Interview with Alison Coleman
by Daniel King
Alison Coleman is the Director of The Fuse Factory, a media arts incubator taking shape amidst the local intersection of art, technology, industry and education. The Fuse Factory was begun in 2008, with the expressed purpose to function as an incubator for innovation, interaction, collaboration, critical thought, diversity, and artistic exploration.
How could I not be intrigued? Indeed. In the month of October alone, The Fuse Factory is offering workshops in Flash Animation, Scratch (creative programming for kids), Paperduino, Actionscript, and Stop Motion Animation! And they are all incredibly affordable, for all of us blue collar, or no collar, creatives.
Daniel King:
I admire your series of technology hacking workshops for young people, and the partnerships with the co-working spaces. Fuse Factory seems perpetually a few steps ahead of the rest of the columbus media-arts community. It seems that your organization is becoming a hub for various creative media & technology practices in town, and in the process, cultivating a community identity of some sort.
Can you tell me more about this new Transit Arts Digital Story Telling project?
Alison Coleman: Digital storytelling has been gaining traction in the arts and education circles in the country for some time, particularly on the coasts - I've been inspired by the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, CA, and I wanted to instigate something along the lines of what they do (albeit on a much smaller scale).
There is also a great university/community collaboration between UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, the UC Links Program, and the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement called DUSTY (Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth) that is very inspiring as well.
In order to make something like this happen here, I needed to find a group or organization that works with teens, since the Fuse Factory doesn't have any formal association with any social service orgs (yet). My friend Loring Reisler had done some great work with the Godman Guild last summer and she put me in touch with Jackie Calderone, who heads up TRANSIT ARTS. TRANSIT ARTS is based at the Central Community House, but they also work with teens affiliated with a few of the other Settlement House system centers.
When I approached Jackie and Maggie Livisay, the TRANSIT ARTS program coordinator, with my digital storytelling program idea they were extremely enthusiastic. With their input, along with the input of local interactive designer/educator/musician Jason Gonzales (he had taught digital storytelling at the high school level in years prior and is also involved with Fuse Factory) I wrote and submitted a grant to the Ohio Arts Council. We went ahead and started up the program in mid-July, and found out a couple of weeks later that our grant proposal was selected to receive some funding, which was very nice!
The program itself has just started - first, the teens learned about storytelling and methods of storytelling from Keith "Speak" Williams, a fantastic local performance artist and emcee. I then introduced them to some examples of digital storytelling.
Once they had the outlines of their stories written, I transported a small "computer lab" consisting of five refurbished Dell mini-laptops, five mics, and five sets of headphones to the Central Community House, and they immediately set to learning Audacity (an open source audio editing software application) and recording their stories.
For background music accompanying their stories, David Morneau, a (formerly) local experimental musician has graciously allowed us to remix the compositions from his piece 60x365 - I like to be able to introduce students to contemporary artists whenever possible.
The teens are on a break from TRANSIT ARTS currently, but we will be continuing the program in mid-September, and it will last through mid-December.
DK: How have you seen Columbus respond to your community workshops, like the hacked toys, or robotics workshops? How did you get started with this and where do you see it going?
AC: It took a little while to get our workshop program off the ground. We started offering workshops in the spring of 2008, advertising them through Columbus Underground and Twitter shortly after. At first, we offered workshops based on our own personal art/tech interests and what we would like to see happen in Columbus. For example, we were really excited at the prospect of introducing people to Processing, an open source programming language developed for artists and designers, and a couple of us were really into social media and computer animation. In the beginning, we had to cancel a few of our workshops because we didn't get enough enrollment, but as time went on and we figured out ways to get the word out (we established an email list, which we added to over time, and got a big boost from Alicia Oddi and Ruby Classen from the GCAC - in the fall of 2008, Ruby started including information about our workshops in their OPP Art email blasts), more people started attending.
"At root, what we want our workshops to do is empower people: to give them the confidence to experiment with different forms of technology and get creative with all of it." - Alison Coleman
I would like to mention the amazing support I receive from Arvind Venkataramani, a design researcher for Sonic Rim who serves as the Fuse Factory education coordinator. He is chock full of energy and amazing insights, and his involvement has been really instrumental in the evolution of our workshop program.
Fuse Factory's Arduino Workshop opens up creative programming to younger audiences
Nearly all of the workshops in our 2008 - 2009 season were offered for the first time, so a lot of it was just trial and error, seeing what people were attracted to, and hoping there was an audience for our interests. Basically what I did was approach volunteers interested in teaching, asked them what they wanted to offer, and scheduled workshops based on their availability. I don't want them to teach anything they aren't fired up about.
Our first workshop that filled up was our Intro to the Arduino, and that was really gratifying. Our circuit bending workshop was very popular too. Another thing we discovered was that there are quite a few graphic designers in Columbus and the surrounding areas who are looking to upgrade their skills for the web but don't have the time or funds to go back to school, and a number of our workshops address that need.
Still, sometimes it is hard to predict which workshops will attract a crowd and which ones won't. This past winter we started handing out a survey to all workshop participants in order to get a sense of who they were demographic-wise, as well as get a better sense of what their expectations were regarding what they hoped to get out of the class and what they'd like to see us offer in the future.
We aren't trying to replace college courses, per se - we couldn't do this even if we tried. We simply don't have the capacity. At root, what we want our workshops to do is empower people: to give them the confidence to experiment with different forms of technology and get creative with all of it. Many people - artists and designers included - are still pretty intimidated by the thought of messing with technology, and they've been conditioned to believe that technological objects are black boxes - you somehow aren't "permitted" to crack them open and experiment with them.
