Digital Adaptations – Reinventing Storytelling

Moving Targets, the knowledge exchange project I work for, gave me the opportunity a few months ago to visit Tern TV’s digital department and work with them for a while. I take the opportunity to thank Simon Meek and his team for having me there and welcoming my “I stare at you, sorry, it’s research” attitude.

I got very excited today when I started to see their project coming up on Twitter. With the department just re-branded as Digital Adaptations and still a few months ahead of its release, the marketing campaign for their adaptation of 39 Steps has started.

RE-INVENTING STORYTELLING
39 steps is a great book on its own right. But now Digital Adaptations have given to it an extra tweak to make the experience more immersive, flexible and insightful.

How?

• Context – Well the story happens in 1914, which for a reader makes it difficult to visualise how things looked like back then. If there was a word that came across the time I worked with them that was authenticity. They have worked to the greater detail researching every single object or location that appears in the book and finding original references to work with.
• Interaction – One of the features I loved the most was the exploring mode. In a book or a movie you cannot explore and interact with the objects but with digital technology you can. There are plenty of fascinating objects to discover that definitely enrich the experience.
• Flexibility – Stories aren’t absolutely linear. There is always room for some jumping around, and Digital Adaptations allows you to do so. They have carefully mapped the story so the readers can explore the book in various ways.
• Adaptability – the software takes care of you as reader, as it adjusts to your habits allowing you to follow at your own path.

BEAUTIFULLY PRESENTED
During my time at the company I had the chance of seeing the work of Paul Scott Canavan and Thomas Pollock in action. Both the artwork and the animated effects they were developing set the reader in the perfect environment for the reading.

THINGS I LOOK FORWARD TO 
When I visited the company the project was at a very early stage, so now I am looking forward to its release to:

• See how the variety of media used have been integrated with the story
• Feel the interface, especially on iPad
• and simply to experience the story in a very pioneering way

Great team, great work. Keep an eye on it!

TechMeetUp Movember 11

Yesterday I attended Movember’s @TechMeetUp in Glasgow. It was my fist time, and I loved it.
It is a great place to meet people doing amazing things, drink beer and eat pizza.

The speakers were all very interesting, but I was deeply amused by Alistair Morrison’s presentation: Mass participation mobile software trials in the “app store” age.

They are using a videogame (ios app) – Yoshi – for their research. They are distributing it through mainly through alternatives to the App-store cause it is easy to reach visibility.

Through the app they are getting tons of data – nothing that Zynga or others don’t do – but with it they are questioning the ethics of such a data collection and how it affects people.

For instance one of the trials was something similar to the following

“remember this is a university research project, we are collecting your data”
” and we believe you mostly play here”
 and after asked them how concern/happy they were about it.

Even more interesting than the users’ responses was the changes on their behaviour; and how the people who replied “very worried” were too engaged with the game as to give it up.

Other interesting points were

• The undefinition of user. What can you consider a user? someone who plays once, someone who plays twice a week or someone who plays three times a day?
• Behaviour patterns: getting to the point of splitting the videogames in two. For those who enjoy mechanics type A and for those who enjoy mechanics type B. I also wondered if at the point you have some clustering of users, the quantity of data analysed could be reduced  by defining different guidelines for data collection depending on the user.
• Further engagement on evaluation: They involved people in online user feedback through in-game rewards , tried telephone interviewing but only got the less than 10 very very very keen users. Plus audiences are global and they struggled with the language.

I think the work they are doing is brilliant and their insights could easily be translated into guidelines for both policy makers and apps’ developers.

Tailoring activities: Co-design and MiniSurvey

I have started designing the activities for next Moving Target’s workshop on “New Models for Audience Engagement”.

We work with a wide variety of media companies working on different sectors and therefore their needs and relationships with their audiences or users are very different.

We want the workshop to be equally useful for all of them by tailoring the activities to everybody’s needs. So we have started co-designing the activities involving various sectors.

Otherwise we have also created a very short survey in order to get insight in what differentiates each sector as well as the common needs and barriers they are facing.
It’s results will be posted once the workshop is finished.

So, if you work in any kind of media, we have 4 questions to make you!
We would really appreciate your help.

Cheers in advance :)

 

Discussing the Panel

For our next workshop we thought it would be a good idea to have a panel to discuss emerging models for audience engagement.

And as with anything else, we took a very visual approach to it.

We started by visualising with speech bubbles, what things we would like the panel and attendees to debate, discuss and wonder about.

And then we thought we would need to create the right atmosphere to generate debate and get our attendees and speakers’ brains working early in the morning. So we brainstormed about discussion provokers.

 Amongst them we decided on having wee presentations by the panelists, for which we clustered and narrowed down the topics for discussion to four.

But I am especially excited about one of the discussion provokers. And i am excited because I have no yet a clue of what shape it will take…

In my head this looks like some kind of provocative mood-board formed by pictures, drawings and words – simultaneously growing with the debate – and which would represent the discussion and enhance further thinking by visual provocation.

