What can managers do for creativity? : brokering creativity in the creative industries

'Creativity' has become a fashionable term in the contemporary managerial and political lexicon, signalling generalised approval in education, business and the arts. In Britain, 'creative industries' has replaced 'cultural industries' as the umbrella term for artistic and cultural production and distribution, and 'creativity' has been incorporated into the national tourism brand . In business, managers and academics use 'creativity' to indicate an organisation's capacity for innovation, flexibility and autonomy; these 'creative' values are seen to have replaced operational efficiency and strategic planning as the primary source of 'competitive advantage' in business. In education, creativity has spread beyond its original context of arts based subjects and is used to refer to a generalised ability to solve problems and generate new concepts across the entire curriculum. The term creativity has become so all-embracing as to lose any clearly defined meaning and value. Ask any organisation, industry or individual whether they would ever admit to being 'uncreative' and the corruption of meaning is only too apparent. It seems that we are all creative now. Creativity has become both the language and currency of today's knowledge economy

Language as a disruptive technology: Abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind

A growing body of evidence suggests that cognition is embodied and grounded. Abstract concepts, though, remain a significant theoretical chal- lenge. A number of researchers have proposed that language makes an important contribution to our capacity to acquire and employ concepts, particularly abstract ones. In this essay, I critically examine this suggestion and ultimately defend a version of it. I argue that a successful account of how language augments cognition should emphasize its symbolic properties and incorporate a view of embodiment that recognizes the flexible, multi- modal and task-related nature of action, emotion and perception systems. On this view, language is an ontogenetically disruptive cognitive technology that expands our conceptual reach

The Performance of Light: Exploring the Impact of Natural Lighting in the New UMass School of Performance

This thesis explores how natural light can be integrated with built form to create a “performance of light” in architecture. Lighting conditions from a contemporary dance piece, as well as other architectural precedents, were studied, and aspects adapted into the building’s design. In addition to designing theatrical effects of light, the classroom and administrative spaces were designed to take advantage of natural light. Daylight studies were used to inform glazing design and material selection to stay within illuminance thresholds in the spaces. This project is responding to the facility needs of the campus of UMass Amherst where the program of the dance, theater and music departments are stressed for space, are operating in below-average facilities, and are separated, making collaboration difficult. The programmatic concept driving this design purposely mixes offices, classrooms and rehearsal spaces, creating overlap and collaborative opportunities. The use of mass timber was also an important aspect of the buildings’ design. Wood brings along many benefits, such as lower embodied energy, carbon sequestration, better thermal properties, and an increase in the perceived quality of architectural spaces. The volume of wood used in the building’s structural system was run through a life-cycle analysis to determine the overall carbon footprint, in relation to the amount of steel and concrete used

Pacific beach communities of the nineteenth century

The historical study of areas such as the Pacific Islands, where the indigenous peoples have been in contact with Europeans for all or most of the period covered by documentary records, has undergone a marked change of emphasis during recent years. Once visualized as essentially a branch of Imperial history, the focus has now moved to the islands themselves; to studies of the change and development which have occurred in the Pacific under the stimulus of introduced and indigenous cultural forces; political, economic, religious and social. The pioneering work in the reorientation of Pacific history was Professor J.W. Davidson’s Ph.D. thesis submitted to Cambridge University in 1942, entitled, 'European Penetration of the South Pacific, 1779-1842’, which for the first time detailed the advent and activities of early Europeans in the South Pacific and analyzed the consequential changes effected in the island communities

Including the urban heat island in spatial heat health risk assessment strategies: a case study for Birmingham, UK

Background Heatwaves present a significant health risk and the hazard is likely to escalate with the increased future temperatures presently predicted by climate change models. The impact of heatwaves is often felt strongest in towns and cities where populations are concentrated and where the climate is often unintentionally modified to produce an urban heat island effect; where urban areas can be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to integrate remotely sensed urban heat island data alongside commercial social segmentation data via a spatial risk assessment methodology in order to highlight potential heat health risk areas and build the foundations for a climate change risk assessment. This paper uses the city of Birmingham, UK as a case study area. Results When looking at vulnerable sections of the population, the analysis identifies a concentration of "very high" risk areas within the city centre, and a number of pockets of "high risk" areas scattered throughout the conurbation. Further analysis looks at household level data which yields a complicated picture with a considerable range of vulnerabilities at a neighbourhood scale. Conclusions The results illustrate that a concentration of "very high" risk people live within the urban heat island, and this should be taken into account by urban planners and city centre environmental managers when considering climate change adaptation strategies or heatwave alert schemes. The methodology has been designed to be transparent and to make use of powerful and readily available datasets so that it can be easily replicated in other urban areas

Playful networks: measuring, analysing and understanding the social effects of game design

Games are fundamentally a social activity. The effects of this foundation can be felt at every level - from the social negotiation of rules, through cooperation and collaboration between players during the game, to the effects of relationships and social status on play. Social effects can change the way the game is played, but the mechanics of games can also affect the patterns of social behaviours of the players. The arrangement of game mechanics and interfaces together defines a ``social architecture". This architecture is not limited to directly social mechanics such as trading and messaging - the game design itself has a holistic effect on social activity. This dissertation frames games around these social aspects, and focuses on analysis of the patterns that emerge from these playful interactions. Firstly, a model is defined to understand games based on the social effects of play, and these effects explored based on the varying impact they have on the play experience. Mischief and deviance is also investigated as forces that challenge these social effects in and around games. Based on interaction data gathered from server logs of experimental social games, social network analysis is used as a tool to uncover the macroscopic social architectures formed by each design. This allows the use of quantitative methods to understand the nature of the relationship between game design and the social patterns that emerge around games in play. Key findings confirm that social activity follows a heavy-tailed distribution - a small number of ``hardcore" players are responsible for a disproportionately large number of interactions in the community of the game. Further than this, the connections between active hardcore and the rest of the player base show that without the hardcore users, the community of games as ``small worlds" would collapse, with large numbers of players being separated from the society within a game. The emergence of grouping behaviour is investigated based on the effect of social feedback. Following findings of social psychology in non-game environments, evidence is provided that highlights the effect of socio-contextual feedback on players forming strongly bound tribal groups within games. The communities formed through the play of games can be described in terms of network graphs - webs of interactions flowing around a network of players. Social network analyses of social games show the emergence of patterns of reciprocity, clustering and tribal behaviours among the players. The evidence also shows that the collections of game mechanics, or social architectures, of games have a predictable effect on the wider social patterns of the players. As such, this suggests games can be specifically engineered for social effects based on changes in the patterns of interactions, and issues around mechanical or interface elements can be identified based on anomalies observed in the network graph of player interactions. Together, this dissertation provides a link between the theoretical ideas around social play to the measurable effects of social behaviours of players within games. It proves that game designs, as mechanical systems, have a demonstrable effect on the social patterns of play, and that these patterns can be examined and used to engineer better game designs for the benefit of social experience

Indigenous Protest in Colonial Sāmoa: The Mau Movements and the Response of the London Missionary Society, 1900-1935.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017