Innovation Labs

Day three: bleep mobile - Sonic Game Play

We’ve had the legs pulled off our idea, poked it in the eye and kicked it around the room a bit. The good news is with a bit of first aid from the lab it’s almost fully recovered and ready to venture out into the world again.

There’s been tons of useful stuff this week particularly ‘good cop – bad cop’ where you get to pummel someone else’s idea – put it back together and present it back to them.

One of the disciplines we’ve found useful this week is to describe a typical user for your idea (age, likes, dislikes, how they use technology etc) and then write a story about how they experience it.

Once you start presenting that story to a range of different people you quickly discover the strengths and weakness of your approach and identify the areas you need to work on. There’s no doubt this has helped us hone the idea.

ps thanks for the strap line Ian, we’ll keep you posted.

Tim & Cliff
http://www.synergy.tv

Schedule for Day 3

The focus for day 3 is to continue to develop the idea, focusing on the NABC pitching technique. Today and tomorrow will be very unstructured, giving each team lots of free time to really knuckle down and work on their idea. We have a new mentor just for today - Ian Anderson from Designers Republic - and he will be available for booked sessions or casual feedback throughout the day.

Jem Stone and Jason DaPonte from the BBC internet commissioning team will arrive today at midday, and will be around for consultation until the final pitches on Friday. We've timetabled 20min slots for each team with Jem and Jason this afternoon. This will be the only structured time you have with them - other than that they're around for informal chats. Here's the schedule:

14:10 - Technophobia
14:30 - Save9
14:50 - Synergy
15:10 - Dubit

15:30 - Break

15:50 - Desq
16:10 - Gamesauce
16:30 - Blink

16:50 - Break

17:10 - Quba
17:30 - Beacon Dodsworth
17:50 - Sense Internet

TechnoPhobia's Tuesday

It seems to be all hell-for-leather at the moment but we've managed to find five minutes to relax and reflect! You really do live and dream your idea at the iLabs and we've had so much time to think about our proposition in great depth and also get into the heads of our users too.

We found yesterday that it really helps to take half an hour to go for a walk around midday and change your surroundings otherwise you can develop a one-track mind.

Amongst other things we've learned a great new buzzword - “Snacking.” In the context of... “Simon generally visits the BBC website to snack on news content.” This was one of the terms used to describe web user behaviour in terms of how they browse and search the web and we liked it!

DESQ - circa midway - how's it going?

There's not been a great deal of free time or blog time in the last 48 hours or so and I don't expect things to alter, so I'll try and make a couple of entries to record and reflect on the ta-da 'lab experience'.

We're here (that's me, David Squire and my esteemed co-collaborator Stuart Nolan) to try to create something that draws on our collective experience in thinking about games, the aging population, play, enjoyment and enrichment. We're also here for the ride, for me to learn more about pitching and about how to develop an idea better and for Stuart to apply his thinking on play and games and to do some magic tricks of course!

The feeling of being on a roller coaster comes partly from the relentless but exciting pace the lab operates on - despite the vast amounts of food available, I can't imagine Matt, Frank and the mentors piling on the pounds - but also because your feelings towards your project/your baby alters every couple of hours or so. One minute you think you've got it strapped, you've found the killer app, the next it's back to the drawing board and you're down in the doldrums.

The premise of shaping your idea around Needs, Approach, Benefits and Competition helps. As you think more about your audience's needs and their journey, your idea starts to reshape into something far more interesting and more considered. I must admit I was somewhat sceptical about spending an entire day on 'who's your user?' but having someone in mind (from usual demographic profiling to how their average day pans out) really tunes you in on how people use interactive content and what they want from it. If we get this bit right, the rest should follow on nicely.

I'm sure everyone here would admit that the fact this is a competition with the potential prize of a commission is in the back of your mind all the time. But what's great and amazing, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, is that people are genuinely helping each other shape and focus the development of other people's projects. We must have pitched our idea now 3-4 times over the first 2 days, and the response, feedback and interest gets more helpful and more heartfelt each time.

Luckily, and despite a little gushing there, we're managed to avoid any hippy bonding exercises - things that involve having to close your eyes or pretend to be someone (or worse something) else. Thank the DG for that!

So, as the dawn breaks over the misty hills of Masham, its day 3 in the Swinton House.