All posts by miriam

Feminism, Policy and Otherness, 20th July, University of Greenwich

6th July 2016 miriam

The past week of British politics seems surreal in its ambiguity over the future. Reflecting not only the political but deeply embedded social challenges facing us in the 21st Century. As we look across Europe (and indeed the world) we see similar challenges for politicians and policy makers to tackle. Institutions we thought were immortal suddenly seem very vulnerable; both to collapse but perhaps more importantly to change, where fresh ideas and ways of seeing could find the space come to the forefront.

Woman also seem to be playing a key role in these political landscapes with newspapers like the Guardian running stories about May, Sturgeon, Merkel: women rising from the political ashes of men (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/sturgeon-may-leadsom-women-to-the-rescue-amid-political-turmoil). However it seems that despite the gender of politicians there does not appear to be a significant shift in the way that policy is constructed or legislated. This will be the core focus of this conversation which will look at how feminist philosophy can push policy making into creating new ethical guidelines which draw from a more inclusive and plural range of ideas.

The Feminism, Policy and Otherness Creative Conversation will feature Nicole Dewandre, from the European Commission in conversation with Felicity Colman, Professor of Film and Media Arts at the Manchester School of Art. The event will be chaired by Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director of Body>Data>Space and Reader at the University of Greenwich

We will aim to address the key questions:

What would policy-making look like if it implemented creative and feminist philosophy?

What are the prejudices in current policy-making?
What new ethical frameworks might evolve?
What are the potential barriers to these forms of creative intervention?

The conversation will also welcome questions and debate from the audience as we attempt to navigate the turbulent waters of deeply established convention. This promises to be an exciting meeting of minds unpicking the relationship between feminist philosophy and policy-making!

Register at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creative-conversations-feminism-policy-and-otherness-tickets-26323549445

Speakers Profiles:

Felicity Colman is Professor of Film and Media Arts at the Manchester

School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Prof. Colman is Vice-Chair of the EU funded COST [European Cooperation in Science and Technology] Network Grant Action IS1307 on New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter [2014-2018] http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/IS1307. She is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2014), Deleuze and Cinema (Berg, 2011), and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers ((McGill-Queens University Press/ Routledge /Acumen, 2009), and co-editor of Global Arts & Local Knowledge (Lexington, 2015), and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). She is Co-Editor [with Dr David Deamer and Prof. Joanna Hodge] of the A/V Journal of Practical and Creative Philosophy. Her current book projects are on “Digital Feminicity” and “Materialist Film”.

Web: http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman

Twitter: @felcolman

Nicole Dewandre is advisor for societal issues to the Director General of the Directorate General for Communications, Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) at the European Commission. She studied applied physics engineering and economics at the University of Louvain, operations research at the University of California (Berkeley) and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB).

She published “Critique de la raison administrative, pour une Europe ironiste”, coll. L’ordre philosophique, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2002. She entered the European Commission in 1983. She has been a member of the Central Advisory Group and the Forward Study Unit, dealing with strategic analysis of research and industrial policy for the President of the Commission (1986-1992). In 1993, she supported the Belgian Presidency of the European Union in the areas of industry, energy, and consumer policies. She then worked in “science and society” issues (women and science, research and civil society) from 1994 until 2006, before being in charge of the “sustainable development” unit that has been put in place in DG Research between 2007 and 2010. She is now working on the societal interface of the Digital Single Market.

Website: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/onlife-initiative

Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcGywYSJlf0

Twitter @NicoleDewandre

Ghislaine Boddington, Co-founder and Creative Director of body>data>space and Women Shift Digital, is a researcher, artist, dramaturg, curator and thought leader specialising in body responsive technologies. Ghislaine is recognised as an international pioneer advocating the use of the entire body as a digital interaction canvas for over 25 years. She has created live telepresence projects between thousands of participants/audiences across the world for arts, educational and creative industries usage, using her work to deeply examine the representation of our physical selves and our shifting identities in virtual environments. She has co-created and directed many art works exploring the hyper enhancement of our human senses, including “me and my shadow” for the National Theatre in 2012. She has been lead director of many international multi-partner projects, most recently the successful EU project “Robots and Avatars”.

