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So I´m going to post my personal notes from every session over the next few days. If this picks up momentum I will continue to post work influenced by what I have learned highlighting it and getting the workshop/ session holder´s feedback about it whenever possible.

Please feel free to add your own notes in comments to posts or by linking to somewhere you have posted them ,  along with additional material such as slides and references for more information.

I found watching the pitching sessions very useful as a learning experience. It is interesting to understand how commissioners evaluate the attractiveness of a pitched project. My impression was that there is an inherent bias against projects that are not strongly character driven with alot of dramatic elements. They seem very certain of their audiences´ tastes so perhaps the medium requires this kind of storytelling. I question this from personal experience;  alot of the time I am interested in learning and getting to know processes or environments without all the emotional strings tugged at. I find it ironic that in the knowledge society, “educational” is a dirty word in broadcasting, relegating engaging content that is practically useful to a distant corner on the basis of assumptions about what we find attention-worthy. So it was very encouraging to hear Ann Julienne ´s advice on how to approach technology and science in television as well as Hana Rezková´s thoughts on storytelling about inanimate objects. Multiple conversations with Massimo Arvat and Boris Mitic about their work and approach and still going on in the back of my mind.

At one point I mentioned to Ann Julienne and Hanka Kastelikova that I don´t “watch tv” during a lunch conversation.  And they asked how I knew anything about TV- and in extension, I suppose, why I was at the event pitching a project to them They commented that they couldn´t understand why people who watch content produced for or by Television Broadcasters online say that they don´t watch TV.  The where, how and why of coming across “media content” does change its role and significance, and in extension the nature of the activity of interacting with it. For example coming across a video clip and watching the stream from a blogpost  as part of an ongoing conversation on a particular topic is not the same as passively watching the tv show from via the television set in your living room ( if you even have one). I think what is comes down to is differences in how you choose to  distribute your cognitive surplus.

I also discovered that non-tv or film interactive formats that involve high-quality audiovisual content production are challenging to fund. The reasons as  to why this is the case vary across Europe. In Germany for example,  the public service networks are explicitly forbidden from funding projects that live online unless they have been broadcast on “TV” first according to Claudia Schreiner. Regardless of the reasons it is unacceptable. Not only is this not in keeping with promoting innovation (experimentation) in Europe, it contracts opportunities for people who do non-standard format audiovisual work to operate equally in the cultural marketplace and impedes their ability to build audiences and communicate their work.

It seems  that Broadcasters that have access to public money are rewarding activities that do not encourage us to direct it towards creative content production, but passive “TV” consumption. Am I missing something here?

The objective of the ongoing project is to create an online presence for Bottega Veneta that achieves the following:
• Stimulates multi-channel selling.
• Captures the essence of the luxury experience through outstanding craftsmanship and timeless/innovative design.
• Generates buzz and traffic, both online and in-store.
• Offers new ways to experience the brand through digital innovation.

The question the client and agency were asking is: How do we make a good e-commerce website for our brand?
I re-framed the question to: how do you create an online luxury retail experience? The reason being that I was not convinced of the assumptions made about about what the purpose of their digital presence should be in driving their overall business. I wanted to avoid the trap of discussing / settling details of how a website should look before we even established what users should be able to do on the site and how it would relate to off-site interaction…

My contributions to the project:

• Asking the questions
• Figuring out how to answer them
• Analyzing results and generating insights
• Translating the findings into a form useful to the design team and clients
• Managing client expectations and helping the project manager to deal with a them
  

Adopters of new technologies tend to interpret them in their own way, rather than simply using them as their inventors meant them to be used. There seems to be a deep social need to break free of technology as intended by its designers. This resonates with the yearning for transcendence, that mystics, artists and philosophers have been turning their attention to since time immemorial and which is the subject of recent research efforts in cognitive neuroscience. A case is made for conceptualising the interface as a vehicle for transcendence between different selves. If one accepts it, it follows that user experience can be improved by not sealing in the user in a predetermined role, and in extension by allowing for a more open-ended adoption of technology by users. The paper makes use of empirical data collected during preparation and teaching of an undergraduate course commissioned by Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. It attempts to translate the implications of re-thinking the interface as a vehicle for transcendence into guidelines to be embedded in designing human-computer interaction.

More often than not, political decision makers don’t have the appropriate metaphors to discuss technology. Many of them don’t really use IT besides mobile phones; many belong to a generation where that kind of literacy is really not that widespread. We think this is dangerous: dangerous because it may bring to unsophisticated policy decisions, and dangerous because issues might polarize the European society (like in the case of the Pirate Bay trial), leading to a loss of intellectual perspectives on the technology policy debate.

So I engaged the European Commission into co-founding Wikicrats, a project which addresses these issues. We launched the initiative with a workshop held at Reboot 2009 in Copenhagen and are now working on a large-scale European rollout of the project.

“Nadia performed the self-organising task in an enthousiastic manner, and with professional ambition. Her commitment was very high, and she understood well the meaning of this first step in a very complicated process. Nadia is competent and works hard for her values.” Bror Salmelin, August 1, 2009

Social network scraping + trendspotting + arduino + code + lEDs + dumpster finds= the popculture o-meter lamp.

More info coming soon…

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