If you’ve been to Tuttle over the last few months, you’ll at least know where the Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC) is – it’s physically a building near Kings Cross. A former sculpture studio that acts as a fabulous multi-purpose space for the kind of open ended fun and games that drive the thinking behind the Centre.
The idea is that it’s a ‘safe’ space for collaboration, firstly between the different colleges within the University Of London – UL covers a huge range of subjects, most of those are siloed even within the colleges, let alone across the various colleges that geographically cover a BIG area of London. Like so many other big academic institutions, collaboration is often an after-thought, in a world where the race for funding, accreditation and dominance in a specialist field drive evermore-focussed specialisation, with little room at the margins for the serendipitous goodness that happens when, say, a musician and an architect meet up to swap ideas. Or a physics undergrad gets to talk to an environmental scientist about the application of their work in eachother’s fields.
It does happen, but it’s pretty rare and the terms are often loaded.
So what happens when you create a neutral space for such things, one that’s well resourced and has a dedicated team making things happen there? Well, that’s what the project will find out.
And today, in the collaborative spirit that drives the entire project, we’re going to assemble a website in a day. And by ‘assemble’, I don’t just mean ‘install and design’, I mean concept, content, everything.
‘We’ in this instance is a collaboration between C4CC and Amplified – so the web monkeys that are doing the back end and design stuff are Ben Walker and Xander Cansell, the co-ordinator is Brian Condon (who straddles both worlds, running C4CC and being a core Amplified person too), Laura Kidd, Debbie Davies (co-opted in from the amazing pool of creative collaborators that gather at the C4CC for Tuttle on a Friday morning) and me, with the incredible Lucy Windmill making it all actually happen, as is always the case with Amp stuff.
So, follow the #C4CC hashtag today on twitter, or each of the participants, and before too long, we’ll post the URL and you can hopefully see it all happening before your eyes. The content will start diffuse, existing in each of our own web environments, but Twitter is the place to look for the links…