Date: September 17th, 2008 16:00 to 18:30

Venue: Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer, South Bank Centre, London

Become a better digital designer in a unique one-to-one clinic with London’s top creatives.

Get input from the industry’s leading creative directors on your digital design work.

Learn how to make your work more creative and more saleable.

Work out the problems that are preventing you from making progress.

The iDesign 08 Portfolio Clinic produced by dynamo London as part of the London Design Festival, will bring together established and emerging digital design talent with the key objective of providing industry-led career development advice and guidance. The event will offer the attendees the chance to meet London-based digital media agencies and gain insight into portfolio presentation, best practice and what companies are looking for in potential employees.

The event is intended for digital media students, recent graduates and freelancers, aged 18 years old upwards.

Bring along your laptop in order to be able to show your work to our experts. Be aware that you may not be able to establish an internet connection.

This event is being offered for FREE, thanks to the kind support of skillset and the agencies taking part in the clinic. However, you must register in order to be guaranteed a place.

Registration: http://idesignportfolio.eventbrite.com/

Venue Details

Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer, South Bank Centre, London

Buses stop on Waterloo Bridge, in York Road, in Belvedere Road and in Stamford Street.

Nearest underground stations:
- Waterloo (Bakerloo, Northern, Jubilee and Waterloo & City lines)
- Embankment (Circle and District lines)

Nearest main line rail stations:
- Waterloo
- Waterloo East
- Charing Cross

Visit Transport for London’s Journey Planner

Where’s The Money? Sort out the hot trends from the overheated hype, interactive design wheat from the chaff. What technologies, disciplines and practices will make the biggest difference to your bottom line and your reputation?

3D to 5D. Digital design enters the worlds of film and architecture with the rise of 3D worlds, for both consumer and professional audiences. What are the special challenges created?

Future Interactive. Learn what you need to know about the slash/slash generation, emerging technology, global trends and their potential impact on interactive design in 2009 and beyond.

Design Showcase. See, meet, and touch, the latest and greatest stars in digital design in a showcase of inspiring, surprising and sometimes unsettling interactive work.

Adrian Shaughnessy

Consultant Creative Director

This is Real Art

Adrian Shaughnessy is a self-taught graphic designer.

Until recently he was creative director of Intro, the London-based design company he co-founded. He left in 2004 to pursue an interest in writing and consultancy, and is currently consultant creative director of This is Real Art, a ‘virtual’ design company.

Shaughnessy has written three books on design for music (the Sampler series) and edited a book of Intro work.

He writes for many of the leading design publications, and is a contributor to Design Observer and The Wire. He lectures extensively around the world, and in January 2006 he was appointed editor of a forthcoming magazine devoted to illustration.

http://www.thisisrealart.com/

Anne Longley

Digital Strategy Director

MediaEdge: CIA

Ann is Digital Strategy Director with MediaEdge: CIA, a global communications planning and implementation agency. She has been working in the digital arena for over 10 years

Her work has taken her to Africa where she helped set up an awardwinning social enterprise with support from Vodafone and to Bristol where she worked with Futurelab, a think-tank and ideas incubator focusing on digital innovation in education.

Currently based in London, Ann is heading up MEC’s Social Media Practice which entails listening and learning from what people are talking about online in order to improve relationships and ultimately organisational performance

Over the years, Ann written and presented on digital age dynamics and provided digital strategy consulting to clients including BT, Cadbury Schweppes, Chanel, Courtaulds Textiles, Glaxo Smith Kline, Lotus Cars, Reuters, Rio Tinto, Scottish Power, Swinton Insurance, Toshiba Europe, and Tate & Lyle.

http://www.mecglobal.com/

Brendan Dawes

Creative Director

Magnetic North

Brendan Dawes is Creative Director for magneticNorth, an interactive design group based in Manchester, UK. Over the years he’s helped to realise projects for a wide range of brands including Diesel, BBC, Fox Kids, Channel 4, Disney, Benetton, Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola.

Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 back in the early eighties, Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art both in his role leading the team at mN and on brendandawes.com, a personal space where he publishes random thoughts, toys and projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects.

