Invention Mobs: The Event

 Social Media, Technology  Comments Off on Invention Mobs: The Event
Oct 052011
 


On Wednesday, October 5, 2011, my students gathered in the Neely Room at Georgia Tech to showcase their experimental and interactive creative projects.

Students developed and crowdsourced a variety of games, music videos, websites, fictional narratives, and much more, for the Georgia Tech community.

To learn more about the project, see my explanatory essay at: https://www.leeannhunter.com/2011/09/28/invention-mobs/. To preview some of the student activity on the projects, see the student blogs at: https://www.leeannhunter.com/invention/.

 

Invention Mobs: The Concept

 Social Media, Technology  Comments Off on Invention Mobs: The Concept
Sep 282011
 

My fall 2011 class was inspired in large part by Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. What I love about Daniel Pink’s book is that half of the book is also a handbook. He offers activities as suggestions for developing specific types of creativity. Thus far, the students have blogged about Symphony and Play (see, for example, “Cutting Out Excess” and “Playing with Comics”).

I have, in the past, recommended the book to my engineering students at Georgia Tech. It’s not enough to be good at math, science, and engineering. Creativity, innovation, and creative thinking are absolutely paramount to achieving any kind of great success in their fields. (Even the university’s Strategic Plan acknowledges this need.)

The Process

I didn’t know it at first, but Ze Frank (multimedia, social media comedian), was also going to be inspiration for the course. At the last minute, on the first day of class, I decided to show my students Ze Frank’s Chillout song. While the resulting song is good, what makes it really good is listening to the song after reading through the process.

Ze shows us how the idea for the song was born: an audience member writes that she feels lonely and wishes he could write a song for her.  Ze then proceeds to create a chorus, which he sends out to a small group of people, and asks them to record themselves singing along.

The final result of all this multimodal collaboration: a chorus of strangers telling this one lonely woman, “hey, you’re okay, you’ll be fine, just breathe.” Over and over again. The power is ultimately in this idea that strangers want this woman to feel okay, and maybe these strangers want me to feel okay too. A sense of goodwill emanates from the song and the chorus of voices.

Major lesson achieved on day 1: the secret is in the process, not the product. I realized right away that this song project would serve as the foundation for what would become their “Invention Mobs.”

The Experiment

On the third day of class, the invention mobs began. I asked students to bring a handmade object to serve as inspiration for the activity. The activity was inspired by a technique mentioned in Cameron Herold’s TED Talk “Let’s Raise Kids to Be Entrepreneurs.” Herold suggests that instead of telling your kids stories, that you give them three objects and ask them to tell you a story.  I’ve tried this out with my own nieces and nephews with great success.

Why shouldn’t I try it in the college classroom? The power of play is gaining traction in the workplace and in the classroom.

Time was limited. Students had 25 minutes to group up and craft a creative work out of their objects. Most students, because of the example that I gave them, went with the story option. The last 25 minutes were spent presenting their stories to the class. I insisted at the last minute that they incorporate nonverbal actions into their storytelling. And they did.

The result: I watched students tell silly stories, acted out in silly ways in front of a class of peers, on the third day of their first year at college.

While I worried that the activity lacked substance or was too immature, I found that we had achieved a very clear objective: make something together and engage in spontaneous fun with your classmates. Rather than “show and tell,” they presented their own version of “make and show.”

The Project

This exercise was to serve as the foundation for what would eventually be called their “Invention Mobs.” I posed Ze Frank’s Chillout song and the experimental class activity as exemplars of multimodal, collaborative, creative projects. I challenged my students to use these examples as inspiration for organizing their own projects.

Perhaps the projects could have gone off without of hitch had I stopped there. But I insisted that their creative process include the contributions of strangers. It sounds simple enough, but many students have really struggled to get strangers to willingly (and preferably, joyfully) contribute to their projects (see, for example, “Stranger Danger”). Other student groups experienced some success (see “Creation Flows”). At the same time, I think this added challenge has made all the difference.

Students are nearing the final culmination of their projects, and I look forward to posting the results.

TechShares Symposium

 Economics, Social Commerce, Social Media, Technology  Comments Off on TechShares Symposium
Dec 072010
 

On December 8th, my students will showcase their capstone projects on collaborative consumption, a rising movement in consumer culture that promotes community, sustainability, and economy, defined by Rachel Botsman in What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.

