Curating Media and Design

Dissertation: Going Live - Collaborative Video Production After Television

Thu, 31 May 2012 11:36:00 +0200

This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. We have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Author: Arvid Engström, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University

Access here: http://www.tii.se/mobility/?page_id=1695 or have a look at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-75931 where it might also show up.

ABSTRACT - This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. The work frames a design space that spans across both the social and technical domains. It associates emerging collaborative practices online with new means for producing and broadcasting media in real time, over mobile networks and using low-cost consumer technology just as these technologies are becoming widely available in the world. As a premise, we sketch a scenario where groups of non-professional users, enabled by new technology available in their mobile phones, produce live media collaboratively. We use detailed ethnographic inquiries into the practices of expert media producers to inform design and spur innovation of new technology. Over the course of the design research process, we have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Parts:

Mobile broadcasting – The whats and hows of live video as a social medium
Lean collaboration through video gestures: co-ordinating the production of live televised sport
Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time
Mobile collaborative live video mixing
Amateur vision and recreational orientation: Creating live video together

Aca-article: Can Big Media do "Big Society"? On hyper-local journalism.

Thu, 31 May 2012 11:19:39 +0200

This paper examines a UK-based commercial local news network and evaluates the level of audience engagement by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting.

Thurman, N., Pascal, J. C. & Bradshaw, P. (2012). Can Big Media do “Big Society”?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics.

http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1125/6/Thurman_Pascal_Bradshaw.pdf

ABSTRACT - The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model.

Aca-articles: The open and participative city - from Cumulus 2012

Mon, 28 May 2012 18:00:00 +0200

The papers from the Cumulus conference in Helsinki has now been posted online. The theme this year was “Open, participative city: how design knowledge can support public services in the development of open, participative city environment”.

You find papers on these themes:

open interactive city
innovative services
designing sustainability
what is the function of art in contemporary society, and what is artistic research?
dialogue of art and design in education

Access here: http://cumulushelsinki2012.org/academic_papers/

Aca-article: Developing collaborative services in local contexts

Mon, 28 May 2012 17:26:23 +0200

This paper reflects on two years of research of joint work with the local players in Milan, Italy, with whom designers working on Feeding Milan have started to build a significant network of multifunctional and collaborative services.

Authors: Daria Cantù, Marta Corubolo, Giulia Simeone, Politecnico di Milano

Open access here.

ABSTRACT - This paper presents an ongoing applied research case of Design for “place” development (Meroni, 2011): Feeding Milan, energies for change. The project aims at restoring the sustainable food chain and the relationship between the city of Milan and its productive countryside, by activating new de-mediated services for food provision and local tourism. It advances the hypotheses by centring the design process on the communities of shareholders and potential users it is possible to design a high-quality service and, by activating local synergies, it is feasible to get high performance and well-optimised distributed system to support service delivery. The argumentation shows how such these hypotheses have been verified by the design practice during the activation of the pilot projects on the local scale. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the project improvements and to reflect on two years of research of joint work with the local players with whom designers working on Feeding Milan have started to build a significant network of multifunctional and collaborative services.

RELATED - Lecture: A Human Centered Approach for Design for Services, by Anna Meroni.

New book: Challenging the Innovation Paradigm (and the pro-innovation bias)

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:45:07 +0200

This book attempts to bridge the separation of discourses on desirable and undesirable consequences of innovation, and it contributes to our understanding of how the dominant discourse of innovation is constructed and reconstructed at different levels of society.

Authors: Karl-Erik Sveiby, Pernilla Gripenberg and Beata Segercrantz

Large parts of this book are available on Google Books. Published by Routledge, 2012.

Aca-article: Making things happen - Social innovation and design (by Ezio Manzini)

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:28:09 +0200

This paper introduces the notion of social innovation and discusses how design can stimulate and support it. An introduction to a new field of design: design for social innovation.

