Unthinkable to deliver keynote at the AMA digital day

I'm very happy to announce that we will be delivering the keynote presentation at the Arts Marketing Association digital day on 22 November at Sadlers Wells.

We are going to be talking about a small set of methodologies for creating digital content strategies that we are calling Plan - Adapt - Emerge. These processes have been developed by us over the last few years to give a framework for our digital strategy work, but we have always wanted to hand over those processes to willing clients for use in their everyday reality. So we thank the AMA and Cath Hume for giving us an opportunity to describe these thinking, planning and development tools to 200 or so people as part of their day long focus on the practical realities of creating a plan for digital content.

If you would like to know more about the whole day or you want to come and join us you'll find more details on the AMA website.

Two transmedia projects for autumn

We are very pleased to have been commissioned for two significant transmedia projects that will be keeping us busy in the autumn. We have just started a piece of work for the BBC's Knowledge and Learning department taking a very close look at the transmedia storytelling possibilities of the current BBC tool set. This will be followed by two weeks working with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to develop their transmedia thinking.

It feels like many broadcasters are taking another, perhaps cooler, look at the possibilities of transmedia experiences. A rush of innovation and experimentation over the last few years has created a lot of useful lessons, but there is clearly some way to go to making the production and commissioning processes a more natural part of big broadcasters' work. Both of our projects will be about how to balance innovation processes with ways to create more accessible day-to-day transmedia experiences using existing tools and platforms.

And if you happen to be interested in transmedia there is a very interesting conference happening at the end of October at my old college Ravensbourne. It is called London Transmedia fest 2012 and looks like it is going to be big. (Sadly though we will miss it as we're going to be in Johannesburg at the time.)

Unthinkable invited to help create a best practice guide for the charity sector

We were delighted to be asked by Joe Barrell of the Eden Stanley Group and Vicky Browning of Charity Comms to be the digital representative on the advisory panel creating a new best practice guide on generating powerful communication strategies for charities, to be published later this year.

The first meeting was characterised by a very refreshing and honest exchange of views about the most important challenges facing communicators in charities at the moment. It was great to meet some of the other members of the panel, and with their pedigree and experience I think this guide could be a truly useful and practical tool.

We were joined by Vicki Cookson, Head of marketing and communications for RNIB, Jim Godfrey, a seasoned media and political consultant and Ruth Richards, Head of communications for Mind, all of whom had some tremendous insights into the role strategy can play in making communication a more central and effective part of a charity's mission. We will keep you informed of interesting developments.

The rapidly expanding universe of the Dean Rodney Singers

The multicoloured universe of the Dean Rodney Singers project keeps on growing. You may have seen earlier posts on this digital project that we are developing with Heart n Soul for the Paralympics, but this is a project that doesn't stay still for a second.

It's a project that's near impossible to summarise without pictures, sound and a great deal of hand waving, but here's an attempt: the singer and composer Dean Rodney had a vision of an international collaboration involving 72 musicians, singers and dancers both with and without learning disabilites in seven countries to create something amazing together as part of London 2012. As the project began to take practical shape, this involved Dean, working with Charles Stuart, generating 23 tracks of raw musical material, which could then have layers of musical and visual creativity overlaid by artists in Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Croatia, China, Japan and Britain. The process has run across several phases and has used iPads as the primary creative tool. It will culminate in an installation in the Southbank Centre in early September which itself will be open to interaction from people on site.

Right now we are working with Goldsmiths' Creative Computing Department to create the content and prototypes for the installation. The global band are working hard to create final versions of the 23 tracks that will comprise the album that will accompany the show. Here are the midway mixes. Dean himself has just returned from a major adventure in Japan and China, where the band members took to their iPads with enormous dexterity and flexibility.

Wired has just done a piece on the project, and I wrote something for Arts Professional on the real challenges of using iPads as the basis for a giant collaborative and creative venture. And the Southbank has a page on the project here.

I'm really hoping you will be able to make it down to the installation at the Southbank Centre so that you too can join the Dean Rodney Singers.

See you in the Blue Bar from 1-9 September.

Creating Great Digital Experiences for the arts

Materials from our workshop on Creating Great Digital Experiences

Justin & I spend a huge amount of our professional lives helping arts organisations create digital experiences. Sometimes that's indirect, in the form of strategic advice to the likes of the Barbican, Southbank or Glyndebourne, and sometimes it's more direct, in the form of concept development and implementation for people like the ENO or Heart n Soul (notably, Justin's brain-melting creative work on the Dean Rodney Singers project - he gets all the fun).

So when the BBC Academy asked us if we could deliver a version of our 'Creating Great Digital Experiences' workshop for arts organisations who have had work commissioned for The Space (a content platform put together by the BBC in partnership with the Arts Council as part of the Cultural Olympiad), it seemed a natural fit.

We did face a couple of challenges in doing this. First, how could a workshop conceived around the need to create digital experiences around TV & radio programmes read across into the arts world? We felt that many of the same principles applied - and in particular that there was benefit in thinking in terms of users, assets and platforms in that order. But while a programme is by definition something that exists in a standard traditional format to which digital thinking can be applied, arts projects encompass a far broader spectrum, and may indeed already have digital components.

Second, many of the exercises we have developed over time for this workshop are ones that we have taken out to arts organisations and worked through very successfully with them in more expansive settings. For this commission, we had to compress them into a very concentrated period of time, and we also had to invite members of different organisations to work helping each other shape ideas.

Third, we knew we were up against a very discerning audience, as everyone we were working with had already by definition been responsible for some great digital thinking that had been funded by The Space.

Finally, we decided to inflict an extra challenge on ourselves by expanding the workshop to cover some thinking about delivery, sustainability and legacy.

But a job's a job, and we went ahead with alacrity. I delivered the first session in London last Thursday, and Justin is running one in Salford this afternoon. The end result was a highly engaging afternoon that saw cinemas working with art galleries and orchestras working with theatre companies to polish each other's ideas. It's fair to say that in the space of half a day, the benefits you're going to get from a course like this centre on understanding a useful process for developing ideas, rather than ideas themselves that are necessarily workable. Still, some of those ideas were genuinely fascinating, and bore out the usefulness of a process involving a fair few lateral leaps. My personal favourite was a theatre company who concluded that the most compelling legacy for their day of one-woman shows would be a virtual gallery of user-generated art.

Best of all, our first break coincided with the arrival of the Olympic torch relay in White City so we had a grandstand view out of the windows of the handing of the torch to Bruce Forsyth.