As for the sessions in Shanghai, Paris and Denver, the program of the meeting is divided in two parts:

10:00 – 12:15 Invited speakers

The 1st part is dedicated to invited speakers from Finland curated by Philip Dean, director of Media Factory, head of the Media Department and founder of the Media Lab at Aalto University (formely TaiK)

• 10:00 – 10:45 Massimo Menichinelli: Bits+atoms+processes: the influence of code culture on Design

The revolution of digital technologies and their culture has first brought new tools into the design and media disciplines. Lately, it has also brought the culture of digital processes and organizational forms as well: designers are not merely adopting digital tools but also their original culture and social dynamics. The Open Design movement, albeit still under development, is an example of how a culture (and its organizational forms, business models and dynamics) typical of software development has been adopted into the design world. The Digital Fabrication and FabLabs phenomenon is showing how we are also redefining our relationships with materials and manufacturing processes as mediated through bits and codes. Therefore, we are now witnessing that traditional design cultures and software design cultures are blending together, giving birth to new hybrid artifacts between code and design.

About Massimo Menichelli

Massimo Menichinelli is a designer working and researching on open collaborative projects and the systems that design them since 2005. Massimo founded openp2pdesign.org, a collaborative project for the research and design of open, complex and collaborative projects, systems and processes. He has participated to conferences and has given lectures and workshops in many countries including Italy, Spain, Finland, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Media Lab of the Aalto University and Producer for the FabLab activities at Aalto Media Factory for the Aalto FabLab.

LINKS:
http://it.linkedin.com/in/massimomenichinelli
http://mediafactory.aalto.fi
http://fablab.aalto.fi
http://openp2pdesign.org

• 10:45 – 11:30 Pekka Koponen, development director at Forum Virium, about current open data projects in Helsinki,

• 11:30 – 12:15 Speaker #3 to be confirmed

12:30 – 14:00 Open session and lunch

The 2nd part is open to any willing participant who’s interested in presenting activities, projects, research tracks or curricula related to Digital Culture, interaction design & new media. The presentation will take place during lunchtime.

As some sort of pre-session, all participants are invited to join the Demo Day at Media Lab, Wednesday April 23rd afternoon 13:00-17:00.

This program is still a work in progress and will be updated regularly.

F. Degouzon
Coordinator for the Digital Culture Working Group

Thanks to our good friend Fred Murrell, who took time to convey quite a nice bunch of speakers/contributors, we had a very lively and interactive session, with lots of discussions and exchanges between all the participants.

As for the previous sessions in Paris and Shanghai, the program was roughly divided in two parts : a set of presentations by invited speakers and an open space for Cumulus members. Not unsurprisingly, the “local” teachers got to know each other quite well, and decided to open up a bit the format of the session itself, by encouraging discussion and interaction. The setup did help for this matter, as we had a board meeting for the whole day, enabling proximity in a cosy environment.

The first speaker was Rafael Fajardo, who introduced several reflections about the outcomes of experimental “social” (as in “social activism”) games he developed through cooperative workshops. We went through a light and open discussion about the influence of games on digital culture, as it provided an opportunity for emotional engagement in digital systems.

We switched then quite smoothly to Hugh Graham from 1st Movement, who was the sole “business representative” of the session. We therefore asked him his opinion about the qualities, skills and knowledge expected from design education. His answer was quite clear : train autonomous, open and creative professionals with a true attention to users. Which lead us to the notion of tools and interaction with the users, a perfect transition for Michael Mages. He exposed the virtues of rapid sketches and low tech prototyping for problem solving.

After lunch break, the organisation has been a bit messed up as the fourth speaker, Joy Sikes,  didn’t show up. Nevertheless we switched then to the presentation by the Cumulus members. Pipsa Asiala from the Media Lab in Helsinki did a short presentation of the current activities of the department.

Last part of the afternoon was dedicated to the presentation of a long term collaboration between the web agency Markit On Demand (formely Wall Street On Demand), specialised in financial information display, and RMCAD Communications department. Erik Lennert, creative director of Markit, made a very clear and detailed description of a six months collaboration involving a whole group of student and a team of professional designers. Balancing pros and cons, he made a very encouraging conclusion about the reciprocical learning situations experienced by both the students and the designers.

This was an appropriate conclusion to the day, which happened in a very smooth and warmful way. We have to thank again the organisers at RMCAD, especially Fred Murrell who gathered this excellent panel.

The next session will be held in Helsinki during the spring’12 Cumulus conference ( May 24-26 2012) with the help of the Media Lab people. Details will be announced on this blog as soon as possible.

