The Fleet Store : devising a public retail exhibition to promote creative, innovative and sustainable business models for emerging fashion designers

1.Description of the Work The Fleet Store was devised as a creative output to establish an exhibition linked to a fashion business model where emerging designers were encouraged to research new and innovative strategies for creating design-driven and commercial collections for a public consumer. This was a project that was devised to break down the perceptions of emerging fashion designers that designing commercial collections linked to a sustainable business model is a boring and unnecessary process. The focus was to demystify the business of fashion and to link its importance to a design-driven and public outcome that is more familiar to fashion designers. The criterion for participation was that all designers had to be registered as a business with the Australian Taxation Office. Designers were chosen from the Creative Enterprise Australia Fashion Business Incubator, the QUT fashion graduate alumni and current QUT fashion design and double degree (fashion and business) students with existing businesses. The project evolved from a series of collaborative workshops where designers were introduced to new and innovative creative industries’ business models and the processes, costings and timings involved to create a niche, sustainable business for a public exhibition of design-driven commercial collections. All designers initiated their own business infra-structure but were then introduced to the concept of collaboration for successful and profitable exhibition and business outcomes. Collaborative strategies such as crowd funding, crowd sourcing, peer to peer mentoring and manufacturing were all researched, and strategies for the establishment of the retail exhibition were all devised in a collaborative environment. All participants also took on roles outside their ‘designer’ background to create a retail exhibition that was creative but also had critical mass and aesthetic for the consumer. The Fleet Store ‘popped up’ for 2 weeks (10 days), in a heritage-listed building in an inner city location. Passers-by were important, but the main consumer was enlisted by the use of interest and investment from crowd sourcing, crowd funding, ethical marketing, corporate social responsibility projects and collaborative public relations and social media strategies. The research has furthered discussion on innovative strategies for emerging fashion designers to initiate and maintain sustainable businesses and suggests that collaboration combined with a design-driven and business focus can create a sustainable and economically viable retail exhibition. 2. Research Statement Research Background The research field involved developing a new ethical, design-driven, collaborative and sustainable model for fashion design practice and management. The research asked can a public, design-driven, collaborative retail exhibition create a platform for promoting creative, innovative and sustainable business models for emerging fashion designers. The methodology was primarily practice-led as all participants were designers in their own right and the project manager acted as a mentor and curator to guide the process and analyse the potential of the research question. The Fleet Store offers new knowledge in design practice and management; with the creation of a model where design outcomes and business models are inextricably linked to the success of the creative output. Key innovations include extending the commercialisation of emerging fashion businesses by creating a curated retail gallery for collaborative and sustainable strategies to support niche fashion designer labels. This has contributed to a broader conversation on how to nurture and sustain competitive Australian fashion designers/labels. Research Contribution and Significance The Fleet Store has contributed to a growing body of research into innovative and sustainable business models for niche fashion and creative industries’ practitioners. All participants have maintained their business infra-structure and many are currently growing their businesses, using the strategies tested for the Fleet Store. The exhibition space was visited by over 1,000 people and sales of $27,000 were made in 10 days of opening. (Follow up sales of $3,000 has also been reported.) Three of the designers were ‘discovered’ from the exhibition and have received substantial orders from high profile national buyers and retailers for next season delivery. Several participants have since collaborated to create other pop up retail environments and are now mentoring other emerging designers on the significance of a collaborative retail exhibition to consolidate niche business models for emerging fashion designers.

News via Voldemort: Parody accounts in topical discussions on Twitter

Parody accounts are prevalent on Twitter, offering irreverent interpretations of public figures, fictional characters and more. These accounts post comments framed within the context of their fictional universes or stereotypes of their subjects, responding in-character to topical events. This article positions parody accounts as a ritualised social media practice, an extension of fan practices and irreverent Internet culture. By providing a typology of parody accounts and analysing the topicality of selected parody accounts’ tweets, the research examines how these accounts contribute to topical discussions. In-character framing of topical comments allows parody accounts to offer original interpretations of breaking news that receive more attention than their other tweets. The presence and longevity of parody accounts underline the importance of humour on social media, including within news and topical coverage.

Strategies for the suspension and prevention of disconnection: Rendering disconnection as socioecenomic lubricant with Facebook

This paper attends to the idea of disconnection as a way of theorising people’s lived experience of social networking sites. Enrolling and extending a disconnective practice lens we suggest that the disconnective strategies of suspension and prevention are operational necessities for those we might see as the users and owners of sites such as Facebook. Indeed, our work demonstrates that disconnection in these contexts need not be associated only with modes of resistance and departure, but can also act as socioeconomic lubricant.

