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This week I'm trying out a slightly different format for the notes. I've had brief summaries from the main teams and projects, a couple of personal items from people, and then some more in depth context from the Devices Team.

Stories Team

The big piece of work this week is preparation for launch of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Front web application on next week. Malin and Andrew have been planning usability testing, which took place earlier this week in Broadcasting House. Zillah's been recruiting people for this and ensuring various things and people are ready for launch. James and Richard, our freelancer developers, have been working extremely hard to get most of the prototype working correctly for the user testing.

Ciaran, from the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Front programme team, was introduced to the working prototype and the StoryArc CMS and started checking and correcting data.

Michael's been managing the bug list for StoryArc. Tristan has been quality checking, bug testing, Trello wrangling and writing an intro blog post.

And for the next stage, Malin's been working with the user research company to confirm the brief and recruitment profile for an in-depth study in a few weeks' time.

Content Team

Tom, Barbara and Ant have been been preparing for the Eurovison joint sprint (of which more below): Tom's been analysing tweets and doing lots of research around the various apps and websites available. Ant and Tom attended a prototyping workshop on Atom News, while AndrewW and Barbara have been putting together a requirements doc from user testing for Atom News with Malin, which will help them iterate the next stage of prototyping.

Ant attended the Google IO event in London.

Denise has been researching emerging technologies including bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.

Data Team

Chrissy went to the in Shoreditch last week, joining Connected Studio in a team with Miles Bernie and Mark Langton. Jiri also attended.

James built a system using and to harvest tweets during Eurovision, it should be reusable for next year. James is also now a qualified drone pilot now, as he's passed the

We delivered 10K programmes to use as new training data for the Kaldi speech to text system we've been colleborating on. We have also built a pre-compiled Debian package for the core of Kaldi. This gets us some way to having an easy to install and use system and we'll be further testing it with Â鶹ԼÅÄ news this sprint.

Discovery Team

Jiri was a panelist at the discussing how to design just-in-time location-triggered interactions that would be actually helpful and that wouldn’t just spam people with countless offers and notifications.

Thomas organised and attended - a conference about well-being in the Web industry, with emphasis on creativity, awareness and experience. Thomas was also speaking about ‘An end to end modular architecture at the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’ at the Conference in Nantes.

David attended the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s - our aim to transition to a quicker and more efficient production process.

Chris Newell has been preparing for a new MSc student project, in a collaboration with the at UCL. The project will explore the use of for the classification of news articles.

Devices Team

Eurovision joint sprint preparation

The Devices team is doing a joint sprint with the Content team for the next two weeks. We’ll be working on a user-centred approach to creating really interesting new multi-screen and multi-device Eurovision Song Contest experiences. This is as input to the MediaScape project, but if it’s successful we will try to get ideas built for next year's Eurovision.

The timing of this sprint is planned so that we have the Eurovision event fresh in our minds and those of our user testers as we start the work. We’ve chosen Eurovision because it’s a fun event where millions of people throughout Europe use multiple devices while watching TV to interact with each other, making it perfect for our MediaScape usecases. We’re also able to use the content in various interesting ways, which for many events (sport for example) wouldn’t be possible.

We’ve been preparing for the joint sprint by:

• Analysing the current user experience, planning user research - including designing and evaluating an online questionnaire with fans, applications, channels (TV and Radio, Red button, applications, social media); seeing what data and content is available and making sure we have access to it
• Recruiting participants who’ll help us evaluate ideas that we have in the next two weeks. Participants have completed a questionnaire about their Eurovision, another group will come into the office during the Joint Sprint to evaluate our early ideas and concepts.
• Doing background research on Eurovision
• Planning the schedule and activities

MediaScape

The Eurovision work will feed into MediaScape, our EU-funded project. Dan’s additionally been looking into what it would take to make compatible with the original Go version.

