About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Skyline to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Includes a photo essay by Skyline’s event special guest, Simon Pope.
Book a place at Skyline (Friday 12th November) or one of the other forthcoming events, Underside & Sonic Geographies.
Download
Completed Field Trip eNotebook A4 only PDF 1.12Mb
Blank eNotebook A4 | US Letter PDF 1.12Mb
About : A notebook compiled during a study visit to Germany to learn about Passivhaus building design principles. Created with a combination of note taking, Polaroid prints, QR codes and links to web content.
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] from the City http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2188 Passivhaus Field Trip eNotebook by Rob Annable http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2182 Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2175 Tangled Threads… Comment posted on 10-27-2010 at 11:20
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] from the City http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2188 Passivhaus Field Trip eNotebook by Rob Annable http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2182 Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2175 Tangled Threads… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 13:56
Introducing the eBook Observer | bookleteer blog [...] different people and organisations. As part of the research, I created an eBook of my own – the eBook… Comment posted on 8-26-2010 at 12:37
About : Articulating Futures is a 4 day workshop that was designed and facilitated by Niharika Hariharan, commissioned and creatively supported by Proboscis (London) to mobilize young students to creatively think and articulate issues that are important to them and their future as young Indians. The first series of these workshops were held at Chinmaya Mission Vidyalaya, New Delhi between the 17th-20th November, 2009. These eNotebooks were created to help the students organise and share their ideas across the workshop, combining English & Hindi.
Working in collaboration with tutors, filmmakers and artists, Articulating Futures investigated subjects ranging from the change of identity of young Indians, their views on language, traditional cultures and the importance of a global/local societies. Through discussion, debate and creative exploration, this workshop resulted in a range of exciting and insightful ideas and scenarios developed by 16 year old Indian students that showcase their vision of themselves as unique in a fast developing homogenous culture in modern India.
You can read about the project in detail at http://articulatingfutures.wordpress.com/
Published December 2009
Niharika Hariharan is a narrative designer and a filmmaker, keen on working and exploring the intersection of design with related and non-related fields such as sociology, sciences, education and traditional knowledge systems. She has worked on numerous multi-disciplinary projects in the realm of social and community design, developing innovative research methodologies, scenario building and story telling techniques. Niharika was awarded the ‘TATA scholar’ in 2007 and her work has been exhibited at many national and international festivals and events. www.niharikahariharan.com
Case Study – Niharika Hariharan | bookleteer blog [...] Once the workshops were completed, Niharika scanned all of the eBooks as part of an archive of the event.… Comment posted on 9-22-2010 at 20:41
International languages & bookleteer [...] week we published Niharika Hariharan’s Hindi/English eBooks for the Articulating Futures project on Diffusion – they are a great… Comment posted on 12-7-2009 at 20:31
uberVU - social comments Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by proboscisstudio: new on #diffusion: Articulating… Comment posted on 12-4-2009 at 00:18
About : A few weeks ago I was privileged to take part in a project which brought Porer and Pinbin, two Negkini speaking people from Reite (a village on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea) to the British Museum’s Ethnography Dept. They were with Dr James Leach (Head of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen) who has done extensive field work in their village over the past 15 years, and who hosted their visit to the UK this summer. Their visit to the BM was to take part in the latest stage of the Melanesia Project, a project bringing indigenous people from Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to look at and discuss objects in the collection to increase understanding of their social, cultural and spiritual significance, as well as details of what they are made of, how they are made and by whom.
The Melanesia Project explores the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artefact forms, socially-significant narratives, and the indigenous communities from which historic collections of Melanesian art derive. Focusing on the important but largely unstudied Melanesian collections in the British Museum, this project aims to bring new perspectives to both the study of indigenous art, and the understanding of ownership, heritage, and relations between museums and communities.
James and I had discussed meeting up during the project sometime before and then I had suggested using Diffusion Notebooks to create documentation of the process that could be easily shared with Porer and Pinbin’s own community (who enjoy a subsistence lifestyle in the Papua New Guinean rainforest without electricity or many of the communication technologies we take for granted). Our colleagues at the BM, Lissant Bolton (Head of Oceania Section) and Liz Bonshek (Research Associate) agreed, and I was invited to come in and observe and assist with the process.
It was a remarkable opportunity to see how people from a very different culture and civilisation respond to objects collected up to 170 years ago from their locality – how their relation to the objects was one rooted in the materials and the craft with which they were made. It was impressive to see the depth of tactile knowledge Porer and Pinbin have in their hands, how the act of touching was fundamental to their process of recognition of the plants and other materials used in making the objects as well as how they would have been made, as though the touching of the objects conducted a current to complete a circuit of memory.
