Tag Archives: Event

creativity, design, Past Events

Designing Death: Panel Discussion

Designing Death: Challenges and Aesthetics for the 21st Century

Date: Wednesday 15th March 2017
Time: 18:00 – 21:00
Venue:  University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street Building, 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich SE10 9BD

RSVP here.

Death is personal.
Death is social.
Death is constructed.
Death is meaningful and meaningless.
Death is ritualised but also intuitive.
Death is annihilation and transcendence.
Death is art and science.
Death is human.

Dying is one of the most personal experiences we will have in our lives and yet there are still norms for what bereavement and funerals should look and feel like.

This panel will consider the growing movement which questions whether any models or systems of categorisation still speak to our contemporary understanding of death. Funerals in the UK now have more scope then ever to be a richly personal occasion and design is contributing to this movement. The funeral industry is adapting to the contemporary need for more individualised rituals and people’s desire to use funerals as a creative opportunity to further embody or understand the lives of the dead in an individual way. These shifts challenge what the dead mean to us and how bodies and environments merge to create new associations and experiences of death.

As people begin to identify themselves as non-religious or explore incorporating a plurality of religious identities that combine and augment existing rituals and practices the question of what to do with the dead, both literally and socially, becomes ever more complex. Contemporary design methods are uniquely placed to contribute to the development of new rituals and practices around death and bereavement. As design has been opened up beyond the world of products and has begun to intervene and work within systems under labels such as service designer, experience designer and co-designer, the idea of designing for a purpose that puts emotion and experience at the center of the design is establishing its place for a range of companies and services.

The Design Council’s May 2015 post Reinventing death for the twenty-first century reflects this shift by detailing some of the challenges and ways that design could intervene within end of life care, both in terms of the appendages linked to dying at home but also in terms of new rituals, breaking taboos and the introduction of new technologies where appropriate. Additionally design competitions such as Designboom’s Design for Death, the Future Cemetery Project and OPENIDEO’s Reimaging End of Life have opened up this topic for discussion within the design community.

Panel Speakers:
Ivor Williams

Ivor Williams is a designer who specialises in death and dying, through his work as Senior Design Associate at the Helix Centre and his research and consultancy group Being and Dying. He explores the use of technology-for-good as co-founder of the design company, Humane Engineering. Their first product, Cove, is a music-maker designed to support grieving adolescents.

Website: ivorwilliams.info
@ivorinfo | @beinganddying | @helixcentre

Louise Winter

Louise Winter is a writer and the founder of Poetic Endings – a modern funeral service offering ceremonies of style, substance, relevance and meaning. She’s also the editor of the Good Funeral Guide – the only independent resource that exists to help the public get the funeral they want.

Website: www.poetic-endings.com
@poetic_endings | Poetic Endings Facebook | Poetic Endings Instagram

John Troyer

Dr. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr. Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website (http://www.deathreferencedesk.org), the Future Cemetery Project (http://www.futurecemetery.org) and a frequent commentator for the BBC.

Website: www.bath.ac.uk/cdas
@DeathRef | @FutureCemetery | @CenDeathSociety

Dr Ros Taylor MBE DL

Ros is Clinical Director at Hospice UK. She combines her role at the charity with her work as a palliative doctor at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Fulham, London, one of the world’s leading specialist cancer treatment hospitals. Ros joined Hospice UK as a director in October 2014. Prior to that she had been a trustee at the charity since 2009 and was also the Director of the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted, a position she held from 1996 until 2015. She has a special interest in medical education, medical humanities, ‘whole person care’ and has lectured widely, both nationally and internationally. Ros is also a Deputy Lieutenant in the County of Hertfordshire and was awarded an MBE for Services to Hospice Care in 2014.

Website: https://www.hospiceuk.org/
@hospicedoctor

Chair
Stacey Pitsillides

Stacey Pitsillides is a Lecturer in Design at the Creative Professions and Digital Arts Department, University of Greenwich. Her research considers how technology and design shift our understanding of death and bereavement. As part of this research she has curated events for public engagement that question legacy and aesthetics. These include Love After Death for Nesta’s FutureFest (https://www.loveafterdeath.co.uk/) and Material Legacies for the Stephen Lawrence Gallery (http://www.greenwichunigalleries.co.uk/material-legacies/). In addition to this she is on the standing committee for the Death Online Research Symposium and has been the co-facilitator of three unconference events discussing issues of death and digitality.

