Creatives | *iHub

Quarterly Creativez Catchup

Stats, facts and figures. A lot has been happening in Kenyas Creative economy in the last few years and as we garner a name as well as positions ourselves in creative fields we need to know as Kenyan Creatives – Where Are We going?

Is the Creative Industry in Kenya as fragmented as it looks? Where are the societies, associations and groups that can galvanise different sectors together? What are the common challenges we all face and how can we counter these? What Industry projects are there that we should know about and support? And finally with a new government coming in 2013 what do we need in terms of capacity, investment, resources and support to grow our creative economy locally and globally?

YOU, are our Special Guest and we are super excited to hear YOUR about your projects, thoughts, concerns and solutions this Sunday. A brief summary on the Creative Scenerio presented by The Creativez will set the tone for The Catchup so do come on time.

DON’T MISS The Catchup especially if you are in these fields: digital animation (visual and sound effects),Broadcast (TV, radio and film), Visual arts , Digital media (mobile applications and internet), Publishing/Writing, Gaming, Performing arts and cultural expressions, Advertising, Architecture, Art and antiques markets, Crafts, Design, Designer fashion, Interactive leisure software and Music.

For info or clarification kindly email us at TheCreativez@gbs.co.ke or tweet us on @TheCreativez or drop a line here https://www.facebook.com/pages/TheCreativez/328928143784107

Please RSVP here: http://catchup.eventbrite.com/

By: Jessica Colaco

06-05-2012

Community Creatives iHub iHub-Research Members

Research Advice: Designing An Infographic

Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics. Over the past few months, iHub Research has being creating infographics to represent data. Well here are some of the lessons we have learnt in the design process:

Keep it simple and try not do too much in one picture.
Decide on a colour scheme and template
Think of it as a visual essay: ensure your arguments hold and are relevant.
Draw conclusions.
Reference your facts in the infographic.

Some infographic formats include:

Timelines;
Flow charts;
Annotated maps;
Graphs;
Venn diagrams;
Size comparisons;
Showing familiar objects or similar size or value.

Source: http://spyrestudios.com/

Creating your infographic

Plan and research.
Use free software to create simple graphs and visualisations of data.
Use vector graphic software to bring these visualisations into the one graphic.

If you have a little design skill, the very best approach is to create all the simple graphs and illustrations yourself using vector graphic software. Your end result will be more visually attractive and you will have more freedom to be creative with it. Here is a great link to get you started.

Need an infographic done by iHub Research, well email us at: research@ihub.co.ke with the subject INFOGRAPHIC CREATION

By: Jessica Colaco

18-04-2012

Community Creatives Events iHub Members

Creative Robotics Boot Camp

The Creative Robotics Boot Camp organized by iHub Research in partnership with FabLab Nairobi is a two-day boot camp/workshop, whose main aim is to bring together the tech community in Nairobi in creating innovative robotics projects made by and for the Kenyan market. The event will be taking place on the 20th and 21st of April 2012.

It will run concurrently with the International Space Apps Challenge under the Open Hardware category, which will be taking place at the iHub on the same dates. If you would like to find out more please visit http://spaceappschallenge.org/

More information on open hardware can be found at http://spaceappschallenge.org/challengedescriptions/#hardware

Objectives

The program aims to bring together tech enthusiasts with an interest in robotics. The participants will undergo a short, intensive course on the use of the Arduino board as a platform to program robots.

The boot camp aims at providing a platform for techies to explore robotics, develop their skills and come up with innovative ideas on how to apply robotics in the context of the Kenyan tech community, and in the manufacturing sector.

Platforms

Arduino Platform

Arduino is a popular open-source single-board micro-controller, descendant of the open-source Wiring platform, designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible.
Arduino hardware is programmed using a Wiring-based language (syntax and libraries), similar to C++ with some simplifications and modifications, and a Processing-based integrated development environment. You can find more information about the Arduino Platform here.

