Unthinkable round-up, spring 2012

Six months on from our last round-up in December, it feels like a good moment to take stock of what we have all been up to.

Obviously, our biggest news has to be the departure of Simon and Sarah (as announced here earlier today). Justin and I are sorry to see them go, and we wish them the very best of luck in their new ventures. Justin, Simon and I have been working together in one way or another for over a decade, during which time we have learned a huge amount from each other and had a lot of fun in the process. As our fellow co-founders of Unthinkable, Simon and Sarah have helped shape what the company is today; indeed, we worked together on our company manifesto just a few months ago, and Justin and I are proud to continue to espouse its philosophy. We look forward to building on the strength of Simon and Sarah’s contribution and ideas as we take the company forward into a new stage.

In project terms, we have (with apologies to vegetarian readers) had the chance to get our teeth into some very meaty challenges. I had the satisfaction of bringing the ITV News digital redesign to fruition - see this post for more details of its on-time and on-budget launch - and in the process rounding out my working knowledge of Agile methodologies and more generally keeping myself up to date on what's involved in the delivery of complex software projects. I'm pleased to add that since I wrote that post, ITV Sport has also launched ahead of schedule and in good time for the Euro 2012 championship. Additionally, without going into inappropriate detail, I am reliably informed that ITV News is well on course to meet the extremely ambitious targets we set for it to ramp up its unique users.

We've been lucky enough over the last few months to do some very interesting work with the BBC. Justin worked with the BBC Academy to create a big exploratory strategy day for BBC News, examining how the BBC should deliver its news experience on tablets. The day brought together technologists, producers, journalists and importantly, audience members into a series of workshops and co-creation exercises.

We also recently wrapped up a review for the BBC of their service and workflow around digital audience feedback channels. Dry as it sounds, we love the insight this kind of work can give us both into the challenges of driving change in complex organisations, and the impact of digital technology on the expectations and behaviour of audience members (or users, or customers - choose your poison) in their relationships with those organisations. In the case of the BBC there is also the angle - that continues to fascinate us - of accountability in the widest sense to a paying public (rather than private customers). Not least, we got to have some fun doing role-play as mystery shoppers with the BBC and other organisations.

Our biggest relationship with the BBC, though, has been with Knowledge and Learning who have brought us in to help with the development of their digital 'product' from a couple of different angles. In the winter we worked with them to guide an ambitious programme of work developing design prototypes on the theme of time-based navigation, and we delivered a research paper looking at the conceptual framework, competitive landscape and emerging best practice around the theme. (Coming at a busy time, this project gave us the chance to work with a valued old friend, Matt Walton, newly emerged into the freelance world from a highly productive stint at BBC Worldwide.)

More recently, we have come back to the question of BBC K&L's product development, this time from the perspective of advising on its strategy around URLs, and thus by extension around workflow, content management, data modelling and ultimately some pretty profound questions about how the whole BBC sees itself developing as a digital player.

Our arts focus has continued in the form of two very interesting and entirely different projects. We are midway through delivering an amazingly ambitious digital creativity initiative called Dean Rodney Singers for Heart n Soul as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Through a project using iPads as the central tool in a music and video collaboration between seven countries, we are learning a huge amount about interoperability, how different creative tools work for different people and the real nature of intuitive design. We are designing and continuously amending the creative process so that the band, a rich mixture of people, some with learning disabilities and some without, can combine their efforts in all sorts of productive ways. We are right now in the process of designing the experience of the installation that will be the culmination point of the project that will happen in September at the Southbank Centre.

Our English National Opera project took us into very different territory. We were invited to do do a rapid assessment of their digital communications and to bring together a group of people from across the organisation to work towards a shared plan. Having seen what a rapid assessment can achieve with the right energy we are keen to see if this is an approach we can develop to enable organisations to get stuck into digital thinking quickly without taking on too much at the start of the process.

In a similar vein we were also asked to do some rapid strategic assessment and concept development for Universal Classics. Given our background in delivering digital editorial services for Radio 3 and the Proms this was a particularly fascinating project and we look forward to the launch of their new service.

This year's Digital Shoreditch provided the platform for us to ramp up the level of ambition around our Group Think format, partnering with The Barbican to deliver a public event in one of their cinemas focusing on the lessons that can be learned from successful collaborations in the digital arena. The turnout and feedback we received for the event suggest to us that the risk paid off handsomely. Sarah has provided a full write-up of the event, and you can see a pretty picture that neatly summarises it here. We were particularly pleased to work with The Barbican on this one, as it enabled us to help them put into practice one of our recommendations, that they forge creative links with the growing tech sector in their east London back yard. Invited along as speaker and panellist for another Digital Shoreditch event, Figtalks, I grabbed the chance to obsess in public about one of my pet topics, digital remembering.

