Prototyping Weeknotes #43 (10/12/10)
After the disruption caused by the weather last week it's nice to be back in the office. George is up in Manchester today meeting R&D and academic colleagues to discuss possible partnerships, whilst those of us in the office try our best to ignore the drilling that has resumed in the hotel next door. Theo is finishing the Autumnwatch demo video he's put together and Chris N, Paul and I are discussing the fallout from the infrastructure move last week. A "top 10 ideas for storytelling" chart has appeared on the office wall which is soon filled with a collection of interestingly titled post-its.
On Tuesday the UX team head off to a workshop around intergenerational media consumption and the connected home arranged by Maxine from R&D in collaboration with the Royal College of Art and Imperial College. They're exploring future research questions to advance our understanding of the connected home. The students (from the Innovation Design Engineering course) will then spend some time in early 2011 developing some of the ideas and themes explored in the workshop. Back at base, Tristan and Kat run an ideas workshop with the engineering team and explore some of the more interactive and generative aspects of storytelling.
Duncan has picked up from where he left off on the energy monitor project but soon hits the same blocker and we decide to call time on it. He's going to experiment with the , to understand a bit about as well as looking at KinectTools, the Quartz Composer plugin that retrieves colour and depth image data from the Xbox Kinect.
Wednesday morning is spent planning and organising work for next year and discussing a new project idea that is gathering momentum. Paul's locked in a room all morning thrashing out the details of a collaborative project proposal. Technical debt is the topic for the afternoons engineering meeting; mapping out the current situation and deciding what the priorities are. Kat, Chris N and George make a start on preparations for a possible trial of a RadioDNS service.
A few of us head over for the first meeting to be held in the new Broadcasting House on Thursday lunchtime; the building is great, shame about all the PowerPoint. The storytelling team have an update with some people from Vision who are planning to prototype an original story, presented solely through the web. This is followed by an idea-generating session around detective drama. Tristan is aiming for 3-4 ideas to be roughly scoped by Christmas and to then build a low-fidelity prototype for each one in the New Year. Meanwhile, Paul is continuing with his data validation work on the net neutrality project; lots of number crunching, spreadsheets and the like.
Vicky ends the week up in Manchester at a meeting with Maxine from R&D and Lancaster Uni to review the analysis of the Autumnwatch trial data which will form the basis of the final report. Paul manages to finalise the technical contributions to the collaborative proposal and has a good meeting with an R&D colleague about sharing cloud computing research findings from the Firehose work. Chris N has spent most of the week in a server room diagnosing problems with our blade enclosure. It's not fully fixed but we finally seem to be making some progress. Kat takes part in a lunchtime treasure hunt to test a new Android application being developed by A&M and we finish up with a visit from an interesting indie showing some very cool work they've been doing.
Comments Post your comment