technogoggles

My youngest son, who is 6, said to me, “I want to show you my Busy Book”. “What’s your Busy Book?” I said. “It’s for half work and half not. I’ve got some drawings in there and some maths.” I love the half not bit.

Apparently the teacher gives them a notebook at the start of the term and says that they can use this when they’ve done all their other work. As most teachers do. But the thing that’s brilliant is that she calls it their Busy Book and so it’s the thing that they put all their busy-ness in.

So I got my own.

New places open your eyes. I went to Bethnal Green and this is what I saw. Mostly big stuff, monsters.

As of today I’m going to be lecturing in Design part-time at Hallam University in Sheffield. It’s two days a week of something that I tasted last year as an associate lecturer and I enjoyed. There are a few things that have led to this decision:

1. Learning and being creative. Tom Stafford recommended a book to me last year, Impro. It’s about engaging people and using the techniques of improvisation to be creative. It’s a brilliant book that led me to other resources about how to get people working and thinking creatively, some of which I used in my lectures last year. I want to experiment with other strategies to try and become a good teacher, hopefully influencing some students to learn effectively in that way that some of the best teachers I had helped me to learn and think critically (thanks, Mike Smith and Prof. Adam Tickle). And I’m also fascinated by doing design, by strategies that help us to invent ways to make us act and think differently (“cultural invention“) and having admired the work of people like Anne Galloway who embrace the possibilities of new technologies in academia, this job will hopefully give me space to think about design in a way that running businesses on a day-to-day basis doesn’t.
2. Higher Education. I tweeted a while ago that Higher Education “was screwed” and I have good reason to think that large swathes of HE are indeed screwed (applications for degrees are down this year by approximately 8% and art and design courses by double that), not only because they are becoming expensive and less relevant to employability and consequently offer less future value, but because top down approaches to innovation in large institutions is really really hard. However, I think this is possibly  the most exciting time to be in HE because of the challenges it faces. There are more opportunities to be radical at a departmental level and I’d like to be involved in radical things, things that DEMOS started to talk about in their excellent paper The Edgeless University. One thing in particular I’m keen to explore is how a student body could, with support from a University / mentors, run a business as a co-operative or social enterprise where they offer design services to clients and learn by doing. It’s raw, but I believe a potentially more risky, more exciting and more rewarding way to learn.
3. Branching out. David Hieatt, the chap behind howies and now Hiut Denim ran a course earlier this summer about business. It had quite a profound effect on me. He talked with real conviction about the things necessary to make good businesses. This included the importance of looking after yourself and one of the many references he drew on was Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I found it liberating. And I realised that having run a couple of businesses (in Rattle and Folksy) for the last six years I had forgotten about looking after me and what I wanted. Taking this job is part of looking after me; satisfying that bit of me that wants to teach and research whilst still having a hand in the businesses.

This post is about a strand of work I’ve been doing at Rattle which attempts to tell stories about the BBC from the data mined in subtitles and is to compliment the post written by BBC R&D “From Channelography and beyond“.

Way back in 2009 we kicked off a project for BBC R&D which looked at taking BBC subtitle data and seeing what these subtitles could tell us about BBC TV output. It was a data research project with the aim of seeing if subtitle data could be mined effectively and if that resulting mined data was of any value.

The project was called Channelography (@channelography) and has only basic styling (we call it an alpha to manage expectations, but people stlll expect an R&D project to be beautiful!). To mine the data we use a service we built called Muddy, which we’re in the process of simplifying and open sourcing, to extract terms and match them to a controlled vocabulary of things. This controlled vocabulary is based on Wikipedia, which has over three and a half million articles (things) for us to match to.

This alpha project highlighted a few things:

1. Approximately 58% of programmes have subtitles, so this is the majority, but by no means all.
2. The quality of data in pre-recorded programmes (where subtitles can be done in advance) is superior to live programmes – so in news, for example, there are far more incorrect spellings and even words.
3. Children’s programming throws up far more false positives as the subtitles tend to use similar phonetic words to the sounds made and the character names used, you know, weird stuff!

The data itself showed for the first time, the number of mentions of people, places and events on BBC TV by channel, genre, format and also programme brand. (Data methodology point: We only take one mention per show of an entity. We chose to do this to remove the bias toward things mentioned in programmes with a specific current affairs remit.)

Here is Elton John, so far mentioned 207 times on BBC TV since we’ve been collecting the data (Since Sept 2009):

And when we dig down we see Elton the recent programmes he was shown in…

And then the specific mentions in those shows, and in this example, Mastermind:

You can also see number of shows and repeats per channel, for example in March BBC2 had 1341 broadcasts of which 445 were new programmes. This compared with 1018 broadcasts on BBC1 of which 770 were new.