Several of the notebooks of their observations of the objects made during the week are here to download, print out and make up. The notebooks, written in both English and Tok Pisin (the lingua franca of PNG) by James, have images of the objects as well as the people in the discussions, taken with digital cameras and printed out using a Polaroid PoGo printer (the sticky-backed prints placed directly into the notebooks). The notebooks were then taken apart and scanned in as flat A4 sheets to become Shareable PDf files. This enabled us to transform unique hand-written notebooks into digital publications that can be printed out, made up and shared as often as necessary. It was also an opportunity to give physical records to Porer and Pinbin that they could return to their village with and share their experiences and what they interacted with with their own community – making tangible some of the experiences that would be almost unimaginable and very difficult to communicate to people whose lives are lived within an entirely different relationship to the environment around them.
British Museum & Bookleteer | bookleteer blog [...] was used in the Melanesia Project to record, Porer and Pinbin, indigenous people from Papua New Guinea discussing objects… Comment posted on 7-1-2011 at 11:05
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Ethnographic Notebooks, British Museum Melanesia Project http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1301 [...] Comment posted on 11-2-2009 at 15:54
Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe As my name apire above. I am a consultant witch export all African Cultural Instruments. Regards. Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe. Comment posted on 10-14-2009 at 18:44
Card Making Sounds like a wonderful experience! How long has the project been running? Comment posted on 10-1-2009 at 13:51
A few weeks ago I came across Kevin Macleod‘s website, incompetech, where he has created a series of free graph and notepaper generators for making all sorts of useful and intriguing designs. We’ve combined a small selection of his page designs into Diffusion eBooks as examples of how we can further extend the Shareable Notebook range, and offer custom and personalised eNotebooks for different purposes.
About : Proboscis are running a creative workshop on September 18th at ZAIM, Yokohama as part of the Dislocate08 festival. The workshop is the initial stage of our research for Sensory Threads, engaging artists, urbanists, designers, technologists, musicians and dancers in an active investigation into the sensorial patterns and rhythms to be found in our environment. The area around ZAIM in Yokohama will become our research field as we seek out and evidence the recurring, overlapping and intersecting sounds and movements that take place as we act in, and react to, our environment.
Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them. We aim to premiere the work in 2009.
Sensory Threads is being created by Proboscis in collaboration with Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab, The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary (University of London), the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and the School of Management at University of Southampton.
Published September 2008.
Proboscis is an artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The Sensory Threads workshop is being led by Giles Lane and Karen Martin with Frederik Lesage.
I’ve been working recently with Bradford Libraries (West Yorkshire, England) on a few small community engagement projects. They have received funding under the Community Libraries Programme to extend and refurbish the library at Manningham. In June 2008 I was asked to run a public event in the library to engage people with the process and open up a period of consultation.
The intention was to have a two hour early evening slot, with the architect and plans available, plus members of staff of course, but no set programme. So the first condition was to design a consultation event where people are constantly coming and going, but you want to attract their attention, inform them, provoke thinking and capture their views.
The idea of a treasure hunt as a fun way to generate interest quickly became the key component of the event. Working with library staff I developed a set of clues which would require users to go to specific locations in and around the building. The planned extension will be built over part of an existing car park and a community garden will be designed alongside, so we had the chance with the treasure hunt to help people visualise it. I was pretty sure that the Diffusion eBooks would be the ideal mechanism for linking clues to further suggestions and comments.
Here’s how it worked. Visitors were given an eBook, with the first clue printed on the first page. Each clue required the hunter to go to a specific location, inside or outside the library building, where they would find the next clue printed on a set of peel-off labels. They took one of these labels and stuck it onto a space on a new page in the eBook.
We provided space on each page for hunters to write an answer to each clue. Additionally there was a supplementary consultative question, designed to solicit ideas and suggestions for the new building.
So for example, the second clue asked “Where will the disabled parking spaces be?” This required checking the site plans, with the architect on hand to help work out the answer. The hunter then had to pop outside to the specific location, where friendly staff held a folder of labels for clue 3. If necessary, users were shown where the label should be placed in their eBook. The supplementary question asked: “What else is needed to make sure that disabled people have good access to the new library?”
At the location of the answer to the final clue, users found a note saying “Well done! You’ve finished the treasure hunt – please go back to the start and collect your prize.”
We anticipated that some users would rather get on with the hunt, and then perhaps settle down afterwards to write comments in answer to the questions. In practice, we found that most took this course and staff were on hand to encourage and support comment. Nonetheless, it was obvious that a number of hunters lacked confidence writing in the English language and were reluctant to offer any comments. Aware of this, staff engaged most of them in conversation and anyway it didn’t matter – they were in the library, taking part, willingly engaged and ready to contribute in other ways.
