Category: Notes

A place to post notes that may be seed for a future post.

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Richard Gregory lecture 2013

On 28th October 2013 the Bristol vision institute hosted the annual Richard Gregory lecture in the Wills Building, University of Bristol. The talk was titled ‘Better than being there – Being there better, How technology is shaping the future of media’.

Matthew Postgate has the job of shaping and leading research and development for the BBC. His talk covered the approach the BBC is taking to embracing emerging technologies, practices and coping with the challenges that brings for a global organisation. Here are my notes:

  • Evaluation of tools to educate and entertain which is the mission of the BBC
  • Broadcast is considered a system of creation, delivery and consumption which hasn’t changed much since 1922
  • Key theme of change is now we are in the information age
  • IP end to end
  • Data centric
  • New devices and new interfaces
  • This has led to a change in how we create media to deal with the shift
  • The new broadcast system is split between create, deliver, consume and the BBC have four themes as a framework: immersive, pervasive, data rich and interactive (personal and adaptive)
  • IMMERSIVE: trying to get to the halo deck from star trek
  • 2012 Olympics used super hi vision
  • 8k cameras which are 16 times quality of current HD and uses 22 surround sound – sound not only left to right but also up and down
  • Showed an example of using the oculus rift VR headset and a 360 camera to film music practice
  • PERVASIVE: Ability to be everywhere and showing live events on mobile to complement
  • Designing for four screens: TV, desktop/Laptop, tablets and mobile are considered for all design
  • Hewlett Packard say ‘information as a utility’
  • We expect to arrive and be able to use and consume immediately
  • Wallpaper thin television using tablet control is coming in the next 20 years
  • Friends and family can join you from their location to watch things remotely together
  • Different surfaces emerging
  • Media will become more contextual as there is already more media than we can possibly consume
  • Media will begin to seek you out based on what systems know you consume using software agents
  • DATA RICH: no longer sealed, more akin to datasets
  • Will be commonplace to overlay data to your screen, even during live events
  • INTERACTIVE, PERSONAL, ADAPTIVE
  • You’ll be able to zoom into the screen
  • Interactive to become personal
  • Adaptive abilities enabling previously fixed programmes to change, such as using your location to alter the activity live, such as using your local weather during a radio show
  • We shouldn’t lose sight of the storytelling
  • If we can take the traditional broadcast skills and add new science and then combine we’ll have even better broadcasting
  • We should be brave in re-inventing broadcasting
  • The use of contextual media will mean that your device knows your activity and will deliver the right type and length of content based on expected location, calendar entries etc

 

 

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Week 20

This week, in between three days out at events, my mind began to wander towards our team and service activity for 2014. In short I have been thinking about the scope of the work, embedding digital into our daily activity (hat tip to Michael Edson) and getting things done. After a few months to settle in, I now have clean air to run in with a better sense of some actionable work. I must focus and ensure we ‘DO’ now. Here at the highlights of the week:
  • I attended the local tedx event, Tedxbristol 2013. Lots of students in attendance who I enjoyed earwigging
  • World usability Day hosted at the M Shed and a great 1 track affair with a diverse agenda
  • Disaster planning
  • Team catch ups and progress meetings
  • Reviewed the student as producer project requirements before their deadline
  • Uk Museums on the web 2013 hosted at Tate Modern in London. 120 or so of my peers in a 1 track informal series of talks about work recently done and plans for 2014. I met a very friendly and supportive bunch who I look forward to working with in the near future. The 5:30am bus to London I enjoyed less!
  • Discovered youtube tv which enables you to send videos to your TV from any device on the same network.
  • Released v1 of our service Digital Principles into the wild. These will really help us in the coming months and support the digital strategy which is coming soon. The 8 principles began life as over 150 scraps of paper that I collected from conversations with my team, other groups in the sector, the service, funders and partners.
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Week 19