Website: http://www.digitaldeath.eu/
@RestInPixels | Digital Death and Beyond Blog

The Material Legacies exhibition will be running until 25th March 2017 at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery Greenwich.

Cinematography, Film, Past Events

A Dialogue with Billy Williams OBE, Vanessa Whyte 22nd Feb

Cinematography: A dialogue with Billy Williams OBE, BSC
& Vanessa Whyte

22nd Feb 2017

Billy Williams OBE, BSC shooting The Manhattan Project

Billy Williams OBE, BSC is an award winning cinematographer with a distinguished career in film. At just 14 years of age he started out as an apprentice to his father, working on training films for the Ministry of Defence. From there he went on to become an assistant cameraman with British Transport Films, making documentaries and developing his skills until he was given the opportunity to become a cameraman. Billy was 38 when he got his first big break with the feature film Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Since then, he has worked his way to the top of the industry with film credits such as Women in Love (1969), On Golden Pond (1981) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). Notably Billy received an Academy Award for his cinematography on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982). In 2015 BAFTA paid tribute to his outstanding contribution to cinema. As a major influence in British cinema, it will be an honour to host Billy as he shares his wealth of knowledge in cinematography and the processes of working on film.

In conversation with Billy; we will also be welcoming Vanessa Whyte.

Vanessa was the Director of Photography on the 2016 BAFTA award-winning short film Operator and her drama projects have been screened worldwide, winning awards at Raindance, Vancouver, Berlin, LA Film Festival, Mofilm, IMDB and London Film Festival. She recently appeared on Woman’s Hour discussing women, cinematography and the new UK female cinematography collective illuminatrix.

Both cinematographers will be able to answer questions following their conversation.

This event is organised through the Creative Conversations initiative at the Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich and features as part of the Film and TV Production UoG programmes.

This is definitely an opportunity not to be missed. Interested academics, practitioners and members of the Creative Conversations network are welcome to attend.

Time & Date: 22nd February 2017, 5:00PM.
A drinks reception will follow the talk.

Venue: Lecture Theatre 004, University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street Building, 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich SE10 9BD

Tickets for this event are free and can be booked on our Eventbrite page here.

Creative Business, Markets and Communities, Past Events

Attending to Social Media: Panel Discussion

This Creative Conversations event, held on 30 November 2016, brought together creatives and professional communicators to discuss how attention works in social media. Our panelists were:

Joanna Walsh (@badaude). Author, editor at 3am Magazine (@3ammagazine), the force behind @read_women and more. Her books include Hotel (2015), Vertigo (2015), Grow a Pair (2015) and Fractals (2013).

Dan Calladine (@dancall). Head of Media Futures, at Carat Global.

Francesco D’Orazio (@abc3d). VP Product & Research at Pulsar (@Pulsar_social), co-founder of the Visual Social Media Lab (@VisSocMedLab).

Colette Henry, Communications Planning Director at Futerra (@futerra), a sustainability-focused creative communications agency.

Steve Cross (@steve_x). Comedian, consultant, trainer, Wellcome Engagement Fellow, honorary fellow in Science and Technology Studies at UCL (@stsucl). Creator of @BrightClubLDN and @ScienceShowoff.

Chair: Gauti Sigthorsson (@conceptbin). Principal Lecturer in Media & Communications, CPDA, University of Greenwich.

“People are the most interesting thing on the internet.”

The chair welcomed the guests and panelists to Greenwich.

Content is endless on the internet, but people’s attention is finite. How do we generate attention in social media? Can you have too much attention? The wrong kind of attention? What do you do with it when you capture people’s attention?

Ultimately these questions are about interaction rather than content. Anyone can put some text, sounds and images out there, but getting a reaction is a different proposition. This evening is about people, because people are the most interesting thing on the internet.

“The labour of accounting for yourself”

Joanna Walsh, the first panelist of the evening, remarked on the relationship between authors and readers over social media, and related it to the popularity of auto-fiction, the blurring of fiction and autobiography by the writers. This puts the figure of the author in the spotlight. Michel Foucault, in his essay “What is an Author?”, defined the author as a function that emerged with the printing press and mass-literacy. This new production and distribution of print gave rise to a demand from the state for someone to be accountable for what was written.

