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We as Net-Makers Want to Foster an Elastic Thinking Movement, Choosing Amsterdam as a Creative Playground.

Team

Shubhojit Mallick (IN)
Jeroen Ruijter (NL)
Mizuki Kojima (JP)
Enrico Catalano (IT)
Camila Olivera (BR)

Commissioner:

Description

The week with the final concept

After hours of intense and near murderous discussions, we finally decided upon our concept.

 

The user journey video can be found here:

clickable_mockup

The week with the web based platform

After months of deliberation and insane fights, we finally managed to reach a consensus about our project… So our innovative, mind blowing idea would be free to view and all of YOU can have a taste of our hard-work. So stay tuned while we develop our web based platform.

 

The whole idea revolves around the fact that we need to present information at the bottom of the “information pyramid” i.e. the information not available on google to the emerging creative professionals. Here’s a sneak peek into our concept.

Foto 07-11-2013 14 41 13 (1)

While we were working our ass off we decided to indulge in Yoga, arm wrestling and random crazy things which didn’t make sense.

Foto 05-11-2013 20 54 26  Foto 05-11-2013 17 57 32

 

Research Paper, The week with

After months of hard-work, we are really glad to present our research paper

The week with iFabrica

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So you think you can fabricate ???

iFabrica, is a two month old fabrication facility which allows anybody to create and build anything ( Seriously, Anything) from scratch. We saw how to make a lamp using the plasma cutter.We saw how 3D printing is revolutionising the world of prototypes. And the girls went gaga over this:

IMG_3515

 

 

 

The week with the Dutch Design Week.

The Dutch Design Week was a magnanimous gathering of creative professionals and emerging creative professionals at Eindhoven. There was a host of events and workshops ranging from Design Thinking to Pizza painting and building 3D printers.

 

This was the perfect platform for us to test our concept and we carried out a bunch of interviews to gain insights and collect data. Here’s our visualization, beautifully designed by Enrico and Mizuki.

illustrazione DDW

Based on our survey we modified and simplified the visualisation and this is how it looks now.

illustrazione DDW_requirements

 

Foto 25-10-2013 11 34 13 Here we see Mizuki measuring his height using that lamp.

Foto 24-10-2013 16 54 36 This guy at the DDW, presented a fully automated car which could write information on it’s own.

 

 

 

The week with the interview posts

We were really glad that we had the interviews from a plethora of professionals as it really helped us gain insights about the creative professionals and about the whole creative ecosystem. So we started to analyze the insights and decided to try and figure out a bunch of common values which our list of interviewees might have.

Foto 04-10-2013 16 35 21Foto 04-10-2013 16 35 21 DSCN6717 Foto 04-10-2013 16 32 29 future_ps

 

It was really interesting to study the interviews because it made us realise that we were truly, madly ,deeply… Screwed…!

It was evident that the creative professionals faced problems and they couldn’t network efficiently, but they still networked. They still collaborated and shared and got inspired. So the problem is the solution in itself… #gasp-out-loud…

What we mean is… The creative ecosystem is so cool and awesome that trying to zero in on that one all encompassing solution might win us the Nobel Prize…. So stay tuned;  while we file our patent.

The week with all the interview

This week we had millions of transcripts to type, ( well actually we had 10 but anyway million sounds cool) and it was a helluva job trying to type out everything without distorting the essence. Stay tuned for all the super exciting materials.

Some where in between all that we had a  workshop with Natalia on how using DMI tools and google scraper.

IMG-20131002-WA0000

We really learnt a lot about how the creative industry works and the data was especially interesting to analyse.

word_cloud

You can get a better view of Mizuki’s visualization of the word cloud below.

word_cloud

And here we have Enrico’s research visualization:

keywords_distribution

But, the highlight of the week had to be :

 

 

The Indian Lunch.

The week with all the confusion

The week started out with some really intense brainstorming sessions with the Design Thinkers group and Natalia. We tried to categorize our research question into How, Why and What…. Well, at-least we tried to. The results were quite interesting. Take a look:OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

And if that wasn’t enough; we had another mind blowing experience at the Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The whole agenda of the conference was for us to better understand the creative industries and creative professionals in Amsterdam. While we tried to interview a handful of professionals, we realized that maybe our research methodologies were still not upto the mark. So while we sit and rack our brains with the research, you guys enjoy this pic:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

The logo of our project

Three weeks passed since our project started and we have finally designed our logo; Our identity !!

 

creative_city_logo_22092013

 

The inspiration behind this was three folds:

1. These lines means canal and streets. Both of them are symbolic scenery of Amsterdam.

2. The figure expresses “C”, the initials of our project name. And this “C” consists of connected lines. Connection for creative industries and creative professionals is a part of our goal.

3. Red stands for the color of Amsterdam and Blue means a canal.

Letters:

We used a font of “Futura medium”. Futura is a sans-self typeface designed in Bauhaus. Futura means future and looks like clean, standardized, stylish. We think it is appropriate for the creative city.

 

Interview with Geert Lovink

On Friday the 13 of September the team had an interview with Geert Lovink.

Geert Lovink (born 1959, Amsterdam) is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School. From 2004-2013 he was an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Lovink earned his master’s degree in political science at the University of Amsterdam, holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland. (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/geert-lovink/biography/)

photo

It was a very interesting interview, we learned a lot about the creative industries and what to look out for in the future. We would like to thank Geert again for making time for us. Underneath you can find the transcript of the interview.

GeertInterviewAllparts