global digital creativity research & workshops

I was very lucky to be invited by the Cleveratom team to work with them as part of my ‘Work Experience’ within my Year 10 school curriculm - and what a week to be working with them on!

From the 5th through to the 12th July, Hal and Matt have both been working incredibly hard with students of various ages at the Bromfords School - Wickford, Essex on Creative Radio Production. This was in preparation of leading a cross-media production based entirely on the rather topical entertainment superstar ‘Michael Jackson’ as a tribute to his life and work. The workshops the students took part in during the week, led up to a final showcase which was performed to various Year 6 induction groups from accompanying local primary schools.

The final production consisted of a wide variety of highly-talented performances incorporating modern and contemporary dance and vocal engagement which was led in a ‘radio-style’ format by student DJs with a helping hand from Matt and Hal. Below are a few photos and YouTube videos displaying just some of the songs from the fantastically performed, exciting production.

To access ALL performances and visit our YouTube channel: please click here

During the half term holiday in London Matt and I worked for the BBC running the Networked Identity project at the Science Museum and the Serpentine Gallery. This event was for young people to spend time finding ways of expressing their emotions about the environment that they are in.

Working with us for the week was Christian Nold who has developed a scientific art form called ‘Biomapping’. In brief, this is a lie detector mechanism which you wear as you walk around an environment. The detector measures changes in your state of arousal, or your emotional response to your current situation. Combine this with a GPS device and you have the ability to plot your emotional response on a map of your area… Google maps come in very handy here!

Additionally, throughout the week we encouraged the participants to blog their experiences, photograph and video where they went and keep a project diary of all of it. The Science Museum hosted a number of events for the participants, including free entry into the Science of Spying exhibition - a wonderful interactive event whcih really captivated the young (and old) alike! Rob Skitmore from the Science Museum also ran a morning’s workshop getting the young people to make a telegraph - in one week we travelled from the early part of the last century into the here and now! Rob was excellent, and the activity a great success.
All of this data was important to keep as they were also working towards an Arts Council Bronze award. The Serpentine Gallery had an exhibition of Karen Kilimnic’s work. This formed the focus for the second part of the week. Sophie Higgs from the Serpentine Gallery worked with us for the last couple of days and really helped bring out some very interesting ideas from the group.

There were some problems throughout the week with the technology, which was a bit of a shame. Just about everything electronic which we plugged in at one time or another managed to fail at some level. This introduced an edginess and challenge to the week which we were not so accustomed to, and meant that I spent a lot of time on the telephone talking to Matt about ways around the issues! It wasn’t that each piece of kit died, so much as different pieces were not working together as well as they might have done!

Despite this, by the end of the week there had been an astonishing amount of creativity exhibited by the participants and a display of the work was mounted at the Serpentine Gallery on the Friday. Parents and friends were able to visit, view and share in the work that was done, much of which was at a very high level of achievement.

So, well done to all who took part, thanks to all who supported (including the tireless Katie Holbird from BBC Blast) and special mention to John and Mike from Reflecmedia who went out of their way to ensure we had kit in time for the event to use with the young people.

Although Ultralab is now not my employer (Click here to find out why) the company I now work for will continue the work we started at Ultralab in the field of Digital Creativity. Cleveratom Ltd will continue to undertake groundbreaking global research into how learning can be made better using new and emerging technologies. The example work below is exactly the kind of stuff Cleveratom now does, along with online social software and school design.

Find out how the BBC 2 Wales ident animations were created by visiting this link.

Here are the finished products that were a part of the Christmas festive season on BBC 2W, linking in between each programme on the network. All made in clay and by six year old children, you really need to watch these, click ‘Play Now’ below!!!:

 Watch the Animations! [1:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Watch the BBC TV show about how the animations were created!: Play Now | Play in Popup