This week was a mixed bag of different activity with the biggest excitement meeting three groups of students from the University of Bristol.
I kicked off the week attending Digital Bristol workshop at the Colston Hall for the morning sessions. We got to hear from local business such as Aardman animations who are working with Rolls-royce to see how Aardman ‘bottle’ creativity. Taking 15 years to produce a new engine is too long! We heard from local funding pots about the various flavours of borrowing and grant available. After the kickoff session I sat in on the ‘playable City’ strand to hear from the Watershed, Council and ibm about projects they have been doing to get the public involved. I made a comment about strangers not wanting to play with other complete strangers but rather the people they are with, which most folk didn’t agree with.
A service wide review of our current budget position took a large amount of my energy carrying on from the previous week. Enough said.
I met with the retail manager to explore our online shop options including ebay and amazon as options. I vaguely recall a few museums selling via these channels so will be doing a bit more discovery around this. Get to the people without re-inventing the wheel was the general vibe.
I completed my final Health and safety workshop
I attended an evening ‘debate’ about profit in the heritage sector. It was less of a debate and more storytelling from the speakers. A few useful views were made by the audience.
We will be showing an exhibition next October called ‘Moved by Conflict’ at the M Shed Museum around World War 1 and the involvement of people from Bristol. I got to sit with one of our in-house designers to see how these get planned and executed. I will be exploring the digital engagement aspect and had to submit some thoughts. We’ll be looking at sensors, RFID, motion tracking and displaying stories in new ways for the service rather than passive projection and iPads.
I saw some great work by our collection team who are working on migration of data from an old system to our collections management system.
Heard about an idea for crowd funding.
During a meeting with two different UWE factions I mentioned my 2014 idea for ‘bringing the museum out into the City’ which was very positively received. I MUST put these ideas on the blog as I think this thread of an idea has legs.
I have been on call to support the 3 day MuseomixUK event up at Iron bridge, thought the one time I could of been of use I didn’t have my laptop with me!
Cleared up some confusion around our intentions for a website plan for 2014. If anybody can point to helpful material on ‘cases for museums to have their own non-council website’ that would be most welcome.
My personal highlight of the week was meeting three groups of students who will each be producing a digital outcome for the service. Each group is from the University of Bristol Computer Science department on their second year and working with us as part of their course. I canvassed the service for problems that needed solving and three were selected. The kickoff meetings went well and I have great hopes for the outcomes in due course. Partnership working that is working!
Stepped on a few toes…

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Week 18

This week was heavy on spinning some tiny plates for 2014 activity. From next week onwards I’m hopefully returning to the present and kicking off with digital skills training and ‘the website’. Rather than go day-to-day this week here is a list of activities which mostly follow Monday – Friday.

  • Great evening talk by Matthew Postgate from the BBC Better than being there – Being there better, How technology is shaping the future of media  which included wallpaper thin TVs, contextual content and personalisation. Much of which will affect the museum sector in the next twenty years
  • Ran a Twitter training session for the good folks at Blaise Castle House Museum
  • Went to introduce myself to Bristol and Regional Archaeological Services and looked at bringing the website back into the fold
  • Had a tour of the services that Calvium offer for mobile development
  • Briefly chopped it up with Tom Metcalfe about being involved in the REACT objects sandbox projects
  • Sat with Alastair Somerville to see what work he doe’s in the sector. This is regarding to ‘bringing the collection’ out to the public around our digital engagement focus.
  • Found out more about what possibilities we have with improving our website offering centrally. There are big changes afoot which may or may not work to our advantage. One of our questions which I hope to hear back on soon is if we can have an AB test effectively driving 50 percent of visitors to an ‘alpha’ website and seeing if there is a positive change in usage. Why spend time, money and resource if effectively folks are happy.
  • Began to wrap my head around opportunities for licensing some of our media such as images. Across the sector there is an assumption that our digitised collections have bags of cash waiting to be unlocked. Yet many museums are now giving away thousands of images for free. Lots to unpack in this area.
  • Understanding audiences wants and needs on-site and ‘out there’. Add in stakeholder demands, throw into a pot and make magic in 2014…
  • Confirmation that we’ll soon start work with three University of Bristol Student project teams from the Computer Science department. They’ll be working on three of our problems as part of their coursework. The projects are around databases, making collections playful and showing objects in space and time
  • Budgets
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Week 17

