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AKIR
CLUSTER AHO's own local AI data centre, assembled by ten design students from scraps, recycled and donated machines, and run by them as a studio for the whole school. Opened Friday 23 October 2026, 15:00, in the Interaction Design workshop, next to the AHO pub.

the cluster stands · the open Thursday studios are paused since 4 Nov 2026 while the workshop's staffing is solved
The cluster brings a nest of black boxed nested nets into the studio. Running AI locally lets us work on our own data and on our understanding of the machines handling it. The hardware is the easier part; trust will take some time. The AKIRCLUSTER offers a room for that. Come try the Tøyen-Cola of data centers.
Enrique Encinas, the opening invitation to AHO, 22 October 2026
One of the three wooden towers on wheels: recycled iMacs, a Dell all-in-one, Mac minis and a tower PC on pine shelves, monstera cut-outs, the workshop window behind.
One of the three wooden towers on wheels, Interaction Design workshop, October 2026.

The room — the opening, Friday 23 October 2026

The workshop in fog, the towers' screens lit People arriving at the opening A tower's screen at the opening The table at the opening A tower in the evening light The crowd at the opening, drawn Speaking at the opening, drawn The room with the towers, drawn

Photographs by Enrique Encinas; the drawn frames are image-model edits of those photographs, made for the Instagram sets of 29 October and 4 November 2026.

What it makes — the first moving images, 2 November 2026

Five seconds of "the studio", rendered on the cluster's GPU box beside its own language model (Kandinsky 6 Pro, fp8, about 13 minutes a clip).
The same prompt with sound, rendered on an 8 GB card in the room (Kandinsky 6 Lite, about 8 minutes a clip).

Local, by design

Open-weight language models and speech-to-text run in the room. What you type to a local model stays in the room. Logs are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and say so.

Seven student-built services

A laser-cutting assistant, a companion, a compute interface, a research workbench, a data commons, and two more; plus a research studio for interview analysis, research-question development, visual and sonic inquiry.

Why a school builds one

Cloud AI bills are invisible until a term is over. Owning the machines makes the cost, the data and the decisions visible, and changes which questions a school can ask of AI.

The course that built it — Kreativ Kode :: AHO Unlock Edition, 29 Sep – 23 Oct 2026

A four-week elective in which ten design students, with the residents of craitr.no, built the school a data centre out of what the school already had: old workshop iMacs, Mac minis, OptiPlexes, one GPU workstation, pine boards, wheels. AHO IT and the Institute of Design helped generously. From the course's last week the students are its operators.

Residents are named here only once each says yes. Their portal: code.craitr.no.

  • Tue 29 Sepsession 1 — the first tower built in class, Grupperom 3
  • Sep – Octeleven sessions: the machines, the models, the door, the services, the room's own rules
  • Thu 8 Octthe residents' cafeteria event (their first design brief)
  • Fri 9 Octwhat the school said: the student parliament (SAHO)
  • Fri 16 Octthe cluster moves into the Interaction Design workshop
  • Fri 23 Octthe opening, 15:00, after the electives' walkthrough
  • Thu 29 Octthe first open studio: Research (interview analysis, research questions, visual and sonic inquiry)
  • 4 Novstudios paused until the workshop's staffing is solved

The research around it — where CRAITR took the work this autumn