Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

I’ve been to a few events over the last week and I’ve started breaking my rule of not using the word “busy” to describe what I’m up to. I don’t know about you, but a while ago I became irritated by the banality of this little word.

To describe yourself as “busy” is becoming increasingly silly in a world where every minute of our lives seems to be dominated by email, news, CrackBerries, cameraphones, increasing numbers of ’social networking’ sites and more and more ways that one can generally fill a spare minute with either consuming or generating random pieces of often irrelevant and ultimately throwaway ‘content’.

So for a while I managed to remove the word ‘busy’ from my vocabulary.

I think I managed a year.

My problem at the moment is that I seem to have involved myself with a vast array of projects and ideas and I find it difficult to tell people about one particular aspect of what I’m up to that might in some way be relevant to them. Is the person I’m speaking to (another glass of rubbish “networking event red” in one hand) into music, design, digital media, politics, education … ?

So I thought that perhaps a snapshot of where I am at could be useful. Next time someone asks “what are you up to” I can say - have a look at my blog… and from another point of view, maybe just writing down some of the things I am doing might actually help me make some sense of the things that I’m doing!

So, what am I up to at the moment (just off the top of my head - I’ll add more as I think about it!):

Plus - I’m one of the directors of this new and exciting design festival, which as of October will be an annual event held in Birmingham. The aim of the festival is to raise the profile of Birmingham’s growing design scene, attract international interest for the design industry in the UK and worldwide and provide a platform for groundbreaking content, speakers, designers and ideas.

Making 3form’s interactive design installation for Plus - as part of Plus, each of the agencies involved will be taking a stand at the Plus Expo where we get to show off our creative skills by producing a clientless piece of design. My intention is to produce an audio-visual interactive light installation using sensors, video inputs, projection, music (from Type), Flickr images and animation. Should be fun.

3form - My day-to-day job is heading up the design agency 3form. What this means is that I am indundated with an often unmanageable level of emails, phone calls, msn messaging, meetings, presentations, proposals, projects, ideas, etc. It’s great fun most of the time (being your own boss and all that) but sometimes I reach the end of the week and feel like I’ve generated a whole extra week of work and not made a dent in what I wanted to achieve even in the week past!

I get to work on some pretty fantastic stuff at 3form. Current highlights include a project for Maverick TV / Channel 4 / Jamie Oliver, a big and ongoing piece of work for the V&A museum and a great idea for the Learning Skills Council with Clare Edwards of Gigbeth (another one that made The List). I’ve also been involved with the lovely people at Audiences Central working with them on a number of things, including the main Audiences Central site and the forthcoming site for Marketing Birmingham’s creative and cultural campaign launching in September.

Type - Not to be confused with my colleagues at Plus, Typevents, this is the experimental record label that I run with the fantastically talented John Xela. Type hasn’t been at the forefront of my day-to-day efforts for the past couple of years, which to be honest, irritates me. It’s a company based on making fantastic, innovative, experimental music, but when you compare it with the simple idea of selling design work, websites and consultancy to businesses it’s very difficult to push forward commercially. Global niche or not, the market for ultra-experimental music is not one to go into expecting to make one’s millions!

However, Type to me is soul-food. No matter what anyone says to me in the future, my heart is in all things experimental and innovative, and Type (thanks to John’s fantastic A&R) has consistently pushed the boundary of what the UK experimental scene is doing.

I just wish it paid the bills! No matter how many fantastic syncs (publishing deals) we get for Honda, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harmony Corrine, etc. making a living in the music industry now (and the experimental niche in particular) is difficult. I wish I could say otherwise, but the value to me is much higher than any cash reward that I might receive from it.

Peter Broderick artwork - I’m currently working on some artwork for the forthcoming release ‘Float’ by the young and talented Peter Broderick for his first album release. Evidene that good artists _do_ get signed from Myspace demos! This means I’m trying to balance time commitments, changes in the light, coming home late from random after-work events and trying to have some spare time with doing photography at the weekend and producing print-ready artwork. Ha, no problem.

