Tiago
Gama Rocha
Creative strategist, hackathon specialist, creative producer, lecturer, mentor, and entrepreneur.
Passionate about exponential change, digital transformation, recombining innovation, and the future of transdisciplinary collaborative work.
I am interested in critical and transdisciplinary modes of practice that combine science, technology, art, and communication. Throughout the last 10 years, I have made my way into becoming an expert in brokering
news ways of working between, and across, these fields.
I am the outcome of a very special international doctoral program , designed to foster new forms of interdisciplinary research, education, capacity building, and collaborations. Not surprisingly, the research questions tackled by this UT Austin Portugal Program were sufficiently complicated, and stretched across multiple disciplinary fields that, more often than not, I saw myself entering in science-ficthemes . To study journalism, attention, emotion, and technology, in its full flavours, required a lot of different perspectives, and a variety of different disciplinary expertise. Undertaking interdisciplinary research, for me, was inescapable.
Through UT Austin|Portugal Digital Media Program platform, I received extended training in entrepreneurship and work with industries utilizing digital media to explore new products, services, and formats. During the later years of my fellowship, along with fellow colleagues from the program, we received funds to create two specific interdisciplinary collaborative projects, which were designed to produce transdisciplinary results.
First came Openfield Creative Lab — a creative lab specialised in multi-sensory experiences, combining video, sound, light, architecture, and interaction, and applying generative design and artificial intelligence to their process, translating data to meaningful artworks, turning algorithms into creative partners. Already in its 5th year of operation, to this day, Openfield continues to create a wide range of interactive and performance-based media artwork that has helped shape how audiences perceive artistic experiences in both public and private spaces. As a founding member and creative producer, I act as a catalyst for bringing different disciplines together.
Recently I co-founded EMERGENCE Hackathon, a project built from premisse that what detaches the innovation unfolding in today’s world from the preceding era is the combinatory force behind digitized powered innovation. Because digital goods are nonrival – they don’t decay or get dry out – it is now possible to combine multiple layers, and generations, of digitized innovation, to foster new innovations. In other words, innovation and technological progress is now sprouting from simply recombining things that already exist.
Now in its third year, EMERGENCE Hackathon is seen as an efficient instrument to broaden the skills of internal human resources, while, simultaneously, addressing external ecosystems to scout for and enable new perspectives.
The experience gathered in a tutorial supervision role at EMERGENCE Hackathon was the gateway for the beginning of a career as an invited assistant professor, to be unit coordinator of the Seminar II course and apply the EMERGENCE interdisciplinary methodology at the Digital Media Doctoral Program.
This experience as an Invited Assistant Professor at FEUP continuously offers a test bed as for which extent hackathon methodologies can be applied to a larger co-creation setting, involving doctoral students with arts, media, technology, and communication professionals.
At FEUP, I am responsible for engaging first year Digital Media doctoral students in identifying opportunities to develop solutions based on digital media and developing creative solutions to solve concrete problems. My classes are seen as a medium for drawing connections between different fields, improving the perception of complex situations, and gaining new perspectives on difficult issues.
In 2017, together with Ricardo Araújo Pereira, Miguel Góis, and João Rito, we created [nome inglês com style] , a creative boutique that offers strategy, creation, and production of communication contents for clients from a wide range of businesses. For us, humor is not just a form of entertainment. Humor is not one-dimensional. Humor generates emotion, and emotion captures attention. It is a great tool that facilitates the understanding of the arguments and the creation of memories.
In this sense, positive stimuli, emotion, attention, and understanding of the message are key elements to position brands in the public's mind, and ultimately, for every work we do, be it researching, teaching, managing, leading, creating, or ideating.
EXPERTISE
Human Centered Features
1. Consulting
Hackathon-as-a-process
Generating open innovation while walking the innovation cycle, correlation of trends with business strategy
Analysis, strategic reflection, strategic formulation
Strategic Planning
Creative Communication
Human insights, creative ideas, messages that matter
2. Hackathon-as-a-Service
Multidisciplinary Expertise
combining several academic disciplines or professional specializations in an approach to a topic or problem
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
build on each other’s expertise to achieve common, shared goals
Transdisciplinary Innovation
action-oriented results, focussed on addressing real world complex issues, beyond the disciplinary perspectives
3. Education
Teaching
Entrepreneurial Journalism, foundations and challenges of communication, digital technologies and interactivity, learning through hackathons
Curriculum Development
Course design, pedagogic innovation and experimentation, hackathon practices, action learning process
Workshops
Advertising, collaborative innovation, strategic Planning, hackathon-as-education
Currently doing
Creative strategist at [nome inglês com style]. Hackathon Specialist at EMERGENCE Hacakthon. Creative Producer at Openfield Creative Lab.
Invited Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto and at Instituto Universitário da Maia.
Keep in touch
Let's move forward. Let's work together.
Reach Out!
