Back in February we ran a Culture Hack East Ideas Lab in partnership with Creative Front and CoDE at Anglia Ruskin University, with support from the Arts Council.
The aim of the lab was to bring together cultural organisations, technologists, designers and developers to experiment with rapid ideas generation. We had over thirty attendees including Hoipolloi, The Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, ADeC, CRASSH, Cambridgeshire County Council, Tribal Labs and Stride Design.
Over two days, they created user journeys, developed paper prototypes and pitched ideas. Our panel – made up of Georgia Ward (Arts Council), Zoe Svendsen (Metis Arts), Rachel Drury (Arts Policy Researcher in Residence, University of Cambridge), and Daniel Jones (Erase) – selected two prototypes to receive development bursaries, taking the ideas beyond paper prototypes to digital prototype stage.
Developed by Specialmoves, Parrabbola, DanceDigital and firstsite, Art Buddies is about creating opportunities for audiences to take risks, facilitating group attendance to artistic exhibitions or performances. They could be novices who have an interest in the art form, or knowledgeable enthusiasts keen to share. The Art Buddies team have tested an early stage prototype with target user groups, and through this they have refined what a successful and engaging experience would look like.
University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s Cambridge Cabinet contains nearly 160 artifacts found in the Cambridge area that originate from the Medieval, Roman and Prehistoric periods. Developed by the museum with Atlas Live, the Wall of Cambridge Archaeology iPad App presents the visitor with a representation of the cabinet, maps of the Cambridge area, and the objects themselves. MAA is keen to develop the prototype to a second phase period, involving user testing in the gallery. Off the back of this initial prototype the group have located additional funding to enable this future development.
Once these prototypes are available to the public, we will share those links with you here.
Photos: Tim Mitchell
Ideas Lab Judging Panel (L-R): Zoe Svendsen (Metis Arts), Rachel Drury (Arts Policy Researcher in Residence, University of Cambridge), Georgia Ward (Arts Council England) and Daniel Jones (Erase)
Successful project team (L-R) Lisa Hann (River and Rowing Museum), Anusha Iyer (Tribal Labs) and Dr Leah Tether (Anglia Ruskin University)
Another winning project for (L-R): Dr Richard Hoadley (Anglia Ruskin), Pascal Auberson (Specialmoves), Kat from Dance Digital and Philip Parr (Parrabbola).
The Ideas Lab grand finale involved pitching digital prototypes to a panel of experts, including Rachel Drury (Arts Policy Researcher in Residence, University of Cambridge), Daniel Jones (Erase), Zoe Svendsen (Metis Arts), Georgia Ward (Arts Council England) and Rob Toulson (CoDE).
This session began with informal updates on two projects. Richard Hall from Cambridge Country Council updated the group on his ideas around audience data visualisation and Daniel Pitt from the Junction explained his ideas around the peer recommendation models within the arts.
Three diverse formal pitches for projects followed. The first pitch was led by Anusha Iyer (Tribal Labs), Lisa Hann (River and Rowing Museum) and Dr Leah Tether (Anglia Ruskin University)- surrounding an application to engage young rowers with the history of their sport.
Second, Dr Chris Wingfield (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) and Billy Gibson (Atlas Live) introduced an idea for a tablet application bringing to life archaeological finds around Cambridge using data drawn from an existing display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Finally Pascal Auberson (Specialmoves), Dr Richard Hoadley (Anglia Ruskin), Philip Parr (Parrabbola) and Kim from Dance Digital presented their paper prototype, which aimed to encourage wider arts engagement through a buddying system.
We are delighted that after careful deliberation by the judging panel the three pitched projects were each successful in gaining £2,500 towards their development into digital prototypes before the end of March 2013.
Congratulations to the successful project teams – and watch this space for updates!
This guest blog was written by Alexandra Reynolds, PhD student at Kingston University.
The second session of the day involved facilitated discussion forums around commissioning and resources.
The commissioning forum negotiated possible solutions to problems encountered with funding and tendering by arts organisations and technologists.
The process of tendering can be frustrating for technologists, who often carry out preliminary work on bids only to find these are awarded to a different practitioner through the tendering process. One solution is to build longer term partnerships between technologists and arts organisations with funding for preliminary project research built in: a working method reflected in the Ideas Lab model.
Another issue with commissioning surrounds the uncertainty of arts funding and the fact bids take up to 2 years from application to award. This makes it difficult for digital practitioners to work with arts organisations and means technologies can be out of date by the time projects are realised.