Finally we'd like to take this opportunity to thank Lorna Palmer for continuing to be a valued associate of the company, bringing a combination of intelligence, creativity and efficiency to every challenge we throw at her. In this period, we have benefited from her contributions to our work with a very different set of projects for the BBC and our rapid assessment at the English National Opera.

Visual notes from our collaboration Group Think

As luck would have it, I sat next to Kirsty from Made by Many at our Group Think at the Barbican a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't help noticing the wondrous image that was taking shape in her pad. Watching her note-taking in action was like watching one of those RSA animations in real time, only better. So, with her kind permission, I am sharing it with you:

Sarah's post about the event will explain how it all relates to what was said.

The Secrets of Successful Collaboration

Those of you that have been paying even vague attention to our blog and twitter feed will know that last Wednesday was the occasion of our first ever public-facing event on the subject of collaboration. While our previous events (or Group Thinks as we like to call them) have been round table discussions for an invited group of 20-30 guests, this was rather larger in scale and ambition: several months in the making, a co-production and held in an auditorium which seats 150.

Before I try to summarise proceedings, here’s a word on how it came about. Last year, the wonderful Barbican Centre commissioned Unthinkable to create their digital strategy and one of our recommendations was that in order to cement the Centre’s well-deserved reputation as a cutting edge digital arts and media innovator, they should reach out to tech community on their doorstep in neighbouring Shoreditch. So when this year's Digital Shoreditch Festival was announced, it seemed like a pretty obvious moment to put together an event…together.

So, how did it play out?

First to speak was Leo Thomson, the Centre's Director of Audiences. She welcomed everyone and presented some of the Barbican's groundbreaking digital arts work, highlighting collaborations with, among others Ryoji Ikeda, Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicité, rAndom International and of course touching on the wonderful Game On exhibition - one of the first shows in the mainstream art world to explicitly recognise the artistic value of video games. I think it's fair to say that while many in the audience would have been aware of some of this work, few would have been aware of the Centre's extraordinary digital legacy.

I followed Leo, introducing the session's shape and laying out a few of Unthinkable's positions on the subject in order to get people in the zone a bit. Many of the observations I made were informed by a questionnaire we circulated to some of our friends, partners and clients, the results of which we've been posting on the Unthinkable blog over the last month or so. I also drew on my own experiences of creating digital media collaborations including recent work with the Shoreditch tech community and long term interest in helping small and large companies work together more productively. 

Sarah sets the scene - mutual loathing has no place in collaboration!

I described collaboration as a "necessary evil". It's necessary for large companies not least as they struggle to innovate, whereas for small teams this comes much more naturally. The flip side of this is that smaller companies often lack the scale, resources and networks to turn innovation into real business. And evil? Well, precisely because it's so difficult to get right. I cited the disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner, of which Vanity Fair reported, "Fights started even before the nuptials." I finished more positively, saying that among the things most commonly cited as the "secrets" of successful collaboration were a shared vision, trust and mutual respect, and a combination of strong leadership with broad ownership.

And so to our conversations.

Nikhil and Daniel introduce Radio Connected

Totally Radio's Daniel Nathan and MixCloud's Nikhil Shah took to the stage to talk about Radio Connected, an umbrella for a series of collaborative projects funded by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which aim to improve a whole bunch of processes and output for those working in online radio in the UK, including metadata, asset ingest, content distribution and rights reporting. A heady mix, to be sure. Matthew then interviewed them about how it had all gone. He picked up in particular on the fact that the collaborations were so complicated: the first involved something like seven partners, and one of those was RadioPlayer UK - already a consortium itself! What emerged during the talk certainly bore out the point about mutual respect; Daniel and Nikhil plainly have very different ways of working, but spoke with obvious admiration for each other. The need for clear leadership in such a complex situation was apparent; so too the need to be flexible. And the funding certainly made things interesting. A lot of the grant money was for "collaborative R&D" but as Nikhil put it, the TSB were looking for "a bit more R than D", whereas, of course, many of the consortium partners, MixCloud and RadioPlayer among them, were looking for a bit more of the latter. It also emerged that any collaborative unit looking for this kind of funding must have at least one among its number who is prepared to deal with vast amounts of paperwork, written in the kind of language which doesn't necessarily come easily to business people.