Programme

Day 1: Introduction (From 5pm – 8pm)
Venue- FabLab Nairobi (University of Nairobi Science and Technology Park)

A brief run through of what the Programme will entail, in terms of the requirements, objectives and expected outcomes of the workshop.

This will start with refreshments and a tour of the FabLab, which is a centre for building prototypes and incubation of companies, the projects and incubations under it, and programs and opportunities available. This session will involve a guided class on how to design and build a motor driver which will be used together with the servo motors during the boot camp.
It will also be a opportunity for participants to get acquainted with each other.

Day 2: Robotics Boot Camp (From 8am)

Venue- iHub

Morning session

Overview on Arduino: the parts, components and installation of the software. This will also involve an introduction on basic electronics.
The participants will have an interactive session involving videos of the interesting innovations made by other techies using robotics, with a special focus on project that are from developing countries.
Basics on using Arduino boards. This involves testing the classic “hello world” example using an LED.
A class on the use of variables and procedure calls, with an emphasis on the use of the special procedures setup() and loop(). The participants will then learn how to compile the example programs and test them on the Arduino board.

Mid Morning

This lesson will focus on the integration of various sensors, actuators and components which can be used with the Arduino board.
Separation between digital,analog and serial sensors. This class will also be taught using breadboards so that the participants can get a better understanding of how to connect components to the board.
This class will cover the different kinds of serial communication and how to intergrate the Arduino with different kinds of hardware. The core of this class will be serial protocol communication.

Afternoon

The teams begin working on their projects, while under supervision from the coordinating team.

Requirements

The participants will be required to each have a laptop.

The participants will be divided into teams of up to five, with each team being required to come up with a robotics concept. This idea will be entered into the Robotics Contest which will be held on the last day of the boot camp/workshop.

Each group will be required to each have a blog post, which should be ready before starting the competition.

Robotics Contest Ideas

Below are some of the challenges that the participating teams will be required to develop solutions for using the Arduino platform:

1. Creating a digital score board for the foosball game at the iHub.

2. Developing a mapping robot that once let free in an enclosed room, will collect information and send it to a nearby PC using Bluetooth or ZigB. This is information in temperature, humidity and light intensity.

3. Make a obstacle-avoiding robot.

4. Create a device/solution that can monitor traffic and work with traffic lights on Ngong Road. This solution should also be accessible on the open-data platform.

Take-aways

There will be prizes for the top 3 entries:

1st Prize: Ksh 50,000, t-shirts and a 1 year silver membership to Github
2nd Prize 30,000 and 1 year bronze membership to Github
3rd Prize 20,000 and 6 month bronze membership to Github
The t-shirts and and GitHub membership are courtesy of Github.

Registration

If you would like to participate in the Space Apps Challenge only, please register here.

If you would like to participate in the Robotics Boot Camp, please register here. Please note that due to space restrictions we can only accept the first 30 people who register.

By: Simeon Oriko

01-04-2012

Creatives Entrepreneurship iHub

Culture Shift Kenya – Results!

Over the past three days, a team of 45 of Kenya’s premiere creative, cultural, design, technical, and business talent came together for an experiment: to explore the challenges faced by the creative and cultural people of Kenya. The teams began with an analysis of the challenges these creative groups face – from musicians and fine artists, to traditional craftspeople and graffiti artists.

What they did

They built new business ideas with the stakes forming an investment of £5,000 along with help turning their prototypes to reality, ranging from mentorship and access to Nairobi’s iHub to space on a Creative Entrepreneurship course being created by the British Council in partnership with the GoDown Arts Centre.

The judging

The standard set by the teams was rather high: the judges had great difficulty choosing a winner, the judges tore up the rulebook, splitting the first-place investment prize into two prizes, and reaching into their own pockets to provide a modest investment for a pair of runner-up team.

The winners: Pakacha

Pakacha (chest, or kit, in Swahili) is a platform to help artists find and sell art supplies – from paint to theatre lights to camera lenses. Sellers can list art supplies for hire, barter, or sale, and buyers text an SMS shortcode at 5 Kenyan Shillings to contact the seller. Art supplies are irregularly available in Kenya, and the barter and hire economy is critical for a range of arts.

