CARIAD presents at CEWN showcase event in Trefforest

664801_origThanks to the Creative Exchange Wales Network for hosting their latest showcase event, experts from industry, Welsh Government and the BBC attended to give advice and support recent projects.

Leah presented on several of her projects which have received CEWN support, including iMagine, Breaking Bread and ProFoundCoding. She spoke of scaling up plans for Breaking Bread and the video tagging project in progress, aiming to improve teachers understanding of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. More details about the event can be viewed here.

 

 

CARIAD contributes to Children In Need day

DSC09993Thanks to everybody at Trinity Project Splott for hosting such a special event for Children In Need day last week. CARIAD gave a mini Breaking Bread session and connected with the Communities First Cluster in Splott and Adamstown and the legendary No Fit State Circus to discuss additional collaborations and projects.
The event was a huge success and preempts the emerging Trinity Project as a crucial community based hub for creativity, arts and intergenerational activities and events in Wales now and in the future. Exciting times ahead

Final workshops underway for ProFoundCoding

Thanks to AnalysisPro and teachers Andrew Walker and Rachel Woodhouse for working with us over the past few months to develop our latest video tagging templates. The project won additional funding from CEWN to create new templates based around concepts of engagement to tag video sessions of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. We will be releasing the template shortly along with instructions on ways to use and interpret the template for teachers in special schools. We will be adding the latest templates and information to our resource and website, ProFoundCoding which we released over the summer.

We spoke about the project at a recent CEWN special showcase event at the University of South Wales, Trefforest where we pitched the next stages to create new employment opportunities in special schools for Performance Analysis. Watch this space 🙂

 

Showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre

Thanks to everybody for attending our showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre especially the staff and service users from the Gladys Resource Centre at Aberdare for creating such a memorable performance. Thanks also to Touch Trust, CEWN, SIP and all of our other supporters for making the past two years so memorable and successful.

 

 

 

 

New CEWN funding success

20140430113038.m2ts.Still001Delighted to announce that Leah has been successful in her latest funding bid to work with special need teachers from Exeter House School and AnalysisPro! ProEngagementCoding will be developing new work and templates from our first collaboration with the project ProFoundCoding. The group will be seeking to extend their reach by designing a series of templates and to begin evaluations of the templates in action, a call for some volunteers will be going out soon!

 

First performance of Somability held at Millennium Centre

Thank you very much Digital Innovation week for hosting the first live performance of Somability in action. It was a wonderful event and opportunity to showcase our service users performing with Somability. DSC08483The biggest thanks of all go to Cath, her staff and the service users at Gladys Resource Centre Aberdare, who put on a wonderful show demonstrating some of their newly learned choreography and gestural movements as a part of working with Artis Community, well done Artis Community you are certainly making movement irresistible!

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Thanks also to Eluned Parrott AM for stopping by to have a look at the project development thus far, lovely to see you and to have your support. Wendy and Mareck from CARIADinteractive also gave a talk about (co)-creation, giving us all some insights into inclusive and participatory design. Filmmaker Dan was also on site, he has been awarded funding from Cardiff Met to make a film for Somability.

Nice to meet you Dan and looking forward to the end result! Finally thank you to Steven from the BBC for organising the event, coming to see the performances in Aberdare, and making us all feel a part of Digital Innovation Week, I hope the rest of the week’s antics go well!

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CARIAD wins two new SIPS (Strategic Insight Programe) awards

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Congratulations to Leah and Cathy for being awarded another two SIP (Strategic Insight Programme) awards. Cathy will work with the company Stillwalks http://stillwalks.wordpress.com/ to create a series of drawings through video. She will also scope some potentials of using some Stillwalk videos to promote wellbeing by ‘bringing the outside in’.

Leah will be working with AnalysisPro http://www.analysispro.net/, Andrew from Exeter House http://www.exeterhouseschool.co.uk/ and Dawn from St Luke’s http://www.stlukes.herts.sch.uk/ special needs school to scope ways of tagging videos of Intensive Interaction sessions. Thank you very much to Cardiff Met and everybody who helped on our bids!

CARIAD begins video documentary at Singleton Hospital for i-Magine: using technology to enhance subjective wellbeing and reduce stress for children in hospital .

 
We had a fantastic day of filming at Singleton Hospital, Swansea yesterday for the project i-Magine. CARIAD’s Leah was awarded SIP (Strategic Insight Programme) funding from Cardiff Met to work with OnPAr productions to create a video documentary funding proposal, interviewing specialists, carers and families who have experience of children’s hospital environments. Huge special thanks to Prue (Arts in Health Co-ordinator Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Healthboard in partnership with University of Wales Trinity St David, Swansea) for sorting out the participants and making all the arrangements and to Cathy for managing the project. still

The day was a huge success and it was wonderful to give people the opportunity to tell their stories and what would be really useful for them in the hospital. Richard now has all the material and is hard at work editing together our film, watch this space! Thanks to all who have contributed again, CEWN, Cardiff Met SIP and ABMUHB.

