myths of innovation

insightful and humourous slideshow discussing the nature of innovation, especially relevant with all this ranting and buzzword craziness going on lately… hat tip to charlie for the link!

ip neutral and why the ceeb will NEVER be the beeb. le sigh.

***update

the cbc does indeed fund and partner certain initiatives in this regard, such as the digital development initiative with nmbc and bc film: link

reading up on the bbc innovation labs, which were recently relaunched after a hiatus of sorts in the uk. it’s highly awesome, and fills me with a sense of envy towards the monarchy, a bit of frustration to know that our own people’s-history-of-hockey-cbc doesn’t have the resources nor would ever do anything as risky/dare i say innovative as this, radio 3 aside. interesting that the bbc, a state-supported organization no less, is fostering this type of exploration and experimentation, and providing the resources to make ideas fly. mmmm!

the deal with the bbc innovation labs is this:

The Innovation Labs are a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers, working across both Future Media & Vision platforms.

We are inviting independent companies from across England, Scotland and Wales to pitch ideas in response to a briefs set by New Media & Vision commissioners across the BBC.

moar…

GameON: Finance is just around the corner

 
***UPDATE  we’re looking for a few volunteers to help out with day and evening – for registrations, OneXOne meetings, etc. please drop me a line if you’re interested – 4-4.5 hrs at a time, and all volunteers get a free pass to the conference – michele {at} interactive ontario {.} com.

whew – what a week ahead! we’re just pulling together the final odds and ends for io‘s GameON: Finance, the games industry investment forum i’ve been working on the past few months. it happens january 17 and 18 at the grand banking hall of one king west. this building is gorgeous – definitely an echo of the old financial institutional era with soaring ceilings and marble everything – a lovely venue.

as for the event itself, woo! GameON: Finance is designed to bring together members of the games industry, the investment community, educators and policymakers -with a strong focus on the financing and business development of games. we’re hoping to facilitate some fantastic conversations and connect people for future opportunities.

as for the speakers…

eric zimmerman, cofounder and chief design executive at nyc’s gamelab will be kicking off the evening keynote reception on january 17th. i caught eric’s talk at ocad’s mobile nation conference in the spring of 2007 – his energy and brains will bring a great dynamic to the conference. on january 18th, our morning keynote will be the fabulous richard iwaniuk, director of finance at bioware, maybe canada’s only firm that can say they’ve raised capital from bono (or at least his private equity firm ;). richard’s keynote definitely raises the bar for the rest of the day!

the panels throughout the day range from monetizing tech IP, case studies, models for growth in emerging channels, negotiating funds, what both ides of the table are looking for, positioning products, the effects of public policy and the drivers of innovation. our speakers range from investors, policy specialists, publishers, studios and analysts – a great lineup of people for some great conversation. register here, and our early bird price expires at midnight tomorrow! hope to see you there!

return to yyz

sacher torte & ruby port

back from vienna a week already, followed by days of unpacking the new house and wrapping up loose ends for work. it was an interesting trip, and an interesting conference.

while the content was good and engaging, i hate to say it but knowledge, creativity and transformations of societies was poorly organized and not very well thought out, which is a shame as it could have been so much better with just a bit of different effort, ironic given it’s name and mandate… a few things that bothered me…

panel locations weren’t advertised (even general street signage was lacking) and were spread across the city, there was little in the way of networking and meeting with your fellow attendees. and there wasn’t any wifi, which, isn’t so important in the long run.

but those were the little qualms. the biggest problem was that the organizers rescheduled the panel i was on about 6 days before the conference began. originally set to go on friday, we were moved to sunday, which meant that some people missed the panel as their flights were leaving sunday afternoon, or that they were rescheduled to present at 8am. yikes!

beyond that, the content was really really great. mark rectanus, from the university of iowa, spoke about the tensions between institutional knowledge and emergent knowledge (universities and wikipedia, for example), and ways to reconcile this through teaching, dialogue, active participation with one’s students, etc.

and tatjana chorney, from st mary’s in halifax, spoke about transformational teaching methods that also speak to mark’s themes – that while instructors still need to communicate a historical or contextual knowledge base in their curriculi, there’s also an increased need to facilitate and broker knowledge acquisition, insight and analysis as well – the skills and creative impetus to understand and act upon information.

my paper touched upon the underlying dynamics that aid in that facilitation – how groups form, how they trust and read each other so that knowledge can permeate throughout a community. three overlapping areas, and i’m honored that i was able to speak to theirs and the others work. well done, everyone!!

vienna itself is a lovely city – bourgeousie architecture and winding laneways, grand palaces and wiener wurstl stands everywhere. i completely fell in love with the food – especially apfelpunsch, and the people were kind and hospitable. looking forward to another trip in the future!

media lab toronto is born!

casecamp6 took place last tuesday at the century room, and was a really incredible night full of awesome cases, announcements and people. eli has really raised level of conversation and built a fantastic community around casecamp, which has now partnered with achilles media (the producers of nextMedia). congrats to all – and looking forward to the future. tom has some great notes on the evening as well!

media lab toronto also presented their inaugural project – TXTris, an interactive SMS projection where text messages sink down from the sky onto a hilarious toronto skyline made of tim horton’s boxes. congrats to patrick, gabe, michael and dory, and i can’t wait to see where this will go!!

all this useless beauty

cali balles, photo

i came across this paper* while researching for my project and prepping for the last lecture of the year before presentations, and it really highlights some of the ideas i’ve spoken about previously as well as given articulate phrasing to some really interesting connections in the relationship between craft, design and digital technology. craft and design have had a schism since the industrial revolution, when, for all intents and purposes, design was born. greg calls design ‘creation for reproduction’ – making with the direct intention of replicating, and thus requiring systems and standards to ensure exactness throughout that reproductive process. and most digital technology reflects this, presenting us with clean and simple efficiencies of form but very little humanity. i think that craft, however, embodies a bit more of our humanity as the unique experience of making by hand can’t be replicated and our tools and processes do not become extensions of ourselves, but rather interfaces in an empathetic relationship with the materials, the ideas, the user and ourselves. and beauty.

jayne wallace and mike press (the latter of whom is speaking this week in halifax at nscad university’s neocraft conference- i SO WISH i was there) express their thoughts on the role of beauty in craft, it’s approximation in design and it’s role in creating better digital technologies.

