Although our perspectives and expressions of what we feel is Post-Digital are quite different, we seem to agree that Post-Digital creation does not necessarily have to exclude using digital means to achieve or produce one’s outcome. Quite the contrary, we believe that the Post-Digital is informed by thinking with digital tools but not being confined to using digital tools or methods. Just to give a bit more context here is a previous posting about defining digital.

In our last conversation Vjeko, Duane and I agreed that we need to push ourselves into articulating some specific aspects of how we view creating in a Post-Digital landscape. With this in mind we gave ourselves this thought experiment:

With a gun to your head, what is the most important thing the digital has taken from you? What is the most important thing it has given you?

My first inclination was to say that the Digital era has given us new eyes. Much like how Charles & Ray Eames gave us a new viewpoint or way of thinking in their milestone film, Power of Ten. Some say the digital era has given us the ability to stretch time and space.

What I mean by new eyes is the idea of being able to see beyond our normal capacity – magnifying on incredibly fine details of images or sound or panning out to ‘see’ how nine Beethoven symphonies plot out over time. The notion of being able to convert something that happens over a great length of time or space into one macro view is a digital one. Yes, I’m sure it was done before we had digital technology but the ubiquity of computing has brought that type of thinking to the everyday designer or artist.

This brings me to what I believe is the most important aspect of what I have found as a creator in the digital era. The digital world let’s me to traverse many mediums seamlessly. When I am creating with digital tools I can live in the moment and improvise without the borders that we have in the physical or analogue space.

In the digital space, everything becomes your raw material for creating. Everything is up for grabs – duplicatable and malleable. Everything can be converted from one medium to another. The boundaries melt away.

I’m able to make something out of something else. The digital medium lets me mash sound, visual and thought into a single expression. I feel that my multi-disciplinary tendencies are able to blossom in a natural way.

What’s good is also not so good
As it turns out, what I believe to be the great advantage of creating in the digital sphere is also the cause of what I believe I have lost in the era of digital creation. Personally I believe I have become less focused an artist or creator. In my teens I played guitar and by university I was playing guitar professionally and had mastered the instrument. The single-minded intensity and desire brought me the level of proficiency and intimacy with the guitar that in turn gave me the ability to express myself extraordinary ways. Essentially, I am still striving for that same level of self-expression in the digital sphere.

The digital world has an intoxicating allure that, for whatever reason, tends to fragment my focus and send me off on tangential exploration. Sometimes this brings me back to my original intent with new found fodder and sometimes not.

Whether we like it or not digital computing is pervasive in our culture, sometimes I wonder if asking us to imagine our lives without digital is as difficult as a fish imagining life without water. If you want to swim the digital gives you vast oceans to dive deep into. But what if you don’t want to swim?

Although our perspectives and expressions of what we feel is Post-Digital are quite different, we seem to agree that Post-Digital creation does not necessarily have to exclude using digital means to achieve or produce one’s outcome. Quite the contrary, we believe that the Post-Digital is informed by thinking with digital tools but not being confined to using digital tools or methods. Just to give a bit more context here is a previous posting about defining digital.

In our last conversation Vjeko, Duane and I agreed that we need to push ourselves into articulating some specific aspects of how we view creating in a Post-Digital landscape. With this in mind we gave ourselves this thought experiment:

With a gun to your head, what is the most important thing the digital has taken from you? What is the most important thing it has given you?

My first inclination was to say that the Digital era has given us new eyes.
Much like how Charles & Ray Eames gave us a new viewpoint or way of thinking in their milestone film, Power of Ten. Some say the digital era has given us the ability to stretch time and space.

What I mean by new eyes is the idea of being able to see beyond our normal capacity – magnifying on incredibly fine details of images or sound or panning out to ‘see’ how nine Beethoven symphonies plot out over time. The notion of being able to convert something that happens over a great length of time or space into one macro view is a digital one. Yes, I’m sure it was done before we had digital technology but the ubiquity of computing has brought that type of thinking to the everyday designer or artist.

This brings me to what I believe is the most important aspect of what I have found as a creator in the digital era.
The digital world let’s me to traverse many mediums seamlessly. When I am creating with digital tools I can live in the moment and improvise without the borders that we have in the physical or analogue space.

In the digital space, everything becomes your raw material for creating. Everything is up for grabs – duplicatable and malleable.
Everything can be converted from one medium to another. The boundaries melt away.

I’m able to make something out of something else. The digital medium lets me mash sound, visual and thought into a single expression. I feel that my multi-disciplinary tendencies are able to blossom in a natural way.

What’s good is also not so good
As it turns out, what I believe to be the great advantage of creating in the digital sphere is also the cause of what I believe I have lost in the era of digital creation. Personally I believe I have become less focused an artist or creator. In my teens I played guitar and by university I was playing guitar professionally and had mastered the instrument. The single-minded intensity and desire brought me the level of proficiency and intimacy with the guitar that in turn gave me the ability to express myself extraordinary ways. Essentially, I am still striving for that same level of self-expression in the digital sphere.

The digital world has an intoxicating allure that, for whatever reason, tends to fragment my focus and send me off on tangential exploration. Sometimes this brings me back to my original intent with new found fodder and sometimes not.

Whether we like it or not digital computing is pervasive in our culture, sometimes I wonder if asking us to imagine our lives without digital is as difficult as a fish imagining life without water.

If you want to swim the digital gives you vast oceans to dive deep into. But what if you don’t want to swim?

Here’s my slidedeck from the conference.
Mobile Magazine Publishing

Some of the videos that I showed in the presentation:

Chapter 1: Good is the Enemy of Great

Chapter 2: Level 5 Leadership

Level 5 Leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.

