DIT Digital

The Proposal

This year's project was inspired partly by three things. The firstly had been Iain Aitch's use of geo located technology to bring together stories, and the second was Lucy's involvement with Vivienne Westwood's campaign Intellectuals Unite. The third inspiration had been Giddy Brighton, which developed an app, utilised oral history and augmented reality to build community histories in Brighton (particularly of dance halls) using augmented reality. 

We were particularly interested in playing with the division between geographical place and digital traces. What would it be like to virtually augment physical places with digital sources?

2016-7 was officially the 40th Anniversary of Punk (via the release of God Save the Queen). Punk Heritage seemed to be dominated by established canonical narratives.

We went to visit two particularly interesting, and contrasting Punk exhibitions

The first was the British Library's exhibition Punk London.

The second was Brighton Museum's 'Photo-punk' Exhibition

Lucy reviewed the punk anniversary, including these exhibition for the journal Twentieth Century British History

Rather than focussing on one of these heritage sites therefore we sought to explore a different legacy of punk in a different way.  If Punk is now mainstream, what, we wondered, might it mean to produce a punk history that disrupts this newly established canon?

This year we have the unique opportunity to work with designer and campaigner Vivienne Westwoodwho has provided the brief for our projects, under the heading 'DIT (Do-It-Together) Digital: Augmenting Subcultures'. You are asked to identify a theme or topic for your resource in response to Vivienne's manifesto 'Active Resistance to Propaganda'. You can read more about the context and thinking behind the manifesto here.

In order to develop your project, you will be introduced to a variety of apps and digital tools to make your own DIY resources. Remember, the brief is to only use free or open digital resources. The seminars in weeks 7 and 8 will be replaced by all-day workshops in order to allow you to work intensively on your projects. Consequently, there will be no seminars in weeks 9 and 10.

Intellectuals Unite

We were inspired by Westwood's project Intellectuals Unite and Climate Revolution

One of Intellectuals Unite's strengths is blurring the line between art, culture and activism - particularly by putting each in the 'wrong place'.  Intellectuals Unite has also combined music, performance and intellectual debate, for example with a clubnight and at LSE's Resist Festival

The Resist Festival was curated by Lisa Mckenzie in collaboration with film maker Paul Sng.  This had a particular synergy for PPB as one of our earliest course trips out had been to see his film Dispossession and post showing discussion.

Resist also produced a zine as part of their publicity.

The Manifesto and wider project had already inspired a song my MC Righteous

If we took this as our starting point, AND therefore anyone is an intellectual, and social concern is that digital lives have being robbed of time to think and be intellectuals , then DIT Digital is a way of bringing intellectualism to the social network. 

Vivienne Westwood have very generously donated a set of tickets for PPB students to attend a talk she gave at the Dome in Brighton

Augmented Reality

TEL produced a ToolKit specifically aimed at open/easy access AR apps, e.g Aurasma and Geo tagging

 We had already had some experience experimenting with Augmented Reality through the Scarlet+ project which had grown out of the JISC funded

  Observing the 80s. There is a report of the development of Scarlet and Scarlet+ published Ariadne: The Web Magazines for Professionals

This informed our side project - Augmenting Zines (see Unit 

Developing the Projects

Students identified what themes and concepts and what sources they were familiar with that could be used to respond to the Manifesto.

What can we do?

The next stage was to choose a topic in response to 'Active Resistance to Propaganda'. Then to identity the learning goals and building blocks of their end product.  They were asked to think about the structure needed by the user and to do a skills audit amongst themselves in preparation for two one day workshops at 

the Synergy Centre in Brighton.

It was an appropriate venue which experimented with sustainable forms of social organisation, and was unfortunately coming towards the end of its lease despite a popular campaign to save the venue. The focus on sustainable organisation was particularly pertinent in terms of Intellectuals Unite's connection to Climate Revolution. It led to discussions about the energy costs of digital projects involving a lot of different screens and equipment.

Workshop 1

We captured the process in a Padlet

What they produced

What students got out of it

This is their message to the future

For the future

Our evaluation

In many ways we had honed the project down, in terms of providing a brief in advance, having embedded local history throughout the module and with a ready set up space. However the technological challenges proved challenging, perhaps because the two way move (to combine geo tagging with AR). Having Kitty on site was invaluable. In the future we will use our Zine workshop to ensure that students are pre-trained in the appropriate technology in more transferable ways. We also missed out on the role of mentors throughout, although we had one mentor who was very helpful in the first workshop in terms of facilitating planning, it proved how central the mentoring process are to the success of previous projects. 

Since the project finished we have worked with Kitty to identify more useful technologies. (** Chris describe what he has done).  The ease of access to OER Commons has also helped us to collate all the different strands of the project in a suitable shareable and open form.