Voting with their feet:
transmitting Personal Development Planning web-assets by passive interactivity
Turning E-gotism to marketing advantage :
promotional bonuses from pdp web - assets
Combining Personal Development Planning with the realisation of personal web pages has evolved continually since the inception of a PDP pilot project in the textile design programme in 2004/05. The practice has spread widely across the faculty and is readily embraced by students as a fitting vehicle for the expression of reflections on personal development and particularly for professional self-marketing.Despite the E-gotistical distractions of socal networking web sites such as bebo, myspace and facebook, www.blogger.com (now a sub-brand of google) remains the most operable multimedia webhosting site, with little undesirable extraneous content. Obviously text, images, movies and graphic formatting can all be uploaded effortlessly without a whisper of HTML code being necessary. It has become entirely standard for creative graduates to list their web assets as readily as their email addresses on business cards. This addition communicates more than a route to access information, it also gives the strong message of IT competence and fluency.
However, the sheer proliferation of internet blogsites can induce a negative response from casual viewers. There is no sign as yet of the phenomenon of personal web publishing receding, but it is implicit that the value of a particular web asset is greatly dependent on the targeting of an interested audience, by fair means or foul.
“This is the age of the internet and those who are most adept at using it are the ones who get noticed. Personal and professional websites and blogs and other internet formats can make more people aware of your work and raise your profile, provided those are done well enough and take advantage of the kinds of things that search engines use when people look for information.”
“Take control of your personal brand.”
Jeremy Smith / CASE University 2006 http://blog.case.edu/jms18/blogs_in_academia/index
E-commerce specialists have addressed the pitfalls of invisibility within the vastness of the web by devising and marketing elaborate systems of data-mining to identify and target individuals revealed through their approximation to niche consumer proles. The plague of pop-ups is the consequence.
In line with a desire to continue to develop the multimedia web - asset approach to Personal Development & Planning, in the course of 2007/08 the textile design programme has built upon its previous initiatives by exploring the concept of making web-assets accessible and visible to a niche audience - but outside of the remote interacivity of cyberspace.
This was put into operation within the real physical environment of a specialist exhibition - new designers 2008 - and offered to interested visitors the background information from web - assets relating to individual artefacts and designers.
A system was engineered by Alex Gibbins, with encouragement from Stephanie Marsland - both in the School of Technology - which was able to sense interest in particular exhibits. This sensing apparatus measured the relative level of attention given by visitors to specic textile artefacts and in turn triggered the prioritisation of the display of related web-assets on a nearby plasma screen. This was installed horizontally for easy sight line recognition.
Several means of sensing were considered - proximity devices, infra red, eyeball tracking and pressure pads. The latter was adopted as offering both economy, functionality and robustness. The time constraints of building the exhibition and rigging the “passive interactivity” apparatus also suggested that the pressure pad approach would come together most efficiently and would truly permit a heavy traffic of interested visitors to
‘vote with their feet’
The system worked immaculately and is in itself a pilot scheme for further development in both the the curation of exhibitions and the creation of interfaces giving interaction between the physical and the virtual. By inverting the norm of internet searching (by making the physically found object trigger the delivery of accumulated web-assets) the value of the assets is multiplied and the rôle of the designer reinforced.Benefits for students:
Enhances ‘point of sale’ impact for employment
Gives evidence of IT skills
Supports value of building web-assets for PDP employability purposes.
Amplifies the signicance of exhibited work.
Benefits for staff:
Opens avenues of cross-faculty collaboration on interactive curation and presentation.
Provides pilot scheme validity for further development of concept, between Schools and Faculties.
Raises awareness of potential of staff interaction.
Benefits for the University:
Raises awareness of potential of staff interaction.
High visibility of advanced usage of research expertise.
Enhances marketing of courses and Faculty by evidencing ambitions of innovation and interdisciplinarity - as appropriate for The Sir Richard Branson Centre for Design & Innovation.