Brendan regularly speaks at design conferences across the globe, has been featured in many magazine articles and books on interaction design as well as writing two solo works published by New Riders.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York featured Brendan’s "Cinema Redux" project as part of the ground breaking "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition in 2008

http://www.madebymn.co.uk/

Colin Jenkinson

Design Director

Cogapp

Colin Jenkinson is Design Director at Cogapp, an interactive company based in Brighton.

He has worked on projects for many of the company’s world-class clients, including MoMA, The British Museum, V&A, BBC and National Portrait Gallery. His experience and commitment to producing creative work of the highest quality has seen Cogapp’s design department successfully complete many ambitious projects, significantly raising the company’s profile in the field. Cogapp has been innovating for more than twenty years, and continues to push every brief it receives to produce beautiful, long-lasting work.

Colin graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1993, and has built a career spanning more than twelve years as a designer. He is passionate about innovative technology coupled with beautiful design that is accessible for everyone.

http://www.cogapp.com

Ximo Peris

Creative Director

Smoothe

Ximo Peris initially trained as an architect before moving into architectural visualization in 1997. He lived in Holland for 3 years, teaching at TU Delft and working at DPI Animation House before moving to London and joining Hayes Davidson.

Since 2000, Ximo has worked for Smoothe on a variety of large-scale film and animation projects across the UK and worldwide. Most notably Ximo liaised with the London 2012 bid team, delivering the CGI and managing an extensive team to create imagery and film sequences that very simply, yet effectively communicated the Olympic vision to a global audience.

Other projects Ximo has delivered include work for Mercedes Benz to launch the new Mercedes Benz World at Brooklands, Orchid House, (Lower mill estate, waterfront Landmark homes project in the Cotswolds), which featured in BBC2’s design show and several large scale productions that incorporated green screen studio shoots for projects all over the middle east.

Ximo is currently overseeing production on the next suite of communications to relate to the press for the Olympics and working on a large production in Kuwait promoting a mixed use district in central Kuwait City. Ximo regularly lectures and presents to students as well as architects on the language and techniques of visualization within the construction industry.

Over the years Ximo has developed skills not only within the design aspect of his role, but discovered a real passion for teaching and training. He has built his team at Smoothe from nothing up to 15 people and regularly takes on students to help with their development. This enables him to have clear and concise explanation techniques and constantly hone his advice on the best ways to encourage people both creatively and professionally.

Ximo and his teams work, regularly appears in noted industry journals such as the AJ, the BD and 3D World, and projects which he has been involved in have picked up awards at various events from the pretigious Big Chip Awards to the Imagina Awards. Ximo also wrote a chapter for Brian Smith’s “3ds Max 2008 Architectural Visualization-Beginner to Intermediate” that will be released on July the 31st. http://www.3dats.com/products.asp

Some other links that you might find of interest:

http://www.stroom.nl/paginas/pagina.php?pa_id=4422935

http://www.mundosdigitales.org/english/noticias/noticia03.htm

http://dmvc.vismasters.com/speakers.html

http://www.smoothe.com

Some YouTube videos of the presentations should appear here soon. Podcasts are already available. They are also available through iTunes here.

Simon Waterfall - our conference chair - laid out the shape of the day and explained why this discussion was so important. Simon’s rigorous time-keeping, intelligent contributions and withering put-downs kept the day running smoothly and we’d like to offer a virtual cheer for his efforts here (Yay!).

Tom Campbell - head of creative industries at the LDA - explained why the digital design industry is so important. Eight percent of this country’s business revenues can be directly linked to the creative industries, potentially outstripping financial services as our most important export. This segment’s growth is double the rate of the rest of UK industry at the moment. There’s still a lot of work to do, though, and Tom wants to hear from potential contributors in need of funding or other assistance.

David Kester from the Design Council explained why it’s so important that digital, interactive design receives the credit it’s due. The creative industries as a whole are burgeoning, but it’s interactive that leads the pack when it comes to solid financial growth: the London design scene, in particular, is humming. While policy and design might seem like opposites, it’s the Design Council’s job to put those two things together.

