Category: Notes

A place to post notes that may be seed for a future post.

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Week 24

Although the end of the calendar year is nearly upon us I have been looking at the financial year as my ‘North star’ so no mad rushing over here to complete projects before Christmas.

  • Me and the team spent about half a day looking at the high level (50,000 ft in David Allen GTD speak) activity for 2014. Much of our thinking is looking at where we want to position ourselves for 2015-2018 which is the duration of the next Arts Council funding stream
  • I took yet another stab at online shops. Running an online shop is the easy part. Trying to resolve payments and syncing to our finance system is soul-destroying. The Council just isn’t able to be responsive so I’m looking at how we can go around this rock-block
  • I met with aardman  to see if we can collaborate on a research and development project in 2014 so watch this space
  • Played good cop, bad cop for an introduction to social media session
  • Chopped it up with Martin P about how our service could engage with wikimedians. The only issue is that of the creative commons licensing which needs to allow commercial use. I hope that the trend of others embracing the ‘share-alike’ mindset will win over our service
  • Budget forecasting – monthly reminder of how much time can be wasted with a poor user interface
  • Agreed in principle to run some digital training for the service and to extend to other South West teams and services
  • Agreed what our digitisation focus will be for 2014. We’ll be concentrating on transferring magnetic tapes and moving a large collection from a legacy system
  • Had a planning session with the learning team about their website requirements
  • Discussed Enterprise
  • Finished up the week seeing the first working prototype of Team Eclair’s student project. They are using a world map and timeline approach to displaying our collection and i’m now very excited about where this may lead us
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Week 23

The theme of this week collaboration and thinking more seriously about the first stages of a website redesign. I locked out  a large portion of my week to consider different directions for the website and also submitted the initial business case.

  • Met Nikesh Shukla who runs the web side of visit Bristol to see how we can help each other
  • Spent an afternoon with the conservation department to better understand their area of the service. Luckily for me they are also full of ideas for activities on a new website. Blogging is popular with them.
  • Had a fruitful introduction with Nomensa to hear about how they approach User experience. Making sense of the Cross-channel user experience is a concept I have long been trying to articulate into a single phrase . They also have a beer fridge!
  • Met with the Bristol Old Vic to see about collaboration and I really enjoyed hearing about their prototyping of sets and plays
  • Got the wheels moving on some digital signage (read TVs) with GB
  • Aardman left a message…

 

 

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Week 22

This week was super packed and organised around several major events. I have my head in our web strategy so here are the highlights.

  • Planned and delivered a communicating on the web mini 90min workshop which essentially said that Google is our homepage and content strategy is key.
  • Met a critical friend from the Arts Council and waxed lyrical about innovation and digital engagement
  • Discussed in more detail the digital requirements for next years Moved by Conflict exhibition
  • Progressed with 1 of our student project teams
  •  Attended the private view for the launch of the refurbished galleries five and six
  • Learned about budget forecasting
  • Attended the private view for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year which included our experiment with motion tracking and ghost slugs which I urge you to see for yourself and THANK YOU to Stef Goodchild
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Week 21

If I had to use one word to describe this week it would be Choices. I have choices, you have choices and 2014 is ready for us to start making choices. This was how I kicked off my team meeting on Monday. We have much to accomplish next year and at the moment the calendar is pretty empty. Yes we could just copy out the 2013 calendar and get back to work, doing all the things we did this year but I don’t think that 2014 should be the same. Yes there is plenty of work that will be similar – temporary exhibitions to build and destroy (i mean take down but that hip hop reference stays!), repairing computers, shooting objects, digitising moving image collections, reacting and a gang of other expected tasks. But we also need to evolve our team, our Team Digital. Our team not only needs to cope with the expectations from 2013 but also to grow with our audiences, funders and peer demands for the next 5 years or so. This means making dozens of tiny changes to how we work and importantly what we work on. Change is largely incremental and we can work to that tune or pretend things are the same until they are not and drown at the shock. What this really means for me and the team is that we may have to say no to current activities in order to find time for new fledgling activity such as Bring Your Own Device, sensors, user experience design, revenue generation, refreshing setup and working more closely with other organisations. To that end, I sent a request to all managers asking them to submit their requests for Team Digital and some have started to roll in. Once we have these requests we can make those choices we always put off.

