London Embraces Digital Media

I covered this story on 17th of September as a BBC London freelance, South Bank Centre, London.

Published on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2008/09/18/
london_embrace_digital_media_feature.shtml

A one-day digital design event which aims to help the public in their everyday lives has been held at the South Bank Centre.

Digital Design Day (D3) gathers together industry professionals, interactive designers, technologists, and emerging multimedia graduates to explore ideas related to the web, 3D, interactive design, the collision of art and digital technology, and how the modern digital media can interact with the public.

The event, held on Wednesday, was part of the week-long 6th London Design Festival
’08, organised by technology company Carrenza and supported by the London Design Festival and dynamo London.

Online projects promote museums

The idea of user generated content and a user-friendly interface was under discussion in a session called “3D to 5D”.

Colin Jenkinson, from Cogapp, introduced work his company had done in conjunction with museums. He discussed agile and creative online projects created by digital professionals aimed at attracting new audiences.

These projects hope to encourage audiences to share their thoughts and particular interests through the web.

“If the audience can upload the content they produced on the web for instance, after their visits to these museums, it could be a much stronger attraction for the new audience,” Colin said.

However, he also cautioned that larger museums might be put off and find it quite hard to react in such a highly interactive web 2.0 environment.

Avatars interact with public

Stacey Spiegel, the CEO and co-founder of Parallel Worlds Labs, agreed with Colin saying “sharing and re-creation is the root”. He discussed how the virtual world can positively influence people.

“For instance, utilising avatars (a computer representation of yourself) to assist older people is a very good example. These “avatar staffs” can help with their disabilities and mental health problems,” he said.

Second life is a 3D virtual world in which people can socialise with each other, create businesses and start to trade. To some extent it reflects their emotions and thinking, and this is what digital professionals are trying to develop by using these avatars more positively to help the public.

Bridging the gap between technologists and designers

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, CEO of technology and design consultancy Tinker, raised an interesting issue which currently concerns the industry; technologists and designers sometimes cannot communicate in the same language with each other.

She said: “60% of technologists come to us expressing an interest in design, however only 40% of designers show an interest in digital technology.

“The separation between design and technology can be tracked back from art schools and science institutes.”

Stacey Spiegel also expressed his concern: “It is a mental division and we should try to bring them together. Educational institutions should try to bridge the gap between design and technology.”

Portfolio clinic

The i-Design ’08 Portfolio clinic, held during the event, was designed to create opportunities for emerging designers, web developers and students to showcase their work to the industry professionals.

It attracts more than 20 companies based in London, Brighton, and other English regions.

“The work from the multimedia/interactive graduates certainly is not as professional as the industry people,” Malcolm Garrett, the creative director at AIG commented.

“However, some of their work possesses a strong creativity, which is crucial for the industry, and the content showed their particular interests in certain areas.

“What they should now try to think is how to present this fascinating content into a better structure and layout, and make the whole piece of work more dimensional.”

The design director, Steven Pearce, from Poke said the works on show were very diverse, and covered a wide range of design aspects, from print to multimedia, from interactive design to 3D, and demonstrated the younger generation’s strong interest on digital design.

When asked if it was ever possible to hire someone from the portfolio session, Malcolm said potential employers believed that as long as the graduates possessed the fundamental basics; certain skills, life-long learning drive, capacity to develop their skills, passion and enthusiasm – they certainly had enough potential to work in this field.