1st part of the excerpts below (2nd to follow shortly)

Beauty, we argue, plays a vital role in humanising technology and ensuring its cultural relevance… Industrial design can
employ the illusion of beauty to temper the beast of technology by providing a veneer of desire, seduction and usability. But let us not confuse eternal beauty with the passionate but fast fading blooms of desire. We enjoy the delights of the G4 Powerbook as much as the next fashion-conscious academic, but only as a well designed one night stand at the orgiastic party of our consumer culture.

moar

what i learned from the arts & crafts movement

photo by 3blindmice

from my post from last week, and some really inspiring conversations since, these are some of my thoughts and a bit of rationale of the connections that’ve been flitting thru my head over the past few months…

• people are happier when they have control over the nature and outcome of what their goals, as well as the process in which they can work. the desire to make is innate – we desire to be heard and to leave a trace of our voice, in materials, events, systems, etc, and i think we strive for integrity in our tone of voice.

• objects/services that represent the values and integrity (or the brand, if you will) of the maker have a stronger attraction and potential for engagement.

• objects that retain traces of those who made them speak not only of the context in which the thing was made, but also create a sort of relational continuity with the maker*. our perception of objects and their social systems is intersubjective, and the flavour added here becomes personal and human, providing space for social practice, creating narrative and future legacies.

moar

iLunch 6.03

Hey! we’ve been planning a really awesome event for this Friday November 16 at the Gladstone Hotel – iLunch 6.03 – (ad)ventures in mobile. there’s a great lineup of panelists, one-on-one meetings after the panel proper, and a tasty lunch! Details below, and hope to see you there!

(ps – big props to sebastien chorney and io’s mobile committee for taking the reins on this session’s program!!)

(Ad)Ventures in Mobile
Opportunities in mobile marketing: A discussion on mobile content, applications, user experiences, business models, and integrating the strategy that works for you – with special guest speakers:

* Adrienne Clapperton, Producer, BiteTV
* Gavin Newman, Executive Producer, Virgin Media Television – UK
* Andrew Osmak, Senior VP Business Development, Lavalife
* Derek van der Plaat, CEO, Jambo Mobile Solutions & Silverbirch Inc.

Moderated by:
* Claude Galipeau, Principal, The Galipeau Group

Discussion description
This iLunch session will be dedicated to exploring the future possibilities for mobile – both the content and the applications required to get content to intended market. The guest panelists will examine the medium of mobile in order for traditional content producers to get up to speed on the status quo, emerging opportunities (and numerous challenges). We will also look to other media platforms such as broadcast, broadband, music and publishing, as well as out into the social climate of society to consider unique opportunities and rate of innovation on this platform. We will ultimately focus on how to exploit the personal nature of mobile devices through content and applications to enrich the mobile experience for the end-user.

A panel of progressive members of the mobile community as well as leading thinkers and innovators in multi-platform content will use this context to discuss opportunities for Ontario mobile businesses to create these types of commercially viable applications and content for a global market.

stealing what’s real?

this is a fascinating signal – a 17 yr old kid is arrested by dutch police (and 5 others are detained for questioning) for allegedly stealing over €4000 worth of furniture from Finnish SNS Habbo Hotel. From the BBC:

The six teenagers are suspected of moving the stolen furniture into their own Habbo rooms. A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said: “The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites.

“In Habbo, as in many other virtual worlds, scamming for other people’s personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while. We have had much of this scamming going on in many countries but this is the first case where the police have taken legal action.”

Virtual theft is a growing issue in virtual worlds; in 2005 a Chinese gamer was stabbed to death in a row over a sword in a game. Shanghai gamer Qiu Chengwei killed player Zhu Caoyuan when he discovered he had sold a “dragon sabre” he had been loaned.

that line between on and offline implications is getting pretty fuzzy – yikes!

also gizmodo is covering the story

thx to kyle for the fyi

arts & crafts revisited

***update below***

a few weeks ago i gave a talk on the arts & crafts movement that emerged during the latter part of victorian britain, from roughly 1860 to 1900, and i was taken with the similarities between now and then, in relation to the changes and/or transformation our culture has undergone over the past twenty years or so; and i think i’m still in teacher-mode, so this is a bit of a long post. while the circumstances and contexts are very different, there are arguable parallels in the nature of how people responded. lately i find myself more and more fascinated by the past incidents of massive change, thinking about what insights into the future can be gained by looking back.

bit of history…. originating a few centuries prior with the printing press, the industrial revolution took hold in the early 1800′s with the advent of mechanized innovations in the textile industry, and the mechanization of labour quickly spread to other industries and spurred the production of goods towards extraordinary volumes, creating a greater need for regulated tradeways (rail, road, canal, etc) and urban development. mass production of goods was rampant, newly established factories hired workforces in the thousands, and a new middle class of entrepreneurs and nouveau riche emerged.

by mid-century, the industrial revolution was reaching the crest of its first wave, transforming every aspect of british culture while it gained strength as a global empire. it’s critical to remember that these changes were happening for the first time ever, accelerating human life into the modern age at a pace that barely allowed time to gain vantage on the present before hurtling into the future, all the while changing the expectations of what that future might hold.

more after the jump…