Author: Ezio Manzini

Open access: http://sigeneration.ca/documents/Makingthingshappen.pdf

ABSTRACT - The paper introduces the notion of social innovation and discusses how design can stimulate and support it. In order to do that, it considers several examples of radical social innovation, proposing three main typologies of innovation processes: top-down, when strong actors take the lead to promote and enhance a social change; bottom-up, when social changes emerge from grassroots activities; and hybrid, when a variety of bottom-up and top-down innovations take place within the framework of a coherent program. The paper indicates how each one of these three typologies implies some design initiatives,(meaning sequences of actions characterized by a clear design approach). Considered as a whole, these design initiatives and capabilities define the area of competence of a new field of design: design for social innovation. This can be defined as a constellation of design initiatives geared to making social innovation more probable, effective, long-lasting and apt to spread.

Report: The Art of Exit - In search of creative decommissioning (by Leadbeater and Bunt)

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:23:20 +0200

This report argues that truly transformational public innovation requires creative decommissioning: actively challenging incumbent service models and mindsets to invest properly in new approaches. As public resources are increasingly precious, creative decommissioning will become a critical capability for public services.

Authors: Laura Bunt, Charles Leadbeater

Published by Nesta, The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, UK.

Access full report here: http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/ArtofExit.pdf

MORE - The case studies presented in this report are all examples of attempts at creative decommissioning. These are not all stories of success, nor blueprints for how this is done well. We have come across many examples of brave efforts that have encountered huge opposition or delivered limited change. We have met teams left exhausted by trying to bring about sweeping reform too quickly and without adequate planning.

Nonetheless, strengthening this capability is going to be critical to the public sector for the foreseeable future, as constraints on public finances intensify and the demands on public services continue to grow. This paper is designed to open up the ground for more discussion, research and practice of what constitutes creative decommissioning – to help those using and working in public services to navigate this difficult and contentious space.

Articles co-written by academics and industry people are more cited

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:01:39 +0200

The report “Publication cooperation between businesses and the higher education sector in Sweden” from The Swedish Research Council shows that in medicine, publications produced by businesses and universities in cooperation were more frequently cited than publications produced by businesses alone. Other fields of science showed similar patterns.

An English summary is available here, including the full report in Swedish.

CFP: Medium, Immediacy, Intermediality - “medium” beyond current disciplinary frames (Postmodern Culture, due June 1, 2012)

Mon, 21 May 2012 21:24:12 +0200

This issue of Postmodern Culture aims to gather ways of seeing the term “medium” beyond current disciplinary frames. Rather than take the routes of literary or film studies, art history or communication theory - and rather than see media as discrete, pre-constituted categories of aesthetics or mechanics - we seek to put the category of medium into question, and in doing so, to facilitate approaches to the various mutually dependent media whose boundaries and frames might now seem less conclusive.

Abstracts due June 1, 2012.

Read full call-for-papers: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v021/21.3.article.html

CFP: Cities to be Tamed? Questioning the role played by urban planning, design, and policies in the urbanisation processes of the global South (Nov 2012, Milan)

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:35:00 +0200

International conference aimed at simultaneously exploring and questioning the role played by urban planning, design, and policies in the continuous urbanisation processes affecting the so-called ‘global South’.

Abstracts due June 15, 2012. The conference will be held at Politecnico di Milano, November 15-17, 2012.

Read full call-for-papers: http://www.contestedspaces.info/

Free first issue of the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:57:01 +0200

This is a peer-reviewed journal that aims to bridge the gap between media and communication research and actors with a say in media production, devoted to research with an applied angle. It has a particular focus on contemporary issues and practices of media firms as they are experienced by their actors journalists, executives, publishers and proprietors.

First issue available for free http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ajms/2012/00000001/00000001

Call for Chapters: Research and Design Innovations for Mobile User Experience (due May 30)

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:02:40 +0200

Mobile user experience has gained momentum as a significant area of research in recent years. This book will aim to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area.