  • The City Council Budget review was made public for consultation
  • Advised on several databases that are pretty fundamental to teams that need more than a few plasters
  • Introduced Stefan Goodchild to the audio visual team. Stef has kindly offered to produce a demo at the private view for Wildlife Photographer of the year. The interactive will use an xbox kinnect to motion track people as they walk pass it and draw a trail on the wall using a projector. My hope is that this will demo the usefulness of the technology to various teams and can be used next year.
  • Began to write our web strategy for 2014
  • Took a tour of the University interaction and graphics lab with Peter Bennet. It was like being a kid in sweet shop and I really hope we can work together on the future of interaction design in a museum space.
  • Talked to the Records Office about their storify project for The Dreadnought journal and hopes for wikipedia.

 

 

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Richard Gregory lecture 2013

On 28th October 2013 the Bristol vision institute hosted the annual Richard Gregory lecture in the Wills Building, University of Bristol. The talk was titled ‘Better than being there – Being there better, How technology is shaping the future of media’.

Matthew Postgate has the job of shaping and leading research and development for the BBC. His talk covered the approach the BBC is taking to embracing emerging technologies, practices and coping with the challenges that brings for a global organisation. Here are my notes:

  • Evaluation of tools to educate and entertain which is the mission of the BBC
  • Broadcast is considered a system of creation, delivery and consumption which hasn’t changed much since 1922
  • Key theme of change is now we are in the information age
  • IP end to end
  • Data centric
  • New devices and new interfaces
  • This has led to a change in how we create media to deal with the shift
  • The new broadcast system is split between create, deliver, consume and the BBC have four themes as a framework: immersive, pervasive, data rich and interactive (personal and adaptive)
  • IMMERSIVE: trying to get to the halo deck from star trek
  • 2012 Olympics used super hi vision
  • 8k cameras which are 16 times quality of current HD and uses 22 surround sound – sound not only left to right but also up and down
  • Showed an example of using the oculus rift VR headset and a 360 camera to film music practice
  • PERVASIVE: Ability to be everywhere and showing live events on mobile to complement
  • Designing for four screens: TV, desktop/Laptop, tablets and mobile are considered for all design
  • Hewlett Packard say ‘information as a utility’
  • We expect to arrive and be able to use and consume immediately
  • Wallpaper thin television using tablet control is coming in the next 20 years
  • Friends and family can join you from their location to watch things remotely together
  • Different surfaces emerging
  • Media will become more contextual as there is already more media than we can possibly consume
  • Media will begin to seek you out based on what systems know you consume using software agents
  • DATA RICH: no longer sealed, more akin to datasets
  • Will be commonplace to overlay data to your screen, even during live events
  • INTERACTIVE, PERSONAL, ADAPTIVE
  • You’ll be able to zoom into the screen
  • Interactive to become personal
  • Adaptive abilities enabling previously fixed programmes to change, such as using your location to alter the activity live, such as using your local weather during a radio show
  • We shouldn’t lose sight of the storytelling
  • If we can take the traditional broadcast skills and add new science and then combine we’ll have even better broadcasting
  • We should be brave in re-inventing broadcasting
  • The use of contextual media will mean that your device knows your activity and will deliver the right type and length of content based on expected location, calendar entries etc

 

 

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Week 20

This week, in between three days out at events, my mind began to wander towards our team and service activity for 2014. In short I have been thinking about the scope of the work, embedding digital into our daily activity (hat tip to Michael Edson) and getting things done. After a few months to settle in, I now have clean air to run in with a better sense of some actionable work. I must focus and ensure we ‘DO’ now. Here at the highlights of the week:
  • I attended the local tedx event, Tedxbristol 2013. Lots of students in attendance who I enjoyed earwigging
  • World usability Day hosted at the M Shed and a great 1 track affair with a diverse agenda
  • Disaster planning
  • Team catch ups and progress meetings
  • Reviewed the student as producer project requirements before their deadline
  • Uk Museums on the web 2013 hosted at Tate Modern in London. 120 or so of my peers in a 1 track informal series of talks about work recently done and plans for 2014. I met a very friendly and supportive bunch who I look forward to working with in the near future. The 5:30am bus to London I enjoyed less!
  • Discovered youtube tv which enables you to send videos to your TV from any device on the same network.
  • Released v1 of our service Digital Principles into the wild. These will really help us in the coming months and support the digital strategy which is coming soon. The 8 principles began life as over 150 scraps of paper that I collected from conversations with my team, other groups in the sector, the service, funders and partners.
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Week 19

