Collective Digital Innovation: Integrating The Expertise Of Multiple Specialist Stakeholders Including Young Homeless People In The Creation Of Mobile Apps For Social Change

This paper reports on a collaborative action research project which sought to combine the knowledge and expertise of multiple specialist organisations with the understanding and insight of young homeless people in order to find digital ways of supporting them before they became homeless. We discovered that adopting a collective approach to the demands of digital innovation enabled us to develop precise hypotheses and resulted in mobile apps for young people targeted at specific moments of emotional and practical need. The action research project is reflexively analysed in seeking to understand this process of collective digital innovation

Thinking as drawing

‘Drawings can dismantle or disregard material and weight, providing insight into the unattainable’ Thomas Mayne ( p.79)Drawing begins in the unconscious, a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious in which things are worked out and found. This paper explores what, as artists, we can reveal about sensory experience by taking this non-verbal means of communication and constraining it through the problematic context of representation. In our work we use drawing as a vehicle of construction and recognise the potential for drawing to activate and reconstruct memory in the production of new ideas. Drawing is discussed as an occupied and per formative place of thinking, arriving through gesture, multi-sensory and often material experiences.Building on recent work, in which conventional drawing processes were applied to the development of an academic paper (‘Dilemmas and Practices’, ‘Telling Places’ Conference, Dec 2007 UCL), we investigate the hidden spaces of our own methodologies as we tried to exchange sensory information through the constraints of technology, speech and virtual communication. We reveal the ways in which textural experience became suppressed and the extent to which shared references. (memory) built through previous sensory exploration, enabled new ideas to emerge. In conclusion we reflect on how the slippage of technology both restricted and enabled new ideas and how the use of frameworks from varied disciplinary knowledge: ‘creating a good black from drawing in fine art practice and Joharis Window from Communication Management, revealed hidden aspects of sensory experience and provided a new direction within the practice

Dilemmas and practices

What can be revealed if we open a process which is normally closed to view, exposing it to vulnerabilities and misinterpretation? To investigate the notion of hidden spaces we decided to treat the development of an abstract as a practical collaborative drawing project. Our aim was to use drawing as the site of an active research project and look at the relationship between processes of thinking and the state of drawing. Within this methodology it was our intention to use drawing as a process in which concepts are formed, where an idea is in constant flux, in a space of experiment and change. This subsequent paper ‘Dilemmas and practices’ deconstructs and represents the artist’s process in the context of the Research Spaces Conference – Telling Places: Narrative and Identity in Art and Architecture, Bartlett/Slade U.C.L. December 2007. It questions our methodologies both in relation to the constraint of abstract writing and the conventions of conference presentation. The narrative is a process of re-tracking, of loss, of choices in relationship to the challenge posed to us. Outcomes relate both to our specific practice, where we actively seek to search through difference and open up gaps, and the context of research space. We conclude that the process of drawing aids recognition of what we need to understand better in the quest for something to become known