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We are still at the beginning of the digital revolution and there are huge opportunities on the horizon: the rise of wearable tech and the internet of things, and many more we don't even know yet. This poses new challenges in the creative industries. UALFutures organised a Co-Creating day to set up some ideas for how they can do this at University of the Arts London (UAL). The mission is to create a digital toolkit for students; a space for students to explore the possibilities of new technology in their creative practise. This was held on two separate days. I decided to get involved as I am UAL alumni and also because I love innovation! So here's an insight to what happened and lessons learned...
CO-CREATING
Having diverse people = having diverse solutions.
Although we sometimes glorify the idea of the lone inventor or innovator, most innovation comes from people working together. There were about 25 people and we were split into groups of five. And although the Digital Toolkit is for students, there was an equal mix of students, alumni, teachers, male, female, young, mature and industry professionals taking part. This meant that the innovation would have a diverse range of ideas, skills, and knowledge from the past, present and future.
#Share and Learn. It's not about YOUR idea, but what the group can generate..there's no personal Intellectual Property in Co-Creation! There was no prep before we were put into teams - We generated all ideas in that team and that way all ideas however big or small would be heard, so there were lots of ideas on paper and we were able to select the best one(s).
6 year olds making computers
We listened to a presentation from @alecmolloy who most importantly was wearing some cute trainers - by Adidas/Issey Miyake and spoke about www.kano.me, an educational company for younger generations. He made making a computer seem like a walk in a park...if 6 year olds are doing it? "You can do anything if you put your mind to it" he says to me, when I seek some reassurance that learning to code is difficult. I agree with him - now I know that babies are building computers there really is no excuse now :)
The following week we had another day to generate new concepts from the ones we had already built on. There were new people this time, and since I had the pleasure of attending both meetups, I found it amazing how new concepts had developed from the previous session ideas. For example in the first week our group came up with the idea of a platform where students could share skills in short tutorials. Then in the second week the new group I was in, we came up with the concept of crowd sourced skills tutorials.
We heard some amazing presentations from industry to help spark our innovation, such as Erik Rodin from Hyper Island who made a very important point about Innovation by making us get off our arses and go to the row in front / or behind. This was annoying as I had a good seat in the middle ;) but proved the point that not all innovation is necessary. We need to remember that innovation is to make things better, not just innovate for the sake of innovation. He also illustrated ( see pic below) how Google has innovated from simple search engine to google maps, google drive etc and who knows what next.
We also heard from Mike Johnstone, Cofounder of Technology will save us, and www.hirschandmann.com
One thing is clear, this is going to be one of the best times to be a student!
And you might be able to see some of our innovation concepts come to reality at UAL's careers festival Artsmart. taking place on 9th July 2015.
And you might be able to see some of our innovation concepts come to reality at UAL's careers festival Artsmart. taking place on 9th July 2015.