So, it stimulates our curiosity about programming and content and ultimately what the BBC presents.

Later in 2010 the BBC commissioned us to take this further and present a dashboard of this data, ‘slices’ of the data presented in ways to engage an audience. The audience for this was mainly BBC management. And so we created two dashboard views on the data. This was the first:

In doing the information design our principal heuristics were that the time periods should fit with people’s understanding of “TV Time” and also that information should be interesting without us having to rely on the data to deliver the story. In practice this meant choosing things like “number of films this week versus last week” and curating mentions of companies that were well known (banks, oil companies, social networks and consumer electronics companies). In short we provided the narrative framework to drop the data in to. We weren’t too happy with version 1 initially. It felt too fussy and didn’t give the impression of being a dashboard, something conveying authority and power.

The second attempt was influenced by Russell Davies’ talk at Playful in 2009 and in particular the idea that pretending is an important to create an emotional connection with users. Help people to believe that they’re in charge of a nuclear submarine, even though it’s just their email client. That kind of thing.

It feels a bit more like a dashboard should do, although actually many people prefer the first iteration. Ideally we’d like to have had as the design brief “The Director General’s Dashboard” complete with Defcon style warnings for when repeats hit a certain level or when mentions of D list celebs starts to climb. That would be neat. Who wouldn’t want to be the DG!

(You can grab the archive of daily dashboard views on the Channelography Flickr stream).

From this work, we became increasingly interested about how you could tell stories with data and so the BBC commissioned us to produce an annual of BBC TV for 2010, told through subtitle data as well as other data that is available from the iPlayer feeds (such as repeats). We created this as a printed, concertina document, intended as a Pocket Guide. This format was used as we wanted BBC management, who are generally busy people, to have something they could share and show amongst others, over a coffee. The material document somehow made this R&D concept more accessible. The BBC 2010 Annual can be viewed online, here.

There were two key design challenges in the production of the annual. The first was to show the year, the sense of movement throughout the year, together with macroscopic views into particular domains, such as “opportunities to view”, mentions of place etc. We did this by providing a timeline of key programmes and events. The second design challenge was to provide meaningful stories from the data for the eleven panels. We chose to design for things that would be inherently interesting regardless of the data. This brute-force approach helped to save time (limited on this two week project!) but in adpoting this approach we potentially missed some of the patterns in the data.

Here are some examples of the panels.

Dead Yet Alive – Top 5 historical figures by mention on BBC TV (together with a sample of their appearance in subtitles):

Company mentions correlated with share price

Repeats Opportunities to view

Head to head mentions

I think this is my favourite. It’s easy to understand and taps into a desire to want to have winners and losers.

So, in a little under two years we took an interest in data and started to explore what you could say about the BBC from subtitles. The answer is you can say quite a lot and you can start to infer things about the BBC and the data such as that Afganistan featured more prominently in the news in 2010 than Iraq and that Jamie Oliver is more popular than Gordon Ramsay.

Where’s the (public service) value?

There are different potential sources of value in this data and in using this data like we have. The first is navigation. Describing content more effectively for it to be indexed, allowing people to get to content, and discrete bits of content, for example the mention of Elton John in Mastermind, above (and providing the show is available to watch via iPlayer), which might be relevant to someone looking up Elton John in BBC Music pages. We get a heap of emails from people researching particular people and who come across Channelography as it places so well in SEO; most of them look to correct particular factual errors they’ve seen or see if we have contact information! Currently BBC shows only have a description that is indexed and not the subtitle or associated subtitle metadata so subtitle data would be incredibly useful to boost the SEO of programme and iPlayer pages.

Secondly, there is potential business value in aggregating the data to know what the organisation is putting out, when, especially when combined with other sources such as the Guardian API, you might start to get a sense of how news events were covered.

Thirdly, there is the storytelling. How different people appear together or cluster and how over time the data could become a way to tell stories around content and as a proxy for British culture more generally and the things that pre-occupy us, for example how Victorian drama is replaced by Edwardian or how Shakespeare’s influence ebbs and flows, all hugely interesting and only do-able when you have data available on this scale by a media organisation as central to the culture of a nation as the BBC (PBS, for all it’s excellent work doesn’t have nearly the reach or the scale in the US the BBC has on the UK).

Next steps

We’re hoping to do the same for radio as we’ve done for TV, utilising speech to text. Radio has had something of a resurgence in recent years and yet it still remains hard to search across. Storytelling the Archers (for you folk over the pond the Archers is a British institution, and the longest running soap opera ever) through themes would be awesome! We’re also hoping to extend our work in visualising information to create a more useful dashboard, perhaps with a bit more pretending built in.

