Category Archives: Research

creativity, Past Events, Research

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

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:

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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

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

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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

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

What #MakingLondon Made

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?’

mapping

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.

MapLRg

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)

Markets and Communities, Research, Uncategorised

What does it mean to be “local” in a digital culture?

One of our key themes for Creative Conversations this year is the role of the University in the creative ecology of Greenwich. This brings together key strands in our work: The relation between markets and communities, and how new forms of content, new business models and digital technologies connect in practice. We look to our local community for examples of how this works in practice, and for collaborators.

At our Open House event earlier in the year, we put out an open call for comments on how those present might like to connect or interact with the University. With the aid of some post-its and a whiteboard, we asked those present to suggest how they might want to do that.

Around half the comments were about training, with respondents expressing an interest in the University offering learning opportunities to learn media skills, basic web design and content management, and ways of keeping up with new developments and technologies.

film-design

Another important theme in the comments was an interest in collaboration with University staff, and in mentoring students, and taking on interns/placement students for projects.

Finally, networking emerged as an important topic. Participants mentioned meetups, links with industry, and a sense that the University can offer a social hub for local businesses and organisations.

Chart-themes

We on the Creative Conversations team are very grateful to those who participated, and their input has certainly informed our programme of activities and events for this coming year.

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

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

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.

DESI_ROAST_EVA

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 18th June, 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

 

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

 

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!

MakingLondonE_Flyer(large)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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/

Research

New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies

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The New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies Conference last week put the focus firmly on collaborations between academics and media industry workers and addressed some of the questions that arise from such research. These include questions about confidentiality and ownership, about who funds the research and whose interests it serves. In a particularly interesting panel about research methodologies, Hanne Bruun examined some of the  issues faced by researchers using qualitative interviews in their research. She raised questions of access and power and also the difficulties involved in researching problems and failures in media industries. Since people are understandably more willing to be interviewed about successes than problems or failures, the range of research that a researcher might carry out using this method is potentially threatened. Eva van Passel discussed some of the challenges involved in a project in Flanders to analyse remuneration for screenwriters, directors and actors, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. What existing data is useful and how can it best be used to establish such a variable and context dependent measure as what constitutes ‘fair’ remuneration? Van Passel suggested that the best way to proceed might be to start from establishing what is definitely ‘not fair’.

In another panel on Changing Technologies and Practices, discussion centred on the breaking down of boundaries between marketing and core content, focussing on Channel 4 as a case study.

In an industry panel discussion on research, Kate Ogborn of Fly Films said that she would be most interested in  research into what makes an independent production company successful. Laura Marshall of Icon Films agreed.

Final Keynote John Caldwell returned to the themes of concealment and disclosure, official, informal and unauthorised (such as the Sony hack) and their role within production studies research.  He explained how he has examined both the information exposed by the Sony hack and the reaction to the hack, as well as social media presence and other data sources and what they might reveal about the media industries. He pointed out that academia was part of, not separate to, the same corporate culture and neoliberal political economy in which media industries exist and stressed the importance of academic researchers clearly defining their relationship with media industry workers and organisations within any research project.  Are they discussants, investigators, collaborators or co-authors? However he also gave examples of ways that these roles can in fact shift and collapse and highlighted the number of researchers in this area whose personal background and identity straddle the boundaries between academia and production.

Caldwell also elaborated on his concept of para-industries (the ‘subterranean levels’ of media production that go into producing pitches and other development and promotional materials, such as ‘look books’ and ‘pre-script novels’, in order to get a project into production). He pointed out that it was important to recognise what is not being researched and aspects of production that remain invisible. He said he was particular interested in the way that every media production was a link in various chains of individual and organisation brand production and how creative labour on any particular production, rather than being supplied simply in exchange for financial compensation, was therefore often part of complicated deals and exchanges that exceeded the context of that particular production. Caldwell proposed collective creativity and consensus building and opposing forces such as dissensus, downsizing and outsourcing, as fertile areas of research, suggesting that studies of incoherence, as well as coherence, are potentially of great use to media organisations, as well as of interest to academics.