Chapter proposals due May 30, 2012. To be published by IGI Global

Full call: http://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/720

INTRODUCTION - Mobile user experience (UX) has gained momentum as a significant area of research in recent years. The emergences of mobile human-computer interaction (HCI) as a separate, unique field in HCI discipline with diverse academic activities and body of literature supports this idea. Although mobile devices allow users to stay connected anytime anywhere, diverse user groups still suffer from usability issues caused by the design of mobile interfaces and the limitations of mobile devices (Kaikkonen, 2009). Although the mobile HCI community is trying to create and adapt research methods, tools, and infrastructure for mobile-specific challenges and opportunities (Kjeldskov and Stage, 2004), there is still a limited number of studies on mobile UX, which addresses both researchers and professionals that work in the field of mobile HCI. Secondly, it is not so difficult to observe that the product managers in the sector of mobile communication often ignore usability issues and UX processes because of time and budget limitations. However, when it comes to delivering innovation on mobile devices, new philosophies, researches, and approaches should be taken into consideration.

OBJECTIVE - This book will aim to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area. By including cutting-edge empirical studies and live cases from the professional sector, it intends to prepare a reference book for the mobile human-computer interaction community that will reveal key mobile user experience issues with solid data and guidelines and will support innovative mobile UX design processes.

New Book: Virilio and the Media - an introduction to Virilio's media related ideas

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:02:15 +0200

Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio’s examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy. This new book, Virilio and the Media, presents an introduction to Virilio’s important media related ideas.

Author: John Armitage, Professor of Media at Northumbria University.

Published by Polity Press: http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745642284

MORE - Virilio and the Media presents an introduction to Virilio’s important media related ideas, from polar inertia and the accident to the landscape of events, cities of panic, and the instrumental image loop of television. John Armitage positions Virilio’s essential media texts in their theoretical contexts whilst outlining their substantial influence on recent cultural thinking. Consequently, Armitage renders Virilio’s media texts accessible, priming his readers to create individual critical evaluations of Virilio’s writings. The book closes with an annotated and user-friendly Guide to Further Reading and a non-technical Glossary of Virilio’s significant concepts.

Virilio’s texts on the media are vital for everyone concerned with contemporary media culture, and Virilio and the Media offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to the ever expanding range of his critical media and cultural works.

Call for Submissions: The Car as an Arena for Gaming (Workshop @MobileHCI, San Francisco)

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:03:15 +0200

The car is unique place to be. Gaming in cars, for safety reasons, cannot be like gaming at home, but also not should be. But gaming in cars has the potential, of making use of all the cool properties of the car itself, the practices of driving, and of driving as a socially shared experience.

Due May 25, 2012. The Car as an Arena for Gaming Workshop at MobileHCI 2012, San Francisco, CA, September 21, 2012.

Read full call here: http://workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/mobilehci2012/index.html

MORE - In this workshop, we aim to gather both practitioners and academics to work out the possibilities and challenges of this design space that to our experience has been slightly forgotten about since Juhlin and colleagues’ excellent work on the Backseat Playground system.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

in-car gaming or driving or traffic as a social experience
the car or driving or traffic as a design space for gaming
passengers or children in various car related activities
safe driving in relation car gaming
learnings from game research or the game industry relevant for the topic

Call for Submissions: Using Technology to Facilitate Behaviour Change and Support Healthy, Sustainable (Workshop @HCI12, UK)

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:01:07 +0200

This workshop aims to bring together a multidisciplinary set of researchers interested in the behaviour change through technology across three highly topical domains; non-communicable diseases, greenhouse gas emissions and ageing.

Workshop papers due June 17, 2012. HCI 2012, Sep 12-14, 2012, Birmingham, UK.

View full call here: https://sites.google.com/site/techbehavchangehci2012/

Prism: a tool for collective interpretation, not just fact-checking or copy-editing

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:18:20 +0200

Prism is an experiment in crowd-sourcing, which until now has only made fact-checkers and copy editors of the “crowd.” One of the fundamental questions behind Prism is: what happens when the “crowd” is asked to imagine and interpret, rather than merely transcribe?

