693 posts
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
So, back from another SXSW :(
It's great to be back in a country where the butter doesn't contain sugar by default, where fizzy drinks don't come in buckets and where you can buy meat in units of less than one pound. But... I will miss adding cheese and chipotle oak-smoked maple-flakes and sugar-coated tequila-bacon dust to my deep-fried food. If we hadn't got out when we did I would not have fitted through the doorway of the plane.
It was another awesome trip for Made by Many for many reasons - not least because of the way people embraced Picle, the iPhone app we launched.
We promised to make Picle an open experiment in Lean product innovation. To that end, we approached SXSW as a giant customer development exercise. This blog post is about how we prioritised the feature-set that we launched with, and how we might grow and evolve from that Minimum Viable Product.
Bruce Sterling's closing keynote at SXSW was typically fiery and inspirational. But whereas last year's felt like a war cry, this year there was a strain of hope in his words.
And he summed it up this way:
Be passionate about what you do, because now is a pretty awesome time.
After a week of BBQs, speeches, panels, margaritas, putting names to faces and more BBQs I’ve landed back at Made by Many HQ and I want to share some of the Picle love.
Alex Harding is an Interaction Designer at Made by Many and the inventor of Picle. This is the story of Picle in Alex's own words - a story already blogged on this website, but told through a beautiful video that Alex and Paul Wyatt made last week.