Auto-fiction presents the author as a persona, blurring fiction and autobiography, as in the work of Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), and earlier in Truman Capote’s work, starting with his first novel (Other Voices, Other Rooms) featuring a cover image of the author himself, beautiful and mysterious, a photo which became Capote’s “avatar”. Walsh noted also that both Heti and Capote work at an intimate level. Both these books are about the part love played in their lives. Heti’s work, in particular, reminds us that disclosure is a performance. The moralism of authenticity demands truthful self-disclosure, which can be seen in the social media compulsion to and reward of self-disclosure.

This translates to labour. “The labour of accounting for yourself” in writing. Walsh distinguishes between writers’ output (written work published) and promotion online, while noting that this boundary is becoming ever more blurred.

“Social media is the domain of the shapeshifter”

The next speaker, Dan Calladine, is Head of Future Media at Carat Global. His career at the agency predates most online media (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), so he’s seen the rise of the “digital native” alongside the new online media that now dominate.

A key teme for Calladine was how quickly novelty becomes ordinary online. He pointed out that the “like” button is only around 5 years old. Sharing, liking, replying – these are behaviours that are fairly recent. [ref. Without their Permission, book]

Anyone can create stuff online. Fake news (and Facebook’s stated inability to differentiate between them and real news) are an example of the proliferation of content like this. In that, they are related to fan sites, which have created mini-celebs in their own right, and social media celebrities like vloggers.

Social media is the domain of the shapeshifter. Personas are different between platforms (i.e., my Twitter persona has a different voice and content than on Facebook, Instagram, etc.). And sometimes we find those differences out by breaking the implicit rules of those platforms. For example, Dan Calladine’s profile picture on LinkedIn, a picture of a kitten, looks pretty unusual for that platform.

Speculating on trends, Calladine noted that Facebook’s “live video” feature is now being heavily pushed. In a few years we’ll wonder what these platforms looked like without that feature.

Some other emerging trends:

VR (FB bought Oculus Rift and its OS), virtual, augmented reality technologies for being “together” over media in a different way from what we now have.

Commerce will become more social, especially with people becoming more comfortable with sharing their shopping and purchase experiences online.

FB and TV (Twitter and TV), closer links between social media and what used to be called television.

Automation and bots will be seen a lot more in interfaces of all kinds, so that chat messaging serves as an interface for services we’ve had to dea with by text until now. With Siri and now Echo, it is becoming usual to speak with digital systems and to get a response.

“Dark social” (email, Snapchat) is also growing more important.

“All of this is about relevance.”

Following this, Francesco D’Orazio stuck to the topic of marketing, audiences and how his company, Pulsar, aims to be nothing less than an oracle for what people tink, using social data.

The key idea for D’Orazio is relevance. This is what is at stake in all monitoring of publicily visible social media. : Discovering audiences, trends, planning insights (targeting), measurement, category mapping, brand health.

Marketers want attention (lat. attendere, “waiting” in Italian). Attention and waiting.

D’Orazio raised the question of incentives for falsity, of content that is aimed purely at capturing attention long enough to persuade people to click on a headline and to share it. What’s the “need” for fake news?

Topicality: Affinities of audiences.
Expression: Language of the audience.
Value: What is of value to the audience, and what values does the content correspond to or serve.
Timeliness: Moments.
Targeting: Communities.
Engagement: Performance of content, what works.

All of this is about relevance – whatever is on social media has to resonate with people in order to be read, viewed, shared…

“Attention is an exchange”

Colette Henry, communications planner at Futerra, opened with a fundamental question on our topic: Why is attention important?

As infants we need attention for our survival. We have a basic human need to “grab” or “take” attention. But it also serves an essential filtering function – we pay attention by deciding what not to pay attention to.

Attention is an exchange, and if you work with social media, you must respect this exchange of attention. And be willing to let go of it: Control of attention is like a spotlight. Social media enables whoever (not just those who pay) to take up the spotlight.

Ignore this at your peril when it comes to communications strategy. Henry shared some examples of how slippery the controls are over who gets to direct the spotlight of attention, even in well-resourced campaigns. Nestle’s “positive cup” campaign, opened up a lot of discussion on social media, with people reacting to the campaign by asking about the recycling and waste generated by the use of aluminium pods. Similarly, Beyonce’s “Who runs the world?” for a large clothing retailer provoked a reaction focusing on sweatshop labour, asking how the clothes were made and at what human cost.