Again, the in-process, short-term, intensive model of the Ideas Lab: particularly with funding allocated for prototype production, was considered a positive way of combatting these concerns.
In the forum around resources, participants were asked to feed back about the sorts of resources which would be useful to them following this Ideas Lab and in future Culture Hack Events.
Attendees suggested they benefitted from practical demonstrations, workshops and case studies of successful projects – ways to practically get things done. Participants also wanted to follow up networks and contacts made through the Ideas Lab, potentially through an open forum and felt they would benefit from practical online guides presented in lay language.
This guest blog was written by Alexandra Reynolds, PhD student at Kingston University.
Day two of the Culture Hack East Ideas Lab kicked off with a second ‘speed data’ session, this time exploring a series of 20 one sentence challenges drawn from ideas gathered in the first day’s sessions. Challenges discussed included questions such as ‘how can we ensure that the digital will enhance and not detract from user experience of museums’ and ‘how can we work towards innovative ways of archiving digital content’.
In the next part of the lab, participants spent some time working with, challenging and developing the prototypes of other groups in the Ideas Lab. Group members took this opportunity to offer a fresh perspective on the ideas of their peers, asking what other approaches could be used to develop the projects, what would happen if they used a different technology, and how the project would change if directed at a different audience. Participants were also encouraged to use Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html) to think differently about the various projects.
Following this exercise, participants fed back their thoughts to the other groups, exploring possible challenges for projects and sometimes completely overturning concepts and approaches to ideas. At this stage group members returned to their initial project ideas, and began developing paper prototypes – mapping these concepts in 2/3 different ways for different users. Some technologists roved between the various projects and various participants temporarily swapped groups to test out the plans for user experience. 
This guest blog was written by Alexandra Reynolds, PhD student at Kingston University.
After a group discussion, participants re-grouped to develop the morning’s project ideas. We began with a ‘Speed Data’ session, where technologists and arts organisations had a series of 2 minute conversations exploring where their interests collided and what skills they could swap.
Next, project ideas brainstormed from the morning session were reviewed, and participants were given the opportunity to swap groups according to particular interests.
Two hours of lively discussion later, 7 possible ideas for digital projects were shared with the group. Possible projects to be developed on the second day of the Ideas Lab include ideas around mobilising the opinions of expert audience members, engaging young audiences through digital archival artefacts, sharing collections material between museums, producing a new creative entrepreneurship hub, filtering collections items according to locality and finding ways to bring collections out of the museum into urban environments.
After brainstorming digital projects to develop during the Ideas Lab, participants heard about a range of other contemporary projects in the field through a selection of fast moving 5 minute talks.
First to speak was Martha Henson, a digital producer previously working with Wellcome Trust. Martha focused on ‘High Tea’ http://hightea.wellcomeapps.com/ an online game where players act as Independent British Smugglers selling Opium in China’s Pearl Delta. This game has an educational function in that it uses real historical data in its production. However, the application is not didactic, rather using the game format to help empower audiences.
One particularly interesting thing about High Tea is that Wellcome Trust actually encouraged the sharing of the game on other sites. According to Martha, this greatly contributed to the popularity of the game, but also offered the indirect benefit of spontaneous user evaluation through social media commentaries uploaded on other sites.
Tom Armitage, a freelance technologist and designer was next to present around his project Spirits Melted into Air commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which visualises performance data by capturing all but the written word. Tom suggested smaller finished projects can be more interesting than larger sprawling initiatives, though he made clear the importance of retaining big thoughts. Tom also reflected that digital projects can be important as a way to represent facets of the life and motivations of a wider organisation.
Francesca Panetta, Special Projects Editor at Guardian, Director of Hackney Podcast and Producer of Hackney Hear was next to offer insight. Hackney Hear is a geomapped locative audio app filled with oral histories, poetry and archival material from Hackney’s London Fields. Francesca gave an overview of this project touching on its ability to change our very relationship to space and place, with particular focus on the importance of user-testing and knowing one’s audience – and the need to build for these users rather than for yourself.
Finally, we heard from Jonathan Austin, one of the Founders of Makespace Cambridge – a resourced Hacker Space where people can meet and collaborate. Jonathan focused on the importance of creating a space which facilitates doing, not just thinking and questioned how to work collaboratively to develop the most creative possible ideas rather than the loudest.
