Remix : Andy Clark ʼ s Being There

Introduction In 2005 I left a successful career as a consultant and designer in the children’s new media industry to reenter the academic world. I was interested in how and why different forms of new media might impact children’s experiences and their cognitive development. So much of what I saw in industry was driven by market and business demands and by novelty – being first to market – rather than being grounded in rich understandings of how children develop intelligence and how this process could be supported through their interaction with new media. I had taken a turn away from screen-based products and found myself wanting to work on the kinds of hybrid physical-digital exhibits common in museums and science centres. It seemed to me at that time (before I had children of my own) that hybrids were better suited to the active, social, busy lives of children, than products aimed at single child sitting isolated in front of a computer screen. I had so many questions about how and why different forms of media might be beneficial to children that I decided to take an academic position and was hired at a new School called Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Canada.