Brands are not able to control attention, people will take note of whatever they like. A brand cannot “own” the attention spotlight.

Henry pointed out that good practice examples of socia media campaigns shows that brands can successfully give up ownership of the campaign itself, generating positive attention and engagement. For Henry, it is essential for social media communications to “recognise that you don’t own it,” and be prepared for others taking it in directions you didn’t foresee at the planning stage.

“Puncture your own filter bubble”

And finally, on the principle that you should never put anyone in front of an audience after a professional comedian, Steve Cross concluded the panel presentations.

He opened by explaining how to make outrage marketing work for you – the Daily Mail model of science communication and comedy. One key point he impressed ont he audience: Fake “facts” get you lots of followers and retweets.

Also, do your best to puncture your own filter bubble. Are you a science communicator? Why not retweet status updates from kids who don’t like science, and complain about having to do it at school? Result: “Boring people” who take things literally unfollowed Steve’s account in droves.

Cross took us on a whirlwind tour of his events (Science Showoff, Books Showoff), and his Twitter feeds. He tweets in a number of guises, adopting a variety of personas and voices, including tweeting as a naked mole rat.

Concluding with a pro tip, Cross advised anyone wanting to build a following on social media: Get a very good camera. Photos get a lot of likes and shares. Take good pictures of people who perform at your events, they’ll make them their profile pictures, share them, etc.

“Pay attention to get attention”

Some shared themes emerged among the panelists in their remarks. One is that if you want to generate attention on social media and sustain it for longer than the few seconds it takes to find the like-button, you need to find something that people care about. To do that, be open to surprising, random-seeming topics (naked mole rats, anyone?) and pay attention to what comes back to you from what you put out initially, because things change along the way.

The panel concluded with a discussion on the many ways in which social media demands of its users that we construct personas through which to perform our presence. It doesn’t mean that these personas are inauthentic (on the contrary), but rather that they are part of what Erving Goffman called the “presentation of self in everyday life”. This presentation is now enabled in a new way by social media which allow us to perform not merely to our intimates and those we meet in person, but to a dispersed, decentered audience.

Another theme that emerged in discussions was the blurred distinction between true and false, fact and fake – fake news being the obvious example of how social media not only enables but rewards behaviours which generate attention, sensation and entertainment. Is this emblematic of our “post-truth” moment in politics, as well, in which unsubstantiated claims can swing elections?

“We live not in the age of news but in the age of fiction” (Joanna Walsh)

For Creative Conversations, many thanks to our panelists, and to Alex Craft, marketing and events coordinator for CPDA.

creativity, Past Events, The Future of TV

Gub Neal on Producing & Storytelling

Well known for his work on Cracker, Band of Gold, Prime Suspect, Queer as Folk and current series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson, Producer Gub Neal shares his in-depth knowledge of the creative process and the business of television drama past, present and future in these video clips from  his Creative Conversation with us in March 2016.

see all clips here

creativity, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

The Writer as Catalyst and Collaborator 27th April

Writing is self-expression, but it is also much more. Writing can start a conversation, issue a call to action or stand as an act of witness. Writing may be the work of a unique author, but it can also be interactive and collaborative.  Our panel will discuss the potential of writing as a form of action and collaboration.

Panel Members:

Olumide Popoola & Annie Holmes, co-authors of forthcoming book breach,  a short story collection, which tells the story of the refugee crisis through six voices based on interviews with refugees in Calais.

(c) Deborah moses-Sanks
Photo (c) Deborah Moses-Sanks

Nigerian-German Olumide Popoola is a writer and performer. Her other publications include essays, poetry, short stories, the novella this is not about sadness (Unrast Verlag, 2010) and the play text Also by Mail (Edition Assemblage, 2013).

Olumide’s interests include creative/critical investigations into the ‘in-between’ of culture, language and public space. She is an associate lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College London.

 

Jean-Paul Flintoff, author of How to Change the World

Screen Shot 2016-03-22 at 12.54.27Jean-Paul Flintoff is the author of five books, published in 16 languages. His latest is a novel, which he crowdfunded with Unbound, and the writing of which involved collaboration with theatrical performers, fellow authors, and many of the individuals who pledged money to the book.

www.flintoff.org  

@jpflintoff

 

Sarah Haynes, Head of Media Production at the Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University and creator of collaborative fiction The Button Jar

SarahHaynesFollowing a career in video production Sarah moved into new media and for a number of years was a multimedia developer at the International Centre for Digital Content, Liverpool, in a team working on CD Rom, web and digital games research projects.

