We’ve been pulling together the co-creation task for the Friday. The good news is that we’ll have a task and one with a real purpose behind it. These are sourced from a co-creation agency that one of the organizing committee has as a client. There are currently two tasks, both of which are very topical, interesting and give us a corpus of materials to look and to get to grips with. One of these tasks is a project eliciting posters designed to raise awareness about the importance of freedom of expression and safety for journalists globally. The other is a project focused on sourcing new ways to vote for the Facebook generation. We’ll be choosing one of these over the next few days.

The idea will be to get people into smaller mixed groups of 5 and analysing materials together and submitting the materials to a semiotic analysis together. This will both to use semiotics to create an analytic framework for extracting more meaning from the entires and sorting them into themes but also to dig for connotations and cultural codes that that will allow us potentially to go beyond the material.

The desired outcome of the task is to show how semiotics can add value to making sense out of creative work. We’re not looking for polished conclusions – the primary focus of the task is simply:

to work together towards a common goal, which is also good networking
to share ideas and perspectives (being respectful of each other’s ideas)
to have reflections and / or some sense of how the task and process went

The reality is that in each group there will be a mix of abilities and different theoretical persuasions in each group and varying abilities to ideate too. Some groups will have those less experienced in interpreting texts and they should feel free to sit back and chip in as they can. We will encourage people to dig into the material and to be creative. The format for the session will be as follows:

Briefing 10 minutes
Working 50 minutes
Sharing 30 minutes

So please bring your computer so we can upload materials. Look forward to working with you all.

Chris and Organizing Committee

Only seven tickets to SemioFest 2012 remain. So hurry and book your place to avoid missing on an exciting event.

Contact Pavla if you have any queries.

The rough outline to SemioFest agenda is now available to view here. We have an exciting lineup of speakers who are presenting a wide gamut of ideas. Kicking off with our keynote speakers Prof Paul Cobley and Mark Taylor of Mr Mark Taylor’s Brand Emporium who will be followed by a line up of academics and practitioners presenting perspectives on semiotics.

There is great momentum behind SemioFest. We are finalising all arrangements. We have more than enough abstracts for all the presentation slots. We just need to confirm exactly who will be presenting and when.

Just to give you an idea though there are abstracts on the following topics and this does not include Keynotes, Panels or Co-Creation slots:

• Semiotics of luxury brands
• Digital flows and cultural codes
• Semiotics and the semantic web
• Index for benchmarking brands
• Semiotics and brand Equity
• Social media strategy
• Rhetoric in advertising
• Rhetoric in product design
• Archetypes and pattern analysis
• Colour semiotics
• Semiotics and urban gaming
• Qual and quant text mining
• Crowdsourced semiotics