cityofsound

IDEA conference, Seattle

In a week's time, I'll be speaking at the IDEA conference in Seattle. Organised by the formidable Peter Merholz, the conference has a great theme, with a nicely multidisciplinary set of speakers. As Peter puts it: "practicing designers from a range of backgrounds discussing their various approaches at helping manage a world of information overload." An honourable intention indeed. Here's the IDEA Vision Statement:

"Throughout their days, people are engaging with complex information to manage their lives. And designers now realize that information isn't simply this stuff you find -- the appropriate presentation of information helps people make sense of the world around them. This conference addresses issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where "cyberspace" is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes. This conference brings together people who are addressing these challenges head on. Speakers from a variety of backgrounds will discuss designing complex information spaces in the physical and virtual worlds."

I'll be attempting to summarise thoughts from a few personal interests, dissolving the thinking from my recent Aula presentation in essence of 'new musical experiences'. Here's my abstract,

"Drawing from work in both strategic and operational areas at the BBC in London, I'll explore some of the ways big media companies are approaching the new media landscape. Far from being marginalised by Web 2.0-style operations, I'll argue that broadcast media can be reinvented to take advantage of both its traditional strengths and the new environment it finds itself in. I'll highlight the course we're plotting between between the top-down, fully-articulated, designed, broadcast models and the fully-participative, emergent, vernacular, open-ended, networked models. Essentially believing there is some value in both, and lots in their potential fusion. This will include examples of strategic work defining the design and navigation principles around the next generation BBC website as well as tactical steps towards this, drawn from interactive products and services made at BBC Radio & Music. This will include using hosting music festivals in Second Life, explorations of 'Lost' mapped onto graphical scores, spurious relationships between urban planning and designing media systems and tricks for getting design 'into the boardroom'."

I'll be looking forward to seeing Jake Barton again, and meeting quite a few others. (Do say hello if you're there.). It's a great program: Michel Migurski's stuff at Stamen always looks fascinating, there's a panel on libraries with Deborah Jacobs, Linda 'continuous partial attention' Stone, and I'm keen to hear what David Guiney has to say about design work for the National Park Service.

The conference is at the Seattle Public Library, which I'm very excited about. It's a cracking building. I saw it briefly in 2005, and am looking forward to doing a sort of informal 'post-occupancy evaluation' on it. It'll be interesting to see how much vernacular 'wayshowing' has been added to the building.

Calling All Nations

Of course, for all the fine talk of gleaming modernity here, I can't resist nostalgia sometimes. So, regard this public information booklet on the BBC World Service, produced during WWII. Many varied publications were issued by government-backed stationers, aimed at explaining the war-time effort in all its palatable facets - such as these on military equipment - and a couple covered the work of the BBC in this context. It veers fairly close to propaganda at times, yet I find it fascinating as an example of mid-40s publishing and a telling artefact from the history of public service media.

The crisp typography, charts, and Abram Games-style cover are redolent of a professional and valued culture of communicative arts in everyday lives. The writing itself speaks volumes of British culture at that point. The empire is barely fading at all; still a meaningful global entity. The BBC's original role in shaping that is clear too, at this distance. This booklet attempts to describe a world brought together through broadcasting, littered with photographs of people around the globe, apparently connected by a common set of beliefs as well as a common platform. You can see the power in this message. It's been well-documented how the Other Side used the power of broadcast radio, so it's interesting to see these messages from the home front.

It's not without surreal aspects too. I love this picture below: DInkas listening to a radio in the Sudan. Clearly staged, and to what end? But amazing either way. They've hidden the generator. Actually, it looks like they, or enterprising BBC engineers, have tethered the radio to the cow. (Perhaps an early methane-powered prototype.)

It wasn't just the listening Sudanese; Scottish people were even allowed on-air, apparently, though perhaps only at Christmas.

This chart below is the piece-de-resistance for me. A beautifully painted infographic indicating transmissions across the globe; a Truly Great Britain floating above, as if some celestial body. It claims 200 million listeners at that point. An exaggeration? Perhaps not.

I've uploaded a higher-resolution set of selected pages from the booklet at Flickr. Enjoy.

Movements in Modern Media

I recently attended the Aula 2006 event in Helsinki, and as promised, as well as the slides-as-PDF to download, see below and you'll find the fully written-up and illustrated version of the 8-minute talk that I gave.

The talk offered me a chance to road-test an unformed idea, growing out of previous writing here but also partly informed by my 'day job' at the BBC. It's slightly more explorative or theoretical - though without theory, thankfully - than the usual pieces here. Those of you who have previously read the 'New Musical Experiences' and 'Why Lost is genuinely new media' pieces will see elements of those re-used here. Fear not, there is some new material, not least because I actually changed my talk at the last minute. I'd suggested to Marko Ahtisaari, curator and host-supreme, that I'd do a revamp of my New Musical Experiences talk, but decided to switch to some more recent concerns and an almost last minute series of thoughts about John Cage. Thanks again, Marko, for your gracious acceptance of my variability!

Audio signatures for BBC radio networks

Interesting stuff from our R&D team - aka Tristan Ferne - automatically produced radio signatures for BBC radio networks, using the iTunes signature maker.

"I have a directory for each radio station on a particular day with an MP3 file for each programme and I run the application over this. Each random chunk is then cross-faded into the next one in the same order as the programmes were broadcast. This gives a 1-minute signature file per day per radio station, hopefully representing what went on that day..."

Laden with issues, editorial and technical, which Tristan explores further in his blog post. We're not quite sure how, or indeed if, to deploy them yet - though we do have a set of potential locations and functions in mind. Interesting either way.

