The third Sydney greenUps was themed around film and the environment and was another full house.

Nell Schofield introduced us to GRASS.org.au her initiative to promote sustainability in the film industry. Director Maryella Hatfield presented The Future Makers a documentary on Australian innovation in renewable energy, and Mark Forstmann showed a teaser of Monkey Puzzle a new Australian film set in Blue Mountains. Phil Stubbs showed Holland Tunnel by the Neistat Brothers, The Age of Stupid film trailer, and Energy Wasting Day a humorous satirical site.

Bill McKibben dropping in to the on his way to interviews at the ABC studios. Bill is co-founder and director of 350.org and was one of the very first writers on global warming with his book ‘The End of Nature‘. He talked to us about what 350.org was hoping to achieve on October 24, and played a powerful and beautifully designed video.  Watch the 350 video here.  Bill echoed our sentiments with his enthusiasm for greenUps and excitement that we’re reaching an ever widening audience with the night.

The next greenUps will be held on June 2 (the first Tuesday of the month) at a yet to be determined venue. Email info@greenups.org or join the Facebook group to receive an invite.

Related posts:

1. September greenUps – For the Love of Bikes!
2. Sparks fly on the dancefloor at July greenUps

Last week was the 20th anniversary for the Ozchi conference, the leading forum for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in Australia and New Zealand.

I had the pleasure of presenting a paper co-authored with John MacFarlane, a producer at Digital Eskimo, Reflections on the role of Seeding in Social Design (pdf). In it we discuss the way in which social technologies, dependent on participation for success, bring into focus the dynamic and critical relationship between design and use. In social technologies the user literally determines the design, we (designers) only provide the platform. This is an interesting landscape for designers as our role starts to extend beyond constructing and making, to taking responsibility for facilitating and enabling participation. Designing and implementing social technologies successfully means also developing strategies for engagement.

At Digital Eskimo we are responding to this in a range of ways, including developing a range of codesign activities and applying participatory methods that attempt to facilitate the engagement of communities around a project or campaign. We refer to these as “seeding activities” and the paper presented some of our recent learnings, reflections and approaches.

There were a lot of great speakers at the conference, some of the highlights included Gary Marsdens (author of the excellent Mobile Interaction Design book) keynote on doing HCI in South Africa, or rather failing to do HCI. He generously presented on his mistakes and learnings, and provided an insight into some of the issues he encountered when applying traditional HCI assumptions and methods into this particular context. Gary discussed Mxit, the massively successful Mobile Instant Messenger, and presented some of his own innovative work, BigBoard, which uses Bluetooth to create a free community sharing tool.

Other highlights included the Indigenous Led Digital Enterprise panel, where Vicus Steffensen, from Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways and Troy Mallie from Cultural Systems Solutions (two different technology approaches to knowledge and land management for Indigenous communities) presented alongside Pasty Cameron (Telling Places in Country, Tasmania) and Yvonne Cadet-James (Gugu-Baden Cultural History, Townsville). Yolande Strengers also presented her excellent research into water usage, and how our social norms require us to wash and bath much more frequently that we really need to.

Related posts:

1. Reflections on the role of seeding in Social Design

We’re delighted to announce that last night the Raise The Bar campaign won the SMAC in Your Face award at the first Sydney Music, Art & Culture Awards presented by FBI Radio and Time Out magazine. The awards, presented at the Opera House, focus on Sydney’s creative community and are about celebrating the “interesting, the ingenious, the clever”.

From left: Dave Gravina, Andrew Cox, Adele Winteridge, Jonathon Larkin and John Wardle accpet the prize

Congratulations to all the winners on the night which represented some of Sydney’s most creative young talent (a special congrats to Fergus Linehan who pipped us at the post for SMAC of the Year!).

