In a Nutshell
At RMIT University's GEElab, we are researching how game design thinking can positively affect and alter architecture & urbanism, mobility, popular media, storytelling, engagement, other sciences as well as society itself.
GEElab's Steffen recently spoke and mentored at X Media Lab: Global Media Ideas 2012 at the Sydney Opera House, where the latest GEElab project www.network-detox.com was launched, a satirical website and hoax detox practice that, by making the familiar strange, critically comments on digital culture at large by the way of entertainment. Alongside the website, Steffen presented GEElab projects and experimented with comedic roleplay, exercises - see the image where "patients" practice, Qigong-style, "Turn Off Your Device" - and with Network detoxification tablets (sic!) that had been specially manufactured for the occasion. Of course, they were placebos.
Global Media Ideas is XML's annual international summit as part of Vivid Sydney - a festival of light, music and ideas. XML: Global Media Ideas consisted of two parts: the Pro Day Conference on 8 June 2012 (General Admission) for which 300 seats were available; and then the Lab itself (9 – 10 June) during which selected digital media businesses and project teams worked one-on-one with the mentors – "gaining high-level elite personal consultation and entering into an impeccable international network," as XML's website put it:-). It was truly inspiring and fun, Steffen says. Other XML mentors included, for example:
- Michael Naimark - World authority on Media Arts and R&D; Original design team for MIT Media Laboratory; Founding Member of the Atari Research Lab, the Apple Multimedia Lab and Lucasfilm Interactive (now Lucas Arts) (Los Angeles)
- Ian Charles Stewart - Co-founder of WiReD Magazine; Serial Entrepreneur; Venture Philanthropist; Investor in Media, Sports, Entertainment, the Arts and Education; (Beijing)
- Corvida Raven - Founder of SheGeeks; One of_ Time Magazine's 25 Facebook Profiles You Should Subscribe to Right Now_; Formerly Ted Conversations Community Catalyst and Intel Advisor (New York)
- Warren Coleman - Co-writer & Co-director Happy Feet; Co-writer Happy Feet 2 (Sydney)
- Bonnie Shaw - Serial Social Innovator; Founder of Snap-Shot-City; Director of Strategy at iStrategyLabs where she works with Disney, Microsoft, Intel, GE, Nasdaq, Audi, amongst others (Washington DC)
- Colin Griffith - Director Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI) (Sydney)
- Mark Pesce - Co-Inventor of VRML, judge on The New Inventors, a nationally televised television program in Australia, and author of The Playful World.
The slides for Steffen's talk "Network Detox: Connected Futures In Play" can be found here.
