04 Unlecture

Well, well, well! My reflection on the Unlecture is being posted a mere one day after it was actually held!

It was our first symposium! Brian’s back! A variety of questions were posed and discussed! Many things to celebrate this week, and it was great to see the tutors in their element – listening to smart people muse on subjects they know a great deal about is pretty cool, and not something we get to witness all that often.

Didn’t really understand the Actor-network theory, and will definitely have to do some research of my own into it, but I enjoyed the discussion over the future of the media industry, and the relevance of speculative thinking, or forecasting, in this field. I had linked the whole ‘design fiction’ concept with the future of the industry, so it was good to hear an in-depth discussion on this same point. I agreed with the general consensus in the room, that while attempting to forecast the future is never going to work, a complete ignorance of the future’s possibilities is also not the answer, and we should be engaged in a mixture of both methods. Looking to the past and present to develop good work, while speculating as to how our skills may be employed in the future.

I also found Adrian’s description of Google’s ‘development day’ to be really interesting. I’d heard about this before, actually – Adrian said it was the only model he knew of, but I think that there are video game companies who employ the same concept in their workplace. Bethesda actually gave its employees a week to develop anything they wanted, and the results can be viewed here. A lot of these results actually ended up in DLC. It seems like a fantastic way to encourage creativity in an environment that emphasises rules and regulations.

Anywho, looking forward to more Unlectures!