Mobile Art && Code

Co-Hosted by Eric Paulos, Frauke Behrendt, and Marc Davis.

3 hours, $40.
Sunday 8-Nov, 9am-12.
This workshop is limited to 8 participants, by application only. Workshop location TBA.
All levels — no special skills are required.

Have you made a mobile or locative media project of your own? Perhaps you’re a Masters student in interaction design, and you’d like to hear some fresh critical opinions about one of your projects. Perhaps you’re from a small company, and you’ve just released a mobile product or service, but you’d like to get some thoughts on how it could be better. Or perhaps you’ve been laboring in isolation on your weird new artwork, and you’d just like to share it with an interested crowd of ingenious brainstormers. Either way, if you’d like to show your project to world-class experts in mobile and locative media, this session is for you.

Get some fresh perspective. By popular demand, we’ve created this special workshop format to allow you to receive friendly critique and helpful suggestions from a panel of international experts. Here’s how it works:

Each 3-hour workshop session will be divided into eight 20-minute critique periods, plus a 20-minute break. During each of the 8 critique periods, a lucky participant will make a 10-minute presentation from their laptop, describing or demonstrating their project. Then, a four-person Panel of experts will do their best to help you: offering 10 minutes of design suggestions, historical references, examples of related work, or other forms of helpful critique. The 8 participants are expected to attend the entire 3-hour workshop, and are invited to make comments on each others’ work after the Expert Panel has finished doing so. Each participant will receive a Quicktime video of their critique session, on-the-spot, for their personal reference.

Who is this Workshop for?
This workshop is for you if you’ve made a project involving mobile phones or locative media — and you’d like to receive feedback and helpful suggestions for your project from a creative panel of international experts. We encourage participants from any educational level (e.g., from high school students to PhD students) or social sector (.edu, .com, .org, .gov), but we expect this workshop will be especially helpful for Masters students in art, interaction design or computer science programs who are seeking additional critique for their ideas. (Note: if you’re from the commercial sector, you should be comfortable sharing your project without an NDA.)

What You Should Bring:
You’ll have 10 minutes to make your presentation, followed by 10 minutes of discussion from the panel. We’ll provide a projector, stereo sound system, and a spare computer; we recommend you bring a laptop with a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, and a backup of your presentation on a USB thumb drive. Please practice your presentation beforehand to make sure you’re within the 10 minute limit — especially if you intend to give a live demonstration — as your presentation will be strictly timed. (Note: If you haven’t tried it before, we also recommend you practice connecting your laptop to an external display.)