Creative Waves - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 47

CreAtive WAves: An omnium
initiAtive in CollAborAtion
With iCogrAdA

regular feedback and support from not only the
variety of teachers who volunteered to take part,
but also established creative professionals using
the Internet as their sole communication tool. An
added complexity of the project was the introduc-
tion of official mentors housed within each of the
small creative working teams and the inclusion of
invited special guests to add expertise and excite-
ment to the proceedings.
In hindsight, the first Creative Waves project
received a significant amount of acclaim, however,
the real success of the project was not so much
the creative work that took place, or that resulted,
but the interaction and socialisation between so
many distanced people that occurred. One of the
main aims we intended for the project was in
fact to open up discussion about the process of
designing and in particular the critique of visual
communication processes - to this end the project
was a great success. Too often perhaps, especially
in areas of graphic design, visual end-results are
left to be viewed in isolation and to explain them-
selves, whereas this project aimed to address the
prospect of discussion about works in progress
and to be able to view the entire process of so
many young designers around the globe and not
just be presented with their end results.
Following conclusion of the Creative Waves
'05 project, the processes involved and the out-
comes produced by the many participants were,
as mentioned earlier, presented at numerous
design and education conferences in many coun-
tries; including the 2005 Ascilite (Australasian
Society of Computers in Learning in Tertiary
Education) Conference in Brisbane, Australia.
During this conference Omnium was awarded
the 2005 Ascilite President's Award for the in-
augural Creative Waves initiative as well as for
the Omnium® Software used to host the entire
event. Additionally though, the conference was
to have a more important part to play in the next
few years for Omnium's research. Following the
presentation of the Creative Waves '05 project
at the conference, Omnium was approached by

Having created and run several global online cre-
ative collaboration projects since 1998, in 2005
Omnium began an exciting collaboration with the
International Council of Graphic DesignAssocia-
tions (Icograda) by conceiving a series of free and
voluntary online design projects for students and
their teachers around the globe under the banner
of Creative Waves . Three significant projects have
taken place under this banner to date (Creative
Waves '05, Creative Waves '07 and Collabor8)
that collectively have involved approximately 500
individuals from over 50 countries worldwide.
Notably, the second Creative Waves project, that
took place over three months in 2007 called Visu-
alising Issues in Pharmacy [VIP] , progressed the
Creative Waves direction to align with Omnium's
more recent research activities that encourage on-
line collaboration on more socially-aware design
projects to aid people in less fortunate locations
around the world.
The initial Creative Waves project, titled
03>04>05 and held over a seven-week period
during March and April in 2005 saw a cross-
disciplinary e-learning project between graphic
design and photo-media students. The Creative
Waves '05 project linked over 100 art and design
students and their teachers from member institu-
tions of the worldwide Icograda Education Net-
work (IEN) and was structured to examine new
ways of working collaboratively online and the
prospects these open up for communicating visu-
ally with people around the world who would most
likely never ever meet. By doing so, it continued
Omnium's existing research that challenges tradi-
tional paradigms of individual creative processes
and their championing of exclusiveness, isolation
and sole-ownership of creative outcomes.
Throughout the project, the volunteer partici-
pants formed strong creative and social bonds with
partners in distant parts of the world, receiving