Open Mapping Toolkit - Onteca
NewsHunt - The Workshop
National Conversation - Tagish
Closer to Home - Enigma Interactive
Muddy Boots - Rattle
Radio 1 Go - Luxson

Congratulations to all these teams, and to all the participating companies for making the week such an interesting and creative experience!

Adrenalin pumping, eyes hurting, brain buzzing, still smiling :-)

Jack Bauer couldn’t make it, so it was up to Juan and David to stand inside the fire and represent LUXSON (Create Communicate Connect, Internet Marketing Media, http://www.luxson.co.uk, .eu, .com, .mobi)
NB! Our amazing new website is in progress behind the scenes and due to go live in May/June.

Swinton Park was a surreal setting for innovative future-thinking, yet also a subliminal and constant encouragement towards a ‘solid’ outcome.

Monday was an easing-in combination of meet and greet and initial ‘pressure-testing’ of the raw ideas with the help of a simple approach (Listen, Yes and, Yes but).
First impressions were very good – impressive location, structured and focused approach and very friendly people.
As BBC virgins, we decided to first put just one (the simplest) of our four selected ideas into the ring as a tester, then watched as the punches came in - jabs, body-blows, upper-cuts and heavyweight nose-breakers (thankfully no knock-outs), leaving everyone’s ideas back in their corners bleeding and sore. That was the point of course - a friendly warning, an initial taster of what would happen if the heavyweight BBC was put in the ring with an indie’s featherweight or tired and old idea. (Watch the trailer)
It was great to see that everyone took the punches as good sports and nobody seemed too upset. (It would not have been good for the atmosphere had it been otherwise).
Monday evening for us then was all about adding muscle and weight to the first idea and working out what to do with the other three. Several hours and punch bags later we had combined the first idea with two of our other ideas into an exciting, stronger combined BIG idea.

Tuesday was all about user-centred design. Two important dimensions to the day, ably and effectively facilitated by the lab experts, a) more ‘pressure-testing’ of ideas, this time from potential users’ points of view (solution to a real user problem or a solution looking for a problem?), and b) the communication of ideas (can someone ‘get it’ in less than 5 minutes). We worked through a ‘day in the life’ of our user, who through the week became our ever-present invisible friend, helping us add muscle, lose fat, improve speed and accuracy of communication and design something that would make a positive difference to his life and that we could communicate in a quick and compelling way.
Afternoon role-play theatre was great fun. Better than that, initial reactions during the day to our combined big idea were very encouraging. On the right track then :-)
We spent Tuesday evening in the detail of the idea (dimensions, features etc.), making it do push-ups and pull-ups till it and we were thoroughly exhausted.

Wednesday was ‘meet the commissioners’ day. Aswell as making preparations for the commissioners, the morning was a further push to speed up the communication of ideas (in a 1-liner and in 50words) and thereby also determine whether or not ideas were clear and focussed enough. Time to focus the idea down then!!
Meeting the commissioners was great, more than the fact that getting to speak with them would ordinarily be less than straightforward, we were impressed by their sharp thinking and positive, professional approach. We now had an even clearer understanding of the standard required and how strong, fast and accurate our idea and its communication would need to be.
We spent Wednesday evening introducing the fourth idea into our ring, rather than leaving it as a solitary spectator, and to our amazement instead of it getting knocked out of the ring it immediately made friends with our user and joined in with the combined idea! Brilliant! But now even more work needed to focus the idea down!

Thursday we had a couple of very useful sessions with our ‘primary’ commissioner, who also ‘got it’ straight away, and with another of the commissioners also. We now had lots of useful pointers for both the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various aspects of our idea and also for its communication.
So now it was all about the final preparations for the fight – I mean the pitch.
Again, the expert facilitators were spot on and were fantastic in their casting of a critical eye on the pitch approach, in our case making the important observation later that day that we had in fact, in focussing so completely on the idea, missed out the most obvious part of our pitch “who are LUXSON?"!! In the timeless word(s) of Homer "Doh!".
After dinner: we now knew exactly what and how we wanted to pitch but the pitches were going to start at 9:30am on Friday, so we only had a matter of hours left to pull together all the actual pitch materials. Sleep was relegated to a lower priority – both Juan and I knew from first hand experience what it is like to have a sleepless night with a baby needing attention, so one more wasn’t going to be a big deal attending to our new ‘baby’.

