ia play

The BBC’s Innovation Labs are back on. This year’s Labs are aimed at “independent new media & vision companies in … Scotland, North East England, North West England and Wales & West Midlands”.

The labs provide

• Participation in an intensive creative workshop with peers and expert mentors
• An opportunity to pitch a project to BBC New Media commissioners
• Access to business advice, mentoring and development finance from other sources
• Retention of any IP that they develop
• A £5,000 fee for each of the selected teams

We’ve been trying to come up with a new org structure for our website and every plan we’ve come up with so far has included categories that on closer reflection turn out to just be miscellaneous categories re-branded.

Alongside the meaningful stuff like ‘programmes’ and ‘news’ we’ve got ‘about’ which is just a bucket for corporate information and other pages we have to have on the site but the audience isn’t necessarily looking for. At the moment we’ve also got ‘innovation’ which is a bucket of new stuff that doesn’t fit in the current org structure. And then there is ‘products’ which wouldn’t necessarily be a miscellaneous category for another organisation but for us it means things we make that aren’t TV or Radio programmes.

Might need to have a re-think.

Apparently in Germany there is a job title Direktor Grundsatzfragen that translates as “Director of
Fundamental Questions”. If challenged I imagine most organisations would claim to have someone who is considering the questions fundamental to their business - strategists , executives and the like. But for most of these roles the focus is different. After all strategists are primarily being paid to come up with good answers/strategies.

A job where you just focus on working out what the question should be? That’s a new one to try and get on the org chart.

There’s a story this morning that the government has asked for a study into the impact of ‘violent’ video games on children. I’m a little bit dubious about the decision to have Tanya Byron to head up the study. As the news coverage (but not the DCMS press releases) make clear Bryon is best known to the public as the resident expert on The House of Tiny Tearaways. Is it necessary to have a recognised TV presenter lead this sort of study?

Oddly it appears the same story was covered in September but with the focus more on the impact of the internet and porn.

Part of the study will “commission a literature review and analysis of current evidence on the effects of exposure to such material on children’s wellbeing and behaviour” but mostly the study will look at the effectiveness of regulations, parents concerns and childrens opinions so I’m not expecting any new evidence. Instead we can probably expect press releases in March that will pick which of conflicting existing research conclusions to focus on and use anedoctal evidence from parents to ‘give colour’ to the story.

(I’m also curious what they really mean by violence. Are they worried by my childhood destruction of robot after robot in Sonic the Hedgehog? Is this the same as picking up a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto, having (off-screen) sex with the her, and then beating her up and stealing her money? Actually, I don’t know the answer to this. Does it matter how ‘abstract’ the violence is?)

The title of this post is a bit of cheat as it isn’t really work. I’ve been involved in a BBC scheme called ‘Connect & Create’ which aims to join up community projects with BBC staff who have expertise that might help the charities. I’ve been involved in two ways so far.

Firstly in a Media Matching event which was a bit like speed dating for charities. It was evening event that 8 charities and 8 varied members of BBC staff attended and each pairing had 5 minutes to chat and see if there was a way we could work together.

The second project is about releasing members of my team to help the National Trust over a longer period of time. I’m trying to set this up this week.

The things I like about C&C so far:

* reminds you how much you know and how valuable that knowledge can be to others

* gives you the chance to engage in projects that are often simpler and shorter than the complex infrastructure projects I normally end involved with at work

* creates an opportunity to learn or refresh skills that it might be hard for you to do at work

* helps you learn from the charities about the members of the public they work with, either through the charity or directly

Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.
Mark Jenkins, “To Timbuktu”

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Gail Pool

So… what does a sitemap have to be like to transform the way people travel the site?

Today the lovely Jane Murison, our in-house expert on card-sorting amongst many other things, ran peer trainng for us on card-sorting.

One of the things Jane mentioned was how much more enjoyable and less stressful participants find card-sorting than research like task-based testing. She felt this was partly due to a (British?) reticence to criticise a seemingly finished product but we also discussed the game-like properties of card-sorting versus the test/assessment properties of task-based testing.

There are comfortable and familiar echoes in card-sorting of Snap and more so of Happy Families, and even formal card games like Bridge that on one level rely on grouping ‘like with like’ e.g Hearts with Hearts or Kings with Kings.

I guess this a theme explored by Rashmi Sinha’s research and her work with game-like elicitation methods (GEMs) and particularly OpenSort.

With the MindCanvas GEMs I kind of feel that some of the game resonance is lost (and more of the test resonance introduced) by removing the physical/tactile cards. Maybe that’s just my obsession with trading cards and a sign of not enough time spend playing Solitaire on my PC.

(related card-sorting thought -  looking forward to Donna Maurer’s book dedicated to card sorting)

Last week I took the first of the BBC’s new programme of creativity training courses, Ideas Coaches. The course was aimed at staff who wanted to help a team generate ideas, rather than necessarily be more creative themselves.

The part of the course that we found most powerful was the creation of ’spark questions’ (apparently the BBC used to call these springboard questions, not sure why the change). We spent seemingly ages just crafting the questions we wanted to generate ideas for. Our initial questions were all dismissed as far too specific (meaning we’d already narrowed the range of possible solutions) and far too negative (meaning the group would be more depressed than inspired by the question). The latter point was interesting as I’ve often seen myself and some of my most talented colleagues descend into morose self-pitying rather than coming up with any ideas for solving our problems.

Most of the questions started with ‘how’ as this was deemed to suggest the solutions were actually out there. Some ended up pretty cryptic but you wouldn’t be using them entirely out of context:

“how can we stop the fighting and start the building”

“how can we take our place on the world stage”

“how can today’s best be sure to be tomorrow’s too”

We were skeptical of how well they could work when they have lost the original specificity (one is about kids TV programme, the last is about BBC website) but what they worked brilliantly for was producing completely off-field suggestions, things that the original problem-owner never even saw as being part of the picture. As course leader pointed out “what makes you assume that the future of the BBC website is to be a website at all?”