About : Around the world, urban form and metropolitan experience are being transformed by the presence of networked computation. The urban fabric and discrete elements in it are newly empowered to capture, process, transmit, display and even act on information. At the same time, our daily tactics of doing and being — practices of citying that have remained invisible throughout recorded history, and have generally been lost to that history — are now being rendered explicit and gathered up by that same network.
Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield of Do projects have run “walkshops” devoted to exploring these transformation and their consequences in cities worldwide. Through the Transformations series, they offer Systems/Layers, a quick guide to running a walkshop for yourself, covering the particulars of choosing a terrain, knowing what to look for, recruiting participants, and promoting your event.
Nurri Kim, co-founder of Do projects and author of Tokyo Blues (2009), is an artist who is interested in exploring the narratives hidden in the ephemeral routines of everyday life. You can see her work at nurri.com.
YOUrban — Noticing the City [...] have kindly open sourced the concept, and even made a pamphlet on how to run [...] Comment posted on 10-5-2011 at 11:33
“Real artists ship” « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird [...] the launch of Do 1101, Systems/Layers: How to run a walkshop on networked urbanism as a Diffusion eBook pamphlet.… Comment posted on 3-26-2011 at 21:18
Giles Lane Jed, think of it as a bargain : we commission original new content and provide it to you for free.… Comment posted on 3-23-2011 at 09:47
Jed Harris I can watch the video on how to fold up the ebook, but what I really want to know is… Comment posted on 3-23-2011 at 00:44
Download Creative Connections, Wisbech Museum for Leverington School Facilitated by Idit Nathan A4 | US Letter PDF 775Kb What is a reflective practitioner? A CCI workshop for ReFocus Cambridge Early Years Educators led by Sally Brown Pat-a-cake Nursery A4 | US Letter PDF 670Kb Enabling Creativity, A workshop for educators led by Susanne Jasilek Kettle’s Yard A4 | US Letter PDF 3Mb Slow Time, A workshop for educators led by Sally Brown Kettle’s Yard A4 | US Letter PDF 670Kb Imagination and empathy, A workshop for early years educators at Homerton Nursery, Cambridge facilitated by Sally Brown A4 | US Letter PDF 1.3Mb Out and About, An Ignite workshop for educators at Fields Children’s Centre Cambridge A4 | US Letter PDF 670Kb Re-Imagine Training, A Day for Members of the Re-Cap Partnership Monday A4 | US Letter PDF 510Kb
About : These booklets offer participants at our professional development workshops a visible trace of their experiences. Bringing together some elements of narrative from the workshop facilitators, images from the session, and personal reflections and observations, these Traces offer us a playful way to continue a dialogue with the groups we work with.
We seek to continue to inspire and challenge the groups by offering back to them evidence of their learning experiences with us. Before discovering bookleteer, we had used an A4 format for our Traces but have been delighted to find this ingenious format as it offers a much more playful response. Like Proboscis, we know from our own work that taking part in the process of making can influence your thinking and attitudes. Inviting workshop participants to make their own Traces which they can keep as a record of their work with us, offers an ideal continuation of many of the ideas we have explored with them in the workshop itself.
Published February 2011
Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI) is a not for profit organisation working creatively with communities in a whole range of settings – we work in schools, hospitals, museums, galleries, forests, gardens and most recently with a waste treatment centre. We help make ideas grow by looking, making, exploring and discovering together. Our role was recently described by an enthusiastic scientist colleague as a ‘yeast’ enabling new possibilities for creativity to bubble up in a variety of settings.
CCI’s Library of Traces | bookleteer blog [...] To help CCI widen the audience for their work we’ve posted 7 eBooks on our diffusion.org.uk library and will… Comment posted on 2-21-2011 at 15:00
vinay This is really a great blog and I enjoyed the information given about E - Books Comment posted on 2-21-2011 at 14:55
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Underside to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Book a place at Underside (Friday 26th November) or the last event of this series, Sonic Geographies on December 10th.
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.
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on River to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Streetscapes to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Download A week in the life of London’s Cultural QuartersA4 | US Letter PDF 6.3Mb The Alternative, Whistle Stop Tour of the West End Cultural QuarterA4 | US Letter PDF 2.3Mb PhotographyA4 | US Letter PDF 9.4 Mb
About : Seven Days in Seven Dials: A week in the life of London’s Cultural Quarters
Last month Proboscis and our FJF Placements Shalene Barnett and Karine Dorset worked with with participants on Seven Days in Seven Dials. Three books made by participants in the project are now available to download. The project involved a temporary exhibition, films, podcasts and books put together by participants from London’s Culture Quarter Programme working with podcasters, photographers, artists and the team behind the Empty Shops Network touring project. For a week ten artists and thirty young people employed on placements in some of London’s leading cultural institutions used 18 Short’s Gardens as a studio. During the week the group explored the area gathering local stories, histories and connections and captured a snapshot of life in Seven Dials in film, sound, photography and writing.
