Street computing workshop 2009

The Street Computing workshop, held in conjunction with OZCHI 2009, solicits papers discussing new research directions, early research results, works-in-progress and critical surveys of prior research work in the areas of ubiquitous computing and interaction design for urban environments. Urban spaces have unique characteristics. Typically, they are densely populated, buzzing with life twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These traits afford many opportunities, but they also present many challenges: traffic jams, smog and pollution, stress placed on public services, and more. Computing technology, particularly the kind that can be placed in the hands of citizens, holds much promise in combating some of these challenges. Yet, computation is not merely a tool for overcoming challenges; rather, when embedded appropriately in our everyday lives, it becomes a tool of opportunity, for shaping how our cities evolve, for enabling us to interact with our city and its people in new ways, and for uncovering useful, but hidden relationships and correlations between elements of the city. The increasing availability of an urban computing infrastructure has lead to new and exciting ways inhabitants can interact with their city. This includes interaction with a wide range of services (e.g. public transport, public services), conceptual representations of the city (e.g. local weather and traffic conditions), the availability of a variety of shared and personal displays (e.g. public, ambient, mobile) and the use of different interaction modes (e.g. tangible, gesture-based, token-based). This workshop solicits papers that address the above themes in some way. We encourage researchers to submit work that deals with challenges and possibilities that the availability of urban computing infrastructure such as sensors and middleware for sensor networks pose. This includes new and innovative ways of interacting with and within urban environments; user experience design and participatory design approaches for urban environments; social aspects of urban computing; and other related areas.

The creative sector in New Zealand : mapping and economic role : report to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise

The New Zealand creative sector was responsible for almost 121,000 jobs at the time of the 2006 Census (6.3% of total employment). These are divided between • 35,751 creative specialists – persons employed doing creative work in creative industries • 42,300 support workers - persons providing management and support services in creative industries • 42,792 embedded creative workers – persons engaged in creative work in other types of enterprise The most striking feature of this breakdown is the fact that the largest group of creative workers are employed outside the creative industries, i.e. in other types of businesses. Even within the creative industries, there are fewer people directly engaged in creative work than in providing management and support. Creative sector employees earned incomes of approximately $52,000 per annum at the time of the 2006 Census. This is relatively uniform across all three types of creative worker, and is significantly above the average for all employed persons (of approximately $40,700). Creative employment and incomes were growing strongly over both five year periods between the 1996, 2001 and 2006 Censuses. However, when we compare creative and general trends, we see two distinct phases in the development of the creative sector: • rapid structural growth over the five years to 2001 (especially led by developments in ICT), with creative employment and incomes increasing rapidly at a time when they were growing modestly across the whole economy; • subsequent consolidation, with growth driven by more by national economic expansion than structural change, and creative employment and incomes moving in parallel with strong economy-wide growth. Other important trends revealed by the data are that • the strongest growth during the decade was in embedded creative workers, especially over the first five years. The weakest growth was in creative specialists, with support workers in creative industries in the middle rank, • by far the strongest growth in creative industries’ employment was in Software & digital content, which trebled in size over the decade Comparing New Zealand with the United Kingdom and Australia, the two southern hemisphere nations have significantly lower proportions of total employment in the creative sector (both in creative industries and embedded employment). New Zealand’s and Australia’s creative shares in 2001 were similar (5.4% each), but in the following five years, our share has expanded (to 5.7%) whereas Australia’s fell slightly (to 5.2%) – in both cases, through changes in creative industries’ employment. The creative industries generated $10.5 billion in total gross output in the March 2006 year. Resulting from this was value added totalling $5.1b, representing 3.3% of New Zealand’s total GDP. Overall, value added in the creative industries represents 49% of industry gross output, which is higher than the average across the whole economy, 45%. This is a reflection of the relatively high labour intensity and high earnings of the creative industries. Industries which have an above-average ratio of value added to gross output are usually labour-intensive, especially when wages and salaries are above average. This is true for Software & Digital Content and Architecture, Design & Visual Arts, with ratios of 60.4% and 55.2% respectively. However there is significant variation in this ratio between different parts of the creative industries, with some parts (e.g. Software & Digital Content and Architecture, Design & Visual Arts) generating even higher value added relative to output, and others (e.g. TV & Radio, Publishing and Music & Performing Arts) less, because of high capital intensity and import content. When we take into account the impact of the creative industries’ demand for goods and services from its suppliers and consumption spending from incomes earned, we estimate that there is an addition to economic activity of: • $30.9 billion in gross output, $41.4b in total • $15.1b in value added, $20.3b in total • 158,100 people employed, 234,600 in total The total economic impact of the creative industries is approximately four times their direct output and value added, and three times their direct employment. Their effect on output and value added is roughly in line with the average over all industries, although the effect on employment is significantly lower. This is because of the relatively high labour intensity (and high earnings) of the creative industries, which generate below-average demand from suppliers, but normal levels of demand though expenditure from incomes. Drawing on these numbers and conclusions, we suggest some (slightly speculative) directions for future research. The goal is to better understand the contribution the creative sector makes to productivity growth; in particular, the distinctive contributions from creative firms and embedded creative workers. The ideas for future research can be organised into the several categories: • Understanding the categories of the creative sector– who is doing the business? In other words, examine via more fine grained research (at a firm level perhaps) just what is the creative contribution from the different aspects of the creative sector industries. It may be possible to categorise these in terms of more or less striking innovations. • Investigate the relationship between the characteristics and the performance of the various creative industries/ sectors; • Look more closely at innovation at an industry level e.g. using an index of relative growth of exports, and see if this can be related to intensity of use of creative inputs; • Undertake case studies of the creative sector; • Undertake case studies of the embedded contribution to growth in the firms and industries that employ them, by examining taking several high performing noncreative industries (in the same way as proposed for the creative sector). • Look at the aggregates – drawing on the broad picture of the extent of the numbers of creative workers embedded within the different industries, consider the extent to which these might explain aspects of the industries’ varied performance in terms of exports, growth and so on. • This might be able to extended to examine issues like the type of creative workers that are most effective when embedded, or test the hypothesis that each industry has its own particular requirements for embedded creative workers that overwhelms any generic contributions from say design, or IT.

