Alternator is a futuristic online racing game made for the ABC. Its purpose is to inspire players to take an interest in clean and renewable technologies. But can a game really save the planet?… No. The game can’t… but the people who play the game can.

There is a growing belief that games have an important role to play in behavior change. The games for change festival this year secured Al Gore as keynote speaker, and the Game Developers Conference in 2012 has a strand dedicated to games for change.

Young players who love car racing games aren’t necessarily interested in researching clean energy solutions, but Alternator opens that world for them in a really fun and engaging way. The player builds their car with clean technology. By winning races, they gain a legion of supporters who invest money in that technology allowing the player to make their car even cleaner and more powerful. The game is filled with amazing facts, but also has links out to the real world of clean technology.

So far the response from young players has been incredibly positive. One girl even gave the game 1 million out of 10. (perhaps we should have made a mathematics game).

Being my first game it was a huge learning experience, however the learning curve is still arcing up. It turns out making a game is the easy part. Spreading the word is where things get really tough. I’ve realised very quickly that it’s not enough to have a really fun game, you need to let people know it exists.

Marketing. How do you successfully market a game?… especially as an independent. I don’t know yet. I’m still working it out.

We have hired a social media expert to help us with the Facebook/Twitter/MySpace push. This has been reasonably successful so far. In the first week we had over 1000 fans of the game, and four weeks later that has risen to 3,750. Hopefully that number will continue to grow, though we are waiting to find out player numbers from the ABC so it’s impossible to say how many “fans” are actually playing the game. If you’re an indie without the time, expertise or inclination do the social media yourself I would highly recommend hiring an expert. There are plenty to choose from. We used Hayley Benson from BensonMears.

What we haven’t been able to do yet is get is get reviews or articles in either online or more traditional publications. If anyone has some ideas or experience in this area I’d love to hear your thoughts about how to break through and stand out from the other games being reviewed and written about.

As marketing for the game continues we are looking at how we can grow the concept of Alternator. We have designed an amazing world and characters, which the game only barely scratches the surface of. “Transmedia” is the latest buzz word for having one idea across several formats. So as well as taking the game into apps for phones or downloads for consoles, we’re looking at creating educational supplements for schools, and even an animated series. All of these elements will help feed back to the game and build the audience for Alternator.

Einstein apparently said “The world we have created is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking” So you never know….maybe Alternator will inspire the thoughts of the next Einstein who will find the ultimate solution to our energy needs!

Join founder, Alison Tickell, for a practical discussion on sustainability within the creative industries. Drawing on her experience working with the likes of EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner music, Alison will establish some guidelines for best practice, show you how to develop and implement a sustainability plan in your organisation and share some of the powerful free tools and resources that Julie’s Bicycle have created.

Tailored for small to medium arts organisations, independent artists and cultural workers, this session is presented by The Edge in proud partnership with the British Council Australia.

When: 6-7:30pm, 12 Oct
Where: The Edge Auditorium
Cost: $10 +BF
Bookings: http://greeningci.eventbrite.com

About Julie’s Bicycle
Established in 2007 by and for the UK music industry, Julie’s Bicycle is a non-profit company working with the arts and creative industries to understand and reduce their environmental impacts.

Together with research partners, Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and Surrey University’s Centre for Environmental Strategy, Julie’s Bicycle produces research papers and practical guides, run events, workshops, seminars, training sessions and networks to maximise the reach and relevance of our work.

About Alison Tickell
Alison is the founder of Julie’s Bicycle and an Associate Professor at Buckinghamshire New University. She is a part of the Global Reporting Initiative, and a founder of the United Nations Environmental Programme Encore initiative. She is also a trustee of Sound Connections, a school governor and a fellow of the RSA.

Alison trained as a professional musician and combined performing and teaching before embarking on a more prosaic career. Her previous roles include Music Director at Creative and Cultural Skills and Director at Community Music, founding Board of Creative and Cultural Skills and lead consultant for the National Skills Academy.

Illustration by Christine Sharp www.christinesharp.com

“I love eating croissants… being a baker must be 10 times as wonderful!”

This is the kind of naïve thinking that led me to making a computer game. While a croissant only takes 60 seconds to consume and is instantly satisfying, learning to bake good French pastry can take years of sweat, swearing and broken eggs. It’s the same with making games…minus the eggs.

