A trip and a tip

The last Friday in November we lectured at the Gotland Interactive Park incubator in Visby. The talk was on entrepreneurship in the creative field. There were a lot of people attending and we got many interesting questions.

We had a really fine day in Visby with our hosts from GIP, Johan and Jonas from Pitchin, a company that does industrial design. Actually we had such a nice time we almost forgot to go home.

We're also stunned by the beautiful thank you-card we got:


Johan and Jonas from Pitchin w/ fire and kittens!

A tip for those who haven't yet discovered this:
TED, Inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers

Crossover Nordic

By Karin

In September this year I participated in a 5 day workshop called Crossover Nordic. It was an intense experience and its taken me some time to process it. The idea was to bring people together from the old media (TV, film, documentaries) and new media (web, mobile, games). We spent almost a whole week together at a remote place called Slussen on Orust, an island on the Swedish west coast. The focus of these five days was to come up with new ideas for cross media concepts.
The workshop was mentored by Heather Croall (Director of Doc/Fest), Paula Le Dieu (Executive Producer and Consultant Networked Media), Jason Daponte (Managing Editor, BBC Mobile Platforms), Neil Richards (Director, The Mustard Corporation) and Mark Atkin (Commissioning Editor, SBS Australia in London) and it was lead by Frank Boyd (Unexpected Media). Personally I was a little disappointed that Matt Adams from Blast Theory weren't there since he's also one of the Crossover mentors normally and I'm interested in the work he does. Any way there where some great people there and especially Paula was an absolute angel.

So what happend?


We were around 20 persons from Sweden, Denmark and Finland, with professional experience from working with either new or old media. It was a nice bunch of people I must say, and very hard working. The only problem was that we where too hard working. There was no time to even gasp for air as we where thrown into new assignments and brainstorms. Frank said he was surprised that none of us had a break down or a fight at day two, since that is what usually happens. But being Nordic must mean being very polite and even tempered because none of that happened (luckily!). You can read more about what happen during the workshop in Jasons blogg.

Here is my feedback on the whole thing:

I'm trying to use the six hat evaluation technique by Edward De Bono that we learnd during the lab.

Red: for emotional, instinctive response
Yellow: for what is good, what works well
Black: for the problems, the things that are wrong or could be improved
Green: for any suggestions about how things might be done differently
White: for any facts, information or data
The sixth hat is blue: it stands for process.

Red:
The workshop experience for me was fun but tough. I felt a bit bad afterwards actually. I've been thinking a lot about it, so it must have had an affect on me. I felt frustrated about being pushed in to things I didn't feel was good for me. I generally don't like being just in the head for such along time in a row, not being able to get exercise, relaxing, being outside. I felt this had an affect on my performance in a bad way, and made me somewhat lose my commitment in the ideas that came up. Fortunately there was a lot of nice people around so I still had a good time and some really good discussions.

Yellow:
I think it works well going away for a few days to do something like this. This brings less distractions and more focus on what we were doing.

Working together this closely with people in a group really speeds up the process of getting to know each other, which is a good thing. When I met everyone a week later it really felt like meeting old class mates.

Practicing pitching is very useful.

I really liked the exercise where we had a platform (Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia etc.) and a genre (horror, romace, etc) and we had to produce a story around it. This made us think in new ways (I just wish we had more time..).

Black:
I think its a problem that when you don't get enough rest and exercise your brain slows down. (And a lot of food and alcohol is not the solution!) With a slow brain you can't be very innovative. Another problem was the lack of understanding among the participants of different media (new and old), what's technologically possible and the benefits they bring concerning the users experience. This made it difficult to come up with ideas where cross media were used in innovative ways. In the beginning I remember some talk about using the storytelling ability of the people from old media but I think this got lost along the way. There was too much focus on using as many media as possible and not enough on why.

Lastly a problem I find is very important but it has more to do with what happens after the workshop. What to do with the ideas? Where can you find funding for cross media concepts? This is clearly an issue to bring up (maybe we did and I don't remember).

Green:
My suggestions is to start the workshop by letting the participants explore one medium at the time (especially the ones that are new to them) and to form an understanding of the value the different media can bring to a concept. Its great to show inspiring examples and to let the participants evaluate why these worked so well (and what didn't work).

Secondly, MORE FREE TIME! And maybe some organized outdoor activity. I strongly believe this is needed to process the ideas.

More inspiration in general would be nice. I like the idea of starting a brainstorming session with a piece of music, a poem, a story, a short movie. Anything that can make you think with the heart is very useful.

I would also suggest a discussion about funding and what's needed to go on working with an idea.