I asked students to bring collaborative consumption to Georgia Tech’s campus. The college campus is fertile ground for collaborative consumption, and it is a market that has yet to be tapped. Here are a few of their ideas:

  • Nexus Connections: a campus transportation system consisting of solar-powered carts with zipcar-style access (don’t miss the video!)
  • Buzz2Buzz: a campus network for buying, selling, and trading goods
  • Buzz Bikes: a bike-sharing program built from a repository of pre-owned bikes
  • Food for the Forgotten: a volunteer program that redistributes leftover food from GT dining to the homeless population
  • Tech Hubs: collaborative work spaces designed to facilitate group projects (see especially the Google Sketch-Up rendition)
Oct 032007
 

Of course Teufelsdrockh’s Philosophy figures clothes – in one way at least – as the invisible fabric of society, but this passage – with its crude literal denunciation of clothes – does indeed convince us to desire a “world out of clothes,” though our German philosopher would have us believe we are nothing but an “air-image” in this “so solid-seeming World.”

From Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) [1832-3]:

“While I – Good Heaven! – have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dinger? Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?”

Jun 072007
 

According to this New York Times article, social interactive web sites ala MySpace are cropping up that are targeted at young girls with their simple communication tools. More specifically, most have in common the real-life obsession girls have with “dress-up.”

Sites like Cartoon Doll Emporium feature a selection of dolls kids can personalize. “Belle of the Ball,” the doll I personalized below, is the only doll which had the selection features we’re used to in Avatar designs, such as Zwinky. But most, oddly, were basically online versions of paperdolls, in which we drag cutouts of clothing onto the body of the model. (Perhaps these dolls are targeted at a younger age set, who might delight in simply dragging and dropping the doll clothes. I think it’s a poor use of technology.)

What surprises me most is how much I loved personalizing my “Belle of the Ball,” as I do all the avatars I create for myself. Am I creating a technological image of the person I perceive myself to be? fantasize myself to be? I never know. And yet there always seems to be “rightness” in each color or style of clothing I select. It’s an amazing power to be able to fashion oneself without limits, without consequences.

May 012007
 

As I was taking a walk around the block in (what has been for days) the smoky and stifling air of North Central Florida, I realized two important things about my previous post.

(1) In my catalogue of “vital stats” one might wish to know about another person passing in the streets, I thought only of superficial mostly virtual details and nought of what might concern us in encounters of the flesh. On the streets, would we not also be tempted to want to detect in our hand-held monitors anything and everything from the common cold to STDs to genetic diseases, if we could? That is, if technology and society fostered such a practice? I say this as I imagine, my eyes still sore from the stinging atmosphere, that disease will soon consume us.

And so my rose-colored invention darkens.

Even more so in my second realization: (2) Environmental pollution and disease have not yet consumed us, which suggested to me the idea that it will consume us, and therefore this rosy world I live in is an environmental equivalent of the pre-9/11 world. The Floridian atmosphere struck me as so unhealthy as to not want to be out in it. My absence of concerns about disease, pollution, or any other condition of the fleshy world, in addition to my fixation on the rainbow-colored MySpace visions of the virtual world, suggest to me that life remains uncomplicated as far as public health in the U.S. goes. Yet that smoke-laden polluted air dropped a heavy veil over my lungs, rendering my previous post suddenly bittersweet.

Virtual Living

 Social Media, Technology  Comments Off on Virtual Living
May 012007
 

I previously wrote on the idea of my life as a character, i.e. what if I had an author hovering above me, narrating my every thought, sensation, memory, or basically any quality not visibly or audibly expressed. I think of the novel as a technology for reconfiguring the presentation of the individual, and as such, the novel enables me to conceive of additional categories for understanding my life.

Computer technology takes this reconfiguration of life to a new plateau. In our experience of other people on the Internet, we almost always have access to all sorts of vital stats for other people–we can see a name, a photo (or many, representing multiple times and situations), birth date, location, interests, habits, videos, blogs, etc. In other words, I’m provided with a predictable frame for beginning to know someone, without ever having to enter their physical space, or even introduce myself.

Aaahhh, so I think, what if, out on the street, someone could do the equivalent of hovering their mouse over my image to access all this information about me, before even waving at me? More practically, what if I simply had a chip embedded under my skin and as others pass me, they could scan me with their palm-sized computer and retrieve any number of stats–am I single? what’s my occupation? how old am I? where am I from, where do I live? do I have anything in common with you? It would make the introductions between strangers much more efficient, no?

Sound crazy? Not really, it’s simply a more real-time version of what we get on the Internet. The reason I’m thinking of this now is that on today’s Rocketboom I was introduced to project WoW, created by Aram Bartholl of Denmark. His concept for the project stemmed from his experience of gaming technology in Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft, that feature characters’ names hovering above their heads. (I wonder, of course, why names are so significant in this game and whether or not if I click on the character I get access to additional information.) In any case, I am fascinated by Aram Bartholl’s decision to carry out a performance of this concept of names hovering over heads into the streets.

The result, while clumsy at times, is rather startling. As I watch the videos, my impulse is to hover my mouse over the person to find out more information. Which led me to the subject of this post, and my invention for replicating virtual life on the streets… It’ll happen.