Mapping the creative industries

Mapping the creative industries

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has drawn up her first thoughts on the creative industries and how they are connected. It comes from her experience at the V&A’s Power of Making symposium.

In her own words….

As I work my way through my notes on the event, I also wanted to start to unpick who was using the word “make” and what they were making. This is a first stab and not really about creating collaborative connections yet. I might also be missing some things, do let me know. In this, I think we can see where the “creative industries” overlap and therefore where skill sets overlap. This also proves perhaps that one should be quite careful with using any one term. Designer, artists, engineer…when you look close enough, can become one and the same.

I personally think its a great map and a very good stab at a difficult subject. Great to see Artist, Designer, Hacker, Developer, Engineer, Crafts person all given the footing as one another.

I specially like the fact Hacker is sandwiched right between designer and developer… Something I certainly like to class myself as.

Maybe if I was to change two things it would be the notion of 2D and Crafts person. Digital is maybe different from 2D and certainly from 3D. Crafts person strikes me as too descriptive and tied down to a format. However I don’t really have another name to suggest…

Google App Inventor, excellent stuff

Google have really hit it out of the park this time. Google App Inventor (sign up page) allows almost anyone to build a Android application using a simple interface. Now don’t get me wrong, the interface is pretty nasty but heck Google are democratization app development and in my book thats great news for content producers or just people with good ideas and a little time.

This all flies in the face of Apple’s restrictive SLA which prevents apps being made with a application on another system.

I look forward to seeing what other democratization google does in the near future, but boy do google need some good designers, because this looks pretty ugly. Hopefully that won’t put people off. Maybe Google should get Adobe involved in this one?