Ian Frank

Change agent, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Event planner, Idea generator, Job-seeker, Scientist, Single, World traveler

I am a researcher, educator, festival director and non-profit president, so I am usually occupied either doing these things or trying to make the most of, and expand, their intersections. I am a full professor at Future University Hakodate in Japan, where I teach AI. My festival work concentrates on the "World Music and Dance Festival" (WMDF), which I started in 2008. In the six years to date, we have hosted over 1200 artists from 43 countries. The Festival is run by my non-profit "Worlds Meet Japan" (WMJ) Association, which also runs a co-located "Goods and Gourmet" festival, featuring booths from across Japan. In Feb 2014, we started a kids' version of the summer event featuring groups from Russia, Taiwan, and a hundred or so Japanese kindergarten and elementary school students. WMDF ran a full programme in the year of the Tohoku earthquake, despite all the originally planned overseas groups withdrawing. In 2013, using charitable funds raised by previous overseas WMDF artists, we were able to bring a group of Japanese performers from the disaster area to our event. Independently, in 2012 & 2013, I also set up and ran Japan's first multi-genre, multi-venue Fringe Festival. Organising event spaces brought me to the design concept of "wayfinding", which I'm gradually finding I can use as an umbrella term to view lots of what I do. For instance, in AI research, often tasks can be described in terms of having to get computer algorithms to navigate through a space of possibilities. Also in education, I wonder if current systems pay enough attention to what should be a primary goal: giving students the abilities to make their own way in life when they graduate? As a possible way to address that final question, I have been developing a series of workshops that use the Japanese notion of "koto" to underpin a target of "interaction" between people and an environment. Through a series of tasks that use mostly everyday materials, students get the chance to learn thinking skills that may stand the real world test of time.

Cycling, reading, thinking, teaching, learning, producing, many other "-ing"s

AI, Critical thinking, Festival Production, Mathematics, Programming (computer), Programming (events), space design, Wayfinding, Workshop activity creation, Workshop facilitation

Chapter 1 now being written.

Untidying. Squeezing in as much as possible before the deadline.