Highlights from the 2010 Creativity and Technology conference

The all-day Creativity and Technology (CaT) conference, which took place on June 10 in New York, was stuffed with sessions designed to highlight interesting uses of technology, business models of creative companies and emerging trends in creative media production. We’ve boiled down the peaks and valleys from this year’s CaT conference in this article.

Post-digital session gets conference off to great start

A panel of people working in the so-called post-digital space opened the conference with interesting examples of how physical interaction is driving post-digital media. The panel set high expectations for the rest of the conference that, unfortunately, proved to be unmaintainable.

Bing’s 3-D rendering tech pushes augmented reality

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Architect of Bing Maps and Bing Mobile at Microsoft, talked about new technologies that are evolving augmented reality, particularly as they pertain to digital maps. He spent a lot of time discussing advances in 3-D rendering technology as a means to simulate the physical word, a far cry from the Mapquest era of simply getting driving directions.

3-D rendering as Bing employs it involves taking multiple 2-D images and using a computer program to connect them. One of Bing’s strategies to render 3-D images from 2-D maps was to crowd source photos of locations and landmarks via social media. Blaise used the attempt to map Ta Prohm Temple in Cambodia through social media as an example of one of the challenges of this approach. The problem is that people tend to take the same photos of landmarks. And because the Ta Prohm has a very weak series of photos linking front to back. it doesn’t reconstruct very well.

But the technologies and strategies are becoming more sophisticated and Bing has started getting very good synths, including ariel synths that are creating very detailed 3-D renditions of landmarks.

Creative rockstars offer lot of talk, but little rock

• Andrew Bell, Head of Creative Technology, The Mill
• Faris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer, MDC Partners
• Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship
• Moderator: Teressa Iezzi, Editor, Creativity

Panelists in session called The New Rock Stars, Part Deux: Creative Technologists and Digital Strategists, complained about their businesses being pigeon-holed into specialized areas when the reality is that, as Faris Yakob pointed out, the output of technology takes different forms but the ability to solve those problems are common to everyone. Yakob said that the issues he commonly runs into aren’t individual technology problems; they’re habitual legacy issues.

Ivan Askwith agreed that there is a misconception about what constitutes a specialized technology issue. He said that Big Spaceship has been perceived as a high-end Flash shop. But just as no designer would call themselves a Photoshop designer, Askwith wants Big Spaceship to be seen as a business that can meet the digital effects and animation needs of their clients, which sometimes involves Flash. The goal is that designers and programmers think about how projects fit into overall strategy. Andrew Bell echoed Yakob’s and Askwith’s sentiment, adding that no business wants to be limited to a particular screen.

The future of 3-D media

AICP President Matt Miller presented a discussion about creating 3-D content for TV. Joining Miller was John Collins, President of VFX company Framestore, and Ed Ulbrich, President of Digital Domain’s Commercials Division and Corporate EVP. Miller framed the discussion around misconceptions about producing 3-D content. Not all of Miller’s questions yielded productive discussion, but the audience was able to glean a handful of insights from the session.

Infrastructural technology proof of concepts

Carlo Ratti is an architect and engineer at MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory. His presentation centered on how he and his team are recombining digital technology and physical components to create not only a new type of city planning, but high-tech public works projects, too. Though Ratti wasn’t clear on how it would be used, one his city planning data collection strategies is to use real-time cell phone and internet activity to create heat map visualizations.

Ratti discussed several additional projects before finally yielding the floor. Highlights included a 2010 project in which 500 participants tagged 300 trash items to track the disuse chain. Unfortunately, Ratti didn’t discuss the implications of the project except to acknowledge that we can tag and track everything we create, even the things we throw away.

Another highlight from Ratti’s portfolio is Flyfire, which is a fleet of miniature helicopters each equipped with a multi-colored light control system. The devices would be synched to fly in formation and act as physical pixels to create 3-D images and environments.

The interaction is the story

• Nick Bergstrom,, Creative Director, Mother
• Patrick Gardner, CEO, Perfect Fools
• Nick Lawe, EVP, Chief Creative Officer North America, R/GA
• Gerry Graf, Chief Creative Officer, Saatchi and Saatchi
• Moderator: Teressa Iezzi, Editor, Creativity

The main takeaway from this panel was that storytellers need to be more cognizant of the ways in which storytelling vehicles have changed and need to work with more closely with the technologists creating new storytelling formats. Nick Bergstrom likened traditional short form stories to dates in which only one person (the storyteller) is doing all the talking. He advises storytellers to listen more and talk less, by which he means that it’s OK to set up the context, but the interaction between your message your audience should make up the bulk of the story.

Nick Lawe agreed with Bergstrom that an interaction creates story. He said that there are contexts for dictating a story and times for making things that contain stories, by which he presumably means creating interactive websites and creating post-digital physical objects (see our article on how physical interaction is driving post-digital media).

The other speakers agreed with the McLuhan-esque assertion that the interaction is the story. But as Patrick Gardner pointed out the problem that arises is that the people who make story containers are usually techies who have a lot to learn about storytelling. In fact, as Gerry Graf asserted, there is no evolution of story — mash them, remix them or retell them and you still have a story in one form or another — but there is an evolution in the way we tell them.

Data visualization gives face to real-time data streams

One of the more interesting vendor-y presentations came from Eric Rodenbeck, Founder and Creative Director at Stamen. He showed some of the data visualization work his company has been doing. One of the stand-out examples was a graph that showed water usage during a hockey game. The data showed how much usage spiked between periods, which may enable utility departments to plan for changes in water availability and pressure.

Rodenbeck said that Stamen uses real-time data streams to feed their visualizations. Stamen’s bubble visualization for MTV is an example of a Twitter-powered visualization based on a real-time data stream. The visualization displayed celebrity photos in bubbles of varying sizes depending on how often the celebrities’ names’ are hash-marked and tweeted (also see our data streams article from Wiredrive’s SXSWi coverage).

Unfortunately, the conference was running behind schedule and Rodenbeck graciously sped through his presentation in hopes of catching up, which left very little room for further discussion about Stamen’s data visualization projects, applications and capabilities.

Where do agencies stop and tech shops start?

• Winston Binch, Partner, Crispin, Porter and Bogusky
• Thor Muller, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, Get Satisfaction
• Matthew Szymczyk, Co-founder and CEO, Zugara
• Moderator: Ann-Christine Diaz, Managing Editor, Creativity

The final panel we were able to see before leaving to prepare for the Wiredrive mRSS Workshop was Making it Work: Agencies or tech developers? Yes, a panel discussion that was intended examine and contrast the role of the agency against the role of the tech developer in hopes of negotiating the areas of overlap.

In Winston Binch’s view, the agency should house everything, tech development included, in order to serve as a one-stop shop. Matthew Szymczyk, on the other hand, argued for specialization within the agency world. For Thor Miller, the question was one of transition. How does an agency become a tech shop? He looked to 37Signals as an example of a business that weened itself from the agency model to become a web application shop.

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