ia play

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?”

The Big Draw kicks off tomorrow with a mission to show that drawing is “enjoyable, liberating and at everyone’s fingertips”.

This is conveniently timed as I’m on a mission to spend more of my time drawing at work (part of a larger mission to spend less time with my computer). Step one was completed when I moved to my (huge) new desk and decided to keep it pretty much clear, bar the computer and an A3 sketch pad. Admittedly a lot of what gets scribbled on the pad is phone numbers and to-do lists but it has seen a fair bit of drawing too. It has been on a few trips to the cafe downstairs too. I tried taking it to a couple of meetings but that felt plain odd. So I also need to replaced my ruled notepad that goes to meetings with a smaller sketch pad. I never stick to the rules so the latter is pretty pointless.

Khoi Vinh wrote of doodling designers:

“The last thing you want to do, if you’re a designer in a business environment who wants to be taken seriously, is spend your time in meetings doodling like an idle schoolboy. “

But drawing isn’t always doodling (’to scribble aimlessly’) - if we’re allowed to write down our thoughts in meetings then why not draw them.

Perhaps it is time to copy David’s ‘A Drawing A Day‘.

Recently at work I received a survey request from a member of our HR team. She is studying for a further degree and was collecting data for her dissertation on organisational psychology.

At its heart the survey was evaluating what I though the values of the BBC were and how well this matched my own. Her hypothesis was that the closer the fit between my values and how I perceived the BBC’s values then the more likely I would be to be satisfied with my work and actively commited to it. I would be less likely to be intending to find a new job.

It was an interesting task given that the BBC has a clearly articulated set of values:

• Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
• Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
• We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
• Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
• We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
• We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/purpose/

The values are on our diaries, our ID cards and displayed 10ft tall in the entrance to the Media Centre. When they were first announced years ago I was skeptical of their usefulness as they seemed to boil down to the staff being told to ‘be good’. Uncontroversial but hardly profound.

Reflecting on this now I realise that ‘be good’ has two meanings and they pretty much sum up how I see the BBC’s values: making high quality products and programmes whilst playing nicely.

We may fall short at times but the goals remain pretty appealing.

Whilst we’re on the subject of assumptions, the title of this posting was another observation by another colleague about information architects. It was meant as a statement of fact and not something that would upset anyone, let alone the IAs.

Now this ‘fact’ successfully ignores my impractical desire for my notebook to be A3 sized to allow for much bigger diagrams but that’s besides the point.

We can be, I admit, narrow in our communication methods. Most people never want to be shown a spreadsheet. But I think in this instance my colleague is confusing ‘being visual’ with ‘using colour’.

Then again ‘you lot are a bit grey’ isn’t really an improvement.

A colleague expressed surprise today at the name of this blog since “I don’t think of you as playful… you’re very sensible”. It would seem that the arrival on my desk of a pink boggly eyed flamingo from Las Vegas and various FatDUX ducks can’t dispel years of building a reputation for pragmatism. And apparently keeping pet chickens in Tottenham is a rubbish way to be “a little bit crazy” as the little egg producers are probably the most practical pet you can get.

But I’m interested in the creation of this new antonym pair, playful-sensible. I mean, I understand what they are getting at. We have a tendency to associate play with time wasting, task avoidance, and just generally not getting the job done. It is what children do instead of doing jobs, isn’t it?

At this point I defer to John Thorn, sports historian and author of Total Baseball, someone a little outside my usual reading matter:

“Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.”

Which makes it a very sensible thing to do, surely?

Matt Jones returns to the BBC in a few weeks. I think this confirms my theory that they put chips in our brains that make you feel ill if you are away too long.

Jones recently presented at Interesting 2007, Russell Davies’ conference where “all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things.” I’ve just been flicking through his slides on slideshare and it shouldn’t have surprised me that he crammed themes of play in there alongside cityscapes, comics, the Sultan’s elephant, Parkour, Francis Fukyama, and psychogeography:

“truly playful spaces are those that enable the unplanned and un-authored to occur within their environments. Truly playful spaces are being crowded out by authored experiences, but this is only having the effect of making them even more attractive environments. A great recent example was the “play” inspired by The Weather Project installation in Tate Modern, where many people chose to lie down and bathe in the artifical sunlight, making patterns together that they could see in the huge mirrored ceiling”.

Looking forward to having him back and causing chaos.

Today was an Innovation Forum at work. An open invite is sent out for staff to pitch ideas and for other people to come along and vote. It was held at the Dana Centre in London, a space set up to allow the public to engage in debates about controversial science issues. Apparently the Science Museum couldn’t do this as it is “a family-orientated space”.

Upcoming topics include ‘what will everyday healthcare look like in 20 years’ time?’, ‘how are new technologies helping to secure our skies?’ and the seemingly less cerebral ‘are chilli-eaters sadomasochists?’.

We were just there to talk about broadcasting.

Themes of play appeared in some of the ideas but the basic voting was given an extra playful dimension by the use of ‘optical’ voting. When we arrived every chair had a shiny length of piping resting on it which inspired many bizarre suggestions of potential uses. As it turned out the lengths of drainpipe wrapped in reflective tape were our way to vote. When we held them vertical a ‘yes’ vote was recorded and horizontal indicated a ‘no’. A camera picked up the light reflecting off the pipes and this data was fed to a real-time display of the vote. Apparently the system made an appearance at Hack Day the other weekend.

The process certainly led to more enthusiasm for voting but what really put a smile on my face was the occasion when the display was switched on but there were still a few more questions for the speaker before voting time. Whilst the speaker answered the question, all around the room members of the audience were quietly and bit sheepishly playing with their voting sticks to mess with the vote display on the screen behind the speaker.

There was a discussion later about how to get more audience participation during the screening of sports events on the BBC’s Big Screens. Someone suggested using a similar voting system. The idea was rapidly squashed when someone observed that the last thing you want to give thousands of football fans watching a big match is a load of blunt objects.

Lego we are hopefully all familiar with.

But Lego Serious Play? Sounds a bit contrary but as The Science of Lego Serious Play says “play is usually fun, it is seldom, if ever, frivolous”.

Lego Serious Play is a consultancy method from the Lego group that gets participants to build metaphors of their organisational identities and experiences using Lego bricks and then work through imaginary scenarios.

It is based on the concept that when we “think with objects” or “think through our fingers” we tap into ways of thinking that most adults have not used since childhood.

The method builds on theories of constructivist learning and the idea that when people construct things out in the world, they simultaneously construct theories and knowledge in their minds. By building Lego metaphors participants can make abstract ideas and relationships more more tangible, and therefore more readily understandable.

Would love to give it a go…