The second session of the day emerged as something of a head-to-head. Psychologist Dr. Nick Baylis explained how our love-affair with technology might be endangering far more important parts of our lives. Are we spreading ourselves too thin by taking on virtual friendships when hugging and kissing our ‘real-life’ friends would make us healthier? Baylis believes we’re spreading ourselves too thin by attempting to maintain dozens (hundreds?) of online friendships. His nemesis - arguably - came in the form of BBC technology writer Bill Thompson, who argued that technology was innocent. The Internet is giving 14-year-old girls (and the rest of us) a freedom and flexibility that not even Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, experienced. What followed was certainly ‘healthy debate’: technophiles raged against the suggestion that their lives were less full or their relationships more shallow because they chose to conduct those relationships through online media. Our speakers, on the other hand, ended up agreeing with each other on some significant points!

The first panel session of the day was pretty diverse, but united around the theme of how design and technology is affecting the lives of everyone, not just a digital elite. Toby Barnes, who heads up Pixel-Lab, explained the state of play in computer games.  He argued that more is not always better. Commentators on this scene often obsess about the degree of graphical detail in games, for example, but there are far more important challenges around involving the mainstream in gaming, especially when it comes to women. Benn Achileas of Neoco spoke about the elements of good and evil in digital marketing. His main point was that the vast amount of content on the Web means that marketeers need to offer real value in order to compete with the free material that is readily available. Gerry Griffin spoke about the difficulty experienced by people trying to educate in the current climate. He had the modesty to avoid talking about his own product, Skill Pill, which might alleviate that situation - it’s mobile learning in short segments, delivered through your mobile phone.

Helen Keegan gave a great overview of the mobile scene as it stands, with a keen insight that while location-based services appear to be the flavour of the month, context-based services offer considerably more promise. The information we would like to receive standing at Piccadilly Circus at noon on Tuesday is considerably different to what we want to hear about at 9pm on Friday night, for example.

During the breaks, thanks to our good friends at Cybersalon, there was the opportunity to see some of the more avant garde elements of the digital design world with contributions from design projects based at Channel 4, Cambridge University, Sennep, Troika, Someth;ng, Proboscis, Fijuu and Igloo. However, the lunchtime presentation from former pop idol and now major music theorist Martyn Ware with contributions from SHowstudio, Jason Bruges Studio, Newangle and Fabrica was very much in danger of stealing the show. The feedback from that session was extremely positive and we’ll be approaching Martyn with a view to a standalone session very shortly.

The afternoon consisted of two panel debates, united under the banner of ‘the design response’. Given the fragmented, multi-media world that people today inhabit - the morning panel’s theme - what are designers to do? Clive Grinyer from mobile operator Orange discussed the extent to which designers need to take leadership on product design. If products are designed for ‘normal people’ and designers are (loosely) normal people then their insight into what works and what doesn’t ought to take precedence over marketing managers obsessed with average revenue per user and the feature-count on the side of the box. Grinyer spoke of the debt of responsibility designers carry: while he’s an advocate of knowing the audience in order to inform a design, handing responsibility over to that audience in the form of voting or user-created donations seemed to him an abrogation of that duty. Elliot Jay Stocks came from the opposite side of that debate. He talked about how he’d engaged his (former) audience in the re-design of Carson Systems’ site, blogging and discussing changes and new ideas with users in minute detail.Their insight - both positive and negative - had allowed the design to more properly respect the views, tastes and ideas of the community that used the site. Also, how the internet designer bugbears of usability, accessibility, standards and guidelines might also be our friends.

Two case studies of interactive design in the public sphere followed. Steve Flaherty gave an outline of his company, Starsight. Starsight is solar-powered streetlighting that contains an integrated wi-fi hub that is powered by the same battery. Aimed at the developing world, the design considerations included the need for variable ingredients for the construction of the lights, so that they could be made from local resources in any part of the world, and the ways in which they could be made secure - in places where any metal has significant worth - by feeding into the community through their educational contribution (internet access, light for tradespeople working at night) and thus becoming protected by the communities it is placed into.

Channel 4 commissioner Adam Gee described the bigartproject. Members of the public take pictures of public art using their mobile phones and upload it to the website, to be shared with other contributors and viewers. The project is destined to be a short television series next year and is perhaps unique in the way it is ‘crowdsourcing’ the subject matter of those programmes.