Friday was all about the pitches.
With bizarre technical glitches and even a very brief power cut (thankfully just as one pitch had finished), Murphy was showing off his law a little too much for comfort.
We were down to pitch last and watching all the other pitches felt like the chances of sleep-deprived memory loss were rapidly increasing as the minutes melted.
Before we knew it our turn had arrived and thankfully the mix of adrenalin, coffee and auto-pilot were enough to deliver the pitch as we had planned it (more or less). Result!

Many thanks to all for a fantastic week :-)
This has been the longest week of our lives (this year so far).

Stay in touch, we would love to meet up with any/all of you again sometime.
(And please pass on our details to anyone you know who may be suitable and interested in working with us - we’re always on the lookout for excellent recruits/freelancers!)

David (david@luxson.co.uk) & Juan (juan@luxson.co.uk)

Well, that's it!. It's now the start of the week after our Innovation Lab, so this will probably be our last post on the Blog. Some appreciation is probably in order then - so firstly, a big thanks to all of the mentors, the commisoners and everyone else who supported us into knocking out idea into shape. Secondly, thanks to the staff at Swinton Park for making our stay as comfortable as possible - it's a great place to stay and nothing was to much trouble for them.

Pleasingly, at this stage, It looks like we will be one of the fortunate teams who will be able to have a conversation with the BBC about taking our idea forward this time - which is great for us. Having said that, but we do feel for those who won't, especially as you do start to form a bond with people who are going through the same process as you are, in the same place and at the same time. It seems to have ben a pretty close-run thing, and there certainly weren't any bad ideas as far as we were concerned. We're sure that they will all turn up in some shape or form in the future - we'll certainly be keeping an eye on the companies and organsiations which we've come to know over the last week.

So, keep an eye out for "The National Conversation" and who knows - we might see some of you next year.

Cheers

One thing I was amazed at this year was the number of photography "Geeks", at the labs I attended with Onteca last year there was just me and Matt Lock who were photo geeks, this year it seems like every other person has some reasonably in depth knowledge of photography, and if I had a beer for every time I've seen a flash firing around the hotel I wouldn't be sobering up for the next couple of months.

There have been people covering an increadibly wide range of experience with photography from people who take the odd snapshot to one guy who is a photography teacher, plus pretty much everything in between, and there have been discussions at various points throuought the week covering many wide and varying aspects of photography including the perenial film vs. digital debate (whose conclusion many times surpised me, given the high-tech new-media background of the people here I was expecting everyone to say digital wins hands down, but alot of people seemed to believe as I do that digital is great for convenience and immediacy, but for more abstract things such as look & feel and the 'spirit' of an image film still rules the roost)

One great thing about the number of photography geeks is that there have been an impressive number of images added to the labs flickr pool anyone who hasn't checked it out already definitely should.

One of the things I said at the start was if I could learn 50% of what I learnt at last years lab, I'd be happy, regardless of '...and the winner is...' So here's a random dump of things that what I is learnt from the lab:

The BBC public service remit remains at the heart of its offer more so than ever, and there's pressure on it to remain distinctive and not tread on the toes of commercial services; flickr is more popular than it was a year ago; 360 commissioning could be a good thing or a bad thing for new media, depends on the commissioner and if they hark back to single-channel television; you only manage to talk to at best half of the labbers, so the final day is sometimes the only time you hear what they've been doing all week; twitter is a good site; ideas take time to nurture and develop, its best not to be scared of throwing out ideas or approaches, even at the eleventh hour; NM indies need to get closer to commissioners to better understand the BBC's needs and interests, so we don't waste either of our time; people from Newcastle are generally nice.