Pakacha will receive £4,000 in funding for their idea, plus mentorship, 6 months’ access to the iHub, and a place on the Creative Entrerpeneurship course.

Second place: Rubiani

Rubiani sought to connect buyers of local, handcrafted goods directly with the makers of those goods, by building a mobile application with information on local crafts in different areas. They will start with the Maasai Mara, a highly sought tourist destination and will seek to partner with tourist agencies and target the over 1 million tourists coming to Kenya each year.

Rubiani will receive £1,000 in funding for their idea, plus mentorship, 6 months’ access to the iHub, and a place on the Creative Entrerpeneurship course.

Runner-up: artivism

artivism is working to coordinate on- and off-line activism with artists. They will start by documenting a current campaign of street art in Kenya to encourage a conversation about the upcoming elections, adding QR codes to those street art works and encouraging online conversations.

Runner-up: creatory

The creatory team thought that the stories created through the creation and experience of visual artists was critical to the arts’ appreciation. They are building a platform to help artists share the stories of their creation, and using some clever social engineering to get users to share their stories.

creatory and artivism will each receive £r00 in funding for their idea, plus a place on the Creative Entrerpeneurship course.

Rule of Thumb

Rule of Thumb built a working prototype of a ratings site for events organisers’ service providers – by collecting and presenting information on service providers from both events organisers and event attendees, they want to increase service providers’ reasons to provide top customer service.

e-Kwality

e-Kwality is seeking to bring Kenyan musicians to the international stage. They will act as a music label and management company for Kenyan hip hop and r&b music, curating up-and-coming talent and marketing them abroad.

C-Fund

The C-Fund aims to connect artists, investor, and industry through an online community. They will create an on- and off-line community where performing artists can meet, collaborate, and find resources to help them build solid business plans around their work. These business plans can then be showcased to industry and investors.

Gallery

Congratulations and thanks

The standard of projects was particularly high in Kenya – several teams worked through at least one night, and at least two teams performed well under particular challenges, including losing team members.

We’d also like to thank our judging panel, our mentors, the British Council in both Kenya and London, the iHub, and Social Innovation Camp for all their help.

We’re off to a well-deserved night’s sleep.

By: Simeon Oriko

30-03-2012

Creatives iHub

Culture Shift Kenya – the ideas

About 50 professional designers, developers, creative, and business people came together at the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya yesterday afternoon, not sure what to expect. The teams met each other over breakfast, and covered each other with labels like “Designer”, “Doer”, “Thinker”, and “Troublemaker”.

After a rousing morning of samosas, tea, ideas generation, tea, post-it notes, lunch, and tea, these were the 7 ideas that our teams settled down to work on:

- Creatree is a way to engage audiences and other artists with the stories of creation of the artwork

- BlackThumb a way to rate service providers for events & creative

- Tupo is a repository of local creative content online

- C-Fund is there to bridge the gap between creative entrepreneurs and capital

- Robini wants to even the playing field for rural craftspeople in the market

- F!Act wants to coordinate arts with on- and off-line activism

- CreativeMe is an online marketplace for hard-to-find creative industry supplies in Kenya

Good luck to all the teams, they’re deep in working at the moment, and we’re excited about the direction in which they’re moving.

By: Simeon Oriko

30-03-2012

Creatives

Creativity in Context

This post was originally written by Tim Kindberg on the British Council Culture Shift Blog and cross posted here.

*****

We had a high-energy day at the iHub in Nairobi yesterday, thinking of problems or “itches” that need scratching in the creative sector, and ideas for sustainable solutions. Forming groups, getting to know one another, talking across the business/tech/creative sectors. Eight ideas/groups emerged, from finding creative materials such as canvas to paint on, to connecting creative start-ups with investors. Discuss, drift, re-focus, encounter a gotcha and take a different path. All of this could be happening anywhere.

