Pittsburgh
Celerity’s Innovation Center is developing a new social networking platform that will assist educators and researchers in working together to create of new learning tools and games.
Celerity is teaming with CMU and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) on the platform, called Working Examples. The project was funded by the Gates and MacArthur Foundations for an undisclosed amount and is housed at ETC.
The goal of the platform is to help researchers, designers and developers to work better together on projects through a website that acts as a social network for collaboration, explains Harry Ulrich, director of the Celerity Innovation Center. The platform will boost innovation in several areas, such as the creation of new educational games for children or better industrial design.
When people from different disciplines or areas of expertise are collaborating to develop a new field, they lack defined and widely accepted solutions to core problems, he adds. Until there are such solutions, no one can be sure such an emerging field is possible or necessary.
For example, a research scientist who is focused on elementary-level math theory may work with a game designer to create a product for children that gives them the ability to interact with one another on math concepts.
“This allows them to design a better game,” says Ulrich. “It’s a sort of social network for collaboration across different disciplines.”
Celerity is based in McLean, VA, employs 35-40 internally (plus 60 consultants) at two offices in Pittsburgh, Gateway Center and the Celerity Innovation on Fourth Avenue. The company has nine regional offices and 600+ employees across the country.
The company focuses on human center design, using designers to validate how existing products work and overcome and solve critical problems.
While the Pittsburgh office has downsized in recent years, Celerity is growing again and plans to
hire six for the local office, mostly software developers, web and mobile analysts.
The platform will be unveiled in Chicago, Illinois, at MacArthur's Digital Media Learning Conference in March 14-16 2013.
Source: Harry Ulrich, Celerity