Learning Histories
May 28, 2009
Posted by victoria in: Events | Add a commentBetween November 2008 and May 2009, the organisations involved in Interchange (Watershed, Spike Island, Arnolfini, The Architecture Centre and Picture This), evaluated the project using the Learning Histories model.
Mentored by consultants Katie Venner and Dawn Langley, eleven ‘learning historians’, drawn from the permanent staff and freelance associates of the five creative organisations, and one consultant ‘learning historian’, undertook 44 interviews with colleagues who were involved with (or had been involved with) the Interchange project.
To begin the process, last autumn, Katie Venner and Dawn Langley discussed with the directors of the five organisations what it was they wanted to find out. The group recognised that the project was a complex collaboration; it had been challenging to participate in, and yet there was a strong sense that, in spite of the difficulties, learning between the organisations had taken place, and that this as yet, had not been captured. The focus for the learning history therefore became an inquiry into participants’ experience of the collaboration and learning from Interchange.
The Learning History is a living document, which is the result of a process that involved the learning historians collaboratively reviewing the 44 interviews, and identifying key themes and responses to the inquiry questions. Common strands were grouped together – highlighting both convergent and divergent experiences. Sharing the data sparked further reflection and sense making. This collaborative exercise provided the framework the consultant learning historians used to organise the data into the Learning History document.
The Learning History is therefore the sum of many voices, fed back to all the project participants, with the intention of starting another conversation; about the experience of learning about others’ perspectives; about the meaning you make; and about how that might influence what you do next.
Today, the learning historians fed back on the common strands to the wider group. The conversations that took place (prompted by the document), were a key part of the learning history process.
The meeting began with an overview of the process from Katie and Dawn. This was followed by a series of short reflections from the learning historian’s, about their personal experience of the process.
As learning historian’s, we felt there were five key learning points that became apparent from the learning history:
1. We didn’t introduce ourselves very well to each other in the beginning.
2. We don’t know what we’re all doing and what the crossovers could be.
3. We all have different ways of learning, communicating and relating.
4. It’s up to us to make it work, nobody’s going to tell us what to do.
5. We think it could be rich – we shouldn’t underestimate the potential of what we have.
The meeting focused on addressing these points, beginning with an ‘audit’ of skills and connections made throughout the project - we’re aiming to draw together a visual map of the connections that were made between individuals, the skills that were shared, and the skills people are willing to continue to share. Hopefully, if people need help with things in the future, this should provide info about who is out there.
Following this, we discussed and shared our thoughts from the position of knowing what we know now. Imagining we were offering advice to another group of organisations like us, embarking on a similar collaborative project in the future, we discussed what advice or wisdom we would offer them.
This is what the two groups came up with (in no particular order) …
- Collaboration is hard work – it requires commitment
- Clarify expectations and desired outcomes
- Connect people on all levels eg. Organisational skills mapping audit, looking at what skills people have to share, and what skills they’d like help with
- Collaboration can hold a mirror up to your organisation and/or free individuals from perceived restraints of organisation
- Consider neutral administration of the project i.e. fixed-term contract project manager, not related to any particular organisation
- Use experience to change direction/pace/partnerships/reflect
- Be willing to adapt to inevitable changes. Give permission to take risks and fail.
- Be honest about areas of competition and conflict
- Establish and open and honest culture right from the start. Talk about fears at the beginning.
- Do things.
Other discussion centred around defining clear starting points; celebrating difference and conflict; trust and trusting; being prepared to listen, look afresh and concede; focusing on areas of shared interest; being prepared that it won’t be plain sailing; and getting everyone’s buy in, from the start.
Learning Histories is an interesting process. It rooted out the stories and exposed the rich texture of the vast project that is Interchange. Where we as organisations, and as a group of individuals go from here is up to us. Personally, I think it’s really important that we recognise the crossovers between our organisations; we recognise how it has changed the way we operate as organisations; we recognise the skills and expertise offered by the individuals within our organisations; and find continued ways to work together – to help and support each other in the future, whether that be within collaborative projects or on one-to-one basis.
Futuresonic 2009 and the Social Technologies Summit
May 17, 2009
Posted by victoria in: Events | Add a comment
Last week I attended Futuresonic 2009 and the Social Technologies Summit conference - so much to do and see. As well as the conference, there was a city-wide music and arts programme, + fringe events that fell under the EVNTS strand of the programme. There were over 300 artists involved in 100 events across 30 venues.
I spent most of my time ducking between various talks at the conference, but did make time to visit the exhibition at CUBE, as well as catching AntiVJ and Murcof at RNCM.
There were a mixed quality of presentations during the conference. Highlights for me included Stowe Boyd on 'Social Tools and Future', Ewan McIntosh from 4iP on 'The Death of Industrial Education', Adam Greenfield's 'The City Is Here For You to Use', Stefan Agamanolis from Distance Lab on 'Getting Over the Social Communications Burger', Aaron Koblin on 'Data Visualisation', and the BBC's Philip Trippenbach on 'Why We Must Use Games for Good'.
Stowe Boyd presented a whirlwind tour of the rise of Social Media and the Social Media tools we've utilised over the past few years - software intended to augment social systems. From email, to IM, to Facebook, to Twitter - Social Media has moved from the private inbox of email clients, to the fully public correspondence of Twitter. Boyd believes Microblogging is the tool of the new world, a world where we can easily stay abreast of status and presence information. I've heard many people discuss these new 'decentralised' systems, however, what was interesting about Boyd, was the declaration that these systems are egalitarian but far from democratic. They depend heavily on social status, how many friends you have, how many people are following you. We are existing within a new context, so what are the rules?