This week was a mixed bag of different activity with the biggest excitement meeting three groups of students from the University of Bristol.
I kicked off the week attending Digital Bristol workshop at the Colston Hall for the morning sessions. We got to hear from local business such as Aardman animations who are working with Rolls-royce to see how Aardman ‘bottle’ creativity. Taking 15 years to produce a new engine is too long! We heard from local funding pots about the various flavours of borrowing and grant available. After the kickoff session I sat in on the ‘playable City’ strand to hear from the Watershed, Council and ibm about projects they have been doing to get the public involved. I made a comment about strangers not wanting to play with other complete strangers but rather the people they are with, which most folk didn’t agree with.
A service wide review of our current budget position took a large amount of my energy carrying on from the previous week. Enough said.
I met with the retail manager to explore our online shop options including ebay and amazon as options. I vaguely recall a few museums selling via these channels so will be doing a bit more discovery around this. Get to the people without re-inventing the wheel was the general vibe.
I completed my final Health and safety workshop
I attended an evening ‘debate’ about profit in the heritage sector. It was less of a debate and more storytelling from the speakers. A few useful views were made by the audience.
We will be showing an exhibition next October called ‘Moved by Conflict’ at the M Shed Museum around World War 1 and the involvement of people from Bristol. I got to sit with one of our in-house designers to see how these get planned and executed. I will be exploring the digital engagement aspect and had to submit some thoughts. We’ll be looking at sensors, RFID, motion tracking and displaying stories in new ways for the service rather than passive projection and iPads.
I saw some great work by our collection team who are working on migration of data from an old system to our collections management system.
Heard about an idea for crowd funding.
During a meeting with two different UWE factions I mentioned my 2014 idea for ‘bringing the museum out into the City’ which was very positively received. I MUST put these ideas on the blog as I think this thread of an idea has legs.
I have been on call to support the 3 day MuseomixUK event up at Iron bridge, thought the one time I could of been of use I didn’t have my laptop with me!
Cleared up some confusion around our intentions for a website plan for 2014. If anybody can point to helpful material on ‘cases for museums to have their own non-council website’ that would be most welcome.
My personal highlight of the week was meeting three groups of students who will each be producing a digital outcome for the service. Each group is from the University of Bristol Computer Science department on their second year and working with us as part of their course. I canvassed the service for problems that needed solving and three were selected. The kickoff meetings went well and I have great hopes for the outcomes in due course. Partnership working that is working!
Stepped on a few toes…

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Week 18

This week was heavy on spinning some tiny plates for 2014 activity. From next week onwards I’m hopefully returning to the present and kicking off with digital skills training and ‘the website’. Rather than go day-to-day this week here is a list of activities which mostly follow Monday – Friday.

  • Great evening talk by Matthew Postgate from the BBC Better than being there – Being there better, How technology is shaping the future of media  which included wallpaper thin TVs, contextual content and personalisation. Much of which will affect the museum sector in the next twenty years
  • Ran a Twitter training session for the good folks at Blaise Castle House Museum
  • Went to introduce myself to Bristol and Regional Archaeological Services and looked at bringing the website back into the fold
  • Had a tour of the services that Calvium offer for mobile development
  • Briefly chopped it up with Tom Metcalfe about being involved in the REACT objects sandbox projects
  • Sat with Alastair Somerville to see what work he doe’s in the sector. This is regarding to ‘bringing the collection’ out to the public around our digital engagement focus.
  • Found out more about what possibilities we have with improving our website offering centrally. There are big changes afoot which may or may not work to our advantage. One of our questions which I hope to hear back on soon is if we can have an AB test effectively driving 50 percent of visitors to an ‘alpha’ website and seeing if there is a positive change in usage. Why spend time, money and resource if effectively folks are happy.
  • Began to wrap my head around opportunities for licensing some of our media such as images. Across the sector there is an assumption that our digitised collections have bags of cash waiting to be unlocked. Yet many museums are now giving away thousands of images for free. Lots to unpack in this area.
  • Understanding audiences wants and needs on-site and ‘out there’. Add in stakeholder demands, throw into a pot and make magic in 2014…
  • Confirmation that we’ll soon start work with three University of Bristol Student project teams from the Computer Science department. They’ll be working on three of our problems as part of their coursework. The projects are around databases, making collections playful and showing objects in space and time
  • Budgets
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Week 17