What worked well The treasure hunt clues and the eBooks were developed remotely, with staff locally printing out the eBooks and, never having encountered them before, making them up a day or two in advance. As always, one or two showed greater dexterity than others, but it was done. I travelled to Bradford on the day of the event knowing that the documentation was ready.
In terms of helping to guide people through the treasure hunt process, the eBooks worked flawlessly. No-one got lost or did the clues in the wrong order. And no-one got into any difficulty with the sticking of labels: every one was placed in the right place on the right page.
We printed some eBooks on A3, giving a page format of around 21 x 15cm. These proved more popular and suited being carried around for 15-30 minutes, allowing plenty of space for notes.
What I’d do differently We had the smaller eBooks printed on yellow paper, but ideally I’d like to introduce some colour in other ways and the obvious place to do this is with the sticky labels.
A key point It’s important not to see this as an engagement technique in a vacuum. If we did, we wouldn’t get results. We ran this exercise while the library was open, with staff having conversations with users, an SMS option for comments, and other opportunities for people to get involved in the decision-making process. The eBooks fit perfectly in the treasure hunt and the treasure hunt is just one component in an ongoing mix of engagement activities and processes.
Kevin Harris: eBook Treasure Hunt | bookleteer blog [...] this post on diffusion.org.uk Kevin writes that the eBook Treasure Hunt worked well and no-one had difficulty [...] Comment posted on 8-18-2010 at 08:03
Business trainer bruce This is a brilliant idea. Simple but very effective. Although time can always be an issue… Comment posted on 3-11-2010 at 08:44
Abstract : Second in a series of eBooks created by Bev Carter as part of Proboscis’ Generator Case Study Residencies. This eBook has been designed for students at the village school in Umologho to fill in, responding to questions asked about them and their lives by British schoolchildren who have previously encountered the paintings and stories of the ‘A Little Something About Me’ project. This eNotebook will, in turn, enable the children of Umologho to ask questions of British schoolchildren in a future eBook for the project, In this way we hope to establish an evolving dialogue across continents and cultures.
Published November 2007
Bev Carterhas been developing an arts and communication project with students in Umologho village, Nigeria since December 2006. “I’m excited that there are many ways that the eBook can be used explore how people feel about and interpret the environment around them, using pictures and words. I like the idea that thoughts, on the run, can be captured.” Bev is finding ways to share this information between young people in Nigeria and England. Contact bevalittlesomething@hotmail.co.uk
In addition to using the Diffusion eBook format to publish essays and artists books, Proboscis has also been using it to create notebooks for specific activities and projects. The eBook format allows us to design and distribute a notebook that participants in a project or workshop can fill in by hand (writing, drawing or adding stickers as they wish) which can then be scanned and turned back into a PDF file for sharing – either within the group or more widely. This ‘virtuous circle’ moving from digital to material to digital is at the core of the ‘Shareables’ concept. We have designed the Shareables so that they can be used without always needing a computer, but still providing a path for capturing and sharing digitally.
Proboscis has successfully used ‘eNotebooks‘ in our schools projects as learning diaries (e.g. Sound Scavenging, Everyday Archaeology and Experiencing Democracy) and, in our community projects as a simple means of gathering local knowledge and information (e.g. Robotic Feral Public Authoring, St. Marks and Conversations and Connections).
Learning Diaries
The eNotebooks have been very effective for the schoolchildren participating in our projects, giving them a single place to record and reflect on what they have learned from the different activities and how they are integrated into everyday learning. Over the three years we have collaborated with the Jenny Hammond Primary school on Social Tapestries projects, we have worked ever more closely with the teachers to use the learning diaries to make the bridge between the activities of the workshop and what the children are learning as part of everyday school. The diaries themselves are also an invaluable tool for the teachers and us to gauge each child’s engagement with the project and its concepts – some children choose to do the minimum whilst others spend considerable time and effort embellishing their drawings and writings. This serves an additional function in helping to assess the impact on learning that the workshop has had – the diaries show how the children are absorbing new ideas, vocabulary and improving their spelling as the project progresses.
Field Notebooks
We have also used the eNotebooks in community-based projects and workshops to record knowledge about places and communities. The eNotebooks offer a familiar ‘interface’ and technology (paper and pens) that is very inclusive and engaging – allowing people to write, draw or stick photos into them. In communities and situations where access to computers and broadband internet was not possible the eNotebooks allowed us to design a simple and effective means of asking open (but targeted) questions and enabling people to complete them there and then or post them back to us at their leisure. We see many other possible uses of this kind of eNotebook for researchers in the field doing ethnographic or anthropological studies.
