by Andy Polaine on April 27, 2008
in Uncategorized
by Andy Polaine on April 23, 2008
in Uncategorized
The Omnium Project will be running another global online creative collaboration project under the Creative Waves banner from 28th April – 20 June, this time convened by Ian McArthur and Rick Bennett.
This time the project, called Collabor8, will see design students and lecturers from Australia and China join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively and fully online.
The project theme is about creating awareness about the importance of cross cultural design practice and sustainability in design. It will do this by challenging students to work together to design graphics for contemporary, environmentally friendly and sustainable ceramics, textiles, products and environments.
Participation is free and I believe there is space to squeeze in a couple more people, even though the website says the deadline is mid-April. If you are interested, you can apply here.
If it’s any kind of incentive, I’ll be doing a special guest podcast and hosting a thread called “What good is service and interaction design for saving the planet?” in which I’ll take a look about how ‘network thinking’ – something inherent in interaction and service design – is essential to solving some of the complex problems facing us.
Of course, that might be a disincentive for you, in which case just ignore my part and enjoy the rest of the special guests in there.
[tags]Omnium, creative waves, COFA, Australia, China[/tags]
Tagged as:
Australia,
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creative-waves,
Culture,
Design,
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Omnium
by Andy Polaine on December 17, 2007
in Uncategorized
by Andy Polaine on October 18, 2007
in General
I’ll be in Cuba this weekend (20th and 21st October) to give a presentation at the Icograda World Design Congress with my Omnium colleague, Rick Bennett.
On the crazy off-chance that any of you who read Playpen are going to also be there in Cuba, do come and say hello!
[tags]icograda, cuba, lectures, presentations, omnium[/tags]
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by Andy Polaine on September 18, 2007
in General
by Andy Polaine on September 4, 2007
in Uncategorized
I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. FOTB runs from 4th- – 7th November and my session is on the last day.
I feel a little bit of a cheat here as I’m not really known as a ‘Flash guy’ (and my students will know that I’ve railed on Flash plenty of times before – but, hey, the latest version really is a lot better). But as many of the speakers are going to be going into depth about their Flash work and techniques, I thought I would instead talk about approaches and a bit of history.
So, I’m going to be giving a presentation called Playful Revolutions, which really came out of the presentation that I gave at magneticNorth that Brendan Dawes invited me to give. He said “antirom were revolutionary, tell them about that!”, which is a bit like being invited to “tell people how great you are”, which I’m not and can’t.
However, looking back over all those projects (good and bad) as well as things-I-wish-I-had-done turned out to be an interesting process. I think there is always a danger of re-inventing the wheel now that so many Wheel 2.0s are out there, so a bit of history (albeit short) is probably a good thing.
If you’re going to be a Flash on the Beach, or just live in Brighton really, let me know. It would be nice to catch up.
Tagged as:
Design,
Interactivity,
Lectures,
Play,
Work
by Andy Polaine on August 31, 2007
in General
I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality of all the folks at ULS.
Although it would have been nice if I had managed to leave a little more time for discussion, I was really encouraged by many of the responses and questions afterwards. I gave me a sense that there are plenty of like minds out there wanting to try make some real changes in the system and philosophy of education that align better with the creative/knowledge economy and the Play Ethic.
Ewan McIntosh, in an amazing feat of very fast typing and live blogging, has some thoughts on the first part of the talk here, in which I went through Omnium’s projects and Creative Waves 2007 in particular. He also added some great links and thoughts about the second, Future of Education, part in a separate post.
The slime mould you can see above is a metaphor I used for lots of small trends that are developing in parallel suddenly connecting up and coagulating into what appears to be a complete, coherent organism (which is essentially what ‘Web 2.0′ is a case of).
It can happen suddenly and there is the potential for this to happen in education and completely upend things. I think the likelihood is probably that it won’t be as upended as it could be because of the established mechanisms for controlling that status quo. (I also talked about outlying villages and towns coagulating into suburbs and finally being absorbed into major cities as a similar, slower, example).
However, the change will happen in any case and the real challenge is to be asking the right questions far enough in advance to work out how to deal with these rapid changes. At present I haven’t seen much evidence of this from within institutions themselves.
Incidentally, I owe the use of the slime mould metaphor to Steven Johnson and his excellent book Emergence.
ULS will be putting up a podcast and the presentation material on their website soon, I’ll post a link when it’s up.
UPDATE: It’s not on the website yet but you can find the podcast by subscribing to ULS’s iTunes feed.
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by Andy Polaine on August 1, 2007
in General
I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning.
I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 – VIP project in detail, talking about the using a design process and creative collaboration for cross-disciplinary projects as well as a look at the issues facing the future of education. Much of which I have developed since writing about these issues a while back. I’m planning a bit of a brainstorming session with the attendees too. There will hopefully be a podcast and a download of the presentation on the ULS website afterwards.
It would be great to catch up with any of you there and if you want to get in touch before hand, please do.
Details are: 30 August 2007, 10am – 12.30pm. It’s free, but you need to contact Yvonne Kincaid to register.
Tagged as:
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