Research & development for the social web
Week #1274
Hello.
It’s year end so we’ve been paper shuffling, identifying and bug tracking the odd anomaly in the accounts. It’s the kind of activity that’s crying out to be made more playful and interesting (a web service-cum-mech-turk like Mazuma perhaps?) because it really is so deathly dull that I’ve precious little incentive to do it.
This week we:
- Released a mobile web app called Holiday Calculator which Frankie talks about elsewhere. It was part of our regular hackdays, which we’re running once a month. I’m enjoying the exercise of rapid prototyping / building and working intensely as a team. The act of releasing something is also really satisfying, although we’ve debated long and hard about when it’s right to release something.
- Ran a couple of workshops for clients who do event related stuff and one is hopefully leading to some really fun arduino “big button” stuff.
- Completed then postponed a TSB application with the Mudlark chaps. We’re adapting the idea for the more appropriate metadata competition in September.
- Welcomed Doug, the new Folksy developer into the office for the first time and Rob spent a chunk of time with Doug managing and designing scaling solutions for the marketplace, which had a few splutters and fleeting moments of downtime, like when you used to have manual choke on a car and you didn’t leave the choke out for long enough. It was that kind of feeling.
- Delivered an update to stakeholders on an industry-wide project with the BBC (project Mablethorpe). The sketchy approach to describing experiences is something we’re using more and more and usually it works well, however on this occasion more detail and a mock up would probably have been more appropriate.
- Reviewed the 4IP contract we got through for project Southwold.
- Continued to build up our design resource stuff with some books and cards, to help us find inspiration, and provide stimulus for projects (in that “can I have one of those please?” kind of way):
I continued to annoy the office with my new found favourite band, Crystal Castles, and try to create a rave style experience in the office. Headaches ensued, followed by Andrew’s more mellow Country playlist. The unintended consequence of this argy-bargy was that playlists look like being our next hackday project.
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