But this isn’t happening anywhere. It’s happening in Kenya, full of entrepreneurial spirit and creative energy but a place that is more “developing” than “developed” in some respects — like the difficulty of obtaining canvas and other basic arts supplies .

The longer I spent talking to the groups about their ideas, the more it seemed that working to the specifics of the Kenyan context was critical in developing their value propositions. Their concern, by and large, is about making Kenyan businesses to meet the particular needs of Kenyans, not (necessarily) for the global market. They want to fix the problems and grasp the opportunities they see around them in their everyday and business lives.

Appropriateness and appropriation are both important. “Obvious” questions came up for me like “Why wouldn’t someone just use Amazon for this or Kickstarter for that?”. Amazon doesn’t exist in Kenya, whether that’s because of the very different means of payment or distribution networks or warehousing opportunities — or something else — I don’t know. Kenyan ecommerce does exist, however. And no doubt many new ideas are to come that will originate from here, and which the West will find itself appropriating.

There are plenty of ways of appropriating technologies, to provide solutions appropriate for here. Equally, there are road blocks due to lack of infrastructure. It’s great to see creatives working on exploiting technology to create value for Kenya. Not only do the solutions need to be imaginative, but creatives thrive on dealing with constraints and gotchas. At the same time, they have expectations of technology that tend to pull technologists out of their comfort zone. And that is a good thing. Technologists are creatives are creative in their own ways, too – more “creative” than many think.

What are these teams going to come up with today as they advance their ideas?

By: Hilda Moraa

28-03-2012

Community Creatives Entrepreneurship Events iHub iHub-Research Start-Ups

Design Thinking Workshop at iHub

It was a super cool and interactive workshop with Terry and Joshua from Stanford d.school and Dan from University of Nairobi. If you are a techpreneur,researcher, a designer and you did not attend then you missed out! We learnt a bunch of interesting and eye-opening things.

The workshop started off with an interactive session entitled ‘The Wallet Project’ , an immersive activity meant to give participants a full cycle through the design thinking process in as short a time as possible. The project itself gives facilitators the opportunity to touch on the fundamental values of the d.school that include:

Human-centered design: Empathy for the person or people you are designing for, and feedback from users, is fundamental to good design.
Experimentation and Prototyping—Prototyping is not simply a way to validate your idea; it is an integral part of your innovation process. We build to think and learn.
A bias towards action: Design thinking is a misnomer; it is more about doing that thinking. Bias toward doing and making over thinking and meeting.
Show don’t tell: Creating experiences, using illustrative visuals, and telling good stories communicate your vision in an impactful and meaningful way.
Power of iteration: The reason we go through this exercise at a frantic pace is that we want people to experience a full design cycle. A person’s fluency with design thinking is a function of cycles, so we challenge participants to go through as many cycles as possible—interview twice, sketch twice, and test with your partner twice. Additionally, iterating solutions many times within a project is key to successful outcomes.

The second phase of the workshop, the team went out to understanding how designers approach problems to try to solve them, individuals and businesses will be better able to connect with and invigorate their ideation processes in order to take innovation to a higher level. Teams of 8 had interviews with ‘Mama Njoroge’s’ to find out what they want and possible solutions. The teams got interesting findings such as:

Lack of proper roads to transport their products and services
Lack of storage facilities and lots of food wastage
Lack of an ordering platform to advertise and the vendors to get more traffic for their products
Insecurity and no community policing
No proper water and sanitation facilities
Insufficient capital and financing for business expansion

Summary points:

Point of view= user + need + insight, this is the anchor/focused challenge that grows from empathy.
Often you could build on a bad idea and get a good one that relates to it
Imagination! Empathy! Reframing the problem! Generate alternatives! Iterate based on feedback! Build and test!
Fail Early, Fail often then learn from that!
The fundamental way to test prototypes is by letting users experience them and react to as well as your perception of your users and their needs.

By: Simeon Oriko

19-03-2012

Creatives Events iHub

Creativez Meetup: Startup 101 – The ABC’s of Running your Business

The Creativez Meetup will once again be held at the iHub this Sunday 25th March 2012 from 2.00 pm to 5:00 pm.

