16 posts
Last week we had our first Picle strategy meeting since getting back to blighty from SXSW. We have digested a lot of feedback from tweets, emails, reviews, articles, as well as testing it out ourselves, and it was time to step back and take a look at where we're at.
We started off by evaluating how the launch went and how people have responded to the concept of Picle. Stuart drew this rather rudimentary graph of the potential life span of Picle.
In all honesty I must log onto the BBC website and my local news website at least 20 times a day mostly through my smartphone or work computer, and I can honestly admit that I learnt more about today's events by logging onto this 3 times today
For a while I’ve been troubled by the effect that language can have on the group design process. When we began to come up with ideas and solutions for ITV’s online news proposition, we used terminology to share our individual understanding and to communicate different solutions between us - we would use the words “feed” and “stream” interchangeably, as were phrases like “topic landing page” and “dynamically generated index page”. You could say that this is a natural symptom of having multiple humans from different backgrounds with different mindsets working together on the same shared problem. We want very different people working together, this is good. But what we want less of is the misunderstandings, confusion and antagonistic recollections. We want more group flow, enthusiasm, cohesion and personal investment so that we can use less energy for more benefit.
As with most social online applications, you can think of the data as more like a graph than very simple objects that stand alone. This kind of an application and data is my favourite kind of system to architect and here is why. I warn you, this might get geeky..
A guest blog by Robin Pembrooke, Managing Director online and on demand at ITV
A little over a year ago we kicked off the design process for our project to re-conceive and launch a brand new ITV News offering online. I'm writing on budget day 2012 and as we speak the product is up and running http://www.itv.com/news/, and being used by journalists around the country as the nation discovers what’s in store for the financial year ahead.
A combined team has delivered the project from Made by Many, ITV and ITN. Before we began there was much discussion internally about how much effort we should be putting into news online. Given the dominance of the BBC in the UK, the massive resources that the newspaper groups throw at it, and the general difficulty that everyone has in making money from online news, why would we bother?
On the left, a shot taken from the Home Page; on the right, the simple drag-and-drop Admin tool that was created for the newsroom.
For the past ten months Made by Many has been working with ITV and ITN to transform ITV News into a multichannel news service by adding online, mobile and connected TV to broadcast television. Leading on a live news feed, the first web, mobile and tablet releases of a radically different digital news service went live on Monday 19th March. This is the story.
I recently caught up with a former Cambridge University lecturer of mine, David Trotter. As well as being an extremely inspiring teacher, David is an expert on literature and cinema between the world wars, and has a particular interest in the social effects of communication technology. It was fascinating chatting to David – we're looking at the same thing through different lenses and there's clearly so much to be gained, on both sides, from these kind of exchanges. Read on for the surprising origins of social media, what really happens when tech goes head-to-head with nature, and more.
picle's a bit like a comic. As @malbonster said, it's more dreamlike than video. I think part of that comes from the spaces between the frames into which you have to insert your imagination. That was a theme of Scott McCloud's amazing graphic explanation of the history, meaning and art of the comic, Understanding Comics. Here's his illustration of the design decisions a comic artist makes. It's a remarkably good guide to how to make a great picle, too.
One of my favourite talks of SXSW this year was ‘Rebuilding LEGO’ by Prof. David Robertson of The Wharton School, Pennsylvania where he teaches innovation and product development. The talk was a cautionary tale of how dangerous innovation can be if it isn’t managed.
FLICKR CREDIT - kalexanderson