More pictures of the working group by Lindsay Roome
http://www.cumulusdenverphotos.blogspot.com

Frédéric Degouzon
Head of Strategy, L’École de design Nantes Atlantique
f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com
Follow @fdegouzon

UPDATE : Final timetable online, see below for exact timing of the session, Sep. 12. added presentations by Michael Mages and Joy Sikes to the program, Sep. 6.

Digital Culture in the United State recognizes that we are in the midst of a revolution.  At the start of this revolution there was a great deal of hype around media “convergence” — where the web would intersect with traditional broadcast medium and the “new media” would be born.  But now it is clear that the future won’t be so easily defined.  Instead we see a multitude of different possibilities as designers and developers create new products and services from online “mash-ups” to multi-device cloud computing services, social network based games, and products that connect to everything and get multiple generations involved in advanced technology in new and exciting ways. We recognize and embrace this complexity as it becomes imbedded in endless inherent possibilities. Join our Cumulus Working Group – Digital Culture and engage in discussion and interactions from around the world.

Fred Murell,  Chair of Communications Design, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design

Date of the session : September 29th 2011, 10:00 a.m to 4:30 p.m

Provisional program

1st part (10 a.m – 3:30 p.m) : the speakers

10:00 a.m – Complexity and confusion in cyber spaces

Presenter : Rafael Fajardo, Associate Professer at University of Denver, Colorado.

Rafael Fajardo will explore the tensions that exist at the intersection of
design and emerging digital practices and the imlications those tensions have
for learning and teaching contexts.

Rafael Fajardo is a designer, researcher, and educator at the University of
Denver, Colorado. He is the founder of SWEAT, a loose collaborative dedicated to
the creation of socially conscious videogames. He is Co-Principal Investigator
at P4 Games, a project sponsored by the US National Science Foundation to
explore the making of games as a holistic pedagogy in secondary schools. He is
Associate Professor with a dual appointment in Electronic Media Arts Design and
in Digital Media Studies. Fajardo currently sits on the board of advisors of
Games For Change and of the International Digital Media and Arts Association.

http://www.rafaelfajardo.com/

11:00 a.m – Tools for Designers: Inventing the Future with Stories

Presenter : Hugh Graham, Director of User Experience, The1stMovement

As our society goes through a period of significant transformation, the role of the designer should and must evolve as well. The increasing overlap between communication, interaction, product, and environmental design demands a shared vocabulary and a coordination of approaches. Increasingly, designers are leading the charge in advocating for integrated, systems-based approaches to support interdisciplinary initiatives.

Storytelling and visual narrative techniques are an essential tool for designers working on complex initiatives. Not only do they help in developing a shared understanding of goals and objectives within members of the team, they also provide a framework for transforming research into ideas, concepts, and prototypes. Stories serve both an interpretative and generative role in inventing the future.

This session will provide some history and background on how stories can be used by designers and other team members to spur creativity and effective communications. Attendees will be encouraged to interact and offer their thoughts on how storytelling and design can help to make complex systems more usable, useful, and desirable.

Bio : As Director of User Experience for The1stMovement, Hugh Graham focuses on connecting clients’ strategic goals with opportunities to engage and interact with their target audiences. He oversees the research used to inform the design process and utilizes stories to create compelling and engaging environments, real and virtual.

As a design strategist and interaction designer, Hugh is an advocate for the use of people-centered research, prototyping, and facilitation to help organizations develop and implement innovative ideas, with a focus on using story-centered approaches to provide interdisciplinary teams with new tools that encourage rapid, iterative design and development.

Prior to joining The1stMovement, Hugh was the Director of User Experience for Sapient Corporation and Director of Content Strategy at iXL. Hugh lives in Denver with Artist/Illustrator Hadley Hooper and Maddie the dog.

12:00 a.m – Sketching and Low Fidelity Prototyping for Digital Experience Design

Presenter: Michael Arnold Mages, Digital Design, College of Arts & Media, University of Colorado, Denver

In the commercial world, working quickly and cheaply is a necessity. In the US, where design education is first considered a pathway to professional practice, the least expensive and quickest prototyping tool, the sketch, is frequently underemphasized in favor of more seductive, more replete digital prototyping tools. In a culture where students often feel pressured to fill portfolios with “camera ready” versions of websites, mobile applications, and information visualizations, the sketch is viewed as lacking value in the design process. In some cases, students become so immersed in the software development process, that they lose sight of the value and the role of design in development. The instinct of the student is to do minimal pencil-and-paper sketching and move to digital prototyping tools as quickly as possible.