With the world now rating Kenya as the 2nd place to watch for innovation and creative developments, a lot of interest and opportunities are being availed to the various “startup” communities to enable this. Despite this there is a dearth in basic understanding of what keeps a business running in this region (East Africa) in the global age- which is why you are ALL invited!

The speakers for the event are profiled as follows:

Githua Ngaruiya of General Motors EA will provide tips in financial management horned from experience from his work with various international brands.

Gil Kemami is the MD of Ogilvy Advertising a company with a “play hard work hard ethic” that’s behind some of the more legendary advertising campaigns seen in the region.

Steve Mbuthia is the MD of Endeavour Consultants – a strategy firm propelling businesses to longer term sustainability by linking businesses to the hearts and minds of people through real and engaging social and community engagement.

Money Management which Githua breaks down so easily is the start and end of any business, however you cant make a move without knowing where you are going- ie Strategy and Gameplan which Steve gives the importance it deserves. Yet you may have the Steve Jobs/Michael Jackson of all innovative-groundbreaking creations but if no-one knows about it, and its not on the shelves- then it does NOT exist- which Gil will be handling in terms of Market Access.

By: Tosh

16-03-2012

Applications Community Creatives

Meet, create tech tools & win £5,000

What do you get when you put leading digital innovators, creative practitioners and a whole lot of entrepreneurial energy in a room together for 48 hours in four cities across Africa? We don’t yet know… but we predict some incredible ideas, lasting relationships, and seriously investable solutions for challenges faced by the creative community in Nairobi.

Are you a creative? Are you in the cultural, or in the digital sector? Or a developer, innovator in the tech space?

The iHub in partnership with the British Council invites you to participate in the above competition for a seed fund for your innovation for a whopping £5,000.

Dubbed “Culture Shift”, the event will pair up a creative, a business professional and an IT innovator for three (3) days to develop a creative application with addresses concerns or a need in the local communities through digital media and ICT based solutions.

Once you sign up, you shall be paired up with technologists in the ICT field or a professionals from the creative sector and together you will be expected to come up with an innovative solution of your choice that will address socio-economic needs.

A panel will evaluate the solutions developed and the winning pair will pocket £5,000 (about Ksh. 655,000) as a seed fund to implement the idea(s).

If you are interested, kindly fill in this online form before Friday the 23rd and we’ll get back to you with more details. We are looking for 30 representatives from the Creative sector and 30 developers or IT innovators. So hurry up and sign up!

More details will follow after your confirmation

By: Jessica Colaco

29-02-2012

Community Creatives iHub Members

*iHub_ Robotics Initiative

The *iHub_ robotics initiative started last year as a way for members with interest in computer hardware and robotics to have a platform to share ideas and collaborate. Towards this end, the iHub also purchased an Arduino based DF robot for members to code and to use to sharpen their hardware skills.

This culminated in the first ever meet up for hardware enthusiasts last year at the *iHub_where members came together and shared ideas on hardware programming and the members also got to work with the DF robot.

For new (and existing) green members looking to join the initiative there are a couple of ways you can get involved:

Join the *iHub_ robotics group, which can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/ihubrobots Use the forum to ask robotics-related questions and to contribute to discussions as well. The group email is ihubrobots@googlegroups.com
Come and play around with the In-house robot, and improve on it. We encourage members to add peripherals to the robot to give it extra functionality. Contact robotics@ihub.co.ke for access to the robot.
Members are also encouraged to bring along any hardware and robotics projects they have done and share with other members.

This year, we are planning to partner with Universities and Higher Education institutions so that members can have a better feel of the process that goes into designing and commissioning computer hardware and robots.

As a bonus, if there are final year Electrical Engineering students looking for advice, the *iHub_ robotics coordinators (Caine and Juliette) have offered to give free advice to students on how to go about their projects. You can contact them at: robotics@ihub.co.ke