Pete in person and Tod via Skype

Next up was a very different collaboration, and one suggested by the Barbican's Creative Learning team. Punchdrunk is a highly innovative British theatre company who specialise in immersive and to some extent interactive experiences. Their 'Sleep No More' is a retelling of Macbeth that takes place in over 90 rooms in a vast six storey building in Manhattan. (It’s now in its 16th month and is very much the talk of New York.) As Punchdrunk's Enrichment Director, Pete Higgin is responsible for taking the Punchdrunk experience into new arenas, chief among them digital. Over the last six months he's been working closely with Professor Tod Machover at MIT's Media Lab and the Punchdrunk core team on a project to realise the experience of 'Sleep No More' as a remote digital one - an extraordinary challenge given that the live experience is quite so visceral, so multi-sensory. Pete talked us through the project (which is funded by Nesta's Digital R&D fund) and then Justin interviewed him and Tod, via Skype, from the US. This was very appropriate as much of the collaboration was conducted remotely, with four or five hour Skype conversations a regular occurrence (as one of four directors of a company that is very much "virtual" this very much struck a chord with me). Once again, mutual respect seemed to be the foundation of the working relationship; there seemed to be a genuine trust on both Pete and Tod's part in each other's technical, creative and aesthetic decisions. They were also candid about the fact that they had some room for mistake-making, this being a research project, but were also clear when asked by a member of the audience, that they wouldn't do anything differently were they to do this all over again.

Simon and Anno talk gin and digital

The conversations closed with Simon talking to Anno Mitchell, Director of Strategic Planning (or as she put it, "Head of Hand Waving") at the innovative Shoreditch-based agency Friday. Simon joked that following fascinating talks on immersive theatre and the future of radio he and Anno were going to talk about funerals, but actually the discussion was fascinating. The nub of things was this: Friday have been working for some time with the Co-Operative Group, and specifically with their Funeralcare service - the UK's largest provider of funeral services - reinvigorating their digital presence. Friday and the Co-Op are of course vastly different in scale - about 30 people compared to "4,000 ish" - and in culture, but it was striking just how strong the relationship is between the two teams. Again, trust was key, and Anno made it clear why this was especially necessary with a long term digital project: despite the agency often being brought in by the marketing or communications teams, Friday's approach to digital is to dive deep into a client's entire working and business culture, generally insisting to some degree or other on the rethinking of some fundamentals. Simon made the point that of course we were still ultimately dealing with a client-supplier relationship, but I was left with the impression that Friday's work with the Co-Op was in a very real sense a true collaboration - one not reliant on (or mandated by) funding, and therefore one which had to deliver in the marketplace.

Before piling into the bar, we finished off the evening with a handful of quick pitches from some fascinating projects that are actively seeking collaborators. Anna Rice from the Barbican's Creative Learning team discussed this autumn's Weekender; Benita Matofska introduced crowdsharing platform ThePeopleWhoShare.com and Jody Osborn, a current Springboard participant I’m mentoring, talked about TheBackScratchers.com, appropriately enough a marketplace for creative industry workers looking for collaborators.

So, as you can tell, there were a lot of people involved in making the event a success and I would like to thank them again:

Paul Kercal from Guildford College whose hilarious illustrations appear here, with his kind permission.

Our fantastic speakers: Anno, Pete, Nikhil, Daniel and Tod for their time and insight. And Anna, Benita and Jody for their fine pitches.

The Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network for their generous sponsorship - and special thanks to Richard Booth from the KTN who came along and tweeted the event live (take a peek at #collaboration).

And last but not least, our friends and collaborators at the Barbican, especially Leo Thomson, Thomas Hardy, Abi Wood and the technical team for all their hard work behind the scenes. You might be interested to know that the Barbican is currently recruiting for a digital content producer. More details here.

The Business of Digital Remembering - a Figtalk

I was privileged to be invited to speak at Figtree's Figtalks event as part of Digital Shoreditch last night. When I have to stand up and talk to people I will often write something long form before turning it into speakers' notes and delivering the same thing in mangled form. So here is my talk in its original wordy glory. Apologies for the lack of hyperlinks or pictures... and thanks to Simon for the Gibson quote at the start, and to Justin for chipping in the interesting bits.

I'm going to talk about the business of digital remembering, and I'm going to start with a quote from William Gibson:

We are that strange species that constructs artefacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting...

Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory.

