Design Informatics Innovation Inspiration Tours
Design Informatics Masters Programme Director Lynne Craig shared some highlights of this year’s Design Informatics Innovation Inspiration Tour in London…
I don’t usually post about my teaching practice. But hosting the third (and last) of my annual Design Informatics Innovation Inspiration Tours in London with dream team Susan Lechelt and Kyle Morrison, this year, I wanted to share some highlights…
The wonderful bespoke session with Gate One Consulting, part of Havas was a clear highlight. The kindness and generosity of long term collaborator Joe Kearins and colleague Cailyn Miller who openly discussed the challenges and opportunities of embedding data-science and design in the real world, left a lasting impression.
‘We help clients find a data driven culture‘. Joe Kearins, Gate One.
This resonated, particularly in my work with Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) and the Data-Driven Innovation Initiative community, but also in the positioning of, ‘data-as-a-culture’ to actively and intentionally create using AI and ML to predict the future (for clients) and drive action. We explored the ethical implications and infrastructure of public, assessable and sustainable data points, and revisited the role of the, ‘translator’ of this knowledge as a growing area for investment, reflecting on the unique student profile identity of Design Informatics as a conduit and convener of data-science and design knowledge. A behind-the-scenes-tour also included highlighting the impressive architectural design artefact staircase at Havas, a physical data-capture of the evolution of the area, made from old railway lines. The floor throughout the building was made from Moorfields eye hospital. A cultural convergence of re-purposed industrial and hospital materials to the digital and data economy as mirrored in EFI as a recycled hospital building… small insights, big patterns.
Students visited UCL London with Susan Lechelt and loved the Global Disability Innovation Hub, lead by Catherine Holloway. I have previously developed collaborations as part of my founding role of Digital Anthropology Lab from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London with this grouping, and was great to see more cross-overs and shared interests emerge around areas of innovation, materials, data and care…
A trip to the ridiculously satirical data physicalisation arcade, The Novelty Automation Museum is highly recommended.
The tongue in cheek spectacle, acted like a fun-park mirror to distort interpreted ideas of the future, creating a data-fulled and playable physical world.
Highlights included projects, The Expressive Photo Booth, The Alien Probe, The Small Hadron Collider; Quantum Physics for Beginners.
Kyle Morrison brought a jigsaw piece from YokoOno exhibition as a physical data collection point of the day, and we ended the session with a great tour by Insider London, walking streets in Shoreditch where I co-founded Holitionfrom in 2008.
We listened to the history of this distinct time in London, fusing innovation and entrepreneurship to the buildings and streets from 2008. Fulled from adjacency to multiple creative, technology and finical markets, a special, naturally evolving and difficult to replicate ecosystem sparked the beginnings of what became locally known as, ‘silicone roundabout.’ It reminded me of the time UK Government, with Nick Clegg, launched the Digital Catapult and Silicon Roundabout vision from our Holition offices in Curtain Road against a backdrop of cutting edge motion capture suits, haptic interfaces, AR, and VR; innovations ahead of their time…in another lifetime.
Most intriguing retail innovation was the ‘Blue Mountain School,’ a closed door shop for replicating and sourcing archive artefacts. New business-models still emergent. Today, we visited the somewhat academic presentation of Patric Prince, Digital Art Visionary at the V&A. Here we were introduced to the first artistic, playful and experimental developments of computer imagery, and the adjacent and timely relationship between access to science, technology and engineering which enabled these developments, crafting new insights from re-purposed tools and fuelling a landscape for others. A little abstract in immediate impact for our students, born in different times, yet highlighting the still important and pioneering development of computer graphics, before they were called computer graphics.
Against a backdrop of AI driven image generation accessible in your pocket via smart phones, the cultural immediacy and omnipresence of computer graphics often lacks connection to the emergence of the field; or the associated entrepreneurial permission to change, develop and adapt it beyond given platform technologies.
This cyclical shift is happening again. From the 2008 economic crash prompting silicone roundabout and others, and now with AI image generation suggestive of infinite potential, yet still unknown. The historic value of knowledge, and of playing with emergence of technology to develop new tools is not to be underestimated, but requires generations to be empowered with the tools and permission to question, build and create, again. In some small way, perhaps the Design Informatics Innovation Inspiration Tour will support this next generation to consider new areas of possibility.
Futures, they are here before we know it, and they are gone before we remember them.
Q. What will our DI Innovation Inspiration students be doing in 10 years? A successful and productive time. Onwards. With thanks to all for participating and walking so much… 🙂