Many people are intimidated by science, and believe they aren't "real artists." Adding to this is the wide gulf people perceive exists between science and math, and art. We want to eliminate this gap, and make art and technology accessible. We want people to leave our workshops feeling like they can go home and sit down with a software application or robotics kit or a box full of electronic toys without worrying they will break something or fail miserably at what they were trying to do.
I mean, they might fail the first time, but they will hopefully realize this isn't the end of the world and they feel confident enough to keep trying.
As far as where we want to go, there are several areas.
First, we want to expand and diversify our audience. We've been working on marketing our workshops to parents and their kids, and a few of our into-level robotics workshops have attracted children and adults. We also intend to continue applying for grants so we can serve folks affiliated with the various social service agencies around town.
One of our board members, Sam Hoar, works with autistic adults for a living, and we're exploring ways to collaborate. Another way in which we are trying to expand is create series of workshops that work in conjunction to achieve a specific technological and artistic goal.
For example, we are really interested in physical computing, which is highly multifaceted and can't be adequately tackled in a one-off workshop here and there. So, we've developed a workshop series encompassing putting together an arduino from scratch, learning PHP, exploring interaction design, and creating an emergent behavior sculpture with the Lilypad arduino.
Another workshop series we are developing is a 3-session series of workshops on digital storytelling.
On top of this we are working on getting the word out that we are available for workshops on demand, as well as one-on-one tutoring session. We are still going to continue offering workshops covering web design (HTML, CSS, Javascript), intro-level programming, and circuit bending because people have responded well to those.
DK: What sort of partnerships has Fuse Factory built among local (even regional) groups? Seems like in a very short time - you've build quite an impressive support base. Was Columbus at a tipping point for your org?
AC: In addition to our most recent partnership with Transit Arts and the partnership with the Greater Columbus Arts Council, we've partnered with the Wild Goose Creative and the Idea Foundry. We're really lucky to have been able to work with both organizations, as they are run by incredibly dedicated, talented people who are really committed to improving the arts scene in Columbus.
Wild Goose Creative has been willing to let us use their wonderful space for workshops and performances, and their rates have been extremely reasonable. We will also be working with them on their New Year's bash - the plan is to create an LED floatie installation the first night of the event, and then lead a kid's workshop on how to make a BlinkyBug a day or so later. Hands down, they've been absolutely wonderful to work with.
We also collaborated with the Idea Foundry (headed up by the awesome and intrepid Alex Bandar) when we organized Columbus' First Annual Power Tool Drag Race. We most definitely could not have done it without them! The Idea Foundry provided the space and the equipment and know-how for the drag racer workshop, as well as materials and enthusiastic emcees. Like I said, it couldn't have happened without them, and I'm grateful they were willing to work with us. We also collaborated on an Intro to Soldering workshop earlier this year, and it went really well. Hopefully we'll be able to collaborate with them again.
Power Tool Drag Race Workshop at The Idea Foundry, Summer 2009
An upcoming collaboration is with Igloo Press. I've been talking with Igloo ss founder Allison Chapman about a workshop we've hoping to offer jointly. The workshop will show participants how to create a handmade book with a cover that is lit up with a pattern of LEDs. The LEDs are powered by a Lilypad arduino.
Another org we'd like to collaborate with in the future is Free Geek - one of our volunteers has recently been elected to the Free Geek board of directors and we've been talking about ways our two organizations can come together and put together something educational and cool.
DK: What are some of the effective ways you've learned to use social media to advance your creative ideas? And perhaps... what hasn't worked either?
AC: We use social media pretty much exclusively to promote our workshops, and primarily to promote our events. As you probably already know, traditional forms of marketing (postcards, posters, etc.) can be very expensive for small operations like us. This means we have to be very judicious as to which events we'll use postcards for.
Overall, social media has really been a boon to us. We have an email list, of course, but I also post information about our workshops to various LinkedIn groups, meetup.com, Columbus Underground, upcoming.yahoo.com, various homeschool group listservs, Facebook, and Twitter (although I haven't been twittering as much as I've been wanting to lately). A couple businesses in town, Tracer Media and Portfolio Creative Staffing, spread the word about our workshops via their listservs and their blog, for which I am very grateful. I encourage the other Fuseniks to spread the word through various social media channels as well, and they're very good about this.
As to which channel has been most effective, it's hard to say, although I think LinkedIn has been the biggest source for us. This is just a guess, though. I subscribe to all of the LinkedIn lists that focus on Central Ohio, technology, art, and design. We do pass out a survey after every workshop asking participants questions about their demographics, what they thought of the workshop, and where they heard of the Fuse Factory and the workshop itself.
Although we haven't done any sort of formal tallying across the board yet, the responses in regards to how they've heard of us and the workshops is really varied - nothing has really stuck out in terms of being the biggest generator of workshop participants. We get responses ranging from "word of mouth" and "a listserv at work" to "Meetup.com" and "the internet". Sometimes people simply don't remember!
In terms of what hasn't worked, if a social media channel hasn't brought in workshop participants or people to our events, I guess that means it hasn't worked. I think all of the social media channels have worked to varying degrees if I were to use that criteria. It is a matter of finding a balance between using time wisely (in other words, it is worth the 10-15 minutes it will take to post this info on this site?) and the return from spending that time. At this point, we just want to get the word out as widely as possible, so we pretty much post wherever we think there is an audience (artists, designers, techie people, homeschool parents, DIYers, etc.).
But bottom line: thank goodness for social media! If it weren't for social media, we wouldn't have the reach we currently do.
-Daniel King is a media artist focused on photographic still and moving arts. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. (http://scissorcircus.wordpress.com/)
Links
The Fuse Factory
Center for Digital Storytelling
Transit Arts
Processing
Arduino
Wild Goose Creative
Columbus Idea Foundry
Igloo Press
Free Geek Columbus