To kick the week off I completed the mandatory Recruitment and Selection workshop. The day itself was an enjoyable mix of scenarios and role playing to help us know about recruitment ‘The Bristol City Council Way’. However the pre-workshop homework was an exercise in frustration. The previous week I set aside an afternoon to read the policy and related guidance but the intranet was down. I took the work home for the weekend and low and behold I needed the intranet as practically ever reference was buried in the intranet which isn’t available from home. Why use the web if you force staff to be on-site you may have heard me cry. The only solution was to head to the office for much of Sunday which didn’t make me popular at home. I would pick apart the workbook but the trainers say we are the ‘last’ cohort of the current process. I will say that throwing a bunch of barely related questions together without hyperlinks or consideration for the user in a Word document doesn’t cut the mustard in 2013. My e-learning inner-self had to button it!

Tuesday was largely catching up with the team and me introducing Trello for the whole team to see what major activities we are all working on, myself included. Although we are a nominally a traditional Council team, we are all remote from each other so we need to operate with a proper remote team mindset and use tools to help us achieve our mission (grand eh). This is why I’m looking forward to the new book from 37signals remote office not required out this coming Tuesday.

Wednesday had me wearing my digital fund-raising hat and looking at a magic 8-ball to see what the future of crowd funding might look like. Once I was able to slip this hat I quickly donned my ‘future of digital in a museum’ hat and wrote a 1 page ‘Digital as a Platform’ piece for the senior management team. It included remote working, wearing technology and the museum as publisher. Once it has been used for its intended purpose i’ll throw it up on the blog. As an aside I suggest listening to And the Crowdfund Goes Wild with Yancey Strickler (Episode 42) to hear from one of the kickstarter co-founders.

On Thursday I squeezed in a tour of the Bristol Records Office and got to see a book that has been given to the service. It is a lively diary of a four month trip and we will be running a social media campaign to tell the story which is pretty exciting.

After the tour I got to sink my teeth into some plate spinning around all of our existing online properties, unearthing some projects that require reviewing.

On Friday I enjoyed a lunchtime talk I wrote about the other day and met with a Council directorate that I hope to work with in 2014 as they do some pretty interesting stuff around infrastructure, Green Cities and innovation. Unfortunately the day had to end with a problem pre-dating me joining that I hope can be resolved very soon.

Alex Rankin, who works at the museum service wrote a little bit about the talking cranes project we are breathing new life back into over on his blog which is worth a read.

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REACT Lunchtime Talk: Elements of Interactive Storytelling

During his lunchtime talk Daniel Burwen explained that careful consideration of the four elements plus the four spaces equals coherence for storytelling using technology. Here are my notes for the talk Elements of Interactive Storytelling.

  • The four elements are User experience,  Story, Technology and Aesthetics
  • The four spaces are Hearth, Reading nook, Anywhere and Workbook
  • The spectrum of Narrative mechanics between Games (interactive and mechanic depth) and Films (passive and emotional complexity)
  • Doing (games) vs feeling (films)
  • 1978 laser disc
  • 1983 dragons lair – depth was press button to not die
  • 1985 Mario brothers run, jump’ stopm’ kick shoot
  • 1991 another world – cut scenes appear
  • 1993 virtual fighter – 3d games emerge, camera language and large data
  • Mechanical depth and emotional complexity
  • Uncanny valley for virtual characters
  • Last of us game – unified aesthetic between film and game. The game is built for mechanical depth and is highly abstract
  • Attention economies for TV, laptop, tablet and mobile vary but the longer the attention the higher the value.
  • TV is $10- $60, mobile is free to $5
  • Focusing on tablets gives a good trade-off
  • Game called winosill might be helpful for displays e.g. at blaise Castle Museum 🙂
  • Mouse and keyboard vs touch
  • Interactive narrative is a goal as you can get mechanical depth and emotion
  • New PS4 and Xbox enable body movement and may be tipping point beyond control pads
  • Oculus rift headset – the less abstraction in interface the more emotional connection we can have and this type of device may be the new era post control pad
  • So where is this going? from first moving image film to Citizen Kane was a breakout experience for its time and it has been 41 years since pong
  • Wii came put in 2006 and since then we have great things across all the devices eg the oculus rift’ and Xbox kinnect, maybe we are about to bring them together

Since making my notes I have stumbled across the talk as a slidedeck on Prezi which you should check out.