“Refresh Dublin is an event that promotes design, technology, usability and standards. It is a part of and inspired by the Refreshing Cities movement. The intent of Refresh Dublin is to provide a cross-discipline insight into all things design, interactive, creative and technical, so that different disciplines can learn from each other.” – RefreshDublin.org

How did Refresh Dublin start?

While it has taken a while to organise the event – for example, the sponsorship details, a venue and our first speaker line-up – we’re finally getting there. The first Refresh Dublin event is on this Thursday, October 29th from 6pm in the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin with speakers Sabrina Dent, the Playhouse Dublin team, Eamon Leonard and Mercury Girl Inc. All of the tickets have already been allocated but if you would like to receive updates about future events, you can sign-up to the mailing list, follow @RefreshDublin on Twitter, join the Facebook group or the LinkedIn group.

The “Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light” website was launched last week. The exhibition runs until October 31st in the Lighthouse cinema. I was asked to design and develop the site, in keeping with Kubrick’s taste and style. Interestingly, I discovered that Kubrick’s favourite font was Futura. Although this is not too surprising as he used it for the posters and title sequences of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Eyes Wide Shut”, as well as for the Kubrick collection DVD boxset. Tony Frewin, Kubrick’s long-standing assistant, stated in an article in the Guardian that Futura was indeed “Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant.” I also incorporated a number of social media networks and tools into the website’s design in order to help promote the show and keep people that were interested in attending updated. You can join the show’s Facebook group or follow @KubrickTaming on Twitter.

The website had to be turned around quite quickly and as is often the case there were delays with getting some of the artworks ready and content delivered for the site. However, it was launched in time for the opening night and to the curator’s satisfaction. I have still yet to attend the show but I am hoping to see it over the weekend while I check out some of this year’s Darklight events. I’ll also be collecting a specially commissioned limited edition poster 0f the main illustration from the website homepage, designed by Martin Ansin. Ansin’s hand-drawn retrospective of some of Kubrick’s classic characters is overseen by a portrait of the director and is available as a collector’s item as a high-quality print at the Light House Cinema or by e-mailing kubricktaming@gmail.com. The limited edition of 250 is available to buy for a very reasonable price of 50 euros. Read about the poster in Ansin’s own words.

The exhibition was curated by John Maguire, a film critic with the Irish Sunday Business Post newspaper and the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show on 100-102 Today FM. Read about the show in John’s own words on his blog.

The show has received quite a bit of coverage including articles/ features on:

• Film Ireland
• Darklight
• Filmbase
• Cinematical
• Le Cool
• The Lighthouse Cinema
• IFTN (Irish Film and Television Network)
• Candy Collective
• The Irish Times
• The Sunday Tribune
• The Sunday Busines Post
• RTE’s “The View”
• Scamp
• Movies.ie
• Today FM’s “Ian Dempsey – Breakfat Show”
• Newstalk’s “Culture Shock”
• Kiersten Essenpreis ‘You Fail’ Blog
• QBN
• Entertainment.ie

Photo by collinmel (cc)

Last week I attended an Arduino and Flash workshop, hosted by Ben Arent/ CASL on behalf of the IxDA Dublin. The cost of the workshop included a fully loaded Arduino kit loaded with resistors, sensors and switches from SKPang. So plenty to experiment with afterwards. 
I had previously heard about Arduino and understood that the goal of the Arduino project was to make tools available that are accessible, low-cost, flexible and easy-to-use to develop interactive devices. 

I viewed the workshop as a chance to take a crash course in Arduino and as a break away from designing wire frames and interaction flows for web sites. The workshop also provided attendees with a chance to expand their skill set, start sketching with hardware and in Ben’s own words  to “think outside the web.” The possibilities that Arduino opens up include opportunities for new products and services that can improve businesses and the users experience. An example of this is BakerTweet, created by Poke.

Albion, a bakery in London, uses Baker Tweet to announce what is being cooked in their kitchen. Check out the video:

Thanks to Ben for a good introduction to Arduino. The full workshop agenda has been posted by him on his own website.