I started making websites 15 years ago. Back then we threw stuff online and pretty much hoped for the best. We certainly gave little if any thought for the implications of how it would look in a decade's time. Indeed outside of academia, that would have been an odd question for anyone to ask. It was an age of experimentation, and if we did think about the deep future we probably would have guessed that most of what we were working on then would be replaced as the technology marched on. That's proved largely true - if a website from that time has survived, it's the exception rather than the rule, and we see it as a quaint museum piece. It will also have survived, if at all, as a bundle - content, presentation & structure all bound together in a way that is only useful if you want to approach the website as a single artefact, but pretty useless if you want to make any other use of the content - and forget about anything like structured data. So - looking back at William Gibson's words - to the extent that we were constructing a species-wide, time defying prosthetic memory, it was certainly unthinking but quite a stretch to describe it as immortal.

But the past was, even then, beginning to creep into the present. Digression for a minute - does anyone remember the scene near the end of Brazil where De Niro’s swashbuckling plumber turned freedom fighter Tuttle is overhelmed and eventually obliterated by scraps of paper? 

That image for me (apart from being one of the great moments of cinema) seems an apt one to convey the pitfalls of remembering by accident. The unthinking accumulation of stuff is at best only part of the way to good remembering. Our computers have a thing called memory, which creates the illusion that by putting stuff there we are remembering it. But good remembering needs more than just storage - it needs storage of selected things in a structured way, and with therefore the possibility of the right kind of access. Why do we bother remembering if it's not natural for us? We have developed tools for remembering in our families and our institutions to supplement the limitations of our brains and lifespans as carriers for a complex culture. At its best, remembering helps us to be human and enhances our identities. But often, we don't do so well. What happens to Tuttle looks a lot to me like the happenstance remembering that we tend to do if we're not careful - we end up with things like bureaucracy and family baggage that instead of enhancing our identities tend to diminish us.

And that was pretty much our default way of dealing with the passage of time in the early Internet. Menus, indices and lists were simply getting longer and longer, and eventually awkward decisions began to be needed about what to keep and what to lose. Those of us working at the BBC began to reach for the Get Out of Jail Free card that was 'mothballing' - a banner along the top of our websites stating when the page was last updated, and that 'we have left it here for reference'.

Nowadays, things are different. We seem to have reached a turning point of sorts, where it's clear that the Internet no longer exists in a breathless eternal present, and it is now rare for smart people creating digital content to ignore time & memory altogether. Hooray! At this point I have to mention Facebook. Sorry.

Facebook has realised that the past is at least as compelling as the present. It started life as a service focusing on a wide cross-section of the present; serving its users snapshots of each other's lives and doings in the very recent past. Sam Lessin, one of the brains behind Facebook's newish Timelines feature somewhat hyperbolically described that approach as 'the single biggest lost opportunity in the history of human story telling'. Timelines takes a wholly different cut of the data that its users have generated, realising that, properly structured and exposed, it offers them the opportunity to curate the stories of their own lives. In other words, Facebook realised that it had unwittingly turned itself into a machine to generate biographies.

I made a distinction earlier between conscious & accidental memory. Facebook became conscious that it was doing a kind of remembering that it hadn't noticed before, and invited its users to make the same switch from accidental to deliberate - to become active curators, filling in the gaps in their digital records between their birth and the present.

Back to the BBC for a minute. Their Head of Archive Development Tony Ageh last year made the point in a speech to a room full of European public service broadcasters that 'the Internet is turning us all... into memory institutions'. One passage of his talk looked at a recent project using the BBC archive to shed the light of hindsight on the 1980s Miners' Strike. Probably the key line is this: "The footage needs to be balanced by personal input – by witness accounts – by the voice of people and the opinions of people who were involved." In other words, organisations like the BBC (and more familiarly museums and galleries) - squarely "memory institutions" - perform the most useful service to society's collective memory by opening their content up & letting the participants in those stories reclaim and remix them.

But if we look again at the idea of Facebook as a machine to generate biographies - and in fact, an interlocking graph of biographies - we can see that that phrase 'memory institution' can also apply (in a very different way) to a social network. To understand quite how widely that metaphor actually applies nowadays - far wider than I think Tony Ageh intended it - let's turn for a minute to a business that would appear to be about the present par excellence: a newswire organisation. The Press Association is known as a provider of up-to-the-minute news that pretty well comprehensively covers whatever is newsworthy in this country. What happened yesterday, let alone last year, would appear to be the least of their concerns. And yet the PA have been busy working on a data map that enables them to publish their news not simply as text but as an ongoing and structured record that anatomises the news into events, individuals, relationships and dates. What's particularly interesting is that this isn't an altruistic attempt to provide a public service. Like Facebook, the PA have seen that there is commercial potential in the act of creating structure around collective memory.