Global journalism in the digital age

Mass media have transitioned in the past five years from being one-way communication mediums, from journalists to audiences, into an era of networked digital media in which individuals can easily publish text, photos and video to a world-wide audience.The power of the press is severely threatened and its business model is broken...

A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere

This chapter discusses the methodological aspects and empirical findings of a large-scale, funded project investigating public communication through social media in Australia. The project concentrates on Twitter, but we approach it as representative of broader current trends toward the integration of large datasets and computational methods into media and communication studies in general, and social media scholarship in particular. The research discussed in this chapter aims to empirically describe networks of affiliation and interest in the Australian Twittersphere, while reflecting on the methodological implications and imperatives of ‘big data’ in the humanities. Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and their follower/followee relationships, and have mapped their interconnections. In itself, the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, largely centred on shared topics of interest (from politics through arts to sport) and/or sociodemographic factors (geographic origins, age groups). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network, and also provides a first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. In combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtags, the map also enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower/followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics – allowing new insights into the extent to which particular topics and issues are of interest to specialised niches or to the Australian public more broadly. Specifically, we examine the Twittersphere footprint of dedicated political discussion, under the #auspol hashtag, and compare it with the heightened, broader interest in Australian politics during election campaigns, using #ausvotes; we explore the different patterns of Twitter activity across the map for major television events (the popular competitive cooking show #masterchef, the British #royalwedding, and the annual #stateoforigin Rugby League sporting contest); and we investigate the circulation of links to the articles published by a number of major Australian news organisations across the network. Such analysis, which combines the ‘big data’-informed map and a close reading of individual communicative phenomena, makes it possible to trace the dynamic formation and dissolution of issue publics against the backdrop of longer-term network connections, and the circulation of information across these follower/followee links. Such research sheds light on the communicative dynamics of Twitter as a space for mediated social interaction. Our work demonstrates the possibilities inherent in the current ‘computational turn’ (Berry, 2010) in the digital humanities, as well as adding to the development and critical examination of methodologies for dealing with ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford, 2011). Out tools and methods for doing Twitter research, released under Creative Commons licences through our project Website, provide the basis for replicable and verifiable digital humanities research on the processes of public communication which take place through this important new social network.

The Arab Spring on Twitter: Language Communities in #egypt and #libya

Building on hashtag datasets gathered since January 2011, this paper will compare patterns of Twitter usage during the popular revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Libya. Using custom-made tools for processing ‘big data’ (boyd & Crawford, 2011), we will examine the volume of tweets sent by English-, Arabic-, and mixed-language Twitter users over time, and examine the networks of interaction (variously through @replying, retweeting, or both) between these groups as they developed and shifted over the course of these uprisings. Examining @reply and retweet traffic, we will identify general patterns of information flow between the English- and Arabic-speaking sides of the Twittersphere, and highlight the roles played by key boundary riders connecting both language spheres. Further, we will examine the URLs shared in these hashtags by Twitter participants, to identify the most prominent overall information sources, examine differences in the information diet experienced by English- and Arabic-language users, and investigate whether there are any online sources whose URLs are transcending language boundaries more frequently than others.

Blogging

Weblogs, or blogs, constitute a form and genre of online publishing that emerged in the mid-1990s as a logical consequence of the confluence of personal and professional home pages and new web publishing technologies. To overcome technological limitations, where news updates had to be manually inserted by editing the underlying HTML code, the early content-management systems in the second half of the 1990s built on server-side database technology to dynamically generate web pages; this enabled more convenient and more frequent content updates. Weblogs utilised such technologies to provide an up-to-date news feed, presenting individual news items in reverse chronological order. Most blogging platforms provide commenting functions that enable readers to respond to and discuss individual blog posts...

Enterprise-related crisis communication on Twitter

The rise of social media as communication channels has enabled customers to provide feedback or to ask for assistance quickly and easily. In the context of brand crises, the microblogging platform Twitter is highly relevant because of its ability to support information sharing. By investigating communication on Twitter, the authors examine Twitter activity patterns based on a dataset of some 240,000 tweets during two major brand crises affecting the Australian airline Qantas – the volcanic ash cloud caused by the eruption of Chilean volcano Puyehue in June 2011, and the global grounding of Qantas flights by management in the course of an industrial dispute in October/November 2011. Through this case study we find that characteristics of communication change significantly during different stages of the crisis. Further, we demonstrate that different kinds of crisis result in different communication patterns on Twitter.

