text:
Martha Henson
Digital producer/consultant/game mechanic
Products vs Properties (or What Shampoo Bars Taught Me About Technology)
June 12, 2019 June 13, 2019 | marthasadie
Am a fan of the sopshop.co.uk pastry shampoo, others are available
I had a minor epiphany recently; a noticing. Of the sort where it now seems so blindingly obvious, I can't understand why I didn't notice it before. And now I can't stop noticing it, and the way it informs so much of our thinking as a society and, moreover, the huge problems it causes.
The thing I noticed is this: we have become slaves to product-based thinking. Well, what I really noticed first was that I have but on further reflection I'm pretty sure it's not just me.
Back in August, as part of a general drive to reduce the amount of plastic I use, I began washing my hair with a shampoo bar (instead of my usual brand in a plastic bottle). It took a little bit of adjustment, but I'm now a total convert. Buoyed by this success, I started converting other products over to lower waste alternatives. I stopped using shower gel, and used soap. Instead of fabric softener, I put vinegar (bought in bulk or glass jars) in the wash. Bicarbonate of soda (which I can fill a jar with cheaply at my local zero waste shop) and vinegar work for all sorts of cleaning purposes. I was on a roll.
I googled "make your own shaving cream" and started looking into various recipes when a phrase in one of them made me sit up. It said something like: "of course, you can really use a mix of anything that will lubricate the skin and protect it from the razor" and I thought: Huh, like, er, soap? And yep, turns out soap works totally fine (duh). The answer had been staring me in the face all along.
Maybe you can see where I'm going here. But I couldn't, for a long time, until that moment when I started thinking about the properties I needed for a shaving cream to work, and then felt like an idiot for even needing to google it. But I googled it because so pervasive is the assumption I needed particular products in my life, that it hadn't even occurred to me to think more laterally. My previous mindset, deeply entrenched, was that I absolutely had to have a separate shower gel, a shaving gel, a shampoo, a conditioner, a facial wash, etc etc. But I didn't. I needed things with the following properties: will clean my skin, will help me shave (arguably, not something I need either but that's another debate), will clean my hair. Plain old soap works fine for most of these things (for me, your mileage may, of course, vary).
This is not just true of beauty products. A cake recipe says I need to add an egg, but what it really means is something with binding properties and to help it rise. I can do that with apple sauce (or chia seeds) and baking powder (and yes, this works). Do you need a specific hammer for that DIY job? Or will anything hard and flat that you can hold do, really?
As someone who works as a digital producer (/product owner/manager/whatever), I often find myself railing against the "we need an app" mentality. Or even, as much as I love games, the "we need a game to change behaviour in this area!" mentality. Sometimes as a consultant I will find myself saying, well, let's go back to your objectives here, it seems what you really want to do doesn't really require a game at all, and a simpler low-tech approach might be better and easier (like, maybe downloadable resources for schools, or, er, a book). In these situations I am very comfortable with thinking laterally about what solution might have the necessary properties to meet the objectives. So it seems odd that I rarely applied those same principles to the rest of my life.
But the thing is, this type of thinking is now deeply embedded in our culture, because products make our capitalist world go round. We've been sold the idea that we can't just use soap for a variety of purposes, because if there is only one product to sell us (and it's a simple, cheap one) then there is less money to be made. We've been sold the idea that everything should be an app, or use a new piece of hardware, not because we actually need it, but because that's what makes money. Forget the old stuff you bought, this new stuff will fix your problems!
This is actually dangerous. This technological product-based thinking is driving societal change at a rate that is outstripping policy and safeguards to deal with the new challenges it poses. It is filling our oceans with plastic, using up precious resources, distracting our brains with concerns about which product to use – which one is moisturising, which is cleansing, which one gives off the right social signals – instead of all the more useful activities we could be putting our energies towards. This is infantilising, too, discouraging us from thinking for ourselves and testing things and building personal experience to find the best option (maybe one soap is too drying, does it help to try one that has olive oil in it? This ratio of vinegar to bicarb in my cleaning solution produced a huge amount of froth, let's try again with a different one).
So now I'm thinking, what does the world look like if we go back to first principles? If we think in terms of properties, not end products? What do we really need and what can we replace with, well, vinegar and bicarb, or soap? Does it have to be VR, or could it work with the technology that most people already have? It might mean a little compromise, but are the marginal gains to be found in the new and improved version really worth it?
(Who is doing this property-based thinking well? I'd love to hear any examples, please share!)
Should you ask for creative work as part of a pitch?
March 28, 2018 March 28, 2018 | marthasadie
At the risk of breaking Betteridge's law, the answer to the question in the title isn't quite "no", but it isn't far off…
Trevor Klein shared this tweet with me recently, and, basically, HELL YES:
Slide 1 of BBH's 1982 pitch for Levi's explaining with seductive confidence why they didn't pitch with creative:
– Key issues are nearly always strategic
– Creative solutions often immediately appealing, rarely correct
– Creative credentials should be evident from track record pic.twitter.com/KFfwtu8qS1
— Tom Roach (@tomroach) March 16, 2018
I got a bit excited:
Please can everyone commissioning creative agencies for any reason whatever read this. SRSLY. I might get this done as a frigging tattoo. https://t.co/f0hSGGEgGc
— Martha Henson (@marthasadie) March 16, 2018
I'd like to expand on this a bit, and reboost the signal outside of the advertising world, because I think this is a really very important point. I've seen this get ignored too often within both broadcast and cultural sector work, in particular. I'll also provide an example of what you can do instead that I hope may be useful.
BUT… I wanna see the ideas
So, the idea that we should ask for a creative pitch for creative projects seems logical at first. It is also extremely prevalent; so ingrained in fact that even when I've asked specifically for NO creative as part of a pitch, companies often can't help themselves.
BUT there are several reasons why this is usually a bad idea, and one I heavily discourage when advising clients on briefs and tenders. This is some hard-won personal experience here, folks.
Let's start with some of the points mentioned by @tomroach in their tweet.
Insufficient time, understanding, access, client input
The first part of a creative project should be a discovery process between the client and the agency. This is often several days long and involves joint meetings, brainstorms, audience research gathering, idea testing, collaboration etc etc. This is what it takes to come up with an idea/product that might actually be a good starting point (and still just a starting point). Why would you expect agencies to come up with something worthwhile without going through that whole, involved, collaborative process?
As Tom says above, they are therefore not a means of coming up with correct creative solutions.
Creative solutions often immediately appealing, rarely correct
Creative pitches are, however, quite seductive. This is dangerous on two fronts:
a) the client (and agency) gets attached to the idea presented at the pitch and then fails to allow a properly executed discovery process to deliver something much better. It is especially important to factor in user research at this stage and genuinely tailor the product to people's needs and behaviours. For this to happen you need to be fully open to all potential solutions at the start (within your means, of course). I've seen the opposite happen several times, though, where the creative idea at pitch dictates the direction of the discovery process, and the end product doesn't really meet user needs as a result.
b) the idea blinds the client to shortcomings in the rest of pitch. They are so excited by the idea that they fail to fully question the track record of the agency, their processes, or the proposed budget. All of which are actually far more important. Which brings me to…
Creative credentials should be evident from track record
Just because someone has a good idea, doesn't mean they can deliver it. The only way you can be sure that they can is to look at their track record (as well as, I would add, their project management processes, proposed approach and budget). Even a new company should be able to provide you with the individual track records of those involved.
If they have none, be aware, you are taking a major risk and you should spend considerable time discussing their proposed processes (especially project management, user testing), technical knowledge and risk mitigation to attempt to offset this. If you don't have sufficient relevant experience and resources in-house to effectively mentor an agency in this type of situation, go with an agency who is very experienced instead.
And to add a further point:
It isn't ethical to ask companies to do lots of work on spec
Especially small agencies. You are asking them to do thousands of pounds of (pointless) work for you for free, and in a competitive climate, companies will, but that doesn't make it OK. Agencies go bust because of this, seriously, and that benefits none of us.
Any exceptions?
Maybe you're doing something that you feel is quite new, or you're asking agencies to break out of their comfort zone a bit and show what else they can do. If so, consider taking more time to brainstorm ideas in a workshop together, which will also give you time to see how compatible you are. But still don't get attached to these initial ideas, see above. Be prepared to entirely throw them out when you start the proper process.
You could also pay a company who seems promising and creative to go through a more involved discovery process. I've actually seen this done with several companies at once, which I think worked well. It's also, I think, completely fine to separate discovery and delivery if you want to manage risk – committing only to a week or two's work initially – and potentially use a different company for delivery.
And (evergreen statement), if you haven't got budget for any of this, consider whether you are really able to deliver anything worthwhile on this scale, and maybe adjust expectations accordingly. Squeezed budgets rarely result in useful or usable solutions.
What should I do instead?
Writing a good brief is a subject for another day, to be honest. But, here is a (redacted/edited) outline from a recent brief I wrote that may be useful. After outlining our objectives, requirements and parameters, we asked for proposals to include the following:
Scope of the proposal (including risks + dependencies). Responses should not focus on creative responses, but should instead outline an approach to delivering the specified outcomes. This should address [specific issues related to this product].
Suggested timelines and a draft budget. [Or you could just say the budget that you are working to and ask for their day rates]
Examples of previous relevant work. Ideally this should demonstrate experience working with [list of features of this project that we would like to the chosen vendor to have experience in].
Brief CVs/outlines of relevant experience for the team members who would be working on this.
Any changes or variance from the requirements laid out in the brief
Any other thoughts? Counter examples? Feel free to share them in the comments.
Stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren't prepared to promote them properly
March 9, 2016 | marthasadie
This is going to be a rant, because I'm cross, so, fair warning. First I'm going to tell an illustrative story, and then I'm going to make the case that a really large proportion of digital projects are TOTALLY WASTING THEIR TIME AND MONEY. Here goes.
