News

 

Lecturer Positions in:

Speculative Game Design / 3D Visualisation, Immersion and Simulation / Interaction Design.

Closes: 12/07/2020. Interviews: 29th-3/07/2020.

 

i-DAT is a vibrant open research lab and teaching collective for playful experimentation with creative technology in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, situated within the Faculty of Arts,  Humanities and Business. It delivers programmes of study at both undergraduate and postgraduate level such as BA/BSc (Hons) Digital Media Design, BA (Hons) Game Arts and Design and BA (Hons) Virtual Reality Design.

These programmes embed the production of digital media and design within a framework of creative and experimental artistic practice. They have a rich interaction with MRes Digital Art and Technology and MA Game Design, and a substantial and established PhD community.

They also have strong international connections with the Game Arts Design programme being delivered as a 3+1 at Nanjing University of the Arts and CODEX, an international PGR network. You will be based at the Plymouth campus and would be expected to contribute to this TNE activity.

Three positions are available:

 

 

The University is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive community – a place where we can all be ourselves and succeed on merit. We offer a range of family friendly, inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, staff engagement forums, campus facilities and services to support staff from different backgrounds.

We particularly encourage applications from women, black and minority ethnic people who are under-represented in this area within University of Plymouth.

Please demonstrate how you meet the essential criteria outlined in the knowledge, qualifications, training and experience elements of the job description in your supporting statement.

Please include a PDF portfolio of practice with your application or a link to your personal website.

For an informal discussion to find out more about the role then please contact Andrew Prior by email andrew.prior@plymouth.ac.uk or the School of Art, Design and Architecture by telephone on +441752585150

 

 

 

photo by Ben Kreukniet

 

A new fund to help support SWCTN alumni whose livelihoods have been impacted by Covid-19 (Coronavirus) to continue their professional practice at this critical time.

The Brief

• Is there a creative technology experiment that you can achieve from a position of social isolation? 
• Is there R&D you can do now for a future project? 
• Is there some future-gazing that you’d like to undertake? 

 

SWCTN are offering micro commissions of up to £2500 Offered on a rolling basis throughout May and June

Covid-19 is changing both the way we work and the context for our work. How might our shifting understanding of time, touch, liveness, connection and the way we experience our environment impact on what we do next? What observations or discoveries are you making that you want to hold onto for the future, and what impact is this having on your creative practice?

SWCTN recognises the difficulties that many parts of our network are currently experiencing. Within the context of self-isolation and social distancing, many will have seen work plans significantly changed and income disappear. 

We feel strongly that your work is significant and that it holds real value as we begin to emerge from the current crisis and look to build a different kind of future. We want to support that work by commissioning, gathering, and sharing your ideas. With that in mind, we are redirecting some of our grant funding to buy you time for thinking, planning and innovating.  

We are seeking applications that look to the future and build on the work that you have done with SWCTN to date. Applications should reflect on one or more of the network’s on-going discussions about immersion, automation, and data, as well as the ideas that the SWCTN team have begun to explore more recently around economic resilience, inclusion and environmental sustainability. 

SWCTN values interdisciplinarity, as well as cross-sector and cross-region working, the hyperlocal and the global. Your work might be in collaboration with other members of the existing SWCTN network, or you might want to work on your own. Your output should support creative resilience either in your own work or in the broader community. 

Your response might use text, film, or audio; for example, it could be a prototype (on paper or mocked-up) for a future project, an artefact or object that you create, a reflective essay, or a wireframe for a future web project. It might be something else entirely, providing it can be delivered, shared and meets the other criteria – we’re willing to consider it.

SWCTN website here:

Sloth-bots (http://arch-os.com/projects/slothbot/) feature in Kristian Kloeckl’s new book The Urban Improvise
Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities.

 

 

The Urban Improvise
Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities

urbanimprovise.com

Published by Yale University Press. A book for architects, designers, planners, and urbanites that explores how cities can embrace improvisation to enhance urban life.

The built environment in today’s hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically.

These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts.

Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.

 

Reviews

[testimonial name=”Michael Batty, author of Inventing Future Cities, The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London, UK” target=”blank” border=”yes”]“In the headlong rush towards a digital world, we are in danger of losing the emotions of living in cities. In this essential book, Kristian Kloeckl suggests that the way we improvise has an even more significant role in the cities of the future.”[/testimonial] [testimonial name=”Malcolm McCullough, author of Downtime on the Microgrid Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, USA” target=”blank” border=”yes”]“If your city seems overscripted lately, take time for Kristian Kloeckl on open systems for agile citizens. Concise, enjoyable, and deeply researched, The Urban Improvise could be the best urban technology book to read this year.”[/testimonial] [testimonial name=”Mike Phillips, School of Art, Design and Architecture, i-DAT Research Group, University of Plymouth, UK” target=”blank” border=”yes”]“Kloeckl’s insights are original, credible, and eminently useful. This innovative book unlocks performativity as a design approach, making it applicable to the smart hybrid city. This is an important and novel twist to the rapidly fossilising rhetoric around the smart city. It offers a new fresh lens for understanding the implications of technologies that are seeping into the normal everyday.”[/testimonial] [testimonial name=”Mark Shepard, editor of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo, USA” target=”blank” border=”yes”]“Kloeckl’s thoughtful application of concepts from improvisation in the performing arts to the design of urban interactions in the hybrid city offers a vital alternative to the techno-centric approach of the smart city evangelist.”[/testimonial]

