A spring round-up

It's been an especially busy period for us here at Unthinkable - and when I say period in truth I'm thinking of the months pretty much since Christmas. It's one reason (or should I say excuse?) for us being a little less active than we'd like to be on this here blog. Not just busy either - but active on a genuinely wide range of fronts. So we thought it about time to say a little about what we're up to right now. File under "company news" if you like. So, in no particular order...

We're delighted to announce that we've been appointed by the Barbican Centre in London to consult on the redesign of their website. We've worked with the Barbican before, hosting a workshop for their management team, and of course have been working with their principal funder, the City of London, for nigh-on three years now - as we continue to. But this is our deepest yet engagement with them and we're most excited about it.

Sarah's Dealmaker role with UKTI's Global Entrepreneurs Programme has been augmented with a new strand of work aimed at driving the tech and media boom in London's East End, a project announced by the PM last autumn. In the meantime, the GEP role goes on, and Sarah finds herself suddenly surrounded by interesting and innovative companies, among them Mobile Banking Systems and Solvate. 

We continue our enjoyable and rewarding engagement with Heart n Soul, an organisation dedicated to working with artists with learning disabilities; we've been helping them shape up their thinking about their web presence for some time now, but more recently have been helping to design and think through a huge, international music collaboration, using some amazing web tools, centred around the vision of Dean Rodney of The Fish Police, one of HnS's biggest acts. We're also really pleased to be working alongside Andrew Dubber of New Music Strategies on the project.

On the if-we-tell-you-we'll-have-to-kill-you front, Matthew is working as Project Director alongside our old friend, designer Paul Finn of Fitzroy and Finn, on a definitional design project for a major UK broadcaster. More on that when it launches and is un-embargoed.

Justin is carrying on our tradition of training for the BBC; he's currently working with the BBC Academy, delivering and developing a series of sessions on cross-platform production which is rolling out across the organisation's entire TV production base.

Simon continues to work in his part-time role for the CIKTN as their Metadata Theme Champion. It's been a crucial time for the role, with the second of two Technology Strategy Board metadata funding rounds being launched; the fund was recently explained and explored in a day-long seminar at Bafta, with over two-hundred guests in attendance, and hundreds more tuning in on the web. Simon hosted the day for the CIKTN and Justin led the afternoon's collaboration and brainstorming session.

On behalf of our old BBC A&Mi colleague Simon Nelson, Simon and Justin also ran an interesting session for the management team from New York Public Radio, looking at some of the issues around classical music, radio and interactive media. You can take a peek at some of our thinking and research on this popplet. The session also sparked off a series of blog posts here.

We also worked with the Royal Opera House on their highly successful Culture Hack Day, ran persona-building and user journey workshops with creative writing advocates Spread the Word and the City of London, worked with the English National Opera on a series of interactive propositions based on upcoming productions and finally are helping a radio industry consortium shape up an R&D proposition.

Along the way, we've been meeting some great people and truly interesting companies, among them Nikhil Shah from Mixcloud, Aisha Yusuf from Said.fm, radio strategist Grant Goddard, Chris Thorpe from Artfinder, Peter Bellingham and Alison Dunnett from the Welsh National Opera, Chris Jackson from Metabroadcast and Evan Stein from Decibel.

Lastly, a word on some of our relevant reading over the last few months, including some more in-depth pieces on the web...

Paul Starr: The Creation of the Media

Stuart Brand: Whole Earth Discipline

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

Michael Foley: The Age of Absurdity

Matthew Crawford - The Case for Working with Your Hands

John Gray - Gray's Anatomy

Kevin Kelly - What Technology Wants

Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic - The Management Myth 

Rob Walker in The New York Times - On Radiolab, The Sound of Silence 

Phil Buckley on the BBC Internet Blog - (Hopefully) no more tears: CBBC website relaunch

David Kusek on the Future of Music blog - Attention Music Managers and Artists: you may be owed BILLIONS in unpaid royalties

For more of our more day-in-day-out thoughts, observations and, well, gleanings, follow us on twitter.