‘Design process’ category

I’ve been talking about the BBC Innovation Lab for several days now, and I realised I still haven’t properly explained how it works. So now I will.

The first stage is soliciting applications in a short, structured, text-only format. No fancy visuals, no investment in eye-candy, no false promises.

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At the end of Part 2, I asked a question which I failed to answer. "Could these self-conscious innovation processes ever take hold in the television world?" To address it we need to know a little more about the people involved in the Lab. (more…)

The second way in which the Innovation Labs were a good thing (see Part 1 was that they were a self-conscious attempt at a better creative process. Ever started a new job and wondered – why the hell do they do things like this? It’s crazy! You can see so many ways to improve processes. And then the outrage starts to fade as you get on with the job, and six weeks in you’re just like everybody else.

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At the end of March 2007, I was invited to the BBC Innovation Lab. The basic idea behind the Lab is to give independent producers the chance to pitch their experimental new media ideas to BBC Commissioners. More than that, though, it’s a workshop in user-centred design which has tried to set best practices for developing innovative ideas.

I think it’s a very exciting development for a number of reasons. Firstly, it tells us how the BBC sees itself. It used to be a broadcaster – radio, then TV. Forty years later the Web came along, and the Corporation kept quiet while its worker bees found interesting ways to apply it to their programmes. And when it was finally challenged, the BBC said something like, “Yes, we’re making websites. They’re for our TV programmes. It’s like leaflets. We’ve been doing leaflets for years. Nothing to worry about.”

But things are different now. Everybody knows websites aren’t like leaflets any more. And what the BBC is doing, quietly, but clearly, is saying – we’re not a broadcaster any more. We are a medium and a means – and we aim to weave the media fabric of this society.

Here’s an example: children on a school trip, heading to Whipsnade Zoo. They pile out and head to the bear enclosure. Grabbing their phones, they photograph a barcode next to the enclosure, and the next moment they see David Attenborough talking about the bears, and see the bears in the wild, on their phones.

Is this what a public service media agency in the 21C should be doing? Absolutely. Is it broadcasting? Clearly not. It’s something else, and that something else could be almost anything. And so how do you find those other things you don’t know you want? You start an Innovation Lab.

We successfully pitched to attend the BBC Innovation Lab in 2007, and it was a great experience. I wrote a few posts about it back then, and in the light of 4IP they seemed worth posting again. They’ll appear over the next few days.

If you are thinking about commissioning work on your existing or new website, you’re going to want to write a brief to give to your developer/designer at some point so they know what you want. Here are some topics to get you thinking in the right direction and help you do just that.

What do you need a website for?

It may sound like a daft question, but it is at the top of the list for good reason. Even if you have an existing website, ask yourself the same question again. What do you need it to do for you? What are your short and long-term business goals? Do you need to raise awareness of your product? Increase sales by widening your audience? Get your brand message across to a new audience? Once you’ve really know what it needs to do, we can start to think about how we can achieve it… This question will help us define what the key design and functionality needs to be.

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We call ourselves interactive designers. What exactly do we mean by that and why should you care?

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Five simple steps to designing grid systems – Part 1 : Journal : Mark Boulton