In 2016 she co-curates Nesta’s FutureFest, is curator for the EUNIC series of exhibitions”The Games Europe Plays” and continues her research into virtual physical bodies through her Fellowship at Middlesex University and Readership at CPDA University of Greenwich.

Website: http://www.bodydataspace.net

Twitter @GBoddington

Business Models, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Why do reader/user communities build?

16th February 2016 miriam

We used to call them ‘the audience’ but now they don’t behave as we expect audiences to. They’re active, they’re vocal, and they’re engaged. They have multiple options and channels, voices and media. They want do everything and have a say in everything on their terms. And many of them don’t want to pay for it by following the traditional publishing business models.

We are all the audience for something. We live in exciting times as an audience, we are being courted and sought after with suitors from all forms of media. We are encouraged to enter and explore created worlds through multiple entry points. Using American TV show Fringe as a case study Mélanie Bourdaa discussed how audiences engage across multiple media to follow story arcs in ‘Following the Pattern’: The Creation of an Encyclopaedic Universe with Transmedia Storytelling.’ A key, and very influential strategy and theory she suggests is Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling . It allows us to engage with a writer/designer’s vision on multiple levels, as much or as little as we want. The key thing here is that we can choose to become really involved, going beyond the ordinary level of engagement for an audience.

It is not all about the audience, these are equally exciting times for writers and creators. You can imagine your story in people’s social media, in games, in books and on the TV. A story can have an active following, conversations happening in real time, apps can help access it and live experiences can draw in a completely other group of people or enhance the feeling of belonging that a community has.

Authors can choose how they want to share their book experience with their audience; they can choose to have their characters tweet, such as Goran Racic tweeting as his hero Thomas Loud from his book ‘Loud Evolution.’ Not stopping there he has created a whole district in Minecraft where visitors can explore his world. Little by little the book world that we enjoy enters into our real world, to come with us to the office, the gym or while we wait in a Tesco Metro queue.

But at what point does this audience become a community? A dedicated group of people that are interested enough not just to buy the story in its multiple forms but to spend the time to influence the plot on many of these digital platforms, following the success that gaming has enjoyed where players can influence or even change the storylines within certain parameters . Let’s face it, those of us that are old enough to remember them loved those old multi-branching adventure books where you could make decisions and those choices took you to different pages of the book.

The main problem that authors, designers and marketers face with all of this participation is money – where does all the money come from to create these great experiences. Audiences want so much for free now. The kickstarter model has proved a great launch pad for creative projects. The backers are the people that actually want the creative product and so are happy to fund it. The audience becomes the backers becomes the community.

I enjoyed Naomi Alderman’s, Rebecca Levene’s and Adrian Hon’s Zombie Run! in this way, an audio adventure while you get fit. I like the idea, backed it through kickstarter and then became part of a community of runners, though not the fastest of runners I am a happy runner enjoying a story and getting a little fitter along the way. Intriguing a potential audience sufficiently that it then becomes a community and is prepared to pay for it is a hard model to follow and necessitates creating work with no guarantee of return. This is only one of business model out there that author/ designers/ filmmakers and publishers are using.

Fallen London with its steampunk aesthetic is equally captivating, a browser-based game in which every choice you make changes the storyline. It is free to play but the business model choice to keep it that way means it is delivered in little chunks. However, the community that Failbetter builds through this sharing will potentially go on to buy Sunless Sea, or The Night Circus or buy pure narrative premium content such as The Gift.

For the upcoming Creative Conversations panel on March 2^nd , the next part of our Creative Conversations New Space of Publishing series, we start to tease out this very subject. ‘Building Reader Communities’ will question what distinguishes a community from an audience, and if writers and publishers need to build such communities and what they could gain from doing so. We also want to unpick what the implications are for the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship when the business model changes and the community is so much more in control of the creative product.

Our panellists will include: Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival; Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press; Alexis Kennedy, CEO of in interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games; and a commissioned video featuring Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’, a sci-fi novel based in the Elite Game World.