While this might be desirable in a commercial culture where final deliverables need be produced rapidly and with as little expense as possible, it is not the only workflow used in professional practice, and perhaps not an ideal workflow for education. Drawing from commercial software development methodologies like Agile, and RAD, we propose to refocus interactive coursework upon iterative sketching and low-fidelity prototyping, centered on principles of radical simplicity, and creating functional processes to support human goals.

By shifting emphasis from the final deliverable to the process itself, it is hoped that students will be able to focus more clearly upon the central domain of designing software experiences: the human, business and process problems themselves, rather than the spurious focus on production of seductive “skins” for minimally functional software. The primary goal of this focus on process being: the intended user experience maps as closely as possible to the perceived user experience. This presentation will show examples and a case study of interactive design courses centered around sketching and low-fidelity prototyping.

Bio: An interaction designer and educator, Michael has lectured widely, and has served on the jury for the Association of Internet Researchers conference series since its inception. Bridging the gaps between theoretical, creative, and business practice, Michael has taught Interaction Design approaches to design, computer science, business, and art students at the University of Denver, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, and the University of Colorado-Boulder. Currently Michael brings his approach to human-centered interaction and experience design to The University of Colorado-Denver. His clients have included Oracle, StorageTek, Seagate, and NIIT in Bangalore.

2:30 p.m – Conversations, Connections, and Change

Presenter: Joy Sykes – EffectiveUI

The surprising role designers play in connecting businesses with their customers and why this new dialogue is critical for responsible change. Joy takes you through the process of how she manages and directs her team through presenting and implementing complex projects at EffectiveUI by allowing the audience to experience first hand how the process of conversations, connections and change takes place in the world of business.

Bio : Joy Sykes is Director of Customer Insight & Research at EffectiveUI, a user experience design agency located in Denver, CO. Joy, and her team, work to integrate the voice of the customer into the design and development of digital products and services. Clients include B2B and B2C fortune 500 companies across industries such as financial services, energy, aviation, and home fashion/style. She has also work with various US governmental agencies. Joy holds a Master’s degree and Doctoral degree in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

2nd part (3:30 p.m – 4:30 pm) : the doers

Digital Culture Open Session

3:30 p.m : Visualizing the students’ study projects (context digital culture)

Presenter : Ms Pipsa Asiala – Producer/ Tutor/ Teacher – Aalto University/ School of Art And Design/  Department of Media/  Media Lab

4:00 p.m : Introduction of the Communications Design department at RMCAD by Fred Murrell and David Bieloh

4:30 p.m : Closing speech by Fred Murell.

You would like to share and to discuss about a research program, a project, a curriculum related to the topic of this working group ?
Just send us an email to register for a 20 minutes presentation at f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com. No frills no chills.

You need to register for the Cumulus Denver conference in order to participate to the working group session. The Cumulus conference is organised by the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design.

An overview of the French digital ecosystem

A four hour slot was dedicated to the working group’s session. First part featured invited speakers from the French local ecosystem, from 10:00 to 12:30 am.

Benoît Drouillat, president of Designers Interactifs, the main professional organisation for interaction design in France, introduced the current state of the art in France : trends within the profession, the level of recognition by institutional partners, design education players and main figures. He outlined the multiplicity of terms and definitions and the effective lack of recognition of interaction design as a proper field of design practice, despite a quite healthy and active mix of well trained professional designers, innovative companies and studios, and valuable design courses. But as we’re in France, everything should be more complicated… Read the content of the presentation on Designers Interactifs website.

Virginia Cruz and Nicolas Gaudron from the design consultancy fim IDSL made a concise but complete overview of the process of innovation they engage with their clients (with a perfect fluent english, thanks Virginia). They drew the line quite efficiently between problem solving for applied innovative solutions to a broader social approach. Unfortunately we are not able to present their works for non disclosure matters, but there is a comprehensive portfolio of their projects on the IDSL website.

Some feedback from the Cumulus members : an “open mic” session

The second part in the afternoon was stuck with four presentations from various Cumulus members, with very little time for discussion unfortunately.

Dominique Sciamma, head of Strate Collège Designers, introduced the “Interactive Systems & Objects” programme.

Martin Zimper, head of the CAST programme at Zürich (Switzerland) ZHDK, made a nice introduction to this new department dedicated to new audiovisual formats & experiments for online and mobile media.

Niels Hendriks, a young researcher from KHLim Media and Design Academy in Genk (Belgium), shared with us the questions raised by the “Social Spaces” research group.

