Innovate or die: productive anxiety in the post-digital art school

Description

This presentation will discuss Modual.org, an intensive 2-week pop up design studio, where 60 students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds worked collaboratively to develop projects on the theme of positive social change. The workshop was highly blended, with 75% of students taking part online, using Slack and Fuze. We will talk about how Modual provided a safe container in which we created the real anxiety and stress that occurs when trying to deliver projects in the creative industries. We will also discuss how the anxiety of ‘digital addiction’ was turned into an engine for good.

Takeaway

Participants will gain insights into how to design an interactive, agile educational experience relevant for current digital industry practice. They will see a demonstration of how instant messaging app Slack and web conferencing platform Fuze can work together to create a productive, creative and supportive blended learning environment.

Abstract

Collaboration, innovation, resilience, social conscience, self-motivation and positivity: these traits are highly desirable, even essential for practitioners working in the creative industries. As educators, how do we make sure that our graduates begin their working lives with these qualities as part of their professional tool-kits? This paper will describe and reflect on an innovative educational initiative exploring new ways of teaching professional creative practice in a post-digital world.

During an intensive two week workshop in January 2016, 60 students from a range of arts disciplines created their own 'pop-up design studios' to develop projects that aimed to effect positive social change. We created a safe container in which to push students to their limits and create the real anxiety and stress that occurs when trying to deliver projects in the creative industry.

The experience was highly blended, with 75% of students engaging online each day. Instant messaging app Slack and web conferencing platform Fuze were the core technologies of the workshop, enabling collaboration, communication and digital camaraderie. With 26,000 Slack messages, 16GB of files uploaded over the two weeks, and 70,000 minutes of Fuze meeting time, it was an intense, digitally mediated experience. The students’ feedback about their technological experience was extremely positive overall, with several participants saying that the workshop has changed their views of social technologies. We will share some of their feedback, but emphasize that rather than the tools, it was the peer environment and ‘start-up mindset’ enabled by Slack and Fuze that was transformative for students.

Participants were encouraged to use social media to increase the scope and reach of their projects, and did so with varying degrees of success. We will discuss how the workshop invested social technologies with a sense of purpose, showing students that platforms like Instagram and Twitter can be used in powerful and meaningful ways. We call this ‘positive digital addiction’; The hyped trance that is the norm of digital life can be an anxious one - constantly checking Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or other platforms is a familiar compulsion for many people. Tapping into this compulsion is part of Slack’s business model, but for educators, it offers a way to make what we are doing more attractive to students. Given that digital addiction has become the norm, we aimed to equip students to make conscious choices about social technologies, and turn a familiar kind of behavior into an engine for good.

We will share reflections on which aspects of the workshop worked well face to face and which online, and discuss how the participants experienced the social dynamics of the online and offline spaces differently; for some, the online space enabled them to be more confident and expressive. For others, face-to-face interactions were easier and more natural.

The paper will draw on student feedback, interviews with the workshop leader and staff team, industry experts and a researcher. Thus we hope to paint a rich picture of the experience and share insights that will be of value to the DeL community.