If you’ve got any questions about this work do get in touch via Rattle. Thanks.

A diagram of cause and effect where the concept of risk is implicit; a lovely way to sell investments as it brings out the game and sense of play. It would be interesting to draw out news events in a similar fashion, rather than most of the infographics produced for news, which more-often-than-not don’t tell a story, but help interpret a system.

Chromaroma tries to facilitate a game-like behaviour on traveling from one part of London to another, something that you’re able to affect only to a limited degree (you’re dependent more on the transport network). It tries to do this by focusing on teams as much as individuals and in this sense it runs up against existing embdeed behaviour, which just doesn’t work like that. Skiing on the other hand tends to be done in small groups, or teams, you decide where to ski and more-often-than-not there’s a value in getting down the pistes as quickly as you can. Moreover, there’s a social value in seeing your activity in map form, with stories about where you went, who was quickest (and slowest), distance traveled and check-ins to hard pistes (via the chairlift or bubble or poma) being a principle way in which your peer group story their vacation. A beautiful dashboard of yours and your groups activity would be social object gold.

Because of the sparcity of information and the social value inherent in knowing, a version of Chromaroma in ski reports could effect behaviour change, by driving people to under-utilised pistes, improve on times taken to make it down a piste, or perhaps just see where you’ve been. It’s basically supporting the inherent gameiness of the group sport. And as the industry is estimated to be worth around 6 billion Euros annually in France alone, you can see potential for local classified revenue through the game, “beat today’s distance traveled on the Lac Bleau piste and win lunch at La Raclette”.

Designing around existing behaviour and values is easier than trying to create them anew. Just a thought.

I did a talk at Interesting North back in November 2010 on my favourite two subjects; cities and bikes. Here it is:

James Boardwell from Interesting North on Vimeo.

“To create successful animation, you must understand why an object moves before you can figure out how it should move. Character animation isn’t the fact that an object looks like a character or has a face or hands. Character animation is when an object moves like it is alive, when it looks like it is thinking and all of its movements are generated by its own thought process. It is the change of shape that shows that a character is thinking. It is the thinking that gives the illusion of life. It is the life that gives meaning to the expression. As Saint-Exupéry wrote, “It’s not the eyes, but the glance – not the lips, but the smile… “John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, from his Siggraph course on animation.

I’ve been thinking about how technologies manage our attention a lot recently, and I’ve found this quote from John Lasseter and particularly the reference to Saint-Exupéry helpful in designing technologies and interfaces that are more attention aware.

We’ve been stuck in a phase of designing ‘shouty’ things, things that don’t take into account how contexts change, and that our attention shouldn’t be assumed. Technologies have been designed, in large part, around having our sole attention, anytime, anywhere, when, this full-attention mode is actually the exception rather than the rule. The side effects of this are that we struggle to find strategies to manage our attention, creating what has been term an “attention deficit”, an inability to focus or “continuous partial attention”. Heavy users of email, Twitter and Facebook are no strangers to such poverty of attention and notification services like Growl only heighten this now, now, now design imperative.

An economy of gestures by “users” is well understood now, and gaining widespread adoption (‘swipe’) mainly thanks to Apple, but technologies haven’t been so good at their own gestures, at ways of feeding back. Sound sensitive car stereos that change volume depending on ambient noise and / or if you take a call, is one fairly mainstream example of a context sensitive feedback loop. But I’ve struggled to find examples of software doing this. It’s either “on” or “off”, full power or no power, all your attention or none. Using human gestures we’re programmed to understand, such as a ‘glance’ or eye-contact when talking, provide possible cues to design. Creating focal points which change the more we engage with an application, perhaps? Creating friction in the form of delays to an app responding after it’s been left for a long time, or perhaps if it is continuously opened that mimic the kind of responses we’d get from social contact could create more useful ways to manage attention. To return to the original quote, maybe we’re focusing on the lips, the UI, when we should, perhaps, be looking at the smile.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

One of the things we’re doing at Rattle are once a month ‘hackdays’. We’re doing hackdays to rapid prototype ideas we have, learn new technologies and have some fun.  Previous hackdays have produced things like Wordr, Social Scoreboards, Pretend Fan, Open Plaques and the Job Box.  This month we created We Watch: a way to see what your friends’ are watching on the telly tonight. You’re probably coming here having played with the web app. If not then it’s probably worthwhile doing that first.

This post sketches out our design process and thinking on this mini-project.