The culture of contemporary writers' festivals

This thesis examines the culture of contemporary writers’ festivals in an international context. In the last five decades writers’ festivals have emerged in cities across the world, and during this time they have expanded their literary discussions and debates to include numerous other topics of broad interest to society. To examine the expanded popularity and function of writers’ festivals, this thesis establishes a new vantage point for theorising the content now typically generated by these events using concepts in urban festivals and public culture research. Importantly, the new vantage point addresses the limitations of current commentary on writers’ festivals which routinely claim they trivialize literature, and more generally, contribute to the decline of public culture. The thesis presents two case studies: one on the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia and the other on the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada. The first case study, which focuses on the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival, illustrates the many overlapping and often conflicting discourses as well as opinions productively discussed and debated at writers’ festivals. Key topic discussed and debated at the Festival include local topics about the host city—its history, literature and politics, as well as broader literary, political and celebrity culture topics. The diversity of topics discussed at the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival is typical of the majority of writers’ festivals similarly located outside the largest geographic centres of global literary production and circulation, and designated as ‘peripheral’ festivals in this research. The second case study on Toronto’s International Festival of Authors examines the ways in which the 2006 Festival almost exclusively focussed on literary and celebrity culture discourses, and promoted itself on these terms. The 2006 International Festival of Authors’ discussion and debate of a narrow range of topics is typical of the few writers’ festivals located in global centres of literary production and circulation, and unlike ‘peripheral’ festivals they are not experiencing the same growth in number or popularity. The aim of these ‘international’ Festivals is not to democratise their elite literary beginnings, but rather to promote ‘literature’ as a niche brand for quality writing that is valid on a global scale. This thesis will assert that while all writers’ festivals are influenced by the marketing desires of publishing companies, the aim of international writers’ festivals in marketing to a virtually and globally connected elite literary audience makes them more susceptible to experiencing declines in audience and author participation.

Creative Industries

We are experiencing a period of profound social and economic transformation. This is a shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy (or a “creative economy”; or an “economy of the imagination”.) This new, emerging economic system is fundamentally organised around people (not machines or buildings); and around place. We heard Richard Florida argue that creative, talented people won’t go to where the job is, but vice versa, the job will come to them. So according to Florida, where we live is becoming the primary factor in global economic development. (Incidentally, it is worth contrasting this idea with the alternative proposition - put by speakers at this Forum - of “new nomadism”, that is, that creativity is nomadic and not bound by place.)

