Very sad news for the people affected, and for Dundee and the creative industries as a whole. It comes just a week after the launch, through EA Games, of their new title, APB.
Dundee’s economy has been dealt a savage blow today with the collapse of leading video games company Realtime Worlds, leading to the loss of 170 jobs.
Read the full story over at The Courier.
Victor Keegan writes in the Guardian:
Last year the Harvard Business Review linked online game-playing to leadership ability, pointing out that multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest are good at developing skills such as ‘risk-taking, speed and fluidity’ that businesses need in a globalised digital workplace. IBM and other corporations use virtual spaces to hone management skills in a world where events such as the financial crash would have been regarded as far-fetched had they appeared in a computer game a year or two ago.
Last week I saw two small examples of what might be the future. At a seminar organised by Digital Public, a consultancy, I met the young people behind Dead Ends, a videogame commissioned by Channel 4, which enabled kids from at-risk London areas to work with rollingsound.co.uk, a small multimedia company, to create a game about knife life on the city’s streets with a serious underlying message. [...]
In Plymouth I visited TwoFour, an interesting company embracing everything from TV production to virtual worlds, which has linked with Stoke Damerel Community College to conduct entire lessons in Second Life for 13- to-17-year-old kids lacking motivation, with surprisingly encouraging results. Meanwhile, Sony Computer Entertainment has released to critical acclaim the UK-developed Little Big Planet, a PlayStation 3 game where players can learn elements of physics or other disciplines.
TruSim, a division of Blitz Games Studios in the UK, has developed Interactive Triage Trainer, a 3D virtual representation of a real-world situation designed to train professionals how to prioritise their treatment of casualties after a catastrophe.
These are a few examples of what could become a mass market under the watchful eye of the recently established £3m Serious Games Institute at Coventry University. David Wortley, director of the institute, is hopeful that their work will dispel some of the social stigma around videogames to highlight positive applications that can deliver genuine solutions to real social and economic issues.
We all think recycling is great. Right?
Maybe this will change your mind…
A two-day Innovation Showcase designed to give students and businesses the chance to learn about the range of technology and expertise available in Tayside will be held in the Dalhousie Building at the University of Dundee in November.
Organised by The Innovation Portal and the Enterprise Gym, the showcase includes a business day on 18 November and a student day on 19 November.
The business day, hosted by Peter Day from BBC Radio 4’s In Business programme, will also be attended by Jim Mather, Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism and feature Dundee-born Ken Keir, MD of Honda UK and Senior VP of Honda Motor Europe, as the keynote speaker.
It will highlight the expertise available at the University, the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the University of Abertay and show how productive collaboration between local firms and academics can stimulate and foster innovation
The student day will give students an appreciation of the process of innovation and its significance in the knowledge economy. It will feature talks from young entrepreneurs and the chance to take part in competitions. If you wish for a teaching group to attend one of the sessions please contact Ken Edward at the Enterprise Gym at k.z.edward@dundee.ac.uk.
To register for the event and find out more visit www.innovationportal.co.uk/showcase
Things that are designed in the west are increasingly made in the east. Cheap labour and cheap materials mean we’re used to paying next to nothing for our clothes and toys.
But soaring demand has led to quality issues (and that’s putting it mildly – lead paint in children’s toys is more than just a ‘quality issue’). And now, a drop in demand is having consequences for the people we relied on to make things as cheaply as possible, as reported by the BBC:
Most of the world’s toys are made in China.
But in the last seven months, half the country’s toymakers have gone out of business.
Last year’s toy scandal, when lead paint was found in Chinese made toys sold in the US, was the beginning of the trouble.New safety regulations added to costs, wages were on the rise, and then factory owners noticed that their orders from overseas were beginning to dwindle as customers in America and Europe cut back because they have less money to spend.
As I leave, Wang Suzhen, insists on loading me up with an armful of cuddly pandas.
Written on them: ‘Wo ai Bei jing’. I love Beijing.
They were ordered by a foreigner, but he never came to pick them up, she says.
And it is not just the toymakers who are suffering. In almost every industry, the orders from overseas are rising slower than they once were.
On the same theme as last week’s lecture on “Good Design/Bad Design” the New York Times recently published an article
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
[...]
Properly used, design thinking can weave together elements of demographics, research, environmental factors, psychology, anthropology and sociology to generate novel solutions to some of the most puzzling problems in business. So pervasive has design thinking become in the last five years that Stanford University has created an elective program it calls d.school — more formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design — that has proved wildly popular with budding entrepreneurs from all corners of the campus.
It is a time in the spotlight for a process that historically has been relegated to the end of the business planning line.
