Rik Abel: Tag Tag Tag...

So last week I was at a BBC Innovation Labs week with my friend and Headshift colleague Al. It was fantastic. The lab was a week-long "rapid-prototyping creative workshop" event - there were ten teams from London interactive media companies working on projects which would hopefully then be 'optioned' by the BBC for further development. The methodology was to repeatedly 'pitch' your idea throughout the week, have it dismantled by the very smart and helpful mentoring team and BBC people, go back to drawing board, work out how it could be better bearing in mind the feedback, rinse and repeat. This is an extremely effective method for rapidly improving and evolving an idea from something really quite fuzzy and ill-defined (in our case "make social tagging into a game, somehow") into a viable and much more concretely thought-out product (social bookmarking and tagging for teenage kids - we know more or less how to do this, and are quite excited about what we came up with over the week).

We were both totally convinced of the value of 'personas' as a tool for really getting into the heads of your putative user, that is to say as a tool to enable empathy. This is an aspect that is often forgetten, even in so-called social software - the end users are real people, not an idealised version of yourself. By creating a believable persona you can get outside of your own head and view the product from the perspective of a user much more easily. We got quite attached to our persona, Kelly, 14, from Cricklewood...

It was inspiring to be around and to interact with so many very smart and lively and interesting (and just plain NICE) people working in the same area - this is something which should happen much more often, in my opinion - there needs to be more cross-fertilization of ideas, sharing and collective learning in our discipline - and also more 'face time' with the actual human beings who are doing this interactive media stuff. Co-opetition is the way forward, for sure.

So we pitched our project repeatedly all week, leading up to the final pitches on Friday, when Jem Stone from the BBC decided which ideas would be taken further and which wouldn't. Happily, ours was one of the ideas which he picked, hurrah! All the pitches were impressive (and I think that several were much more impressive than ours, but maybe just didn't fit with the specific BBC objectives for this lab) and I hope that everyone involved felt that the week was worthwhile - I'm sure that we all managed to get valuable work done on our ideas and that many, if not all of them, will see the light of day in some form, one day.

Speaking personally, I had the most wonderful week, it was great to meet other people in my area, to have such stimulating conversations (particular shout out to Nick from Plot for being consistently extremely interesting and giving me lots of leads to follow up...), and to drivel on about tags without my listeners eyes completely glazing over. (Erm, well, sort of).

Now we are looking forward to getting cracking on our idea and to see what we can produce in a month. We're really excited about it and couldn't have gotten where we are without the wonderful creative hothouse of the lab. Thanks to all involved and I hope we can do something similar in the near future!