Alternator is a futuristic online racing game, which inspires players to take an interest in clean and renewable technologies. The game came about thanks to ABC and Screen Australia’s serious games initiative. The brief was for filmmakers or screenwriters to team up with game makers to create a Serious Game.

I come from the film and TV side of the equation, including the creation of AFI award winning comedy show ‘Double the Fist’.  I had always wanted to make a game. I love playing games, I get seriously addicted, and I imagined making one was just like playing one only ten times more fun. Clearly I had never made a game before, and certainly not a Serious Game.

Serious Games… It sounds a bit like Boring Fun.

I know. The seemingly contradictory nature of the concept struck me the first time I heard it too.

A “Serious Game” is any computer game that has a primary purpose other than entertainment. Serious Games are designed for a variety of reasons: education, information, health, even advertising. You’ve probably seen those fun little animated flash games at the top of some websites that challenge you to test your hand eye coordination… the real purpose of those games is to get you to click the link. I hope others have fallen for it as many times as I have.

Teachers and parents have known for centuries that games are a great way to encourage children to learn, but as our digital capabilities have increased the rest of the world has finally realised the incredible power of games to change thinking and behavior.

How do you make a Serious Game?

Games use all of the core aspects from film making; script, character, story, theme; and add the complexity of audience interactivity and multiple options. Serious games then add the extra complexity of a specific outcome for the player.

Being a novice game maker, I made sure I did plenty of research before starting development. Basically I spent weeks playing games! It was tough. Luckily there were plenty of Serious Games out there to test (I’ve included some links at the end of this post). I decided very quickly what made a great Serious Game.

It was simple.

Make sure it’s a great game! Even though the primary focus isn’t entertainment, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be just as entertaining as a regular game. You could have the greatest message in the world, but if no one wants to play your game the message will be lost, so I knew we had to make a game that was first and foremost 100 percent awesome fun to play.

There’s often a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the future of the planet, so I wanted to go against the negativity and create something that gave young people a feeling of optimism by showcasing some of the amazing planet saving inventions that exist right now! Using the fast action of car racing felt like the perfect game genre to do this.

Racing games are usually all about gas guzzling. We took a lot of the classic racing game structure and twisted it to our theme. You can drift around corners to create boost energy, which is pretty standard for car games, but in Alternator if you don’t use the boost, any extra energy you make is sold back to the grid for extra cash!

The Team

We put together a small, but highly skilled team of people that spanned across Australia. Producer Dean Tuttle and I are based in Sydney. John Welsh, our serious games expert and co-producer was in Adelaide. Our music and sound FX team were from NSW. And our core game developers were based in Brisbane. Check out some of the work our Brisbane devs have also done.

We also had plenty of support from around the world. Scientists and engineers from every corner of the globe contributed to the game. We were lucky to have American gaming guru Noah Falstein as a mentor. Making Alternator has been truly collaborative on a global scale.

Because Alternator straddles the present and the future, we designed all of the game elements to reflect this.

The music, sound FX, and art design, are wild and futuristic and like nothing you’ve seen or heard before, but they all have links to today. For instance, one of the music tracks combines, a beat boxing didgeridoo with digital distortion, slide guitar and synthesised metal chords. It rocks!

We wanted the upgrading of the car to happen in a way that we’d never seen in any other car racing game. We fell in love with the concept of the upgrades creating the shape of the car. Milenko Tunjic our car designer, went to town and came up with some amazing designs around that idea. We had to work very closely with Shawn Eustace our Art Director, to make sure the concepts were achievable in 3D.

The Serious Bit

As well as being a great fun online racer, the game needs to deliver on its ultimate aim of inspiring players about the amazing world of planet saving technology that exists today.

Developing the serious side was a massive undertaking, we wanted to avoid it feeling like two separate elements; a car racing game and then some information about renewable energy. A lot of serious games fall into this structure, which is less than ideal.

All the game experts I spoke to while making Alternator gave me the same advice: “Never let the player take their hands off the controls”. Games are an interactive art form. We didn’t want players to stop having fun to read a Wikipedia entry. So we spent a huge amount of time with the team to crack the solution for keeping the learning aspect tied intrinsically to the game play.

The game is set 50 years in the future. Scattered around the race tracks are ‘tech pods’ which you must find and collect. Each one of these pods contains a different clean technology to discover. As you unlock these new inventions for your car the game flashes back to the present to show you the real technology it’s based on.

