ia play

The title of this post is a bit of cheat as it isn’t really work. I’ve been involved in a BBC scheme called ‘Connect & Create’ which aims to join up community projects with BBC staff who have expertise that might help the charities. I’ve been involved in two ways so far.

Firstly in a Media Matching event which was a bit like speed dating for charities. It was evening event that 8 charities and 8 varied members of BBC staff attended and each pairing had 5 minutes to chat and see if there was a way we could work together.

The second project is about releasing members of my team to help the National Trust over a longer period of time. I’m trying to set this up this week.

The things I like about C&C so far:

* reminds you how much you know and how valuable that knowledge can be to others

* gives you the chance to engage in projects that are often simpler and shorter than the complex infrastructure projects I normally end involved with at work

* creates an opportunity to learn or refresh skills that it might be hard for you to do at work

* helps you learn from the charities about the members of the public they work with, either through the charity or directly

Matt Jones returns to the BBC in a few weeks. I think this confirms my theory that they put chips in our brains that make you feel ill if you are away too long.

Jones recently presented at Interesting 2007, Russell Davies’ conference where “all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things.” I’ve just been flicking through his slides on slideshare and it shouldn’t have surprised me that he crammed themes of play in there alongside cityscapes, comics, the Sultan’s elephant, Parkour, Francis Fukyama, and psychogeography:

“truly playful spaces are those that enable the unplanned and un-authored to occur within their environments. Truly playful spaces are being crowded out by authored experiences, but this is only having the effect of making them even more attractive environments. A great recent example was the “play” inspired by The Weather Project installation in Tate Modern, where many people chose to lie down and bathe in the artifical sunlight, making patterns together that they could see in the huge mirrored ceiling”.

Looking forward to having him back and causing chaos.

Today was an Innovation Forum at work. An open invite is sent out for staff to pitch ideas and for other people to come along and vote. It was held at the Dana Centre in London, a space set up to allow the public to engage in debates about controversial science issues. Apparently the Science Museum couldn’t do this as it is “a family-orientated space”.

Upcoming topics include ‘what will everyday healthcare look like in 20 years’ time?’, ‘how are new technologies helping to secure our skies?’ and the seemingly less cerebral ‘are chilli-eaters sadomasochists?’.

We were just there to talk about broadcasting.

Themes of play appeared in some of the ideas but the basic voting was given an extra playful dimension by the use of ‘optical’ voting. When we arrived every chair had a shiny length of piping resting on it which inspired many bizarre suggestions of potential uses. As it turned out the lengths of drainpipe wrapped in reflective tape were our way to vote. When we held them vertical a ‘yes’ vote was recorded and horizontal indicated a ‘no’. A camera picked up the light reflecting off the pipes and this data was fed to a real-time display of the vote. Apparently the system made an appearance at Hack Day the other weekend.

The process certainly led to more enthusiasm for voting but what really put a smile on my face was the occasion when the display was switched on but there were still a few more questions for the speaker before voting time. Whilst the speaker answered the question, all around the room members of the audience were quietly and bit sheepishly playing with their voting sticks to mess with the vote display on the screen behind the speaker.

There was a discussion later about how to get more audience participation during the screening of sports events on the BBC’s Big Screens. Someone suggested using a similar voting system. The idea was rapidly squashed when someone observed that the last thing you want to give thousands of football fans watching a big match is a load of blunt objects.