MDEF Archive — Cognitive Orgies

Interactive archive of all projects from the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF) at Fab Lab Barcelona / IAAC, visualized as a living network of people, projects and ideas across cohorts.

🌐 Live: https://fablabbcn.github.io/cognitive-orgies/ (set this up — see deploy section below)

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✏️ How to update the data

Two CSV files drive everything. Edit them in Excel, Google Sheets, or directly on GitHub — the live site reloads them on every page visit (cache-busted).

data.csv — projects (one row per project)

Column	Description
id	Unique id (proj001, proj002…). Keep stable across edits.
title	Project name
year	Year (e.g. 2024)
type	Microchallenge 1 / Microchallenge 2 / Microchallenge 3 / Microchallenge 4
description	Short paragraph about the project
areas	Comma-separated, e.g. mail art, post art
knowledge	Comma-separated knowledge fields
weak_signals	Comma-separated weak signals
photo	URL to project image (any public URL works — GitLab raw, S3, etc.)
students	Student names separated by | (pipe), e.g. Roger|Alejandra
link	URL to project repo / website

students.csv — student profiles (optional)

Column	Description
name	Student name (must match exactly what's in data.csv students)
bio	Short bio sentence
photo	URL to portrait photo

A row only needs to be added here if you want a bio or photo. Students appear in the network whether or not they exist in this file.

Editing workflow

1. Download data.csv from this repo
2. Open in Excel / Numbers / Google Sheets — edit normally
3. Save as CSV (UTF-8 encoded)
4. Commit + push (or upload via GitHub web UI: Add file → Upload files)
5. Wait ~1 min for GitHub Pages to rebuild — done.

⚠️ Always save as CSV (UTF-8) — Excel sometimes defaults to other encodings that break special characters.

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🚀 Deploy to GitHub Pages

This project is 100% static — no build step. Deploy in 3 steps:

1. Create the repo

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/fablabbcn/cognitive-orgies.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

2. Enable Pages

• Go to Settings → Pages
• Source: Deploy from a branch
• Branch: main, folder: / (root)
• Save. After ~1 min the site is live at https://<username>.github.io/cognitive-orgies/

3. (Optional) Custom domain

• Add a CNAME file with your domain
• Configure DNS as per GitHub docs

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🧪 Validation

A GitHub Action (.github/workflows/validate.yml) runs on every push and checks:

• data.csv and students.csv parse correctly
• All required columns are present
• No duplicate project ids
• All students referenced in data.csv are spelled consistently

If validation fails, the build is flagged red and the broken commit won't break production data.

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🛠 Local development

Just open MDEF Archive.html through a local server (so fetch() works for CSVs):

# Python
python3 -m http.server 8000

# Or Node
npx serve .

Then open http://localhost:8000/MDEF Archive.html.

Opening the file directly with file:// won't work — browsers block fetch from local file URLs.

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📂 Project structure

cognitive-orgies/
├── MDEF Archive.html      # Entry point
├── loader.js              # Fetches & parses CSVs at runtime
├── graph.jsx              # Network visualization (React + SVG)
├── panels.jsx             # Toolbar, detail panels, filters
├── data.csv               # ⭐ Project data — edit this
├── students.csv           # ⭐ Student bios/photos — edit this
└── .github/workflows/
    └── validate.yml       # CI: validate CSVs on every push

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🙏 Credits

This project is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Original concept and design by Santi Fuentemilla at Fab Lab Barcelona.

D3 C4 P4 – v1.0 (AI acted as Driver in Coding / Programming and Prototyping / Making. AI acted as Co-Creator in Design. All other phases were fully human-led.)