Different Roles - or should I say walls

Several developments since the last post which have kept life pretty busy. First of all though, I had several emails resulting from the Jane Austen demo posts, showing interest in the project. One in particular was from Linda Robson Walker, the author of 'Why Was Jane Austen Sent away to School at Seven? An Empirical Look at a Vexing Question' which formed the basis of The Talking Walls' virtual build of Steventon Rectory. Linda mentioned that the first few paragraphs of the last blog were quite technical in the terminology used, for which I apologise. I forget that readers may not be familiar with animation terms so I will explain a little.

The house had been built in 3D for the earlier demo that was posted. The little clip of just the house spinning and looking dark brown, was an experimentation in another piece of software, where the materials previously shown on the house were discarded in preference for a flat beige colour. This was to help decrease the file size in order to upload it, the file size was initially large due to the program through which it had originally been built. I hope this is a little clearer, the original house can be seen more clearly on this link

Thankyou Linda for your response and contact, it was wonderful to receive such a great email (I will be in touch).

Regarding the title of different roles, I am very lucky to now be a part-time lecturer at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, in the subject of branding and marketing to the 2nd and 3rd year students. Alongside of this, I am also lecturing at the University of Winchester in Animation & Games (Specialist 1 module)for the 2nd year BSc students on the Digital Media Design course and also about professional processes (Processes 3 module) for the BA and BSc 2nd year students. Extremely interesting and varied subjects, and great places to work.

This leaves me some 'spare' time to continue with various projects for The Talking Walls and continue researching for my PhD. As part of all of this, I was honoured to be invited to talk at Winchester ENetwork by my Director of Studies, Dr David Birks, last Tuesday at the Winchester Business School. This was my first visit to the Business School, and I was amazed at how the building had been adapted for use as an art gallery, seminar, conference and study rooms. The 'room' in which the talk was being held could not have been better, it was in the old chapel with a vaulted beamed ceiling, beautiful windows and yet all the modern technology for giving presentations / conferences. I think my voice was a little lost in the vastness of the room and the fantastic turn out - approximately 100+ people from the University, local business and support organisations such as Business Link.

My talk was about the challenges I have met in the development of The Talking Walls since its conception in 1996. The title was Building Talking Walls, an apt title in many ways. From the feedback, it seems to have been received extremely well, and has brought me into contact with several people who I would not have met otherwise. Thankyou David and Professor Neil Marriott for inviting me to talk and welcoming me so warmly.

Winchester ENetwork is an excellent opportunity for students and businesses to network, an ideal way for prospective creatives to understand how other creative businesses started in their chosen field, and learn from their success and the many pitfalls that can occur when first starting out in business.

Changes

A busy month with various events having happened as well as the work on the Beaulieu project.

I am now studying my PhD (MPhil/PhD in Design) with Winchester College of Art, University of Southampton. The reason for moving from Solent to Southampton is mostly due to the creative design support from my new supervisory team at Winchester, Dr David Birks, Ed d'Souza and Professor Ashok Ranchhod. It will also allow me to submit a practical (the TW application) as well as the thesis. This was not impossible at Solent but also not the norm, with Winchester it is expected from a design student.

The PhD therefore has had a little lapse whilst waiting for the paperwork to go through. I am now desperately trying to get back into it, a little difficult with the break in study and the Beaulieu project, but thanks to the encouragement and focusing guidance from Dr David Birks, I am starting to write again. The more I am reading about ethnography and case study research, the more I can see how the PhD will be invaluable to the development of the Talking Walls application.

I wanted to study at this level primarily to discover how people would want to use this type of application in a heritage environment, how they prefer to learn about their culture, what aspects of their culture were they interested in and how to provide something that would engage and encourage them to learn more. I thought that if I looked at these areas, I would be able to build these results into a template, giving the public something that they wanted to use and were able to use easily, adapting it to their own level and learning preference. This has always been the basis of The Talking Walls.

Technology has become an integral part of this now. When I first embarked on this concept, CD-ROMs were all we had, then DVDs and kiosks. Now we have the web, mobiles, PDAs, interactive TV, intelligent whiteboards as well as DVDs and Kiosks. With this hardware, we also have touch screens, gps, bluetooth, RFID and wireless. Instead of confusing the issue, i.e. which platform do I design for, this technology allows The Talking Walls to expand by becoming multiplatform, offering the user a choice in how they would like to interact with the application. This might be dependent on age, culture, wealth or class.

I like to think that I am a fairly good observer of people, reasonably sensitive / intuitive, and empathise with different people's situations, therefore observing how people use and interact with the application and the environment they are in makes perfect sense to me. Studying people this way might take longer than doing a survey with a heap of questions, but it will hopefully give me a really good insight and help in creating a user friendly, entertaining, educational heritage application. Here's hoping!


A new website, same web address, courtesy of my other half Paul, has just been uploaded. It is now down to me, through Contribute (web editing software) to update the information and provide more images. It will also have a staging area for people to view the application as it develops, so if you are interested email me and I will send the link.