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Volatiles

August 15, 2016 · by emergentformau

IMGP3877-2

It’s been a while and I shall get writing to bring some of the projects from the last couple of years to the site because there has been a wide range of projects and some interesting connections between them. Some dead ends too which also adds to the thought process.

One that was recently published on the iBooks store (yesterday) is the culmination of a project with the Edith Cowan University group called HealthInfoNet. It is the first of a series we will be doing to create mixed media publications to offer a broader array of access points to some important research – in this case the use of volatile substances in Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander communities.

One task was to bring the many facts and figures from the original publication and develop a narrative arc for an animation to begin the book. While the knowledge of petrol sniffing was widespread some years ago, significant developments by BP in their Kwinana research lab resulted in the development of low aromatic fuel. Drops in the use of petrol in some communities was as high as 95%. To celebrate this achievement BP produced a wonderful short video which they granted us permission to use.

The use of photographs to give the book a tone and feel was also an interesting challenge as it is too easy to try to use stock photos or stray into culturally sensitive territory. In the end a narrative of using nature to capture aspects of the story, drawing the life out of the land, ants under the surface and then the colonising aspects of plants on the coastal dunes. I shot all of the photos around Bold Park near the coast in Perth.

Next in this series is the review of the use of illicit drugs and we are working on the next photographic theme with Aboriginal elders and also creating the narrative for the animation which I will again do with Peter Ryan.

Craft of Multimedia

July 3, 2012 · by emergentformau

The unbelievable growth in the capacity of people to take pictures, make music or films and generally record life in this Century has created an enormous potential. This potential used to be in the hands of creative professionals exclusively 15-20 years ago but just like type setting and then desktop publishing, the democratising of the tools has led to proliferation – good and bad. The craft of multimedia is in danger of being lost like the craft of wooden boat building.

Apart from the obvious issue of where do we put these media objects, there are questions of how do we combine them to tell stories and will we be be able to do either in the future when standards change or technologies leave our current media behind.

Combining the media used to be called multi-media back in the day. Various frameworks for doing this have come and gone over the years – think Hypercard, Director and yes, even Powerpoint (& Keynote) although their use has been limited to bullet point aggregation by far too many people. I remember David Byrne (Talking Heads) showing the potential of Powerpoint as a media framework with some wild multimedia only to have this ignored by the crew who do decks. It even provoked the great Edward Tufte to write a book about it.

Then there was the web whose growth has gone unabated to the extent that this is now where the objects lie but not so much the stories in the same sense as multimedia in the past. At first it lacked the capacity in both speed terms and in the sophistication of the tools then, well then a lot of people thought that was about that could be done on the web – with the limitations. Since then though we have apps and more recently, iBooks.

A lot of people will only consume iBooks but with the release of a framework for authoring media objects, iBooks Author – new tools are springing up around this latest media framework. Great stuff but do we port our Hypercard decks or look at this anew? Drawing on the power of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript and publishing standards (EPUB3) we can now generate aggregated media to tell rich, interactive stories again using modern standards that can be viewed from many platforms even the web if we do it right.

Have we lost the capacity though to make these rich and engaging stories filled with interaction and wonder? I don’t think so but now the old pro’s who created great digital stories last Century can pass on the skills or craft to the young app makers and web developers and themselves get excited about what is possible in the combining of two eras.
Could be immensely exciting and huge fun. I’m in. It would be wrong to see the craft of multimedia lie in disrepair.

Learning from students

May 27, 2012 · by emergentformau

One of the great things about the workshops on Learning Space Design last week was seeing the students interact with the different furniture and settings in a thoughtful way. Then to record their thoughts and take the ideas back to the tables for discussion. Some of course, couldn’t wait that long and engaged in discussions over lunch. Fantastic.

Another thing that impressed me a lot was the eloquence and thoughtful conclusions and commitments from the tables at the end of the day – most from the students on video in front of 200 people. Surely this is a huge source of ideas, imagination and experience we should tap into when designing anything from classroom furniture through various spaces through to whole school dynamics and space use.

Why stop there? In a time when the options for learning are exploding in terms of technology support, space design, context, timing and mode of learning – who knows what works better than the student. Couple this with a teaching staff who can tap into this source of ideas on a continuous basis for refining, sharing and extending the thinking across the school and even beyond.

Then we jointly develop winning innovations that take each unique learning space to reality.