Try Prism here: http://prism.scholarslab.org/

MORE - Users interact subjectively with a text and contribute to a collective interpretive energy that has infinite possibilities beyond the highlighting exercise itself in research, in the classroom, or in engaging and experimenting with larger data in the humanities (computational linguistics and text mining, for example). The goal of Prism is to produce aesthetic provocations, that is, visualizations that incite and encourage conversation.

New Book: Media, Place and Mobility - a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:50:55 +0200

With its powerful advocacy of a “non-media-centric” approach, this book offers a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living. Drawing primarily on phenomenological perspectives, Shaun Moores focuses on the ways in which people inhabit physical and media environments, and he explores the bodily and technologically mediated mobilities that are involved in this activity of dwelling. His discussion includes many specific examples of mobility, from the manipulation of remote-control devices to the movements of walking and driving in the city or of getting around in online social spaces.

Author: Shaun Moores, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sunderland.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=389674

New Book: Cloud Time - The Inception of the Future (on the culture and politics of cloud computing)

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:14:24 +0200

This book maps capitalism’s mobilization of cloud computing in its bid to archive and enclose the future. The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control.

Authors: Rob Coley, Doctoral candidate at the University of Lincoln, Dean Lockwood, Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Media at the University of Lincoln.

Published by Zero Books: http://o-books.com/books/cloud-time

MORE - The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.

CFP: Journalism and Mobile Devices (Nov 15-16, Portugal)

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:37:12 +0200

How do mobile devices affect the traditional forms of delivering news? Can the app economy be an alternative to selling content? Is there a new journalistic language and new journalistic genres for these devices? These are the three themes of this conference.

Abstracts due June 30, 2012. International Congress on Journalism and Mobile Devices, Universidade da Beira Interior (Portugal), 15-16 November 2012.

See full call for papers: http://www.jdm.ubi.pt/index-en.php#CallForPapers

CFP: Platform Politics - Platforms replacing the open web as the default digital environment?

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:08:23 +0200

This issue of Culture Machine will explore how digital platforms can be understood, leveraged and contested in an age when the ‘platform’ is coming to supplant the open Web as the default digital environment.

Full articles due Nov 1, 2012. Special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 14.

ABOUT - Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. For this issue of Culture Machine we are seeking papers that explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’.

The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’ can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue will look to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it will think about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. As such, platform politics requires a distinct mode of engagement, which this special issue of Culture Machine will endeavour to encourage and provide.

We invite contributions on topics such as:

Protocols as machinery of the platform – its common language, including ideas of control and/or the possibilities and limitations of open, non-proprietorial platforms.
The specific relationship between networks and platforms (including the discussion of whether the former are being subsumed by the latter), and distribution vs centralization/aggregation — not least in terms of user created content and content management systems (code politics of algorithms, and the use of APIs).
The question as to whether a process of enclosure is taking place via the struggle over the creation and expropriation of ‘network value’, or whether it entails a more parasitical engagement with, and enhancement of, the existing network architectures.
Visibility/invisibility: platforms as political spaces to be seen/heard, or indeed tactically escaped and eluded.
Resistance: how the above described issues relate to the potential for cultural, political, social and economic praxis, which in turns opens up a space from which to address recent global events. (See, for example, RIMs (Blackberry Messaging’s) enclosure, which ironically creates spaces of resistance as well as disturbance and securitization.)
New software possibilities: for example, Drupal’s opening up and democratization of content management, which perhaps creates a kind of ‘platform commons’? The potential of ‘Diaspora’, the open source social network, to offer a viable alternative to proprietary social media.
The role of intrinsic network tendencies, as opposed to political and economic decision-making, taking in explorations of the relevance of graph theory, the role of power laws and the network-specific characteristics of ‘communication power’.

Please submit your contributions including contact details by email to Joss Hands: joss.hands(at)networkpolitics.org

Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.