Cloud of Cards — A joint design and ethnographic research investigating personal clouds and data centers

Cloud of Cards, “a home cloud kit to re-appropriate your data self”, is the final outcome of Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), a joint design and ethnographic research project investigating personal clouds and data centers. The main results of this design research project have been informed by the preliminary findings of an ethnographic research into the cloud (Cloud of Practices) and a design sketches phase conducted in parallel. They comprise four digital and physical artifacts, forming a set of modular tools (“cards”), which are delivered in the form of an open-source DIY kit, freely accessible at www.cloudofcards.org and on Github. The purpose of these tools is to enable everyone, in particular the community of designers and makers, to set up their own small-scale data center and cloud, manage their data in a decentralized way and develop their own alternative projects using this small-scale personal infrastructure. With texts by Christophe Guignard, Nathalie Kane, Patrick Keller and Nicolas Nova, interventions by Random International, students from CAL/MID (Media & Interaction Design) and Alice Lab (EPFL), fabric | ch, and several others, as well as an interview with Matthew Plummer-Fernandez (#algopop).