Finally, last but not least, Ulrich Schendzielorz from Schwäbisch Gmünd HfG (Germany) made a very efficient presentation of the Interaction Design BFA program in SG.

Next Cumulus Digital Culture is planned during the Cumulus fall conference in Denver, September 29th 2011. Fred Murell from RMCAD will introduce us to the fascinating IxD community in Colorado. Programme will be announced on this blog as soon as possible. Participation is open to Cumulus members, please send me a mail !

Frédéric Degouzon
Head of Strategy, L’École de design Nantes Atlantique
f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com
Follow @fdegouzon

The provisional program is now online for the next session in Paris. It will be divided in two parts : morning part will be dedicated to invited speakers while the afternoon session will be open to Cumulus members introducing themselves.

10:00 – 12:30 Part #1 Invited speakers : a glance at French interaction design

First speaker : Benoît Drouillat, President of “Designers Interactifs” – Main professional organisation for interaction design in France

Benoît Drouillat is the founding president of *designers interactifs*, an organization to advance the interaction design profession in France. He has an hybrid background in both design and literature. He has held numerous positions in interactive agencies. He talks and teaches in design schools and at universities (Paris-Est Créteil and Limoges) about interface design and information architecture. He has published 2 books with Nicole Pignier: Penser le webdesign (2004) and Le Webdesign, sociale expérience des interfaces web (2008).

www.designersinteractifs.org
www.drouillat.com

Second speakers : “Our experience as a small French innovation design consultancy” – Nicolas Gaudron & Virginia Cruz, IDSL

Nicolas Gaudron holds a Master of Arts in Design Products from the Royal College of Art in London.
After a work experience at IDEO Palo Alto (California), he worked at INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) as product / interaction designer on a new communication control protocol and smart devices («Interliving» European research project of the Disappearing Computer IST programme). He then joined Renault Industrial Design, «Prospective & Concept Car» Department where he has contributed to the development of the Human-Machine Interaction expertise, before founding IDSL in April 2007.

Virginia Cruz has an engineering and design background. She is graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Mines ParisTech, and from the Royal College of Art in London with a Master of Arts in Industrial Design. After working for Electrolux in Sweden, Sony R&D in France, she worked for Orange France Telecom group as interaction designer at the «Smart Objects and New Interfaces Laboratory» in Grenoble and at the Explocentre innovation centre in Paris. She joined IDSL in April 2008.

Teaching activities They talk and teach in design, engineering and business schools about innovation methodology, design thinking and interaction and service design. They started teaching in 2006 when they cofounded a 1-year interaction design studio at ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs) in Paris. They are supervisors and teachers of the interaction design course (part of the Humanities and Social Sciences programme) at Ecole Polytechnique since 2008.
www.id-sl.com

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

Self service buffet.

13:30 – 15:00 Part#2 Members sessions : an introduction to Cumulus members’ activities and projects

Rule : Fifteen minutes session to introduce your approach, your experiments or your outputs in the field of Digital Culture

• 13:30 – Dominique Sciamma, Strate Collège Designers
• 13:50 – Martin Zimper, ZHGK/CAST (Zürich)
• 14:10 – Niels Hendrik, KHLim/MDA, Social Spaces (Genk)
• 14:30 – Ulrich Schendzielorz Schwäbisch Gmünd HfG

You feel like you should be on stage ? Send us a mail f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com

Updates will be published here as soon as possible.

15:00 End of the Working Group

The session will be held at Strate Collège Designers. 50  seats available. Official website for the conference (registration required to participate).

A vision of the Chinese digital market by design practitionners

The first part of the session was focused on a vision of the Chinese use of digital technology through two complementary speeches.
First presentation was made by Itamar Medeiros, User Experience Manager at Autodesk Shanghaï and coordinator for the Shanghaï group of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) . He brought us a documented vision of the actual digital market in China, with numerous facts and figures. Itamar posted the presentation and an excellent post about the session on his own blog.

Here is the presentation on Slide Share : Digital Culture in China: OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERACTION DESIGN

Second presentation was made by Lynnette Chan, former Lead of Creative Studio at Asentio and industrial designer at IDEO, now freelancer at Rénnovate . She introduced the results of a huge survey and ethnographic study conducted in several urban areas of China about the actual use of digital vs printed magazines. It was a well-illustrated grassroots approach to daily life, a good addendum to Itamar’s “Big picture” approach.