I should take this opportunity to thank all of those wonderful people who made the campaign such a huge success – and forgive me if I forget anyone .. our members who sent over 7,500 virtual drinks, gave money and made hundreds of calls to Liberal leader Barry O’Farrels office the night before the vote in Parliament, Clover Moore, Graham West MP, John Thorpe (ex AHA President, aka the villain!), FBI Radio, Spanton Media, Walter at Melt and Cedric at Cafe Lounge, Tom and the team at Mooball, Kate Bezar at Dumbofeather, Two Thousand, Kripy, Musicland, James Squire, Burrundulla Wines and of course all the RTB crew who put so many hours into the campaign.

Which incidentally isn’t over, stay tuned shortly for the next phase of the campaign …

Related posts:

1. Raise the Bar wins SMAC Award!
2. SMAC In Your Face Award – Raise The Bar Campaign 2008
3. Top 100 Creative Catalyst award

 … the convergence of social action and technology
Last week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the Making Links conference in Melbourne. A big thanks to the organisers and the great attendees who all represent organisations and activists doing excellent work for social change. My presentation, ‘Reaching out or Moving closer: connecting with your community’, focused on participation and engagement (See it here on slideshare). In particular ways that people can approach social technologies to initiate and foster relationships with their community.  I focused on how we can use these tools to develop an ecology appropriate to our stakeholders motivations and interests, rather than focusing on the one stop shop idea of traditional websites.

This way of thinking can often be a challenge for organisations who are uncomfortable about giving up the control of their brand or message. However relinquishing control of those things (to some degree and in new ways) are inevitably part of embracing social technologies, and working more collaboratively with our stakeholders and ‘users’. As Aradhana Goel from IDEO puts it, we should be thinking about enhancing our brand through participation (pdf).

For those that were interested in some of the other sources that I quoted around using social media and social change,  I have uploaded the presentation to slideshare and added some links.  Thanks to all for the great feedback.

Whilst at the conference I had the pleasure of seeing a number of  great projects, some of the highlights included the Freedom Centre who have been using msn and other private forms of online communication work support young people on gender and sexuality issues.  Info Exchange  do a wide range of work making ICT available to organisations and indivuals (including setting up free access via satellite in East Timor). Reps from Mission Australia, Barnadoes, Youth of the Streets and the Vodafone Foundation presented their fantastic work ‘Young People Connected’ giving street kids and disadvantaged youths mobile phones, the presentation of which brought more than a tear to the eye. Awesome work thanks guys.

Related posts:

1. Making Local Links

Recently I enjoyed a forum at the Nextwave festival in Melbourne in which Mark Pesce, spoke on the impacts social networking technologies are having on our interactions with each other and power structures in society generally.

Mark’s talk (above) in particular was most intriguing as he described how his twitter network informed him of the Sichuan earthquake’s epicentre, impacts and ‘ground truths’ as he calls them well before the global mainstream media networks were able. Quite amazing when you think this is one mans’ twitter network. He made the point that these networks are one of the biggest threats to global news media. Another two examples of how social networks are changing and challenging the power structures of society follow, one in which he describes how a blogging site played a pivotal role in bringing down a US Attorney General (no less!).

More on Mark’s blog

Related posts:

1. SXSW: Friends and Acquaintances

The tag line this year is ‘Social Media and Public Relations: are you ready for the audience to jump in?’, a timely topic for the PR industry to grapple with no doubt. Actually the conference is a bit broader than that as it will focus on the importance of on-line communications strategies for Public Affairs Professionals and engaging the media in this dynamically evolving multi-user environment. Some damn fine speakers and panelists attending as well so should be a good one, i hope to attend a fair whack of the conference actually it’s that good.

My particular presentation is titled ‘Is your website an effective communications tool?’ in which i will be discussing what we learnt working on the Raise the Bar and Your Rights at Work campaigns (and other campaigns time permitting!)

If you don’t know the Walkley Foundation they are ‘the peak industry body representing Australia’s media and is aimed at supporting and encouraging professional and ethical journalism.’

Visit Conference web site.

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Image above: We’ve just taken delivery (courtesy of Sheriff) of two new recycled Ansett Airline trolleys to add to our fleet which we use as storage units around the studio.

