#sigh.  I should be used to explaining what a Creative Digital Producer does by now, but it bugs me.  Bugs me because the world is changing at such a fast pace and many people don’t understand why.

My reply…  “I produce websites, games, apps, 2^nd screen experiences, interactive videos, etc.”

“Oh..”  she says.   I’ve lost her.

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

To explain digital, we need to figure out WHY people are so turned on by it.

We live in an era of participatory culture.  This means anyone magically transforms from being just sitting on a couch (a consumer of media) to putting a comment on an instagram post (a contributor) and even editing their vacation photos (a producer).

Television used to be a place of magic.  People marveled at how images were sucked into cameras and then displayed on your TV.  My dad tells me the first time he was invited to watch a television show, airing from Buffalo in the 1940s, at a neighbour’s house.  Instead of listening by the radio, there were images.  People.  On a screen.  Moving.  Just wow.

Those days are long gone.

YET, we just don’t want to watch anymore.  We EXPECT to participate.

We own the media.  We want to have our say, state our opinion.  We want to cry that Firefly was cancelled.  Share that facebook post that made us laugh.  We want to be the next Beyonce and sing our hearts out on Musical.ly.

WHY?  What has changed?

It’s this amazing tool that connects people through wires on computers.  Built on a DIGITAL infrastructure.

Also, media production tools, like editing software, have become easy to use and cheaper to buy and available in the palm of your hand.  Also built on a DIGITAL infrastructure.

SO… Internet + Media Production Tools = a Participatory Culture.

INTERACTIVITY

Until the digital age,

Producers = those that create content and cultural objects

Consumers = the audience or purchasers of those objects.

There was a big divide between the two.  You need to get hired by a company who had equipment to produce, or just be rich.  There was a HIGH PRICE to pay to be a producer.

And now… the lines between producer and consumers are blurry.

Consumers have all they need to produce on their phones.  Shoot video and share.  Post a comment.  Practice your ukulele on Instagram Live (my 10 year old does this).

Therefore, for you to participate, you need to interact with production and other people.

INTERACT.  Think of it this way…. If you are able to change image or texts, you are a producer.  You are interacting with the media.

And.. I have a new name for you.

You are a “user”, instead of a “viewer” (not the drug type of user…)

Yep, you are creating, playing, experimenting and exploring. The days of couch potato-ing are behind us (except for some shows..  I’m looking at you Expanse..  i’m a total couch potato for you).

DIGITAL vs ANALOGUE

Digital is things that you can change.  HOW is this magically done?  Yes, yes the internet makes things possible.. but really…  HOW?

Digital is information inputted as numbers.  1s and 0s.

All this info is data.  It is processed, stored and outputted to online sources and digital disks.

And you can change and move these 1s and 0s.  They can be re-arranged.  Made into algorithms.  These can be edited and transformed into new things.

Analogue on the other hand, is produced into an actual object.

Print, Photographs, films, newspapers.  Analogue is based on Physics and Chemistry.

Analogue lends itself to be mass produced.  The same object produced again and again and sold as a commodity.

A print photograph is Analogue.  But a digital photograph can be edited.  This is digital.

WHAT IS DIGITAL MEDIA?

Media that can be produced where users can participate and interact with it.

That is what I do, I want to say to the smartly dressed woman.

But, she is looking at her phone texting someone.

Oh… the irony.

Photo by michaelsnead

I’m in the middle of the longest game of hide and seek. I’m seeking potential employee candidates and they are hiding. Its really a long and tedious process. I’m forever seeking them.

Come out, Come out, wherever you are.

Buggers.  Ok.. I’m not an HR person.  I’m a producer.  My role is to get things done.  Use all necessary reasonable actions to ensure this happens.  And if it means I’m an HR person for a bit, so be it.

Its just… not really fun.  And I spend my time posting, sorting, talking, listening, critiquing and still no where.  Where is the HR pill!  Need one stat!

So here has been my plan.