Related Links:

• - Arduino project website: http://www.arduino.cc/
• - Arduino wiki, aka the Playground
• - Arduino Tutorial
• - Make Magazine article on the Arduino

Do you sometimes forget how to type the copyright symbol, the Apple icon, the cloverleaf symbol on the command key or a trademark logo? Yes? Then this tool is for you. For web designer/ developers, there is a handy “as html” toggle option that will copy the character as html code. i.e. “” as text or “” as the html option. And before any Irish readers wonder, yes – they have included fadas too.

The Konst & Teknik website has more examples of selected works from the studio, which are interesting. I like the “Analogue vs. Digital” experiments with the concept of reality in moving pictures.

(Found via bobulate and swissmiss).

On June 12th, 2009 I attended the first TEDxDublin event, which was organised by Aaron Quigley and hosted by the Science Gallery.

The previously recorded TED talks that were show at the event were: 

• - Pattie Maes on the Sixth Sense. TED Link
• - Robert Full on Learning from the gecko’s tail. TED Link

The three live speakers at the event were:

• - Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who talked about the Photosynth project. Photosynth can take a wide variety of images, analyze them for similarities, and then graft them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. 
• - Scott Rickard presented on the “source signal separation” or the cocktail-party effect. 
• - Mark Billinghurst presented “Accessible AR: Bringing Augmented Reality to the Masses”. Mark is the director of the Human Interface Technology Lab in New Zealand and the inventor of the “Magic Book.” Billinghurst has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in human computer interface technology, particularly in the area of Augmented Reality. His presentation also had the best slide from all the presentations (in my honest opinion).

The three talks can be viewed as videos here:

FITC (Flash in the Can) is one of the largest and longest running events for the design and technology community. The 2009 Toronto event celebrated what it means to “live, think and play outside the lines” this year, with three days packed full of inspiring sessions focused on the art and craft of interactive design and technology.

Interestingly, the “Flash in the Can” name is a reference to Adobe’s Flash software and CAN – taken from Canada. The inaugural festival previously focused strictly on Flash. However, the scope of events has broadened to include motion design, creative inspiration, mobile and gaming technologies as well as other forms of interactive and digital media technologies such as Flex, Air and others.

Traveling to the event in Toronto (a great city, my first time there) was a great opportunity to check out Toronto and the interactive design and technology industry there, to network and to give me some food for thought for when I move to Canada at the start of 2010.

Pre-Conference Day: Workshops and the Get a Job event

I attended R Blank’s workshop “Practical ActionScript 3“, which covered the fundamental changes in ActionScript 3. The workshop aimed to teach attendees the core changes in AS3 and how to execute all basic functionality (such as loading external music, keep using your FlashVars, and parse through huge XML files) while getting a handle on some of the new terms and concepts available in AS3. Blank also presented a session titled “Get Off Your Ass and Start Using AS3 Already!“, which although I did not attend I am happy to say that I’ve been using AS3 ever since.  If you haven’t gotten off you ass and started using AS3 yet, do it!

During the workshop’s lunch break I took some time to explore the Get a Job event in which a number of leading agencies presented and set up booth to talk to potential talent about future opportunities. During this time, I got to talk to some of the people at great places such as First Born Multimedia, Henderson Bas, Grow Interactive, Relish and Fuel Industries.

The conference itself split sessions into four main streams: Creative, Technical, Business and Panel. There was also some showcase sessions. While I personally chose to attend mainly creative and some technical streams as that content was more relevant and interesting to me, there were some great business and panel sessions that I attended also. If anything, it was sometimes hard to decide what sessions to attend as there could be four all happening simultaneously. The way in which the conference center in the Toronto Hilton hotel was set up allowed attendees to switch between sessions if you so desired, meaning that you could sit in on half of one session at the back of the room and slip out of that to catch half of another session.

 
The Conference:

Listed below are the sessions that I enjoyed most during the 3-day conference. In no particular order:

Zachary Lieberman (thesystemis.com) & Golan Levin (flong.com, Twitter): “Art, Gesture, Computation, Framework.”

“A glimpse, maybe, of possible near futures (and near misses!) in interactive art and design.” 

