First trial workshops of Breaking Bread hosted at Cardiff Met are a massive success!

Posted on by Wendy

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Thank you thank you, to ALL of our Breaking Bread participants who fought through the heat to attend our first trail workshop of our brand new service, Breaking Bread! Marion, Leslie, Jane, Liz, Gerri and Lyn teamed up with Daniel, Steve, Gareth, Helena, Ilid and Deirdre and made some delicious bread and pea and mint soup for lunch. A big shout also goes to Rhys (master baker) for hosting the session and Ray and his team at Food Technology, we couldn’t have put it together without you!

Our group also provided us with crucial feedback, tips and suggestions for the future of Breaking Bread. It seems that we have some very eager stakeholders and a very much needed and wanted service for the future. Lots of possibilities! In the immediate future we will be launching our new website where you can find information on what Breaking Bread does, our history, and where we want to go from here, keep an eye out for that. You can also follow us on Twitter @Breaking4Bread and a Facebook page is coming this week as a sharing platform for all things Bread! We hope you will all join us on the beginning of this exciting journey 

First performance of Somability held at Millennium Centre

Posted on by Wendy

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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Daniel Marshall awarded his BA designing for children with Autism

Posted on by Wendy

 

exhibition autism 2Congratulations to Daniel Marshall who was awarded his BA this year in Product Design at Cardiff Met. Daniel has been working to design for children with Autism to facilitate interaction between parents and children. Daniel undertook extensive research into autism for the project and this has really shown in the final outcome. His work was shown at this years degree shows at Cardiff Met. Visitors who came really liked the product, took photos and enquired about the design process. Daniel reports that children throughout the exhibition were constantly wanting to interact with the toy! We wish Daniel all the best in his future studies and career. Well done Daniel! You can contact Daniel about his work at daniel.marshall31@btinternet.com.

CARIAD wins two new SIPS (Strategic Insight Programe) awards

Posted on by Wendy

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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 works with Connected Studio at the Millennium Centre

Posted on by Wendy

CARIAD has a fantastic day at the Millennium Centre today facilitating Connected Studio developing ways of making classical music more accessible to audiences through digital content and platforms. We also learned about new technologies and ideas to further establish links between academia and the media. We were reunited with Peter from PDR, Emily from School of Education and Katherine from CSAD.

We had an eventful day designing our new ‘Classy App’, a prototype to condense and consolidate some of the content on BBC 3 Radio, to renew and reinvigorate an audience with an interest in classical music but perhaps a bit shy about taking those initial first steps into the genre. Thank you Connected Studio, BBC, Hannah, CEWN and everybody else organising such a successful dynamic day, lots of possibilities!

CARAID visits CEWN event Living Longer, Living Well

Posted on by Wendy

Leah DSC05227and Gary Beauchamp from CARIAD had an informative morning at The Atrium this week, collaborating on the latest CEWN event, scoping potentials for creative knowledge exchanges under the title ‘Living Longer, Living Well’. It was an eventful morning, developing persona profiles and brain storming early ideas and interventions for our scenarios.

The afternoon saw the development of our int3erventions to new heights through re invigorating an old collaboration with ThinkArk and PlayArk creative companies in Cardiff. Looking forward to further collaborations developing our new ‘Breaking Bread’ service, facilitating residents in care homes to make bread. Watch this space!

CARIAD visits Exeter House School to discuss potentials for video tagging

Posted on by Wendy

 
Thank you Andrew from Exeter House School http://www.exeterhouseschool.co.uk/ for hosting such an eventful day yesterday: exploring the possibilities of video tagging to capture Intensive Interaction sessions with young people with learning difficulties. Leah from CARIAD and Jon Moore from Analysis Pro http://www.analysispro.net/ had an eventful first meeting at Salisbury yesterday. We looked at some videos of ‘Intensive Interaction’ with the lovely Dawn all the way from St Luke’s Foundation School, Hertfordshire http://www.stlukes.herts.sch.uk/tv_radio/index.html showing us the amazing work they are doing capturing evidence of their intensive Interactions with young people with learning difficulties. Lee from IT and Rachel another teacher from Exeter House completed our group.

DSC05102We started by discussing some of the problems encountered particularly with evidencing children’s engagement and communication. The focus was on the Intensive Interaction sessions, a widely used model to encourage communication and one that has had incredible results. We also learned about some research into capturing these Intensive Interaction sessions using video, and the strategies and recommendations the teachers have developed. This ranged from the angle of the camera to the size of the frame. We learned that the focus is always on the face in Intensive Interactions and that it has been argued that video can capture nuances and idiosyncratic details within these sessions more effectively than other measurement models.

Then we discussed some of the problems with capturing the sessions. Many many issues were discussed from technical problems (for example not enough room to store HD data on school servers), to aesthetic and communicative features of video (for example a bird’s eye view coupled with a close up, narrative within the clips, and a sense of the environment with less than perfect filming)to much more conceptual and challenging problems (for example subjective interpretations of behaviours, how much detail and history of the child is needed to make a claim for improvement)…and this was just the morning!

Later Jon took the floor and gave a very brief overview of some of the software tools and packages he has been developing in partnerships for his entire career. Originally used for sports analysis we discussed some of the potentials of adapting some of the strategies, tools and software to begin to code and manage some of the video from the Intensive Interactions. To pick out key moments, file information and use it to build up layers of metadata of rich and dynamic visual evidence of the children’s engagement. Looking forward to the next stages!

CARIAD attends second Connected Studio Event

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CARIAD’s Leah attended a very informative follow up meeting to the first Connected Studio day held in Wales in November which developed ideas to engage audiences with classical music in the BBC. http://cariadblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/connected-studios-linking-academics-and-media/ While this was a much quieter affair compared to the frantic day of knowledge exchange in November it was certainly an exciting and insightful afternoon.

We got to meet and greet a second round of researchers, academics and creative people from across Wales and discuss some of the potentials going forward to the build day in February. The BBC as always were very excited to hear about our ideas and background as we were equally privileged to be working with such a dynamic group of researchers and the expertise of the BBC. Looking forward to our first build day on this pioneering pilot project with endless potentials for CARIAD!

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

Posted on by Wendy

 
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.