Ewan McIntosh began by outlining that education is 'done to you', it's supplied by adults for a 'captured audience' and they 'put you to work in boxes'. McIntosh looked at a number of case studies - creative projects targeting young people that 'work'. He discussed the use of anonimity in projects like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and compared this to sites like Landshare where anonimity wouldn't work. His presentation interestingly examined the delicate relationship these sites have with people's information - if people feel the data still belongs to them, and they can choose how much or how little they give, trust is convened. Trust cannot be enforced, it doesn't work. McIntosh suggested that bringing this balance into pedagogy to replace the proprietry systems that education tend to use at present, will create a healthier, more effective system.
Nokia's Adam Greenfield discussed the idea that data belongs to everyone and should be freely available everywhere, at all times. He cited some interesting projects, including:
Christian Nold's Emotional Maps - "participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-eplore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community."
and Tom Armitage's Making Bridges Talk - "Twitter can be a wonderful messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful. So when I found an untapped data source for such an object, I thought it was worth having a poke. Half an hour of scripting later and Tower Bridge was on Twitter."
Distance Lab is well worth checking out, particularly the Iso-phone project and Mutsugoto, both presented by Stefan Agamanolis.
Philip Trippenbach discussed 'Why We Must Use Games for Good.' You can read his presentation on his website, which I'd highly recommend.
Finally, do check out Aaron Koblin's Data Visualisation work (the above image is from an animation of data that plots incoming and outgoing planes over New York). Koblin has recently been snapped up by Google, and is a master in scraping open API's and making sense of the data through often beautiful visualisations. Koblin is always looking for innovative ways to create new artworks. In Bicycle Built For 2000, 2088 voice recordings were collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result is a version of the song 'Daisy Bell', made up of 2088 voices.
Finally as expected, the AntiVJ and Murcof performance was stunning. The newly commissioned site-specific audiovisual installation mixed live music, projected imagery, and a huge layered, semi-transparent installation. The content created by AntiVJ's Simon Gelifus, was a spellbinding, multifaceted cosmos of a million stars and abstract shapes and was a perfect fit with Murcof's mesmerising sounds. The auditorium filled with stars and shapes as the projectors (which faced the audience), broke through the transparent projection surface and bounced off the walls, ceiling and the audience too. Truly immersive, truly stunning.
Media Sandbox April Newsletter
May 1, 2009
Posted by Clare in: Events | Innovation | Mobile | Add a commentOur six Media Sandbox commissions have been striding forwards with their projects this month. The groups are researching the opportunities posed by multi-platform technologies and we are pleased to share their recent progress…
There’s exciting news from both Indie Mobile and HMC, Drake Music and bibic: After a month of head down planning, Indie Mobile have now appointed a technical partner, London agency Destar Limited. Destar are experienced mobile developers, and are excited to be working with Indie Mobile to tweak and trim 'The Generator' into an effective application; Things are also hurtling forwards for HMC, Drake Music and bibic. Legendary music producer Jools Holland will help launch a version of their 'Cyber-therapy' software called ‘Visual Voice Pro’. A high profile event will take place in early May at Rich Mix Studios, East London. It will be an excellent opportunity for the team to promote the project and give people the chance to try out the software first hand.
After weeks of research into game show formats, demographics, time-structures and interactivity, this week saw U-Soap Media begin the practical test phase for 'Viral Spiral'. Happily, they’ve gathered together a fantastic group of actors and directors, who have thrown themselves headlong into the project. With buzzers and prompt cards at the ready, the first session saw the play out of game scenarios and invaluable discussion around the findings. You can see pictures from this session in our Media Sandbox Flickr group.
Nomos Media have been on the road with Radio in Schools this month, promoting 'AudioEnable' to over 30,000 teachers and industry reps at the National Education Show in Birmingham. Despite a slightly shaky technical start, they attracted a non-stop flow of visitors and signed up an impressive number of schools. They also made valuable contact with a number of Brands, who were really excited about the potential of the project. Back at the office, the designs for ‘AudioEnable’ are almost complete, and they're really close to having the raw functionality up and running on a touch screen device.
Having an early beta release of 'Street Art Dealer' has helped a great deal in generating feedback and ideas for C6 and Steal from Work. They’ve identified a number of key issues to be addressed, and are now looking to raise awareness of both the project and the technology. This month will see them actively building a strong body of artists and artworks; planning a major project launch in Bristol; nurturing some high profile buyer case studies; and alongside all of this, ironing out the system’s technical and usability issues.
AntiVJ are immersed in the development phase of ‘Mapping Software 1.0’. Working with freelance developer George Crabtree, they’ve made huge leaps forward. The software engine is almost complete and they hope to post footage of the first experiments on their blog very soon. They’ve also met some interesting people this month, including Media Sandbox Advisor Nicole Yershon from Ogilvy. As well as receiving an inspirational tour of Ogilvy’s Digital Innovations Lab, Nicole offered valuable insight into the possibilities for ‘Mapping Software 1.0’ in the field of contemporary advertising.
An industrious month all round has led to significant progress in concepts, designs and development. The teams have moved forward at an incredible pace and we’re really excited by the tangible ideas that are beginning to manifest. To follow their progress, remember to check their Project Journals regularly.
Read the full newsletter, sign up for updates and learn how you can get involved here: Media Sandbox news feed.
Media Sandbox is managed by iShed working with South West Screen with support from South West Regional Development Agency and Watershed.
