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The Design Museum 2012
Fig.1. Lawrence Lek at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London.
Seen it once, then again with my 14 year old son – and for a third time with my 16 year old daughter next week. Potentially with other members of our extended family and friends too. I should have bought a season ticket.
The Design Museum is unique – I spent time with EVERY exhibit. I need a couple of hours every day over ten days. That’s how much it resonates with me – the stories, the process, the end result.
There are three galleries:
FIRST FLOOR
Fig.2. Jessica Ennis takes the stairs to the first floor seven at a time
Innovation in Sport – design with a bias towards the Olympics and Paralympics, with Formal 1, Le Mans, hand-gliding, surfind and a few other sports too. Sixteen sports people silhouettes on the walls in the stairwell – how do you physically match up to Jessica Ennis, Messi, Phelps or Sharapova?
SECOND FLOOR
Fig. 3. A 3d rendering of a crystal whose shape is formed by your presence and movement (courtesy of a Konex device and a laser)
Digital Memory – a dozen designers, architects and conceptual artists play with Swarovski crystal to express what memory is. Most mind blowing, all beautifully displayed with headsets explaining what is going on in the artist’s words and other interactive screens – and ‘augmented’ content from wif-fi and 3g.
SECOND FLOOR – SECOND GALLERY
Fig. 4. Yuri Suzuki at the Design Museum
Designers in Residence – six young innovators set a brief, there journey of discovery, experiment and creation lovingly recreated with video, artefacts, audio and displays – and a take-away booklet.
With half-term upon us where do you recommend taking children, young adults and their friends? How does this change if you are their grandparent or parent of a friend? Can you cater for them all? What might it cost?
The cost of getting into the Tower of London made my jaw-drop – £23 for an adult? £55 for a family ticket!! I think I’ll leave it for another 1000 years.
The Wellcome Foundation ‘Super Human’ exhibition and other galleries are free (and lunch is great too).
The Design Museum was £11 for an adult, £7 for a student
Where in the world do you go? We all have our favourites.
Winner-take-all or we’re in it together
In week one we H810ers have been trying to get our collective heads around the meanings of ‘accessibility’ and ‘disability’ – courtesy of the Paralympics and the US Presidential Elections there is a wealth of contemporary opinion.
I don’t follow the US Presidential Election at all, but sometimes you catch something. This I believe gives us a political model for ‘accessibility’ and any interpretation and response to disability.
“When we vote in this election, we’ll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in. If you want a winner-take-all ‘you’re-on-your-own-society’ you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility – a ‘we’re-in-it-together’ society – you should vote for Barrack Obama and Joe Biden’.
And what The OU means:
Volunteer recruitment for the London Olympics 2012
Fig. 1. Display of the Olympic Village, ExCel, Custom House, London Docklands. Part of a display for the 3,500 Gamesmakers who are being recruited over the next months to support the Olympics next summer.
Not blogging is for me a loss as I have always used a diary (1974-1999) and then a blog (1999-to present day) to provide a record or archive of what is hitting my head every day.
This provides, during times of reflection, the opportunity to think over events. (With a diary I might not look back at a page for a decade, but at least it was there).
I have little doubt that this is because I am between modules. Creativity, Innovation and Change (B822) kicks off in November.
Many colleagues keep a ‘daily log or notebook’. I used to, but found I’d fill them too quickly. I favour IT to assist, sort, store. I will ‘forget about’ something in the knowledge that I can draw it from my electronic ‘brain’; this of course assume that the content has made it that far. So a blog is a repository. The problem is which blog? These have a habit of splitting into multiple folders.
Nor is this blog the place for Social Media and Online Communications (my role at the Open University Business and Law School). Though at times there is considerable overlap with all that I have learnt in the Masters in Open and Distance Education. (Modules H800, H809 and H807 completed).
Nor is it the place for my potential adventures with the London Olympics 2012, which had me (like a number of OU Colleagues) attending a ‘Gamesmaker’ presentation and interview yesterday. I have been lined up for the Press Office, potentially to contribute to the Knowledge & Information desk which will draw in educational value from the events to share with future Olympics, otherwise either in the Olympic Village editing/writing a regular newsletter, or at one of the venues ‘door-stepping’ athletes and getting their words to the media centre.
My summer ‘vacation’ 2012
A part solution to the failure to post a blog is:
1) I took notes (directly into an iPad for the most part, so no need to transfer/transcribe)
2) I took pictures (sometimes with the iPad, now with an iPhone, such grabs of presentation slides that I immediately upload to Picasa Web. These in turn would be best placed in a photo friendly blog in WordPress, FlickR or Tumblr, though currently they are saved into locked galleries online).
3) I keep a daily log/notes of my day, aggregating content of interest from RSS Feeds (LinkedIn groups and Blogs) as well as Google Alerts. This has always remained offline. I need to get it into FileMaker Pro so that is it more searchable.
The above to provide a catalyst for developing further any one of these topics at a later date (if at all), but usually easy enough to discover if blogged (private view), or put into a relational database software package such as FileMaker Pro.
I therefore have a record of events, meetings, presentations and so on, which include:
MONDAY PR and the words of students and alumni from discussions and requests to our growing groups in LinkedIn.
TUESDAY Interviews with Alumni (three of the 1996 graduation group reflecting on their experiences of the MBA and what they have done since). Brief a TV production company.
TUESDAY Creation of a blog for Open University Business Network. Kathryn Tickell at the Stables (or was that last week ?!)
WEDNESDAY Using Camtasia, Audacity, a MAC and the Institute of Educational Technology ‘Podcasting Suit’ to produce a video-version (animation/movie) of a presentation I gave on Social Media in Higher Education which I wish to induct academics (or their teams) to use to compress 45 minutes lectures into scripted pieces that are more ‘Web Friendly’.
WEDNESDAY Tweet inaugrual lecture of Professor Cherie Booth and the acceptance speech of Leslee Griffiths BA.
THURSDAY Personas and Mental Mapping (an OU technique to understanding and predicting visitor behaviours when using online materials)
THURSDAY Communications, Leadership and Influence (a presentation by the new Director of Communications). I took from this the need to make the time and effort to empathise with colleagues with whom I work.
THURSDAY Open University Businesss Network (a series of quarterly breaksfast briefings for local business people that started on Thursday)
THURSDAY Edit of interview visiting fellow from Ghana
Mind Bursts 