Lieberman and Levin discussed implementing advanced technology to try and help every day people in their everyday lives. One of the more eye-opening aspects of their presentation focused on an eye-tracking program that they tested with an ex-graffiti artist who is paralyzed due to the debilitating effects of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The software enables him to draw and communicate through eye movements. The duo also presented a range of collaborative and solo projects, and described their “open mouth”

 strategy – As a viewers interest or awe increases, their mouth opens further. They suggested that as the mouth opens, access to the heart opens also. This strategy was demonstrated with sequential photos of a child viewing one of their installations. Another concept that they touched on was DIWO (do it with others) – meaning that it is better for all involved and for the outcome of a project if there is collaboration and sharing of skills. Also eye-opening (but in a completely different way than their earlier demonstration, pardon the pun! – You’ll know what I mean when you view the installation) was the Double-Taker (Snout) interactive installation.

Joshua Davis (joshuadavis.com | Once Upon A Forrest | Twitter): “Space.” 

When I first got involved in digital media in 2000, Davis was the first person in the design and technology industry that I remember thinking was more like a rock star than a designer. That aside, I would consider myself to be one of the many admirer’s of his work. During this engaging and animated presentation, Davis explained how flash technology has enabled him to do “rapid prototyping” sketches. Something that may have taken months with traditional sketching, now takes him a matter of days, thanks to technology.

Camille Utterback (camilleutterback.com): “Responding to Bodies: My Work is Watching You.”

Internationally acclaimed artist, Camille demonstrated the process behind some of of her interactive installations and reactive sculptures. Interestingly, she still uses Director for some of her projects. 

Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship | BSS Labs | Twitter): “Big Spaceship: Digital Creative Agency.”

Joshua’s session illustrated the importance of looking into internal projects and experiments, and discussed other important aspects of the Big Spaceship’s approach and process – a focus on collaboration between disciplines, the importance of culture and work environment, and making time to explore alternative techniques and new technologies. Teams at Big Spaceship are organized by projects instead of by job titles.  

Big Spaceship’s work philosophy includes:

• There is no one creative person or overall Creative Director. Everyone can contribute to project ideas and is considered creative.
• They experiment constantly, including experimenting with internal projects – not only client work. 
• Fun begets quality.

I really liked their Hope vs. Despair project that acts as a physical representation of a Twitter mood detector (see image below). Finally, one slide from the presentation in particular stood out: “Don’t hire assholes. No matter how talented.”

Marcos Chin (marcoschin.com): “Pretty Pictures.”

In Marcos’ own words “I believe that content and concept are very important in the creation of a successful illustration; I absolutely love beautiful pictures, but I think that a beautiful image with a strong idea can be even more engaging.”

Marcos, who is best known for his illustrations for the ubiquitous advertising campaign Lavalife showed samples of some of the work that he has done for clients including Time, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He gave the audience an insight into his image-making process using Illustrator and talked about his experiences of balancing his personal projects with his commercial illustration work.

Carole Guevin (Netdiver): “Online, The Brand is YOU!“

Read more about Carole’s presentation in her article on Netdiver. You can also download her presentation slides as a PDF from the Netdiver site.

“Reality Cheque: Running a Freelance Business.”

This discussion was aimed at freelancers and contained information about how to set your rates, contracts, taxes and incorporation. Panelists were: Dana DiTomaso (LakeStreet Communications | Twitter), Kendra Gadzala (www.gadzala.com), Nadine Lessio (nadinelessio.com  | Twitter) and Stacey Mulcahy (bitchwhocodes.com | Twitter). Moderated by Ann-Marie Cheung (FlashGoddess.com | Twitter).

Joseph Corr & Mathew Ray (Crispin Porter + Bogusky): “Digital Experiences Beyond the Monitor.”

Joseph and Mathew shared the “100 foot experience” of large, interactive installations in destinations including Europe’s largest billboard (Liverpool), domes in Dubai and video projections on the Grand Tower in Jakarta. “Having access to some of the biggest toys in the world is one of the best parts of working with large clients. But, knowing which platforms to incorporate into a campaign, and how to architect a solution to not just support, but take advantage of them can be a complicated task. Lo-fi and homebuilt executions are also possibilities, and often are potential endeavours for students or teams interested in speculative projects.”

