Squatting Supermarkets

Squatting Supermarkets uses the logos and packaging graphics of products as AR fiducial markers. A content management system allows attaching information and interactive experiences to logos, instantly transforming them into open, accessible, emergent spaces for communication. A mobile application allows consumers to use their smartphones to take pictures of the logos on the products’ labels and to use them to access the augmented reality layers of information.

Concept

Augmented reality to create squatted communication practices inside supermarkets

Products have incredible and complex stories, made of transportation, production, people, places. Yet products (and supermarkets) fail in showing the enormous richness that characterizes their production and distribution. Products’ labels and supermarket communication are the vehicle for a very limited set of points of views and voices. Squatting Supermarkets addresses this situation by creating a free, autonomous layer of information on products and supermarkets using augmented reality.

Squatting Supermarkets uses the logos and packaging graphics of products as AR fiducial markers. A content management system allows attaching information and interactive experiences to logos, instantly transforming them into open, accessible, emergent spaces for communication. A mobile application allows consumers to use their smartphones to take pictures of the logos on the products’ labels and to use them to access the augmented reality layers of information.

Presented for the first time at the Piemonte Share Festival in 2009, at the Museum of Science in Turin, Squatting Supermarkets has been shown multiple times internationally transforming products into a tool for ubiquitous storytelling, narrating the stories of the people, places and events that characterize their lives.

Squatting Supermarkets has been used as an innovative publishing system, as an art performance, as a tool for scientific research and as an instrument for social entrepreneurship.

Squatting Supermarkets on AOS

Squatting Supermarkets on FakePress

the iSee mobile application on FakePress

Timeline

Research

  • Conferences & Speeches
    • “The Augmentation of Reality”, Accademia delle Belle Arti, Macerata, 2011 [ view ]
    • in "FakePress”, S. Iaconesi, O. Persico, Public Camp 2010, Bari, Italy [ view ]
    • "Squatting Supermarkets" at Robot Festival 2011 [ view ]
    • in “Critical AR (Augmented Reality) Ensemble” at IAR 2010, Milan [ view ]
    • lecture “Squatting Supermarkets”, Università di Roma, La Sapienza [ view ]
  • Papers & Researches
    • Ruberti, F., Iaconesi, S., Simeone, L. (2010) Squatting Supermarkets. iSee and the emerging of the ethical social consumer. Poster presented at: International Universal Design Conference. Hamamatsu City (Japan), 30 October – 3 November 2010
    • Iaconesi, S., Persico, O., Carrera, D., Hendrickson, C., Squatting Supermarkets, 2010, ESA Conference, Università Bocconi, Milan, SSRN 1692185
    • Iaconesi, S., Simeone, L., Saperi p2p, at DULP 2009, Tor Vergata University, Rome, IxD&A - Interaction Design & Architecture(s), "Ubiquitous learning in Liquid Learning places" N. 7&8, ISSN 1826-9745, ISBN 978-8888044-15-6

Events

Credits

  • FakePress Publishing
    concept, design, production
  • AOS, Art is Open Source
    concept, technologies
  • Salvatore Iaconesi
    concept, technologies, research
  • Oriana Persico
    concept, communication
  • Simona Lodi
    concept, curator
  • Luca Simeone
    design, research
  • Cary Hendrickson
    ecology and sustainability research
  • Federico Ruberti
    marketing research
  • Dario Carrera
    research
  • "Active consumer" research group at Tor Vergata University
    research
  • Piemonte Share Festival
    production
  • SMIR Project
    production