In fact researching these technologies was one of the most exciting parts of working on the game. I had no idea just how many amazing inventions are out there, and so many sound like they’re from a science fiction movie.

Solar panels made from spinach. Batteries made from viruses. A craft launched into the air with lasers. Even flying cars! And there’s plenty more in the game.

And the reward for unlocking all of this amazing technology? You get to use them. The game takes these inventions 50 years into the future, and they become the upgrades that help your car drive faster, drift better, and fly higher. It’s really cool!

From conception to completion has been a two year process. While it’s not as instantly gratifying as playing a game, making Alternator has been ultimately been a much more rewarding experience. Especially knowing that the effects will be longer lasting and much better for players than a buttery croissant!

But can it save the planet?

In ten days you can play it and let me know what you think. In a month I’ll let you all know how successful we were.

In the meantime, check out the alternatorindustries.com website for more info or check out some of these serious games for inspiration:

California’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle)
National Geographic games
World without oil
Virtual world solar challenge
Habitat Heroes
Harpooned

Help Seeker

Following on from the success of Flood of Ideas, the School of Ideas competition got youngsters thinking about how to flood-proof Queensland for the years to come.

Entry was open to students from prep (only 5 years of age!) to year 12 and we were blown away by how thoughtful and practical their solutions were. From the 50 entries we received the judges had a tough time narrowing it down to a winner for each age group. But they did, and we are pleased to announce the follow winners (drumroll please):

Early: Prep – 2
Winner – Yandina State School, for Paperbark trees, underground houses, snorkels and hologram food

The judges were impressed by how this idea considers the importance of the practical relationships between individuals, our pets, building, infrastructure and natural systems like waterways and trees. A highlight of the submission is the system of ‘hologram food’ that attracts animals to a secure bunker to protect them in times of flood (aweseome!).

Runners up – Calvary Christian College, Yandina State School

Young: 3-6
Winner – Calvary Christian College, for Help seeker

The systematic and creative integration of technology was the standout feature of this idea. The Help Seeker is a high-tech ‘super rescue vessel’ that could quite practically be developed to be positioned in disaster-prone areas in anticipation of flood events.

Runner up: Calvary Christian College

Middle: 7-10
Winner – Brisbane Grammar School, for Joining Dams to Create More Space

The judges were impressed by this submission’s understanding of the system of water courses and dams in South East Queensland and the potential to integrate this network into a more developed flood response. The idea aims to spread the impact of a flood event from one central dam (Wivenhoe) and disperse the water through a network of secondary dams and waterways.
Congratulations to all our winners. Three students from Brisbane Grammar will be taking part in a three day workshop at The Edge to expand and build on their idea. While they are here they will be making an interactive object and working on a presentation to showcase at the International River Symposium being held in Brisbane 26- 29 September 2011.

Flood of Ideas is a joint initiative of The Edge, State Library of Queensland and The Healthy Waterways Partnership, capturing the creative spirit that emerged in the wake of the state-wide floods of December 2010 and January 2011.

While the rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday that the Rapture never arrived, a small band of survivors faced their own apocalypse in Brisbane.

As part of the 2011 Fringe Ideas Festival we recruited six Survivalists to role play in Future City: Zombie Climate Apocalypse. That’s right. Not only did The Muscle, The Geek, The Medic, The Scientist, The Eye Candy and The Hunter-Gatherer have to source shelter, water and food in a landscape ravaged by climate change. They also had to fend off attacks by zombies.

Luckily, the merry band of Survivors recruited through a Facebook campaign had no shortage of skills, smarts and familiarity with zombie lore…

The game began with the six survivors setting up camp on The Edge plaza. The team faced challenges like setting up water collection/filtration system, securing their camp and collecting weapons. Meanwhile a gang of Marauders terrorised the Survivors, forcing them to choose between short-term survival and protecting the camp from sabotage for longer-term benefit.

In an epic turn of events the Survivors killed a non-player character after a large scale battle with a horde of zombies. There were more surprises when Eye Candy and Hunter-Gatherer double crossed the Survivors and joined the Marauders. But the Survivors were vindicated as the game drew to a close, regrouping to overrun the Marauders’ camp, steal back their water filtration system and buckets, and even steal some seeds to plant for future crops and survival.