‘Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence,’ says Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of the design consulting firm IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Calif. ‘Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.’
While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into ‘rapid prototyping,’ which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.
‘It’s the designers’ version of the scientific method,’ explains Greg Galle, co-founder and managing partner of the C2 Group, a consulting firm based in Half Moon Bay, Calif. ‘It’s sloppy and messy and not nearly as disciplined as the scientist, but we do trial and error and we hypothesize and test and we see what we learn and then we go back and try again.’
Visit the New York Times to read the rest of the article.
Lisa Jardine writes for the BBC about the history of the British concept of “home”:
‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ was already a familiar platitude by 1700. To have a place of one’s own for shelter, where dependants are protected and their possessions are safe, feels like a fundamental social good. But have we gone too far in our quest for personal space and privacy?The family as a unit has varied considerably in the course of history, but the bond between those who live under one roof together has always been an important one. Today, a ‘family’ tends to mean the tiny cluster of individuals related by birth – typically, father and mother and one or two small children, but increasingly, one adult and a partner or dependant – who share a residential unit.
Until the 19th Century, however, the word ‘family’ was a synonym for an entire ‘household’, and was used to cover all those who lived together in a dwelling, whether related by birth to the householder, employed in their service, or simply lodged with them. ‘Home’ was the bricks and mortar in which half a dozen or more adults lived their lives, supporting one another by their labour.
When the renowned humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam settled in Basle in the 1520s, for example, his familia or family included a collection of friends, admirers and disciples, all living together in one comfortable, spacious house.Household-families
Under the watchful eye of Erasmus’s formidable housekeeper Margaret, these young men and boys – pupils, lodgers and colleagues – performed all the household duties their distinguished Master required, preparing his meals, doing the housework, running errands and taking care of his horses.
Paintings of Erasmus like the one by Hans Holbein in the National Gallery in London show a solitary scholar in his study, surrounded by his books. But his was no isolated ivory tower. Even at work in his study on the Latin and Greek classics Erasmus had his famuli – his disciples, collaborators and factotums – around him.The same young men who staffed his kitchen and stable also worked as copyists transcribing from manuscripts, as scribes writing to his dictation, and as proof-readers and editors for his publications.
Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, household-families like these were the standard type of group sharing a single roof. The historian Naomi Tadmor has argued that the family portrayed in Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (published in 1740) is typical of the times.
Mr B – the squire who over the course of the novel’s two volumes attempts unsuccessfully to seduce his household servant Pamela, eventually agreeing to marry her – is a bachelor, but nevertheless has a fully-fledged household supporting him and his lifestyle. These he refers to consistently as his family.City life
As a waiting-maid, Pamela belongs to this community of domestic servants, distant relatives, friends and companions, all living in a single dwelling. She never refers to her ‘poor but honest’ elderly parents, who lived elsewhere, as ‘family’. And the plot turns on the fact that she expects to be kept safe and protected within the household where she lives and works.
As family life moved increasing toward cities in the late-18th and 19th Centuries, houses of the type in which Mr B or Erasmus lived surrounded by dependants – big gabled mansions with plenty of nooks and crannies – continued to be built.But increasingly domestic structures centred on the housing needs of the growing middle classes. Scaled-down town-houses were put up, many of which still survive today, modified for modern use. These still provided lodgings for dependants and servants under a common roof, but centred on the family life of a group of blood-relations, in a way we can recognise.
Further down the social scale, accommodation was also always shared, but here it was fraught with difficulties. Just as happens today in rapidly urbanised economies, most of the working classes found themselves living in ad hoc ways, in overcrowded accommodation, which entirely lacked the privacy that we all now crave, and could hardly be said to offer the stable communal structures that Erasmus and Richardson wrote about.War years
Social historian Amanda Vickery has recently explored in detail the way in which, in multiple-occupancy working-class homes in the 18th Century, locked boxes, padlocks and keys to rooms and cupboards were talismans for hard-pressed lodgers, providing them with a remnant of private space and decency, away from the prying eyes of the landlady and their fellow-residents.
In our own times, the drive towards privacy has become paramount. We can see the modern ideal emerging in those wonderfully dated advertisements for domestic appliances from the 1950s and 60s, which show a smiling housewife, immaculately turned out in a many-petticoated dress with a cinched-in waist, pushing her vacuum-cleaner over expanses of carpet, or admiring her shiny new refrigerator.After the crowded, shared accommodation of the war years – shared washing and cooking facilities, wet laundry on the shared landing and a communal toilet – the domestic dream was resolutely a home with a front door of one’s own. The promise of government to the returning armed forces was that social housing would make that dream a reality – would provide ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’.