Seven Days in Seven Dials was devised by Dan Thompson from artistsandmakers.com and Dan Williams from Culture Quarter Programme and involved Richard Vobes, Steve Bomford, Michael Radcliffe, Natasha Middleton and Proboscis. Over thirty young people were involved from placements in the following institutions: Create KX in Kings Cross; Exhibition Road Cultural Group and the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington; organisations from the West End Culture Quarter (including The Hospital Club, The Design Council, National Portrait Gallery, English National Opera, Royal Opera House and Somerset House) and Proboscis.
Seven Days in Seven Dials: A week in the life of London’s Cultural Quarters, a book documenting the project and its workshops
Seven Days in Seven Dials: Photography, work from the photography workshop
The Alternative, Whistle Stop Tour of the West End Cultural Quarter, a tour of the Culture Quarter written by participants in the programme
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] & Salah Mohamed Ahmed http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2108 Seven Days in Seven Dials by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2096 What Type Are You? A StoryCube… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 14:00
Seven days in Seven Dials, Books | Proboscis [...] Radcliffe, Proboscis and Natasha Middleton. The books, made using Bookleteer, are available to download from Diffusion.… Comment posted on 8-6-2010 at 08:03
About : This eBook was produced by participants Nataša Flac, Bruna Tomšić, Marta Maričić, Iva Santini, Ana Hrćan and Majd Al-Shihabi (DodoLab) in a Youth Workshop on public spaces run in Rijeka, Croatia, by Andrew Hunter and Lea Perinic, June 18-19, 2010.
Published July 2010
DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.
Download Kitchener Field NoteBook A4 | US Letter PDF 280Kb
AC Youth Workshop Book 1 : Kitchener Market A4 | US Letter PDF 8Mb
AC Youth Workshop Book 2 : Victoria Park A4 | US Letter PDF 9.5Mb
AC Youth Workshop Book 3 : Interview with the Mayor A4 | US Letter PDF 4.5Mb
About : A youth workshop developed by DodoLab in collaboration with The African Canadian Association of Waterloo Region and the Healthy Communities Research Network. The workshop took place on June 25, 26 & 28 2010, in Kitchener Ontario with participants from the African Canadian Youth Leadership Project.
A field notebook was designed for the workshop participants by DodoLab and three eBooks were created by the participants in the workshop.
Published June 2010
DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] REP) by DodoLab http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2066 Kitchener African Canadian Workshop by DodoLab http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2054 Meet Us At Kont by DodoLab http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2060 Rijeka,… Comment posted on 10-27-2010 at 11:22
About : This eBook was produced by participants Marta Vejmelka, Katarina Knafeij, Marija Tičić and Kyrie Vala-Webb (DodoLab) in a Youth Workshop on public spaces run in Rijeka, Croatia, by Andrew Hunter and Lea Perinic, June 18-19, 2010.
Published June 2010
DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.
About : This is a field research work book for participants in a Youth Workshop on public spaces run in Rijeka, Croatia, by Andrew Hunter and Lea Perinic, June 18-19, 2010. Part 1 involves groups of participants responding to questions. Part 2 asks the participants to engage the public in conversation. Part 3 will involve photographing the spaces to generate publications and online surveys. The three sites in Rijeka being investigated are the Korzo, Pier and Cont Square.
Published June 2010
DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.
Download
Part 1 – TransportA4 | US Letter PDF 2.1Mb
Part 2 – MovementA4 | US Letter PDF 2.6Mb
Part 3 – ListeningA4 | US Letter PDF 2.3Mb
Part 4 – CommunityA4 | US Letter PDF 2.9Mb
Part 5 – GettingInvolvedA4 | US Letter PDF 3.5Mb
Part 6 – PerceptionsA4 | US Letter PDF 3.1Mb
About : These 6 eBooks comprise a downloadable version of an artists’ bookwork created by Proboscis for Green Heart Partnership with Hertfordshire County Council. Proboscis were commissioned to explore peoples’ ideas about community in four very different geographic communities to get a broad range of opinions across the county: in Watford, Stevenage, rural North Hertfordshire and the commuter areas of Broxbourne. The project focused on finding out the reasons why people get on with each other and feel part of the community and, developing a better understanding of our communities in order to help Hertfordshire County Council and its partners to plan their work supporting communities over the next few years.
Published February 2010
Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.
Orlagh Woods is an artist whose work explores how diverse people and communities engage with each other and their environment – how they connect, communicate and are perceived both through digital and non-digital means. She has been working with Proboscis since 2004 and also curates a professional development programme for British Asian theatre company, Tamasha, in London.