Amid the twists and turns worthy of the most melodramatic daytime soap opera (if soaps featured more camping and zombies, which they obviously should) the Survivors even found time to join with zombies, Marauders and curious bystanders to learn a Thriller dance. A funky armistice, if you will.

What was it all about? A new way to get people thinking about sustainability, survival and climate change. It’s all very well to talk about these things, but if you’re actually camping out, worrying where your next meal is coming from and forced to band together to protect your fellow survivors you’re bound to consider sustainability in new ways. Future City asked people what they would have to offer – skills, knowledge, personal qualities – in the event that they were all that was left of their city. With Future City we hoped to develop a format that people can use anywhere to act out these questions about survival and environment.

So what did we learn from the Future City experience? That you never know who will step up to the challenge under difficult circumstances. That humans are utterly unpredictable and loyalty to the group is no match for the instinct to survive. And that even the gravest betrayals can be overcome, if only momentarily, by the power of dance.

Discussion still continues on the Future City Facebook page, where you can see photos from the game and watch video of the Thriller dance. We also hope to bring you some dramatic accounts of the game straight from a Survivor – watch this space.

At a first glance it might look like any old sign but if you look closely you’ll notice a few differences. It is in fact a moss graffiti, solar-powered LED sign!

“Wow!” (I hear you say).

“How do you create moss graffiti and how does that fantastic colour-changing, solar-powered LED light work?”

They are two very good questions and I will reveal all of my secrets so that you may too create your very own moss graffiti solar-powered LED sign (MGSPLEDS).

Moss Graffiti

I’m the first to admit I am no moss graffiti expert (although I’m happy to say I have met a couple of you lately) and while my failures currently outweigh my successes this is the best recipe that I have come up with so far:

Moss Graffiti Recipe 2.0

• A few handfuls of moss
• Half a tub (100g) of natural yoghurt
• About half a cup of a good yeasty beer (I choose Guinness- great for moss graffiti..not for drinking IMHO!)
• A teaspoon of brown sugar
• Two tablespoons of corn syrup (alson known as glucose syrup)
• I also crushed up a bit of fertilizer (Ozmocote) to give it a little extra grunt

Here’s how it all goes together

Wash as much of the dirt and rocks and stuff away from the back of the moss.

Add the yoghurt

Add the the moss

Test the beer

Add the remaining beer

Add the sugar

Crush some fertilizer and add to the mix (be sure to SERIOUSLY clean your mortal and pestle after this- fertilizer and stomachs don’t mix).

Mix it all together in a blender. Be careful with the corn syrup. Its there to bind everything together however if you use too much (as I have) you’ll end up in a sticky situation (literally). Store it sealed in the fridge until you’re ready to apply it. It should keep for a few days at least.

Making the Sign

Making the sign was trickier than you might think.

Bunnings on a week day is always a treat.

MDF (or custom wood as its also known) is a composite material and is really absorbant, so I had to give it three coats of paint to seal the surface. To transfer the Edge logo to the MDF backing board, I put together a big printed paper version of the Edge logo, stuck it on to the MDF and then traced over it with a ball-point pen, pressing down really hard to leave an imprint of the logo below.

The imprint becomes the outline of where to paint. I then traced over the imprint with a lead pencil to make the outline more visible. Its handy to have an architecture degree at this stage for the set square work, but not essential!

After this I applied the moss graffiti mixture very carefully over the logo. I actually found that using a kitchen butter knife for the fine detail and getting the edges and corners right really helped.

Its also good to do a few coats and try an build up some depth to the mixture so it has a better chance of taking off.

The LED solar-powered light

Connecting the LED colour-changing solar-powered light required a collaborative effort. Mainly because I have only ever soldered guitar parts and tend to get +’s and -’s mixed up. So, thanks to fellow-Cat Colleen and geek in residence Clinton we managed to hook up our solar panel (12V panel max 1.26 W) to a single LED RGB colour changing light.

We mounted the sign to a temporary wall in the new Edge Studio and the solar panel on the adjacent face of the wall with access to sunlight through the glass. Mounting the sign and lining it up with the light took a bit of dodgy gaffer tape engineering but it eventually came together nicely.

The moss part of the sign has been regularly sprayed (twice a day) with a few water concoctions; one with rice water (left over water from boiled rice) and another with Seasol.