1. Job posting everywhere I can
2. Reach out to acquaintances, ask to share the word and for recommendations.
3. Sort through incoming resumes.  (really… you are in retail and want to be an Art Director?!?!)
4. Repeat.

Its worth it when you get that right person, who is a great fit.  But in the mean time….

WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?

Photo by Rachel (aka mia3mom)

I have a war on my hands. It’s been somewhat drawn out and rather bloody. Well, how bloody can a fight be when you are punching your fists in the air at an invisible enemy.

Hey you… yeah you… get back here. Right here. Look at me!

So, who is this unknown foe?  This bandit who has more energy than this fairy child.  Who demands your attention, but then, when you reach for it, it escapes as fast as a Rob Ford apology.

It’s a simple thing really.  Except when needed.

You know what I’m talking about.  I see you suffering in this war of selective attention.  You are working on something, then you remember that fight with a friend you had yesterday… She was not being kind.  BEEP… oh, I have that conference call in 5 minutes.  God, I need a coffee.  I mean… she should not have said those things.  Oh.. thats a cute cat on facebook.  Awwwww.

That is why I was drawn to this book, simply called Focus by Daniel Goleman.  I saw the author on The Colbert Report, then in my facebook feed… and while browsing in Chapters…  while I was looking for a book on cute cats.  Anyway…  I NEED to focus better.  I mean, how many cat books does one need?

Focus involves “a narrow, fixed pipeline…  Instead of splitting it, we actually switch rapidly.”  Makes sense.  We can’t multi-task.  We switch-task.

Daniel also talks about a top brain and bottom brain.

TOP:

You reflect.  You think about it.  You ponder. “…taking things one at a time and playing more thoughtful analysis”

BOTTOM:

Where, pretty much, everything happens.  Its the auto system.  Where habits live and things are done with little effort.

What does this mean?  If the top is busying pondering, the bottom kicks in.

Flubs, Wegner found, escalate to the degree we are distracted, stressed or otherwise mentally burdened.  In those circumstances a cognitive control system that ordinarily monitors errors we might make (like don’t mention that topic) can inadvertently act as a mental prime, increasing the likelihood of that very mistake (like mentioning that topic).

WHY?  Because overloading attention shrinks mental control.

Now, this may be obvious…  but what really stood out to focused me, is the role that emotions play into this.

If I’m pissed about something, its all I can think about.  I let things role over and over in my head.  It makes my coffee bad, decisions negative and cats not so cute.  Yes, I become emotionally highjacked.

The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation.  Highjacks are the superglue of attention.

Yes, emotions take our focus away….  but HOW OFTEN DOES IT?  AND FOR HOW LONG?

If you are running on emotional focus for most of your day, where is your focus?  Is it on your work, or the turmoil in your head?  How many days have you (and certainly I) have lost due to misplaced emotional focus.  Imagine how much more can be done, accomplished even, with focus.

So just calm my emotions… its that easy?  Before you call BS.  Think of this.

Emotional resilience come down to how quickly we recover from upsets.

Feelings, emotions are normal.  Feel them.  Acknowledge them.  Then BOUNCE BACK.  How?  Um…. read Daniel’s book.  I recommend it.

Source: Early Childhood Education Degrees

Photo by Paul Townsend

“I’m confused”, my Dad would say.  “What do you do for a living?”

I try to explain that I produce projects on the web, on mobile, through social, supporting TV.

Then I catch him explaining to someone, “She works with computers.  No.. not a programmer. No, not in graphic design. Frankly, I don’t know what she does.  She sits in front of her computer all day.”

[Sigh.]  When did it become complicated?  Old media was simple.  You worked on TV, Radio, Film.  You would be on staff at a newspaper, magazine.  You would produce a book.  These were simple, absolute THINGS.  Actual products. They were created and they were absolute.

Old Media is a THING.  A THING that DID NOT CHANGE.