It promises to be an interesting evening of discussion and places can be reserved through Eventbrite.

Featured image Winter Kaleidoscope by Dr-Wolf0014 on Deviant Art

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

What #MakingLondon Made

12th January 2016 miriam

This blogpost is the final reflection on the event Making London, held on the 18th July 2015 at the University of Greenwich (see #MAKINGLONDON – A First Person Account for full breakdown of the day).

The desire to run a design-led community engagement event like #MakingLondon was ignited by our Creative Professions & Digital Arts department settling into our new home in Stockwell Street, Greenwich. As we became habituated to our new setting and began enjoying the high tech equipment and creative environment, I couldn’t help but reflect on the vintage market place that, on weekends, used to take over this small piece of industrial land with its haphazard collection of furniture, books, clothes and traders. By reflecting on this I began to question what this shiny new RIBA nominated building does to the community here in Greenwich; does it offer new opportunities, collaborations and cultural activities, or is this just what we would like to see reflected in our possession of this space? Are we giving something to the community or displacing it through continued building and development? Through the series of Creative Conversations events we have begun to challenge ourselves, and allow ourselves to be challenged by others, to map out the impact and constellation of networks that have been shifted, altered and re-formed through our occupation of Stockwell Street.

From personal experience we also began to question ‘what does it mean to belong to such an amorphic city as London?’ and ‘whether this alters our sense of belonging and our ability to form connections with those around us?’

Fig 1: Our original Making London brainstorm considering everything from agile belonging to Pop-ups.

To consider this we have begun by looking outwards to see whether design could have an impact on the way that London is currently being shaped, and to question the relationship forming between building developments, financial markets, local communities and the creative industries. It became a trajectory that sought to give people a voice and space to reflect on and construct new perspectives on their own personal London-based issues. By bringing together a collection of diverse people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines; from game developers to political activists, from ages 20 to 65, our aim was to use design methods and workshops that would allow them to creatively rethink their relationship to London. These activities, writing and thoughts were spatialised within an oversized map of London. Attendees were invited to inscribe their most powerful memories of living in London, what they value about London in its current incarnation and the growing issues of living in a city that has become filtered through it being a financial hub.

The map data could be divided into four main themes; these are London in Flux, London Debates, Londoners on the Go and London Pride (further analysis of these can be found in the Making London report).

For the full information:

Read the report on our Making London Workshop

Watch footage of Making London, including interviews with participants (5 Minutes)

creativity, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

The hyper-connected audience

3rd September 2015 miriam

It feels as though Henry Jenkins observations on the potential for participatory, collaborative and convergent media has never been truer. The entertainment properties I find interesting have a life beyond any narrowly defined medium, in fact reaching out into the other media to develop a story gives the work nuance and richness and, of course, further emotional investment from me.

‘In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms’

Anyone wishing to create or publish anything now has an eye to other media as an outlet. Naturally, as Jenkins suggests, this has led to not just telling stories through a transmedia experience, but to marketing these brands as worlds to be explored. The Blair Witch Project did this, famously, extremely effectively.

The mainstream media industries were always aware that new audiences could be developed by reaching out to them in a comic book for example after a film success. The decision to develop and fund entirely new content in order to grow an audience and keep them engaged is relatively recent marketing decision; showing that consumer behaviour analysis and an attempt to understand the deeper motivations behind consumer decision making is being taken more seriously. Jenkins terms this ‘affective economics’.

Ubisoft , no small industry player, released Watch_Dogs, an open world action game, in 2013. The protaganist that we were to identify with was Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who spent his time hacking into the city’s Central Operating System (CTOS). To market this game BETC Paris created Watch Dogs WeareData experiential website revealing a 3D interactive map in which we could explore the cities of London, Paris and Berlin the website through the visualisation of publicly available data, reading people’s live tweets, watching the metro go from station to station, looking through instagram posts. A person could lose themselves for hours in this ground-breaking piece of content that was arguably more interesting than the game it was marketing. And you could join in, adding your own data to this live stream.