ITV drop the ball (aka the money, the talent, and the joke)
In my pre-museum days, before I joined the Wellcome Trust, I worked on digital projects for TV at Kudos for the best part of 2007. You may or may not recall an ITV show from the following year with an interesting concept: it was a rather cheesy soap opera set in Cornwall with Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon called Echo Beach, which was followed in the schedules by a fictional comedy about the making of Echo Beach, called Moving Wallpaper and starring Ben Miller. The whole thing was the brainchild of the great Eastenders lead writer Tony Jordan.
Alongside the main show a third online element had been commissioned, which is what I was working on. I still really like the idea, which was that a mole was operating on set, filming secret behind the scenes footage on Echo Beach. Before the TV show launched, and each week during it, these videos would be "leaked" into the public domain, showing the stars behaving badly, being divas and drunks, riffing off of their public personas and TV characters.
The aim was comedy and shock. A crack team of writers (from the Thick of It and other notable shows) was assembled to write the video skits, of which there were 12. An experienced comedy director was brought on board, and a small team of top filmmaking pros assembled. We got Jason Donovan (an absolute hoot to work with) supposedly filmed alone in his dressing room putting on a dress that Martine McCutcheon had worn on the show to mime along to her Perfect Moment hit. We also filmed him involved in vodka fueled fist fighting and fights with his agent, McCutcheon herself having tabloid-baiting practice snogs with female co-stars, secret thieving, incompetence, actors being ridiculously demanding and all sorts.
It's been a long time since I've seen any of those clips, but I seem to remember we were all pretty proud of them when we handed them over to ITV. And either way, a lot of effort and talent and a not insubstantial (albeit not quite sufficient, it never is) budget went into making them. Which made ITV's subsequent bungling of the next stage all the more galling.
Our concept was that these videos would be released to a poorly executed website (Geocities style) by the "mole" and then the press and public would be pointed at them. These days, they would be leaked to YouTube from the mole's account, ideally, but the main thing was to maintain the fiction that Moving Wallpaper was the real world and the behaviour captured was genuine, and thereby preserve the joke. Instead, ITV did this: they created a page on the official ITV site for the videos, using the official ITV player to play them, and then they used the punchline as the title for every single video, giving away the gag before anyone had even started watching them.
The jokes were thereby rendered stone cold dead.
They then sent out, as far as I can tell, one press release which sparked two small articles from the Sun and "Celebs Now", and that was the extent of the marketing effort. I haven't seen the viewing stats, but I'm 100% certain they were feeble. And that was the end of that project. All that hard work, months of preparation, script writing, production and editing. All that money, pretty much entirely wasted by a failure to understanding digital marketing, and a failure to invest any serious time and effort in promotion.
I wish I could say that was the last time I saw this happen.
A familiar pattern
I'm using this example because it's far enough in the past that I can be brutally honest about it, but it stands in for probably a good 60-70% of digital projects I've worked on, to some degree. This includes projects for museums and galleries, for publishers, and for other broadcasters. It includes my projects and the projects of others: I did a straw poll amongst other digital producers, and my goodness! The outpouring of anguish and recognition that followed.
And I'm writing this now because despite all my best efforts, I recently watched exactly the same thing happen again, and I'm fed up. I want to say this:
Stop wasting money on digital projects if you aren't prepared to promote them properly.
I'm serious. Do NOT embark on any digital project if you aren't going to at least make a decent effort to tell people about it or otherwise figure out how people are going to see it.
If you are going to make an in-gallery app but only have room for a small piece of signage and no budget or space for print promotion, do not bother. If you are going to create a game and put it on your website and think maybe your organisation might be able to muster up a single tweet and facebook post about it, give up now. If you are creating an amazing interactive video experience but the entire budget is going on production and you've run out of money to market it, stop.
Furthermore, if you think that a digital experience, be it mobile or online, game, video, or guide, is going to sell itself, and thereby itself be marketing for your TV show or exhibition, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Actually, I suspect this attitude is partly to blame for some of the failures in this area. There seems to be some confusion over whether these digital add-ons are marketing themselves but, by and large, it doesn't work this way, things just don't magically "go viral".
Now, I have been part of some very successful game projects in which we did pretty much no marketing whatsoever (High Tea and Axon, for Wellcome Collection). However, we were working to a very specific distribution model that relies on making a cracking game, seeding it to casual gaming portals, making it easy to rip and waiting for it to catch on. It worked, the mechanics of those portals make this possible, but it has its flaws (not least reaching a relatively narrow demographic).
For mobile games, in gallery apps, online interactive fiction etc etc, this is not an option. You are competing in a very crowded market for audience attention. Even if your content is amazing, you are going to have to work very hard to make people aware of it, and do so in a way that sells it effectively to draw them in. Let me be clear: I'm not saying this is easy, and it can involve a bit of luck (the right person picking it up on twitter, for example), but it cannot just be ignored.
Why does this keep happening? I have a guess
So why is it, so often? Apart from the reason above, I feel like a major factor is that these digital projects *are* just seen as add-ons. They get neglected by marketing teams who are focussed on promoting the big exhibition or show, which is where the real accountability lies for their actions with the higher-ups (and the funders too, perhaps?). I've been there in meetings with comms teams who make it clear that our digital project is just never going to be a priority when they are being scrutinised instead for their role in increasing actual ticket sales or getting press for the main exhibition.
If that's the case, the project probably shouldn't even go ahead. Whatever the size or type of audience you are seeking, someone absolutely has to make some sort of plan and put time and resource into communicating with them. So often this seems to fall to the production team themselves in this situation, but without organisational buy in, this is never going to be as effective as it needs to be.
For my own part, I try to have a discussion about communications around a digital project as early as possible once it's kicked off, but I'm beginning to realise that this is too late. These conversations need to happen before, and at a higher level. There needs to be a commitment before any major work starts that the project will be fully supported by the organisation.
It's also clear that some comms and marketing teams feel out of their depth with digital projects. Some of this is a problem of perception: digital projects can be promoted in precisely the same way as books and exhibitions – with signage, adverts, flyers, social media posts, targeted press releases, building relationships with bloggers and newspapers and so on – and the principles about what makes an appealing message are not necessarily different.
I fear the problem is more about understanding the digital product and its potential audience, and therefore knowing *who* to build relationships with and where to send a press release. But surely, this is no different than looking for subject specialist avenues to market to for other products? Also, there are various online-only routes (your Reddits and the like) that comms departments seem wary of but need to understand. It's not hard, you do it by using these sites and getting to know them. If this is all too much, hire a digital marketing agency to take the weight.
The outcome of this sorry situation
Aside from the wasted time and money (sometimes public money too, which is particularly infuriating), what I find very dispiriting is organisations using the failure of digital projects as a reason to stop doing them; writing them off as inherently risky instead of examining what went wrong and trying to learn from mistakes. It's also dispiriting to see the level of frustration from digital producers and agencies, many of whom have told me that they are avoiding work of this kind from now on because they are sick of seeing it fail due to a lack of promotion. It was part of the reason I started moving away from digital production work too.
Of course, it's possible that some of these projects were just rubbish, that the content or concept was just unappealing. But it's really clear that users and viewers aren't even getting to the point of finding that out and these digital projects aren't really being given a chance.
I don't think it's that complicated: projects of this nature just need the budget, commitment and a plan as to how people are going to hear about it. If this isn't in place from the beginning, ask why, and don't start until it is.
Whilst writing this I heard so many stories of this happening, but few that people were willing to put names to (although blimey but the BBC comes up a lot, Channel 4 too). I understand. But if you have an example, even if just anonymously, please do share in the comments. Or have you got any other thoughts on this, do you disagree?
Reaching a new audience through gaming
February 22, 2014 | marthasadie
Below is a paper by Danny Birchall and I that we wrote in 2012 about our work with games at Wellcome, and what we'd learned along the way. It was written just before I left, and so it felt like a nice wrapping up of what was a long and interesting process. It was only published in print, though, and I asked permission to post it online, which they granted as long as I waited 6 months. It's been more like 18 months, but anyway, here goes. I hope it's interesting and useful to anyone thinking about how they could use games as an engagement or learning tool, or to reach millions of people.
Martha Henson and Danny Birchall
This article first appeared in Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2013) Vol. 1, 4 351–356 Journal of Digital Media Management 351
Wellcome Collection is an unusual public venue, based on the Euston Road in London. It is part of the Wellcome Trust, which was founded in 1936 according to the wishes of Sir Henry Wellcome, a biomedical entrepreneur and fanatical collector, as expressed in his will. The aims of the trust are to improve animal and human health, largely through funding biomedical research, but they also have an interest in public engagement with science. This is where Wellcome Collection comes in.
Together with a very fine medical library, the building houses two permanent exhibitions. One displays a small fraction of Henry Wellcome's original collection of artefacts loosely connected in some way to health, but with this remit interpreted in such a broad way as to include items such as Charles Darwin's walking stick, a chastity belt, prosthetics, surgical instruments and a Peruvian mummified corpse. The other looks at more modern medical concerns such as genetics and obesity through art and objects such as sequencing machines and diet books. There are also temporary exhibitions and events that deal with a wide range of topics related to life, medicine and science. The most recent, Superhuman, challenged ideas about what constitutes human enhancement, while the next one, Death, will tackle the emotive but endlessly fascinating subject after which it has been named.
