Mobile Academy: start

I managed to attend the start of the Mobile Academy last night run jointly by the UCL and Mobile Monday.

The course is 36 hours long and many of the sessions are given by London based entrepeneurs looking to pass on their knowledge and skill in the mobile arena.

So overall I am very glad I managed to secure a place.

The course is designed along the lines of the Bauhaus philosophy, which is intriguing, my education is in Product Design, and I am a great fan of their approach.
Julia Shalet (The Course Director) laid out the philosophy something like this

Experiment and Problem solving

Form follows function

Unification of design and technology innovation

Streamlined and simple elegance

which do, imho, map well to the challenges that mobile solutions/apps/businesses face at this stage in the development of the mobile ecosystem etc.

The other theme that struck me as interesting is that of cocuration (yes it’s not a real word, get over it, OK!)
Cocuration is the idea that the course should be able to reflect the needs and aspirations of the attendees.
What this means is that like a good sprint plan, not all the slots have been filled so that we the attendees can suggest topics and the like for these sessions, and it is not, forgive me for even thinking, that this is because they ran out of ideas for sessions I’d never say such a thing.

So overall a good start, and I am looking forward to the rest of the course.