More recently Faber & Faber published Capital, by John Lanchester, a story of post-crash London. To market this book Storythings created Pepys Road which tells the story of the ten years leading up to the world described by Lanchester. Over the course of ten days, they send emails asking questions about your attitudes to various public policies and send you ten new mini-stories written by John Lanchester. These stories reveal a period of public sector cuts and economic upheaval in which we become a part. James Bridle‘s data illustrations position your data within the rest of the accessible live data. Storythings have created ways to tell mini-stories about the decisions both you and the rest of their audience make.

Both marketing activities make use of our own digital shadow, created by our hyper-connected lives, to situate us within these created worlds, these branded worlds. This however doesn’t feel intrusive rather it feels intuitive, captivating and above all interesting. For me the most interesting thing about big data is when it contextualizes our small data, our personal data. We relate to stories and brands when they feel like they have a place in our lives. More and more we are asked to imagine ourselves in these branded worlds, it is a forward-thinking marketing approach, but how much easier is it to do so when we see how we are connected to these worlds and others in them? And how interesting it is when our data is seen through a different lens, one in which we are adventurers, or spies or hackers, or inhabitants of Capital. Media convergence and accessible data streams allow us to inhabit these other worlds easily and convincingly.

We are ourselves and not at the same moment. perfect.

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

Can Design get to the Heart of what Matters for Communities?

15th July 2015 miriam

To begin to answer this question we first need to take a step back and consider what design actually is? Design is one of those funny words that talks both about process to design and products the design within the same word.

We are surrounded by design but our experience of it is often limited to the way we use, own, buy and even desire products. However it is the way these products are created and the reason why they have come to be that is often the more compelling story. These reasons (or insights) are developed during the design process and can exist even without the product themselves. They impact the way we understand people’s values and needs, allowing us to design for specific groups of people. If we take this insight and use it to develop new systems, experiences or even new relationships to our needs, it can be a powerful tool for social change. When we look at design as a process, an engagement or an interpretation, its potential is also much wider. This is not something new; there are entire sectors of the design industry devoted to this kind of process-based design thinking, design research, or even design making. Fields such as social design, experience design, service design or systems design are all examples of the way that design can be used across a wide range of industries to rethink everything from health care to politics to technology & innovation.

However understanding what design means is only one half of the question. To drill deeper we should next consider how design can be used, by both designers and non-designers, within a specific community to tackle complex issues that need a range of expertise and experience. The key to this is giving everyone an equal playing field and language to communicate. In order to do this a community-based design process must be both intuitive and reproducible. If it is not intuitive, people will spend so much time trying to work out how to apply it that they will not be able to drill deeply into the issues they originally wanted to tackle. If it is not reproducible then – as soon as the original designer leaves – the network could collapse and no further action would be possible. One approach is to use a design toolkit. These can be useful if a community wants to try a design process for the first time. There are many available on the market but, although they can be useful in getting to solutions fast, they also (through their design) fix the level of response you can give and peoples roles within the process. This is charted in great depth by Lucy Kimbell in her blogpost Mapping Social Design Practice: Beyond the Toolkit.

Another approach to working with communities of designers and non-designers is to use Metadesign. Metadesign is a process that aims to flatten hierarchies and develop methods which allow everyone within the group to actively learn from the knowledge and expertise of one another. Within the article Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: Enriching Participatory Design with Informed Participation Fischer uses the term underdesigning to describe the focus of metadesign. It aims to limit the control of the designer and allow flexibility and evolution of ideas by creating conducive “environments and not the solutions, allowing… [people] to create the solutions themselves” (Fischer, 2003). This allows for the fusion and fission between individual and communal goals and gives the design process space and flexibility to evolve within any given community in a specific and clearly situated way.