The tone of all of this is very much non-didactic: the aim is to engage visitors with ideas, ethics, history and science in a thought-provoking way rather than merely to convey factual information. This approach also underpinned our thinking when it came to games: they had to be genuinely fun and engaging, and the factual content had to be embedded in a meaningful way. The idea was that people should have their curiosity and interest piqued by playing, not feel like they had received a thinly disguised lecture with a game mechanic crudely stuck on to it. It was also felt that the diverse subject matter that Wellcome Collection covers, combined with resources such as the image library and archives, had the potential to form the basis of really great original games.
But why games? First, a well-constructed game can be an incredibly engaging experience. Even those who do not consider themselves gamers will likely recognise the feeling of losing hours to playing Solitaire or Tetris on their computer, or perhaps Angry Birds on their phone. This state of 'flow', as it is known, is deep engagement and it is hard to think of many other activities that create this.
In addition, play is, in and of itself, all about learning. One must learn to progress in any game and there is no reason why this learning cannot also be factual. Furthermore, 'people who play games' constitute a huge audience, spread all over the world and yet using the same platforms and devices, all brought together by their desire to play. Reaching this audience, one that probably would not otherwise be aware of or be able to come to Wellcome Collection, was a significant reason for choosing this particular route — not because the aim was to convert those players into visitors, but to widen the reach of Wellcome's activities.
THE GAMES AND THE PROCESS
We started relatively simply. The first couple of games were based on existing successful and enduring game mechanics that it was thought tallied particularly well with the museum's content. We worked with an agency called Smile Your Eyes Off to create an online Flash game called Memory, which used the old game of Pelmanism as a basis. In this game, the player must turn over two matching cards to clear them away, the aim being to clear all the cards presented (1). The difference in this game is that all the card faces have pictures from Wellcome Images, a vast and varied picture library that contains both historical and contemporary images (2)
Having different themed levels made it possible to convey the breadth of the collection, with around 30 themes available for ten levels, such as masks, skeletons, cells and advertising. The levels also get increasingly difficult as the images get more numerous and more similar. For example, at the end of the game, the player might be unlucky enough to get the forceps level, which is not only very difficult but also very representative of Henry Wellcome's habit of collecting a large amount of the same type of object.
It was a good starting point — the game was not too complicated and we got to know the process for making games. We found that collaboration was particularly important, it could not have been done without the involvement of image researchers in Wellcome Images and we worked closely with the developers. This spirit of collaboration was to inform the process for future games as well. The game was placed on the Wellcome Collection website, and continues to attract players, with around 60,000 views since launch.
The next project was a quiz engine that allowed the creation of multiple choice quizzes that could bring in images, audio and video in both question and answer (3). This was not particularly original, but was very useful and perhaps most notable for being our first collaboration with Preloaded, an award-winning games agency who focus on 'games with purpose' (4). Soon after the quiz engine project, an opportunity came up to do something a bit different and we turned again to Preloaded to help realise the idea.
In the winter of 2010–2011, Wellcome Collection held an exhibition called High Society, which looked at the history of drug use. One small part of the exhibition dealt with the Opium Wars, a shameful episode in the history of the British Empire in which opium was smuggled into China by the British, in order to raise funds to buy tea. It is a fascinatingly murky and under-discussed period of history, but it also has at its heart a central trading mechanic: buy opium; sell opium; buy tea. It was this mechanic that became the basis for High Tea.
In High Tea, one plays as a British trader, attempting to buy and sell opium at a good price and make enough money to keep the people back in Britain in tea (5). The player must avoid getting their ship impounded by the Chinese authorities, who are very much against this trade. The game starts in 1830 and ends in 1839, if the player survives that long, at which point they are informed how many Chinese people are now addicted to opium because of their actions and also that the result of this trade was the First Opium War, which ended rather badly for the Chinese.
Again, collaboration was very important to making High Tea work. It is a controversial subject and it was important to make sure that it was factually accurate. Fortunately, one of the curators of the High Society exhibition, author Mike Jay, was involved from the start. He helped make sure that the facts and names were right, but more than that, he worked with US and Preloaded to develop the fundamental concept, which came out of a brainstorming discussion about the subject matter.
THE SUCCESS OF HIGH TEA AND EVALUATING IT
Preloaded's distribution strategy for online casual games is to build the game to be self-contained and therefore easy to download and 'rip' to other sites (6). At the same time, the company also makes it easily trackable. This means that the game can be placed anywhere and one can still see the play statistics and information, in this case using Google Analytics. The game is then seeded to major portals such as Kongregate, Newgrounds and Armor games, from which, if it shows any promise, it will be immediately ripped to tens if not hundreds of other games sites around the world. On occasion they will ask permission, but usually not. This is what happened to High Tea when it was launched in at the beginning of February 2011.
Initially, a goal was set of around 100,000 plays in the first few months, but this was exceeded in just one day. The game got high star ratings, was featured on the front pages of all the big portals to which it had been, was ripped to around 70 more on the first day and hundreds of comments were left by players. This 'opening weekend' was beyond all expectations. After a few days the game left the front pages and plays dropped off, although still to a consistent few thousand plays per day, which continues to this day. To date, it has had over 4 million plays (7).
Why was it so successful? What did the players make of it and the unusual subject matter? Some clues could be found from the analytics. We could see that the distribution strategy had worked and that over 50 per cent of plays were on sites that had ripped the game. Around 47 per cent of plays were on the officially seeded portals and only 3 per cent were on the Wellcome Collection site.
We also saw that social media had driven very little traffic, although share links were placed for Twitter and Facebook in the game. It was therefore fortunate that we had not relied on putting it on its own site and hoping it would 'go viral' over social media. We also looked at the Google Trends results for searches for 'opium wars' over several months before and after the game was launched. There is indeed a spike that corresponds with the game, but does not appear to have any other news event associated.
Although this is all very circumstantial, a survey that was put up with the game suggested that the game was inspiring people to do more of their own research on the topic. While the analytics are interesting, they often raise more questions than they answer and a more qualitative approach is necessary to find out more. Collaborating again with another department within the Wellcome Trust that specialises in evaluation, a plan was formulated to do this.
First, players were asked to answer a series of questions not only about the gameplay and about themselves, but also about their learning from the game and how they felt about the British Empire after playing it. Based on the answers from this, an interview script was devised and was followed up with seven players in depth over the phone and in a small focus group.
The results were illuminating. The most pleasing result from the survey was that over 50 per cent of players said they were likely to go on to find out more about the subject under their own steam. This was mostly via internet searches, but one player even said that they had read a book about Chinese history as a result. This was a huge success. As the aim had been for the games to engage rather than didactically educate, to generate interest rather than lecture, this measure seems to demonstrate that this had been achieved. Players were asked whether they knew much about the Opium Wars before playing and how the game had affected how they felt about the British Empire. Over 60 per cent were already aware of this history, but in the interviews most said they felt they had learnt something from playing.
Surprisingly, given how shocking it was felt that the actions of the British Empire were, around 57 per cent of surveyed players felt the same about it after playing and around 10 per cent even felt more positively. This indicated poor survey design as there was no baseline to judge any change in opinion from before the game. As such, this was explored further in the telephone interviews. It turned out that players who felt more positively towards the British Empire did so because the game allowed them to empathise with the traders involved by putting them in their shoes. They felt that their decision making was purely economic — they were just trying to put food on the table and were at enough of a remove from the trade's impact to make ethical factors seem very distant. It was not that players were condoning their behaviour, but understanding it made them more sympathetic. This was very interesting, that even such a simple map-based game could engender feelings of empathy towards characters in it.
The final avenue for evaluation was the commentary left by players on the games portals — many hundreds not only across all the sites on which it was played, but also in blog posts about and reviews of the game (and even comments on those articles), on social media, in YouTube walkthroughs and sites like Metafilter and Reddit. What makes this particularly interesting (although harder to analyse) is that one has no control over it and it can make for unexpected reading. For example, some commentators discussed the maths or economics of the game, not something that had been particularly considered while developing it.
Many commented on the gameplay, which they largely enjoyed, but frequently had suggestions for improving (multiplayer or sandbox modes, ability to buy more boats and so on). A significant number discussed the content in some depth and the commentary was often quite thoughtful and measured. A tiny number, many less than had been thought, took issue with Wellcome Collection supposedly glorifying the actions of the British by making it fun to play.
It was a deliberate aim to try to keep the game fairly neutral in tone to let players make up their own mind, up until the slightly over-the-top results at the end showing the millions of Chinese people the player has caused to be addicted to opium. We had worried that this would be misinterpreted as a pro British Empire game, but most people understood that this was not what was going on here.
In terms of the player demographics, an international audience had indeed been reached, with a large proportion of players not only in North America, but also all over Europe and a large chunk in Brazil. The age range was wide, but more focused on 16–24 year olds than other age ranges, which is a younger audience than is usual for Wellcome Collection activities. One disappointment was a 90 per cent male skew, according to the survey, despite female players liking the game equally well. This is probably a disadvantage of targeting these online portals, which have a mostly male demographic. We are is looking at ways to rectify this for future games, perhaps by including mobile platforms, which have a more even gender split.