We have also speculated on using the Diffusion Generator in brainstorming activities, where the eBooks are used to create iterations or snapshots of the process in situ. This would both provide an immediate outcome to the activity, but also document the creative processes along the way.
Evaluation Tool
Proboscis has begun to experiment with creating structured notebooks for people to give feedback and evaluation on an event (such as a conference or workshop) or project. The StoryCubes have also been used in this way – at the Enter Festival in Cambridge (April 2007) conference delgates helped create a landscape of ideas, images and themes relating to the event. Futurelab also used the StoryCubes to engage delegates at their Why Don’t You… conference (October 2007) in mapping and exploring ideas relating to new education practices and uses of innovative technologies in schools and learning. Proboscis also uses the StoryCubes as a notetaking tool (instead of taking minutes) for its own advisory group meetings, enabling us to combine the questions and observations that the group members note down in an ever-growing and evolving landscape.
Other Ideas
One of our key aims for Diffusion is to explore its uses in places (such as developing countries) with poor access to publishing technologies (both traditional print and electronic). A Diffusion eBook can, of course, be made with nothing more than some blank sheets of paper which can then be written and drawn on – or even have sections of typwritten text pasted onto them. Once made, these unique handmade books can be scanned and turned into Shareable eBooks (PDF files), endlessly reproducible and distributable through email and web downloads.
Examples: we plan to make some illustrative examples available soon
Proboscis has created an online application which enables people to create their own DIFFUSION eBooks without needing graphic design skills or access to professional DTP software. The service is currently in ‘beta’ testing by invitation only. However, if you would like to participate please write to us describing what you would like to use it for.
OUR VISION
DIFFUSION offers exciting possibilties for sharing of knowledge and information, especially in developing countries where lack of physical infrastructure means shipping bulky objects (like books) is difficult and expensive, but where internet communications are beginning to proliferate and low cost paper publications are still easier for most people to access and read than computer screens. For instance, DIFFUSION could be used to provide low-cost, easily updateable manuals for intermediate technologies; for promoting health awareness; for creating teching and learning resources or as a publishing platform for citizen journalism. DIFFUSION provides an alternative to traditional print and online publishing – bridging analogue and digital media. The eBooks can be shared electronically (as PDF files), by photocopy or as hand-made paper books – samizdat for the digital age.
WHAT COULD I USE THE GENERATOR FOR?
The DIFFUSION format is extremely flexible and can be used in many ways, such as for:
publishing essays, short stories or poems
creating simple, easy to distribute manuals and instructions
distributing lecture notes to students
creating lesson plans and learning diaries for students
creating a portable family picture album
creating a visual record of a journey
makinga personal diary or journal
creating a mini-portfolio for artists
notebooks & diaries for fieldwork (e.g. for anthropology or ethnography)
local newsletters or pamphlets
an iterative tool for brainstorming & innovation workshops
Please note that at present the Generator is only available for testing by invitation
About : a participant eNotebook for conference delegates to record and share their experiences at Enter Conference, Cambridge, April 2007 made by Proboscis as part of the Public Authoring Zone.
Published April 2007
Proboscis is an artist-led creative studio based in London, UK.
About: a sample learning eNotebook for a UK Online Centre project.
Published April 2007
Kevin Harris is a community development consultant and writer (Local Level). He blogs on neighbourhoods, neighbourliness, social capital and life at local level.
Abstract : an eNotebook learning diary created for Year 4 students at Jenny Hammond Primary school during the Everyday Archaeology project, June 2006, as part of Social Tapestries.
Published June 2006
Loren Chasse is a sound artist and educator based in San Francisco, California.
Giles Lane is founder and Co-Director of Proboscis.
Orlagh Woods works for Proboscis as part of the core team with particular responsibility for creative development and evaluation.
About : an eNotebook for residents of the Havelock Estate to record and share information, stories or memories etc about the local environment. Created by Proboscis as part of our Social Tapestries project, Conversations and Connections (2005-06), funded by the Ministry of Justice.
Published November 2005
Proboscis is an artist-led studio. The creative team on this project included Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Kevin Harris, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods.
About : an eNotebook created by Proboscis for a community workshop on pollution sensing in London Fields, held at Space Media in November 2005. The workshop was part of the Social Tapestries project, Robotic Feral Public Authoring.
Published November 2005
Proboscis is an artist-led studio. The creative team on this project included Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods.
Diffusion is brought to you by Proboscis, a non-profit organization. Support our work with a secure donation by credit card or Paypal:
You may prefer to support us by purchasing a pack of StoryCubes to make your own story landscapes with – for storytelling projects, workshops, education or evaluation activities.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Giles Lane, bookleteer. bookleteer said: #cityasmaterial Skyline eNotebook with photo essay by…
Comment posted on 11-8-2010 at 22:31