Research & development for the social web
Week #1252
Stephen Fry in his talk at the iTunes Festival reminded us that beyond the survival of the day, one of the first things our species learnt to do was to tell each other stories. For thousands of years, embedded in our culture, has been a focus on gathering together to tell and listen to stories. Perhaps this explains the success of Matt Locke‘s celebration of the spoken word, The Story. Attending this lo-fi conference was a welcome diversion to the office-bound design challenges of the week and although at times it strayed into ‘Jackanoryesque’ territory it was an inspiring event, full to the brim of entertaining, provocative speakers.
From Aleks Krotoski‘s playful and poignant mash-up from the Virtual Revolution through Jon Spooner’s rather studied, faltering world of faux science and fantastic metaphors and Tim Etchell‘s three stories that although brilliantly conceived began to tire before the end the morning sessions built towards some wonderful post lunch speakers. In fact, much of the content on offer was eclipsed by the sublime pathos of Tim Wright‘s ‘Harrison Fraud’ tale. Captivating through its deft use of pace and humourous hooks it was the subtle use of the heartbreaking sub-plot covering his failing marriage that gave the performance its gravitas.
Alexis Kennedy provided possibly the most digitally grounded talk of the day with a presentation on how the team at Fail Better Games, in developing Echo Bazaar, dealt with the complexity of narrative in casual gaming.
The day was rounded off by a star turn by David Hepworth. Such an accomplished and engaging public speaker who demonstrated with ease how to reach out to an audience with passion and authority (helped by an enviable ability to banish awkward vocal pauses).
Aside from this day trip and with everyone else absent from the office this week the whirring fans of the office heaters have been my sole company. Still keen on finding a suitable vehicle for an art directed design theme I worked on the initial design work for the Renaissance East Midlands commission following Frankie’s brief. I’m not sure how close it comes to the physcho-geography concept conceived by James but the opportunity for storytelling, objects with curated ‘voice’ that engages in conversation on social platforms remains.
Meanwhile, Frankie spent the second half of the week first in Birmingham, and then in London. Birmingham was the location of an open day run by the guys at Talis Platform, who have worked recently with the UK Government to provide hosting and search services for data.gov.uk. They could be an interesting partner for us with our Muddy app helping to provide text mining services (as one of the problems with Linked Data is in extracting it from text documents).
Frankie moved on to London to join English Heritage, councils and civic societies at the Commemorative Plaques conference. This is a pretty niche subject, that we might not ordinarily get involved with, but we were invited through our involvement in Open Plaques (an open data project which aggregates data on the location and meanings of ‘blue plaques’ throughout the UK). There was a lot of interest there in mobile Apps and other digital forms of public engagement, so maybe that’s something we could get involved with too.
And throughout this week we’ve all been thinking about how we could create a playful visualisation around the activity on FA Cup final day. Plenty of discussion but still some work is needed to build a substantial proposition. But perhaps it’s the briefest of conversations that often provide greater impact. A Basecamp message from Frankie pointing us towards a basic but pleasing twitter application led Rob to propose a trending recommendation idea that was sufficiently good enough to rouse James from his Alpine retreat to remark ‘I like this, it’s good.’ before returning to his ‘Chocolat Chaud’.
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