That dream is summed up in the so-called Parker Morris Standards, adopted for social housing in the 1960s. They became mandatory for council housing in 1969, and remained in force until 1980.
The Parker Morris Standards laid down the dimensions for typical items of household furniture for which the dwelling designer should allow space, and provided anthropometric data needed to calculate the living space required to use and move around that furniture.High-rise blocks
Its rules specified that a four person terrace house should have 74.5 square metres of space; kitchens for one or two people should contain 1.7 cubic metres of enclosed storage space; in one, two and three-bedroom dwellings the WC could be in the bathroom, but in four person houses it should have a separate compartment. The Parker Morris Standards for space, privacy and convenience continue to provide the familiar features of what we feel to be a modestly comfortable and convenient family home today.
But since the scramble for home ownership in the 1980s, our demands for personal space and privacy have come to dominate the planning and construction of domestic dwellings, and residential units have got ever smaller.Now is perhaps the time when we have to begin to ask ourselves whether the units of accommodation which have been constructed – often in glamorous high-rise blocks, with built-in appliances and fabulous views – are really, in the long run, fit for ‘family’ living, however we define that family.
In June of this year, at the launch of the London Festival of Architecture, the Mayor, Boris Johnson deplored the fact that ‘new buildings in London have some of the smallest rooms in Europe’. For new social housing to be provided in London, Johnson announced, ‘we will be re-establishing the space standards first promoted by the visionary planner Sir Parker Morris’.
The chair of the London Assembly’s planning committee Nicky Gavron welcomed Mr Johnson’s pledge, saying: ‘The mayor has been very clear that he thinks our space standards are shameful; that we are building rabbit hutches.’ Others poured scorn on his promise, as an impossible dream – property values, they insisted, made reinstating the old housing standards out of the question.
We may have to wait until house prices have fallen dramatically before we know whether the homes designed for exaggeratedly ‘nuclear’ forms of living, offered by politicians and property speculators in an over-heated property market, were part of an impossible dream of home-ownership for every individual.
Perhaps the drive in Britain towards compact, separate ‘homes’, with ever-tinier floor-plans, crammed together by developers on restricted urban sites, is our housing equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s – our housing South Sea Bubble.
If that bubble bursts, it is intriguing to imagine how these undersized dwellings might be combined and converted into homes for other types of ‘familia’ to suit the changing times, just as has happened so often in the past before.
Sir John Sorrell is promoting design as a force for good that will see the UK through the economic downturn it currently faces.
“I believe that the greatest creativity happens in adversity,%u2019 he says. “And I believe creativity in adversity is the key to success. I believe in the power of design to solve problems and [foster] innovation.”
He continues, “Design for me is the powerhouse of the creative industries. It is the catalyst that restarts the economic engines of nations.”
As chairman of the London Design Festival, Sorrell was speaking in London last week to an audience of LDF partners and media. He said the sixth festival, scheduled for September, will “take place in a very different context to the past five”.
“The past ten years have seen a pretty good time %u2013 and the past five years a boom time %u2013 for design,%u2019 he said. %u2018This time, there is doom and gloom around, but when the going gets tough, design gets going.”
BBC News reports on a new study being undertaken at Dundee University:
The long decline of Dundee’s jute industry and the reasons for it will be examined in a new research project at the University of Dundee.
Academics have been awarded £128,000 to study why production fell and the impact it has had on the city.The research team will interview those involved in the industry and study archive material.
The jute sector was a major part of Dundee’s economy through the Victorian age and into the 20th Century.
However, the industry then went into a long decline through the rest of the 1900s, with the last jute mill closing in 1998.
‘Global cities’
Professor Jim Tomlinson said: ‘Jute is a pioneer of the decline of old local industry – others like shipbuilding and coal in other parts of Britain came later.
‘Dundee was one of the most globalised cities in the world in the early 1900s, certainly more so than it is now.
‘The city was at the hub of global trading in jute, importing from India and exporting around the world.
‘That faded with the decline of the local jute industry as it faced a number of pressures.’
Dr Carlo Morelli, from the department of economic studies, added: ‘Another focus of our study will be the impact on women’s lives.
‘It is a highly unusual feature of the industry that the jute workforce was largely made up of women.’
The money has been awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, which provides funding for research and education projects.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers writing on Marriage and the Market comment on how the family has shifted from being a form of insurance and mutual dependency to something far more sociable. The role of designers in this seems indisputable:
So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let’s be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children. Returning to the language of economics, the key today is consumption complementarities — activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives ‘hedonic marriage’.