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
I recently came across Kevin Hamilton‘s Complex Fields site, and read his description of a workshop on Critique, Collaboration, Prototyping and how he used StoryCubes as part of it. I asked if he’d write a short summary to post here, which he’s kindly done:
SUMMARY: Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In a couple of workshops now, we’ve used Storycubes to help start the group design process in a way that also establishes critical criteria for later evaluation and reflection. We’ve found that in group work, it’s all too easy to divide tasks early and not actually do the hard work of deciding together about goals, arguing about contexts and outcomes.
Our response to this was to devise a four-part system of critical criteria – CONTEXT, FUNCTION, PROCESS, and AUDIENCE. In the classroom, we ask groups to establish goals within each of these areas, so that they can later return to their stated goals and decide on how they achieved or departed from them. I recently married this structure to the Storycubes with some success.
The projects where I’ve used this technique involved the creation of interactive site-specific artworks. Each team received four blank cubes – one for CONTEXT, one for FUNCTION, one for PROCESS, and the fourth for AUDIENCE. I asked each team to fill each side of each cube with one possible item or goal. The result was six possible audiences, six possible functions, etcetera. The team could then mix-and-match to decide on one approach scenario to explore through physical prototyping or other methods.
One unexpected function of this process was to provide something of a “common enemy” in what for some seemed an overly artificial process. If a team’s members were new to each other or otherwise experiencing awkward interaction, they could at least unify around begrudgingly following the process of constructing Storycubes. (They eventually liked them, even if it seemed too elementary or formulaic at first.) The resulting cubes also added up to a sort of database archive for future iteration and design.
Starting in October we will be running regular informal evening workshops for people to literally pitch up and publish using bookleteer.com. Initially these will be held at our Clerkenwell Studio for up to 15 participants – all you need is a laptop and some content (text /photos/ drawings etc) you’d like to create and share as eBooks or StoryCubes (shareables). We will provide free user accounts to bookleteer and guide you through the steps of preparing and generating your shareables to share online, via email or as physical publications. Once created you can publish them on your own website or, if appropriate, we can publish them on Diffusion.
The first workshop will be held during the week beginning October 12th 2009 (date tbc) between 6.30-9pm.
To reserve a place please email us at diffusion (at) proboscis.org.uk
Participants will be asked to make small donation to cover materials and refreshments.
Giles Lane Hi Sho, the Generator/Bookleteer service is not yet public. I'll contact you separately about how we might help. Comment posted on 9-26-2009 at 09:09
Sho Halajian I am interested in the Diffusion generator and would like information on the cost and formatting guidelines. Where can I… Comment posted on 9-26-2009 at 00:58
About : An eBook made for participants in a workshop with the Sutton-in-the-Isle Youth Group, where we are making a short video (part of Proboscis’ Sutton Grapevine project). The group is collaborating to make a video about their recent trip abroad to meet other young people from around the world and exchange stories for their Your Stories project.
The eBook is a record of the first session’s activities, questions and a storyboard sketch. It captures the process of thinking and the questions we asked in the first session, as well providing a notebook for the group to write on, draw over or change as the sessions continue.
Published June 2009
Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.
Orlagh Woods is an artist whose work explores how diverse people and communities engage with each other and their environment – how they connect, communicate and are perceived both through digital and non-digital means. She has been working with Proboscis since 2004 and also curates a professional development programme for British Asian theatre company, Tamasha, in London.
*** a ‘book’ (long edge binding) eBook created using the new Diffusion Generator ***
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.
Download Manchester Beacon Workshop eBookA4 | US Letter PDF 1.8Mb Manchester Beacon Workshop StoryCubesA4 only PDF 1.9Mb b.TWEEN StoryCubesA4 only PDF 3.8Mb
About : The eBook is a document of the ideas, issues and challenges for an “an online service that maps connections between people, places, knowledge and creative activity in Manchester” – an new tool for public engagement and knowledge transfer for Manchester to be commissioned by the Manchester Beacon Project and Just b. Productions. It records the activities of workshop facilitated by Proboscis in Manchester in June 2008; 16 StoryCubes created during the workshop are also available, as well as 24 of the StoryCubes created by delegates and the public at b.TWEEN08 as part of the ‘landscape of ideas’ for the commission brief.
The workshop and StoryCubes installation was facilitated and documented by Proboscis for Just b. Productions by Giles Lane and Karen Martin.
eBooks for Evaluation and Reflection | bookleteer blog [...] Articulating Futures eBooks from diffusion.org.uk. Read about StoryCubes at bTween here. Find out more about eNotebooks [...] Comment posted on 9-7-2010 at 08:07
Over a week in late July/early August 2007 Proboscis hosted a writing workshop for four teenage girls. The girls were invited to participate as part of the Case Study Residencies programme and spent an intense five days in the Proboscis studio during which they conceived, created, wrote, designed and produced illustrated stories to be published via the Diffusion Generator.
