Creative Research and Development Collaborations

Jones, J.

Around the world there are many examples of how universities and industry work together to create new knowledge and new economic value. Motivating creative, smart people to work together can be one of the hardest aspects of such endeavours, especially where various arrangements and agreements need to take the commercial interests of industry into account as well as the highly aspirational interests of individual researchers. Professor Jeff Jones, CEO and Research Director of ACID - the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design - will discuss some of the key challenges to establishing robust collaborative arrangements, the difficulties that arise where geographic distance is an issue, and the fantastic project teams and outcomes that are possible. Jones will also showcase some of the interaction design projects already underway. Interaction design is about finding better ways for people to interact with each other through communication technologies. Interaction design involves understanding how people, learn, work and play so that we can engineer - better, more valuable and more appropriate technologies to the contexts of their lives. As an academic discipline, interaction design is about the people-research that underpins the development of these technologies. For ACID, interaction design is commercially focused to help people participate in the digital world. ACID is uniquely situated in the world to help Australasia take advantage of the hybrid Indigenous- Asian-European-North American design and creative industries. ACID has a defined capacity to integrate the hard-edged commercial focus of its Smart Living projects with the distinctive and responsible activities in the Virtual Heritage projects. But to make ACID truly distinctive we've combined these with technologies in Digital Media projects and the mass-distribution and social capacity development expertise emerging in the Multi-user Environments projects. This multifaceted integration of technology, methods, domain knowledge and culture provides ACID and the Australasian economy with an ultimate value differentiator and some truly sustainable advantages.

Cite as: Jones, J. (2005). Creative Research and Development Collaborations. In Proc. Sixth Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC2005), Newcastle, Australia. CRPIT, 40. Billinghurst, M. and Cockburn, A., Eds. ACS. 3.

(from crpit.com) (local if available)