By STEVEN PATRICK

KUALA LUMPUR: Content is not growing in tandem with technology, according to Professor David Knight, head of the University of Central England in Birmingham's Department of Visual Communication.

“What's lacking globally is content. There are a lot of tools for developing it, but not enough content per se,” he said at the New Media Youth Festival 2001 in Kuala Lumpur last week.

“There's a great emphasis on developing students with creative thinking to develop that content,” he said.

The growth of interactive television, the resurgence of animation and the increased role of the Web has created a demand for more creative people.

“Five years ago, it was a desperate market looking for creators. Today, it's still a market looking for creators. We used to go to industry to get our people placed, but now the industry comes to us for designers,” said Knight.

He drew a comparison between what's happening today with what happened when desktop publishing (DTP) took off 15 years ago.

“As a result of DTP, many designers and printers were put out of business. The local secretary became the designer who then produced a lot of crap because he or she had no design experience.”

“The same thing is happening with the Internet,” he said. “What's happened in the past couple of years is that print-based information was scanned and transferred to screen. But you can't just take a newspaper and put it on the screen. That would be boring,” he said.

For Knight, “new media” allows one to take technology and develop information in a much more meaningful way -- to present information in “less passive forms” to allow interaction.

“You're changing the whole aspect of passive viewing to one of interactive viewing. In the next five years, as we move into interactive TV, our students, hopefully, will become the creators of this new content,” he said.

Knight claimed his university was in the process of “re-branding” its courses and might call them “new media” courses.

“I don't think there's actually anything new in “new media”. It is basically a re-adaption of multimedia. I think that New Media is a movement where designers are taking control of the technology. It's a movement for the creative people beginning to use the technology. They drive the technology, as opposed to the technology driving the creativity.”

Knight added that the creative industry had overtaken the manufacturing industry as the greatest contributor to Britain's national wealth over the past few years.

Tech and creative fest

The New Media Youth Festival was organised by The One Academy, Sungei Wang Plaza, Epson Trading Sdn Bhd and the New York Art Directors Club Inc, a non-profit organsiation dedicated to the creative arts.

The festival featured talks about new media and also included an exhibition involving over 1,000 local and foreign award-winning new media creations.

There were also talks from both industry professionals and academic representatives, including Silver Ant Animation's animation director Goh Aun Hoe (who has won one Malaysian Video Award and two Kancil Special Merit awards) and University of Wolverhampton School of Art and Design's senior lecturer in animation, Ross Winning.

“New media is about using information technology to innovate traditional advertising. It could be in the fields of animation, multimedia and web design,” said The One Group's joint managing director Veronica Ho.

Ho said that the festival was required as there was a shortage of IT-skilled workers.

“The One Academy has up to 250 graduates per year, but the job market requires 10 times more graduates than that. Not many people realise this, some of the youth are still questioning the possibility of earning a living in IT,” she said.

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