Archives for May 2011

The beginning of the week was taken up with prep for our experience prototyping sessions and then a half-day semantic web workshop at the main R&D offices which involved a lot of talking and learning - it was enjoyable and useful for all attendees.

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The Channelography website fom Rattle

Channelography is a project commisioned by BBC R&D back in the heyday of BBC Backstage. It includes a couple of sub-projects too- Dashboard and Pocket Guide. The genesis of the idea came about from the Mashed event and the Edinburgh TV festival a few years before. The project was realised by James Boardwell (one of the founders of BBC Backstage), Rob Lee and Frankie Roberto of Rattlecentral. They were interested in exploring what makes a channel, a programme, etc by analysing the TV data over and beyond which was supplied by the BBC Backstage project.

One of the things people didn't realise about backstage was that if we didn't supply the data, we could put you in touch with people internally who you could do a deal with. This meant we had hackers building seriously amazing prototypes and demos which would never be allowed to see the light of day for fear of copyright worry.

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Firstly a bit of team news, there are some new positions in Prototyping for a client-side developer, a development producer, an interaction designer, a software engineer and a senior software engineer. See the BBC Jobs site for more details. Now, onto this week.

We have two main prototypes on the go right now, Watch Later and RadioTAG, both due to finish their current phases over the new few weeks. Watch Later is a prototype that aims to give you one place to keep all those TV and radio programmes you've been meaning to watch. Maybe your friend told you something was good; maybe you saw a trailer on TV or read a review in the paper; or maybe someone tweeted about it. This is a service that allows you to quickly note down those recommendations for when you have time to watch or listen to them. RadioTAG, part of the RadioDNS family, is an application to receive an input from users, identify the service they are listening to, and send further information. Basically a button on your radio connected to the web. We are developing and validating the specification and creating user-facing prototypes to determine the best uses of this button.

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The whole team spent Monday in an energetic and excellent day-long workshop with a service design agency looking at some different techniques for low-fi experience prototyping. In a matter of hours we'd identified some real user needs, sketched out some ideas and then translated them into physical prototypes that the rest of the team could 'experience'. Next week we are going to be testing out some of our low-fidelity prototypes with real users; yikes. George described it as 'punk-rock-prototyping' which feels quite apt.

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Manchester’s Northern Quarter was transformed into a massive street party for the creative crowds during Friday bank holiday. Billed as a celebration of the creativity and alternative culture of Manchester's northern quarter, the street party was a great place to experiment in the open with the wider public. With the help and support of Manchester's Digital Labitory named Madlab BBC R&D and BBC North ran a gaming wonderland during the street party.

The centre point of the gaming wonderland was the BBC R&D project Virtual Maestro which attracted and conjoured up the thoughts and views of the general public.

As Max said previously...

As well as being brilliant fun for the public to play with, demos like these are a great way to illustrate some the technical work that happens here at the beeb.

Virtual Maestro will be back at the  Manchester International Festival in July. But at the street party it went down very well with lots of people trying it out. Lots of photos can be found on Flickr. 

Alongside the Maestro, we ran a wii bowling competition and I can happily announce our winner with a verified score of 188 on the day was Rachael Norris. Some R&D schwag will be heading her way soon enough...