Results for articles with tag 'garyhirsch' (2 total)
12/02/2024 08:38:00 AM 
We have 5 tickets left for tomorrow's event!!!
The recent blog post on "Why agencies need labs" forced me to re-think the idea of our "Meet the Makers" conference in NYC on December 3rd.
It struck me that conference is the wrong term, it smacks of the past, boredom, lack of interaction, stale sandwiches, poor lighting and a lousy venue.
"Lab for the Day" is much better term and truer to what we plan to deliver.
Inside the corporate world, the mind is somewhat constrained by the realities of the endless "to do" list- space for thinking and inspiration is sometimes hard to come by.
Our "lab" is a chance to change that.
To explain more, our lab is about "Making" and is designed to provide inspiration from the makers themselves, those who have work directly with them and is all about about the act of making. The "lab" seeks to provide some rules, tools and instruction sets on how to "make" good things.
And in true lab style, we will be conducting a number of experiments.
Here are the key themes and speaker specifics.
Making and Re-Making Brands
Ashley Alsup, has spent time making-over Burger King at CPB and has some interesting thoughts on why corporate America needs to re-make itself and how to do it.
Mark Barden of Eat Big Fish is going to do an experiment with the audience to get them to help him think and re-think about a brand he's personally involved with.
Real Makers and Creators
Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, recently wrote the best-seller, "Making Ideas Happen", is going to tell us how we can all have best sellers.
Jim Wexler makes games for a living, he's going to be talking about the ingredients for good games and talk about how and why games are going invade and become a much bigger part of our lives.
Thomas Callahan left his job in the corporate art world to make bikes by hand going to tell us what he does and why he does it.
Time Magazine was one of the first magazines to re-make itself for the iPad, the most intriguing new media platform for years. Time's DW Pine is going to tell us how they did it with considerable constraints and what they are learning about how to evolve the experience.
For another take on the future of magazine publishing, Sarah Rich is going to be sharing lessons from the 48 hour magazine project, Longshot, which she describes as follows..
In May 2010, we conducted a two-day media experiment. 8,000 people signed up, 1,500 submissions came in, 35 editors selected 70 pieces to fill a 60-page magazine.
People liked it. We broke our distributor's sales records, received positive reviews in The New York Times, PBS, and the Village Voice, and won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. Here, we present selected work from the print edition of Issue Zero.
Frank Rose has spent the last two and a half years researching the past, present and future of storytelling for his new book, "The Art of Immersion". He's talked to James Cameron, the creators of Lost , the people behind Tron Legacy, and many others, about the evolving process of storytelling and what it's going to take to tell a compelling story in the C21st.
Gary Hirsch gets people "out of their shells" for a living and inspires them to develop great ideas with others. He's going to lead an experiment to get us to create a character, one of the most critical components of any story.
Creative Output and Opportunity
Finally, Piers Fawkes of PSFK is going to challenge the audience to create compelling ideas for a fascinating project for the United Nations.
We believe it will be a fascinating day and a "lab" in the true sense of the word.
If you are interested in registering for the few remaining places, you can find out more here.
We are thankful for the support of our media sponsor, PSFK
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/15/2010 08:42:17 AM (1)
(1) 
Jim Wexler of Brand Games, one of the speakers at our "Meet the Makers" event, recently pointed me to an interesting idea of of the University of Utrecht called Game Seeds. Basically, it's a way to inspire game designers to think differently about game design by forcing them to think about the actions of the character first, rather than the user.
As they explain..
"Game design usually starts off by defining the actions of the player(s). Christophe Berg at Metagama wondered if the reverse would be possible, and created a new and innovative game where the design of the characters (and their behaviour patterns) is the first step.
The result is a playful card game that confronts players with certain constraints (e.g. they don’t create a character from scratch) in order to foster their creativity, and pushing them out of their comfort zone by having to make do with the given elements.
Each Game Seeds card contains attributes and an action verb. By choosing some actions, the players start to define their characters behaviour… and by doing so create the range of actions that would be available to the end-user."
It's another reference to the importance of character in the creation of compelling content, a topic both Frank Rose and Gary Hirsch will be talking about at Influx's "Meet the Makers" (a "lab for a day") taking place at Milk Studios in NYC on December 3rd.
Information about the event can be found here.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Articles for tag garyhirsch (2 total).