From a design perspective, this is what we are aiming to do with Making London. By breaking down some of the boundaries between the University of Greenwich and the local community we can use design to help understand our social role as an institution and the challenges we are all facing in an ever-evolving London. The event aims to weave individual needs and values into a collective understanding and to co-create ideas for how the creative industries can continue to innovate in an increasingly corporate and financial capital. This will be challenged within three distinct workshops and framed through a large-scale mapping exercise. We will draw out these design ideas in order to be further developed within subsequent events. The workshops will give everyone the opportunity to engage deeply with what matters to them about living and working in London, mapping out the intersections and points of crisis within their local area. The workshops will use design processes to explore how metaphor can be used as a tool for rethinking problems, help us to imagine the fabric of the city in order to envision uses of data for the near future and try out some fun methods for making complex things simpler and influencing peoples’ decisions towards the social ‘good.’

The first of our #MakingLondon events is this Saturday the 18^thJune, join us by registering at: https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

View our MakingLondon Programme here!

creativity, Markets and Communities, Research, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Experimental publishing, copyright laws and Mix03

13th July 2015 miriam

I have had a fascination with publishing and its potential most of my life, so much so that I was Head of Art for a small publishing company for nearly four years alongside my teaching commitments. I am very interested in the new space opened up by the advent of digital publishing and all of the new business models that are emerging.

It could be argued that everything nowadays is publishing: the social streams in which we document every part of our lives for a variety of audiences as well as our blogs. We need to be careful about what we write in these digital spaces as we are just as responsible for the comments we make, defamatory statements or intellectual property infringement as the traditional and mainstream press. As Alex Newson with Deryck Houghton and Justin Patten point out, we can’t cite ignorance of these laws as our defense. Even high profile comedian Alan Davies had to pay £15,000 in damages to Lord McAlpine to settle a libel action over a tweet relating to false child sex abuse allegations in 2013. We are all fast becoming published authors, even if we are not very good ones.

It was with this interest and an awareness of the published nature of our modern lives that I went to Mix03. Co organised by one of our key Creative Conversations The New Space of Publishing speakers, Kate Pullinger, the Mix Digital Conference at Bath Spa was held over 3 days and explored the various worlds of publishing looking at transmedia, ambient literature, reader participation, moving from analogue to digital, pedagogy, interactive forms and digital poetry to mention only a few areas.

Mix03 had speakers that explore and innovate in this fast growing sector. I was able to listen to exciting key note speakers, such as award winning novelist and game creator Naomi Alderman, Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen of Visual Editions and Ju Row Farr from Blast Theory. There were also interesting projects presented such as Colin Thomas’s Making Digital History and Claudio Pires Franco‘s research on new media forms of the book: both experimenting with the more interactive components in the digital publishing space.

It is the copyright laws, and their relationship with fan fiction and participatory writing projects that I find particularly interesting and while not under the remit of this conference, as it was more experimental and creative, they have an impact on all of us amateur journalists/authors/commentators/artists. In particular Fan Fiction as described by Ciaran Roberts has interesting and complex issues around copyright. For experimental participatory writing projects such as Sarah Haynes’ The Memory Store mutual respect and recognition is a pre-requisite as the project requires participation in order for it to evolve ‘Participatory projects are about both process and product.’ and so the copyright laws need to evolve in order to protect and not hinder these new projects and participants.

The great joy of such conferences is not only to meet like minded people but also to meet people that have a viewpoint at odds with your own, or come at a subject from an entirely different angle. This allows you to reflect and think more deeply about your subject. For me new collaborations and new projects were sparked and new ways to think about existing projects were suggested. I came away feeling wonderfully invigorated, as though my brain had taken a much needed holiday to somewhere new and exciting. It is a conference that I would heartily recommend and I will be booking myself in for next year’s when the option arises.

Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

MAKING LONDON

23rd June 2015 miriam

We live in challenging times.

In the past seven years we have seen the world change. Every political action seems to be marked by a new word that has become ingrained into our very consciousness and fed into every sector of our lives – recession.

This intangible concept has impacted us socially, culturally and psychologically. We have seen people taking to the street and using their bodies to occupy spaces in protest. We have seen riots and we have seen a decline in the value of social support. We have seen the monetization of our services and a property market spiraling out of control. The city, which once took us in and gave us a home, feels somewhat distant; our sense of belonging skewed by fear of the rent rising or loss of employment.