To kick the week off I completed the mandatory Recruitment and Selection workshop. The day itself was an enjoyable mix of scenarios and role playing to help us know about recruitment ‘The Bristol City Council Way’. However the pre-workshop homework was an exercise in frustration. The previous week I set aside an afternoon to read the policy and related guidance but the intranet was down. I took the work home for the weekend and low and behold I needed the intranet as practically ever reference was buried in the intranet which isn’t available from home. Why use the web if you force staff to be on-site you may have heard me cry. The only solution was to head to the office for much of Sunday which didn’t make me popular at home. I would pick apart the workbook but the trainers say we are the ‘last’ cohort of the current process. I will say that throwing a bunch of barely related questions together without hyperlinks or consideration for the user in a Word document doesn’t cut the mustard in 2013. My e-learning inner-self had to button it!

Tuesday was largely catching up with the team and me introducing Trello for the whole team to see what major activities we are all working on, myself included. Although we are a nominally a traditional Council team, we are all remote from each other so we need to operate with a proper remote team mindset and use tools to help us achieve our mission (grand eh). This is why I’m looking forward to the new book from 37signals remote office not required out this coming Tuesday.

Wednesday had me wearing my digital fund-raising hat and looking at a magic 8-ball to see what the future of crowd funding might look like. Once I was able to slip this hat I quickly donned my ‘future of digital in a museum’ hat and wrote a 1 page ‘Digital as a Platform’ piece for the senior management team. It included remote working, wearing technology and the museum as publisher. Once it has been used for its intended purpose i’ll throw it up on the blog. As an aside I suggest listening to And the Crowdfund Goes Wild with Yancey Strickler (Episode 42) to hear from one of the kickstarter co-founders.

On Thursday I squeezed in a tour of the Bristol Records Office and got to see a book that has been given to the service. It is a lively diary of a four month trip and we will be running a social media campaign to tell the story which is pretty exciting.

After the tour I got to sink my teeth into some plate spinning around all of our existing online properties, unearthing some projects that require reviewing.

On Friday I enjoyed a lunchtime talk I wrote about the other day and met with a Council directorate that I hope to work with in 2014 as they do some pretty interesting stuff around infrastructure, Green Cities and innovation. Unfortunately the day had to end with a problem pre-dating me joining that I hope can be resolved very soon.

Alex Rankin, who works at the museum service wrote a little bit about the talking cranes project we are breathing new life back into over on his blog which is worth a read.

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REACT Lunchtime Talk: Elements of Interactive Storytelling

During his lunchtime talk Daniel Burwen explained that careful consideration of the four elements plus the four spaces equals coherence for storytelling using technology. Here are my notes for the talk Elements of Interactive Storytelling.

  • The four elements are User experience,  Story, Technology and Aesthetics
  • The four spaces are Hearth, Reading nook, Anywhere and Workbook
  • The spectrum of Narrative mechanics between Games (interactive and mechanic depth) and Films (passive and emotional complexity)
  • Doing (games) vs feeling (films)
  • 1978 laser disc
  • 1983 dragons lair – depth was press button to not die
  • 1985 Mario brothers run, jump’ stopm’ kick shoot
  • 1991 another world – cut scenes appear
  • 1993 virtual fighter – 3d games emerge, camera language and large data
  • Mechanical depth and emotional complexity
  • Uncanny valley for virtual characters
  • Last of us game – unified aesthetic between film and game. The game is built for mechanical depth and is highly abstract
  • Attention economies for TV, laptop, tablet and mobile vary but the longer the attention the higher the value.
  • TV is $10- $60, mobile is free to $5
  • Focusing on tablets gives a good trade-off
  • Game called winosill might be helpful for displays e.g. at blaise Castle Museum 🙂
  • Mouse and keyboard vs touch
  • Interactive narrative is a goal as you can get mechanical depth and emotion
  • New PS4 and Xbox enable body movement and may be tipping point beyond control pads
  • Oculus rift headset – the less abstraction in interface the more emotional connection we can have and this type of device may be the new era post control pad
  • So where is this going? from first moving image film to Citizen Kane was a breakout experience for its time and it has been 41 years since pong
  • Wii came put in 2006 and since then we have great things across all the devices eg the oculus rift’ and Xbox kinnect, maybe we are about to bring them together

Since making my notes I have stumbled across the talk as a slidedeck on Prezi which you should check out.

