Jed Maiden

Originating from the shire of Devon, I moved to London to study my Architecture Part One at Ravensbourne college. After receiving a first-class with honours, winning the NEWH hospitality design award, and gaining a RIBA bronze medal nomination, I joined 'Eight Inc' design studio to work in a multidisciplinary team to create environments and experiences for brands such as Swarovski, Apple, Jaguar Landrover, Mclaren, and Ecco Shoes.

After 3 years at Eight Inc I joined the RCA, spending my first Year in ADS8 'Data Matter' where I explored and critiqued the British participation system in relation to social housing redevelopment in parallel to the convergence of collaborative digital environments.

I'm a well-rounded and curious designer specializing in animation, gaming modification, filmmaking, temporary construction, and speculative fiction writing, with a recent fascination for open-source software manipulation.

While studying at the RCA I taught introductory design workshops for children at 'Archi-Make' and designed theatrical immersive experience sets for independent theatre companies, the most recent being 'Shotgun Carousel'.

I spend my spare time at gigs, travelling, watching too many films, and building installations for music UK festivals with a small collective, such as 'The Inconvenience store', a satirical corner shop that sells everything festival-goers never need or want.

Knowledge can be public, yet undiscovered. Independent fragments can be created and be logically related but never interpreted all together. Information retrieval, essential for assembling such fragments, is always problematic. The search process can be criticised and improved, but never be capable of retrieving all the information to a problem. This essential incompleteness of search and retrieval makes possible the existence of undiscovered public knowledge. 

The project explores the potential of spatial design to facilitate the search for undiscovered public knowledge by applying gaming technology to the subject of investigative journalism.

To test this new methodology, evidence was collated in collaboration with activist group Ded_ucation during an investigation into Manchester University's ties to Israeli military. The evidence is synthesised into spatial environments for virtual users to explore, creating a new potential to organically discover hidden connections between the narrative elements in the case. Environmental storytelling and forensic details populate the world, all telling an individual but potentially related story. The use of game engine technology allows for a live updatable world that can evolve over time as new connections are proven or disproven. Environments are positioned forming adjacencies according to a hierarchy of narrative connection. Journalistic principles are translated into environmental design, proposing a new technique for information search and retrieval that forms of analogue journalism cannot provide.

Although the methodology within the project can be applied to any investigation, the one demonstrated here is highly specific to a relevant problem currently jeopardising the ethics and standards of higher education. Since 2013 Russell group universities have received over £190 million in funding from arms manufacturers looking for 'innovative' research and use of an academic reputation for credibility. The top five universities receiving arms funding were Sheffield, King’s College London, Cambridge, Oxford, and Imperial College. The huge quantities of funding pouring into UK universities from major arms manufacturers highlights how leading British academics, researchers and institutions may be – inadvertently or otherwise – creating and developing technologies that wage war and bring about human rights abuses the world over.

Gaming as a medium has been used as a scapegoat by the media for the inspiration of explicit violent acts. The project attempts to redirect the associated violence of video games towards the uncovering of institutional violence.

This research has been carried out alongside Ded_ucation a group dedicated to demilitarising education. https://ded1.co/