Knowing what is the 'next big thing' is a factor in success and survival: no surprise then that the study of signs is known as 'semiotics' from the greek word for oracle. But how does one become good at reading signs and why does it matter so much?

Signs dominate everyday life: they can be natural signs, for example a rumble in the sky gives advance notice of a thunderstorm, emotional signs, such as a smile, or manufactured road signs, shop signs and product signs. Signs are the essential building blocks of our communicative environment, and in the context of brand development, the 'right' mark is analogous to success; yet many people, although ready to acknowledge the importance of sending out the right signals, feel ambivalent about signs.

Shona Maciver explores the compelling nature of the sign, its capacity to bully and confront, and the gulf between what it is and what it stands for.

Audience

Ideal for all those who work in the creative industries in Scotland; designers, creatives, artists, writers, researchers, architects, cultural academics, thinkers, teachers, students, gamers and stylists’.

Biography

Shona Maciver is MD of Locofoco Limited (www.locofoco.co.uk). The consultancy has a strong reputation for creativity in print and screen and an impressive client list, including the likes of s1homes, jobs and play.com, (UK Marketing Society Brand of the Year 2005), Museums Galleries Scotland, Visit Scotland and Road Safety Scotland.

The music business is in meltdown - and professional musicians are having to re-assess everything about how they sustain their livelihoods. If people simply won't pay £15 for a CD from the high street, what will they pay for? Recorded music is tending towards being ubiquitous and free(ish), but live music is tending towards high prices for a unique experience. In the face of these trends, how can the power of the internet - particularly broadband and social networks - be used to forge a new connection, both cultural and commercial, between musicians and their audience? With a new self-financed Hue And Cry album in his USB, Pat Kane set out on a journey with his brother Greg to find a new way to being 'Ourselves, Online'. This seminar tells the story of that journey, which might (or might not) end up happily ever after...

There is a revolution in the design of learning spaces all round the world and inevitably this is now impacting on the design of corporate space too. As corporations aspire to become learning organisations and move away from their training rooms and training culture they're increasing looking to designs for schools to inform their transformation. At the same time the design of schools and universities has much to learn from the radical new ways that people organise their working lives : for example in the new media industries. This talk explores how, in designing spaces for learning and working, there is a need for dialogue.

There is a revolution in the design of learning spaces all round the world and inevitably this is now impacting on the design of corporate space too. As corporations aspire to become learning organisations and move away from their training rooms and training culture they're increasing looking to designs for schools to inform their transformation. At the same time the design of schools and universities has much to learn from the radical new ways that people organise their working lives : for example in the new media industries. This talk explores how, in designing spaces for learning and working, there is a need for dialogue.

Because of the increased distributed nature of production technology, not just for immaterial production but for physical production as well, it is increasingly possible to imagine modes of social life which combine re-localised production with global open design communities.

How can we move away from a world that is based on a false notion that the natural world is abundant, and on a equally false notion that we need to impede the free sharing of social innovations through the creation of artificial scarcities in the digital world? The answer may be a reliance on the emerging peer to peer dynamic, and the emergence of peer production, peer governance, and peer property formats as an alternative ways of organizing social life. The increasingly global availability of social cooperation technologies is empowering and enabling the creation of global-local communities that are able to directly create social value, through new types of for-benefit institutions. In this lecture, Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, will examine the key characteristics of this new mode of production, how it creates new business models, and how it could be enabled and empowered by new Partner State-based approaches by public authorities at all levels.

Creativity is a highly valuable and desirable quality, which appears to defy our attempts at understanding it. Despite much scientific research effort, creativity remains infuriatingly elusive. It seems that the very act of scientifically researching creativity makes it evaporate like Daphne. Could it be that we are looking in the wrong place?

If however, we try to understand creativity from the *view of the creative practitioner*, suddenly valuable insights open up, which promise to let us understand and apply creativity effectively and profitably. This research indicates that people can enhance their creative processes and realize their creative potential to maximum effect. Creativity is emerging as a different cognitive entity in comparison with traditional scientific, logic, deductive thinking. Once we realize and accept this, the *EUREKA! process* can be nourished, strengthened and applied.

This talk challenged orthodoxy in assessment. The speaker, Bobby Elliot, has overall responsibility for all vocational (ICT) assessment within the college and workplace sectors in Scotland.

Bobby has a professional and personal interest in assessment (particularly e-assessment) and digital technologies (Web 2.0)...hence the blending of the two into "Assessment 2.0".

He evaluated past and present forms of assessment and considered new approaches. He was introduced by Brian Dickson of AOK Learning.

In an age where a blog post or a video on YouTube is challenging mainstream media as a source for global attention, it becomes increasingly important for business and the community to be aware of what is happening online in social networking spaces. But when MySpace has 200 million users, and Facebook 55 million, YouTube has around 57 million videos uploaded, and consumers are spending more and more time on their PC instead of in front of the television, there is also the confusion of choice: how do you track what consumers are accessing? How do you maintain corporate reputation in a mass of unmitigated opinion? How do you determine what is useful commentary from what is mere chatter?

The third part of the Podcasting in Creative Business seminar recording is the presentation by each of the three groups to everybody participating of the plans they devised during the afternoon session. We listen to each of the presentations and discuss how we think each one would work in the real world. Everybody is encouraged to join in.

The second recording from the Podcasting in Creative Business Development seminar contains extracts from the three group discussions.

Group one was discussing how to create a podcast series as part of a marketing campaign for Innocent Drinks. Group two were planning to use podcasting in internal communications for East Lothian Council. The third group had to make money from selling their podcast of Time Out Travel guides.