Earlier this year, I spoke with the great Neill Cameron about ending the ten-year journey of his comic Mega Robo Bros.
Our conversation covers everything from the first glimpse of the Bros in his mind’s eye to the final pen stroke on the final frame, and many wonderful adventures in between; it’s a proper deep dive from one of the most thoughtful comics creators around. You can read the transcript of our complete conversation as a PDF download here.
The latest edition of Scripturient, my quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now and can be downloaded here.
In it, I interview UC Davis’s Brett Milligan, who together with Emily Schlickman is the author of Design by Fire, a new book exploring our relationship to wildfires.
A transcript from the interview underpinning my column can be read below.
Matt: What was your first ever encounter with fire in nature?
Brett: It would have been the hearth at home, or campfires; my dad took me, sometimes the whole family, camping a lot as a kid and would be very clear about taking care to extinguish it properly. I wasn’t exposed to wildfires until my time in California, decades later, and my first close-up experience with a large wildfire, the smoke, the immediacy of it, came with the LNU (Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit) complex fires a few years back.
“People want to discover the future together, and that future, for us, is always a shared one.”
From the pages of Information Professional magazine, my most recent “Scripturient” column, featuring Sam Nutt of the London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI) on “doing data ethically” – going beyond research and compliance to help “practically discover what the values are which should be driving how we use data: not my values, but those of the organisation, of the city, and of the residents we serve.”
I think one of the hard things about trying something new is figuring out how to work with people’s expectations. When you click that link, do you want to be told a good story? Do you want to be given a good puzzle, with the satisfaction of finding the “right” solution? How much effort should you be expected to put in? How much uncertainty should you experience?
I spoke with Simon Groth of The Writing Platform about my most recent interactive text, The Library of Last Resort.
We talked about strategy and foresight, audience and agency, libraries and information (inevitably), and also learning from the wonder, freedom, and richness of children’s play.
It was a good chat. Check it out over at the Writing Platform website.
This year, the international Next Library conference holds its satellite event at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) in Brisbane. Information professionals and librarians from around the world are invited to Australia’s ‘Sunshine State’ to explore questions of innovation, risk, and resilience. I spoke a little about why SLQ is the perfect place to have these conversations in a recent video.
I’ve worked with SLQ since 2016, spending two years with them as their Creative-in-Residence leading special innovation and engagement projects. Most recently, I co-wrote the new vision for public libraries in the state with the University of Southern Queensland’s Dr Kate Davis.
The State Library’s current CEO, Vicki McDonald, became the organisation’s leader part-way through my tenure there, and in 2017 I interviewed her for the Library as Incubator project.
That means it’s a good time to check back in with Vicki and her team – and this week, I interviewed Vicki again. Since she took the top job, what has changed at SLQ? What does she see as the future of libraries? And why is SLQ now inviting the world’s librarians to visit for a discussion about risk and resilience?
There’s a discussion with me in the latest edition of Information Professional, the magazine of the British library & information association CILIP.
Journalist Rob Mackinlay and I talk about foresight, strategy, scenario planning, and creating alternate forms of value beyond the merely financial.
Check out the full interview here as a PDF download or head over to the Information Professional website.
Murder. Mayhem. Family strife. Gateways to other worlds. Stories that the audience shapes, and that might run for months or even years.
In a corner of Michigan, one library worker and her colleagues are bringing all these things to life.
I first met Audrey Huggett in 2017, while working with Ann Arbor District Library on the Wondrous Strange event. Library technician Audrey has led a series of projects where members of the public participate in live-action storytelling, ranging from murder mystery to an epic fantasy with cosmic stakes.
Audrey joined me to talk about her work in interactive storytelling in January 2019, just as she was completing preparations for the upcoming “In Between: Quest for the Keystone”. Read more
On the blog this week, I’m joined by Dr. Philippa Collin, a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney’s Institute for Culture and Society. Read Part One of this interview with Philippa on political, participation, youth engagement and the digital world here.
How does your role contribute to discussions around youth engagement – and activities which bring young people together with different institutions and organisations?
In the last few years I’ve been involved in large-scale, cross sector engaged research initiatives that bring together young people, industry, community, policy and academic partners to collaboratively identify, design and undertake research on a range of issues such as youth mental health, engagement, employment and online safety.
In this work I’ve been a strong advocate for participatory approaches and thinking about how to be inclusive of young people’s views – from agenda-setting about what gets researched and the terms of inquiry, through to translation and application of research findings. I hope I’ve had some influence!
My most recent project has involved collaborating with eight colleagues at WSU to run a Young and Resilient Living Lab Foundation Project. We brought together 100 participants over five workshops to co-create a community and an agenda for engaged research to inform technology-based strategies to promote the resilience of young people and their communities.
Fo us, resilience should be understood as the capacities to transform the conditions of social life – achieved through ongoing processes of individual and collective receptivity and responsiveness. Read more
I asked Justin Hoenke to join me for an online chat about community and libraries and a thousand other things. Justin is a highly accomplished, much-loved American library director who currently resides in rural Pennsylvania, where he leads the Benson Memorial Library while his family is restoring an old church as a community space.
Justin’s work reminded me of Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going – “A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet” – so we each read that prior to our chat.
It made for a nice jumping off point into a long talk about service, legacy, academic vs. public libraries, and the ongoing dance of community engagement.
Matt
Hello! How are you?
Justin
Good sir, I am well. How are you? We’ve got a lovely spring morning with the birds singing songs. I plan on watering some plants after this. I think this is ideal. Read more
Today we’re joined by Rich Retyi, who leads Marketing & Communications for Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). I met him during the Wondrous Strange event I ran for AADL last year, alongside other great staff like Sherlonya Turner and AADL’s director Josie Parker.
Rich is an exceptional storyteller and advocate for libraries, and alongside his comms work he has created the Ann Arbor Stories podcast and a spinoff publication, The Book of Ann Arbor.
I began by asking Rich how he came to join the team at AADL.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 