This year has seen production of two very different projects, Axon and Magic In Modern London. Following the success of High Tea, the winning formula was repeated for online casual Flash games with a game about neuroscience inspired by the exhibition Brains. As before, we collaborated with Preloaded, the exhibition curator, who this time was Marius Kwint from the University of Portsmouth, and another domain expert, neurobiologist Richard Wingate from Kings College London.
There was a fruitful day-long session of learning and discussion, during which Richard Wingate gave a crash course in neuroscience and Preloaded in game design. We were looking in particular for some rules within the brain science field that could be turned into the rules of a game. A key moment was when Richard showed a video he had created of neurons growing in a foetal chicken brain (this video can now be seen in the game itself). The neurons are growing towards protein targets and are also competing with other neurons to make the best connections and survive. This mechanic, along with the 'brainbow' style aesthetic of bright neurons on a dark background, became Axon (8).
The distribution strategy was more or less identical to that of High Tea and it again met with huge success. As before, we were keen to find out more about players reactions and surveyed them. Although the evaluation is not yet finished and the telephone interviews have not been started, it has been found that over 76 per cent of players learned something from playing the game and, again, a large proportion were moved to go and do their own research after playing.
Magic in Modern London is a very different and much more experimental project (9). It was inspired by a recent exhibition at Wellcome Collection in which an artist, Felicity Powell, took hundreds of amulets and incorporated them into her own work. The amulets, now in the Pitt Rivers collection, were originally collected by folklorist Edward Lovett in the early 20th century. Lovett wrote a book, Magic in Modern London, in which he told the stories that came with the amulets, which were bought or cajoled off ordinary Londoners (10).
This time, the subject matter suggested a different approach. As the amulets were collected around London, the idea of a treasure hunt around the city, where the player 'collected' the amulets themselves, seemed natural, and the obvious platform seemed to be mobile. As it happened, an agency called Amblr was building a platform that used GPS to trigger audiovisual content, which was used to great effect in an app called Hackey Hear (11).
In the Magic and Modern London app, the user navigates a 1908 map, overlaid on modern London, to find 'areas of enchantment' and collect the amulet at their centre. The aim is to assist an elderly and ailing Lovett to reassemble his collection and the stories that go with it. Once in an area of enchantment, music, imagery and voiceover lead the player to the amulet. Finding the amulet in question will unlock a reading from the book or inspired by the book related to each amulet.
The app has only just been released, although an evaluation will be carried out in the same manner as with the other games. As this is in many ways a more complicated and involved experience for the player, it will be very interesting to see how the platform affects distribution and what players make of it.
WHAT HAS BEEN LEARNED?
As we hope is clear, this has been journey of discovery, during which we have been both surprised and delighted by what has been found. The success with reaching and engaging a new audience could be put down to a number of key factors.
Collaboration has obviously been important, as has the distribution strategy. Picking subject matter that was both intriguing and also lent itself to a game was crucial, as was making sure that the factual content was fully embedded in the game mechanic. Working with people who know how to make fun games is hugely important, as is testing them throughout development to make sure they are well balanced. Evaluation is vital, there are many simple methods available to check what players are learning from a game or how they are reacting to it and it is perhaps the most interesting part of the process.
1. Wellcome Collection (undated) 'Memory', available at: http://www.wellcomecollection.org/interactives/memory/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
2. Wellcome Images (undated) 'Wellcome Images', available at: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
3. Wellcome Collection (undated) 'High Society Quiz', available at: http://www.wellcome collection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/high-society/quiz.aspx (accessed 6th November, 2012),
4. Preloaded (2013) 'Preloaded', available at: http://preloaded.com/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
5. Wellcome Collection (undated) 'High Tea', available at: http://hightea.wellcomeapps.com/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
6. Stuart, P. (2010) 'How we publish an online game', available at: http://preloaded.com/blog/2010/08/16/how-we-publish-an-online-game/ (accessed 5th May, 2011).
7. Birchall, D. and Henson, M. (2011) 'High Tea Evaluation Report', available at: http://museumgames.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/44614076/HighTeaEvaluationReport.pdf (accessed 15th January, 2013).
8. Wellcome Collection (undated) 'Axon', available at: http://axon.wellcomeapps.com/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
9. Wellcome Collection (undated) 'Magic in Modern London', available at: http://www.wellcome collection.org/explore/play/magic-in-modern-london.aspx (accessed 6th November, 2012).
10. Lovett, E. (1925) 'Magic in Modern London', printed at the Advertiser offices.
11. Hackney Hear (undated) 'Hackney Hear', available at: http://www.hackneyhear.com/ (accessed 6th November, 2012).
Henson and Birchall
356 Journal of Digital Media Management Vol. 1, 4 351–356 [1] Henry Stewart Publications 2047-1300 (2013)
Why I'm fed up with digital projects (and why I'm not): a rant
July 23, 2013 | marthasadie
I've felt a little rant bubbling up in me over the last few months: a sense of disquiet about digital, a jaded annoyance about wasted time and resources and opportunities squandered. Today I was reminded about an old project that was the epitome of digital idiocy, one of those thoughtless knee-jerk "we must have an app!" projects that make me want to throw a toddler tantrum, kicking and screaming "but who is it for?" until someone agrees to at least do a bit of audience research or string together a minimally viable set of objectives. And that reminder seems to have brought it all to the surface, so here goes.
I am fed up of seeing people and organisations produce digital rubbish: poor apps, clunky games, badly designed microsites and other half-arsed online, mobile and technological systems and whatnots. I am fed up of people who are smart about digital, who think about users, who ask the right questions at the start, who embrace technology without fear and understand how to apply it, being over-ruled by people who've just bought an iPad for their kids and now assume that everyone has them and that this is all the justification they need to insist upon spending £50k on a new app for their organisation (an app for who?! For what?!). Moreover, I am fed up of projects that fail being brushed under the carpet, with no evaluation or debrief that enables everyone involved to learn from mistakes and build something better the next time.
It makes me sad to see money and time being wasted, when it's usually avoidable, and even more so if nothing is then learned from this. It makes me especially sad, because the technology we have available to us today is AMAZING. My phone is able to do astonishing things and the computers I use have incredible firepower (I still remember how exciting it was to get a floppy disc drive for my BBC micro, now look at them!). It feels like there is so much potential and so much more that the technology we have could allow us to do.
It's not like there aren't enough examples of brilliant products, apps, games, and other applications of these technologies out there to learn from. Too many to list. But many many many more that have been an utter waste of everyone's time from the beginning because they just didn't ask some basic questions about who and what their product was for, and test it with that in mind along the way. Isn't that a bit sad?
I know it's not easy. That there is a degree of luck in rising above the huge amounts of competition online or on on the app store, that things beyond your control can go wrong during the development of a project, and that there are some times you need to go on your gut instinct, and that's not infallible. Goodness knows I've made every kind of mistake creating digital things over the years, as have most people working in this constantly changing field. And I will continue to make mistakes, as will most people etc.
So I'm not claiming there is a perfect process, but there are better and worse ones, and there are definitely massive howling alarm-bell-ringing clangers that should be sending up the red flag right from the start. The "we need an app, never mind who for", the "we've got all this content, let's just stick it online, people will come to us", "let's create a whole new portal for something that already exists", and so on. And sometimes it feels like we aren't moving on from this, these whack-a-mole stupidities keep popping up over and over again and just will not die.
Why is that? In a recent conversation with a fellow person-who-works-somewhat-indeterminately-within-"digital" we discovered we'd both been feeling this slight ennui with the field. This sense that it wasn't meeting its potential, that a lot of rubbish was being made, and that it was hard to see how to make things better. We wondered if it it might be that digital is constantly being driven by the hardware makers, by Apple and console or computer companies and that their vested interest in creating new stuff for us to buy means we're always just playing catch up. Why do we let this dictate the pace? Where is the chance to take stock and develop best practice?
My experience as a freelancer over the last few months, applying for funding and responding to ITTs, has also been eye-opening. The systems and funding in place for making digital stuff are really broken. If you were trying to design a process that would result in crappy digital products, you'd make people (who may not be particularly digitally literate) scope everything out and pin it down before they'd ever been able to build anything or ask their audience about it, only then engage an agency who are the real experts but can't change the scope, and then make the project team go through a month long change request process if they want to develop the project in a different direction from the scope based on the evidence as they start building and testing things. Which is exactly the process in place in a frighteningly high number of places. The old models for procuring new infrastructure etc just do not work for digital projects, and it's hamstringing them from the very start.
Plus money, of course. Not enough money, or not tailoring the project to the actual budget available. I've had this rant elsewhere. I seem to spend a lot more time these days telling people not to make a digital thing. Would it work just as well as a piece of text? As a printout? As a physical activity? Or a really simple website? Don't overreach if you just can't afford it, do something straightforward and proven.
But at the same time I love working on and seeing others working on brilliant digital projects. The reach you can get, the amazing response in terms of both scale and thoughtful quality, the sense of shared global experience, the playfulness and the utility, when done well. So, how do we do more of these?
Turning research into results: the Teach Your Monster to Read Teacher Toolkit
Creating compelling museum games: A talk, video, slides and summary
Pokémon Go in your museum: you can't replicate it but you can work with it
Turning research into results: the Teach Your Monster to Read Teacher Toolkit | martha henson: blog on Make it easy: creating good museum resources and services for teachers
Pinball Wizard: Games for Learning – Museum in a Box on Creating compelling museum games: A talk, video, slides and summary
Creating compelling museum games: A talk, video, slides and summary | martha henson: blog on Game mechanic cards: a workshop inspiration tool for generating game ideas
Creating compelling museum games: A talk, video, slides and summary | martha henson: blog on The High Tea game: An education
Gotta catch 'em | Future Views on Pokémon Go in your museum: you can't replicate it but you can work with it
Mobile projects
my films
other people's films
SXSWi
Thoughts about games


