Unexpected Media

Buzz in Leicester

December 7, 2007 – 3:26 pm
Spoke yesterday at a conference on Creativity:Innovation and Industry, organised by the Insititute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester. The other contributors were two academics, Professor Margaret Boden and Dr Claudia Eckert, and Toby Moores of Sleepy Dog, the company that brought us Buzz. Annoyingly I managed to read 8:00 am as 7:00 am on my watch, missed my train and missed Maggie's opening talk. I'll post more when I get a transcript but I think she discussed three kinds of creativity: combinational, exploratory and historic. I know she told me that I was wrong when in my presentation I gave the Koestler definition of 'bisociation' as the heart of any creative act. Claudia Eckhart has been studying creativity and innovation processes at Cambridge University. She compared attitudes to creativity in art and scientific or technical domains, suggesting that the term is regarded with suspicion in engineering projects ...

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Big Apple

November 28, 2007 – 12:33 pm
Originally uploaded by FrankBoyd In New York to run a workshop at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. The brief is more or less: do Crossover (normally a five day lab) in four hours. I have a feeling that this crowd, who are all from television, are going to be very sceptical.

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Muddy Boots: prototype from the 2007 Innovation Labs

November 23, 2007 – 7:56 pm
One of the projects commissioned from last year's northern Innovation Lab at Swinton Park has gone up on Rattle Research's site. "Muddy Boots is a project prototype commisioned by the BBC to investigate the ways in which social metadata can be utilised within the BBC. It's called Muddy Boots because we imagined the boots (URLs) of the great unwashed trampling over the pristine BBC carpet (News pages) :) "

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Distractions

November 21, 2007 – 11:47 am
It's the penultimate day of the two week tour with the Innovation Lab roadshow. We're at the Lowry in Salford today. It's a striking building but one in which the interior designer has been excessively liberal with the orange paint. Last week's Edinburgh event is described by Calico Jack, one of the participating companies, here. I've been a bit pre-occupied over the past few days by what appears to be a real treasure quest: the hunt for the Gold Bug. It's been designed by my friends from Coney and is linked to Punch Drunk Theatre's Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. The treasure trail clearly leads to the show and there are clues to be uncovered there but I think I've started on this too late to have much chance of solving them.

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If it’s Tuesday, it must be….

November 17, 2007 – 10:58 am
Finally a day off from the whistle-stop tour of cities to launch this year's BBC Innovation Labs. We've done events in Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle (again) so far. I decided to base the afternoon's workshop on a user-centred design exercise since that seems to have been the most valuable tool we used at the Labs last year. It seems to have made a good focus for the session; some quite good ideas and discussion have emerged from each launch day. Next week we're in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester and Cardiff. There's a good account of last year's labs written by Chris Marsh, one of theparticipants, here.

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Crossover Pitch Competition

November 15, 2007 – 1:24 pm
The final act of Crossover UK was Cross-Platform Pitch competition at the Doc/Fest in Sheffield. The whole DigiDocs strand was well attended and we had a full house for the pitches. Four of the teams which formed for the last two days of Crossover in October chose to pitch the projects that they'd worked on. All the presentations were impressive, given that people hadn't had much chance to re-rehearse since the end of the Lab but there was one clear winner. Anna Higgs of Quark Films, Tim Morgan of Mint Digital and Diarmid Scrimshaw from Warp Films had formed a team at Crossover following a dinner conversation about eating meat and at what point people might look back in amazement at the idea that we had ever thought of other animals as food. They went on to devise a project called The Museum of Our Futures which would invite the audience to ...

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Digidocs at the Doc/Fest

November 8, 2007 – 11:03 am
The Doc/Fest in Sheffield started last night with a fine documentary about Joy Division written by Jon Savage. The festival starts in earnest today. It has been transformed over the past two years, doubling its budget and the number of delegates attending.  They've also introduced a 'Digi-docs' strand looking at the impact and potential of digital media.  Unexpected Media is presenting three of these sessions, starting today with a panel on the 'new commissioners' who are looking beyond TV to publish and distribute factual content on other platforms. One of the key speakers was to have been Matt Locke of Channel 4 but he's had to pull out, leaving me to try to explain his vision and policy. Fortunately he's recently outlined some of his thinking at his illuminating blog, test.org.

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On the road again

October 30, 2007 – 11:49 am
The BBC Innovation Labs are to continue into a third year with a series of launch days scheduled for next month. They're being produced by Matt Cashmore and Morag Cartwright following Matt Locke's departure to Channel 4.  Unexpected Media will be devising and directing the process again. The intro sessions are filling up fast, so register soon if you are interested. The Labs are a great experience in many ways.

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Staggered

October 30, 2007 – 7:17 am
The Soho Project climaxed on Saturday with a live Stag hunt starting from the steps of Blake House. Weekend shoppers on Carnaby Street didn't seem unduly phased by the sight of resistance operatives attaching gold balloons to the creature's antlers.

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Played Out

October 29, 2007 – 10:56 pm
The Play/Time Lab finished on Friday with seven pitches for games. These ranged from a competition to find the best playground game in the world to a simulation of a totalitarian takeover in the UK following a terrorist attack on London. A couple of the participants in the Lab have written about it here and here.

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