Connected Studios: linking academics and media

CARIAD were delighted to partake in a very interesting workshop and debate to re/engage the public with classical music through digital platforms. The event was run as a part of the larger CEWN project series, where CARIAD has several on-going collaborations and partnerships http://cewn.weebly.com/. The day also identified some synergies with CARIAD and S4C and BBC Wales.

bulb%20copy%20sm_234_234_rsWe are looking forward to seeing how the projects develop especially since so many important issues were raised. Questions asked included ‘what is classical music’, ‘why is it called classical’. The elitist attitude and the accessibility of classical music for all demographics was also on the agenda, certainly some meaty food for thought. Thanks to all involved for hosting such an interdisciplinary day and facilitating in bridging gaps between academia and the media. Take a look her for details of the pilot projects https://www.mediaacademywales.org/partners-pilot-the-first-connected-studio-for-higher-education

CAN PLAY TACKLE SOCIAL ISSUES AND ENCOURAGE CHANGE: A collaboration with PlayARK as part of the Play:Do Hack Week

CARIAD were delighted to have representation at the PlayARK festival this year our very own Steve Coleman reports on his very exciting week:

CAN PLAY TACKLE SOCIAL ISSUES AND ENCOURAGE CHANGE?

This was the question which PlayARK’s collaborative project, the Play:Do hack week, posed to nine individuals from different disciplines and offered them the opportunity to explore this idea in an environment that “focuses on the idea of knowledge exchange and open experimentation.”

The project took place in the week running up to the PlayARK 2013 festival, and was organised by Cardiff based company Yello Brick who specialise in playful communication approaches to create experiences for brands and organisations. The project and festival were held at the Wales Millennium Centre at the beginning of November and brought together international speakers, developers, designers, technologists, and practitioners to contribute to a two-day series of public talks and game events.
The call out for the Hack Week was more than a little enticing:

“The aim of the week is to create a playful and socially aware experience that utilises creative technology and reclaims traditional approaches to how we live and work within our cities”

The idea of reclaiming lost or forgotten processes piqued my interest. It evoked ideas from my previous research into reconnecting with our inner child and using play as a means of developing our creative processes. Whilst the idea of using play as an approach to encourage social change in a real world context drew parallels to my current project of using playful activities to encourage wellbeing in the very real context of persons with dementia. By the time I got to the part about “playful ways to break down barriers and encourage positive social engagement” I was hooked and an application was sent.

I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the nine hackers, and at the start of the week I teamed up with Ravi Thornton, an award-winning writer with an interest in narrative environments as storytelling devices, and with Andrew Price who, as Technology Director for the digital agency Moon, has an impressive client list that includes the BBC, Box UK, and the Welsh Assembly Government.

What followed was an intense semi structured few days that focussed our attention, rapidly yet rewardingly, on prototyping methods, game structure, and concepts that lay at the heart of the projects’ aims; this was achieved through a series of informal presentations from organisations such as the Arts Council of Wales and the Climate Change Commission for Wales, as well as from individuals who shared their experience in using playful methods to engage with a wider audience, such as Transmedia storyteller Robert Pratten and live events organiser Ian Thomas.

The outcome of the week was a game that linked physical experimentation with digital recording and presentation, using collaborative engagement to produce and reveal narratives to those who took part. We were looking at the idea of the transience in relation to online content, how games could be used to reveal a hidden narrative, and explored how engagement in the creation of a story could lead to a sense of ownership of the underlying message within participants. We presented our prototype as part of the festival’s series of talks and then ran a trial event with the public the following day.

For me the experience was incredibly valuable and I feel very fortunate in having attended. As a researcher definitions are fundamental to the shaping and direction of my projects, and my involvement in the hack week allowed me to understand how others define the term play and how this shapes or informs their practice. From a practical point of view the opportunity to collaborate, to such an extent, with practitioners from very different disciplines to my own was something that was quite new to me, and as a result collaborative approaches with makers and practitioners is something I want to pursue further as a researcher. My PDP has quite a few new entries about presentations and communication, time management, focus versus balance, as well as the use of social media (I need to do more of it). The biggest reward of the week is the fact that we all feel that something valuable had been created, and view the week as the beginning of an exciting development.

As a group we have set already set date to meet, chat, and take the project further, with the help of a Google doc we are currently making plans on how to develop our prototype in ways that can address social engagement, playful enquiry and even education issues. As a result of the Play:Do hack week there have been some new skills learnt, and some superb contacts made all of which will, I am sure, inform and contribute to the development of my PhD project.

LINKS:
Play:Do Blog
http://www.thinkark.co.uk/playdo-part-playark-2013-festival
PlayARK
http://www.playark.co.uk/
Yello Brick
http://yellobrick.co.uk/
Ravi Thornton
http://ravithornton.weebly.com/blog.html
Andrew Price
http://madebymoon.com/
Steve Coleman, previous research
https://thehourofplay.wordpress.com/