Is interactive production a collaborative economy?
Benjamin Hoguet & Gerald Holubowicz
In the field of interactive production, the most innovative work is not always done by the biggest production companies. Small structures – or even freelancers and students such as Elaine McMillion who gave us the beautiful Hollow – can adapt quickly to a constantly changing environment, change their shape and size to embrace every kind of situations.
Segmentation, cooperation, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, DIY distribution; all these forms of collaboration are unparalleled forces destined to reshape our creative world.
Much as the collaborative economy is about to transform the way services and products are made and exchanged, collaborative production will define new standards for producers of all fields by tapping deep into the collaborative economy resources:
- by exploring the many possibilities of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and DIY distribution
- by creating stronger interactions with coworking spaces and fablabs as tremendous pools of resources, skills and innovation
- by developing projects and ideas though workshops, hackathons and collaborative writing sessions
- by understanding than trust and community are as much powerful as money and technology
As founding members of Storycode Paris conferences and workshops, we experienced and encouraged this collaborative approach. Our last workshop dedicated to interactive writing and production gathered over 40 people to work on 6 different projects, transforming and transcending them over the course of 24 hours to be pitched before the most prominent French media decision makers (ARTE, France Televisions, Ubisoft…).
We’d like to share what we’ve learned – hosting these events and producing ourselves – about:
- group dynamics around interactive projects,
- workflow and workspace optimization to foster creativity,
- good practices to develop a community around a project, a crowdfunding or crowdsourcing campaign, a DIY distribution strategy…
- specific legal and cultural issues inherent to collaboration…
We had this vision of collaboration and we’ve developed methods and tools to give it more meaning than a simple, “unpractical” word. And we’d just like to share them.