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Northern Ontario Party set to make its first northern tour with its new leader
Taylor Ablett, staff Tuesday, Sep. 6th, 2016
The new leader of the Northern Ontario political party is getting ready for his first tour across the north. Trevor Holliday is going to make stops in Timmins, Hearst, and Smooth Rock Falls amongst others. He says part of the party's campaign is to give a voice to Northerners, saying the party is real people not just politicians who are bred for it.
Although a big part of what sparked the party to officially register with Elections Ontario was an online petition to separate northern Ontario from the south, Holliday says their biggest goal is getting northern representation in the Legislature. He says in an ideal world, all 11 northern ridings will have a candidate elected in 2018.
Holliday will be in Timmins on September 14th, and a time and location are expected to be set in the coming days.
The Northern Ontario Party is officially a registered political party, and it has a new leader

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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UBC Indigenous Law Students' Association
Courage in Law Award
Friends of ILSA
Law Events
Structure & Executive
Constitution of The Indigenous Law Students' Association
Whereas the Indigenous Law Students' Association acts upon traditional, ancestral, unceded Musqueam territory;
And Whereas the Indigenous Law Students' Association welcomes participation from all students, faculty members and staff of UBC Law, be they Indigenous or non-Indigenous, in a positive spirit of interconnectivity and inclusion;
And Whereas, notwithstanding this Written Constitution, the Oral History of the Indigenous Law Students' Association will be maintained and transmitted to connect its Membership to the Indigeneity of this Place and to foster respect for the efforts of each Member of the Indigenous Law Students Association both past and present;
We Hereby enact this, our Constitution, to enshrine our Procedure, Purpose and Structure, for the benefit of the Association and its Members now and for the future.
Purposes and Functions
The Indigenous Law Students' Association (ILSA) provides a bridge between the community of Indigenous students and the general student population of UBC Law.
ILSA provides a broad base of social and academic activities for its Members and all students, faculty members, and staff of UBC Law.
ILSA advances the general awareness of itself, of its events and of issues important to its Membership.
ILSA provides steadfast, unwavering support to its Membership.
ILSA cooperates with the Indigenous Legal Studies Program to achieve their mutual purposes.
ILSA hosts and co-hosts annual and other regular events, and advertises them to its Membership and UBC Law to the best of its abilities.
ILSA strives to set a standard of excellence in all of its purposes and functions and in all undertakings with internal and external parties.
Membership in ILSA is inclusive of any student of UBC Law who wishes to join.
Membership includes, but is not limited to, the privileges of participation in general meetings and activities and events, joining committees, and creating and volunteering for activities and events.
With respect to inclusion, but in the spirit of founding reconciliation on Indigenous initiatives, certain ILSA Executive functions are reserved in preference for Indigenous students only.
The Executive Committee will directly and indirectly support individual members socially, academically, financially, and emotionally either personally or by direction to services provided at UBC Law.
The Executive Committee will caucus as necessary to direct the business of ILSA. The Executive Committee Meetings will be open to all ILSA members, except in special circumstances as required by the Executive Committee.
The Executive Committee will consist of a President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, Third-Year Representative, Second-Year Representative, and First-Year Representative. Other Executive Committee positions can be added on an ad-hoc basis as decided upon at the annual Executive Committee Membership vote.
The Executive Committee commits to spending time and effort towards the promotion of ILSA's individual and collective needs, goals, and purposes.
The Executive Committee commits to transparency in all of their meetings and decisions. The Executive Committee will make every reasonable effort to inform all ILSA Members of meetings, activities, votes and elections.
The Procedure for Amending this Constitution is as follows:
The concerned Member or Committee will table the proposed Amendment at an ILSA General Meeting for discussion by the General Membership.
The Executive Committee will schedule a discussion of the proposed Amendment at the next General Meeting. Every effort will be made to inform the Membership of the proposed Amendment and its discussion at the next General Meeting.
At the next General Meeting, the Membership shall discuss the proposed Amendment and shall seek consensus in respect of a viable resolution either via amendment, further discussion at a later date, or cancellation of the proposed Amendment.
If consensus cannot be achieved, the proposed Amendment shall be tabled at the next General Meeting. If consensus is not achieved, the Membership shall continue to table the proposed Amendment until it is resolved.
In the case that the proposed Amendment is not resolved before the end of either the Fall term or the Winter term, the proposed Amendment will be carried forward to the first General Meeting in the next term, excluding the Summer term.
To amend this Constitution, the Membership must reach consensus.
To pass any motion the ILSA Membership must reach consensus.
In exceptional cases certain motions can be passed with the use of a majority vote. The procedure for such exceptional cases requires the tabling of controversial motions at least two and at most three General Meetings.
If consensus cannot be reached after the first discussion of the motion, the motion will be carried forward to the next General Meeting. At the next General Meeting, dissenting Members will have the opportunity to briefly voice their concerns. If dissenters make up no more than one-quarter of attendees, the Membership is deemed to have reached consensus.
If the dissenting Members make up more than one-quarter of the attendees, a majority vote will decide the issue at the following General Meeting. Members must be made aware of such a vote through the reasonable efforts of the Executive Committee.
For purposes of motions, "majority vote" means that one-half of the attending Membership must vote in favour of the motion in order for it to pass.
Constitutional Amendments cannot be passed by majority vote.
ILSA General Meetings are held a minimum of once monthly at the discretion of the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee will notify the Membership well in advance as to the time and date of General Meetings.
General Meetings will not be held during Exam months or the Summer months.
In March of each academic year, an election will be held for the following executive positions: President, Vice-President, 3L Representative, and 2L Representative.
In September of each academic year, an election will be held for the following executive positions: Secretary, Treasurer, and 1L Representative.
Executive Committee positions may be filled by acclamation, by consensus, or by a majority vote.
The outgoing Executive Committee will determine the method of filling each position through close consultation with the Membership, and through the traditions passed down in ILSA's Oral History.
For purposes of elections, "majority vote" means that no less than one-half of the attending Members must vote in favour of the candidate in order for that person to be elected.
Permanent and special Committees
Committees shall be struck at the discretion of the Executive Committee in consultation with the General Membership. Generally, if a Member can show that a certain Committee will adhere to and promote the Purposes and Functions of ILSA, the Executive will strike such a Committee.
The Executive and Financial Committees are permanent Committees.
Duties of the executive committee
Each Member of the Executive Committee commits to the Purposes and Functions of ILSA.
Each Member of the Executive Committee is responsible for attending Executive Committee and General Meetings, helping to coordinate ILSA events, attending ILSA events, and, when possible, helping transition new Executive Committee Members into their roles.
The President is the Chairperson of the Executive Committee. The President is primarily responsible for being Chairperson of ILSA Executive and General Meetings, acting as Spokesperson for ILSA within UBC Law, liaising with the LSS Indigenous Student Representative, and furthering the partnership between ILSA and the Indigenous Legal Studies Program.
The Vice-President acts for the President should the need arise. The Vice-President is primarily responsible for assisting the President in the President's role and functions. Historically, the Vice-President has taken a leadership role in the organization of social and academic events.
The Treasurer is the Chairperson of the Financial Committee. The Treasurer is primarily responsible for upholding the Purposes of the Financial Committee, keeping records of ILSA's funding and expenditures, and upholding the Law Students' Society's budgetary rules and requirements.
The Secretary is primarily responsible for communications, event promotion, and the keeping of records. Historically, the Secretary's duties have included preparation of agendas for ILSA meetings, taking minutes at ILSA meetings and keeping records of those minutes, maintaining the ILSA contact list, distributing communications to the ILSA Membership, managing ILSA's online calendar, and maintaining the ILSA website.
The First, Second and Third Year Representatives (the Representatives) receive and channel the concerns of their fellow students to the Executive Committee. They promote the Purposes of ILSA within their Years. Historically, the Representatives' duties have included membership in various committees, event coordination, and providing assistance with the tasks associated with the Functions and Purpose of ILSA.
Ad-Hoc Positions, in coordination with the Executive Committee, fulfil the functions set out for them at the time of their creation.
Duties of the Financial Committee
The ILSA budget is administered by the Financial Committee in consultation with the Executive Committee and the General Membership, and in cooperation with the Indigenous Legal Studies Program and the Law Students' Society.
ILSA is committed to excellent fiscal management, transparency, and financial responsibility.
ILSA recognizes that the administration of the budget requires discretion and flexibility on the part of the Financial Committee.
ILSA is committed to fund-raising from charitable organizations that reflect ILSA's Purpose, Functions, and Membership.
Meetings, activities, and events proceed by the discretion of the initiating Member or Committee.
Indigenous procedures that foster respectful dialogue shall be discussed and implemented by the Membership at all official meetings, activities, and events.
Useful Indigenous procedures include, but are not limited to, circle format meetings, use of a talking stick or other object passed from one speaker to the next, consensus-based decision-making, smudging, drumming and prayer.
UBC ILSA logo
Alano Edzerza is Vancouver-based Tahltan artist, and member of the Raven clan. Edzerza started learning about Northwest Coast art from his family at a young age, and his art has been featured in 9 major shows. He has created diverse art in many mediums, including glass, stone, jewelry, limited edition prints and a large variety of canvas paintings. Edzerza has also created custom-designed large-scale works in steel and glass, and he created designs found on the Netherlands 2010 Olympic uniforms.
For more information, click on the logo.
Some ILSA exec members and ILS Associate Director Lee Schmidt attending the 30th Annual Indigenous Bar Association Fall Conference! The theme this year was Systems Disruption. . . . . #indigenousbarassociation #indigenouslaw #systemsdisruption #saskatoon #lawstudents #ilsa
ILSA sweaters are available! Message Brendon Easton to get hooked up. Pullovers $50 Zip-up Hoodies $60 Sizes available s-xl . . . #ubcilsa #ilsa #allard #ubc #lawstudent
Today we gathered together to honour our Sisters In Spirit with a Candlelight Vigil, in memory of #MMIWG2S #SISVigils #NoMoreStolenSisters
Some ILSA exec members and ILS Associate Director Lee Schmidt attending the 30th Annual Indigenous Bar Association… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 8 months ago
ILSA sweaters are available! Message Brendon Easton to get hooked up. Pullovers $50 Zip-up Hoodies $60 Sizes avail… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 10 months ago
RT @LAWMcGill: The Kawaskimhon National Aboriginal Moot has begun! Elder John Cree lead the opening ceremony of this consensus-based, non-a… 1 year ago
INDIGENOUS AWARENESS WEEK
The UBC Indigenous Law Students' Association is proud to announce the dates of our annual event, Indigenous Awareness Week: February 7-10, 2017. ILSA Jeopardy Night will kick off the event Friday, February 3, 2017. Come celebrate with us at Allard Hall in the Franklin Lew Forum. A number of special events are taking place each day with a different theme TBA at a later date. Everyone is welcome!
ILSA Annual Charity Golf Tournament
ILSA members are pleased to announce the 12th Annual Charity Golf Tournament will take place on March 31st, 2017 at the UBC University Golf Course. The proceeds of the tournament will be donated to ILSA's annual scholarship, which is awarded to a continuing Indigenous law student. Please see the "Law Events" page for more details and ticket information. Everyone is welcome!
Prospective UBC Law Students
UBC Aboriginal Portal
UBC Law Students Society
UBC Orientation Guide
UBC Rec
UBC SSC