 

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Week 16

This week was pretty ‘social’ and therefore flat out with meetings and social media!

I kicked off the week with an introduction for one of our casual staff about museums on the web and the opportunities for the service. I used this as a way to see what level of support I could roll-out to a large group of people who are curious about the web but are very much digital visitors or who rarely use the web. The lesson I took away from this session was to make NO assumptions about how others view the web and to listen to each member of staff THEN I can slowly provide the right responses, hopefully at scale but i am fully prepared to go one to one if I need. A seed of an idea also arose around producing guidance under a creative commons licence that perhaps other museums could re-purpose (sounds like Jisc for the museums!).

Next I had to grapple with a project that would have me pulling out my hair if I had any….

Tuesday was a visit to the Safety team for my part 1 Health and Safety for Managers training. I feel confident about our process but there isn’t any room to be complacent and I have several minor things to iron out.

On Wednesday I met with several others to finalise our Museum Social Media principles which should give staff the guidance and confidence to begin helping us use our social media and importantly know who to turn to. A blind spot for us is the weekend but several weekend staff have agreed to cover the fort which i feel is worth a ‘fist pump’. I met Stef Goodchild  for lunch as I wanted to hear how his mind-blowing work on music stages could perhaps be used for temp exhibitions. Think lasers, sound, smoke, LEDs and projection. If you want innovation, experimentation for engagement and R&D Dear funders let me and Stef cook up something!

In the evening M Shed hosted a debate called ’50 years since the bus boycott – what has changed?’ which was enjoyable and packed. The event was live broadcast to a local radio station too so a recording will appear very soon. I played roving mic ha.

On Thursday I spoke with Apple about the finer detail of purchase vs leasing of iPads which I need to expand out into a post on its own. Needless to say I am being very cautious as I don’t want one of those famous cupboards full of obsolete devices in 2- years. Khio Vinh wrote about this in Build not to Last.
I met with two different potential partners for 2014-15 projects around digital engagement.

In the afternoon I headed over to Sift Digital for the regular ‘South West social media meetup’ and really enjoyed hearing Jukesie ranting about the social media landscape. Slides and details are over on his weekly post.

Friday morning I had the pleasure of hearing a visiting resident to the museum talk about how we can help Chinese visitors enjoy the museum. Lots of food for thought around international tourism to the region.

Then I spent the rest of the day at the Watershed REACT heritage sandbox which was an opportunity to network and learn from others in the digital sector beyond the local authority. There was some interest in collaboration and partnership which i see as fundamental to getting things done whilst including Bristol people.

Looking back it was a packed week ending in the bonus Sunday afternoon preparing for my recruitment training in the office!

I think I may have even found a little bit of time to pop home.

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Week 15

On Monday I spent the day in Birmingham for Museum Camp 2013. The event was billed as an ‘unconference’ which essentially means we collectively (100 or so) had 15mins at the beginning of the day to suggest topics to talk about for each of the six 45min slots across five rooms. My hope for the day was to bend the ear of just one person about my draft 8 digital principles. Instead I pitched it as a session and the pleasure of explaining each principle to 15 people and listening to their experiences. I think I was coherent and some of the feedback will be helpful in refining some of my examples. Much of the day was just listening to others but with the helpful caveat that you are allowed to interject at any point which made for a fun day. Topics we touched on included “Why online collections are crap, our biggest digital fundraising mistakes, gesture-based gaming and much more”.
For the rest of the week I rolled my sleeves up for a bunch of interesting stuff. I met with a researcher about trying to collaborate with the University of the West of England. Met the Apple Business team with a view to see what is involved in leasing iPads, explored digital signage (shouldn’t be this hard to find a TV stand should it!). Experimented with Shopify as an online shop, which then unravels data protection issues and careful reading of terms and conditions. I got a quick and dirty demo from a local developer of his work on augmented reality with somebody from the learning team. I am keeping an eye on as many technologies as possible as I really need to think how we can integrate digital into exhibitions and learning work.
I ended the week with a session with my boss about plans and personal development for the next six months. I like to think of the next phase of work as spinning 1001 tiny plates. Lots of things that need juggling across varying time-spans which i’m really looking forward to.
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Week 14