Cookin/Relaxin: Radio signatures

Jobs at BBC Radio and Music Interactive

Several new jobs in our team available now! Closing date soon! We're looking for Technical Project Managers, Software Engineers, Information Architects, R&D types, a Senior Software Engineer and a User Experience Manager. Here's some of what we did last year. For more on the jobs and all information on how to apply, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/rminteractive/.

Closing date now past. Thanks for your attention.

Work: quick review of 2005

Please excuse a lengthy, self-indulgent post (unusual, huh) in which I take stock of the last year at work. Partly this is public thank you to the teams I work with at BBC Radio & Music Interactive; our own excellent Technology & Design team in particular (take a bow!), and the many teams around the organisation who support and enable our work. But this is also me using the blog as the proverbial 'outboard brain', the notebook-cum-scrapbook-cum-sketchpad with the web attached. So excuse the inward focus and switch channel if you like, but I figure some people might find the dispatches from the front line of the BBC interesting, given how little info actually makes it out of large organisations. So here's a (currently flu-ridden) design manager's view, as I see it from our third floor haven at Broadcasting House, overlooking the new building rising from the ground. The Technology & Design team I run is responsible for designing and building the BBC's interactive services around radio and music ...

Notes: Richard MacCormac on Broadcasting House

I can hardly ignore an article in today's Guardian on the BBC's architecture scheme, having trumpeted it in the past. I can hardly comment either, but the article is well worth a read, covering the recent exit of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP) from the Broadcasting House (where I work) scheme at the hands of the contractors, Bovis; a similar departure of David Chipperfield from the BBC Scotland project; the inertia over the White City Music Box project by Foreign Office Architects; and the tortuous details of the difficulty of conducting private-sector partnerships in public sector buildings.

I sincerely hope that MJP's vision is realised at BH - not for the selfish reason of working there, but remembering how inspired I was by a talk on the project that Richard MacCormac gave at the Royal Academy in February 2004. I've been meaning to post the notes I took that night since then, but never got round to it. Now seems a good time to do it. MacCormac spoke with passion, poetry and pragmatism, talking us through slide after slide of architectural drawing, sketch and photograph, and influencing the way I've since thought about the organisation as well as architecture. I'm posting in the rough, un-edited form in which I took the notes, and I hope they capture some sense of the thrilling vision MacCormac has for the building.

Job: Software Engineer Team Leader at BBC Radio & Music Interactive; MattB

Matt Biddulph moved on to work pastures new recently, and I wanted to say thanks to Matt for his work with me and the team at BBC Radio & Music Interactive.

Matt is one of the most creative, intelligent and engaging people I've had the pleasure of working with, and contributed immensely of our team's strategic and tactical thinking and key product development over the last couple of years. He's a great team leader, too. So to anyone looking for one of the smartest software designer/developers in the business, hire that man!

As to the job going forward, here's a link to the BBC Jobs site where you - or someone you know who may be applicable - can apply. Now a return to your usual programming (no pun intended). Job now closed, thanks!

Over 600,000 mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3's Beethoven programmes

I've kept quiet about this until now, amidst all the good pointers to it going on elsewhere, but I'm massively pleased to be able to point people to the press release we just issued around the public response to offering mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3 programmes around Beethoven's first five symphonies.

"Live performances of Beethoven's first five symphonies, broadcast as part of The Beethoven Experience on BBC Radio 3, have amassed an incredible 657,399 download requests during a week long trial. The downloads – launched on 6 June - offered complete Radio 3 programmes containing live performances of the symphonies by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. They were available free of charge and therefore not eligible for the Official UK Download or Top 40 Singles charts, although the public’s enthusiasm for the programmes is evident from the individual totals:

• Symphony 1 (6 to 13 June) - 164,662
• Symphony 2 (7 to 14 June) - 154,496
• Symphony 3 (6 to 13 June) - 89,318
• Symphony 4 (7 to 14 June) - 108,958
• Symphony 5 (7 to 14 June) - 139,905

"Roger Wright, Controller of Radio 3, said: "The response has been incredible and much bigger that we expected. "The success shows Beethoven's enduring appeal and we hope this will encourage new audiences to explore online classical music."

"Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: "This trial was all about gauging listeners' appetite for downloads and the results are astonishing. We are hopeful that we have attracted people who wouldn't previously have explored much classical music, as well as inspiring others to embrace digital technology."

"Gianandrea Noseda added: "I'm thrilled that our performances have reached such a large, new audience and hope this trial will encourage more people to experience and enjoy orchestral music live in concert."

I can't tell you the amount of buzz this is generating right across the BBC. Lots of extremely interesting questions continue to be raised by the success of our trials - from distribution to commercial policy, from music strategies to on-demand radio, from marketing to navigation and so on - and we're feeding a lot of the learning and creative ideas right into the heart of the various bits of strategic and tactical BBC work going on at the moment. It's profoundly interesting for us, and I hope for some of you.

You'll have missed the first set of symphonies, but the remaining four will follow on from the 27th June, so keep your eyes peeled on Radio 3.

BBC Radio 3: Beethoven downloads
BBC Press Office: Beethoven downloads get more than 600,000 requests

Mark Thompson on a virtual redefinition of broadcasting and life in the digital city

At the somewhat unlikely forum that is the Churches' Media Conference 2005, Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick, Derbyshire, my ultimate boss, BBC Director General Mark Thompson, delivered what I think is an absolutely fascinating and thoroughly inspiring speech. Touching as it does on a few topics often covered here - on-demand media and navigation, cultural production and consumption, and digital cities (yes really). As is my wont I'll quote from it at length, though I reckon it's worth reading the full speech.