Once it was produced, it was consumed.  You would go to the store and buy it.  Sit down and watch or listen to it.  The producers created  the opportunity for you to be entertained by it.  It was a wonderful thing.  You approached your experience, generally knowing what to expect.

But something changed.

The 1s and 0s of Reboot TV series

It is simpler than you think.  Little ones and zeros were joined to create a virtual space inside a computer.  These ones and zeros matured and evolved to change anything on a screen instantly. Don’t like the size of the picture? Change it.  Then, these ones and zeros roamed through wires from one computer to the next.  From a server in Chicago, to one in Toronto.  These tubes became the internet and the internet grew into the world wide web.

Still with me?  You continue to consume old media.  Analogue media.  Its great.  But this internet stuff is growing beside it.

So.. what changed?

The ability to change media.  You can talk on forums.  Each move you make in a video game has a direct impact in front of you.  The birth of social media where you can share and contribute to anyone’s media.  There is a fancy name for this.  PARTICIPATORY MEDIA.

In old media, you would passively consume.  In new media, you can Participate and CHANGE the media in front you.  It was no longer a thing.  A product.  But a growing changing media.  And…  you don’t know exactly what to expect.

HOW ABSOLUTELY MIND BOGGLING!!

So Dad… I make participatory media in this new age of the internet.  And yes, I do it with computers.

]]> http://www.laurindashaver.com/2013/09/dad-this-is-what-i-do-for-a-living/feed/ 1 http://www.laurindashaver.com/2013/07/are-you-wired-to-do-interactive-work/ http://www.laurindashaver.com/2013/07/are-you-wired-to-do-interactive-work/#comments Mon, 08 Jul 2013 03:11:20 +0000 http://www.laurindashaver.com/?p=155 I taught piano for 10 years.  Loved it.  The kids would come tramping through my apartment on Saturdays and all kinds of wonderful (and not so wonderful notes) would be created in my space.

There was all kinds of kids.  Kids that were obsessive about learning, kids who just played for fun… and kids who laughed at my jokes (I really liked those…)

And there was a few occasions where I would get a new student who was.. how shall I put this…   not piano learning inclined.  The kid knew it, I knew it… but the tricky part was telling the parent it.

The conversation would go something like this…

Me:  “I need to talk to you about George.  He is a very talented, sweet, funny kid, but after X number of lessons, I can say that he is not wired for piano”.

Parent: “What do you mean?”

Me: “Piano takes a certain kind of natural skill set.  You need to look at the page.  Decode it.  Transfer that knowledge to your fingers and execute.  Not every kid is wired that way.  They are not naturally inclined to let that kind of information transfer through them.  But rest assured, they are wired for other great talents..”

Parent: “So.. you are saying, that my kid sucks at piano.”

Me: “No.  I’m saying, his time would be better spend learning something that is is naturally wired to do.  Like the guitar, the violin, or the circus.”

Never an easy conversation, but definitely a necessary one.

INTERACTIVE

How does apply to the interactive space?  I was having a lovely dinner with my friend Sasha Boersma who is the coordinator at Centennial College for the IDM post graduate program which we also both teach in.  We got talking about, what it takes to succeed in the digital space.

They need to be wired a certain way… just like piano.  But, what is that exactly.

They need to be wired to hack.

Now.. hacking has a bad rep.  It brings up images of Guy Fawkes mask and illegal activity.  The hacking I’m talking about is the kind where you look at a problem and/or a situation and you thrive on the challenge to fix, change, solve, improve in new and different ways.

What are you talking about?  Let me give you an example.

I needed to get a flash game up on a webpage in order to distribute it to stakeholders in the same day.  Easy?  Not if you don’t own a website.  The broadcaster’s dev team was too busy to do it, internally we didn’t have access to the FTP site.  How are we going to post this?  There were no CLIENT resources available.  So.. what did I do?  Just uploaded it to my  personal site.  Yes… it says “laurindashaver.com/blahblahblah” when I distribute it, but it was distributed.

Now was this solution revolutionary?   Hell no.  But it was the nth hack I did that day to keep the project moving.

