It’s been a very exciting week in the Studio as Clare and Verity have been super busy preparing for the launch of a fantastic award, nu desine have returned from China with some very grand plans and we hosted a brilliant open discussion about digital experiences and young people's learning. Read on to find out more:

Verity and Clare spent the week preparing the launch of the Playable City Award, which is a new commission open to artists and creatives from across the world. With a challenge to use creative technologies in surprising and engaging ways, the winner of the award will receive £30,000 to create a new work which will be installed in a public space in Bristol next summer (before being toured internationally).  We’re really excited and can’t wait to see the fantastic ideas that come forward, you can find out more and apply for the award here, and follow @playablecity on twitter.

This week Verity was proud to be on the judging panel for the New Media category of Wildscreen’s Panda Awards. The winner was Kinect Nat Geo TV – America The Wild, which is a fantastic interactive documentary/game played through the XBOX console, encouraging young people to investigate and play with the documentary content. Congratulations to Grizzly Creek Films on a worthy win.

Talking of awards our lovely residents Opposable Games have been nominated for Best Start up in TIGA games industry awards 2012. TIGA’s award night will take place as part of Extended Play Festival's after hours events on Thursday 1 November, where Opposable will also be soft launching their game ‘Clockwork Racers’, so we’re sending them lots of luck! You can take a sneak peak of an early version of the game here.

Yesterday Tim Kindberg and Will Drew tested their new game ‘A Scanner Darkly’ in Cabot Circus. They were play testing this new wifi-based game with between 12-20 people. We’re very excited to hear how it went and will be reporting back from Tim in next week’s blog.  

It’s back to usual at the nu desine desks as Adam, Del and Kaspar have returned from a very successful trip to China overseeing some of the AlphaSphere tooling being made, visiting electronic contract manufacturers and meeting with possible future manufacturing partners. They have also been discussing setting up a nu desine office and assembly line there in the future! You can keep up to date with their progress by reading their blog here & following their twitter account @nu_desine

On Thursday the Studio hosted a round table discussion with Keri Facer from Bristol Uni. She was joined by colleagues from Oslo and Helsinki who are starting to work on a project exploring young people's learning through digital experiences. It was fantastic to have so many Studio Residents and other brilliant people around the table to discuss practical possibilities for future projects.

Nicola has been busy interviewing and writing up her case studies of the Studio and this week posted a interview with artists in residence Timothy X Atack and MrUnderwood. You can read the interview here.

On Friday one of our newest Studio residents Ad Spiers gave a fantastic lunchtime talk on Haptic technology and Robotics. He spoke about his research at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and his own creative projects. Don’t worry if you couldn’t make the talk however as we’ve written a blog post about it here.  

Dan was away on Friday attending Playful 2012, which is a one-day conference all about games, play, interaction, behaviour and everything that comes with looking at the world through fun eyes. This year comedian Josie Long was the compere. You can read Dan’s blog post about the awesome event here.   

We enjoyed our lunchtime talk from i-DAT’s Chris Hunt today about the Moby Dick Big Read project. We’ll be writing that up next week and posting it to share the learning. It inspired debates around copyright and the value of opening up dense 19th Century texts in new ways for a 21st Century audience.