I stumbled across this well written article by Kristen Le Mesurier on blogging in The Age Innovator archives recently which has a nice clear explanation of what blogging is and why it’s relevant to business.

The article references our blog and specifically makes mention of our willingness to share our successes and failures related to sustainability initiatives in the studio. Like most businesses i think, blogging isn’t always our first priority and we’ve been a bit quiet lately while we focus on client work and evolving our Considered Design methods. The article has definitely inspired me to get our blogging house in order …

We have created a roster for staff to ensure that we share the load, keep it regularly updated and provide a diverse range of voices (Unlike some design agency heads I’m pretty sure it’s not all about me!). We are also adding blogging to staff job descriptions and including it in KPIs to further reinforce the importance sharing our stories has for the company.

You should see a difference as we ramp up the posts and renew our commitment to inspire other organisations and people through our own actions on the road to a sustainable world.

No related posts.

Some of our clients need to source images for their websites and communications activities, but don’t have the budget to spend on commercial stock image libraries. Thankfully, there are a number of resources on the web that provide good quality imagery for next to nothing.

We’ve posted previously about using photos from Flickr (and some of the gotchas to look out for) – but there are some other sites worth mentioning also.

iStockphoto is a community site where photographers can upload their photos and illustrations for purchase by other community members for very low cost – between USD$1-$15. If you’re using images on the web you can often get away with using the smaller sizes to keep costs down, though for print purposes you may need to spend more.

The photos are pretty good, though recently have leaned towards more corporate orientation (this might be a result of the site recently being purchased by Getty Images).

Another great site is stock.xchng (as in “exchange”). Similarly to iStockphoto, stock.xchng is a community driven site where users upload photos – however, all photos are free.

Let us know in the comments if you know of any other good sites for finding low-cost images.

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Earlier this month I presented at DUX in Chicago on our Mobile Diary method (link to Pdf of paper). The conference theme was on the shifting landscape of design (and our roles within it). I outlined the re-negotiation of conventional processes and boundaries I see occurring in our design process as a result of research methods such as Mobile Diaries. This is because participants generate research ‘data’ themselves (self-reporting) with blogs and mobile devices, in a way similar to that of user generated content or citizen media.

For me this generates some questions in relation to conventional design and research processes, relationships and protocols e.g how do we handle (most effectively) the relationship with our participants/potential community members? Is it data or content that is produced in these projects? Who owns it, the right to use it and to distribute it? Are traditional researcher/participant roles which are based on protection of privacy and the assumption of anonymous data still relevant? What are the opportunities of these types of methods to seriously engage in co-design with participants and communities of users?

In summarising one speaker summed up my pres in the following terms “where does the research end and the community begin”. Personally I think this does pretty well to capture the tangle of questions, ideas, intersections and tensions I for one have only just begun to unravel. Thanks to all the other presenters and attendees who gave feedback and added their thoughts and I look forward to further dialogue…

Related posts:

1. ‘By the People’ DE presents at DUX
2. Design Research = Fishing
3. Engaging Stakeholders

A quick thanks to Solidariti for including a question from us in their Q+A with Patrick Pittman, a Director of WA based Papercut Media, which you can read here.

Our question was this: “Can design agencies who predominantly work for clients who push a consumption-based way of life claim to be “eco-friendly” by offsetting their direct carbon emissions?”

Patrick’s response included the following bites; “It’s better than nothing. But barely, and in some senses it’s worse than nothing…you cannot outsource your own, or your corporate, responsibility”. Eco-consumerism is not an appropriate response to the issue of global warming.

He’s right. It’s not.

Carbon credits in and of themselves are a good thing, enabling individuals and companies to take responsibility for unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions. There’s also nothing wrong with buying stuff you need (though some peoples’ definition of ‘need’ might require tweaking). But to encourage the culture of consumerism and offset the activities involved in such encouragement is hardly helping the environment.

p.s. we tip our hat to Papercut Media, they are our kind of company.

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