Her research explores the opportunities digital technology affords for collaboration in writing fiction and the potential for new reading experiences.

Sarah is currently working on The Memory Store, an online narrative set in Liverpool in 2115. Readers are invited to contribute their own writing, influencing the story and expanding the narrative universe.

http://www.buttonjar.co.uk/

 

Maya Chowdhry, poet and interactive artist
MayaChowdhry-reading-med-cropped

A poet and Transmedia artist, Maya’s writing is infused and influenced through her work for radio, film and theatre. Her collaboration Tales from the Towpath at Manchester Literature Festival was shortlisted for the 2014 New Media Writing Prize, and her recent digital poetic work Ripple was shortlisted for the 2015 Dot Award. She is currently working for Lets Go as a Digital Artist, making interactive theatre and completing Fossil, a chap book of her poetry.

http://interactiveartist.org/

@MayaChowdhry

www.linkedin.com/in/maya-chowdhry

https://www.facebook.com/maya.chowdhry

 

Join us to discuss the following questions and more:

What is the role of a writer and writing in society? Has this changed?

Do new technologies offer new ways of writing?

How might we think differently about the relationship between writers and readers?

Is it possible to have too much writing in the world?

 

Date and Time: 27/4/16. 6pm Welcome Drinks, 6.30pm Panel Discussion

Venue: Stephen Lawrence Gallery, 10 Stockwell Street, London SE10 9BD

Attendance is free, but you need to register at Eventbrite

creativity, Past Events, The Future of TV, Uncategorised

The Future of Television with Gub Neal 16th March

gub nealGub Neal is a producer with a wealth of experience in television, known for ground-breaking, award winning and hugely popular shows, such as Cracker, Band of Gold, Prime Suspect, Queer as Folk and current series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson.

He will be sharing his in-depth knowledge of the creative process and the business of television drama past, present and future.

Gub has worked in a commissioning role within television (Head of Drama, Channel 4 & Controller of Drama at Granada) and also as an independent producer, co-founding the production company Artists Studio in 2009. His career has spanned many developments in production and distribution in the sector: from the opening up of independent production in UK TV in the 90s, through the rise of satellite, cable and pay TV and into today’s digital landscape, catering for global audiences. He will be drawing on his knowledge and experience of television past and present and considering current trends, to lay out his vision of what the future holds.

This talk is organized through the Creative Conversations initiative at the Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich and features as part of the Film and TV Production UG programmes. Interested academics and members of the Creative Conversations network are also welcome to attend.

Time & Date: 16th March 2016, 5.15PM. A drinks reception will follow the talk.

Venue: University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street Building, 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich SE10 9BD

 

Markets and Communities, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Building Reader Communities 2nd March

Writers and publishers have always needed readers, but is that enough any more? Does future success depend on building reader communities?

Our next New Space of Publishing Panel explores this question, with the help of:

ALEX PHEBY-2

Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co‐directors of Greenwich Book Festival 

As co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival, Auriol and Alex worked with fellow director Patricia Nicol to launch Greenwich Book Festival in May 2015, with the theme of discovery. Strands included history, politics and music (memoirs from Viv Albertine and Tracey Thorn), as well as fiction highlights, such as Jessie Burton, South London author of international bestseller The Miniaturist. The festival also featured a strong focus on childrens’ books, with workshops and other participatory events, and a showcase of new writing from the University of Greenwich’s creative writing students. In addition to their festival experience, Alex and Auriol bring their individual professional experiences to the topic of building reader communities. As Creative Director at Hodder & Stoughton, Auriol is responsible for creative strategy, consumer campaigns, positioning and packaging across Hodder’s publishing output. Alex is himself a novelist and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

www.alexpheby.co.uk
twitter: @alexpheby

 

MeikeZiervogel_portrait3_rb

Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press. 

