Lab Process
December 3, 2006 – 12:01 pmA couple of accounts of the Lab process. One was sent by David Kousemaker, one of the winners from last week’s Mediaguild Lab. The other is about the last of the BBC Innovation Labs, a post by Rik Abel from Headshift I’ve only just come across.
This is what David found useful at the Lab:
- Having an excuse to put everything else on hold.
- A director/guide that points out important (yet achievable) milestones (”by tomorrow morning you should have decided on this issue to make the Lab worth your time”)
- Learning new methods to advance our concept (Tracy Currer’s user scenarios)
- Many short iteration cycles with set moments for presenting results.
- Informal setting/opportunity for dialogue
- Feedback from peers and an audience to try different angles on.
- Feedback from professionals with both patience and experience (without the kind of invested interest that ads pressure/stress)
- As it is always difficult with our own projects not to answer comments with “yes, BUT” it was great to be in an environment where other groups had similar issues. This made us both more aware of our own behavior (helped us to see how annoying / unproductive it could be) and helped us start to move past it.
- It was great to be in a situation where some one says with confidence; ‘I have a method’. Normally I tend to be quite skeptical and find it hard to continue working on a process if I don’t have faith in the outcome. During the week I found myself heading towards despair ones or twice, but concentrating on the task at hand, while keeping faith in the process really helped me out