The duo spoke about Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” advertising campaign project that allowed users to upload video of themselves explaining how they use their PC. Some of these clips were posted to billboards in Times Square, New York. Users who submitted a video could also text their username to a short code (when they were in Times Square, for example, or else when they were looking at a live web cam of the billboards). The technology would then would pull up their video clip on demand. The duo ended by recommending designers explore getting into interactive displays now, if they haven’t already as they both expect to see more and more of them as consumer demand increases. Entry costs into this area are not as high as you might think – Look at the video of the $2 multi-touch as an example:

MK12 (mk12.com): “Dame Judy Dench Could Kick My Mothers Ass™.”

Shaun Hamontree discussed MK12’s journey designing and executing the main titles and smart table sequences for the latest in the James Bond saga “Quantum of Solace.” Watch the finished intro sequence below:

Thierry Loa (hellohello.bz): “Life, Work and Philosophy.”

Colin Moock (Moock.org | Blog): “Your Phone is Your Controller (and Other Multi-user Adventures.”

Moock explored the world of multi-user experiences, demo-ing an interactive game where the audience could turn their phones into a multi-player game controller.

Matt Lambert (1st Avenue Machine | dieLamb | Twitter): “Technology Paving the Way for Story Telling.” 

Matt discussed the thin line between telling stories while still attempting to create work that is visually and technically impressive. Matt brought the audience back to video editing in the early naughties (2000’s) and observed that at a certain point, the art of storytelling was eclipsed by experimentation with the new technologies at hand. Similarly, Flash designers and developers lost sight of end users and focused more on exploiting the technology. The challenge we face as communicators – whether a Flash designer, developer or film-maker, Matt suggested, was to avoid becoming pigeon-holed in technique or technicalities and for content and concept to precede execution. I couldn’t agree more, concept and content can be lost in digital media projects in favor of “making it look cool.”

View a sample of Matt’s work - Discovery Channel’s EMEA “Footprint”:

View the making of the Footprint video on nofatclips.com

Jared Ficklin (Frog Design | Twitter): “Seeing Sound.”

View a video of Jared demonstrating the Ruben’s tube effect:

Mikey Richardson (AmeobaCorp | Mikeyrichardson.ca | Twitter): “The Things I’ve Learned About Being Creative.”

Mikey discussed some of the lessons that he has learned in terms of creative thinking and demonstrated the value of research, strategy, constantly collecting ideas and visuals, and experimentation. He also discussed specific techniques for coming up with new ideas. Richardson went on to explain the creative philosophy that is used at his design firm AmoebaCorp, which from the sound of things is an really inspiring and creative place to work at. I liked how Mikey emphasized the value of small things that can be overlooked by creatives sometimes, such as “being unfashionable” (see slide below), as vital components in the creative process. His slides were very engaging and well designed also.

View a list of all of the presentations at FITC Toronto 2009.
  

In conclusion:

A really enjoyable and inspiring event. The quality of the presentations and the speakers that were chosen to present at the event were second to none; industry people that know what they’re doing and what they’re talking about. I also liked the opportunities for networking. The people that I spoke to were approachable, accessible and enthusiastic. The networking aspect of the event was invaluable, especially for someone who is not from Toronto and who will be moving to Canada in the near future.

Remember to pace yourself if you are going to any FITC or conference events – we’re talking a full 3 days of conference sessions and then onto the parties each night – 3 days from from 9 a.m. until 1a.m. every day (depending on how late you stay out until at the infamous FITC parties, which I found were a good way to talk to other people that you didn’t meet or see during the day and to unwind after a day-long of sessions).
  

Final words:

Engaging, inspiring, motivating, challenging and lastly, refreshing to see how friendly the Flash / Design / Technology community is worldwide.

- Niamh. @nredmond

MORE INFORMATION: UPCOMING FITC EVENTS, RELATED LINKS AND PHOTOS.

Future FITC events:

If like me, you would like to attend a FITC event again, or possibly for the first time, be sure to check out their website, which details all upcoming events. On the upcoming schedule list right now is FITC Mobile in September 2009 (the early-bird tickets are available until July 17th 2009), the FITC Un-conference event that is part of Adobe Max and FITC Edmonton, both in October 2009.

