IFC 2014: Digezz – Teaching Multimedia

Digezz, a creativity lab of the University of Applied Sciences Chur, Switzerland.

Digezz is a multimedia platform of the University of Applied Sciences Chur, Switzerland, for multi-, cross- and transmedia formats produced by students. Digezz is featuring arts, photography, art design, information graphics, radio and video. Digezz is a platform targeted at young people with a special interest in media and arts throughout German-speaking Europe, at professional journalists and artists, and at future employers such as media enterprises or communication agencies. Digezz also is a multimedia didactics based on a concept named “cognitive apprenticeship”. In Digezz teachers act as instructors, coaches, inputters, feedbackers, not as professors. Platforms and concepts of this kind might be creativity labs for any type of non-linear radio.

Why reinvent cultural radio? Why multimedia at all?

1. Broadly speaking: Cultural radio makers work with companies running out of money, and for an audience passing away.
2. Broadcasters have not understood the importace of non-linear, multimedia and interactive radio formats yet.
3. The decrease of public funding causes an erosion of the radio core, especially of fiction and feature. Radio in its traditionally linear, single-media as well as in new interactive formats will always need funding, and hence it has to give proof of its public value not only to today’s listeners, but also to younger generations.
4. Linear radio formats need visualisation. New and creative audio-visual formats are being developed throughout Europe (i.e. the award-winning project www.a-l-abri-de-rien.com) by innovative and creative professionals (i.e. www.2470media.com, Berlin). but they have not yet reached the audience they deserve.
5. Does your feature department have an app? Linear broadcasting needs interactivity, and it needs to be mobile. The radio feature must go where its listeners are, and one step further: to smartphones, to mobile interactives.
6. Multimedia professionals (artists, journalists, media engineers) might be the feature authors of the future.
7. As fiction and feature formats diminish, there is less and less training of future authors. The radio documentary needs passionate and gifted teachers. The feature needs you.

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