Playpen

And you are?

Hi, as the masthead up there explains, my name is Andy Polaine. I currently live with my wife, Karin, in Offenburg, Germany. If you have Google Earth you will find Offenburg here. On Google Maps you can find me here.

I teach online to Australia, here locally in Germany and I work as an emerging media/education researcher, writer and new media design consultant for all sorts of people regardless of where they are in the world. You can view my portfolio, download my CV or view my list of publications, but there is a more detailed explanation of what I do below.

Okay, that’s the “my first homepage” part out of the way.

Tell Me More…

Here is the official bio (or you can just skip to the CV, hire-me part):

In 1994 I co-founded of award-winning new-media studio antirom in London and have worked with clients such as the BBC, the ABC, Levis Strauss and Co. and The Science Museum. Antirom was born out of an arts background (it was initially funded by The Arts Council of Great Britain) and the self-titled CD-ROM is widely recognised as one of the few classics in the short history of multimedia. Antirom closed its doors in 1999, but the website lives on and we all keep in touch. (We all still have spam-choked e-mail addresses too).

I also spent a spell as a senior producer/creative guy at Razorfish in London. Tired of the London life, I visited Australia in 1999 to travel, lecture and get a tan. Charmed by the lifestyle I stayed in Sydney and started the interactive department of visual effects company, Animal Logic (of The Matrix, Moulin Rouge and Happy Feet fame).

I left Animal Logic in 2001 and became a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts and was Head of the School of Media Arts as well as working as a freelance designer and writer.

I write a column called Foreign Policy for Desktop magazine and occasionally for other magazines such as IdN and Computer Arts. I have also written for several other magazines and newspapers as well as academic papers, with over 160 articles and chapters in total. If you are interested, let me know and I can send you some samples - eventually I hope to post most of my writing here. Through all of this I have been lucky enough to have lectured, spoken and performed in various countries around the world.

I won a Research Grant at UNSW to research the language of interactivity and am working on my PhD at UTS with the title Developing a language of interactivity through the theory of play. It’s still ongoing, but nearly finished (I hope).

Recently I was the Guest Professor of Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen (which roughly translates as “design for mediated environments”) at the Bauhaus University, Weimar for six months. I still teach several courses for COFA Online from here in Germany and I also teach in the media faculty of the Hochschule Offenburg (University of Applied Sciences).

One of the main projects I am now involved is the Omnium Research Group exploring creative collaboration online and trying to use this for more ethical and productive means. A recent project was Creative Waves 2007 - Visualising Issues in Pharmacy, which aimed to help raise awareness of critical health issues in Winam, Kenya.

My research interests include: interactivity & interaction design; creative processes & collaboration; online teaching & learning; emerging technologies and their affect on culture and vice versa.

You can download a PDF list of my publications here or view the HTML version.

I am also writing my first novel, which I hope to complete before the next millennium.

Are you for hire?

Yes, in general I am. If you are interested in employing my services in some fashion (interaction design/strategy, consulting, writing, teaching, research) then please feel free to contact me. I frequently work remotely for clients overseas and am happy to travel for short periods of time for projects.

You can download a short two-page CV from here or a full (but long) one from here.

My Linked In Profile is available online for immediate viewing and contains similar information.

If you missed it at the top, my portfolio is here.

If you want to look at my photographs, then look at my Flickr profile.

So, what do you do exactly?

Good question. The short answer is teach, write and interaction concept and service design.

My background is as an interactive/interaction designer (and, occasionally, artist). I’m interested in emerging cultural technologies - the edge where society and technology meet each other and start getting blurry and I like to think I have some decent insights into this. I also have a deep understanding of interactivity and play.

Apart from this I am both a fiction and non-fiction writer. I have also been a Senior Lecturer in a university as well having been in a management position there (and was recently a Guest Professor at the Bauhaus, Germany). I have worked on my own, in small groups and in massive institutions. I very much enjoy teaching and mentoring young creative people (and old people too) as well as public speaking and giving workshops.

What do you want to do?

That’s probably the better question. Put together my skills boil down to the the wish list below. I am interested in almost anything that allows me to:

• mentor and lead a creative teams
• develop innovative interaction and service design concepts
• research and draw disparate spheres of thought together, synthesise these into a clear form to present to others
• continue to understand how many things are created - from design to writing to coding - which really helps with that first point
• speak easily and off-the-cuff in public about a wide range of areas
• do something worthwhile in the world