Related links:

The official FITC Toronto 2009 blog

Big Spaceship’s Labs | FITC Toronto 2009 Link Dump

Photos:

- The official FITC Flickr stream.

- My photos from the event are available to view in my Flickr stream.

Art by Joshua Davis:

I have been using this Firefox add-on for over a year and still think it’s great.

“The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.”

51,675 weekly downloads
8,033,519 total downloads.

More information at: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

“Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Or so the May 2nd, 2005 issue of Business Week stated, but which blogging software should you use?

Undoubtedly, web publishing in the form of blogging has gained popularity as a legitimate business, communications and marketing tool. Furthermore, any internet web manager, developer, designer or digital media industry professional who is worth their weight should maintain a blog, apparently. I myself finally got around to setting up my new blog using WordPress. So… why a new blog? And why have I chosen the blogging software that I have?

Well, having been online since 2000, the blog that I used to maintain was updated sporadically at best, the capabilities of the blog were cumbersome and customisation was extremely limited. Two degrees later, a number of years industry experience and not to mention the changing nature of the digital media landscape itself had me wanting to create a fresh, new, clean-slate kind of blog. Furthermore, despite the fact that my current hosting company, Go Daddy, offers their own QuickBlog system, I decided that I wanted more options than what was on offer. There are a number of other hosted blogging services available, such as TypePad, Blogger and LiveJournal. However, I decided that the benefits of a self-hosted blogging package would outweigh the drawbacks of maintaining my own blog installation. After some research (and assessing what blogging software fellow industry people/ those that I admire were using) I narrowed my choices down to 3: Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern.

On first impressions, I preferred the Movable Type website. However, as Dustin Diaz notes in his own blog, “One should never choose one software over the other based soley on the look of it. I basically got the impression that the classier the UI, the better the functionality must be. Surely a first class design means first class development tools. Wrong”.

So, I dug a little deeper and did my homework. Some help with this included reading an excellent article on the Site Point website, “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed“, which “assesses the performance of the most popular self-hosted options as they go head to head in the battle to become *your* chosen blog software.”

So, who won the battle to become *my* chosen blog software?
- WordPress.

The reasons for this were that WordPress was the best fit for managing static content through the same interface as dynamic content. WordPress also seemed to have the most flexibility in its configuration options, an extensive support community with additional plugins available, permalink flexibility, easy categorisation of content and was very easy to setup (more on this below). There’s no doubt that the different types of blogging software have their own strengths and weaknesses, WordPress just turned out to be the right fit for me.

So, I put the famous ‘5-minute install‘ for the blogging software to the test. On first attempt (3 weeks ago) I gave up after 15 minutes! What can I say?!? It was certainly no reflection on the WordPress software or installation instructions but more to do with my frame of mind at the time – One hundred and one things to do in work, having database connection problems with my host, trying to organise a holiday and subsequently, being in very bad need of that holiday! So… cut to three weeks later – back from the holiday (Sweden & Denmark… hopefully I’ll have more to write about these locations in a future post) and back to the WordPress install. The ‘5-minute install’ took 3 minutes! Happy days.

So, which is the ‘right’ blogging software to use? Well, there is no one ‘right’ package. Some blogging software will suit certain situations better than others. The most suitable choice for me was WordPress, the most suitable choice for you might be something else. Regardless, whatever blogging software you choose should be the one that optimises the productivity of your web publishing. Content really is king afterall!

Related Links:

• The famous ‘5 minute installation’ for WordPress
• Example WordPress installation
• Visual tutorial on how to install Wordpress
• Installing WordPress-An Audio-Visual Presentation
• Business Week May 2nd, 2005 Cover Article – “Blogs Will Change Your Business“.
• ./with Imagination Blog Article – “Movable Type versus Wordpress” by Dustin Diaz.
• Direct Marketing News – “Four reasons why your business should blog next year” by Kevin Hillstrom.
• Site Point Article “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed” by Vinnie Garcia.
• USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review – Blog software comparison chart
• USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review – “Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?“by Susannah Gardner.
• Wikipaedia – Weblogs
• Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.org
• WordPress: http://www.wordpress.org
• Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
• Textpattern: http://www.textpattern.com