University-wide Digital Media Symposium

Digital Media MA and BA students were amongst the delegates for a university-wide Symposium entitled ‘Emergent Design for Playful Engagement’ held at the beginning of the academic year in the University’s Graduate Centre. Elena Moschini and Chris Lane—who teach in the Media Information & Communication subject area—were two of the organisers. The event was funded by the Art & Design Research Capability Fund and was launched by Head of Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, John Gabriel and Faculty of Computing Dean Dominic Palmer-Brown.

Highlights of the conference included a comparative assessment of teaching and learning within virtual and real environments—in which workshop members were invited to take part in a story telling exercise. For one group face-to-face methods were used. For another the medium of virtual world Second Life was employed. Workshop members then compared and contrasted the results from the virtual and real groups.

The conference also heard a keynote address on Public Policy for Digital Britain from LondonMet Film Studies Lecturer Holly Aylett. Dr Milan Todorovic Chaired a panel on new digital communities and spoke about his own work on the music industry and the impact of peer-to-peer files sharing. Assa Ashuach from John Cass presented work on furniture design using Three-D modeling techniques. Proceedings concluded with a screening of work by Anne Robinson, Chris Lane, Nick Haeffner and Robert Robertson which led to a discussion about plans for the hosting within the university of a peer-reviewed academic journal concerned with practice-based media research.

The Digital Arts and Media Technology Group—is currently planning a new series of seminars on the subject of digital media practice.