In digital, you need to have a hacking mentality to get things done.

There are no textbook answers.  My students who expect a step by step guide on how to solve problems will be disappointed.  There is only your creative imagination and google.com (never under estimate what you can google).  And the drive to figure things out.

There are many ways you approach a hack.

1.  What is the most obvious solution?
2. Can’t do the most obvious solution?  Ok..  Google an answer.
3. 3 ideas come to my mind when looking stuff up.
4. Explore those ideas with people on your team.
5. Brainstorm more.
6. Have a conversation with your muse/god/pet.
7. Don’t give up.
8. Ask a friend
9. Don’t give up.
10. This is fun.
11. And… it can be solved.

You need to have that difficult question with yourself.  Are you wired for Interactive?  Are you actively hacking?

What have you hacked for me lately?

INplay’s world is made of Lego.

Or that is what Mark Surman, Executive Director or Mozilla Foundation, wants us to see.  Not a far reach for the kid creatives in the audience who were looking for inspiration and ideas at this year’s international event.

Mark started the INplay 2012 conference off with his keynote, getting the audience to think about the web as pieces.  Pieces that can be hacked, changed, mashedup, and parodied.  So, why would we want the web to be in pieces?  Because kids expect to play.  This includes content on the web.

His project, Hackasaurus, provides tools that make it easy for kids to remix, create and share on the web. The X-ray Goggles tool can see the code behind the Google logo, on the Google home page and through some simple steps, the user can change it to any other image they want and then send it to friends to show their amazing work.

MEEmoo is another example.  This framework connects open-source modules, powered by any web technology.  So you choose a module, then another one.  Then you connect them with this fun, colourful wire.  Voila, a new app!  The fascinating part was a new app was created in the time it took him to explain what it was he was doing.

His point:  the web is made up of digital assets that can be remixed together because the work is modifiable and changeable for self-expression.  It’s the joy of learning and creating.  Just like Lego.

Co-Creating with Kids

David Fono from Atmosphere Industries walked us through a compelling case study of creating a game for kids, with a team of seven kids aged 8-10. The result was Watchers, a game about online privacy. Two young game creators joined the panel to share key learning points:

1. Snacks are mandatory
2. No direct “educational” stuff.  Boring.
3. Turning off the lights and running around can be productive.
4. Lots of Breaks
5. Make the process “Gameful.”  Make it fun.  Even the adults admitted they had more fun creating.
6. Don’t present classifications.  Instead, let the kids create from their own experience.
7. If you can make a Zombie with milk and pig feet, anything is possible.
8.  “Multiple funs”.  Just because you think it’s fun, doesn’t mean I think it’s fun.  Thus, multiple funs need to be created.

Narrative is NOT STORY in gaming

It is the narrative of the activity, not the story when it comes to gaming.  This is a huge shift in thinking for traditional story creatives.

A mobile device is not a phone for a 4 year old.  It’s where they play games, create stuff and read books.

A touch screen cuts across all demographics.  Kids take to it immediately.  In fact, kids are getting so good at eye/ hand coordination that their tests are extraordinary.  Just don’t get them to thread a needle.  They can’t.  Traditional eye/hand coordination activities are dying.

Focus on the user and their experience.  If the experience is easy and fun, you’ve got a great narrative.

It’s not always about winning

Björn Jeffery, co-founder of Toca Boca, approaches kid gaming design by creating an environment where they use their imagination and foster co-play.  Oh… and there is nothing to win.  Their games are designed to be open-ended, designed around a theme and the gameplay is up to the user.

Image their Tea Party app.  A child invites a parent to sit down and play.  Maybe add a few stuffed friends.  You pour tea.  Tell stories.  Share snacks.  It’s just like the real thing, with the play happening between the kid, parent and stuffies, with no mess to worry about.  Oh.. and if you do spill your tea in the app, there is a cloth to wipe it up.

The device and the game are simply props.  The real interaction and the fun is between people using the screen.  Definitely a win, win.