Creative Republic - extending from all of this, and from hundreds of those ‘conversations down the pub’ with creative (again - where did we all get branded this way?!) people it became pretty clear to me that Birmingham and the West Midlands needed to have a bit of a shake up. It pretty much comes down to “Manufacturing is over. What next?” and in my opinion, the creative industries and the service sector are what are going to step into the gulf that is dramatically opening before us in the West Midlands.

I think our region is going to be one of the hardest hit in the national move away from old-style manufacturing, and it is absolutely imperative that at local, regional and national level we put into action a serious programme of investment and support to make that transition easier on all of us. So, with that in mind, a group of creative and cultural leaders (of which I am a member) have put together what we are terming a ‘representitive body for the creative industries’. We want to get our voice heard, and to be involved in the decision-making process when it comes to deciding the future of Birmingham at the region. It’s taken two years to get here, but we are now incorporated and will be appearing on your radar with increasing regularity!

Our first two tasks are putting together a presentation to a group of board-members of Advantage West Midland arguing for recognition and support for the creative and cultural sector and a series of interviews with high profile people in Birmingham in response to Sir Michael Lyons’ “Birmingham City Centre Masterplan Visioning Study”. You could summarise this as “Thanks for telling us what you think should happen in our city over the next few years. That’s great, but this is what _we_ think!” It should make interesting reading.

We’re currently hiring an Ambassador to make the organisation move forward if you’re reading this and are interested.

Fierce! - One of my collaborators on the Creative Republic work has been Mark Ball, head of Fierce! - the performance festival that bites. Mark has been heading up Fierce! for ten years and has managed to create an international-level cultural event that is respected World-wide in that time. This year, Mark invited me to join the board of Fierce! Festival and I’ve not looked back since. It’s early days but I’ve enjoyed every minute of being involved in something so challenging, exciting and urgent. The Name in Lights project we worked on was one of the highlights of the year for me.

Digital Central - So, with my ideas about ‘creative industries’ (where did we inherit that term from anyway?!) and some of the work above as evidence I started getting invitations from various groups of people to join in with what they’re up to. Early on Digital Central appeared on the scene, a project backed by just short of a million pounds to support the ‘Screen, Image and Sound’ industries in the West Midlands, paid for with European funding through AWM. So I lent some time to the project sitting on the Digital Media steering group and more recently the main steering group. It’s been an interesting ride. To be honest, I’ve had nothing but positive reactions for the kinds of things I’ve been pushing for - seed funding for exciting new ideas, targeted business support at the businesses that show good signs of growth, supporting trade missions, supporting mentoring projects. I’ve learnt a lot, but what I’ve really learnt is how easy it is to spend a lot of money very quickly (not that they have) and when dealing with public money it’s very very important to ensure accountability and value for money (I’ve raised this on a couple of occasions).

Creative Birmingham Partnership Board - as part of my work at CR I sit on a board that brings together the main agencies in the region who have a stake in Birmingham’s increasing reputation. Think Arts Council England, The Chamber of Commerce, Birmingham City Council, Learning Skills Council, BBC, Business Link, Screen West Midlands, AWM and others. These guys had the great idea in the first place that Birmingham needed a strong sector voice, and they are more or less responsible for us coming together in the first place as Creative Republic. They’re also responsible for Kevin Johnson’s recommendations for the setting up of Suzie Nortons’ FILM Birmingham.

Created in Birmingham - I had a chance encounter with Pete Ashton at a Birmingham Flickrmeets event for ArtsFest 2006 where we had the bright idea to set up a blog about all the things that are going on in terms of creativity and culture in Birmingham right now. Bouncing off an idea I published in a blog post about branding the city, Pete settled on the CIB title and a new blog was born, and quite frankly Pete has been consitently prolific, relevant and exciting posting nearly every day since. This really has been one of the best projects I’ve ever worked on! It just goes to show how much can be achieved on a shoestring budget (we had a small amount of support from the Creative Birmingham Partnership Board) and how it’s easy to get more visitors than a portal each month just by having relevant up-to-date content.