Opening up to Cumulus members

We are trying to follow up every Cumulus institution relating to the goals and purposes of the working group. Suggestions are welcome ! Join the conversation…

What is the state of Digital Culture in Shanghaï 2010 ? We need inner feedback from players in the local market. What are the trends, opportunities and threats in the vastest area in Asia concerning digital services, applications and media ? With the introduction of case studies (success stories, failures and errors also), explanation and analysis of creative processes & key factors in this specific context will be brought. Invited speakers Itamar Medeiros and Lynette Chan will be provide us with their vision for the future, and maybe tell us a bit about expectations and wishes for the evolution of design education in the field of interaction design, service design, digital media.

Session will be divided in two parts :

- Digital Culture in Shanghaï 2010 : case studies

Invited speakers :

Itamar Medeiros
Itamar Medeiros, from Brazil, currently lives in Shanghai, where he works as User Experience Manager of Utilities Design Solutions at Autodesk ®, and helps promote Interaction Design as a local coordinator for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar Medeiros has developed <>  several websites and interactive media campaigns, both as art director and, later, as creative director. As an Information Design specialist , served as board member of the Brazilian Society of Information Design , and held a lecturing position as Assistant Program Director of the Visual Communication Department of Raffles Design Institute at DongHua University, China.

Lynnette Chan
Human centered industrial designer at rénnovate
Former Lead of Creative Studio at Asentio and industrial designer at IDEO Shanghaï.
Lynnette Chan, born and raised in Singapore, currently curiously observing daily living surprises in Shanghai. Prior to setting up rénnovate, she was an industrial designer with IDEO and Creative Studio Lead at Asentio Design. Her project portfolio includes wide range of products, from Chinese youth media behaviors, health care, oral care, home electronics, future handheld computing to cooking stove for rural China. During the design process, she collaborates very closely across multi-disciplines (human factor specialists, mechanical engineers, and interaction designers).

- State of the art and relaunch of the DC activity : who’s in, who shall be in, what for ?

About Cumulus Digital Culture

Cumulus Digital Culture is a working group bringing together members of the CUMULUS Association dedicated to new media and interaction design.

For a while now, digital technologies and services have appeared all around us on a worldwide scale. Art, design and media higher education institutions have taken into account this emerging and challenging trend pervading our societies.
Many courses, curriculums, degrees and research projects have come to life over the past ten or fifteen years: “new media, “interaction design”, “multimedia/hypermedia” etc…
Depending on each institution’s own history, on the personal interests of the pioneering founders as well as on national and local contexts, many different options have been explored. It’s now time to identify and to gather the various players in our institutions interested in what can be called a “digital culture” in a broader sense.
This working group is meant to be both a platform for discussion and exchanges about existing experiences and a framework for future collaboration, including the quite contemporary issue of research.

Typically, information is shown in a classical template; a bar chart, line graph, pie chart, etc. Such methods of displaying data have become so common that we often use them to communicate ideas, without first searching for a more successful means.

The goal of this project is to take you through the process of information visualization. Information design and visualization is a form of narrative. Each student approaches the information in their own way and generates a new and interesting concept to communicate traditional data sets.

The process of understanding data begins with a set of numbers and a
goal of answering a question about the data. The steps along this path
can be described as follows:

“The process of understanding data begins with a set of numbers and a
goal of answering a question about the data. The steps along this path
can be described as follows:

1. Acquire – the matter of obtaining the data, whether from a file
on a disk or from a source over a network.

2. Parse – providing some structure around what the data means,
ordering it into categories.

3. Filter – removing all but the data of interest.

4. Mine – the application of methods from statistics or data
mining, as a way to discern patterns or place the data in math-
ematical context.

5. Represent- determination of a simple representation, whether
the data takes one of many shapes such as a bar graph, list, or
tree.

6. Refine – improvements to the basic representation to make it
clearer and more visually engaging.

7. Interact – the addition of methods for manipulating the data or
controlling what features are visible.”

Ultimately this is fun, really. Data is surprising in its flexibility and overall squishiness as a design problem. There are so many ways to approach information presentation. Whether it is the friendliness of the illustrative style of Richard Saul Wurman, or the precise regulation of Edward Tufte, or the elegant intelligence of Minard, ultimately you are end up expressing your authorship as a designer and your understanding of your target audience though very subtle graphic cues that guide without getting in the way of illumination.

- Concept by Ben Fry

Project: Data Visualization, Class: Experience Design at RMCAD
Student Designers: Andrew Alger, Jenn Doe, Andrea Kilness, and Grant Miller
Instructor: Fred Murrell

See the projects here:

Andrew Alger, Andrea Kilness, Grant Miller, Jenn Doe