Meike has a background as a journalist, working for Reuters in London and Agence France Presse in Paris and is the author of three novels, Magda, Clara’s Daughter and Kauthar. Meike founded boutique publishing house Peirene Press in 2008, to bring contemporary, award winning European literature in translation to English language readers. Peirene Press specializes in novellas and short novels ‘that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD’ and offers its readers an annual subscription option, as well as individual titles for sale. Peirene Press also produces a newspaper and hosts regular events, including literary salons and coffee mornings. Meike will be sharing her particular approach to building the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship.

www.meikeziervogel.com
Facebook: @PeirenePress
twitter: @MeikeZiervogel

Alexis

Alexis Kennedy, CEO of interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games

Alexis Kennedy is creative director of Failbetter Games, best known for their interactive fiction game Fallen London, which has a large and loyal community. The expansive community and world of Fallen London provided a strong foundation from which to launch the videogame Sunless Sea and was key to its critical and commercial success. Alexis will discuss the relationship between story and community and how it is essential to Failbetter Games’ business model.

http://twitter.com/failbettergames

KateRussell

Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of sci-fi novel ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’.

Kate is currently writing her second book with her online community, enabled by TWITCH streaming and linking to the Elite: Dangerous games platform (the fourth release of the original Elite video game, which was a British video game phenomenon in the 1980s). Kate’s knowledge of how to build a community and work with social media is encapsulated in her book Working the Cloud. She will be bringing these insights to the panel via a specially commissioned video.

Our panel will be discussing questions such as what distinguishes a community from an audience? and why might writers and publishers need to build such communities? We will also consider the implications for the writer‐reader and publisher‐reader relationship

Join us to explore these and other questions  on the 2nd of March. The evening will begin with welcome drinks at 6pm in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery Project Space which is based within the Stockwell Street Building. The panel will follow at 6.30pm.

The Stockwell Street Building is located at 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, London, SE10 9BD

 

Video of this panel event is available here

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Uncategorised

#MakingLondon – a first person account

Guest post by Kasia Wojcicka, Making London participant and marketing assistant

On Saturday 18th July the weather in London was particularly beautiful. It seemed to be a sign that what we wanted to discuss on that day was good and important for the city. The ‘Making London’ event at Stockwell Street Building attracted a large group of creative individuals interested in identifying points of urban crisis and looking for solutions to them. This day of talks, workshops and creative thinking, designed to develop a community-friendly environment within the city, was an initiative of Creative Conversations and an interdisciplinary collective, the XDs.

The discussion panel was opened by Fran Boait from Positive Money who delivered a convincing speech about the mechanisms behind money creation. This not-for-profit organisation based in London aims to challenge the current status quo in our city – the highest personal debts in history, unaffordable housing system and high unemployment – which all have roots in the monetary system. It came as a big surprise to most of the ‘Making London’ participants that only 3% of money is physically released by The Bank of England, while the remaining 97% gets created digitally in a form of loans and disappears as soon as we repay them. Positive Money is campaigning to change the national financial system in order to create a fairer and more stable economy for the benefit of and not against the public. Many questions arose during this talk. We wondered how much sovereign money we actually needed. Society is obsessed with money. It is now socially deviant to be a citizen and not a consumer. But maybe money should only be an option? After all, it is merely a measure of value and not the value in itself. By supporting local Positive Money groups in London we could all attempt to have an impact on this issue.

Another example of excellent team work, which creates changes for the better, is The November Project. Their concept, a boat, created to become an arts hub, run by zero carbon tidal powered technology, will not only be community friendly, but also a green-energy solution. It will offer a money-saving alternative while eradicating the use of damaging fossil fuels from Thames River. So far, however, it has met with a lot of scrutiny and negativity from the local authorities. Everyone agreed that we should not let projects like this sink – they benefit us all. The title of Moira Dennison’s powerful speech –‘Thinking Globally, Acting Locally’ – could not be more true in our times.

Following the creative projects theme, Sydney Levinson from Barry’s Lounge gave us a lot of useful, metaphor-packed tips. He point out that every creative practice should be sustainable – run with not only Mary Poppins’ fun and Hannibal Lecter-like passion but also an underlying business model that is sound. It is important to be resilient in order to deal with plans going wrong. Nearly every project is based on collaboration with other people, whether on purpose or accidentally. To be successful, we need to trust each other to ‘catch the brick’ before it falls on us. However, not every piece of advice given by others is useful, so it should be carefully tested against our own business model. Creators of projects need to be like the Babel Fish (in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)– using a separate language when talking to their audience, compared to with funders and different again with collaborators. Sydney himself calls himself a ‘babel fish accountant’. He shared with us a number of great examples of playing by the rules of the environment in his creative practice. A very memorable one was House of St Barnabas at Greek Street in London – on the top floor it runs an academy teaching the homeless to work in the hospitality industry, on the ground floor they find employment in a busy Soho club.

