Creative Colab ‘17

9 Jun 2017

The second edition of Creative Colab is almost here. This year’s theme is Digital Citizenship.

The 2nd Seminar on Creative Collaboration is an invitation to explore and discuss various perspectives on Digital Media, intersecting creativity and collaboration.

Date: From June 12 to 16, 2017
Venue: UPTEC PINC + U. Porto Media Innovation Labs (MIL)
Entrance: Free

This edition’s overarching theme is Digital Citizenship, unfolded along three vectors: technology, communication and media.

This year’s week-long event is comprised on a three-day hackathon, with public keynotes by guest supervisors and a final seminar with round table discussion.

A panel of guest speakers will offer diverse views on each subject, through their viewpoints as theoreticians, researchers and practitioners in digital media. The organization encourages you to partake in the discussion, moderated by Professor Pimenta Alves, with your own interrogations. This moment aims to identifying new questions and concerns, brought by emerging technologies into the fields of creation and collaboration.

Creative Colab ’17 is an initiative by students of the Digital Media Doctoral Program at the University of Porto, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute and the University of Texas at Austin, EUA.

PROGRAM:

12 Jun – Technology Hackathon
“Game Jam: Location-Based Games For Teaching of STEM”
Exact Venue: The Game Jam will take place at FEUP, room B-107

This Game Jam is aimed at anyone, from people with game development experience interested in creating new games with a novel tool to complete newbies with zero coding and development experience. Using the "Beaconing Authoring Tool", developed at INESC-TEC, participants will be called upon to create storylines and game design around the "Take a walk around Porto" theme, as a basis for creating location-based educational games. This will be a great opportunity for people without experience or knowledge in game creation to get a first contact with the process, through a simplified tool and with a hands-on approach resulting in the creation of playable games. João Jacob, one of the tool's creators, will give a keynote and introduction to its use at the start of the jam, after which participants will start actively creating their ideas and projects. Given their location-based nature, it only makes sense that the final part of the jam consists of testing them out around the city! Just bring a laptop and join in.

Schedule:
09:00 - Keynote: João Jacob
10:00 - Setup
10:30 - Coffee break
11:00 - Game jam
13:00 - Lunch break
14:00 - Game jam
17:00 - On-location test

13 Jun – Communication Hackathon
“Immersive Storytelling and Digital Citizenship”
Exact Venue: MIL

Immersive media experiences are defined by the feeling of “being there”. Therefore, these innovative experiences encompass a huge potential as means to trigger awareness about critical problems in the world. In this sense, immersive media can truly act as an empathy machine, portraying key social and cultural issues in a way that it becomes tools for changing people's mindsets, by leading them to familiarize with selected cultural characteristics, history, values, belief systems, and behaviors of members of other groups.
The main goal of this one day hackathon is to gather a group of people with interdisciplinary skills, that combined may generate fresh insights and a quick turn-around project about immersive storytelling in relation to digital citizenship. Sharing ideas, challenges and solutions, ranging from content creation to content consumption, the participants - guided by digital journalist Thomas Seymat (Euronews) and inspired by Alexandre Gomes’s insights on the main struggles and challenges rede ex aequo and Portuguese LGBTI youth face today - will explore the quickly changing landscape of this new storytelling paradigm by creating a short 360°, immersive story.

Shedule:
09:00 - Welcoming
09:30 - Introduction & kickoff
10:00 - Rapid prototyping session
12:00 - Lunch break
13:30 - Rapid prototyping
17:30 - Coffee break
18:00 - Keynote: Thomas Seymat
18:30 - Keynote: Alexandre Gomes
19:00 - Q&A

14 Jun – Media Hackathon
“Collaborative Agency: Strategies for Creative Literacy”
Exact Venue: UPTEC PINC/MIL

Collaboration through digital media takes place at multiple levels: from learning environments, to social communities, to specialised professional activities. But how much of this collaboration is actually driven by creative agency? How participatory is today's digital culture, and how much of today's digital media landscape are we in a position to reshape?
This session aims to explore, appropriate and deploy commonly accessible assets and creative tools, with the purpose of augmenting digital media's potential as an instrument for agency, empowerment and disruption through collaborative strategies.
Under guidance from guest supervisors, each participant is urged to contribute her own knowledge and skills, on theoretical and practical dimensions, in a collaborative development sprint. Under the global topic of digital citizenship, a few issues are suggested as starting points: what are the strongest creative limitations of today's most common media platforms, and how do we circumvent or counteract them? How can we use creative platforms to expand media literacy and nurture the public's interest in participating, in being informed, in understanding the importance of their rights as digital citizens? Can creative collaboration help drive us towards an actual public sphere?
By asking questions and addressing them on a practical standpoint, combining efforts from technological and communication areas, this teamwork should ultimately produce strategies for augmenting the participatory and creative potential of widespread media resources.

Shedule:
13:00 - Welcoming
13:30 - Development sprint cycle
16:30 - Coffee break, return to work
19:00 - Keynote: Pedro Cardoso
19:15 - Keynote: Ricardo Lobo
19:30 - Q&A
20:00 - Dinner

16 Jun – Public Round Table

MORE INFORMATION AT:
https://www.facebook.com/creativecolab.up/