Fascinating

By Kees Winkel on 6 February 2012

Fascinating. I have started following a course at the University of Utrecht. This Monday morning, I found myself in a hugh auditorium with my colleague Jelke de Boer and some 430 other students. Apart from Jelke and me, I recon the average age was somewhere round 20. “Fascinating”, I found myself thinking in a rather Mr. Spock-like fashion as I really tried to make absolute sense of what I was doing there and how it happened of me actually sitting in that big dark hall with assistant professor Mirko Tobias Schäfer explaining the differences between McLuhan and Williams, ergo, the perhaps philosophical or at least academic dispute on issues of Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism. Fascinating.

tagged with: fascinating, teleology, discourse, startrek

The Battles are on!

By Kees Winkel on 3 February 2012

Only two days to go and the Museum Battle and Media Battle are being kicked off, this time in Enschede. An odd 150 – 160 students from Utrecht’s and Enschede’s Universities of Applied Sciences will pressure cook a concept for their real-time assignors. The briefings will be given in Enschede and our Utrecht students will then work three days in Utrecht to finally pitch in Enschede again on Friday. As I am partially back in the classroom myself as a university student, I wont be able to join ‘my’ guys and girls in Enschede. But I will most certainly help them out during the three days in the creative boot camp at Hal16 in Utrecht.
Although in Dutch, I recommend the Media Battle’s website. The battle has been going on twice a year for a while now and I must say, the results are pretty spectacular. Early September I participated in the previous battle with five groups of students attending the minor Mobile Business Design. The Media Battle was a starter for a half year of intensive mobile business designing of what started as a creative idea during the battle. And I must say, the assignments were really tough.
There was Hoog Caterijne, asking a solution to guide people through the busiest shopping street/complex in Holland during a long-term refurbishment. There was a group of entrepreneurs looking for ways of attracting new commercial settlers in their shopping street, not far fro m the historical center of Utrecht. There was the Harbor Museum of Rotterdam – one of the world’s largest harbors – asking for a solution to guide visitors through their open air and free of charge museum. And there was the City of Utrecht’s Archive asking for a mobile application to help people wandering through Utrecht, taking them back three hundred years ago when the Treaty of Utrecht was negotiated and finally signed; a great diversity of stunningly complex questions that need answers from our students.
SO, as of Monday, my 8 teams in the course eBusiness & Marketing and many other students will crack their brains over new assignments that need to be pressure-cooked. I really am enjoying my livelihood.

tagged with: saxxion, hu, utrecht, museum battle, media battle

Homo Emotico

By Eric Leltz on 31 January 2012

De grote belangstelling voor boeken over “het brein” heeft alles te maken met de trits van crises waar we middenin zitten: de klimaatcrisis, de energiecrisis, de kredietcrisis, de eurocrisis, de landencrisis.
We komen tot het besef dat de huidige economische modellen niet meer voldoen in een snelle, innoverende maar complexe wereld. Deze modellen zijn gebaseerd op groei, efficiency, massa en rendement. Ze stammen uit een (industrieel) tijdperk toen de omgeving niet zo snel veranderde en hulpbronnen in overvloed aanwezig waren. Vandaar dat essentiële zaken van nu zoals het uitputten van de aarde en luchtvervuiling nauwelijks een rol spelen in deze modellen. Het draait er enkel om welvaart en dat kan dus tot gevolg hebben dat het kappen van hele bossen een ramp is voor het milieu maar goed is voor het bruto nationaal product (BNP). Hetzelfde geldt voor het delven van fossiele brandstoffen. 

“Spaghetti Novel”

By Dick Swart on 23 January 2012

In the early 19th century Honoré de Balzac wrote around a hundred novels and essays that together he called ‘La comédie humaine’. He undertook this enormous endeavor in order to give an accurate image of French society in the early 19th century. It was meant to be a critique of the social circumstances in that period. La comedie humaine had three divisions called ‘Etudes de moeurs’  ‘Etudes filosophiques’ and ‘etudes analytiques’. These etudes were divided in scenes varying from ‘Scènes de la vie Parisienne’ to ‘Scènes de la vie de la politique. Among these novels there are a few that have become global classics like ‘La père Goriot’ and ‘Eugénie Grandet’. Honoré Balzac, (he added ‘de’ to suggest nobility) did something new in these novels. Main characters in one book appeared in other books also. You can even read little hints to other books through these cameos as you could call them. By doing so, he intertwined the plots in the books together in to one big narration. The novels are readable separately but together they open up a beautiful ‘network-view’ of French society with its hopes, fears, loves and envy’s in the early 19th century. 
Emile Zola, inspired by Balzac, did more or less the same in his ‘Les Rougon-Macqart, histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire’. But these twenty novels had a more hierarchical approach as it told the story of a succession of family members and their social environment.

Utrecht Crowd Surfing

By Thijs Waardenburg on 20 January 2012

A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.

tagged with: utrecht, crowd surfing, central station, youtube

New Year's Resolutions

By Charlotte van Nus on 18 January 2012

As some of my colleagues already said: happy 2012 to everyone! When the year comes to an end we reflect on the past and look forward to the coming year. We dwell by the things that we have achieved, the new experiences we have gained, the things that unfortunately went wrong or the goals we weren’t able to achieve. New Year is an event to reflect on our life and develop new goals for the coming year.

tagged with: mindfulness, resolutions, new year

The Crossmedialab social media album Top 50 2012

By Michiel Rovers on 9 January 2012

I love charts and yearlists. This passion started in my childhood. As a child I made lists of almost everything: how long it took to brush my teeth and put on my pajamas (with a all time record of 10 seconds), lists of the time the planes flew over our house to Maastricht Airport, and also of all the licenseplates of the cars in our neighbourhood. When I think about it, I’m surprised that my parents never thought I was autistic.

tagged with: chart, social media, music, interaction

A new year a new buzzword...

By Frank Meeuwsen on 6 January 2012

And we’re back! On behalf of the whole research group we wish you an interesting, joyful and above all inquisitive 2012! Ofcourse a new year can’t start without all sorts of trendlists, top 10’s of great things that will happen on us in the coming year, and even lists of these lists. Fear not, we will not pile on these lists with our own predictions. There’s enough of that already and as the late great Peter Drucker once said, the best way to predict the future is to create it.  So let’s work on that the coming weeks and months! 

tagged with: buzzword, 2012, apps, tools

A satisfying Christmas dinner?

By Harry van Vliet on 23 December 2011

As a follow up to my last blog on the measurement of quality, experience, satisfaction & loyalty, let’s take a closer look at satisfaction, as we did in the context of our festival research program. Satisfaction is characterised by most researchers as an ‘emotional response’, a response to a certain service; or as an ‘emotional state’, an affective psychological outcome of visitors’ experience. What this experience includes stays mostly unclear. In contrast to explanations how satisfaction comes about, no less than four models are usually presented to assess consumer satisfaction (taken from: Yoon & Uysal - An examination of the effects of motivation and satisfaction on destination loyalty: a structural model. Tourism Management 2005, 26, pp. 45-56).

tagged with: satisfaction, festivals, christmas

Museumbattle: more than concepting in a pressure cooker

By Karen Hilhorst on 19 December 2011

Concepting, prototyping and field-test as interactive research method. The Museumbattle is a five day pressure-cooking concepting event for students with different backgrounds (economic studies, creative studies, communication studies and technical studies). In total we will organize four Museumbattles during our two-year Museum Compass project (www.museumkompas.nl). 

tagged with: prototyping, museumkompas, museum battle