W3C

Chris is continuing to look into the W3C’s TV Control API, looking in particular at integration of broadcast audio and video sources into HTML, via the <audio> and <video> elements. He also met with Olivier, Andrew McP, Matt Hammond and Nigel Megitt to update each other on the current state of their work at W3C, and see if there are any gaps that need covering. Currently Chris is involved in the Web and TV Interest Group and the TV API community group; Matt’s in the second screen presentation Working Group and Nigel is in Timed Text Working Group.

Cross Platform Authentication

Chris and Joanne have been preparing for their UCL student project investigating the user experience of entering pairing code. The student project will evaluate and test the optimum type and number of characters for pin and pair type authentication systems such as CPA (should it be numeric? textual? upper / lower case? how long?). Chris has written a document explaining the technical and security considerations that determine the required complexity of the pairing code.

Wifi design

Earlier in the year, Joanne used a ‘Wizard of Oz” application as a way to analyse the user experience of a setting up a device to get it on a wifi network. This is a probably the biggest problem for devices that need to be on a wifi network, and is particularly difficult with devices that have a minimal user interface. It’s a common problem for “Internet of Things” devices - especially cheap devices with no screen.

Joanne tested a sequence of lights and sounds on a Radiodan implementation with kindly volunteers in order to analyse whether the cues they were being given as to the state of the device were understandable and clear. This is potentially important work for IoT devices, but is also highly relevant to media devices such as hybrid radios and Chromecast-like devices.

This sprint, Dan and Joanne worked with Diego to turn the results of the wifi trials earlier in the year to create new designs that fit the recommendations, while Libby’s been drafting a blog post based on Joanne’s documents to contextualise the process and results.

Bristol Mini Maker Faire

Libby has been using her 10% time to help with the organisation and promotion of the which will take place on 22nd August at At-Bristol, and is highly relevant to the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s goals of encouraging Digital Creativity in the Â鶹ԼÅÄ and more widely. Recently she met with the organiser Ruth Murray and Bristol Hackspace representatives for planning meetings and “” (minimal, cheap, do-it-yourself drawing robot) workshop preparation.

Crafting and Creativity with UCL

We have been working with at UCL on a future “crafting and creativity” workshop. Dan and Libby spent some time looking at Andrew’s Sensorama code and testing some Espruinos.

Andrew’s been writing the ‘Sensorama’ application running on top of Radiodan that will allow people unfamiliar with code to drag and drop symbolic inputs and outputs in a web page to program a physical Radiodan to play different sounds when different inputs are touched. The idea is that they’ll be able to make an installation out of, say, conductive clay, or wire, or paint, personalise and configure it easily, and then play different sounds by interacting with it.

We’re using for this - at Andrew’s suggestion - because they are cheap Arduino-like boards with a Chrome-app application interface - and you use javascript to programme it.

In August we’ll do a workshop with Nic and Steven from UClic, working with small groups of users to look at research questions around creativity, reappropriation and personalisation under constraints, and perhaps also thinking through making. It’s terrific to work with such enthusiastic, talented and creative people, and of course it’s great to build up partnerships with UCL and others. And it’s brilliant how flexible Radiodan is for these kinds of applications.

Radiodan

Talking of Radiodan, we’ve been wondering how best to summarise the work so far, given that it’s been such a generative project - leading to the Walls Have Eyes collaboration with North Lab for Mozfest and the Design Museum, the collaboration with UClic, the work analysing wifi user experience, the early MediaScape prototype, the hundreds of postcards (which we have displayed in the office), Dan’s work with Connected Studio in South Africa, Andrew’s two-line-display radio authentication implementation, and other potential applications within Radio and Music.

Dan and Libby have started a document working out which pieces of Radiodan - pieces of code, and also conceptual components or ideas - might be reusable in other projects. We’ll continue to work on this while we decide the best direction to take the Radiodan project in.

Interesting links

Marty Cagan’s
Project Soli -
Mad Max -
by Jon Rogers at Product Research Studio
by Neal Stephenson from 1996.