Week 6

Design sprints

Attended 3 days of an internal design sprint organised by a different part of the organisation. It was well laid out, building on some of their previous research insights and in-depth interviews with members of the audience. We spent the first day getting to know a persona, expanding from a sheet describing them into a timeline of their day and then diving and expanding a single moment to identify where we might be able to offer our services or deepens their use of services. Some of the personas have very little interaction with this area of the BBC which is a challenge.

Days 2 and 3 were about coming up with ideas (diverging in the ideation parlance that everyone now uses). First using the "Crazy 8" technique of drawing 8 separate ideas on a sheet of paper subdivided into eight boxes. The boxes were pre-perforated: amazing. Then, after sticking up and talking through the ideas, picking one from the corpus and doing the Beetle technique. Writing the idea in the middle and thinking through a set of questions to "give the idea legs" (ouch, the puns!).

Finally, after sharing again and doing another round of Crazy 8 and Beetle on day 3 we voted on an idea to take forward for design prototyping and one for a technical spike.

The winners were related but perhaps slightly outside of the challenge statement and audience segment specified at the beginning. However, I advocated for exploring the expanses of the idea since something that’s for "highly engaged users" might be for "passive users" with a little learning.

Case design

A common issue when using the laser cutter is making subtly changes to the design and forgetting to reintegrate those back into the master design. We wanted to ensure that our Radiodan case design is complete so we can publish it. A trip to the laser cutter to do a final cut. I also re-created (by tracing in Illustrator) all the shapes on the current design, which I think was exported from a 3D model and so wasn't the easiest set of vectors to work with when changing the length of panels etc. The new file has layers etc to make further amendments easier.

There were issues with how the top panel and PCB fit together, they're a couple of millimetres off which means the back panel doesn't fit properly. I also forgot to cut a hole in the back so the power cable could come out. So I'll be booking another slot to fix those next week.

UCL workshop

There’s a group at UCL that we’ve been wanting to work with for a while so we’ve been moving towards hosting a joint workshop exploring end-user creativity.

I’ve been connecting up sensors to the Espruino (after how great it was to work with for Playlister-Follow). The idea will be that the sensors emit raw-ish sensor data over USB to a Raspberry Pi running radiodan that will actually decide what actions to take.

This also lets us start exploring what a next-gen physical ui might look like. One that doesn't reply on the Pi's GPIO pins.

Holding page

A holding page for an exciting new domain the BBC has registered.