Form the book summary:

The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.

Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and independence. Digital media supercharge these dilemmas, as industries merge and media converge, as audiences become co-creators of content online.

The media industries are the pioneers of the digital age. This book is a critical primer on how media workers manage to survive, and is essential reading for anyone considering a career in the media, or who wishes to understand how the media are made.

The Infoscape Research Lab hosts research projects that focus on the cultural impact of digital code. The lab engages in software and other new media tool development, code mapping, interface design, and new media content analysis. The lab is funded in part with grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Media Research Consortium.

Especially in the lead-up to the now defunct Research Quality Framework, one of the things I had drummed into me was the difference between research outputs and research outcomes. Outputs, I have learned, are (merely) the things you make out of your research–products, publications, patents and processes…Outcomes, apparently, only occur when the outputs get taken up and used for something in the ‘real world’–this is what the RQF framed as research ‘impact’.

Links:
Productivity Agenda 2020 summit
The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative

On October 10-11 2008, the third Video Vortex event will take place in Ankara, Turkey, organised by Bilkent University (Department of Communication and Design), in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures. The event will feature a two-day international conference, evening program, live performances and new media art exhibition. As a follow-up to the Amsterdam conference, held in January 2008, and the Brussels conference, held in October 2007, Video Vortex Ankara aims to continue and deepen the debates, while bringing together a wide range of scholars, artists and curators as well as lawyers, producers and engineers.

VV3 submission information

Themes of Video Vortex 3 Ankara Edition will be: Navigating the database, p2p, art online, visual art, innovative art, participatory culture, social networking, political economy, collaboration and new production models, censorship & YouTube, collective memory, cinematic and online aesthetics.

Which came first, the Interaction or the Design?, Source: Interaction-Design.org, 18 June 2008
Submitted by Mads Soegaard, by Jonas Lowgren

Interaction Design” refers to the shaping of interactive products and services with a specific focus on their use. Broadly speaking, there are two main senses of the concept, coming out of different intellectual traditions but increasingly converging in practice and research.

Dialable is a suite of technologies which allows the public to control big-screen content with simple cellphone interaction. Growing out of thesis work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, it is a project by Daniel Liss.

The aim is not to produce a theory of the archive but to show ways in which the archival documents, information gathering and data-driven analysis, the contradictions of master narratives, the inventions of counter archives and thus counter-narratives, the projection of the social imagination into sites of testimony, witnessing, and more inform the practices of contemporary art. p. 22

…as part of the a broad culture of sampling, sharing, and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers. We are fundamentally concerned with the overlay of the iconographic, taxonomic, indexical, typological, and archaeological means by which artists generate new historical as well as analytical readings of the archive. p. 23

Some of the references I noted in this essay:

Books
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

MIT Press Journals
Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, Fall 2004, Vol. -, No. , Pages 3-22
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287042379847

As companies increasingly compete in giant global markets, innovation and design is gaining greater value than ever before. The role of the designer has become pivotal not just to a company’s success, but also in terms of social responsibility, ethics and sustainability. Good design gives competitive advantage and builds brand value. However, the process of designing truly innovative products that succeed has always been a difficult and risky task. How can the designer respond to these new challenges? Why is experimental design and research so important in all of this? What is the contemporary role of design academia?

Tom described how products and design ideas go through a “constant path of evolution” and a highly productive way of working involves “colloborative non-disciplinary” partnerships. In his presentation Tom showed a table that outlined the incubation of future design ideas for marketable products which he called “bottom draw technology”:

5 years - Products that are available now but are generally expensive and not working well.
10 years - Held in the research and development departments of commercial companies.
15 years - University research

He stressed that design briefs need to be “stretched and tested into something else.” The term “experimental design” was used to describe design that is informed by a “creative, artistic process”. The results of these experiments are recorded and reviewed with the idea of working out how they may be used.

In regards to University research he is reluctant to get caught up in pure consultancy work that does not allow for costs to have “time to think.” The paperwork can overwhelm the research. An ideal industry link allows for “process; research and innovation”.

“Project Migration” involves re-packaging research projects to test industry interest.

In the presentation of RCA student work I was intrigued by the way video was used to document design projects - Tom talked about the need for designers to understand how to use narrative in this documentation. A lot of animation, maps, sketches and illustrations where used by students to explain the design process.

References:

http://www.smartslab.co.uk/