Technology Meets Social Reality

Cyberarium: Global Community Communications Zone for the 21st century.

Our main hope for creating the Cyberarium is social. We hold to an idea that communications technology is one which must be adapted to humans, not the other way around. So wouldn't it be great to have a place for getting users and designers together? Kind of a "We made it in my garage without buracracy and then had a rave to show it off and test it" method. This is the point of Cyberarium: getting engineers, programmers, designers, writers, doctors, artists and other specialists together, and with thier gifts we consider the internet and computers as social tools for making the world a better place.

'User' can be anyone from the children at a local grammar school to cardiologists at a nearby hospital to the severely disabled. The point is to be able to get input from specific humans for building practically useful and ability expanding tools.

Bridging the typical holes between technology development and an end user, Cyberarium is a hands on prototyping lab: potential end user(s) are on site for periods of time to participate in the concept and design stages. Enhancing this overall goal, we also have 'power-nerd gatherings' where we cause collisions between diverse persons and groups purely for synergistic effects (e,g., let's just see what happnes if we hit this nerd with this artist).

Below are links to Cyberarium gatherings in 1997.

Public Demonstrations where we open up the Cyberarium to anyone with an even iota of interest.
Disabled student Eyal Sherman demonstrating progress at a Cyberarium open house.
Members of the local community who usually have no option to surf the net or even pick up some lingo about cyberculture, grammar school students in this case.
Children from local schools coming to test our stuff and give us feedback on what works and what doesn't

Introductory technology camps for kids were also undertaken.

University professors, researchers and graduate students mixing it up.

Our experience is that Cyberarium as both a concept and as a environment works best as a private space immune to corporatistic, academic or totalitarian influences of any sort.