Global journalism investigations in the digital age: Connections and collaborations

Investigative journalists who join what theorist Manuel Castells describes as the ‘network society’ can locate potential news sources using various social media platforms and interview them using Web-based communication technologies. The potential for journalistic investigations involving multi-directional conversations with news sources across the globe is beginning to be explored. Potential news sources who are part of the network society have unprecedented access to specialist investigative reporters irrespective of their location and can speak to them more cost effectively than in the past. This paper explores how new journalism technologies are allowing journalists to call powerful individuals and institutions to account, irrespective of national borders; and how previously silenced individuals are being given a voice. To read an example of international investigative journalism facilitated by a combination of social media, Web-based communications, reporter collaboration and news outlet collaborations see http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/churchs-wall-of-silence-on-sexual-abuse/story-e6frg6z6-1226639077238.

Evidence-based business process management: Using digital opportunities to drive organizational innovation

Process improvement and innovation are risky endeavors, like swimming in unknown waters. In this chapter, I will discuss how process innovation through BPM can benefit from Research-as-a-Service, that is, from the application of research concepts in the processes of BPM projects. A further subject will be how innovations can be converted from confidence-based to evidence-based models due to affordances of digital infrastructures such as large-scale enterprise soft-ware or social media. I will introduce the relevant concepts, provide illustrations for digital capabilities that allow for innovation, and share a number of key takeaway lessons for how organizations can innovate on the basis of digital opportunities and principles of evidence-based BPM: the foundation of all process decisions in facts rather than fiction.

Introducing telemetrics

This paper introduces a new methodology for analyzing and measuring engagement with television content by users of Twitter. Drawing on factors such as the network, viewing audience, and date of broadcast to establish a baseline expectation for volume of tweets around a television show, and applying techniques from the field of sabermetrics to create neutral volume figures (‘weighted tweets’) which exclude these variables, our metrics provide new insights into television’s social media presence. The methodology provides a variety of new measures for analysing the social media strategies of individual television programs, channels and networks, for comparing users’ engagement with programs, channels or networks, and for predicting future volumes of tweets.

Establishing a participatory library model: A Grounded Theory study

Purpose The purpose of this research is to explore the idea of the participatory library in higher education settings. This research aims to address the question, what is a participatory university library? Design/methodology/approach Grounded theory approach was adopted. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with two diverse groups of participants including ten library staff members and six library users. Data collection and analysis were carried out simultaneously and complied with Straussian grounded theory principles and techniques. Findings Three core categories representing the participatory library were found including “community”, “empowerment”, and “experience”. Each category was thoroughly delineated via sub-categories, properties, and dimensions that all together create a foundation for the participatory library. A participatory library model was also developed together with an explanation of model building blocks that provide a deeper understanding of the participatory library phenomenon. Research limitations The research focuses on a specific library system, i.e., academic libraries. Therefore, the research results may not be very applicable to public, special, and school library contexts. Originality/value This is the first empirical study developing a participatory library model. It provides librarians, library managers, researchers, library students, and the library community with a holistic picture of the contemporary library.