$6 off $80+ on all products, available for logged-in users, coupon can be used only once by each customer, end of Sep. 17.
Цены не в курсе! Скидки по промокоду до 33%!
$1 off $15+ on all products, available for logged-in users, coupon can be used only once by each customer, end of Sep. 17.
$3 off $40+ on all products, available for logged-in users, coupon can be used only once by each customer, end of Sep.17.
Промокод действует на все купоны.


About two weeks ago we posted a self-commentary on John Connolly's State of State speech (which you can find HERE). We just wanted to include the video recording of the speech and give another shout out to State of State for this opportunity to elevate the Performing Arts and all of student culture here at Penn State!
Spotlight Sunday: Meet Rachel Reid!
What are your major/minor(s) and your year?
I am PAC's Communications Director. For my career, I want to work in the marketing/communications department of a music or performing arts venue, so getting involved with PAC is a great way to get experience and have fun!
I'm in Tapestry Dance Company, where I'm a dancer, choreographer and fundraising chair.
It's nice to see the organizations collaborate and it's interesting to learn more about the cool clubs I didn't even know existed on campus.
At the beginning of December, I received some phenomenal news - I was lucky enough to be chosen to speak at the 2016 State of State Conference which elevates issues at Penn State and provides a forum to discuss these concepts. When deciding on what to speak about, many different concepts came to me which ranged from the value of my college degree to how tradition and change play a role in our lives here at Penn State. However, because of my experience bringing the Performing Arts Council to life, I knew that my topic had to focus and relate to the concept of student culture and specifically what it looks like and how it can be changed.
I had ample time to write this speech, however as a professional procrastinator the concrete concepts didn't start forming until four weeks before the conference when I began to dig deep into what I've learned while trying to enable change to take place in the performing arts here at Penn State. And then it wasn't until four days before the conference that I was really confident about what I wanted to say. However, the time that it took to put together these ideas enabled me to really begin to understand what it means to change a community here at Penn State and what we've done by changing the performing arts as well.
Now when you zoom out, you see the connections between two different organizations. Thespians and NRT are a great example because they share office space and this opportunity to interact enables actors to span both organizations. However, as I'm sure many in the arts know, creating these seams in the fabric where two orgs can interact so well is NOT common because it isn't easy. But when you look at the trade-offs (increased mission success, better social dynamics, increased impact at Penn State), the value of org to org interaction is almost immeasurable. But these connections are hard to create and even harder to maintain. That is why organizations like the Performing Arts Council have sprung up. To try and make it easy for groups to form these bonds and make their community greater.
Finally, when you zoom out once more, you can see that there is one more level of student interaction/engagement which spans two different and large pockets of Penn State culture. As intuition would suggest, these students ave the ability to affect the most change at Penn State. However, these students are the ones who face the greatest difficulty because they are trying to hold onto two very large and often incredibly fast moving groups. This then either requires strong leadership to take these positions or strong leadership needs to grow quickly to maintain these connections. There are also safeguards, like Student Leadership Roundtable, which is set up by the administration to prevent these students from slipping by enabling student leaders to engage with their peers.
If we can do these things, we can create a structure that will enable change to take place at Penn State and if we focus those efforts (as PAC has been doing) I believe we can make that happen in the Performing Arts Community as well.
A video of John's speech is HERE!
Spotlight Sunday: Meet Carolyn Quinn!
Last January, I heard about PAC at a party from a friend of John and Brian's. I got in touch with John, who I had never met before, and expressed my interest in getting involved. Fast forward a few months and I'm the Vice President, a position which I still hold today. I've had an absolutely fantastic experience learning about and working with student performing arts organizations outside of the School of Theatre.
I am a Stage Management Major in the School of Theatre and serve as a Student Rep in the School of Theatre Affiliate Program Group, our Alumni Board.
I love watching organizations really talk to each other and realize that they can work together. The a cappella genre's common audition was a direct result of this and made the audition process far more smooth and less stressful for all involved.
Lose Yourself by Eminem. Next question.
What is your favorite Penn State arts experience?
Producing 'WE ARE...On Broadway' this January was one of the coolest things I've ever done. Bringing back Penn State School of Theatre alumni to perform and work with current students at the State Theatre was a dream come true. It also helped me to realize that I truly have a passion for producing.
Welcome to the new PAC member spotlight!
Each week, we will showcase a member of the Performing Arts Council to get to know us better!
As President, I've been involved since the start of the Performing Arts Council in September 2014 when it was just an idea in the heads of a few crazy students. We worked to make it a student organization (which happened in December 2014) and then worked on making connections within the community and building the team up to its current 20 member size! Overall though, I work to see the mission of PAC (to foster a culture in which performing arts can flourish by serving as a resource to student performing arts organizations and their liaison to the University) come to life here at Penn State in any way that I can!
I love all of the people that I get to work with because they all have a passion for the performing arts and Penn State. If you want to be involved with PAC there is no way to separate your love for the performing arts and PSU. And getting to work with those people really infuses excitement into the work because I feel the exact same way.
My favorite arts experience was the opportunity to technical direct "In the Heights" when the Penn State Thespians produced it in the spring of 2014. I could not have had more fun or worked with a better group of people than during that phenomenal performance!


