17
May
Friday values sessions are back on and last week Kweku, our all star designer, organised the session!
We started out at the office where he split us into two teams giving both a map and sending us off on the elephant trail around london to see who could spot their most on the way to the next bit of our Values session!!
http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/
Elephant Parade is a conservation campaign that shines a multi-coloured spotlight on the urgent crisis faced by the endangered Asian elephant. Brought to you by www.elephantfamily.org, the event sees over 250 brightly painted life-size elephants located over central London this summer.
Both teams raced through the streets of east London, round corners and green’s towards the river, looking for the various painted elephants along the way and capturing a photo of each one we managed to find, until we reached the destination of the second part of the values session.
This found us at the London Fairtrade Festival, running from 7 – 9 May, the Festival celebrated World Fair Trade Day 2010. A weekend of Fairtrade family fun, including lots of Fairtrade food, music, film and entertainment to enjoy.
We tried a variety of food and drink all available to sample, from candy floss to harry hill nuts, alongside hats and bags and bits.
Later on there was a chocolate and wine tasting, where a man gave a speech about the history of chocolate, and a film was also shown.
After this a couple of the guys went down to TATE Britain as ‘Faith in the City’ and ‘It Ain’t Disneyland’ were being screened at the Late at Tate Britain: East is East event.
Aside from the rain at the end this was a brilliant Bold Values and we definitely had a good adventure!
Check out the elephants and see how many you can spot around London!!
26
Feb
Last weekend the Bold Team escaped the big city and went on a work retreat for 4 days in North Yorkshire at Middleton Lodge.
The Bold retreat was an opportunity for the whole team to spend some time together outside of the office, re-connect and affirm values and set goals for the future of Bold.
We spent the 4 days focusing on how to move Bold forward and make it more incredible for both us and you.
A ton of post-it notes were used and many positive discussions were had.
We all arranged our own session to run that would benefit Bold in some way.
The activities varied including one where you had to do a drawing of how you visualized Bold, and it’s future, which had some great results, and another one based on getting to know each other better. We also had the smarter/riskier scale, where you had to place different projects on the scale in terms of whether they were safe jobs, or risky, and why this was a positive or negative thing for Bold Creative.
I think one of the groups most entertaining tasks were the energizer tasks, with names like he-hi-ho, and pit pat poom.
These encouraged the group to focus and to work together and listen, these saw us all getting quite confused at times, but they brought energy levels up and really made us laugh.
Alongside the brainstorming sessions and tasks, we stuck the main problems we had recognized within the company on various doors around the house so that people could add to this at any time, like how to create a good meeting space with no money!? Less meetings was probably the most humorous response!
Alongside the team building and goals setting, we did play a bit as well! The snow fell on Saturday night, which provoked a healthy snowball fight!
On Monday the bold team spent the afternoon out in the snowy countryside learning how to clay-pigeon shoot!! We had a competition, and it seems a lot of the Bold team members have serious shooting skills!!
In the evenings the Bold team took turns to cook for one another! We made stew, paella, lasagne, along with starters and pre-dinner drinks.
And on Monday night when the Freelancers joined the Core team, we had a proper dinner around the table in the fancy dining room!
Though it was a little later than planned, the whole evening was lovely, and we got an opportunity to keep talking about Bold and values, as well as just generally getting to know each other more!
The kitchen was the hub of the house, a lot of key discussions went on there, alongside a lot of eating, some dancing, and cookery classes!
The Bold Creative Apple and Blackberry pie-making was a kitchen highlight!
The retreat was a great experience for all of us, and really helped push Bold forward, and a lot of good ideas came out of it about how to do this!
The only mishap happened on the first night when we managed to fill the entire house with smoke, resulting in some not so happy firemen – good start!!
The house was brilliant, and although I think we all felt sad to go back home to our poky southern establishments, at least we were full of Bold inspiration and focused on Bold values, and our own goals.
p.s I think we all miss Tabitha the house cat a bit
16
Feb
Last Friday I organized a trip to the V & A for their Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition, for our Friday’s Value Session.
We are currently getting involved in more digital projects, looking at i-phone applications and things, and I thought it would be interesting to see if the exhibition could help us find out more about the possibilities of the digital world.
Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.
The exhibition features both existing works and new commissions created especially for the exhibition.
Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts.
The exhibition explores three themes:
Code presents pieces that use computer code to create new works and looks at how code can be programmed to create constantly fluid and ever-changing works.
In this piece Aaron Koblin, an artist specializing in data visualisation, created an interactive version of House of Cards, on display in the exhibition, where the face would move in synchronicity with your hands.
Interactivity looks at works that are directly influenced by the viewer. Visitors will be invited to interact with and contribute to the development of the exhibits.
This was probably the funnest part of the exhibition with all sorts of different things to interact with,
The one above was one of my favourites, Daniel Rozin trained as an industrial and interactive designer. He creates interactive installations and sculptures that have the ability to change and respond to the presence of a viewer. Although computers are often used, they are seldom visible. Mirrors and the mediated perception of the self are central themes in his work.
This one was really interesting, when you walked past it the metal plates would rotate to create a shadow of where you were standing, and we tried to figure out how it worked, but are still not entirely sure!
For this one you had to create pools of light in a pile of black sand, and in those pools of light grew these wierd cell-like creatures, it was quite fascinating to watch.
It was created by Everyware, a creative computing group formed by Hyunwoo Bang (b. 1978, South Korea) and Yunsil Heo (b. 1979, South Korea).
We had a lot of fun with a video recording installation in this area too.
Ross Phillips is an interaction designer and Creative Technical Director at SHOWstudio, He created a screen with 20 different 3 second long videos playing that people at the exhibition recorded.
We did our own, with quite humorous results.
Network, was the final theme,
Network focuses on works that comment on and utilise the digital traces left behind by everyday communications and looks at how advanced technologies and the internet have enabled new types of social interaction and mediums of self-expression.
The above piece was created by Aaron Koblin, an artist specialising in data visualisation, and this piece demonstrated flight paths that were being tracked.
The Exhibition is on from: 8 December 2009–11 April 2010
Although the exhibition wasn’t huge, we still had a good time and I recommend you head down then and see for yourself!!
25
Jan
At Bold Creative we have 3 Key values.
Smarter not Harder
People
Adventure.
Every Friday we have a Values session, where we do an activity that helps strengthen those key bold creative values.
This week, we went rock climbing in Mile End!
Martin & Greg are seasoned Pro’s so they showed us the ropes, quite literally!
It strengthened our sense of adventure, especially for the first timers, and we got more confident throughout the session, as well as teaching us something new it was a lot of fun!
Trusting each other to help on the belaying, was good for the people values too!
That is a picture of Kweku, who’s doing work experience with us at the moment, pretty adventurous!!