Innovation Showcases
Featured Unravelling Motherhood
Innovation Showcase Tammie Leong
The "Unraveling Motherhood" project is a pilot study that began as a personal visual diary documenting the transition into motherhood while living abroad. It explores the diverse experiences of postcolonial Southeast and East Asian migrant mothers, whose voices are often overlooked. The project collaborates with these mothers through a co-design process to create an engaging online storytelling platform that combines their narratives and photographs with animations. The research utilises practice-based and participatory methods inspired by the feminist ethnography approach. The approach practises ethical transparency and reflexivity and empowers migrant mothers to frame their narratives. It examines cultural creolization, highlighting how migrant mothers blend Eastern and Western cultural practices to navigate societal expectations. The project uses polyphonic storytelling and scrolly-telling techniques—including hypertext, poetic elements, and parallax narratives—to present a non-linear, multi-layered portrayal of migrant motherhood. The research aims to challenge traditional notions of motherhood by engaging with the cultural, racial, and economic contexts of migrant mothers. The co-design approach empowers participants, giving them agency in shaping their narratives, resulting in a platform that authentically reflects their lived experiences. The project also contributes to UX/UI design and digital storytelling by showcasing innovative interactive features that address historical and social issues. Overall, "Unraveling Motherhood" challenges dominant narratives, promotes shared authorship, and enhances understanding of the complexities of migrant motherhood in a globalised world.
Expanding the Horizons of Three-Dimensional Software: Digital Art and Architectural Visualization Redefined
Innovation Showcase Saral Surakul
Visual art is often regarded as prestigious, showcasing artists' abilities to convey ideas through various media. With technological advancements, artists have tools like interactive videos and mobile apps to expand their creativity. However, questions persist about whether machines can evoke genuine emotional responses through art. This presentation explores the author's journey of blending traditional art with advanced 3D software for digital art and architectural visualization. Experimenting with AutoCAD since 1995, the author fully embraced 3DStudio Max in 2006, a tool primarily used in film production. Over time, 3D software became integral to his creative process. Section 1: Art The author's artworks, created in 3DS Max, simulate natural lighting, cameras, and real-world materials. Using Mudbox for intricate detailing, he overcame lighting challenges by developing a regulation technique that mirrors classic masterpieces. The finished works, printed on canvas, reflect his evolving ideas, styles, and techniques from 2011 to 2024. Section 2: Architectural Visualization Blending Sumi ink and 3DS Max, the author developed a unique illustration style inspired by the fluidity of Sumi ink and the vibrant colors of Ukiyo-e. He combines manual inking with digital elements, emphasizing composition, perception, and color. Landscapes are symbolic, with textured overlays mimicking physical media. As technology evolves, the quest to replicate traditional art through digital means continues.
Data Lifeboats for Citizen-Driven Collecting
Innovation Showcase Fattori Mc Kenna, George Oates
This study introduces the Data Lifeboat, a novel curatorial tool developed by the Flickr Foundation to address critical challenges in social media collecting. Traditional archival methods falter when confronting the scale, ephemerality and platform dependencies of social photography — leading to significant gaps in our shared digital cultural heritage. Developed through a series of co-design workshops with archivists, librarians, technologists and curators, the Data Lifeboat enables lightweight, durable, portable downloads of Flickr images with their valuable social metadata (comments, tags, EXIF data etc) preserved. Designed to remedy losses from the ongoing 'Digital Dark Age', where digital records often prove more fragile than physical ones, Data Lifeboat facilitates citizen-driven collections of networked social photography: a distinct entity in photography's history. We explore the tool's democratic potential through our Data Lifeboat documenting the 2019 Notre Dame fire. While media outlets produced uniform coverage, Flickr's community revealed multidimensional perspectives — bystanders documenting flames along the Seine, workers capturing reconstruction efforts, locals sharing views of their transformed neighborhood. This citizen-generated content captures overlooked narratives that expand representation in digital preservation, creating richer historical records than institutional documentation alone provides. This approach can counter collecting biases by empowering communities themselves to determine what merits preservation and provide contextual annotations often absent from official archives. Put more broadly, Data Lifeboats can distribute collecting power, allowing communities and individuals to hold their own collections. Thus Data Lifeboats represent both technical innovation and an opportunity to develop more inclusive, community-driven digital preservation practices.
