Tag Archives: imagination

why so Serious(tm)? playing with LEGO Serious Play

edited excerpt from Ashton and Giddings 2018, At work in the toy box: bedrooms, playgrounds and theories of play in creative cultural work International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation: The appeal of the consultancy programme LEGO Serious Play is in part generated by the tension between work and play. The name itself jams together the Serious and […]

transforming creativity

With Dan Ashton I have recently set up the Transforming Creativity Research Group at WSA. We are waiting for the official website to be launched, but have a news and events blog up and running: https://transformingcreativity.wordpress.com/ We have already run the After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media symposium, and Dan and I […]

future of toys… network ideas

The central theme of the proposed activity is the future of toys in a digital media culture. Taking recent developments in ‘hybrid’ toy and game design and the ‘Internet of Toys’ – systems that integrate physical toys with digital game technologies and networks- the following questions will be asked: What are the implications for game […]

Pokémon Go as distributed imagination

Here’s a draft of a short article accepted for a special section of Mobile Media & Communication on Pokémon Go: The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality (AR) to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on […]

distributed imagination

Distributed imagination: small steps to an ethology of mind and media This project will theorise the imagination in postdigital mediated environments. Imagination has at best been regarded with suspicion in critical studies of media communication and communion. Its Romantic and humanist legacy, and its associations with art and children, seem to push it aside as […]

the hybrid realities of Pokémon (before Pokémon Go)

Excerpt from Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play, 79-85. Transmedia systems: Drawing Pokémon As a transmedia system, Pokémon is designed to open up numerous and varied platforms for play with its characters and world. Our house was for years a monument to its success in this regard. Bedroom walls were covered with posters detailing and categorizing […]

Pokémon as new mass media

Something I started writing at the end of the last century! From Lister et al 2009, New Media: a critical introduction 2nd ed.), 292-294 CASE STUDY 4.10: Pokémon: videogames as new (mass) media To explore the issues arising from popular new media’s implication within commercial entertainment culture we will return to the multiplatform worlds […]

pythiatechnics

What is the temporality of the design process? There is a moment of production, a blank period of distribution and installation as the object goes out into the world and that’s it? There is however at least a dual temporality in production: the actual processes of design, consultation, marketing, etc., and the anticipated, virtual time […]

Connecting the Dots…

I presented at Connecting the Dots: movement, space and the digital image at Cambridge University’s CRASSH last Friday – thanks to a kind invitation from Jenna Ng. I shared a session with Cambridge’s Alan Blackwell (great talk on the significance and player-generated worlds and virtual computers of Minecraft) and the session was streamed to a hungry audience at HUMlab at Umea University, Sweden. Humlab […]