Slow mo from high speed digital video

Digital video cameras are getting better and better which leads to imaginative people having more and more fun. This is a fine example - high speed video means you can do amazing slow motion, and this guy had amazing fun doing just that one night in his hotel bedroom:


Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

We are all makers

This is a lovely TED talk by Dale Dougherty discussing the innate desire to make things he thinks is within us all. He shows lots of people doing stuff just because they can, they're enthusiasts and they like doing it.

What is interesting to me is what he sees as the importance of the social aspect of it all. That by going to events and meeting with other makers they show what they have made, share knowledge and go on to produce more and better things.

The enthusiasm they have and their ability to produce amazing things using low-tech solutions is something that would be great to see within more of my students!

Gangsta rap about cardboard boxes

This is great - a gangsta rap in praise of kids doing creative things with cardboard boxes and toilet roll tubes ... yes, really!

via BoingBoing

Video concealing complexity

I have often observed that film of a skilled practitioner can easily conceal rather than reveal the complexity of what they do. I was just sent a lovely example of this in the form of this short video showing how to fold a shirt:

When I actually tried to copy what she was doing, with some help from a couple of friends, we could not figure it out at all until we found another video where we could follow the narrative in English (rather than Japanese). However, we still had to stop, restart and rewind the video several times until we got it.

In my experience of interpreting craft practice, video is great for giving a quick overview, inspiring someone to want to do it. However, the actual 'how to' is most efficiently put across with a few of simple line drawings to explain the crucial bits.

Kesurokai documentary film

My film of the Chisana Kesurokai 2010 event is almost complete. I am going to Germany this weekend to show it to the group of carpenters who took part in the event in Japan last summer before finalising it. It is a little scary showing it to the people I filmed, but I am pleased with the result so feel fairly confident they will be too.

The majority of my previous film work has been 3-5 minute youTube material. Making sense of a huge amount of footage shot over a seven day period and reducing it to a half hour documentary has been an interesting challenge for me. However, video-logging techniques developed during my research helped immensely and this documentation of all the video clips enabled me to search and select appropriate material fairly efficiently.

Once it is finished I shall post it on my vimeo site.

The two buildings and some of the carpenters involved.

Cambodian donut shops

This is a lovely bit of film making and a fantastic story. Their work ethic is phenomenal and I love that the Cambodian community have generated this new knowledge and then shared it with their family and friends so there are a whole load of Cambodian donut shops in the area.

Return from Kesurokai

For the last two weeks I have been in Japan filming a group of Japanese and European carpenters making traditional timber frame buildings using only hand tools and trees felled on site. It has been a fantastic experience but it is also lovely to be home. The heat and humidity was very tiring ... in contrast it is around 12C and raining heavily here in the Peak District today! It feels a long time ago that I was sat on the tatami mats next to the worksite kitchen logging my video and photos:


Full details are on my Kesurokai blog and early 2011 I should complete a short documentary film about the event, but here are a couple of tasters of the material:

RSA Animate illustrated lectures

The combination of skilful drawing illustrating the short, thought-provoking lecture in this video is great:

I have watched several of them now (it's part of a series) and find them very compelling. Many people find it quite difficult just to listen to a lecture and need something to watch ... other than a 'talking head'. The sketching hits just the right humorous note for me; it emphasises what is being said, without distracting from the content. It also looks effortless which means it probably took ages and ages to create! 

Kesurokai

Kesurokai was started in Japan in 1995 by the highly respected temple carpenter Sugimura San. His aim was to bring together different craftsmen who normally work remotely to exchange traditional craft techniques and knowledge.

The events were brought to Europe through Hannes Schnelle, a German carpenter who spent a significant period of time working in Japan, becoming Sugimura San’s last apprentice before semi-retirement. In 2005 and 2007 he organised Kesurokai in Germany bringing together craftsmen from a wide range of European countries along with a delegation of Japanese craftsmen led by Sugimura San.

In 2010 Chisana (little) Kesurokai will see a return trip, with a group of thirty European craftsmen travelling to Japan to work with their Japanese compatriots building a traditional tea house. I shall accompany them, both to observe as part of my research into the transfer of craft knowledge, and to document the event on film.

Folding knives

This research was carried out in association with Prof Chris Rust at Sheffield Hallam University and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

This project focused on the skills of traditional folding knife makers in Sheffield, once a significant part of the cities famous metalworking industries but now declined to just a few master craftsmen. In our research we undertook case studies with two of these craftsmen, a blade grinder and a folding knife maker, to demonstrate the tacit nature of such craft skill and reveal the methods we used for elicitation and interpretation.

Traditional Sheffield folding knives

Contemporary knifemaker and co-resercher Dr Grace Horne acted as an expert learner, working alongside the craftsmen, observed by myself as designer, and then through experimental making and collaboration together prototype learning materials were generated. The materials were tested and developed into an online resource using a small group of learners who come from a new generation of creative metalworkers whose interests lie in adapting traditional skills to new craft practices.

Knives made by Grace Horne

As a result we were able to demonstrate that the principles for craft transmission developed in previous research could be applied to a specific example of craft knowledge with useful results for the learners. We also developed a more robust methodology for the elicitation and design development methods needed for this form of design practice.

Knives made by a learner using the online resource

Multimedia outputs
FoldingKnives: a public version of the learning materials developed during the project.
TransmittingCraft: online documentation of the project; its background, the work undertaken and outcomes, including video and images from the research.
YouTube channel hosting video clips used during the research.

In this video Russell White makes a folding knife at Taylor’s Eye Witness, one of the last Sheffield manufacturers to still make folding knives.

What's in a name?

I started as a web designer in the 1990s when the internet was taking off, then my research led me into so much more than just web sites so I called myself a multimedia designer, and now it’s interactive media designer as my focus is on learning resources. However, even that doesn’t quite fit …

My research focuses on the design of interactive media to support craft skills learning, but what I do is far more about people than interactive media design. I soon discovered that by far the greatest challenge in my research was the basic eliciting of knowledge needed to perform such complex skills.

It is easy to point a video camera at someone to record their activities, but for the novice this is of limited use. A demonstration by a highly skilled practitioner actually conceals the complexity of their practice because so much of their knowledge is tacit. It is deeply internalised and they respond instinctively to subtle cues that even they are unaware of. It is little wonder that the new learner struggles to imitate what they observe in video.

So, video is fundamental to my practice, but equally so are a set of elicitation techniques aimed at finding what the novice needs to know to get started and make progress. Key to this is the concept of bridges and the use of expert learners, but more about those later …