USE Stimulus Lineup Announced

The submissions have come in, and the final line-up has been decided. Many thanks to all who sent in their ideas and talks. Congratulations to the speakers who have been selected to present on the event theme Future Users of Cool Technology at the inaugural Unsheffield USE Stimulus night at 7pm Friday 19 June.

Scratch Game Workshop

We are delighted to announce a free workshop for children and parents to learn the basics of Scratch to explore creativity through technology. Scratch allows young people to make their own interactive art and computer games, and was used to create the Avatars displayed in the Showroom Cinema during Unsheffield and the Sheffield Children’s Festival.

Talking to Future Users

How do we talk about cool technologies in ways that make sense to new users? How do we talk about technology in ways that take account of the realities of those users? And how do the terms we currently use shape up? These are much bigger questions than whether an event is called BarCamp or Unsheffield – and it’s worth standing back and thinking about.
Dougald Hine takes a timely look at the language of disengagement and the uncool of technology.

4iP

The old adage of Build It And They Will Come simply doesn’t work with many Future Users. Sustained engagement demands not only an innovative product but a shake-up in the way we traditionally go about identifying relevance and creating useful solutions, typically using widespread or mundane technology that’s just applied to cool effect. 4iP have already established a strong pedigree of encouraging forward-thinking and inventive ways to reach out to millions of people who would otherwise happily let the digital revolution pass them by.

The Dirty ‘G’ Word

Video games are the dominant medium of our civilization. So why are they not taken seriously? Why are they considered incapable of exploring serious issues in a meaningful way?
Philip Trippenbach examines the prejudices against one of the most engaging forms of technology.

No Future Shock

Okay, it’s rough to criticise the work of Alvin Toffler, nearly 40 years after he published ‘Future Shock‘. But while Toffler’s key premise – that the shift from an industrial age to a post-industrial, highly technology-mediated society would leave us all feeling rather disconnected and over stressed – may have some merit in terms of information overload, it’s perhaps not quite as stressful. We’ve certainly been living a more connected existence in technologically developed societies since the early 1990s.

Joanne Jacobs explores the evolution of technology into the contexts for engagement of Future Users.

Call for Social Media Surgeons

Unsheffield is building on the legacy of the BashMash voluntary collaboration days to bootstrap a Social Media Surgery for Sheffield’s voluntary and third sector. We’re inviting bloggers and social media experts in the region to become Social Media Surgeons for the weekend and share their skills and experience. Surgery will be open Sat 20 and Sun 21 Jun, and Surgeons will be guaranteed tickets for the event on the days they can contribute.

UK Online Centres

A cornerstone of Unsheffield is identifying effective ways to get more people comfortable with using technology. UK Online Centres are at the forefront of providing training and facilities for people to become digitally engaged. They have been key to converting Future Users into able technology users, focussing on delivering practical, life-changing digital literacy skills [...]

University of Sheffield Enterprise

The Stimulus night that kicks off Unsheffield will serve up a smorgasbord of ideas that point the way forward for makers and users of technology, and we’re delighted that the University of Sheffield Enterprise have joined Unsheffield as event partner to help make this happen. Social enterprise and pragmatic innovation feature significantly in the Unsheffield programme, and combining technology and social research from academic circles with industry generates great opportunities to produce progressive solutions that provide real life-changing value to people.

Future Users? Cool Technology?

So who are these Future Users we’re talking about? And what do we mean by Cool Technology? Why should the former care about the latter? And why should we care that they care about it? All these questions, and many more besides, are exactly the kind we hope to understand better at Unsheffield.