Sadly the sign has been up for a few weeks now and the moss has not been entirely forthcoming. We have a theory that the very dry indoor, air-conditioned environment has prevented the moss mixture from retaining the moisture required to propagate. We’ve since transplanted some real growing moss from the gardens outside and it seems to be holding up pretty well.

Also, the LED light and solar panel have been taken down temporarily as we try to pimp up the LED with a super bright Arduino-programmable alternative courtesy of Markus from NICTA. We’re also trying to hook up a battery so that the solar panel can charge it during the day and the light can run at night.

That’s the story of the sign. Come down to the Edge studio and check it out. I’m sure it will find a place when we’re back in the main building soon. I’ll leave you with a time lapse video I did of the drawing and moss painting phase of the sign:

image courtesy of Alan Hoban ( http://floodofideas.org.au/floods-happen/ )

The FLOOD OF IDEAS is gaining momentum – have you checked out some of the exciting ideas and discussions on the website yet about preparing for future floods? Some of the ideas include a fold-up river walk, a flood response tower, and a floating house that jumps up on stumps in response to flooding.

While you’re there, comment on the ideas or even submit one of your own. With so many people affected by the floods earlier this year, everyone potentially has an experience or idea to share. Project coordinator Christian Duell says FLOOD OF IDEAS grew out of the premise that crowd-sourcing is “a powerful and democratic way to capture knowledge and promote innovation”.

“This is a great opportunity for the general public to play a leading role in promoting innovation and positive change to government,” Christian says.

“We really want to encourage all Queenslanders to get involved by visiting the website and supporting the project.”

FLOOD OF IDEAS doesn’t just aim to draw out urban planning and infrastructure ideas. You might have an idea for communicating flood warnings, policy suggestions, or helping people get back on their feet after flood damage. It might be as simple as maintaining flood awareness through “Floods Happen” bumper stickers.

Alan Hoban from Water By Design told Brisbane Times that while there are some very professional contributions on the site now, no idea is too simple to suggest.

“We want to make sure that there are a mix of ‘back of the serviette’ sketches as well as the high end designs,” Alan said.

“Just about everyone who saw the floods this year had an idea about how we could at least do one thing differently, so that things wouldn’t be so bad if we had flooding again. We want to capitalise on those ideas and then be able to put them into a format where they are accessible and of use to government so they can consider them in future policy making.”

So what are you waiting for? Add your voice to the conversation and you could end up part of an exhibition from April. In the meantime, sign up to our mailing list and follow FLOOD OF IDEAS on Twitter @floodofideas to stay up to date with the latest news.

Flooding occurred in many areas of Queensland during late December 2010 & early January 2011, with three quarters of the state declared a disaster zone. Now is the time to share our flood experiences and find a way to be better prepared next time.

http://www.floodofideas.org.au

FLOOD OF IDEAS is a forum gathering diverse and creative ideas for how we plan and respond to floods and natural disasters in our community.

We are collecting and documenting flood response ideas.
Sketch it, paint it, photoshop it, write it… submit it.

Check out the website www.floodofideas.org.au and upload your idea.

Be sure to sign up to our mailing list and stay tuned details of the upcoming Flood of Ideas Exhibition.

FLOOD OF IDEAS is an initiative of WATER BY DESIGN (Healthy Waterways Partnership) and is being delivered as a partnership between WATER BY DESIGN (Healthy Waterways Partnership) and THE EDGE (State Library of Queensland) with the support of Brisbane City Council, The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, The Australian Institute of Architects, Green Cross Australia and The Stormwater Industry Association (QLD).

Drop seeds not bombs

When: 2pm-3pm, December 18th, 2010
Who: Christian Duell
Where: The Edge
Cost: FREE
Bookings: book.it@edgeqld.org.au

Ever notice those ugly pockets of your neighbourhood that need some love? This is your chance to paint the town green one seed bomb at a time. With the help of Greening Australia’s Seed Bank we have access to a collection of local native wattle and tea tree seeds to create our own self-propagating ‘plant in a ball’. In this one hour workshop you’ll be given all of the ingredients to make your very own seed bombs and you will be asked to drop them into abandoned pockets of your neighbourhood, photograph them and add their location to our shared interactive map. Our plan is to create a greener city and watch these local natives grow both online and in our neighbourhoods.