Interactive Design Principles for Children

 Carla Engelbrecht Fisher is a game designer with a research obsession.  And much to the audience’s delight, she shared some really great insights into how to design specifically for kids.

1. Kids’ fingers are not perfect.  Make big areas for them to touch, because they are not necessarily accurate.
2. Drag and drop is tough.  Give them incremental steps as they go along to encourage success.
3. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat instructions.
4. Immediate feedback is needed.  When the child does / touches something, there should be sound, a visual clue, maybe balloons.
5. Expect multiplayer chaos.  Carla played this very cute and amazing video of 7 kids playing Dance Dance Revolution at the same time.
6. Create in purchase gates.  Don’t interrupt game play for purchasing prompts.
   

Families Play Together Online

If you want to create games that trigger deep routed emotion, use the strongest emotional force that humans know – the connection between parents and children.

Technology, by design, rips family apart by putting family members in their own technology silos.  Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell games, walked us through the psychology and mechanics that work best for bringing families together.

So let’s face it.  As a parent, playing with a child, it can get… um…. boring.  My friends call it death by Candyland.  So creating an app that attracts both the child and the parent requires something for both of them.  It is a shared experience around a theme that both kids and parents care about.

One way to do this is to provide an experience that a family can do together.  Jesse showed a video where a child was driving a car collecting words for the parent to unscramble.  The child sees the word correctly, runs into it and then the parents sees it on a different part of the screen to unscramble.  The more words the parent unscrambles, the more boosts the child gets for driving their car.  The trick here is that the word is on the screen before the parent has to unscramble.  Therefore, the thinking is that the parent knows what the word is before it arrives in their unscrammbler.  Yet, since the scrambling area is on a different part of the screen, the parent doesn’t see the word.  They are appearing too quickly.   The team learns quickly that to achieve ultimate success the child has to say the word out loud. This is true cooperative play.

 

Self Publishing.  Not the scary.  Really.

If an app is in the app store, does anyone know it’s there?  How does one self publish and then get users to purchase?

The panelists of this session agreed on how to get noticed and get sales for your self-published game.

1. Make sure your game is world class.  If it’s not great, nothing will help it.
2. Remove all obstacles to getting the game.  Make it easy and simple.
3. Create a demo video and place it on YouTube.
4. Do community reach, long term.  Create a Facebook fan page and talk to your audience.  Often.
5. Be free.  Temporarily.  Get people to try it and encourage them to talk about it.

At the end of the day, it’s about Play

The common theme this year was play. Playing with Lego, playing with kids and families, making it fun and easy for kids to play.

As for the future, it’s unclear.  Participants all agreed there is one, but technology and the industry are moving too fast to accurately predict.

For me, the conference sparked a lot of ideas and I made a ton of new connections.  But after sitting down for 2 days, my only request is that each day at 2pm, we should have turned off the lights and run around.

Who is my hosting company?  Dreamhost.  Then I was pointed to this article by Scott White who has kindly been helping me. What have I learned?  That the internet is a scary place.

So.. I’m investigating my options right now and I’m sure it means I will leaving dreamhost shortly.

Stay tuned… new look, new host, new posts… with same old me.

Photo by Flickr user Michael Batfish

Is so easy.  You get busy and then one day passes, then 2, them 30.  And before you know it, you are one of those blogs you HATE.  The ones where there is nothing new posted for about 3 million days.  Crickets sound.  Cobwebs collecting in the corner.

What happened?  I didn’t show up.

Its like the friend who stops calling.  Doesn’t come when invited.  And you get pissed off because you take it personally.  What did I say?  What the hell is wrong?

But its not you, its me.  I didn’t show up.

Why?  Oh god.  I could give you three million reasons.  I was busy, my computer has been a pain in the ass, my personal life took over, I was focused on starting other things.

At the end of day, for this relationship to work.  I have to do my part.  I know that.  And I didn’t.

I’m sorry.

I will do better.