Jason Lewis

Skins 1.0: a curriculum for designing games with first nations youth

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) conducted the Skins workshop to explore a pedagogy that integrated North American Indigenous cultural frameworks into the design of video games and virtual environments. Skins provides instruction in digital design, art, animation, audio and programming within a context of Aboriginal stories and storytelling techniques. In the pilot workshop with Mohawk youth at the Kahnawake Survival School, students developed interactive environments based on traditional stories from their community in a process that required them to reflect on how they knew those stories, who had told them, and which stories were appropriate for such remediation. In the process, AbTeC found that the discussions about these stories in the context of the technical skills development provided substantial motivation for both further inquiry into the stories and greater participation in the skills development. This paper describes the curriculum and strategies of the Skins pilot workshop.

Post PostScript please

Writing practices that integrate dynamic and interactive strategies into the making and reading of digital texts are proliferating as more of our reading experiences are mediated through the screen. We argue that rarely do current approaches to creating digital texts operate at the basic textual level of the letterform itself, and that this neglect is partially due to the fact that current font technology is based on print paradigms that make it difficult to work programmatically at the level of individual letters. Work produced in our lab suggests the creative possibilities in being able to easily specify behaviours at such a level, and leads us to propose that writers, typographers and programmers start thinking beyond Postscript-like formats such as OpenType or TrueType to collaboratively develop a new ComplexType format (or formats) that is designed for the twenty-first century as opposed to a simulation of the fifteenth.

Taking sides: dynamic text and hip-hop performance

In this paper we describe Taking Sides, a performance using a real-time speech visualization software system called TextEngine. Taking Sides is a collaboration between our research studio and Montreal hip-hop artist Dwayne Hanley. Our primary goal was to create a strong conceptual link between the text visualization, the content of the artists lyrics, and his performance style. Additionally we wanted to test the flexibility of TextEngine in developing customized performance applications. Pursuing these goals led us through a three month development effort that cycled tightly between design, performance and programmatic iterations.

The future is indigenous

We started reading science fiction as teenagers. We fell in love with the fantastic worlds, the strange societies, the alien cultures and the amazing technologies. As we got older, though, we began to notice the lack of Native people in those futures. In fact, there were barely any nonwhite people at all.

Time travelers, flying heads, and second lives: designing communal stories

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. Tad Hirsch, Editor