Research & development for the social web
Week #1256
We said last week that we’d experienced a “crescendo in activity”. Well, this week has felt even busier (although with less travelling).
On Monday, the project we’ve codenamed ‘Hunstanton’ launched. It’s officially called My Life As An Object, and was commissioned by Renaissance East Midlands, part of the MLA. The premis of the project is to ‘bring museum objects to life’. Not in a animatronic, Night At The Museum way, but rather bringing them to life online, via social websites and services. Each week, over the next few weeks, a different object (selected from the Nottingham City Museum) will tell its story. The first is a yellow Raleigh Chopper, whose life is being lived over on Twitter at @yellowchopper. If you haven’t done so already, go follow it, and ask it questions. I’ve written a bit more about the project and its rationale over on my blog.
Next week’s object is completely different, and uses a different type of interaction. We’ve sent a few friends and colleagues a sneak preview of it by post, but everyone else will be able to see it online from Monday.
The main focus this week has been project Barnstaple for the BBC. This is a pretty intense, fast-turnaround project requiring a lot of thought, rapid design and iteration. We’ve been using pen and paper a lot for the initial stages (it’s faster), and then Andrew’s been mocking up ideas and UX designs in Photoshop as ‘wireframes’ for discussion with the BBC project team. The feedback so far is that we’re on the right track, but still have a lot of work to do to hone the interface into something that’s playful and engaging (as well as usable). A hard task, but an interesting and rewarding one.
Meanwhile, Rob has started development on Project Cromer (for Umbro), which involves training an algoritm to do clever things with tweets (I’ll let him explain that more fully at some future point).
Looking further ahead, we have another project (which would kick off next month) with a different bit of the BBC agreed and almost signed off. And Tuesday next week is Pitch Day at 4iP, where two of our Facebook application ideas have been shortlisted. So we’ve done some prep on that, but there’s still more to do. We’ve also been invited to pitch for some other work in Manchester, on a project that involves some of the partners in the new Salford Quays development.
So, it’s all hands on deck here, and a few long days. But it’s good, and it’s fun, and we’re doing things that play to our strengths and our interests.
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