BIOGRAPHY
Glenn Harding is a serial entrepreneur, producer, technology and strategy consultant who has built numerous international companies in the creative and technology sectors over the last 30 years. Glenn has consistently been at the forefront of convergence of technology, culture and new communication methodologies moving from desktop publishing, B2B telemarketing and research and database marketing in the early eighties through to Interactive and user interface design and Internet marketing in the nineties.
Glenn has pioneered innovation in technology, business methodology and workplace culture.
In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s Glenn built his company Webmedia, into an internationally successful interactive design studio expanding from its Auckland production base into San Francisco, Hong Kong and Melbourne.
Webmedia was one of the earliest pioneers of dynamic flash interface and user centric design (UX) on the web and won creative design awards around the world for their diverse portfolio of innovative projects for multinational clients. Webmedia was named NZ’s best company to work for in a leading independent survey due to the groundbreaking workplace culture developed by Glenn after breaking with all conventional thinking with his approach and at the peak of the dotcom boom grew his studio from four to over sixty staff in their first four years of operation with a staff attrition rate of zero.
At it’s peak Webmedia was valued at NZ$40m.
During this time as a Managing Director of one of NZ’s leading tech companies, Glenn also advised the boards of both the NZ Department of Trade and the Department of Industry to support other NZ tech companies to identify opportunities and partnerships in those markets. He also advised the office of the Prime Minister and participated in numerous business round tables on initiatives to help foster a knowledge economy in NZ.
Glenn has consulted to and written strategy for numerous multinational companies, government agencies and cultural institutions internationally and has twice raised Venture Capital in excess of US$3M for his commercial ventures.
Since the mid 2000’s Glenn’s interests moved to the cultural sector predominantly around digital placemaking. This interest began when he was engaged to draft the original multimedia strategy for Federation Square in Melbourne. As a result of these recommendations Glenn’s company was subsequently contracted to manage the technology platforms and public screens across the site for the next 6 years. As Multimedia Manager at Federation Square Glenn was tasked with developing and implementing multimedia strategy and developing key relationships to facilitate building audience and public engagement. Glenn was also tasked with helping raise the profile of Federation Square Internationally. At the time Federation Square was one of the first non-commercial public screens of it’s kind in the world and there was no road map on how to effectively program an urban screen to achieve these objectives.
During his time contracted as Multimedia Manager for Fed Square Glenn was invited to restructure the interface, content management and public access point projects for Victoria’s Cultural Network. This project was an initiative of Arts Victoria to link the cultural institutions, foster collaboration between the institutions and showcase their digital assets. After successfully drafting a restructure plan to consolidate these projects Glenn recruited a project manager and subsequently sat on a steering committee with the multimedia managers of four of the other major cultural institutions, reporting directly to the governance committee, to successfully shepherd the project through to delivery.
Glenn produced the International Urban Screens Conference at Federation Square in 2008 (USM08). This event was developed in conjunction with Melbourne University and Federation Square and supported by the International Urban Screens Association, which he chaired at that time.
One of the outcomes of this collaboration was a 5 year $750,000 ARC funded research project ‘Large screens and the transnational public sphere’
Glenn has been responsible for consulting on and managing the installation of several non-commercial cultural screens and digital signage networks for city and state governments and cultural institutions across Australia. He has advised local and State Government on these installations, to facilitate the installation of new screens, to help manage and support new screen installations and to produce creative projects and programs for screen partners in the network.
He has written numerous feasibility studies, tender documents, operational recommendations, technical documentation and digital placemaking strategies for governmental agencies and councils around Australia and overseas.
Glenn is a member of the Media Architecture Institute Vienna/Beijing Sydney with a team of the twelve leading international academics in this field. Since 2009 the institute has run five International biennale conferences and a series of summits across Europe, Asia and Australia.
In 2016 Glenn produced an International conference on digital placemaking for Vivid Sydney, MAB16 with two other Directors of the Institute, For this conference, Glenn was on the International Organising Committee and also held the positions of Industry Chair, Exhibition Co-Chair, Communications Co-Chair and Symposium Co-Chair.
The next Biennale is being held in Beijing in 2018 in partnership with China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Glenn and his team have produced a series of symposia on the role of urban media and digital placemaking called ‘Digital Publics’ for Vivid Sydney in 2015 and 2016 and for Pause Festival at Federation Square in Melbourne in 2016 with subsequent Digital Publics events being planned for Auckland NZ and Boston Massachusetts in 2017.
Glenn routinely works with leading academics and universities on a variety of collaborative research projects around Urban Screens and Digital Placemaking including two Australia Research Council projects and has been the recipient of grants from Australia Council for the Arts; Film Victoria; CSIRO; Australia China Council; Henry Halloran Trust and Sydney University, for research, interactive projects, events and exhibitions.
More information can be found at:
https://au.linkedin.com/in/glennharding
http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/about/
http://digital-placemaking.org