The Itch

To find out, at a glance, what’s on telly tonight and what other people are watching.

Context: The Living Room Problem

There are a heap of people innovating in this space, trying to create more sociality around media consumption, and yet the living room is still a loosely coupled set of technologies. We don’t see that changing for a while, mainly because of our learnt behaviours and perceptions about this space. Rather we think the way to join up our experience is through existing lightweight solutions (why try to force new behaviours through a TV?) that build on second screen use.

The Use Case

Assumptions We Made

• The TV schedule is still an important means by which people structure time and what they watch, and especially tonight’s TV.
• Original programming is more likely to create “appointment to view” behaviour than repeats (with the possible exception of repeats of classic programmes on Christmas Day).
• Watercooler moments happen more with programmes with stronger “appointment to view” behaviour.
• Twitter enables us to flag shared TV experiences in appropriate, lightweight fashion, through second screen behaviour.
• Intention to view is just as important for recommending programmes, as actual consumption.
• Having original TV programming you can consume at a glance is useful when faced with the paradox of choice the modern EPG presents us with (both on TV and also in daily newspapers).

These assumption are based on past research we’ve done as well as anecdotal accounts we’ve heard and documented. But they are also, essentially, what we’re concept testing with We Watch.

Why “Intending To Watch”?

This behaviour borrows from the “like” behaviour on Facebook, that is to say it’s not intended to convey anything other than “I would like to watch this”, much as “like” says “I like this”, and not “i’ve bought one of these or I’ve been to this place” etc.  The intention to watch has been practised for years by people circling programmes in listing guides:

Our belief is that this ‘circling’ has value, and acts as a flag to others to consider watching it. And like all good recommendation engines, this is not based on altruism but rather is based on selfishness: the tool is first and foremost useful to you and then in turn it becomes useful to others.

Many recommendation engines are based on the premise that you actually ‘consume’ media. However, this requires effort: you have to actually watch the media! Metabroadcast’s Test Tube Telly project was based on people having consumed the programme and then recommending it.  But for original programmes upcoming on TV tonight you can’t have seen them, so you can’t recommend them. So, how to create a useful service for finding worthwhile things on telly to watch?  We think “Intention to View” is good enough.

Now plenty of other services capture intentions to view, not least the Sky (or Freeview) EPG and it’s bookmark service which reminds you when a programme is about to start. But the Sky EPG doesn’t support viewing “at a glance” and it presumes you’ve already sat down and decided to stay in tonight to watch TV. When actually many people look at the TV guide in advance to decide what, if anything, is worth watching. Pushing back from the ‘now’ toward the future is something that enables sociality, and planned social TV experiences. This got me interested in time…

Structuring ‘Time’

Matt Jones in his talk All The Time In The World highlights the importance of time in designing experiences and, crucially, how time is culturally constructed. He uses the light cone to show an observer’s relationship to space time and how there is no ‘now’, ‘now’ is constructed, from the different measures of when ‘now’ is to the events that now essentially refers to. Rather than perpetuate linear time, Matt and the Dopplr team, sought to work with cultural time and “create a system that increased the happy little co-incidences in your life as you travel through the world”. I like that.

And with We Watch we aimed to create a similar effect, happy coincidences.  TV is different from travel but the principle of increasing the coincidences in the future are the same. So, with We Watch we aim to show what friends and strangers are planning to watch, to enable you to act on those coincidencies, through discussing the programme with them during or after transmission.  As we know from using Dopplr, few plans actually result in a meeting with a friend or contact (in my case one), but can lead to a stronger sense of relatedness and social cohesion.

If We Could Have…

This web app was done in a day (and a bit).  And is intended as a proof of concept.  Of course there are lots of things we’d love to do including:

• Have a more comprehensive broadcaster / programme catalogue (We Watch only uses BBC programme data as other terrestrial and digital TV data has rights issues preventing their reproduction).
• Improve Twitter integration: add a background job where we decouple the retrieval of friends from the main Rails process and then use an ajax progress updater to indicate friends retrieval progress on being returned from Twitter.
• Enable you to save programmes you plan to watch as calendar events (e.g. iCal files).
• Have a page per ‘user’ to see all the programmes they planned to watch as an archive.
• Experiment with other ways to promote programmes based on past decisions (e.g. by TV strand like Storyville, or programme brand or director e.g. Adam Curtis) or popularity (geography e.g. “Popular in Sheffield” or friends of friends).

If you have any suggestions of what you’d like to see or just want to tell us what you think of it do please let us know via @we_watch

Next

We review feedback from people using it and market viability in the New Year and based on this we’ll decide whether to make it into a proper product.