First panel, lead by the bloody-mary mixing Seamus Blackley, made some interesting points about process and organisation in creative industries. Rough notes below, but I’ll just pick out an interchange between Blackley and Neil Young of EA/Maxis:

“NY: EA: interdiscplinary ‘pods’ of 5-25 moving towards ‘cells’ of 7 “magical number” organising like a social network.

SB: the structure you’re describing is Hollywood, except no one company owns all the talent.

Hollywood is a social network. the ‘meet and greet’ you introduce two creative people simply to see if they will get along. a very serious meeting.

If there is a spark then the infrastructure is built very quickly around that to turn it into a creative team. if there is a shared understanding of a common process across an industry, then the need for one company to own all the talent disappates, this allows flexibility and creativity.”

Read More »

Andrew Otwell has announced a ‘homebrew’ style event, much in (un)structure like Dave Winer’s bloggercons, with “activities” like the O’Reilly FOOcamps.

Called Design Engaged, it’s happening in November 2004, in Amsterdam. I’m going to try my hardest to get there – should be excellent.

Rough notes from panel produced by Aleks K from The Guardian Gamesblog, and chaired by Ren Reynolds of Terranova fame.
Read More »

Here at the Edinburgh International Games Festival and just seen an invigorating keynote by Steve Schnur, head of music for EA.

Basically his pitch is that games are the new medium for the promulgation and promotion of popular music.

A choice quote:

“In a typical EA sports game: songs rotate 2x an hour of gameplay, and games are approx 50 hours of game play. A song featured in fifa will be played 700million times… more than any no.1 record in any country.

Here are my rough notes:
Read More »

He’s given an excellent talk on how campus design and design for learning spaces have been changed by wifi and ubiquitous computing.

He gave a great quote by Charles Moore when showing Gehry’s new MIT Stata Centre:

“the fundamental principle of campus design should be to figure out the exact spot that the next revolution should begin”

More notes below, by Dan Hill and myself. Links and pictures to follow.
Read More »

Heading to Boston this afternoon to attend DIS2004. Looking forward particularly to a papers session entitled “Please touch: Tangible UIs” which should be really interesting for us working on that area at Nokia. Also, should be a few familiar faces there to catch up with, and hopefully meet some new friends too. Drop me a line or leave a comment if you’re there.