All materials are provided. Just bring yourself and be prepared to get your hands dirty!

Workshop Materials: Local native seeds, compost, ball clay powder and water.

This workshop has a MAXIMUM of 12 participants.

To book, please email book.it@edgeqld.org.au.

Ho ho!

This latest update brings with it a touch of festivity. If you haven’t already been smothered by Christmas cheer I’m here to remind you that the silly season is well and truly upon us. If, like me, you’re already a little overwhelmed (i.e. fed up…) with the constant commercial onslaught of buy! buy! buy! and useless crap that changes hands during this time of year.. there is a ray of hope. You can have a happy Christmas without STUFF! Check out a little group called Life Squared’s free guide called How to Have a Better Xmas. Reduce your environmental hoofprint with a guaranteed better Christmas!

Now on to my my recent Catalyst shenanigans..

Moss Code

While I was in San Francisco earlier in the year I picked up a fantastic little book called The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith. One of the neat little activities in this book is to create Moss Graffiti. We were talking amongst ourselves here at the Edge and Mick told me about an idea he had to design t-shirts with a QR (quick response) code on them that linked to a webpage containing a generic t-shirt design (like the good old Che Guevera face). So.. we thought, why not create Moss Code? That is.. a QR code made of moss that takes users to a webpage explaining the project!

So as a trial, I went out into the jungle and gathered some moss, brought it back to the Edge, cleaned it up, combined it with buttermilk and sugar in the blender and voila; moss paint! With Brett’s help we generated our own QR code and then armed with the horrible smelling moss goo, a ladder and a projector I painted our QR code onto the outside wall of the Edge building. After about 3 hours of painstaking brushwork and countless passerby enquiries the piece was complete. I whipped out my iPhone and to my great delight my QR scanner picked up the code and took me straight to the webpage we had created for the project! Check out all of the photos here.

Sadly, this is where the story ends. In true guerilla style we didn’t exactly go through the right avenues to gain permission to paint onto the side of the building (woops). So Moss Code (Beta) disappeared quicker than you can say ‘quick response’. But the experiment worked and with some proper planning and collaboration between the other Catalysts, we aim to have something bigger and better adorning the walls of our building in the early new year. Stay tuned!

Seed Bomb Workshop Next Saturday 18 December!

Here it is! My first public workshop as a Catalyst!  Ever notice those ugly pockets of your neighbourhood that need some love? This is your chance to paint the town green one seed bomb at a time. With the help of Greening Australia’s Seed Bank we have access to a collection of local native wattle and tea tree seeds to create our own self-propagating plant in a ball. In this one hour workshop you’ll be given all of the ingredients to make your very own seed bombs and you will be asked to drop them into abandoned pockets of your neighbourhood, photograph them and add their location to our shared interactive map. Our plan is to create a greener city and watch these local natives grow both online and in our neighbourhoods. Be a part of the action and book your spot by emailing book.it@edgeqld.org.au. Places are limited. Just bring yourself and be prepared to get your hands dirty!

Cool stuff

So before I go here’s three things that have entertained me in the last couple of  weeks:

A car that’s grown from seeds (the ultimate seed bomb)

Something something…wikileaks… something…wikileaks…something…Julian Assange…

In celebration of Back to the Future’s 25th anniversary here’s some vintage Crispin Glover (aka. George McFly)..clowny clown clown. Don’t play this to your kids before they go to bed.

Oh and if you want more regular ball by ball action (uggh don’t mention the cricket) of my catalyst and other adventures follow me on twitter.

Over and out.

Tipping Point Australia

On the 12th and 13th of November I had the good fortune of being part of the Brisbane leg of Tipping Point Australia, held right here at the Edge. Tipping Point was a two-day workshop and forum on the relationship between science, art and climate change. The highlight for me was a presentation by Ben Todd from Arcola Theatre in London. Ben’s in the process of creating the world’s first carbon-neutral theatre (he even has hydrogen fuel cells in the foyer bar of the theatre, doubling as a drinks shelf!); a really inspirational dude who approaches sustainability from an entrepreneurial perspective. For a more thorough wrap-up of the event, check out former Edger Sarah Jansen’s blog (which is also hosting a pretty heated discussion on climate change right now!).

