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Pdc talk
- 1. Creative participation and mobile ecologies Anja Venter, PhD candidate, Centre in ICT4D
- 2. “Awarded to cities who recognise design as a tool for social, cultural and economic development.”
- 6. What do the media ecologies of materially poor, aspiring visual designers look like, and how does it affect their experiences in formal education?
- 7. HOW CAN EXISTING PRACTICES INFORM THE DEVELOPMENT OF DESIGN TOOLS FOR MOBILE?
- 9. “I’d rather have a really good and big phone [phablet] than a slow computer. It’s cheaper for this one […] I can hide it when I travel. A laptop is too big when you walk through the Kasi.”
- 16. THANKS! www.nannaventer.com | www.ict4d.cs.uct.ac.za The mobile portfolio
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Anja Venter – I am a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and also a researcher from the centre for film and media studies at UCT, I am currently based at the centre in ICT4D at the computer science department at UCT. Looking at the relationship between creative cultural production and mobile technologies among aspiring visual design students in Cape Town South Africa.
- For the year of 2014, the city of Cape Town was awarded the title of “World Design Capital”: However, Cape Town as a city was re-designed half a decade ago under Apartheid’s group areas, with the intentions of racial segregation and controlled movement – the city as a designed space is still marred by this history – and the design industry in Cape Town is still largely constituted of the privileged elite.
- This makes sense when you look at the statistics: only around 1% of high school learners have the opportunity to study information communication technology, visual arts or visual design up to a matric level. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the art-offering schools are located in wealthy geographic areas, and so perpetuates a culture of exclusion in one of the fastest growing economic industries in the world, according to a recent UNESCO report, (UNESCO, 2013) Exposure to these subjects contributes substantially to students’ acceptance into tertiary courses in design. Most of the design industry in South Africa is still hired directly out of tertiary school.
- But increasingly, as computers and online resources are decentralizing the institutions of learning, especially in developed countries, introductions to creative careers are happening outside of formal education, most notably through digital content creation and online communities of practice. For example, many of today’s web developers cut their teeth by customizing the HTML and CSS of their myspace accounts and even early iterations of microsoft paint can be seen as a “first touch”, as Beth kolko would call it, of a digital drawing environment for a generation of matte painters. Non-instrumental use can lead to income-generating instrumental practice. Generating functional, if not accredited, programmers, designers and artists.
- But how do young people start crossing these boundaries with many formal holes in their portfolios and lived experiences? I connected with young people who were enrolled in bridging courses aimed specifically at young resource-constrained creatives who lack prior formal training and relevant experience.
- At the centre of my PhD thesis sits this question – what do the media ecologies of materially poor, aspiring visual designers look like, and how does it affect their experiences in formal education? I was offered a Nokia grant for my research so I had to append the question:
- HOW CAN EXISTING PRACTICES INFORM THE DEVELOPMENT OF DESIGN TOOLS FOR MOBILE?
- For the past year I have followed the trajectories of around 60 young creatives who, despite varying institution-defined deficits and resource constraints, have battled their way through extended curriculum programs in visual design.
- Luckily for myself and my funding from Nokia, from the onset, the role of mobile technologies in this creative ecology was indisputable. Every single one of the students had access to a feature or smart phone and used these prolifically.
- Some of the emerging creative artefacts include the appearance of grassroots made-to-order fashion brands designed by students promoted over mobile.
- Young people are also increasingly making use of free apps to enhance their mobile photography through editing and decoration tools These are providing new “social, creative, and emotional cartographies” – opportunities for personal expression and agency.
- Mobile phones are also used to document work, turning mobile phones into mobile portfolio folders.
- Yet there are no visual design, or design networking mobile applications which are especially aimed at such Mobile-centric novice designers – who constitute the majority of young creatives in South Africa. so we’ve been working on designs for what such an application would look like.
- I have been running a number of participatory design workshops in tandem with in-depth intereviews that center on such design solutions. Through these processes I am able to offer agonistic spaces for debate around emerging technologies, freed from the strictly profit-driven approaches heeded by larger corporations and marketers.
- I decided to recruit a few Honours computer science students to start working on the tech we were envisaging, and it lead to the partial development of the Molio create tool, which is currently still being workshopped.
- However these workshops have given rise to a number of potential answers to questions of exclusion. These ideas include the Molio network – a social network aimed at young African artist and designers. Molio Market – where young people can sell their digital wares, and Molio learn – a curated resource of online tutorials, User generated wiki’s and connection to educational and workplace information. Thanks!