So there are many reasons to get into the memory business. There are also many ways of doing it. For some, it will make sense to embrace the philosophy and principles of Open Data (have a search for Tim Berners Lee’s 5 levels of open data if you want to get more detail on this). If they do, there is an increasingly sophisticated and powerful community of practitioners ready to embrace and support them - you might be familiar with open government initiatives for example, that have already spawned some extremely useful things, such as theyworkforyou.com or fixmystreet.com. I often advise subsidised arts organisations of all shapes and sizes, and these days I rarely miss an opportunity to invite them to consider this kind of approach (whether they like it or not).

At a slightly less structured level we can look at the Guardian or the New York Times publishing topic-based aggregations of their articles, or the emergence of loose structures driven by public contribution through tagging for photos on Flickr, or music on last.fm etc. Or to take another example from the Guardian, the more subtle and less open approach of republishing its content inside Facebook and making itself - and its stories individually - part of the interlocking graph of user timelines.

Then at the opposite extreme, but an equally coherent response to the question of how to deal with the passage of time and accumulation of memory, would be another project I've recently worked on. In the redesign of its News website, ITV has deliberately opted for a latest-first live blog structure that focuses on the present and pretty ruthlessly pushes the past out of sight. And that's OK too. The point is that they have thought about it, there is a reason for this approach and they are not simply accumulating visible content and links by default.

I don't have a lot of time left to look at the parallel streams of digital remembering that's being done by individuals. I do need to point out (in case it's not blindingly obvious) that Facebook is far from the only option, and that we all as individuals have a similar range of choices to make about happenstance vs conscious remembering, levels of openness and structure, and the mix of content & data, involved in our remembering. In the case of individual remembering, we also need to throw in some additional considerations around privacy and ownership.

It is worth saying that, for individuals, the enterprise of fixing a fossil record of the present as the past of the future has increasingly been joined by that of reaching back into the analogue past and digitising it. 1000memories, a digital service that provides easy tools to encourage users to digitise their family records both genealogical and photographic, have carried out some research pointing to 2011 as the year when we collectively started to scan more analogue photos than we printed digital ones. This illustrates a wider point: after a transitional period where many of us were unsure where our personal archives belonged, we have realised that digital storage is not merely an experiment, a fad or a toy. It's here to stay in a way which the more apparently real, tangible and durable physical artefacts of our remembering are not.

What I think this all adds up to is a challenge to everyone who isn't Facebook to recognise that we all have reasons - from the public good through the need to update our business models and on to our desire to capture and preserve a personal legacy - to think about what time and remembering mean to us in the digital realm - and to get conscious. After all, have any of us in this room yet learned enough about how to do our digital remembering that we could teach it to our children?

Thank you!

Unthinkable, the Barbican and Digital Shoreditch

Unless you’ve been on holiday for the last few months or somehow deftly managed to avoid our emails, tweets and posts (not too many we hope!), you'll probably know that we proposed a session for the Digital Shoreditch festival taking place in London next month. Well, I’m delighted to announce that our event has been formally accepted into the programme. If you voted for us, huge thanks. We really appreciate the support. 

The session (or Group Think as we like to call our events) is on the subject of collaboration, and produced in, er, collaboration with the Barbican Centre who will also be our hosts. We are now busily confirming our speakers and will post again soon with full details. But in the meantime, here’s a bit of a sneaky preview of what we’re planning.

After the usual introductions and scene-setting from us, we’ll be having three conversations with partners from three very different kinds of collaboration. The common thread is digital, but the collaborations themselves range from purely commercial through to creative practice, and the partners from large corporations to Shoreditch-based start ups. The funding models are equally diverse. The conversations will address some of the thorny issues around collaboration, such as why collaborate; when should you do it and when shouldn’t you; how you go about finding partners; what framework and rules do you need; what are the business models for collaboration and what tools work best? There will be plenty of time for Q&A both during the event and over a glass of wine afterwards.

We're always keen to help make connections between potential collaborators, so the session will end with an informal opportunity for attendees to find collaborators for projects and hear about projects looking for collaborators. If you're interested in doing this, please get in touch with me - sarah@unthinkableconsulting.com - as we still have a couple of available slots.

The time and date of the event is 5.30-8.30pm on 30th May at the Barbican's Cinema 3. Places are limited and you need to register to attend. Please do so here. 

We look forward to seeing you there.