Research & development for the social web
Beyond Derby
The last week or so have seen us doing quite a few proposals, finishing off Channelography (in rough prototype form) and thinking about what we should do going forward. You see, our business plan is to develop elbow room to create new products and services (like Muddy and Folksy) of our own and we earmarked the typically ‘slack’ time of December and January to do this. December looks like being busier than imagined but we’re ringfencing some time in the New Year to develop one of our shortlisted internal ideas. We’ll talk more about that when we’re underway but we’re at least honing our ideas now and there’s been a move toward enterprise based products and services, that is things that serve business needs rather than consumer needs. An awful lot of people chase consumer needs (and desires), often rather spurious and nebluous needs and desires and the business models look a bit flaky. With enterprise things (hate ‘solutions’) at least there are established norms, like paying!
We also had a great time with our business brethren Mudlark on a brain walk around Grindleford (near Sheffield), a magic little place which has the benefit of a pleasant cafe (the most contentious entrant in Russell Davies’ collection of cafes) to fuel up. This is where we went:
View Grindleford Brain Walk in a larger map
It wasn’t a particularly strenuous walk as these stats testify:
Total Distance: 3.83 km (2.4 mi)
Total Time: 1:35:26
Moving Time: 56:42
Average Speed: 2.42 km/h (1.5 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed: 4.06 km/h (2.5 mi/h)
Max Speed: 36.52 km/h (22.7 mi/h)
Min Elevation: 227 m (744 ft)
Max Elevation: 357 m (1172 ft)
Elevation Gain: 216 m (708 ft)
Anyway, our brains synced around two thirds of the way along our walk, you can see where – it’s the blue dot. At this point we agreed to do something together. Again, something for the New Year. Nice. Here we are:
Most of the Mudlark folk are Derby and Birmingham based and our most recent bit of business and our best brief ever has been for a museum initiative also based in Derby (and Leicester). The brief, delivered verbally was “could you do something fun with what we have?”. That was it. We said we’d try. I’ve already started to get quite excited about the idea of “a psychogeography of things”. How could objects start to present a space around them which isn’t ‘objectified’. How do objects view the world? There’s a lot of guff around psychogeography but I think it’s a fruitful place to start. More about that probably in the New Year too.
In other news we’re looking for a new administrator / office manager. It’s a part time job. If you’re interested then get in touch via jobs [at] rattlecentral.com and I’m trying to build up a shared toolset for Design Research, starting with some of the basics around Human Centred Design. If you’re interested in that give me a shout.
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