TEDxYouth@Brissie

Last Saturday I was invited to speak at the inaugural TEDx youth event in Brisbane called TEDxYouth@Brissie. This was a local, self-organised TED event coinciding with similar events happening all over the world as part of Universal Children’s Day. Wow..what a day. Some totally inspirational speakers and also a great atmosphere for meeting new people and sharing ideas. The topic of the event was ‘Be The Change’ and I spoke about embracing unexpected change and how an erupting volcano can sometimes be a blessing in disguise (see my first blog post). Some great photos from the day courtesy of Mark Lobo here.

Drop Seeds Not Bombs

Like all good ideas, this one started out as a bit of fun and is now starting to grow! (excuse the pun). We trialed our first batch of seed bombs a couple of weeks ago and got our Tipping Point friends to catapult them around town during the event. Somewhere along the way we thought it might be a good idea to keep track of where these babies land, watch ‘em grow and also put a bit more thought into the kind of native species that we’d like to see more of around our city. So, thanks to Ben at Greening Australia’s Brisbane Seed Bank, we’ve now got a whole bunch of seeds for local native wattles and shrubs. We ran our first seed bomb-making workshop on Thursday with the guys at ADAWS which was a lot of fun and these guys will be among the first to contribute to the shared map that we’re creating to chart the progress of the seeds.

We’re going to be running this as a public workshop in the next couple of weeks, so if you’re interested in helping promote our local natives and making our city greener (plus getting your hands dirty in the process)…stay tuned!

Phew! Time flies while you’re having fun. See you next time.

So it’s been 14 days since my last blog and since then life, art, hip hop and climate change has dominated my existence. I had to go to the Sydney TippingPoint because I am on a flight to Melbourne as we speak and I miss the Brisbane conference. I am currently wishing I could be in two places at once… I am heading to Melbs for three main reasons, 1- for some meetings with Dance and Theatre Presenters to get the low down on programming in 2012 and 2- to host the youth arts showcase for the Vic Youth Arts Market (run by YPPA, check this advocacy body out if you’re a young person in the performing arts) and 3; I am the keynote speaker and MC of the morning sessions at the pARTicipation Forum organised by the Centre for Multicultural Youth. In a nutshell I’m hosting VYAM for YPPA and participating in pARTicipation for CMY… It is as hectic is it sounds y’all. How can I be the change I wanna see when my schedule is soooo hectic? Anyone interested in an internship as a Candy Helper? Jobs would include, helping Candy manage time, write speeches, keep up to date with schedules, eat healthy and low waste (no packaging… we package everything these days- I saw apple pieces in a bag at Woolies, so unnecessary) and keep a hold of her keep cups… which keep disappearing into sisters and boyfriends hand bag/ man bags (l’m happy to share but I didn’t know it would be goodbye.) Hmmm it doesn’t sound like a very exciting job. What could you get in return? Earfuls of ideas about how to bring about sustainable lifestyles for people of all socio economic backgrounds and tastes; lots of belly laughs and mind bending conversations on cultural change; on great theatre; on def poetry; on hip hop Shakespeare; on Thomas Banks exquisite show The Power of Love, on XFactor UK and Rebecca Fegurson; on systemic racism and on why there’s been just the one indigenous actor on Home and Away in it’s 28 years of television…  I need to chill out.

On the environmental sustainability front, the lifecycle assessment project that I’m working on and will eventually turn into a workshop is progressing nicely. I’ve come across a organisation in London called ‘Julie’s Bicycle’ who have developed some great tools and methods for measuring and managing the environmental impact of theatre, music festivals and other events. Spewing I missed Catherine Bottrill’s appearance at Big Sound earlier in the year. Did anyone else catch this?

Right now I’m in the process of contacting creative organisations across Brisbane to see if and how they measure the environmental impacts of their projects. If you’d like to provide some feedback as part of this research please get in touch. I’m also running my first workshop here in a couple of weeks (nervous!) which will be a DIY seed-bombing session thoughtfully entitled ‘The S-Bomb’.

I’ll leave you with 2 things that have blown my mind in the last two weeks:

# 1- Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti- ‘Scared Famous’  Whoah! This album is blowing my mind. It makes me feel a little scared when I listen to it and seasick for some reason. I find the music at times irritating yet contagious. Its been a while since music has moved me like this.

# 2- The work of Vanessa Harden. Some fantastic projects based on the environment and identity. I particularly love the Future Tents project.

Til next time….