Flickr - photography is taking up a significant proportion of my time at the moment. I seem to be generating hundreds of images and I only manage to upload a handful at a time. My addiction to Flickr happened about two years ago now and I have to say that it was _the_ main factor in me getting into photography for the first time (and spending too much money on a Canon 5d, a Hasselblad and a Leica). Flickr has helped me to actually ’see’ in a different way - it’s very strange! So I’m always snapping nowadays, uploading things and linking them from here.

Planning an exhibition - Since starting my photography I’ve felt compelled to arrange an exhibition of my work. At the moment I’m trying to work out how to show it in the best way, where to do it, what medium to get prints produced in, etc. etc. I’m currently erring towards a totally destructive process where the only result of the photographic print is a single, etched image image.

Birmingham Exposure - This was another cool Flickr idea that I had. How about making a site for all the Flickrmeet photographs so that we can link them outside of Flickr and do nicer things with the layout? After getting slapped around a bit from people who didn’t want to be involved, the site ended up a little dormant. I’d like to reinvigorate it at some point…

Birmingham University - Reinvigoration has definitely been the word to describe my reconnection with my old university this year. To be honest I had a very mixed time there. On one hand, the course was excellent, on the other, it was Computer Science so the people I spent my day-to-day with were Geeks (apparently I’m one too now). On one hand, it was a great social experience, on the other I ended up in hospital with an acute/life-threatening illness just before my final year. I think that after leaving I wanted to put the latter behind me and pretty much cut off all ties. However, things change, and I guess at some point in dawned on me that if we’re going to stop the ‘graduate drift’ to London or if we’re going to improve the prospects of this city that we all should be maintaining better links with higher education. So I got back in touch, helped out at a few events when I could and became involved with some of the University’s alumni activity, most recently donating to the Honeypot scheme with the aim of having that money matched by other alumni. Since then I’ve also helped out on the Alumni Funds distribution committee and been invited back to my old department to sit on their industrial advisory board. My main argument? Teach students about the value of IP and make entrepreneurship part of the course.

Design Business Association - Relatively recently, I heard that the current DBA head of development for the region was stepping down, and as someone who has a strong interest in promoting the design industry I thought that it would be an opportunity not to be missed for me to take up where he left off and help support a much-needed voice for industry. It’s early days, but I’m planning some exciting stuff, especially to tie in with Plus 07.

Multipack - A much less formal organisation also sprang to mind when I thought about the DBA - Multipack is a group for self-confessed geeks to get together once in a while to talk Microformats, RSS feeds, Lifehacking, OpenID and other such esoteric web developments. Great fun - looking forward to the next one!

Being a school governor - This year I was invited by the ex-chair of the Chamber of Commerce, Simon Topman, to join the board of St. George’s School Edgbaston. Given my strong atheist convictions it took some persuading for me to join a school even with a hint of religious foundations, but I felt that my voice would be more useful being present than not and that I could be of value to the school by providing balance and a young voice to the board. It’s been another steep learning curve, but a fantastic ride so far!

Anyway, I used to be able to handle the level of work until…

Becoming a dad - All of a sudden I have to stop my often hedonistic ‘worry about sleep later’ lifestyle and have another little person to worry about! It’s fantastic, but has certainly meant I have had to rein in on the late nights of programming and designing I used to do. Ah well, there are more important things in life!

And then finally…

The big mystery project - After I came back from Hong Kong this year I felt that I needed to start developing my own intellectual property and produce my own ongoing revenue streams as well as building things for clients. So, for the last three months I’ve been developing an idea, producing a prototype, writing a business plan and we’re in the final stages of converting this into a search for venture capital funding to make it succeed. It’s pretty exciting! I’ve already had some interest in the idea (which for obvious reasons is hush-hush) and that has been really encouraging.

So there you go, if you have actually read this far I congratulate you… and next time I say “oh, busy” you’ll know what I mean!