During the speeches a graphic scribe visually summarised the speakers’ main points as well as the participants’ own ideas and concepts which emerged from the discussion. We realised that the way out of our powerlessness might, in fact, be acting local. We asked ourselves – is planning created to avoid mistakes, or maybe it comes out of them? The communities want value – but who is going to create it – the government, the council, or maybe businesses, networks or even just the individuals?

The talks were followed by the Mapping London exercise, during which participants shared their memories, values and issues about living and working in London on a gigantic map of the city. It created a picture marked by unique, personal experiences. Often the perceptions of one place were extremely different from each other – some people were happy to have managed to leave it, while others claimed it to be their haven.

Once we mapped our own experiences, J. Paul Neeley invited us to think a little less literally and see the world around us through metaphors. Yossarian, a creative search tool, provides an alternative to traditional internet tools, such as Google or Bing, which limit us greatly by coming up with stereotypical explanations, slogans and telling us what to think. Yossarian invites us to find new meanings and rethink what we already know. Doing a number of searches with results ranging from only slightly lateral to serendipitous and infinite in their possibilities, encouraged us to use metaphor and creative thinking more, while learning about the world around us. After all, knowledge is power but imagination is more important than knowledge.

We then, with the help of Giles Lane of Proboscis, looked at outliers in communications, social behaviour, health, work, leisure, housing and transport-related issues currently visible to us over the horizon. We highlighted them in a graphic form and started looking at what potential impact they could have on us and the city in the future, in which new directions we may go, as everyday commuters, rental tenants, NHS patients or social media users, and discussed the emergent themes, many of which oscillated around isolation, tension, privatisation and searching for alternatives for practically everything, in the context of over-massification, the need for sharing and global, rather than national, thinking. Based on our findings, we created story cubes with six key words describing the themes in connection with critical concepts, such as standards, efficiency, labour, infrastructure, logistics, energy or waste. We then placed the cubes on our map of London in areas most affected by these factors.

In an experience design workshop led by Nicholas O’donnell-Hoare we worked in three teams  with the task of designing a piece of disruptive technology that did either good or bad.  We often make bad decisions in terms of finance, climate change, healthcare or policies without realising the hidden reasons for this. In order to think beyond our usual mindset, Nicholas presented us with method cards which had three categories: motivation, accessibility and habits. We shortly discovered that planning is much easier if we consider what motivates us – the piece of technology could be instantaneous – something that happens straight away, when we get an instant reward for using it, it could also be imminent, if the result is easier to notice, more obvious, or it can tap into immorality. Another category was accessibility – the scarcer a device is, the more or less impactful it can become. If something takes too much of our time – we may give up on it, if it’s too expensive, it might become impossible to buy. On the other hand, it might in fact be seen as a desirable product. To connect these insights to current issues, we could ask – if solar panels were twice more expensive, would they be more popular in climate change tackling? Would people see them as a must-have object of luxury? The last category connects to our habits – routine is one of the key factors in our life – it is common that we want to know what is going to happen on a Sunday morning, but we might also change our actions based on various triggers – boredom or stress could turn us into smokers! We realised that it is much easier and fun to design a piece of technology which will be bad for us, than go through the complicated process of designing one with a good effect. Playing the bad designers helped us release our dark side in a creative way and see how much manipulation we are subject to in everyday life.

During the final mapping workshop we were asked to put the results of all sessions onto the map and draw connection points. Based on mapping these experiences, the participants discussed the points of crisis and potential actions that could be taken to challenge them. We came up with a unique urban tapestry, which represented the memories, needs and hopes of real London inhabitants. It is much easier to realise our problems when we see them right in front of us!

The ‘Making London’ event gathered a group of very creative and open-minded individuals from a variety of backgrounds. We managed to come up with many problems, which could be discussed further and solved in the future. Some of them were very simple and could be sorted within a few days. Future ‘Making London’ events will concentrate on finding points of action and implementing the solutions into the city life. Many participants were impressed by the openness and ability to listen to each other of a group of people who have never met before – a value which should not be taken for granted in a world, where often individuals with a different perspective are not listened or even heard.

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.

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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!