Our final session challenged four leading interactive designers to present the work of another designer who had inspired them. Nat Hunter presented the work of Yugo Nakamura, from his earliest web toys to his engagingly toy-like work for clothes store Uniqlo. Tom Roope discussed the work of Hans Bernhard, a digital design interventionist whose work embraces the concept that design might not be about appearances, but ideas. Berhard has created interventions such as voteauction.com (no longer around, it seems), which hit news headlines and challenged ideas about the sponsorship of political campaigns in the States. Eva Rucki from Troika talked about the need to re-introduce subjectivity into technology if we want to engage people, with examples like the Newton Virus and the Cat Piano. Finally, Malcolm Garrett presented the work of Cogapp for the MoMA gallery: not a flashy piece of work, but exhibiting real genius when it comes to information design and recognition of what users really want and need when they approach a gallery site.

Photos by Darrell Berry, BigShinyThing.com.

Emergence
During the conference lunch break, between 1.15-2.15pm, Martyn Ware presents Emergence - a showcase of innovation in interactivity and digital media…
Martyn Ware is best known as a seminal 80s pop icon and co-founder of The Human League and Heaven 17. However, through the Illustrious Company - his recent creative venture with Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure - and his current convergent art project, the Future Of Sound, Martyn has been working with and and showcasing some of the latest  developments in convergent media and emergent technologies. For Creatively Digital he invites a selection of practitioners at the forefront of interactivity and creativity to share and discuss their work - and guests include:
Ross Phillips - Head of Interactive at SHOWstudio - an online fashion broadcasting company committed to pioneering, live fashion media and led by photographer Nick Knight.
Daniel Hirschman - an interactive media artists currently based at the Jason Bruges Studio.
Andy Cameron - Creative Director of Interaction Design at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre.
David Bickerstaff - a London based artist and the Creative Director at Newangle, a multimedia agency who produce video and immersive experiences for the culture and heritage sector.

Simon Waterfall Bsc (Hons) MA RCA FRSA BAFTA D&AD RDI

Simon has been a creative director since he was sixteen, still at school, his company wrote the first computer games for Commodore 64 and Amigas, he still remembers when computers came with soldering irons. Unlucky enough for him his chosen profession in the Digital arena moves so fast that every thing he learns today is dated tomorrow.

After studying his Masters in Industrial design at the Royal College of Art in 1994 he co-founded Deepend design which grew as the industry embraced digital. It blossomed to 350 staff in nine offices round the world and became the number one creative agency in the UK for three years running and number one in the world in 2001.

In 2001 he with five partners set up Poke which was a vehicle to challenge everything that they had learned, practiced and preached. It become the number one digital studio in the UK in 2006 and is part of the advertising company “Mother”. In September 2007 he will become the youngest and first Digital President of the D&AD and in November will also be awarded with the title of Royal Designer of Industry, the highest honour in Design.

Martyn Ware

Martyn Ware is best known as a seminal 80s pop icon and co-founder of The Human League and Heaven 17. However, through the Illustrious Company - his recent creative venture with Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure - and his current convergent art project, the Future Of Sound, Martyn has been working with and and showcasing some of the latest  developments in convergent media and emergent technologies.

Bill Thomson

New media pioneer Bill Thompson has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. Formerly head of new media at Guardian newspapers, he writes a weekly column, the BillBoard, for BBC News online and a monthly feature for new net users for BBC Webwise. He makes occasional contributions to other publications both on and offline including The Register, The New Statesman, Focus and The Guardian. He appears weekly on ‘Digital Planet’ on the BBC World Service and occasionally on other BBC radio and television programmes. He is the editor of w4mp, the website for people working for MPs.

providing the main digital focus for the London Design Festival. The

conference examines the impact of digital interactive media on all of

our lives. Bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and

thinkers from online, mobile, film, games and tv, the delegation will

discuss how our collective digital future will pan out, and the

importance of good design principles and practices for both social

and economic benefit. iDesign: design for life is presented by dynamo

London in association with NMK and AIG, with support from the LDA.