Banner for IKM's installation at the EADI General Conference in York, 2011
 
Information Knowledge Management (IKM) Emergent was a research programme I became involved with while studying for my PhD at Trinity College Dublin. I met the programme's director Mike Powell through my supervisor, and my department hosted a workshop for IKM Emergent, looking at ways we might be able to help them stage an exhibition about their work at a development conference in Geneva in 2008. I was commissioned to design their installation at this conference, and subsequently developed material for them for other exhibitions and communications of their work over the next few years - see below.

IKM Emergent describes themselves on their website as a "research and communication programme founded on a critical analysis of current practice in the use of all forms of knowledge, including formal research, within the international development sector. IKM Emergent believes that historically the development sector has adopted a too linear and simplistic understanding of how development takes place and therefore of how it needs to act in order to make change happen. As a result, the sector has generally based its work on too limited a range of knowledges from too limited a range of sources. IKM's philosophy is based on the conception of multiple knowledges, multiple realities".

IKM Emergent was a five year programme, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was developed under the auspices of the Information Management Working Group of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).
 

EADI General Conference in Geneva, June 2008

The12th EADI General Conference focused on "Global Governance for Sustainable Development: The Need for Policy Coherence and New Partnerships", presenting "the perceptions of leading European development experts and their associates in the developing regions on dramatic global challenges and on possible policy options or governance models to meet those challenges" (source).

For this installation I designed collapsible, transportable cardboard display stands for images and text that explained IKM's work, and displayed artworks (like Jonah Brucker-Cohen's 'Crank the Web') and technology objects (such as the One Laptop Per Child) that related to their themes. A large monitor and trackball allowed people to interact with information visualisations running in Google Earth.

View image gallery here: IKM Emergent installation at EADI GC2008
 

ICTD at Royal Holloway, London 2010

The international conference ICTD2010 (Information Communication Technology in Development) was hosted by the ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London. It aimed to "provide a forum for researchers, practitioners and all those with interests in the use of information and communication technologies in development practice to meet to discuss the latest research advances in the field" (source).

I designed a second installation for this conference, this time using CNC-routed plywood to make collapsible, transportable display stands, with some accommodating touch screens as well as text panels.

See image gallery here: IKM Emergent installation at ICTD2010