The week began with an introduction to Proboscis and the project and the girls talked about their experiences of writing and illustrating stories – what they enjoyed doing, what they found hard, why they wanted to achieve etc. All four were keen artists and writers interested in Manga; they discussed the kinds of things they currently wrote and the problems they faced. All of them commented that they very rarely finished stories – ideas came and went – and that they would move onto another story before they had finished the previous one.
A walk around Clerkenwell and Smithfield Market, an area steeped in history and vibrant with everyday life and change, formed the basis for the girls’ stories. Each of the girls was given a digital camera and sound recorder to capture images and sounds of the area that interested them. Our route took us past Mount Pleasant, through Finsbury down to Clerkenwell Green and St John’s Gate, through to Charterhouse Square, round Smithfield and St Barts, up Saffron and Herbal Hills and back to Rosebery Avenue. Using a small library of books about London’s past and present, we researched histories of some of the building, who lived in these places and what took place there. In particular the girls became fascinated with a former Victorian school building erected on the site of Clerkenwell’s notorious House of Correction, an underground prison of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Using the walk, their research, and the photos and sounds recorded on the walk as the source material, we spent a few hours as a group planning a master narrative and skeleton storyboard. This set out a single plot and selection of characters which they could all use and base their stories around, with individual stories deviating from this central concept as they chose. Once the bones of the narrative were in place we spent a while coming up with the elements to be included in each scene using the StoryCubes to think about what should and shouldn’t be included.
Concentrating on the storyboarding was quite a difficult task and different to the girls’ usual methods of writing, however it provided a useful framework for working out the characters, their relationships and the major events of the main story. We pushed them to come up with the skeleton story but also let them know that they had the freedom to do what they liked with the stories after this – they could miss out chapters, start at a different point or change whatever they wished.
Focusing on the school and the prison as the place of the story, the characters’ images and their names became important to the girls and they did more intense work on the various chapters and the characters throughout the week. The illustrations for the eBooks were drawn first before being scanned. Some of them were then coloured using Painter and Photoshop. The girls worked on the drawings and stories simultaneously, making decisions as they went along about what images were needed and where. A lot of the Manga-style images were shared between a number of the girls with several of the same characters appearing in more than one of the girls stories. This interweaving of narrative and character giving this series of eBooks a particular coherence and sense of multiple authorship.
By the end of the five day workshop each of the girls had completed the stories and illustrations for at least one eBook; over the next couple of months these were refined and edited before being published on the Diffusion site in November 2007.
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 is developing new design services for StoryCubes:
StoryCube Packs for Conferences & Workshops: for organisers to distribute to delegates as an evaluation tool, or to stimulate discussion and debate. Proboscis will design and produce a pack containing up to 200 StoryCubes and 200 customised handouts for distribution to delegates. Please contact us for pricing.
Workshop Facilitation: Proboscis can facilitate StoryCube workshops at conference and events for brainstorming, discussion and evaluation sessions. Proboscis will design and provide custom handouts for delegates, all the necessary StoryCubes and will facilitate the workshops themselves. In addition we will document and evaluate the workshop as part of the service. Please contact us for pricing.
Personalised StoryCubes: Proboscis can design and manufacture individually designed StoryCubes – e.g. for marketing campaigns or communication projects – in small or large numbers of individual or multiple StoryCube designs. Please contact us for pricing.
Licensing: For customised designs and volume ordering (such as museum education programmes, workshops etc) the StoryCube design may be licensed to take advantage of local manufacturing economies. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
For some examples of how StoryCubes have been used in conferences, workshops, corporate, training and educational settings please visit our Flickr Group.
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 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.
[...] The walking tour is based on the guidelines for a ‘walkshop’ pioneered by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim of…
Comment posted on 3-5-2012 at 19:29
[...] have kindly open sourced the concept, and even made a pamphlet on how to run [...]
Comment posted on 10-5-2011 at 11:33
[...] Systems/Layersby Nurri Kim & Adam Greenfield, Diffusion Transformations, March 2011 (Download A4 | US Letter PDF 5.3Mb Read Online):…
Comment posted on 6-13-2011 at 15:56
[...] the launch of Do 1101, Systems/Layers: How to run a walkshop on networked urbanism as a Diffusion eBook pamphlet.…
Comment posted on 3-26-2011 at 21:18
Jed, think of it as a bargain : we commission original new content and provide it to you for free.…
Comment posted on 3-23-2011 at 09:47
I can watch the video on how to fold up the ebook, but what I really want to know is…
Comment posted on 3-23-2011 at 00:44