Parallel Services

January 11, 2012 · by emergentformau

I was thinking about the amazing experience I just had buying a new MacBook Air, how new digital marketplaces are making things so simple – not to mention fast. This is not even considering the power of a completely integrated experience from someone like Amazon through their Kindle Fire. Contrast that to how we shop for specialist things like food by going to multiple specialist shops. The separate shops also offer some resistance to going backwards on your journey, ie they are somehow serial in nature. If you get the meat, then the vegetable place doesn’t sell what you want, it is hard to go back to change the meat order.

Ideally, the produce and ingredients would assemble themselves around the menu as the dish was being designed by sharing knowledge about availability, fit and broader measures like nutritional value. Then you could cook what you felt like or needed with few impediments other than your own capabilities. To some extent various players are grappling with this but in a very awkward way. Services should be integrated in parallel, not serially.

The thought that many services offered to the community are like the High Street shops. Each in a silo with their own business culture and rules, offering what they have and offering it in a strange sequence which might not fit a real world situation, especially complex ones. This sequential, silo approach may offer efficiencies in tight verticals but denies the complexity in the world that requires integrated thinking and appropriate systems. The recent spate of finger pointing in response to emergency services criticism related to bushfires in WA is a good example. The same might be said for areas like mental Health, except that the new Mental Health Commission is talking about a new integrated, person-centric approach. Where is the digital ‘marketplace’ equivalent? This is one area that could draw on the parallel services model.

In some ways that is the big difference between primary school and high school. High school tends to specialise in silo form. Integration in the form of projects is harder there than in primary schools where the teacher has a brief to integrate. I can’t help thinking that the logic extension of a push to project-based learning or challenge-based learning in schools must be supported by a model similar to parallel services and a digital ‘marketplace’. Take that a step further and we get a school where the students learn inside projects, in the community using digital tools to achieve access to expertise in an integrated way. They can then return to school for the hard problems or assessment. The inside-out school. Could bear scrutiny.

Freeing Learning

November 30, 2011 · by emergentformau

Wow – just come off the face of a wave of inspiration called Stephen Heppell. Apart from the two of us talking continuously for the three days he was here, it was great to have time to spend with educators, innovators and others interested in doing things differently. There was a genuine buzz at each of the meetings and events we ran and pleasing for the first foray by Emergent Form into the notion of catalytic presences.

So, with potential created there comes a realisation that this is the start of something. A place from which to view the future and one that is considerably different from today which in turn demands some focus. A recurring situation throughout the last 10 years in fact, how do you bridge the gap between the vision of what is possible and the view of here, today.

One big idea that fits that bill and really shakes the trees has become almost a meme in itself. The notion that we can separate learning from education and get much better results is an underlying theme of the talks we had. This has surfaced in the video below (when I get it to embed) but also in numerous articles such as this one in Fast Company.

Taking this concept it is then possible to think about the notions of learning set free, with all of the techniques, philosophies and experience of centuries of teaching given new contexts, fewer artificial constraints and new places to flourish. This is what is really exciting. Allowing learning to find its own level and context and adding new possibilities such as technology, which is a part of all our lives, leaves a gap in the thinking at a strategy level. There is little evidence of a view of learning which can accelerate around obstacles like education systems and factory buildings at a National or State level and yet this could be a wonderful proving ground for new innovations to bring along the whole system.

Aside from that there are new contexts for effective learning such as the home, the corporate world and other areas of cultural crisis where learning of traditions, customs and culture has been neglected. We should continue to explore where we take learning now it is freed, how that might work and how it blows apart concepts such as ‘life long learning’ where that is considered to be a part of education.

Tapping into the Past

October 11, 2011 · by emergentformau

It’s been a funny week. For some reason a recurring theme has been comprised of both ‘history repeats’ and ‘why don’t we learn from history?’ Not necessarily in those words but some of this is fuelled by my having to tackle mountains of research papers that stretch back 20 years and are currently taking over much of the dining and lounge rooms – ideas that never got full exposure or were before their time.

For example a recent discussion on new iPad apps for learning quickly turned into an explanation of the thinking about rich media, interaction and engagement was done in the early 1990’s where we drew from many influences including psychology, painting and even theatre. I still think Brenda Laurel’s thinking on that hasn’t finished playing itself out, especially on the design of things like digital exhibitions and learning spaces. Then you see iPads issued to kids sitting in rows as if it were 1899.