Participatory action research for civic engagement

The future of civic engagement is characterised by both technological innovation as well as new technological user practices that are fuelled by trends towards mobile, personal devices; broadband connectivity; open data; urban interfaces; and, cloud computing. These technology trends are progressing at a rapid pace, and have led global technology vendors to package and sell the ‘Smart City’ as a centralized service delivery platform predicted to optimize and enhance cities’ key performance indicators – and generate a profitable market. The top-down deployment of these large and proprietary technology platforms have helped sectors such as energy, transport, and healthcare to increase efficiencies. However, an increasing number of scholars and commentators warn of another ‘IT bubble’ emerging. Along with some city leaders, they argue that the top-down approach does not fit the governance dynamics and values of a liberal democracy when applied across sectors. A thorough understanding is required, of the socio-cultural nuances of how people work, live, play across different environments, and how they employ social media and mobile devices to interact with, engage in, and constitute public realms. Although the term ‘slacktivism’ is sometimes used to denote a watered down version of civic engagement and activism that is reduced to clicking a ‘Like’ button and signing online petitions, we believe that we are far from witnessing another Biedermeier period that saw people focus on the domestic and the non-political. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Occupy movements in New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, Stuttgart 21, Fukushima, the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the Vinegar Movement in Brazil in 2013. These examples of civic action shape the dynamics of governments, and in turn, call for new processes to be incorporated into governance structures. Participatory research into these new processes across the triad of people, place and technology is a significant and timely investment to foster productive, sustainable, and livable human habitats. With this chapter, we want to reframe the current debates in academia and priorities in industry and government to allow citizens and civic actors to take their rightful centerpiece place in civic movements. This calls for new participatory approaches for co-inquiry and co-design. It is an evolving process with an explicit agenda to facilitate change, and we propose participatory action research (PAR) as an indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures and practices for civic engagement. This chapter proposes participatory action research as a useful and fitting research paradigm to guide methodological considerations surrounding the study, design, development, and evaluation of civic technologies. We do not limit our definition of civic technologies to tools specifically designed to simply enhance government and governance, such as renewing your car registration online or casting your vote electronically on election day. Rather, we are interested in civic media and technologies that foster citizen engagement in the widest sense, and particularly the participatory design of such civic technologies that strive to involve citizens in political debate and action as well as question conventional approaches to political issues (DiSalvo, 2012; Dourish, 2010; Foth et al., 2013). Following an outline of some underlying principles and assumptions behind participatory action research, especially as it applies to cities, we will critically review case studies to illustrate the application of this approach with a view to engender robust, inclusive, and dynamic societies built on the principles of engaged liberal democracy. The rationale for this approach is an alternative to smart cities in a ‘perpetual tomorrow,’ (cf. e.g. Dourish & Bell, 2011), based on many weak and strong signals of civic actions revolving around technology seen today. It seeks to emphasize and direct attention to active citizenry over passive consumerism, human actors over human factors, culture over infrastructure, and prosperity over efficiency. First, we will have a look at some fundamental issues arising from applying simplistic smart city visions to the kind of a problem a city is (cf. Jacobs, 1961). We focus on the touch points between “the city” and its civic body, the citizens. In order to provide for meaningful civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces.

Effective communication during disasters: What effects community decision making & action?

Study/Objective This paper describes a program of research examining emergency messaging during the response and early recovery phases of natural disasters. The objective of this suite of studies is to develop message construction frameworks and channels that maximise community compliance with instructional messaging. The research has adopted a multi-hazard approach and considers the impact of formal emergency messages, as well as informal messages (e.g., social media posts), on community compliance. Background In recent years, media reports have consistently demonstrated highly variable community compliance to instructional messaging during natural disasters. Footage of individuals watching a tsunami approaching from the beach or being over-run by floodwaters are disturbing and indicate the need for a clearer understanding of decision making under stress. This project’s multi-hazard approach considers the time lag between knowledge of the event and desired action, as well as how factors such as message fatigue, message ambiguity, and the interplay of messaging from multiple media sources are likely to play a role in an individual’s compliance with an emergency instruction. Methods To examine effective messaging strategy, we conduct a critical analysis of the literature to develop a framework for community consultation and design experiments to test the potential for compliance improvement. Results Preliminary results indicate that there is, as yet, little published evidence on which to base decisions about emergency instructional messages to threatened communities. Conclusion The research described here will contribute improvements in emergency instructional message compliance by generating an evidence-based framework that takes into account behavioural compliance theory, the psychology of decision making under stress, and multiple channels of communication including social media.

Effective communication during disasters

This paper describes a program of research examining emergency messaging during the response and early recovery phases of natural disasters. The objective of this suite of studies is to develop message construction frameworks and channels that maximise community compliance with instructional messaging. The research has adopted a multi-hazard approach and considers the impact of formal emergency messages, as well as informal messages (e.g., social media posts), on community compliance. In recent years, media reports have consistently demonstrated highly variable community compliance to instructional messaging during natural disasters. Footage of individuals watching a tsunami approaching from the beach or being over-run by floodwaters are disturbing and indicate the need for a clearer understanding of decision making under stress. This project’s multi-hazard approach considers the time lag between knowledge of the event and desired action, as well as how factors such as message fatigue, message ambiguity, and the interplay of messaging from multiple media sources are likely to play a role in an individual’s compliance with an emergency instruction. To examine effective messaging strategy, we conduct a critical analysis of the literature to develop a framework for community consultation and design experiments to test the potential for compliance improvement. Preliminary results indicate that there is, as yet, little published evidence on which to base decisions about emergency instructional messages to threatened communities. The research described here will contribute improvements in emergency instructional message compliance by generating an evidence-based framework that takes into account behavioural compliance theory, the psychology of decision making under stress, and multiple channels of communication including social media.