Climb every mountain
November 30, 2006
Posted by Clare in: Ideas | Evaluation | Add a commentWe had the latest MMM meeting this week. Dick and I updated on the iShed progress and then discussed some of the challenges we are facing:
The threat of doing something new and the impact on the existing:
Internal (doubt and confusion)
External Fear from public sector, envy from other organisations, confusion
Move from individual bespoke projects to building a new working environment for risk and disruption.
Maintaining USP – Trust, flexibility, neutrality
Pressure and demand of being seen as an innovative exemplar. Meeting external expectation against ability to live up to and realise the exemplar tag
Articulating an emerging concept to a wide range of audiences
Learning and inventing a new language and a new group structure
Maintaining our own belief and energy – keeping balance between new and existing business areas
Creative Clusters 2006 : Mainstreaming Creativity post 2
November 8, 2006
Posted by Dick in: Events | Add a commentFinal day of Creative Clusters. Main focus is bringing strands
together towards some action points. I choose the Creative Enterprise
summing up. The discussion starts by being dominated by public sector
agendas which provokes a healthy backlash and ultimately a clearer
sense that although the arts are part of the creative economy they art
not primarily about economic activity and have an impact which goes
much wider that the size and vitality of the creative economy. This
gets us into how can the creative sector make better economic progress
and does the public sector really help. A sense emerged that there is
too much competition between UK regions and not enough focus on
globally competitive specialisms. Again quite a bit led back to the CEP
agenda as a driver for govt policy and the need to engage. A sense that
clusters can generate the density and critical mass to register on the
govt radar. My contribution was that planning policy could be changed
so that all new developments must provide minimum 25MB symmetric
connectivity and that all new residential and mixed use development
must include a proportion of affordable workspace or live/workspace as
well as affordable housing. This got a lot of support.Points made by others which I think worthy of mention include:
Kristin Wolff of Corporation for a Skilled Workforce Chicago’s Mayor Daley
declared several years ago that he was going to make Chicago the
greenest US city, people laughed, and apparently he has made huge
strides, been featured on the cover of many design magazines for the
improvement in the live/work environment of Chicago and seen
significant economic growth.
Andy Breslau of City Futures http://www.nycfuture.org & http://www.citylimits.org - Creative enterprise is dependent on audiences and consumers not funding, surely that is where the primary focus should be.
A point I picked up from earlier in the conference was that value
added by a service is relative to the user input such that in case 1.
user driven = less; case 2. user inspired = more; case 3. user adapted
= lots more.
Then the chairs of the different strands came together for the
closing plenary. Peter Stark reported back that the international
strand felt that the UK was suffering from subsidy sickness – too much
energy used up on inward looking self referencing public sector
agendas. The closing speech was from Anthony Sargent of the Sage who
finished by saying that in 10 years we would be in the age of the
imagination.
Then I caught up with my email inbox to find an invitation to the
National Creative Industries Conference on 5th December in Bradford
with George Cox, Shaun Woodward and Chris Powell – this event had not
been referenced at all during the Creative Clusters conference.
Creative Clusters 2006 : Mainstreaming Creativity
November 7, 2006
Posted by Dick in: Events | Add a commentSecond day of this three day conference coming to a close - detailed info on themes, speakers, delegates etc is at the Creative Clusters website.
The first day was a bit slow but I was really inspired by a talk from Andrea Siodmok, Head of Design Knowledge, Design Council UK. The headline was Mainstreaming Design and Andrea was a late change of published speaker so I don't have a copy of her slides, but the inspiration bit was simple: when developing a 'product' you need sketches to visualise the product, when developing a 'service' you need a narrative to understand the experience. This linked straight back to Jon Drori's focus on the need for storyboards as a key development tool in his 'Compelling User Experiences' talk at the recent Connecting the South West event - download from the Connecting Bristol website. more…
Evaluation
November 7, 2006
Posted by Clare in: Evaluation | Add a commentWe have been doing some thinking about what sort of evaluation mechanisms and processes we need to build into iShed. Capturing where we will add value will be key in building a case for public sector support and industry engagement, but this is often hard to track, being qualitative and tied up with many other external influences. There is also a lot of interest/potential in monitoring the dynamics of the network involved in iShed.
I had a useful meeting with Julie Taylor and Lisa Hill of the Arts and Humanities Research Council to discuss some of these challenges. Evaluating innovation is tricky as anything too prescriptive may stifle blue skies thinking or fail to account for the epiphanies that can occur during collaborative research. more…
Will our grandchildren be robotic?
November 6, 2006
Posted by Clare in: Events | Technology | Online | Robots | Add a commentThis radio debate happens tonight on BBC Radio 3 (90-93FM) from 9:30pm to 10:30pm GMT as part of the BBC's Freethinking festival. Featuring Adam Montandon from the HMC MediaLab in Plymouth, Dr Fiona Coyle, former Bristol academic and Philosopher Dylan Evans and Nick Bostrom, leading spokesman for "transhumanism".
You can also listen online for up to 7 days after the broadcast:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/freethinking2006/pip/xuh0o/
