Plunging into 2015, we are very happy to be joined by some brilliant new people…

We are delighted to have two new members of the Studio team. Hilary O’Shaughnessy has joined us in the role of Watershed Producer, and will be Producing the 2015 Playable City Award and some other special projects. Her background spans theatre, games and interaction design. She recently created Prototype Festival of Play and Interaction in Dublin. Rachael Burton is joining us as Projects Coordinator. She’ll be working on various Studio projects, including Being There and the Playable City Award. Before joining the team, Rachael was a production assistant at Cheltenham Festivals and a freelance theatre producer and project manager on projects including Kaleider’s You With Me and Alice Tatton Brown’s Ariel.

We are also delighted to welcome some old friends of the Studio into the fold officially; danceroom Spectroscopy performer Lisa May Thomas has joined the Studio to develop The Touch Diaries, a research project looking into touch, connection and community, and exploring how human contact can have an impact on our physical and mental health and wellbeing. Ian Danby, who has worked on lots of Studio projects in the past, has officially become Studio resident as he has recently begun navigating for Circumstance, and is producing their new ‘intimate sci-fi opera’ about terraforming, When There Is Only Us.

Nu desine’s Adam Place and Becky Sage are currently in Las Vegas at CES, the US’s largest consumer electronics trade show. He has been presenting nu desine’s prototype for their new entry level AlphaSphere, the Alpha Me. Above is a sneak peak at their rather magnificent booth… And here is a teaser video for the new member of the AlphaSphere family.

DCRC Research Fellow Esther MacCallum-Stewart has just put out a paper called Take that Bitches! Refiguring Lara Croft in Feminist Game Narratives. The paper addresses some of the changes in feminist thinking in Game Studies and surrounding the Tomb Raider franchise, since founding DCRC member Helen Kennedy’s groundbreaking 2002 paper Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo. Read the paper here.