Guy Claxton gave a truly thoughtful keynote. Creative-Mindedness: When Technology Helps and When It Hinders. He pointed out that formal education as it’s currently instituted systematically destroys the creative habits of mind. In response to a question on how precisely it does this, he referred to his chart of those habits. For example, one creative habit is inquisitiveness, which is damaged by the focus in structured curricula on requiring students to study questions they have not asked. Another is creative stamina & resilience (exemplified by Einstein, who said that it was not so much that he was especially clever, but more that he stayed with problems for longer). This is damaged by the scheduling of classes that require every problem to be solved in an hour.

The papers continued through the next few days – but there were also a  lot of excellent posters. Apparently as there was only a single track for papers, the organisers could not accept some submissions that were actually very good, so those people were encouraged to resubmit as posters. Which meant that the quality of work in the posters was pretty impressive.

Of course, it’s Creativity and Cognition so there was also room for art – my favourite works were Matt Ruby’s Sympathy for Pacman and Jack Stenner & Patrick LeMieux’s Open House: Interaction as Critical Reflection. To top it off, the conference was held at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and we were permitted an after-hours tour. As well as some tragically unmoving Calder mobiles (which really don’t belong in temperature controlled rooms), there on a wall was perhaps my favourite artwork of all time: Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved. Yes, you have to know the story for this one to work properly.

So finally: a few people asked for my slides, so after the break I’ll embed a Quicktime movie of them. Thank you everyone at C&C 2011, and especially the erstwhile organisers for providing such a great atmosphere for collaboration and creativity.

• Tim McLaughlin – Texas A&M University
• Tommy Burnette – Lucasfilm Singapore
• Tim Fields – Certain Affinity
• Jonathan Gibbs – DreamWorks Animation
• David Parrish – Reel FX Creative Studios

People have different communication styles: some do well face to face, others work better remotely – perhaps they are better at written communication, or on webcam.

If we’re in the same room, it’s easier to correct misapprehensions: “splinters become much bigger wounds”. We form tribes, so be careful to make it one tribe instead of us (here) vs them (remote). During time apart, misunderstandings can snowball.

It’s important to have diffusers in the group, reminding people to chill out.

Watch out for “the game of telephone” – you have to be able to talk peer to peer. Not only management talking to each other.

Time zone difference can work very positively – problems solved for you while you sleep. But it’s harder to collaborate as well, and work doesn’t fit neatly into discrete 8-hour chunks. Sometimes there is a specialist – only one person can fix the problem – so if they’re unavailable in an emergency it’s a problem.

Right now our production pipeline has som many restrictions based on how the elements plug in, and you can’t go back up the chain very easily. This inhibits non-linear collaboration.

There is a tension between the creative process and the factory line method for producing work. But the assembly line is efficient when you have a lot of work to do. Efficiency drives the process.

I don’t like the word pipeline – because it doesn’t just flow one way, particularly early in the show. Late in the show things tend to settle down, you don’t need as much collaboration because everyone knows what they’re doing. It’s a piece of the communication issue

We have groups where everyone is in one place and one person is not, because they’re the right person for the job. When we do that it’s because their creative skill outweighs the difficulty of working with them across distance.

Q. I’m searching for this holy grail online collaboration tool – where does all your stuff live, how do you coordinate all this stuff?

A. As a small factory, communication seems to work OK, asset management is harder.
A. As a large shop, we have entirely custom asset management and it works well; communication is now the problem.
A. When you work with multiple clients, it’s different every time – for every type of collaboration we build a custom tool set. important to document the process.

Especially when focusing on creative work, you have to balance the rules with how the artist wants to work, so you don’t overconstrain that artist – it’s a balancing act. The age-old problem: how do I schedule creativity?

We can’t separate disciplines – lighting department does rendering, compositing, colour correction etc. Handoff is difficult – you need to keep it alive.

Does distance collaboration make our workplaces friendlier to women and ethnic minorities? Don’t know if it’s better or worse, but it’s an open door.

It’s good for the film industry if films are not all made in California – a wider variety of kinds of people will bring richness to the work. People who choose to live elsewhere can still be part of the process.

In our studio in Singapore, we have more than forty countries represented.

Distant collaboration forces us into greater cultural sensitivity.

So far this is just beginning, but perhaps it is a precursor to a new, more thoroughly distributed future.

At Lucasfilm, we double up on supervisors – make sure there is one at each location so artists can get immediate feedback.

With a properly shared vision, I can give more people the power to make approvals.

Dreamworks: trusted luitenants are important. If something is approved, but then goes up the chain to the Director and back down to be redone, that’s no good. This is part of trust.

Q. Is there a minimum cell size? How independent can cells be?

A. The minimum size is a function of the artist. With some artists, the minimum size is 1. But not everyone works best alone.