How to better embed the process of the labs into ideas development is the biggest challenge - there's an intensity to the experience that's hard to replicate. Moreover, you get constant feedback from mentors (outsiders) as well as, most significantly, commissioners themselves.

And it's good night from me and good night from him.

DS and SN. http://www.desq.co.uk

I am slightly scared of the picture below, generally it feels like 1981 (with added laptops) here, Maggie's picture hangs on the wall, the establishment look down with scorn from the walls, Lord Reith is available on an RSS feed to remind us of core values. It does occur to me that the BBC has missed a new media trick you have had desktop Mottie or Bill Oddie. But a desktop Lord Reith the remind staff of core values now that would work.

Remember - "Capture the mood of the nation - join the national conversation."

Wish us luck.........

We are looking at Open Mapping Toolkit (OMT) being a tool which makes it easy for BBC web site producers to include mapped content and interfaces within their sites. The key challenge in this is to provide a clear interface which produces rich functional results for non-technical users.

For those about to attend Innovation Labs for I feel you are my audience, i hate to think it might be more general than that, i would become inhibited and cease to write.
Generally labs are fun but intrinsically challenging, you spend the first couple of days working up your idea with the support of Frank and the team. This follows traditional design practise and the mentors are supportive, it is however their role to find weaknesses and then entice you to resolve them. They are though second guessing the BBC's commisioning requirements and when the 'commisioners' (they hate that term arrive). You get to potentially start again if they find big holes in your idea. We luckily avoided that one this time.

It's nearing the end of the third day, and we're getting grouchy.

Although our ideas are still coming together - it's getting more and more difficult to get there. Our brief and project, as it turns out, seems to be one which produces wildly differing opinions between both mentors, peers and even ourselves. It's a simple idea at it's core, but the issues about whether we should worry about moderation, resources, the BBC as it is now, or the BBC as it would like to be are taxing our grey matter beyond it's usual (somewhat limited) experience. Our brains hurt, but we're probably excercising at least one muscle for a change. Nonetheless, we're remaining half-full at all times - especially when the bar is open.

The process as set out from the start was one of taking an idea, dismantling it, and then trying to reconstruct in a more coherent form. This has been achieved 100% - from one minute to the next we are either about to give up,or perfectly happy. At this precise moment, things are calm, but continuing the song lyric analogy - "There may be trouble ahead".

Tom Loosemore - The BBC's 15 web principles
This is the most BBC-relevant link. Tom presents the 15 guiding principles that came out of the BBC 2.0 research project that he led. All good, solid sensible stuff, with a fair few nicked from other gurus. Well worth using as a sense-check as your idea develops on the Labs

Matt Webb - The Hills are alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
I love this presentation. Its very witty, but also provides some fantastic insight into desiging for 'generation c'. In particular, look at his analysis of the range of experiences linked to, for example, a book, and how these can be catered for in experience/service designs. Fantastic.

Tom Coates - Native to a Web of Data
This is Tom's presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference in 2006, where it went down a storm. Tom is a fantastic thinker and presenter, and this is a brilliantly articulated 'first principles' for web 2.0 design. Basically - understand what your 'first order object' is, then make it permanent, sociable, and iterative. Very, very good advice...

Matt Locke

We intend Open Map Toolkit (OMT) maps to be available to all content producers within the BBC, to enable this we need an easy setup system. The best model we can find for this is akin to 'Project Wizards' in Visual Studio. The content producer will choose from a list of options, including

• What Map


• Custom Layers


• User Generated Content


• Moderation


• Media either from internal sources or Flickr etc


• Aligning data sources, navigation and search options ..

We have spent Wednesday looking at the BBC's current use of maps, for an organisation which doesn't use maps they have an awful lot of them. All the way from simple maps on 'Where I Live' upto very complex and deep applications of Google Maps
Abolition of Slavery
and fun informative applications such as Springwatch
Springwatch Map

Matt from BBC Backstage also contributed some interesting ideas about how he is going to track and blog his overland journey to Russia
http://triptracker.net/