garrettc / tags / creativity

Tagged with “creativity” (9) activity chart

  1. Pixels, People, and Play

    Seb is known for large scale installations and events that bring people together using technology, like his interactive digital fireworks, glowstick voting, and PixelPhones - a system that connects all the smart phones together, turning each member of the audience into a single pixel of a huge pulsating display.

    Hardware and software is evolving so fast that creative coders can barely keep up, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what depth sensors, projectors and smart phones are capable of.

    In this down to earth session, Seb will explore how technology can create huge interactive playful events and encourage a sense of community rather than everyone having a private experience with their own screens.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/lee-delisle/

    There’s a good chance that you’ve seen Seb before: he travels the world spreading his infectious enthusiasm for coding and teaching others how to join in the fun. He’s one of those technology-agnostic creators. He used to do a lot of work in Flash. These days he’s more likely to be using JavaScript or Processing or Corona or whatever cutting-edge technology has currently got him all excited.

    Lest you think that Seb dabbles only in the realm of pixels, he has been known to use the physical world as his canvas too, making digital fireworks and projections with Processing.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 8 months ago

  2. Making Friends: On Toys and Toymaking

    Toys are not idle knick-knacks: they allow us to explore otherwise impossible terrain; fire the imagination; provide sparks for structured play. They do not just entertain and delight; they stimulate and inspire. And always, they remind us of the value - and values - to be found in abstract play.

    Toymaking is not an idle habit. Toys are a fertile ground for creators to work in. They offer a playful space to experiment and explore. They are a safe ground to experiment with new techniques, skills, or ideas. Though they emerge from no particular purpose, they expose purpose and meaning through their making. Toymaking ranges from making realistic simulations of life to producing highly abstract playthings. And everyone who makes things - out of paper, wood, metal, plastic, or code - has something to gain from making them.

    Trying to draw a thread through what, it turns out, has been a lifetime first shaped by toymaking, and then spent making toys in idle moments, Tom will take in (amongst other things) woodwork, Markov chains, state-machines and fiddle-sticks, to examine the values of toys and toymaking to 21st-century creators.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/armitage/

    Tom Armitage is a game designer at Hide & Seek. He’s also a hacker in the true sense of the word, wrangling code to create a Twitter account for Tower Bridge and print out eight years of links.

    He writes on his blog Infovore (and elsewhere) about code and play. You should read it. It’s excellent.

    He also talks about games, technology and social software.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 8 months ago

  3. Boil, Simmer, Reduce

    The actual process of design, the path you take on the way to creating something, is in many ways a “meta object” that can be applied to any design problem.

    Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 back in the early eighties, Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art both in his role leading the team at mN and on brendandawes.com, a personal space where he publishes random thoughts, toys and projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects.

    In this session Brendan talks through his three step process: boil—filling your head with many ideas and possibilties, simmer—taking time to consider, and finally reduce—removing things till there’s nothing left to take away.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/brendan-dawes

    Brendan Dawes is Creative Director for magneticNorth, a digital design company based in Manchester, UK. Over the years he’s helped realise projects for a wide range of brands including Sony Records, Diesel, BBC, Fox Kids, Channel 4, Disney, Benetton, Kellogg’s, The Tate and Coca-Cola.In 2009 he was listed among the top twenty web designers in the world by .net magazine and was featured in the “Design Icon” series in Computer Arts.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  4. The Auteur Theory Of Design

    Why is it that some projects never rise to the level of the talent of those who made it? It’s oft said regarding good work that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts—a company or team comprised of good people, but yet which produces work that isn’t good.

    In his session, John will explain his theory to explain how this happens—in both directions—based on the longstanding collaborative art of filmmaking. Learn how to recognise when a project is doomed to mediocrity, and, more importantly, how best to achieve collaborative success.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/john-gruber

    John Gruber writes and publishes Daring Fireball, a somewhat popular weblog ostensibly focused on Mac and web nerdery. He has been producing Daring Fireball as a full-time endeavour since April 2006.