A. I’m not going to build a light farm in a location with two guys.

A. But maybe data transfer speed increases will change that.

A. How invested people are in the goals of the company has a big effect – people can be more independent if they’re more invested.

In architecture school, I learned how to give and accept review feedback. We need to figure out how to learn these same skills for remote collaboration.

Cultural differences will always exist – and you want them, they bring different approaches to problems. Everyone needs to feel that it’s “our project”. It’s important to fully uderstand cultural differences.

In some countries “I’m not sure” means “hell no”. Managers need to have some maturity and worldliness.

Universities must make cross-disciplinary groups, and must continue with the dreaded group grade, because that’s the world we all live in. The product succeeds or fails as a whole.

Sometimes you need to have times when you’re all in a room with no time limit, to work until something is creatively resolved. It’s *hard* (though not impossible) to do that at a distance.

Q. Donna Cox, NCSA: Can you describe any novel proprietary collaborative software you’ve created? Do you collaborate with scientists ever?

Tommy Burnette: We have a close relationship with Stanford, we have students from there who are pretty much on staff.

Tim Fields: In the games business we often hire PhD physicists

Gibbs: We do, but have never worked with people studying this kind of problem – collaboration and communication – scientifically.

Parrish: We have developed software to allow us to hande large feature film projects without requiring a large coordination staff. It allows our supervisors to give feedback to animators, for example, over the web. Animators, modelers and riggers. It tracks our financials, tracks every detail of every project; producers use it to keep on top of budget and make sure artists aren’t working crazy hours.

Gibbs: It is crucial first to have a system that helps you be very clear about what you’re looking at. [sync]

Q: Parrish: Is collaboration making what we do better, or is it just a necessity?

A. Burnette: if it gives us access to talent we wouldn’t otherwise, it makes it better

A: McLaughlin: Being in Texas, it’s made a massive difference. Gives us access to talent, encourages our team to make better tools.

Gibbs: We always want to do more, this is access to more

Fields: We couldn’t do the scale of work we do – 400-man teams – without this.

Q from Blizzard: We have the problem of timing asset deliveries with approvals, and the difficulty of moving back up the chain. How do you deal with this? Is it harder across sites?

A: Burnette: All of our work comes in on time and no-one ever changes their mind.

[laughter]

At some point it becomes more efficient to pay people to keep track of all the information. In smaller teams there isn’t enough overhead to require it, but once you are that big, it’s vital, to manage the information flow across locations and timezones.

The artist who should have been home half an hour ago but stays an extra hour because somethings not good enough yet, is dealing with the same issue as a production manager who wants to make something better but just doesn’t have the money. Better information flows make for better decisions.

As an artist, you *always* want to make it better – the producer has to make the call to say stop.

[end]

• What I’m Working On
• Imaginary Tablets
• Reclaiming Affordances
• Virtual Meeting Rooms (The longer it takes you to catch on, the more visionary I get)
• Ad-hoc workspace sharing prototype
• Sixteen slides (a summary of my research from 2009, with some notes on metholodogy).
• Mondrian’s Atelier and the 場 (ba) Principle
• A Pale Shadow of Reality: Virtuality as a Second-Best Option
• My Honours Research Report and presentation
• Space, Place and 場 – where I started.

First: here is the list of organisations that have leaked my email address to spammers (most probably because they have been compromised):

• Ning (probably through the Association of Virtual Worlds, which has published its entire membership list as a PDF including everyone’s email addresses)
• Amnesty International (probably by publishing my email address on a petition)
• Palmgear (yes, I was a huge Palm fan, long ago)
• Reqall (an iPhone app with an online service – I prefer Evernote, who have also never leaked my email address to spammers)
• socialthing (now AOL LifeStream, and utterly uninteresting to me)
• Skitch (dammit, I like Skitch!)
• ServiceCentral – a service to book tradespeople to come and break your plumbing.
• Whrrl (some kind of location-based iPhone game thing).
• 3Dexplorer.
• Spotlight – I’m a “VIP member” of this store, which apparently means that I want Russian spammers to sell me a counterfeit watch.
• Webjam – I presented at Webjam once, so this may not be a leak from their website – I gave out this address to the entire audience so anyone there could be the source of the leak.
• Saasu – online (cloud) accounting. If I can’t trust them with my email address, I’m not going to trust them with my financial data.
• Xero – as above. This is a pretty severe problem in both cases; I’ve signed up for free trials of two cloud accounting services and both have leaked my email address to Russian spammers.

I’m getting about 40 spams a day at the moment, all through the above vectors. I’m redirecting those email addresses into the void now.

