Tags



Tag Archives: Australia

Krister Gustafsson – Designing the most compelling educational interactive spaces
March 3, 2010

Krister Gustafsson

The purpose of this paper is to look at the interactive multimedia play equipment, called the ‘Globe Trotter’, at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (PHM), as an exercise in designing the most effective ways to deliver an educational health message to a public audience.[1]


The ‘Globe Trotter’ is part of the MBF[2] Magic Garden[3], a permanent interactive exhibition that has become one of the Museum’s main attractions since its launch in September 2008. Arguably, it was a first of its kind to inspire children and their carers to enjoy a healthy lifestyle of “Healthy Eating and Healthy Exercise”. The educational playground was developed in consultation with leading health experts to help visitors effectively combat the increasing health problems of Australian children, such as obesity and diabetes. The multisensory, high tech playground was designed to create an imaginative and immersive organic vegetable garden where children (ages 2-8) learn through playing with intellectually and physically stimulating activities, such as chasing fish in a digital pond and butterflies amongst conversational pumpkins. What is also special about these activities is that they are highly relevant to a variety of modern multicultural family settings. The ‘Globe Trotter’ specifically explored these themes through giving children a sense of travelling around the world (hence the name) to discover healthy traditional meals and healthy mealtime habits in places ranging from Greece to Australia, and even Alaska. However, its enjoyable reward system required patience to be activated unlike the other highly popular and intuitive exhibits in the playground.

read more..


Nikos Papastergiadis – Global flows and hybrid art in the age of siege
June 20, 2007

In response to the global refugee crisis, the ‘war on terror’ and rising neo-nationalism, contemporary artists are employing strategies that oppose the border politics of exclusion, challenge the mainstream political discourse, offer alternative perspectives on cultural identity and initiate a new ethical quest for community…

read more..


Gaynor Macdonald – Temporalising the Indigenous other: The politics of tradition in nation-building
March 22, 2007

Indigenous rights were once denied because Indigenous peoples were not considered modern: now they are denied if they are. Native title requires them to be ‘traditional’, argues Gaynor Macdonald, and to call someone ‘traditional’ is to imply they do not share ‘our’ time.

read more..