Today teams were set with two tasks, which were designed to develop group discussion:

1 – CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT: Continue to discuss and develop your ideas within your groups.

2 – CREATIVE OUTPUT: how might your concepts be presented / exhibited through alternative interfaces (this is a chance to think speculatively about screenless / wearable / motion gesture technologies, augmented/immersive/virtual reality, etc).

To support this task, participants were treated to a demo of the Virtual Reality/gaming platform ‘Oculus Rift’, in which Mark Aldridge (learning advisor for L.S.M) discussed the possibilities for using this technology as a means of presenting creative work. Students were also able to highlight and discuss any relevant research material, including streaming a number of videos relating to alternative interfaces/future tech. These have also been published via the Facebook ‘coffee room’ for all to view at a later date. It has been really great to see students fully engaging in this collaborative approach to learning.

We then linked up with Chris Heydra from The Hague University of Applied Sciences via google hangouts. The talk focussed on how to approach creative projects within an intensive workshop setting (much like co_LAB). Chris discussed a multi-disciplinary project he recently ran, where he took a group of students to Lisbon and gave them a brief of creating something in response to the word ‘illusion’. He underscored that the project was a first and foremost a research project, which was initiated by a theme, rather than a specific brief (again, similar to co_LAB). This enabled students to explore a wide range of social issues, leading to innovative approaches to the creative process (for example, a robot that collected money for the homeless community of Lisbon). Chris advised students to start by developing an initial concept in a variety of ways – ‘come up with some sort of statement, something you want to approach and apply in the world, then let your ideas go wild!’ – The whole talk can be found on YouTube:

THEN LUNCH HAPPENED! As you can see below, all the goujouns and quiche fuelled some really great team discussions over lunch!

After lunch, Adam Verity from the School of Art and Design got the students to think creatively about issues of surveillance, setting the task of going out into the city to document anything that might be surveilling them. Armed with mobiles phones, the groups were let loose to find interesting examples of instances where they feel they are being ‘watched’ or ‘listened too’. Twitter was used as a tool to archive the group findings of this task, with the hashtag #EYESANDEARS used to pool this content.