In our previous post, we looked at some specific case studies of narrative-centered learning environments that helped us in our projects.

For a few months now, our small (and heterogeneous) team has been inventing a new narrative-based “design” educational model adapted to the age of digital information.

As we mentioned many times, we love the idea of community. We find that it is one of the best places to learn, understand who we are and what kind of attitudes we have (or miss) within a group, find others that share the same visions and ideas and with whom to collaborate with in the future.

A community in which to mix on-line and off-line activities. A place for participants to get to know each other, share references, play together and influence others through a series of hands-on exercises.

A community in which to play games. A network created by game moderators (teachers) and players (students) completing missions (exercises) together.

A community in which to test one’s social influence. A place to explore the potentials of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. A place for learning to communicate and transfer knowledge in the most efficient way.

A community publishing daily through its own social media accounts the players’ most interesting works, the most “liked”, the most commented…

A community as a source of interest and reference to others. A place in which participants become coauthors of an important collection of content and material.

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Design Royale

Design Royal was an experimental project for the 2011 Milan Design week: an on-line workshop, party-in-progress and mind-boggling night. An ongoing project made by people from all over the world and built through human relationships. It consisted of a pop-up event-exhibition involving 14 days of digital work using social media (facebook, twitter, flickr), 14 days of physical work in Milan hideaways and 5 days of play, work and games on-the-spot. All of this for one night at the secret garden, a magical hidden space where everyone was invited.

http://design-royale.com/
@d_royale on Twitter
design-royale on Facebook
Videoleaks on Vimeo

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Whoami

We have been planning and developing an on-line / off-line game, open-source and auto-generative school system.

A school model that can be multiplied on different themes (design, fashion, photography, cooking). An Italian-based global network able to mix digital and traditional tools to connect a worldwide design community.

Whoami’s primary objective is to enable the players to increase their design-related skills through a series of practical activities and get them to understand which kind of designer they are thanks to the Whoami social influence algorithm that calculates each player’s strength, wisdom, charisma and amability. In the digital world, facebook is where the game takes place, twitter is where interesting content from the game is published daily and tumblr is where the players’ works are archived. In the physical world, players meet and build things together during workshops set in Milan or at Abadir in Catania.

http://www.whoami.it/
@WHOAMIgame on Twitter
whoamigame on Facebook
#WHOAMIgame on Instagram

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Design 101 (or design basics)

We participated to a competition for Iversity in which we had to propose a course via MOOC (Massive Open On-line Course). We are quite happy because it was announced this morning that we were one of the 10 winners!

Our course, which will start in fall 2013 consists of a journey into contemporary design through 101 exercises.

In this course, the student transforms his everyday life into 101 projects. In every given exercise, he is immersed into a particular subject’s universe through a series of references. Proposed films, books, websites, music to help him develop informed criticism on the certain task he needs to accomplish.

The content shared and published through social media is redirected and reorganized into a digital archive available to all. At the end of the course, students have the possibility to print this archive into a book in which they are a coauthor.

You can watch the trailer here: https://www.iversity.org/courses/design-101

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Ceramic Futures

This is our new project which is starting today…

Ceramic Futures: from Poetry to Science Fiction is a 2 month design challenge between the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) Rome, Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) and Abadir Academy. Students from these schools will explore imaginative products and future contexts for ceramics by combining traditional mediums of design to an online diary connected to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

http://www.ceramicfutures.com/
@CeramicFutures on Twitter
CeramicFutures on Facebook
#CeramicFutures on instagram

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Stefano Mirti
@stefi_idlab (on Twitter and Instagram)
www.facebook.com/stefano.mirti.3

3^rd Open Global Systems Science Conference

Beijing, October 2014

First Announcement and Call for Papers

 

In 2014, it will be time for GSS to go global. Therefore, the 3^rd Open Global Systems Science Conference will take place in October 2014 in Beijing.

Moreover, there will be GSS initiatives in Europe

–      including an annual CONNECT-GSS conference by projects financed by the EU’s DG CONNECT –,

in the US

–      including a major complex adaptive systems conference with GSS as its main theme at Arizona State University –

and more. In particular, we will strengthen the links to the complexity science community.

The precise date of the 3^rd open conference will be established on the basis of the constraints of people willing to play an active role in preparing it. A preparatory workshop will take place in Beijing, October 2013. This workshop will lead to a joint journal paper presenting GSS to the broader scientific community. Whoever is interested in participating in that workshop is kindly invited to express their interest in a

–       mail to: 3rdOpenGSS@global-systems-science.org

–       together with a 200 word abstract of an intended contribution to the 3^rd Conference.

–       The deadline for abstracts in view of the preparatory workshop is September 30, 2013.

–       Abstracts for conference contributions are also warmly welcome from people who do not want to participate in the preparatory workshop.

–       An extended deadline for abstracts submitted after the workshop will be announded at the end of the workshop.

The preliminary scientific committee consists of Guido Caldarelli (IMT Lucca), Carlo Jaeger (GCF Berlin and BNU Beijing), Antoine Mandel (Sorbonne Paris) and Ye Qian (BNU Beijing). It will be expanded after the preparatory workshop.

For a start, the structure of the 2014 conference will be based on the synthesis paper “GSS: Towards a Research Program for Global Systems Science”. That structure will be modified on the basis of the discussions at the preparatory workshop.

One interesting possibility would be to look more closely into the relation between the global narratives provided by scientists and narratives provided by artists. To make this a serious intellectual exercise, we could invite philosophers currently developing a fictionalist stance in the philosophy of mathematics (see e.g. Mary Leng’s Mathematics and Reality, Oxford UP 2010).

As usual, the debate leading to the 3d Open Global Systems Science Conference will take place on the GSS blog (www.global-systems-science.org).