Co-creative labour

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of co-creative labour. The term co-creation is used to describe the phenomenon of consumers increasingly participating in the process of making and circulating media content and experiences. Practices of user-created content and user-led innovation are now significant sources of both economic and cultural value. But how should we understand and analyse these value-generating activities? What are the identities and forms of agency that constitute these emerging co-creative relations? Should we define these activities as a form of labour and what are the implications and impacts of co-creative practices on the employment conditions and professional identities of people working in the creative industries? In answering these questions we argue that careful attention must be paid to how the participants themselves (both professional and non-professional, commercial and non-commercial) negotiate and navigate the meanings and possibilities of these emerging co-creative relationships for mutual benefit. Co-Creative media production is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theories of work and labour. The articles in this special issue follow and unpack the often diverse and contradictory ways in which the participants themselves use and remake the social categories of work and labour as they seek to co-ordinate and contest co-creative media practices.

Creative Industries : A New Direction?

This paper looks at the work of the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. They have attempted to deal with some of the definitional and policy ambiguities surrounding the DCMS’s re-branding of ‘cultural industries’ as ‘creative industries’. The paper focuses on three central claims. First, that Art falls outside the creative industries; second, that the creative industries moves beyond a cultural policy paradigm towards that of innovation systems; third, that the notion of ‘social network markets’ represents the central defining characteristic of the creative industries. The paper suggests that the attempt to separate out art and culture from the creative industries is misplaced and represents a significant shift away from a longer trajectory of ‘cultural industries’ policies with some damaging consequences for cultural policy and creative businesses.

The Creative Workforce : How to Launch Young People into High-Flying Futures

Creativity has become the economic engine of the 21st century. No longer the preserve of creative industries, 'creative capital' – in the form of novel thinking, navigation, interactivity and border-crossing – has become crucial to success and productivity. But are young people being equipped for a work future in which creativity is the defining feature of economic life? In this important book, Erica McWilliam argues that young people’s creative capacities are not being properly developed and that education, particularly in Australia, demands a massive pedagogical shift. Using both Australian and overseas examples, McWilliam describes what creative capacities are, why they've become important to our work futures, and what can be done to optimise the creative capacities of young people.

Distribution profiles of key weather variables in Australian capital cities : implications for energy efficient building design

Local climate is a critical element in the design of energy efficient buildings. In this paper, ten years of historical weather data in Australia's eight capital cities were profiled and analysed to characterize the variations of climatic variables in Australia. The method of descriptive statistics was employed. Either the pattern of cumulative distribution and/or the profile of percentage distribution are presented. It was found that although weather variables vary with different locations, there is often a good, nearly linear relation between a weather variable and its cumulative percentage for the majority of middle part of the cumulative curves. By comparing the slopes of these distribution profiles, it may be possible to determine the relative range of changes of the particular weather variables for a given city. The implications of these distribution profiles of key weather variables on energy efficient building design are also discussed.

Mobile learning, social learning

Understanding the future development of interaction design as it applies to learning and training scenarios is crucial to effective development of curriculum and appropriate application of social and mobile communication technologies. As Attewell & Saville-Smith have recognised (2004), the use of mobile communication devices for improved literacy and numeracy is a desirable prospect among young people who represent the average age of undergraduate students. Further, with the growing penetration of broadband internet access, the ubiquity of wireless access in educational locations, the rise of ultra-mobile portable computers and the proliferation of social software applications in educational contexts, there are a growing number of channels for facilitation of learning. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient consideration of the interaction design issues that affect the effective facilitation of such learning. This paper contends that there is a clear need to design mobile and social learning to accommodate the benefits of these diverse channels for interaction. Additionally, there is a need to implement suitable testing processes to ensure participants in mobile and social learning are contributing effectively and maximising their learning. Through the presentation of case studies in mobile and social learning, the paper attempts to demonstrate how considered interaction design techniques can improve the effectiveness of new learning channels.

SCOOT game event : families as partners in learning

How games can be designed to engage families in learning spaces outside of the classroom. SCOOT Game has been played by families in various science museums and art galleries in Australian capital cities since 2004. Families form groups to collaborate in the game that takes them on an SMS quest through these places engaging them with artworks, historic facts, landmarks, puzzles, street performances etc.

Creative Commons : the next generation : Creative Commons licence use five years on

Since its launch in 2001, the Creative Commons open content licensing initiative has received both praise and censure. While some have touted it as a major step towards removing the burdens copyright law imposes on creativity and innovation in the digital age, others have argued that it robs artists of their rightful income. This paper aims to provide a brief overview and analysis of the practical application of the Creative Commons licences five years after their launch. It looks at how the Creative Commons licences are being used and who is using them, and attempts to identify likely motivations for doing so. By identifying trends in how this licence use has changed over time, it also attempts to rebut arguments that Creative Commons is a movement of academics and hobbyists, and has no value for traditional organisations or working artists.