30th Sept – 4th Ot

An important part of this week was taking the time to listen to the team. By this I mean I sat in their environment for half a day and in between disturbing them just got to ‘listen’ to what requests came in and see a tiny bit of the detail within their roles. I think there is a lot to be gained from better understanding the fine detail within any job role – i was even jokingly offered an official polo shirt to blend in. What became clearer is what tasks I should maybe take off their plate and what other things I could delegate. One of my tasks is to clear the way for the team to work and to better allow them to contribute to the future activity across the service.

A key activity throughout the week was to join planning sessions on exhibition and service delivery for 2014-16. Much of this I can’t speak on other than to say i’m glad I can be in the mix. Related to this is my need to be thinking more about what ‘digital transformation’ might mean to us. Doing what we do now physically and merely shifting it online is only one side of the dice. I really liked reading ‘Digital innovation in the arts must be about the art‘ and will be revisiting this with the programming team. One tangible outcome was confirmation that although I can’t affect some of the exhibitions that are very well developed for the first quarter of 2014 we NEED to start tinkering around the edges. By this I mean from a technology point of view that we need to start experimenting with RFID, Raspberry Pi, sensors, data and more so that we can build up to contributing meaningfully for later in 2014.

I drafted in Stephen Gray to demo virtual reality using the Oculus Rift headset and as a result we need have 1 project idea to pursue.

I have been tasked with looking at digital signage in the foyer of the City Museum, which basically means a large TV on a stand. However said TV stand is the head-scratching part. The stand must be movable yet safe for the public who may knock/run into the TV. Somebody pointed me to the set-up at the nearby Colston hall and I think this is the kind of setup we need (photo of the tv).

What else… oh, I met a group of local partners about a project we have agreed to bid on which will really be interesting digitally if we are successful. More on that should it come off.

A final highlight was a telephone call with Kevin Bacon from Brighton Museum. We are comparable museums and so was a welcome discussion about keeping each other in the loop about our plans and working together. As my role is the only one of its kind in the service, working with similar posts elsewhere will be essential to bounce ideas and learn from others. For example I shared my draft ‘digital principles’ for feedback.

If others would like to chat then do get in touch as i’m very approachable.

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Week 13

Monday was the tail end of our holiday so the working week began on Tuesday to a mere 128 emails. The emails were largely CC messages and so were dispatched in 10 minutes. I have been making it clear to everybody that email is great but I don’t need to know everything – if you need a reply from me then send it but I don’t need ‘reference/covering’ emails. The rest of the day could be spent clearing a path for activities in October.

Tuesday and Wednesday were both used to catch up with various staff about their projects and for me to better understand some of the detail a few of our roles deal with. The devil really is in the detail and I feel the more I can understand the better for future working together.

Thursday was a social media oriented day. First I met with the Bristol Records Office to see how they run social media and where my team could be of assistance. Then I checked in on the Red Lodge as they are doing an outstanding job and have plenty of ideas for continuing over the winter. In the evening I attended “This Happened Bristol” at the Empire Theatre which had three enjoyable speakers (John Durrant, Dan Efergan, and Lizzie Ostrom) talk about past interaction projects, one of which was about smell.

On Friday I got to tinker with a small website project and had an important meeting regarding a project i’ll keep quiet about for now.

Bonus day. On Saturday I attended a raspberry pi bootcamp run by uob at the @bristol site. The event was spilt between 90min sessions on a broad range of introductory topics and some drop-in areas to ask questions and see some very interesting uses of the kit. The event had a lot of help at hand and was well attended by school children and a few oldies like me. I attended a non-pi session on using twine, a easy to use tool for making interactive if/else type stories that spits out html. I think this could be pretty handy for lightweight public facing games and stories.It was great to see kids coming to events at the weekend like I used to.

Attending local events in the evening and weekends not only helps keep me in the loop but i think is crucial for raising our service profile. I know that these things are hard for many to attend but I really hope I can convince a few others to start doing likewise.