 

The Author

Kristian Kloeckl is a designer and associate professor at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture and Department of Art + Design where he heads the graduate program in Experience Design. Prior to that, he was a faculty member at the University IUAV of Venice and a research scientist at MIT, leading the Real Time City Group at Senseable City Lab, and establishing the lab’s research unit in Singapore. Kloeckl’s work probes the boundaries of interaction design in the context of today’s hybrid cities and investigates the role of improvisational frameworks for design. His work has been exhibited at venues such as Venice Biennale, MoMA, Vienna MAK, Singapore Art Museum. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences such as Montreal World Design Summit, Hybrid City Conference, MIT Platform Strategy Executive Symposium, World Bank SDN Forum, Red Dot Design Museum Singapore, Austrian Innovation Forum, ICA Conference Taipei, eGov Global Exchange Singapore.

 

 

We are please to announce that i-DAT’s Gianni Corino has been awarded a South West Creative Technology Data Fellowship….

 

DATA 2020-21

 

i-DAT’s Adam Russell joins SWCTN Prototype Grant: AIM (Agroecological Information Model)

AUTOMATION PROTOTYPES:

We are looking to invest in prototypes that use creative technologies to deliver original immersive processes, experiences, products or services. The making phase will run through April, May, June with showcasing at the end of June 2019. We anticipate awarding grants of between £20k and £40k.

 

 

i-DAT’s B Aga awarded a SWCTN Prototype Grant: Immersive Histories: Decoding Complexity

 

LOOKING FOR THE CLOUD

The prototype Looking for the Cloud will explore sustainability and diversity in our current and future relationships with new technologies – particularly automation and machine learning. Looking for the Cloud will be delivered in collaboration with The Eden Project and manifest as a prototype book, augmented with a proof-of-concept chatbot. The aim of the project will be to raise awareness and enable conversation around the environmental impact of Cloud computing platforms powering advances in machine learning. This prototype will be the first test project of the Re+ Collective – a new female-led collective supporting women to experiment and work with creative technology.

 

 

AUTOMATION PROTOTYPES:

We are looking to invest in prototypes that use creative technologies to deliver original immersive processes, experiences, products or services. The making phase will run through April, May, June with showcasing at the end of June 2019. We anticipate awarding grants of between £20k and £40k.

 

 

The interactive Digital 3D Model of Bronze Spheric Theme was co-produced with i-DAT and Tate Digital for the Naum Gabo Exhibition at Tate St Ives.

(Original work c.1960, digitised 2019-20)

Tate St Ives Exhibition NAUM GABO: 25 January – 3 May 2020 (Covid-19 extension TBC).

TATE ST IVES

Porthmeor Beach
St Ives
Cornwall TR26 1TG

Project development page:

Returning for the third year, the annual festival showcases the outstanding research carried out by staff at the University in collaboration with colleagues and partners locally, nationally and internationally.

Visual narratives can bring science to life, lifting graphs and diagrams from paper to instead tell a story; fly to the edge of the universe, across microscopic nano-landscapes, or even through the human body. 

• Do you have research that could benefit from innovative visualisation?
• Have you experienced the capabilities of visualised data and what the Immersive Vision Theatre (IVT) can do?
• Are you aware of the support available to tell the story of your research data?

Programme

The programme will be repeatedly daily throughout the Research Festival. 

12:00 | Welcome from Professor Iain Stewart, Director of the Sustainable Earth Institute; or Professor Mike Phillips, Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts of i-DAT.

12:15 | Immersive Visualisation Showcase by Luke Christison, Senior Technical Manager of the IVT

• Inside the brain of Mike Phillips through MRI scans
• NASA’s interpretation of wind and currents on the world
• Reaching the outer edges of the observable universe

12:45 | Impact Lab: supporting businesses through visualisation by Sarah Fear, Project and Knowledge Exchange Manager.

Call for applications – The 3D3 Open Research Residency at the Eden Project.

This residency is only available to 3D3 researchers.

The 3D3 consortium in partnership with the Eden Project Cornwall are pleased to offer an opportunity for an ‘Open Research Residency’ at Eden for its 3D3 cohort (from groups and individual) to support and facilitate public engagement with research that aligns with Eden’s Curatorial Statement and one (or more) of the Arts Programme themes 2020-21.

This Residency offers a unique opportunity for 3D3 creative scholar-practitioners working at the forefront of a rapidly expanding research landscape of emergent technologies for the incubation of public engagement with research. The successful candidate/s will be offered a bursary of £4k (to include all fees, material, travel, accommodation and per diem costs) and access The Eden Project’s incredible resources and facilitates. It is expected that the successful candidate/s will spend minimum two week of the residency in situ at the Eden project (to be negotiated) and that it will involve activities which engage the public (the visitors to the Eden Project and / or their local communities) with their research. This may take form as talks, workshops, installations, performances and or other forms of engagement activities.

Please see attached documents for information and for the application form.

Application Deadline: 20th January 2020