Today, while playing a story in my web app development project, I felt the need to have an ordered hash in Ruby 1.8.7. Argh, this version of Ruby doesn't have ordered hash at all! Surprisingly enough, JRuby versions 1.3.1 or 1.5.1 preserves insertion order.
With Ruby 1.9, this wouldn't be a problem because Ruby 1.9 preserves the insertion order into the data structure. This only gives me foolish happiness for a second or two, after which my academic reasoning onsets bringing sinking unhappiness for the Ruby 1.9 preserving hash ordering by default. Should my prediction go right (or wish come true???) this will revert back to the way it was in Ruby 1.8.* and to solve this problem of having an ordered hash data structure, Ruby future version might have something like OrderedHash, the way Rails has one.
SIDE NOTE: A hash (table/map) is a data structure for storing items in key/value pairs using a hash function. Ideally, the hash function guarantees to map each key to a unique slot index. With this data structure, the average cost of lookup/insertion/deletion for an element remains constant irrespective of the number of elements that this data structure holds. Understandably for this reason this data structure is used in many softwares like databases, caches.


text:
The Peak Malaysia The Finer Things in Life
Jaeger-LeCoultre Manufacture: Where Tradition and Innovation Meet Under One Roof
The home of fine watchmaking invites guests to its historic Manufacture building to admire exceptional fine watchmaking creations.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019 By Jx Chong
The watchmakers at Jaeger-LeCoultre have long been inspired by the exceptional scenery offered by the Swiss Jura Mountains. Working from the Jaeger-LeCoultre in the Vallée de Joux, watchmakers, engineers, designers and artisans work in unison to give birth to fine watchmaking creations that are loved by many around the world.
The Home of Fine Watchmaking regularly invites its guests to make stopovers in its different ateliers, and to discover the restoration workshop as well as the Heritage Gallery.
The Manufacture, which has stood since 1833, recently underwent renovations works for five months that restored the historic building's appearance. For this, the Luc Chappuis Maison carried out substantive design operations: new lime plaster, new window
frames made of Jura stones, bush-hammer technique.
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Within the walls of this historic building lies the restoration workshop where antique watches, pocket watches and other treasures are entrusted to skilled watchmakers. Their proximity with Heritage Gallery allows them to access the originals plans of the watches to reproduce components that would be otherwise impossible to repair or replace.
There is also a rich collection of nearly 6,000 stamps or swages, manufactured by the Maison for their unique movements and preciously preserved at the Manufacture, is also available for this precise watchmaking work.
A Place of History and Inspiration
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The aforementioned Heritage Gallery was redesigned between 2016 and 2017. It presents the iconic timepieces and collections of Jaeger-LeCoultre. It offers visitors a unique, connected experience as well as a close look into the key stages of the Maison's history and the art of watchmaking.
Split across two levels are massive display cases that showcase the Maison's archives which contain written records of technical plans, patent, drawings, old books, client registries, advertisements and catalogues.
Besides their historical interest, these archives constitute a constant source of inspiration for the creation of new timepieces.
A nod to the past comes in the form of a workbench, similar to the one used by Antoine LeCoultre, the founder of the company.
The gallery also contains many of Jaeger-LeCoultre's past achievements including a transparent wall that exhibits 340 of the over 1,200 mechanical movements designed, created and assembled by the Jaeger-LeCoultre Manufacture. Among them is the world's smallest movement, the 1929 developed calibre 101 which barely weighs one gramme.
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Upstairs, visitors will find an intimate atmosphere where aesthetic masterpieces and exceptional pieces are set side by side
without overshadowing each other in individual display cases. There is also the opportunity to admire the renowned Hybris Mechanica collection.
At the end of the visit of this building filled with history, each guest enjoys a unique watchmaking journey to the heart of the Grande Maison, where the past illuminates the present to better reveal it and set off from the Vallée de Joux with sparkles in their eyes.
Heritage Gallery, jaeger-lecoultre, manufacture, Musuem, Restoration Workshop, Swiss Jura Mountains, switzerland, Tour, Vallée de Joux
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Four apps maximising UX on Apple TV
Brightec Team
We took a look at how 4 different apps make use of new UX & UI opportunities on tvOS
A rich new user experience
Apple TV provides a great opportunity for companies to reframe their content and capture new audiences.
The UI of Apple TV offers designers a new challenge but it's the overall user experience and context that is most exciting.
The 10 foot UI (as most users will be at least 10 feet away from the device) means that apps can be used not just by individuals but by couples, families and friends.
The users are perhaps also in a more relaxed or casual place when using the apps (when did you last watch TV standing up?).
Apple's design guidelines are (as you would expect) in depth and offer technical guidance for designing for tvOS.
They encourage designers to consider the distance that users will be from the TV, to utilise the large screen space as an opportunity to present captivating imagery and also consider that the user is connected to the device through a small remote instead of a keyboard, mouse or touch screen.
We took at look at a few apps to see how companies are utilising this new format, and picked four companies (listed in no particular order below) that are using the new UX & UI opportunities to great effect.
The Kitchen Stories app
First up; the Kitchen Stories TV app.
For users that have their Apple TV setup in the kitchen or in an open plan living room / kitchen setting this is a very useful app.
Their smartphone and tablet app is already fantastic and popular, but the TV app takes it one step further.
The size of the TV screen means that the device can be much further away from the hazardous cooking area (has anyone else ever drowned their iPhone in chopped tomatoes?).
The videos skillfully utilise the extra space available and therefore provide increased clarity - enabling the user to better follow cooking instructions (and hopefully resulting in finer cusine).
It is also probably true that the user, when needing to pause or scroll through instructions, would prefer to be touching a small remote with dirty hands rather than an expensive tablet screen or laptop keyboard.
AirBnB offer a simple yet inspiring app that you could easily imagine working well in a group setting e.g. with a partner or a group of friends.
The app offers curated images by city and also by theme, such as; Writers' Houses.
At the time of writing you're not yet able to book through the TV app, but it gives the user a good feel for the cities and the type of properties available (and can of course be booked via their other outlets).
AirBnB also offer some interesting approaches to the challenge of navigation and arranging content within the app.
With the tvOS, navigation is carried out through indirect touch or swipe on the remote control. If the user taps or swipes right then the navigation moves right.
For content such as photographs, Apple use the iOS method of direct swiping. If the user swipes from right to left the photo moves to the left.
The AirBnB app uses the indirect tapping for their top navigation and iOS style swiping for the photos within properties. They also use the iOS swipe to move between properties.
Whether this is content or navigation is contentious but overall the app is very usable, appealing and particularly engaging.
Not On The High Street
Not On The High Street is another great app for groups of users or an individual looking for presents for friends.
Apple guidelines encourage designers to layer icons and images to create a parallax effect. As users are only connected to the device through the remote, this parallax effect increases the feeling of connectivity between the user and the device.
Small movements on the control pad will create subtle changes in the icon and images. This is something that NOTHS does really well with its icon and product images and creates a delightful user experience.
Another challenge of presenting content on a TV is presenting text that is readable from a distance. Apple advise to use text and text input as little as possible. For product description NOTHS have presented heavy product descriptions as an overlay to the product page itself. The layout is visually pleasing and the text is clear and readable.
The final strength of NOTHS is that the TV app can sync up to other devices to complete transactions. This is more convenient when entering personal details and card numbers.
Touchpress
Finally, Touchpress. A beautiful and intriguing app that aims to bring classical music into the living room in a new and exciting way.
Recently visited by Tim Cook himself, this app is worth checking out just for the sheer brilliance in the idea. Whereas the majority of early TV apps will inevitably be serving up some kind of video content to their users, this app has gone much further and delivers simultaneous videos that a user can jump between to get different perspectives on the piece of classical music being played.
The UX for the menu is strong with simple cards and content previews, but once the user is within an actual piece the magic happens with a user being able to simultaneously watch the performance, the score and a heat map or the orchestra (or a NoteFall visualisation for piano pieces).
Whether you are into classical music or not this company has to be respected for the thought and effort they have put into creating something new and innovative for this platform.
This article was originally written for Brightec by Ed Jenkins


excerpt from Canberra Times Review by Sasha Grishin..
'..In this exhibition a strong lyricism prevails coupled with a passion for exploring complex, yet subtle surfaces. [Melinda Schawel] appears to be an artist who acts as a medium surrendering to her process of work, so that an external form grows out of an inner chaos and a new reality assumes a palpable form.
The Cluster series forms the backbone of her exhibition and it is her finest work I have seen to date. The intricacy and mystic beauty of her small created microcosms is quite remarkable as the viewer is drawn into an exploration of the breathing nuances of her surfaces. Within this delicacy, there is also something which appears as quite fragile and in strange way inherently tragic.


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Think Galactic- All the Birds in the Sky
For the June meeting of Think Galactic, we discussed All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. The much-lauded novel (it's on a serious awards streak) follows two characters from childhood through early adulthood, as they find themselves on opposite sides of a magic vs. technology war in a very near future.
Brief notes and possible spoilers below:
Pre-book discussion somehow involved canned tamales and spaghetti trees.
While we all generally quite liked it, we noted a certain messiness or even "draftiness" to it—in the sense that it feels like corners of different drafts with different tones are sticking out in places.
We really liked some of the humorous, Douglas Adams-y or Terry Pratchett-y bits, like Theodolpus, and we also generally praised the YA segments over the later parts.
One thing we agreed on strongly is that the novel is "studded with little gems of sentences and phrases", of which we had many examples.
For some reason we really dig "the trap you can ignore is no trap".
We really liked Peregrine! Non-omniscient/omnipotent AI is really refreshing.
Also really dug Ernesto and his possible origin story. "Too much life" as a possibly disastrous condition, while also kind of an HIV or other immune-condition -analog, is interesting.
There's some general lightness to the overall tone here that doesn't quite gel with some of the heavier parts, especially in the latter half of the novel. We thought the darker aspects of the "youthful" half we integrated better, and we liked the depiction of Patricia & Laurence's families—showing not-great relationships like that.
There were a lot of ideas that we were intrigued by that the novel kind of skipped too lightly over—Patricia & Laurence's ethical debate, for instance, or what exactly to make of "Aggrandizement"—is it actually a warning about hubris, is it a cautionary tale about impostor syndrome and institutional gaslighting? There's not quite enough to tell.
There's some imbalances in the presentation of the "magic vs. science" opposition: the magic side feels really cool, well-fleshed out, and we particularly appreciated the kind of open-endedness of it (hints of other systems that aren't covered by the wizard school, etc.). The science, however, felt extemely cartoony, thus weirdly less believable than the actual magic.
We talked a bit about "catastrophizing" and plot-forcing; most of the main conflicts at the end would have been reduced or eliminated with a "hey, what are y'all doing over there?" instead of jumping right to death-rays and so forth. We also smell something vaguely Buffy/Angelish in the "fateful sex followed immediately by apocalypse".
Worth noting that Buffy is open to both magical & technological
apocalypse-averting strategies.
Very amused by the madrigals and the "unbearably twee" side of the world ending. Madrigal discussion also led us to bring up shape-note singing again, which we last talked about in context of Ancillary Justice.
The conflict over "saving humans, or saving the Earth" brought to mind some other works playing with that—Butler's Earthseed, themes in KSR's Aurora, probably others if we put our minds to it—Kube-McDowell's The Quiet Pools jumps to mind now that I think of it.
I noted that, while I think we should save the planet (duh), it nonetheless might be a good idea for space agencies to have an "Off This Rock!" division just in case.
Some discussion of Luddism, the etymology of "sabotage" (my favorite!), and monkey-wrenching.
The kind of genre mixing/blending going on here led us to talk a bit about Kelly Link and others in the vague genre of "slipstream" or whatever one wants to call the more multiple-genre-borrowing speculative fiction...thing. Ray Vukcevich's Meet Me in the Moon Room also mentioned.
Link was the sort-of discusion choice for BikeCon, which led to us discussing the bicycle journey to Wiscon as well as Wiscon itself.
Was triumphantly pointed out that The Hortlak "is not the first rock-leaving communication we've run into!"—referencing Cherryh's Forty Thousand in Gehenna.
Digression digressed, we returned to the question of multiple genres, or more specifically multiple reading strategies—one of the things we like about All The Birds is its mix of tones and approaches, but it also makes it difficult to adjust our reading strategy chapter to chapter—do we read the cartoony robots on the same level of seriousness as the climate disaster? Does the goofy/Pratchett=y order of Nameless Assassins really fit in the same magic universe as the Maze and the Unravelling?
We're curious to see if Anders decides to explore/expand more of this world, and if it will be more Chaucer-y or not.
Fun discussion! Think Galactic has also selected our next slate of books. Barring unforeseen availability issues, they are:
July: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
August: When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
September: Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
October: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
November: Everfair by Nisi Shawl
December: Iraq +100, ed. Hassan Blassim
January: The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo
Also, although we didn't schedule it as a "book discussion" we are committed to a Steven Universe viewing party/discussion at some point TBD. Keep up with Think Galactic on their website and Facebook group.
Labels: Charlie Jane Anders, climate, fantasy, genre, Think Galactic


