, and within the current paradigm of ‘Smart Cities’, we are again looking for tools to empower citizens. This time organisations are more willing to jump aboard.

In a pilot, we provided Amsterdam citizens with a Smart Citizen Kit, to measure their local environment with affordable electronics. And wrote a Smart Citizen manifesto. And children of a school experimented together with artists during the Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week. To be continued!

Smart Citizen manifesto
Smart Citizen Kit project
Eclectis week

First try: Scottie. We researched the possibilities of using information and communication technology to create virtual intimacy between long-stay absentees and their primary social contact group. It looked promising, using smart materials, wireless communication technology, wearables and sensor technology. But in the end, it did not make it into a product, despite additional research.

Just recently, we tried again, and more successfully, with our BodyGuard project to aid autistic children using their heart rhythm and with Whiskers, that enables communication through movement. Maybe it will happen.

Scottie project
BodyGuard project
Whiskers project

PICNIC brought together people from different worlds, like entrepreneurs, artists, hackers, researchers, tech gurus and developers. Every PICNIC was distinctive, and carried it’s own theme. We collaborated with the PICNIC organisation as a content partner. From a children’s festival PICNIC young to an experimental design structure, Hypermud, and many inspiring co-creation sessions and presentations, PICNIC was a great testbed for us. In 2012, we had the largest contribution to the program ever, but this sixth edition also proved to be the last one in Amsterdam. In 2013 the Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week took place on several locations as an alternative to PICNIC.

Who knows, we might enjoy another PICNIC again soon.

PICNIC Festival project
Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week 2013

Open design builds upon the use of CC-licenses and within our Open Design Lab we organize activities aimed at generating interest in open design and we develop tools to research and facilitate open design. To name a few? Our Fablab in Amsterdam and the one in Jogyakarta, Indonesia are both open design projects. All their projects are documented under a CC-license.

But also the Fab Academy, The Instructables Restaurant, the Open Design Contest and Fairphone were initiated by our open design team. And currently, we are involved in the Fair Meter Initiative and we develop a low-cost, self-adjustable prosthesis.

In 2011, the book ‘Open Design Now’ was published, the first handbook in the field. The content of the book has been published under a CC-license and is 100% open at the website.

Open Design Now
Open Design Contest
Instructables Restaurant
Fair Meter Initiative

With Apps for Amsterdam, North-Holland, The Netherlands and Europe we organized app contests on all sorts of scales, from local to international. At first, they were modelled after the successful Apps for Democracy contest in the US and we used them to promote open data, to make it freely available from as many possible sources for developers to build their applications on.

From the first contest we held, back in 2011, we learned many things. Like the fact that all open data are not equal, as data sets can differ a lot in quality and consistency. The data should also be relevant for users. But most of all: the data has to be made available by (local) governments, institutions and companies. This proved to be the bigger hurdle. But since the European Commission is now also behind the idea, many more data has become available. We also reformed the contests, but they may no longer be necessary in the near future.

We turned to promoting fellowships for developers at the government and building linked open data platforms, as we think this can help to resolve urban problems in a better way and will bring more adequate solutions for citizens in the end.

Apps for Amsterdam
Apps for Europe
Code for NL
City SDK

Designing multimedia furniture became one of the returning topics within Waag Society, with objects like the Storytable, a “Story Altar” for Museum Amstelkring, a Storytelling cabinet for the “Yesterday’s Register” project. They fell in the line of “narrative” projects and digital storytelling. We also designed whole interiors, like an educational environment for the Teylers Museum called “Teyler’s Betalab” and the awarded adventure game “Operation Sigismund” in cooperation with the archives of the Province of Drenthe. A more recent example of an interactive object in the public space was the “Twitter tree” called de Populair.

Reading table for old and new media
Teylers Betalab
Operation Sigismund

We need to connect physical and digital heritage collections by adding digital properties and information to objects. This makes physical or sensory interaction with heritage possible without a computer, tablet or phone. In the MeSch project we give the object a voice, so it tells us its own story. Stories are activated by the behavior of visitors or other objects. As a prototype of an interactive and innovative tool we created the Loupe, a magnifying glass that brings objects to life and shows detail with images, overlays and animations. With innovative tools museums will be able to draw new audiences, too. We work on bringing heritage to a new public that can be hard to reach through co-creation sessions with the Dutch Botanical Gardens and partners in the RICHES project.

This is certainly not our first encounter in the digital heritage or storytelling world. Our heritage lab has worked on these subjects before with museums and archives. Like in the Rituals project of 2008, where people were invited to tell the stories of their personal religious objects, experiences and habits. These stories were then linked to the cultural heritage in museums and archives, at archaeological sites or inside buildings and public spaces by means of location-based mobile technology.

meSch
Rituals
RICHES
Botanical Gardens

This multimedia table had a wealth of video clips on board, that could trigger conversations. It became an easy to operate, firm piece of furniture in which all the modern technology was hidden to the users. They could concentrate on the movie clips and start telling their own memories. The Storytable became a big success as a product, around 100 tables were placed at elderly homes. We also created a number of iterations for special purposes and locations, like the ‘Wisselkabinet’ version in 2007.

It turned out that the tables also provided a tool to enhance reminiscence with Alzheimer patients. In a later stage we prototyped a mobile version, but that idea never took off. Tablets entered the market, and we started developing iPad apps that could have the same effect within the Express to Connect project in 2013.

Storytable project
Wisselkabinet project
Mobile Storytable
Express to Connect

KeyWorx was the base layer under many of our projects, many of those multimedia projects for education, like KidsEye, ScratchWorx (dj/vj tool), but also Amsterdam Realtime and even the mobile game Frequency 1550 and our website of 2006, that lasted until 2012! In 2008 KeyWorx went mobile with the development of 7scenes.

We still create software, with most of the recent work within the CitySDK linked open data platform, mobile apps and back end solutions. Our efforts are now bundled on code.waag.org (Github repository).

KeyWorx
CitySDK