Any suggestions on how to translate that into a tangible outcome for the workshop?

Pre-workshop

At the moment I am starting to design next Moving Target’s workshop which will debate New Models for Audience Engagement/Involvement.

As service designer I can’t help it to think about the workshop as a whole experience and start by laying out the journey of the attendees from far before the event itself.

Despite of having organised a few workshops… I had never visualised the journey since the very beginning: when people become aware of the event – and I realised a step I have always missed but can make a nice difference for the attendees.
Usually, the selection of the starting time of a workshop is made randomly. A sort of “it sounds like a reasonable time”.
But why not to check the train schedules of the main cities your attendees will be coming from to make sure they don’t have to come too early or be in a rush?
I would say it is very little effort in comparison to the benefits for the attendees…

Market research = marketing?

I have lately noticed that many companies understand market research as a mean to inform their marketing strategy. Wrong.

Market research is the mean to understand your possible users/buyers and inform the decisions made during the design process.

In simple terms:
Great idea + development = Good outcome + no demand = waste of time
Great idea + market research = redesign + development = Better outcome + demand = Business

The point of doing market research is to understand the market and your possible users in advance.
Market research is aimed at answering questions such as:
- Is there something similar in the market already?
- Which are our competitors Unique Selling Points (USPs)?
- What are they doing wrong? What are their customers unhappy with?
- Can we do it better or contribute with something new?
- What is the demand for our product/service?
- Who are those that will engage with our product? Why would they pick us and not our competitors? Can we improve their experience?

I wouldn’t start putting money and time into a project, until I have all of those answered. It would be then when I would start thinking about marketing strategy, and make sure I have answer for the next set of questions:
- Where are our customers?
- How can we better reach them?
- What do our competitors do to engage with them?

So as a quick summary, market research can also inform your marketing strategy, but it won’t magically sell your product or service unless it satisfies the first set of questions.

Creativity and Business

My job allows me to visit many different companies and meet very diverse people working in the Creative Industries. I love it. Every conversation I have opens up a new bunch of issues for me to explore.

Lately there is a recurrent topic coming up and that is:
the difficulty of growing creative businesses.

Starting up a company is not easy. Passing from concept to implementation is always a struggle. It requires a lot of energy and support, founding and a good network to start with.

But growing is also tough, even if you have the potential for it.
I have gathered here a few questions that I’ve found more interesting and relevant:

I start from the premises that: most of creative companies are founded by creative people.

WHERE TO FOCUS
The difficulty when growing is that there are too many things to look at:

• the commercial side: networking, social media, finding new clients
• management: making sure you have the required resources and making the best of them
• creation: as creatives, founders must and want to have input in the concept
• implementation: if the resources are limited, founders may also have to work making the stuff happen

And now the big question is: what to leave on others’ hands?

HOW BIG CAN WE GO? OVERWHELMED BY WORK
In crisis times we don’t want to turn down any opportunity. But can we cope with all?
Getting more work does not always entail having the possibility of hiring more people.

MANAGING SIMULTANEOUS PROJECTS
Creative companies usually work on more than one project at the same time, which with limited resources  is tough to manage. Prioritising tasks, resources and time management are key jobs.
At what point of the growing process does the company need a project manager, someone whose only job is to organise and coordinate the work?

THE VALUE OF CREATIVITY
For some reason creativity is usually undervalued, especially if it doesn’t have a tangible outcome. And it is difficult to value externally (how much to charge) and internally (how much to pay the employees).
Small creative companies usually have very variable income, but it depends on each project taken. Therefore it is more difficult to establish salaries as you don’t really know how much money the company will be making in 4 months.

CONCEPT VS IMPLEMENTATION
The outcome usually requires of some kind of technology. And here the battle starts. For some reason it seems that technology and creativity struggle to communicate. So how to find the middle ground?

BALANCING BUDGET
The same sort of battle happens between money and creativity.
Creativity doesn’t have limits. We can go with ideas as far as we want. It is always unfinished: we can always do it better and it can always be improved. Unfortunately budget, timing and resources have a limit. If the company goes far over that limit, they could end up paying dearly for it.

COMPANY STRUCTURE: SKILLS OR PEOPLE?
I have seen a few different ways of structuring small creative companies, but I haven’t quite yet made up my mind on which one works better.
There is one that specially calls my attention, and that’s what I call Skills Based:
Each project has a different team. Only the creative and project-administrative managers are a constant. The concept-implementation bit is made by a new team each project.

That format brings to me so many questions: Do we have a good system to help freelancers to find the right projects/companies and vice versa? Or does it only rely on recruitment agencies and personal networking skills? Could it be made easier?

All these are things I would like to explore within the framework of Moving Targets (@MT_Scotland), so if you have any tips, insights or issues to contribute with, give as a shout!  I’ll be more than happy to have a chat and learn from your experience.  :)
@artmadillo