    He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  5. Jam Session: What Improvisation Can Teach Us About Design

    Have you ever had a spontaneous creative triumph, perfectly in sync with your team?

    A passionate believer in improvisation as a design skill, Hannah’s session will talk about the importance of this technique in her own design process and what lessons can be borrowed from improvised music.

    From the jazz masters to the humble basement band practice, musical concepts such as timing, structure, rolls and expression have many lessons for designers creating an off-the-cuff interface.

    Hannah will explore how the methods of music translate for a design/development team, as well as sharing personal stories and techniques for those times when you need a bit of a jam session.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/hannah-donovan

    Originally from Canada’s icy north, Hannah Donovan is creative director at Last.fm, where she’s worked for the last four years. Before moving to London, she designed websites for Canada’s largest youth-focused agency, working on brands such as Hershey, Heineken and Bic. Hannah also plays the cello with an orchestra and draws monsters.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  6. Everything The Network Touches

    The work we’re collectively doing—opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work—is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-redefining mission.

    It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world.

    It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/tom-coates

    Tom Coates is a technologist and writer, focused on the shape of the web to come and on developing new concepts that thrive in it. He’s worked for many prominent web companies including Time Out, the BBC and Yahoo! where he was Head of Product for the Brickhouse innovation team. He’s most known for the Fire Eagle location-sharing service, and for his work on social software, future media and the web of data.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  7. Kerning, Orgasms And Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks

    Freud popularised the term, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”, to describe how adjacent villages—identical for all practical purposes—would struggle to amplify their tiniest distinctions in order to justify how much they despised one other. So you have to guess how much he would have enjoyed design mailing lists. And, Perl.

    Truth is, to the untrained (un-washed, un-nuanced, un-Paul-Rand’d, and un-Helvetica’d) outsider, discourse in the design community can sometimes look a lot like a cluster of tightly-wound Freudian villages.

    So, how is the role of design perceived by the people who are using the stuff you make? What role (if any) should users expect in the process of how their world is made and remade? What contexts might be useful in helping us turn all of our obsessions into useful and beautiful work?

    Can an Aeron chair ever be truly ‘Black’? Will there ever be a way to get Marketing people to stop calling typefaces ‘fonts’? And, when, at last, will the international community finally speak as one regarding the overuse of Mistral and stock photos of foreshortened Asian women?

    By leveraging his uniquely unqualified understanding of design, Merlin will propose some promising patterns for fording the gap between end-users and the unhappy-looking people in costly European eyeglasses who are designing their world.

    Is there hope? Come to Brighton, pull up a flawlessly-executed mid-century-Modern seating affordance, and we’ll see what we can figure out together. One village to another.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/merlin-mann

    Merlin Mann is best known as the creator of 43folders.com, a popular American website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  8. The Value Of Ruins

    Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria”.

    In his session James will ask if, as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/james-bridle

    With a background in both computing and traditional publishing James Bridle attempts to bridge the gaps between technology and literature. He runs Bookkake, a small independent publisher and writes about books and the publishing industry at booktwo.org. In 2009 he helped launch Enhanced Editions, the first e-reading application with integrated audiobooks.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago

  9. The Designful Company

    In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovators, companies can no longer merely “unlock” wealth. Today they have to actively “create” wealth, or end up in the fossil layers of business history. As a result, brand-builders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in the next management revolution—the rise of the designful company.

    In his session, Marty will explain why design thinking—in its broadest sense—will become the new best practice, and how you can leverage your unique position as a brand-builder to transform the way business does business in the 21st century.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/marty-neumeier

    Marty Neumeier began his career as a designer, but soon added writing and strategy to his repertoire, working variously as a designer, copywriter, journalist, magazine publisher and brand consultant. Having developed brand identities for companies such as Apple, Adobe, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard. He has also authored three bestselling books (‘The Brand Gap, ‘Zag’ and ‘The Designful Company’) which discuss how organisations can bridge the gap between business strategy and customer experience.

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    —Huffduffed by garrettc 2 years ago