(I’m getting about another 40 spams each day to my ACM and SIGGRAPH addresses, but those are all obvious enough that Apple Mail’s spam filters are catching them for me. And oddly, none of those are in English.)

I’ve been signing up for online services this way for a long time, and it’s only recently that they have become a serious vector for spam. And the spam is pretty consistently for the same group of Russian-registered sites.

I wonder how long my personal information has been accumulating, being leaked, then sold, then finally used. I wonder whether other cloud services that I’m actually using have been compromised (as opposed to ones I’ve only signed up for and not entered data into). I wonder how long the attackers will wait, accumulating more personal information on us, and how damaging the resulting identity-theft storm might be.

DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments.

Translation: We don’t trust you.

If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message.

Translation: We don’t trust email.

Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney.

Translation: We don’t trust our staff.

Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects.

Translation: You should not trust this message.

Earlier this morning Prof. Fischer delivered this HAIL lecture on Meta-Design and Social Creativity at the CSIRO. And as social creativity is a central research concern for many of us here, we’re quite excited to have him here.

Personally I’m hoping to talk about mixed reality and tabletop systems as opposed to immersive virtual environments for collaborative creativity at a distance. Or the role of Collaborative Place. Or whatever comes up ^_^

processing sketch with webcam, 3d, drawing

So I’m interested in location, and for this reason will be buying the wifi+3G iPad, which has a comprehensive suite of location-awareness technologies, rather than the wifi iPad, which is also location-aware but less comprehensively so.

I keep seeing absurd fallacies being promulgated about the iPad and Assisted GPS. I think “promulgated” is a word that is now entirely reserved for absurd fallacies. Do you think anyone is out there promulgating enlightenment? If they are, they’re not posting to the Wired Gadget Lab weblog comment threads, anyway.

So here for your edification is the truth about A-GPS vs. GPS vs. wi-fi triangulation.

Note: this is dull, don’t bother reading it. I just had to get this rant down to stop me boring people with it in person.

GPS uses satellites to find your location. It’s quite accurate but it takes a long time to get a satellite fix, especially if you are in a new location. So A-GPS was invented – “a system which can improve the startup performance of a GPS satellite-based positioning system“. A-GPS is GPS, plus extra functions to make it faster. It uses a database of cell-tower locations to get a very rough fix, which makes finding the real satellite fix much faster. It saves battery life, speeds up your GPS fix, and does not damage accuracy at all. It’s not a special iPhone thing, just about any cellphone with GPS now uses A-GPS, because it’s better.

A-GPS does not require data service, just cell tower locations and GPS satellites. Google Maps requires data to download its maps, but if you only have wifi you can cache them and they’ll still be available; or you can use another app that keeps its maps on the device.

[UPDATE: as Aram points out below, it does require a data connection every few days to update its database of satellite locations. However just as with caching the Google Maps tiles, connecting to a wifi network every so often takes care of that so you can, as I say, get away without buying data service.]

The original iPhone did not have GPS or A-GPS. It uses skyhook, which triangulates from a database of known wifi base station locations. This is very accurate if you’re in a densely populated city with lots of wifi base stations around. It’s so accurate because when it can, it will send pings out to three base stations, time how long it takes to get a response from each of them, and triangulate your position. It’s how GPS works, but instead of satellites it uses wifi base stations. It’s pure genius. In the city it’s actually better than GPS because it can be hard to get line-of-sight to three satellites when you’re surrounded by skyscrapers or underground. However in less densely populated areas where wifi is sparse it becomes inaccurate. This skyhook service is what the wifi-only iPad is using. Fantastic in the city, useless in the country.

The iPhone 3G, 3GS and wifi+3G iPad all use A-GPS. As I mentioned earlier, this is GPS. It uses GPS satellites. But because it’s Assisted, it’s faster than unassisted GPS. This means that they can get an accurate position fix anywhere in the world, except a few locations where the US government intentionally blurs GPS (mostly war zones). I expect Apple also has skyhook running on these, so even underground in cities where GPS can’t reach they can still get a location fix through wifi triangulation.

Now, as a bonus, a look into the future: location services will get even better. The Smart Internet Technology CRC Australia developed a system that will triangulate location from known fixed bluetooth signals. This means in super-dense environments like shopping malls and convention centres, you could have centimetre-accurate location. Also, if you happen to be in Japan rejoice: a small constellation of Japan-specific satellites is going up, to bring a super-accurate GPS-augmenting local system to the home islands.

So, please stop writing that “A-GPS” is “fake”. It’s not; it’s the real deal. A-GPS plus skyhook is absolutely the best (fastest, most accurate, most comprehensive) location service available at the moment. The wifi+3G iPad will be, like the iPhone 3G and 3GS, an unparalleled device for location-based services – for the brief time before the rest of the industry catches up.