Whilst in London last week I walked back from the South Bank to Victoria on two consecutive evenings. As I walked down Victoria Street the first night I was looking into the reception areas and foyers of the all-but-deserted office buildings, the shops, the restaurants, and it struck me how odd these places were at night.
Consequently, the next night I decided to do something about it and zig-zagged my way up the street, quickly shooting into the interiors. I say quickly, because the security guards did not look all that amused about being photographed, and there has been at least one incident in London of the Police demanding that images be deleted from cameras in the interests of “security.” I’m not just being paranoid: that night the whole place was crawling with Police because of political demos in Trafalgar Square.
Anyway, here are a few of these strange interiors:
Foyer 1
Foyer 2
Foyer 3
Unlimited Shopping
Restaurant
Foyer 4
Objects Of Desire
Nighthawk
All very shiny, all very bright, all very modern. Completely soulless. What on earth do these spaces say about us (apart from the fact we love wasting energy…)?
A couple of weeks ago went on one of our regular family visits to the lovely (and noticeably improving) National Botanic Garden of Wales. Here are a few of the pictures I took. Making no claim to be a great photographer—a point-and-click merchant at heart—I’m really only interested in composition and colour. Or maybe texture. Whatever:
Last week I attended the Designs On eLearning conference at the Fashion Retail Academy in Gresse Street, London W1. I hadn’t been aware of the Academy before and it’s hardly surprising: it’s brand new. According to The Guardian it was set up with money partly from the government and partly from industry, and provides education at FE level (Levels 2 and 3 on the national scale).
Anyway, it’s gorgeous. What a fabulous place to work and learn in. It’s cool and modern without being cold and detached. It’s stylish but utilitarian. It’s been designed. Here’s some pix I took whilst there:
Where I currently work the environment is quite poor: shabby, grey, drab, and with learning spaces laid out like factory floors. It’s completely out of date, both physically and conceptually. How are staff and students alike supposed to be inspired, enthusiastic, and empowered in such an environment? These days when I teach I want a multi-purpose space: perhaps I’ll start a session with a demo using the computer and projector before breaking off for small group work. Later you might find me scribbling madly on a whiteboard in answer to some questions that have come up. We might use cameras or video, and someone might bring in a laptop or a mobile phone with work on and we’ll need to see it and to share it. At the moment this means I often swap rooms in the middle of a session, or else I’ll have to arrive early and set up equipment borrowed from elsewhere. Sometimes—far too often—I can’t do what I would really like to do at all…
The modern learning space needs to be flexible, social, and egalitarian, with technology embedded into and integrated with the space. It needs to be wireless. It needs to be bold and stimulating, because in the 21st Century we really, really, really need to throw off the ball and chain of the 12th Century teaching methods we still use, and that we remain forced into using by the straightjacket of our archaic working environments. JISC published an excellent report last year called Designing Spaces For Effective Learning and in it they say:
A learning space should be able to motivate learners and promote learning as an activity, support collaborative as well as formal practice, provide a personalised and inclusive environment, and be flexible in the face of changing needs.
Well, at least The Fashion Retail Academy look like they’ve got most of the way there. There is hope for us all…
This is a little Flash image gallery: very simple, very slick, and a total no-brainer to use. The only thing you need to know about it is that the images are loaded dynamically into an empty movieclip on stage, and that the images all need to be the same size. (OK: they don’t need to be but it’ll look rubbish if they’re not). If your images are lots of different sizes, create an empty .swf that matches your display area. Use this as a master template. Embed each image in a separate copy of this master template, and then load those.
Here’s the .fla (520kB) in MX2004 format. By the way, with a bit of tweaking this project also makes a pretty decent interface design: substitute tabs for the thumbnails, replace the images with contextual menus, and hey presto…
The photographs were taken by 1st year BA(Hons) Interactive Digital Media students at Swansea Metropolitan University as part of their coursework.
Here’s a nice little Flash effect derived originally from Brendan Dawes‘ influential Flash Actionscript For Designers: Drag Slide Fade book. Over the years I’ve used this “image slider” quite a lot both on personal projects and in the classroom: the way the images swish across screen, decelerate, and slide into exactly the right position is highly organic and very satisfying. To try it, click here or on the image below: it will appear in a new window.
Dawes’ book dates from 2001 and all the lovely projects are written in Actionscript 1.0 - I believe he must have been using Flash 4. The version included here has been fully updated to be Actionscript 2.0 compliant and is written in my very best Flash ‘good practice’ style. You can get the .fla (2.5Mb) here in Flash MX 2004 format.
The photographs I’ve used were taken a few weeks ago by 1st year BA (Hons) Interactive Digital Media students - Alyn Spiller, Matthew Aldred, Sam East, and Rob Chalmers - from Swansea Metropolitan University.