Collins begins the process of identifying and explicating the unique factors and variables that differentiate good and great companies. One of the most significant differences, he asserts, is the quality and nature of leadership in the firm. Collins goes on to identify “Level 5 leadership” as a common characteristic of the great companies assessed in the study. This type of leadership forms the top level of a 5-level hierarchy that ranges from merely competent supervision to strategic executive decision-making.

Chapter 3: First Who, Then What

First one needs to get the ‘right’ people on the bus
Then figure out the best path to greatness.

Collins states that the process of securing high-quality, high-talent individuals with Level 5 leadership abilities must be undertaken before an overarching strategy can be developed. With the right people in the right positions, Collins contends that many of the management problems that plague companies and sap valuable resources will automatically dissipate.

Chapter 4: Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

Collins outlines a four-step process to promote awareness of emerging trends and potential problems:

1. 1) Lead with questions, not answers;
2. 2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion;
3. 3) Conduct autopsies without blame;
4. 4) Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

Chapter 5: The Hedgehog Concept

In order to help expedite this process, Collins suggests using the following three criteria:

Chapter 6: A Culture of Discipline

The author asserts, it is important that within this overarching culture of discipline, every team member is afforded the degree of personal empowerment and latitude that is necessary to ensure that they will be able to go to unheard-of extremes to bring the firm’s envisioned objectives into existence.

Chapter 7: Technology Accelerators

Chapter 8: The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

When I formed LiFT Studios in 2007 I went through the process of writing a business plan as any diligent person would. I have to admit it wasn’t that much fun. You would think it would be a good time, after all if done correctly, it’s about your aspirations and dreams. I looked at many templates online and reviewed my notes from taking Canada’s government program for Entrepreneurs and Self Employment in 1997. It wasn’t painful but it certainly lacked excitement and I promised myself that I would revisit the business planning process each year to reassess the business.

It’s now that time in the year when I reevaluate the business and see if the company goals align with my own. This is also an opportunity to readdress the businesses objectives and make LiFT better. This time I’ve introduced a few new variables to the process – a few books have been add to the toolkit and a couple of smart people have been invited to participate.

I’ll be adding to this posting as more unravels. For now the first of the books is summarized here.

A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.

Steffen painted a bleak picture of what our world could be like if we continue to misuse it. The talk was filled with memorable little sound bits like “Global Somalia” and “Alligators in the Arctic” and although he described a pretty grim image of the world in 2050 he seemed hopeful that we could change this path that we’re on.

I was able to record his talk on my phone and have posted the full hour lecture just below. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, The MIT Press has published a series on digital media and learning (with open access electronic versions), which they describe this way:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

In their report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg investigate how technology and the internet are transforming shared and interactive learning. They suggest the following 10 principles as “fundamental to the future of learning institutions”.

1. Self Learning
Self-learning has bloomed; discovering online possibilities is a skill now developed from early childhood through advanced adult life.

2. Horizontal Structures
Given the range and volume of information available and the ubiquity of access to information sources and resources, learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to judgment concerning reliable information, from memorizing information to how to find reliable sources. In short, from learning that to learning how, from content to process.

3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility
Learning is shifting from issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility. A major part of the future of learning is in developing methods, often communal, for distinguishing good knowledge sources from those that are questionable . . . We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge-creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline.

4. A De-Centered Pedagogy
In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference.26 This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledge-making, global phenomenon of epic proportions.

Instead, leaders at learning institutions need to adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy that takes advantage of our era.

5. Networked Learning
The power of ten working interactively will almost invariably outstrip the of one looking to beat out the other nine.

6. Open Source Education
Networked learning is predicated on and deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture. Open source culture seeks to share openly and freely in the creation of culture, in its production processes, and in its product, its content. It looks to have its processes and products improved through the contributions of others by being made freely available to all.

If individualized learning is largely tethered to a social regime of copyright-protected intellectual property and privatized ownership, networked learning is committed in the end to an open source and open content social regime. Individualized learning tends overwhelmingly to be hierarchical: one learns from the teacher or expert, on the basis overwhelmingly of copyright-protected publications bearing the current status of knowledge. Networked learning is at least peer-to-peer and more robustly many-to-many.

7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity
The connectivities and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’s learning inputs, contributions, and products. Challenges are not simply individually faced frustrations, Promethean mountains to climb alone, but mutually shared, to be redefined, solved, resolved, or worked around—together.

8. Lifelong Learning
It has become obvious that from the point of view of participatory learning there is no finality. Learning is lifelong.

9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks
Network culture and associated learning practices and arrangements suggest that we think of institutions, especially those promoting learning, as mobilizing networks. The networks enable a mobilizing that stresses flexibility, interactivity, and outcome.

10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation
Networked learning both facilitates and must remain open to various scales of learning possibility, from the small and local to the widest and most far-reaching constituencies capable of productively contributing to a domain, subject matter, knowledge formation and creation. New technologies allow for small groups whose members are at physical distance to each other to learn collaboratively together and from each other; but they also enable larger, more anonymous yet equally productive interactions.

What do you think about the future of learning? Is there a business model in the future of learning and will it sustain itself?

The Course Outline
This introductory studio course addresses the design, composition, and construction of computer interactivity in authoring environments, focusing on the Web. Emphasis is on increasing visual and sensory-based literacy through the application of digital skills. Students also learn to apply the principles and processes of interaction design for the use of animation, still imagery, video and sound for diverse applications, including those for educational, commercial, and communicative purposes.

This course will include:

• Usability
• User Experience
• Graphical User Interface Design

The course syllabus can be found here:
http://www.ecuad.ca/~harmen/classsyllabus.html

Starting January 8th I will also be teaching Interactive Essentials at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design (ECIAD).