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Jang Hye-jin (; 5 de setembro de 1975 em Busan) é uma atriz sul-coreana, reconhecida principalmente por seu papel como Kim Chung-sook no galardoado filme Parasitas do cineasta Bong Joon-ho e por participar em alguns filmes do diretor e novelista Lee Chang-dong.

Hye-jin nasceu na cidade de Busan o 5 de setembro de 1975. Sua carreira como atriz iniciou na década de 1990, registando um papel menor no longa metragem de 1998 If It Snows On Christmas. Começou a ganhar repercussão nos meios de seu país natal em meados da década de 2000 quando interpretou o papel de Park Myung-suk no filme dramático Milyang baixo a direcção do cineasta e novelista Lee Chang-dong e com seu aparecimento no seriado My Sweet Seoul da corrente SBS.

No final da década registou aparecimentos nos filmes Marine Boy de Yoon Jong-seok e Poesia do mencionado Lee Chang-dong. Em 2016 integrou a partilha do filme dramático de Yoon Ga-eun The World of Us e do filme Yongsoon de Shin Joon, dantes de interpretar o papel de Jung-hee no largometraje Mothers de Lee Dong-eun junto a Im Soo-jung, Yoon Chan-young e Lee Sang-hee.

Depois de realizar papéis de partilha em filme-los Adulthood e Youngju e na série de televisão Hold me Tight, a atriz conseguiu o reconhecimento internacional ao interpretar o papel principal de Kim Chung-sook no galardoado filme de Bong Joon-ho Parasitas, ganhadora de quatro Prêmios Óscar em 2020 nas categorias de melhor filme, melhor diretor, melhor roteiro original e melhor filme internacional. No filme encarna a uma mãe de família que obtém o posto de maneira irregular como ama de chaves de uma família adinerada.

Depois de sua participação em Parasitas, a actriz figurou nas séries de televisão de 2020 A Piece of Your Mind, How to Buy a Friend, True Beauty e Birthcare Center, além de interpretar o papel de Seon-myeong no largometraje cómico de Choi Tem-na More Than Family junto a Krystal Jung e Choi Deok-moon.

Filmografia

Cinema

Televisão

Notas

Ligações externas

Atores de televisão da Coreia do Sul
Atores de cinema da Coreia do Sul
Vencedores do Prémio Screen Actors Guild de melhor elenco em filme

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Is Near Infrared bad for your eyes?
No. Recent research has actually showed that near infrared can be therapeutic for the eyes. Currently, it is being studied as a healing tool for diabetic retinopathy. In that research, the near infrared is shined directly into the eyes. While it is not especially fun to stare into the lamps in our saunas, it is not harmful either.
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Hello Everyone and Happy Mother's Day to all mothers out there, and most especially to my mother. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think, and loved more than you know. Happy Mother's Day to you Mumu; love you forever and always, even if we sometimes don't see eye to eye.
There is nothing more sincere than a mother's love for her children, and this picture clearly portrays your love for me while I care more about putting my hairband on for the picture (but really I've got my eye on the food).
Last week after my Mom's birthday celebration (and that whole fiasco that I had with baking her cake), I asked her what she wanted me to bake for her for Mother's Day, and I'm not gonna lie, but said aloud to her, "please not another cake" – the troubles of my mother being born a week before Mother's Day. We both started thinking for a while, and then I remembered that I wanted to make this cake back when I was still in Sydney. Now I know I said no cakes, but this technically isn't a massive layered cake, but instead, mini molten lava cakes.
Somewhere back in July last year, I hosted a tea and scones party for some of my favourite ladies, and one male housemate. We had an assortment of tea of course, homemade scones, homemade strawberry jam, and homemade lemon curd. I had a lot of strawberry jam left over, but I had a way of finishing it by having it with toast in the mornings with a cup of tea. Lemon curd on the other hand I had no clue on how to consume it. I then searched for other recipes that used lemon curd, except for the obvious lemon meringue pie/tart since I am not a huge fan of meringue. I then came across this recipe and I instantly knew that this was the recipe that I was going attempt – but never got around to doing so. Reasons? I actually don't remember. I think it was because the lemon curd had been sitting in the fridge for weeks and probably already off at the time I decided that I want to make these molten cakes. After that, I wasn't bothered to make a whole new batch of lemon curd just for this dessert to happen. But now for Mother's Day – I don't see any better chance to have a go at these!
The original recipe can be found on The Gallery Gourmet and this recipe makes about 8 cakes but I guess differs on the size of your moulds/ramekins.
Preheat the oven to 220C (425F or gas mark 7). Grease 8 ramekins with softened butter or non-stick baking spray. Place them onto a baking tray and set aside.
Melt the butter and white chocolate in a large microwave-safe bowl, stirring every 15 seconds (for a total of 60-90 seconds) until melted and smooth. Remove from the microwave and whisk until smooth.
Add the flour, sugar and salt; mix well. Then add in the eggs, egg yolks, lemon curd, lemon zest, and vanilla extract and whisk until well blended. Divide the batter evenly into the prepared ramekins.
Bake for about 13-15 minutes or until the edges are just starting to to turn golden brown, and the centre is puffy and just beginning to set. Transfer the ramekins to a wire rack and let cool for 5 minutes.
Run the tip of a paring knife around the edges of the cakes to loosen them and then invert the cakes onto small dessert plates or dishes.
Dust the top with confectioners' sugar, garnish with fresh raspberries, and serve with whipped cream.
Share with the family (or friends) and enjoy!
PS: I completely forgot about the whipped cream when I was photographing the cakes, and by the time I had the cream ready and whipped, I found out that my Mom and my sister had already dug into the perfect molten cake that I specifically set aside for my photograph (the other cakes weren't as runny as the one I had opened for the photo). The whipped cream nicely balances out the sweetness and tartness of the cakes.
I'm sure she appreciated these – they look gorgeous and I'm really impressed with the bake you've achieved. Perfect.


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Q: json rest api, locally hosted, lan accessible For some time now I try to figure it out how to create a json rest api and a database, host it locally and make it accessible in lan. I need this for an android app, exactly to parse data from database to app.
I created the json rest and database usimg XAMP but i didn't figure it out how to make them accessible from lan.
After that somebody recomanded me IIS and since then I did'n figure it out.
Some sugestions?

A: For the web api application, host in the IIS server in some other system. In the mobile application development environment is in same LAN  network, then call the api using  that web api system ipaddress instead of the localhost.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Colin Edwin & Jon Durant's Post-Apocalyptic Burnt Beliefs.
Porcupine Tree is among the most popular of the recent generation of Progressive Rock groups. They've even enjoyed chart success. Colin Edwin is their highly regarded bass player. Jon Durant is much less well known, but he' been putting out wonderful ambient-laced electric guitar albums for a couple of decades now. The two musicians got together recently to record an album of guitar and bass duets that goes way beyond that description. It's called Burnt Belief.
Remember that Mayan thing, when the world was supposed to end on January 21 2012, the day the Mayan calendar ran out? Apparently, that didn't happen, but it did inspire an album by Jon Durant and Colin Edwin. They timed the release of Burnt Belief for December 22,the day after the apocalypse.
Obviously the world didn't end, but some of the music on Burnt Belief might be suitable for a post-apocalyptic time.
The project began in 2010 when guitarist Jon Durant asked Edwin to play on his CD, Dance of the Shadow Planets. The collaboration worked so well they decided to record an entire CD together.
Jon Durant joins in the mutual admiration exchange. "A great bass player isn't defined by how many notes he can play," professes Durant from his home outside of Boston. "That's not the sort of voice that would work in the context of my music. And Colin really, he knows when to say nothing, which is important, when to just hit that one great note that just leaves you breathless, and when to add a melodic phrase and do so with real intention.
You can hear the complete interview with Jon Durant and Colin Edwin, including their talk about Middle Eastern music and Peter Gabriel's Passion in the Echoes Podcast.
Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like The Ambient Zone – Just Music Café Volume 4 . Sign up now and you'll also get February's CD of the Month, Ulrich Schnauss' A Long Way to Fall. Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you've been missing.
This entry was posted on January 25, 2013 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Interviews.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.