Sustain/Create

Last night I attended the first Sustain/Create event at AUT. Sustain/Create is a series of public discussions co-presented by the School of Art + Design and the ST PAUL St Gallery which aim to investigate the role of design in sustainability.

The event was was chaired by Rachel Brown of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) (@sustbusiness) and there was a stellar line up of speakers including Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy, Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan, Chris Mulcare and Sir Tamati Reedy.

Each speaker on had only 7 minutes to deliver their message and this made for a really punchy format. They all put forward seriously meaty ideas – it’s impossible for me to do any of the speakers justice but here is a summary of some of the bits that I managed to grab below (apologies if I have misrepresented anything -  apparently the gallery recorded all of it so will add a link when it becomes available).

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Dissolving Boundaries – OZCHI 2009 Paper

The discipline of design is in a constant state of change. As noted in the previous post one of the most significant trends currently impacting on design practice is the opening up of the design process. Design is moving out from the studio and into the wild, taking place where people live [1].  Users are being re-cast as co-designers, co-creators and co-developers. Trends such as ‘open design’, ‘crowdsourcing’, designing for design in use, post-release iterations and ‘emergent design’ provide new ways for people to participate in the design process,  and challenge some of our traditional models of design.

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A working definition of social media and why we couldn’t answer the question

At the first Social Media Club Sydney (#SMCSyd) Leslie Nassar (aka the fake Stephen Conroy) challenged the audience to provide a definition of social media. No one was able to satisfy his request and our collective inability to articulate effectively what social media is, was the subject of some humor and derision. Given the complexity of the subject and its fluidity that was perhaps a little unfair. At the second #SMCSyd a few people put forward their various definitions, but (if I recall correctly) they were generally orientated towards trying to differentiate which technologies did or didn’t classify.

“social software is about a movement, not simply a category of technologies… it’s certainly not complete and as a category, it’s difficult to make sense of its boundaries.” (boyd 2007b)

Like the quote by boyd above suggests, I prefer a looser definition. I see social technologies…social media…social software, whatever you want to call it, to be about both tools and practices. This makes it inherent messy and difficult to capture and describe.

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