I say this not because I hate London. I love London and could not imagine living anywhere else. It is a city full of creative inspiration; full of opportunities to re-make yourself on a daily basis without fear of social pressure or judgment. It is a place of discovery. Of education and culture, a place of history but also a place of technology and innovation. It is a place, which flourishes in spite of it all, where markets ebb and flow like the tide of the Thames popping up across the city and creating temporary communities; farmers markets, craft markets, Christmas markets, pound-a-bowl markets and many more.

Markets are vital to human societies, as they allow us to exchange goods and services between us, rather than every individual having to produce and do everything for him or herself. As a result, the marketplace becomes an arbiter of value, ‘discovering and representing the desires of society’. This is why the idea of the free market can be championed as a moral cause, because it represents people’s freedom to obtain what they want in life.

However, this idealized vision of the marketplace is not the reality we are currently living in. Real estate and business in London are currently driven by a worldview, which sees money not as a measure of value, but as, in itself, the ultimate value. It is very easy to make this mistake, since money acts as a proxy for something that is a constant variable – i.e what is important in life and society. However the effects are serious, since it is leading to the marketization of every aspect of society and to a conception of the market, which is very narrow and prohibits the many other kinds of exchange and interaction that might be possible.

Making London is a design-led event, which encourages you to step away from your workplace and see things with fresh eyes. It aims to bring together a community of designers, cultural movers and shakers, local businesses & charities, policy makers, planners et al. Using design methods, this workshop based event will take you through the process of considering the things you value about living in London and the issues you face. These will be collaboratively explored and built upon with the aim of developing some group insights into potential projects for social change and creative interpretation.

It is in essence a social hackathon, exploring, through design and making new approaches to collaborative problem solving.

To attend this event, register at: https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk

See our E-flyer below, click for further information!

This event is organised in collaboration with The XDs (experience design group). The XDs are an experience design collective with 200+ specialists, an eclectic bunch of creatives, psychologists, data scientists and designers.

Other people & groups who are doing work in this area include:

http://sophiehope.org.uk/projects/

http://www.brave-new-alps.com/

http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/

http://positivemoney.org/

http://metabolicity.com/

http://www.neweconomics.org/

http://potlatch.typepad.com/about.html

http://mediaculturalwork.org/members/

Business Models, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Considering the ‘Open Portal’ effect on publishing

26th May 2015 miriam

May 20th’s New Space of Publishing panel, masterfully chaired by Justine Solomons of Byte the Book, saw some energetic discussion and a really engaged audience. We were encouraged to hear all the panelists urging potential and practicing writers to continue writing; to keep at it, to hone their work and to find their audience. Steve Carsey, Director of Original Programming for Audible, Katrina Hopewell, marketing consultant in broadcast and digital publishing, and Jeremy Thompson, MD of independent publisher, Troubadour and its self publishing arm, Matador, made a clear case for discovering and creating work for your audience. On the other hand Kate Pullinger, award winning novelist and digital storyteller and members of the audience made an equally strong case for letting your audience find you rather than writing for a perceived audience, acknowledging experimental poetry’s online success.

This notion of the author as solely in charge of what they choose to write with the freedom to hope that it resonates with some members of the public is key. Before the panel we asked if the traditional roles of writer, agent, publisher and publicist have changed and what was clear is that with advent of the internet, blogging and eplatforms the writer has many more options. Eszter Hargittai noted as far back as 2000 in ‘Open portals or closed gates? Channeling content on the World Wide Web’ that we no longer have to get past ‘gatekeepers’ to a potential audience, that a lack of big budgets and influence needn’t stop creators any more. The panel spoke about the plethera of ways to get content out there, Katrina espoused the Wattpad model highlighting how that has earned some authors great deals with established publishing houses while creating an audience in the process, such as Macmillan signing UK writer Nikkei Kelly’s Stylcar Saga trilogy.

But here we have the dichotomy of the modern publishing phenomena. Jeremy brought up, to the amusement of the whole audience, the notion that some books are better left inside their author. While he made the point light-heartedly he exposed the other side of this new found freedom. We are now bombarded with content and trying to find meaningful content is hard. The author is competing for people’s time, not just their click through attention. In 2009 Hat Trick Associates cited technorati estimates of over 200 million blogs worldwide, and blogging is only one form of sharing written content.

