DESIS-UK Workshop: Public Service Collaboration-Opportunities and ChallengesEzio Manzini, (Founder, DESIS Network) Eduardo Staszowski, (Director, Parsons New York DESIS Lab) Mat Hunter, (Chief Design Officer at the Design Council)

We were invited to foster new and support existing social innovation projects among public services, and identify current challenges and projects for future collaborations.  The ‘marketplace’ set-up offered an opportunity to share research interests and resources with a wider audience and find partners to collaborate with.  The approach was very open and sociable.  We each designed a poster containing a short description of individual ‘challenges’ and what we would like help achieving.  Each had a 2 minute pitch to groups that circulated around the room having the chance for everyone to know about each-other projects. I realise that for my own  project I should have explained this differently, or not put forth the challenge that I did.  I have come to realise that when explaining the case-study aspect of my work, people seem to focus that it is about food, when its really about communication. Overall, it was a great opportunity to informally discuss my project.  I received good feedback from a number of people.  I found particular links with two other PhD students: 1) student looking into collecting an overview of perspectives of social innovation and transforming these into a visual representation. 2) student looking into urban development and participatory design.

World Economic Forum I attended an informal workshop organised by the World Economic Forum, as representative of independent creators, to discuss Norms and Values in Digital Media and The New Era.  As this is private WEF research, I won't share here the content of the event.

As a designer, I feel it is important to create opportunities for the different stakeholders involved in the creative industries to discuss the issue of open-source content, sharing ideas, and the creative economy.  I was there representing the creative community, as someone active in the social media sphere, who creates and shares content online.  This is a grey area that involves much discussion on the evolution of creative rights and licensing as we are yet to know how it will evolve in the future...  We can all agree that the current systems are not designed for contemporary platforms existent and the future of technology, although, useful open source resources are becoming standard use such as Creative Commons.