A separate conversation extrapolating the new world facing Universities of nimble outsourced players, distributed students and intermittent engagement bringing the Universities to be brands, assessing authorities and at the core a return to the Oxbridge model of 500 years ago. Similarly, the implication of a design-driven economy on an appropriate capability network to support it. Some answer seems to have been there long ago in crafts, guilds etc. but what is the modern equivalent and where does this intersect with education and workforce learning?

Not that all of the answers lie in the past, some things around us are new and unique.

Its more about casting an eye across a range of options, some of which can be drawn from the past or from different fields, circumstances and even conditions. What seems to be happening is that many decisions (and the people making them) are so overwhelmed by complexity, change and speed that considering the past is an option too far. Yet considering how someone else has resolved an issue before, making logical links to similar circumstances and even seeking inspiration from the past can all contribute hugely to dealing with today’s thorny issues. This is where the notion of using the capability network and a framework for evaluation to support complex decisions and strategy is essential. It is this thinking that is helping EF develop an evaluation framework for learning technology in different contexts. More on this project soon.

New spaces

September 21, 2011 · by emergentformau

Frank Ghery's Stata Centre Building in MIT, Cambridge.

Last year I was able to spend some time with Tim and Laurence of Brand Architects discussing the Classroom of the Future project they had just taken to China. Inspiring stuff that points the way to a future of re-thinking the design of spaces for learning. The connections between this design and its application to other variants across both K-12 and VET learning led to some great ideas but shifting the mindset of the people who minimise risk and repeat formulaic buildings was tough.

This was the latest interaction with such ideas. In the past I have discussed new exhibition spaces and experiences with Roy Stringer, learning spaces with Stephen Heppell, visited places like my first Frank Ghery building, the Stata Centre at MIT and seeing elements of how these might come together in the future such as the Toyota sponsored Auto Mechanic facility in Canberra which borrows ideas from theatre. New thinking about the nature of experience, the changing dynamics of these spaces and the use of technology as an integral part of the experience were common to all.

The recent publication of the new book by B Joseph Pine II, one half of the influential duo who released The Experience Economy 10 years ago, has got me thinking about these things again. ‘Infinite Possibility’ now extends the playing field and also begs new questions about how we design buildings, spaces, furniture and tools to fit this new world? It is not a trivial side issue any more. Learning, innovation creativity and collaboration drive new economies.

How does a space look when a child can pick up their technology (iPad) and explore the world in real time using the inbuilt camera and augmented reality? What sort of nooks are useful for:

Introspection and reflection,
Collaboration in the real world or virtually,
Mentoring, or
Teaching?

Once the industrial presets are thrown out, there can be seen a wonderful array of new possibilities for how we design real world knowledge spaces. This doesn’t stop at learning and schools. If a modern economy is characterised by knowledge work, innovation and collaboration; what do offices, walkways, shops and transit areas now begin to look like. Possibly not what we have developed over the last century or so. The Stata Centre shows what can be done, the portable Classroom of the Future sets an additional set of possibilities and who knows what else is possible. If only we can match the pace of change of technological possibility with the design of spaces, nooks and furniture – it would open up a new world of possibilities that might reverse the trend of shrinking marginal benefit in what we build.

New Projects to Come

September 5, 2011 · by emergentformau

The content on this site will reflect where we have come from for a while. Much of what has been done in the past has relevance to today because in general, it was done as applied research – looking forward. There will now be some new applications of older stuff as well as some brand new projects that are taking shape right now. More of them later.

This will be the place to track the evolution of Emergent Form and as the name suggests we are not sure what it will turn into. One thing is for certain, it will be as terrific a ride as the last 10 years with KT Studio.

As far as new projects are concerned, there are some exciting possibilities becoming apparent. One of those will begin with the forthcoming visit to Perth by Stephen Heppell, one of the world’s most eminent educational technologists. Emergent Form will be working with partners to ensure this visit is well attended and recorded but is also the start of a range of strategic conversations that will enable us to bring Stephen back again next year.

Modern Economy

September 2, 2011 · by emergentformau

An Interview with Paul Houghton for the Creative Cities Summit held in Florida, USA in 2005

This was quite an honour to be asked to be a part of the conference which included people like Charles Landry, Carole Colletta and many others. The downside of being in government was that such a trip had to run the gauntlet of minders, gatekeepers and ultimately receive the blessing of the Premier. I didn’t get to go but did this video as a starter for the discussion and got some good feedback on the thinking. This thinking then went into a series of talks I did in Perth called the Economy of Ideas – more on that later.