So now we have another set of questions, with so much content out there how can we find those newly written gems? Will we rely on crowd sourced reviews to usher us to new finds? Will the older authors potential lack of technical skill prevent them from effectively engaging in the digital revolution? We think that this has opened up the market place for all yet Hargittai and Walejko establish in their 2008 study ‘The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age’ that there is still inequality in this perceived freedom according to socio-economic class and gender, does this just mean we are getting much more of the same?

the 3 of us — Three of the Creative Conversations team. From left: Miriam Sorrentino, Gauti Sigthorsson, Rosamund Davies wielding the microphone.

Photos: Panagiotis Balalas

Book Design

Beautiful Books

5th May 2015 miriam 1 Comment

Angus MacWilliam in his 2013 Paper ‘The Engaged Reader’ draws our attention to a small moment in history when postgraduate Alan Kay posited the notion of the ‘Dynabook,’

‘a portable interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book.’

This 1968 notion was to eventually evolve into ebooks which are now consumed on a variety of different devices and are integrated into our everyday lives. A four-year research project conducted by the Book Industry Study Group ‘Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading’ suggests they have become a ‘normal means of consuming content.’ The public appears to have accepted them, notwithstanding generational variations. The ease and convenience of a lightweight and relatively small gadget holding a number of books has enticed us. The Publishers Association‘s Statistics Yearbook 2013 shows that Ebooks now make up 33% of fiction sales and 7% of non-fiction/reference sales. UK consumer e-book sales altogether rose 18% to £263m, overall it is a relatively buoyant sector.

There was much hand wringing by publishers when they thought that this easy and convenient digital revolution would kill traditional publishing. However this doomsday prophesizing isn’t new, Albert Abramson in ‘The History of Television, 1942 to 2000’ notes that with the advent of the TV and the collapse of academic jobs anxiety over the loss of traditional publishing increased between the 1960s and the year 2000. And publishing still managed to survive, we still read physical books. In the UK with publishers selling 685.5 million physical books in 2012 (PA Statistics Yearbook 2012, The Publishers Association), print books must still be doing something right. Are publishers, writers and artists doing something new?

One clear area is perhaps not so much new as very, very old…back to the days of limited print runs rather than mass media, artist’s books and self-publishing. While print books can’t offer digital interactivity they can readily offer an entirely different, more visceral interactive experience through the printed book as artefact. Limited print runs for the artist/author are achievable as are limited edition covers for Traditional Publishers. Arifa Akbar notes (The Independent 27 November 2014) that he sees more and more beautifully designed books in the postbags he receives each week.

A great example of this is Brazilian designer Gustavo Piqueira’s book project, ‘Mateus, Marcos, Lucas e João’ which is a darkly humerous 21st-century spin on the Bible. Masterfully referencing the classic design elements of Medieval illuminated manuscripts and manuscript grid he revisions the world of the Old Testament, set now in a world of traffic jams and fast food. The book was launched alongside an exhibition, Inanis—iluminuras para o século 21; at the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin library, at Cidade Universitária, in São Paulo. An excerpt is available for download from the exhibition website.

Another great example is Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Strange Library.’ Its enigmatic cover with attached library ticket holder draws you in to a beautifully designed experience in which a young schoolboy stops at the library on his way home to returns some books. Yet another beautiful example is Riverhead Books’ limited edition cover for Chang-rae Lee’s novel ‘On Such A Full Sea’ which was the first ever 3D printed slipcover. Set in a future America we follow the story of Fan, immersing ourselves in tales of hope, betrayal and the human condition.

So what is there that we can learn from the ‘new’ experimental design ethic in books and our appetite for them? We might ask if digital interactivity has had the effect of making us keener on interactivity in every experience, or indeed if the digital world has made is weary of interactive everything and we are looking for something that feels better crafted and more real? Naturally these aren’t the only questions, every question raises others; How else can art and design experience be integrated with texts and print? What new freedoms does this give to auteurs and how should we price such artefacts?