ROBOTS & AVATARS FORUM – OUR COLLEAGUES OF THE FUTURE?
Wednesday 25th November 2009
The first Robots & Avatars Forum was co-produced by body>data>space and NESTA and initiated the programme with an intense day of debate on how young people today will work and play with new virtual and physical forms in 10-15 years time.
Attendees were invited from the education, creative industries, new media sectors, Robotics and Avatar worlds, work and behavioural psychologists, artists and key experts from future economy and future workplace. The day included keynote speeches from UK based and international experts, plus working groups and innovative panel discussions to explore the themes in depth.
The Forum aimed to envision the skill-sets, aptitudes, resources and methodologies that will be required by today‘s young people at work in 2020 onwards, given that so many of the jobs they will do have not been invented yet.
Some questions we explored:
— What potential challenges does the education sector face in preparing young people with the right creative skills and attitudes for their future work environments?
— With new representational forms in virtual and physical life – robots and avatars – likely to be a part of everyday working life, what will the working day for future generations entail?
— What is the emerging psychology underlying robot / avatar creation within today’s younger generations? What are the implications of this for how they learn?
— How do our robot and avatar creations reflect on ourselves? What can they teach us about ourselves?
The forum was the first event in the Robots & Avatars programme which also includes Educational Events, an Exhibition, a Website and a Book. It will investigate new relationships and skills the future workforce will need and what the next generation can expect from their jobs, careers, and recreation time.
The programme, starting with the Forum, aims to provide a platform for inter-sector and inter-generational investigation of the future of our identities in the 21st century. It examines the potential identity evolutions of today‘s younger generations within the context of a future in which divisions between virtual and physical spaces are increasingly blurred. It takes new creation techniques of self-representation, evolving in the form of robots and avatars, and weaves together unique strands of activity to explore the effect of these ideas on the artistic outputs and working modes of the future.
Robots and Avatars is a programme of work across 2009 and onwards conceived and produced by body>data>space with partners NESTA, rehearsal.org / Ignite!, King’s College Visualisation Lab (King’s College London), Hi8us, ResCen (Middlesex University), Soda, b.TWEEN festival, Kinura, Kinetica and RAN (Digital Art Network).
Robots and Avatars Forums are co-conceived and co-produced by body>data>space and NESTA .
If you would to co-operate, join in or make a link please email hello@robotsandavatars.net
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