I’m at Crossover Montreal 09 this week, a cross platform brainstorming workshop run by a team from the UK. I took the lab as a participant in March of this year thanks to the CFC and NBC Universal. This time the program is sponsored by Telefilm and is part of the festival du nouveau cinema. I am not here to develop a project and pitch it this time but to act as a mentor helping the participants develop their ideas.
Most of the first few days of the workshop is spent leading the dozen or so participants through brainstorming exercises, but Frank Boyd, Margaret Robertson and Richard Adams — the other mentors — each present some of their favourite sites during the course of the week.
First up was Frank, the dynamic and inspiring leader of Crossover. He presented a variety of multiplatform projects. Frank emphasizes the need to make things that are “user-shaped”; design centered around understanding how people behave and use things.
He talks about different screens and the modes people are in when they use them:
- Desk screen
- Sofa screen
- Palm screen
Frank points to different digital spaces that are used in different ways:
- Secret spaces IM, mobile, sms, text
- Group spaces: bebo Facebook, twitter
- Publishing spaces: flickr, blogger livejournal
- Performing spaces: second life, world of warcraft, home
- Participation spaces: marches, ebay, meeting, markets, events
- Watching spaces: television, theatre, music gigs
In approaching projects, Frank tells us to understand our users, our competitors, ourselves. He advocates creating user personas; inventing people who are archetypical users. In creating a persona, create some biographical background, imagine their technological abilities, attitudes toward technology, interests, goals fears and the triggers that would bring them to the project. It’s important to get some insight into the Once you have a clear idea of who the persona is, create a usage scenario, walk them through the experience of the project, always asking how can we this a better experience? how can we make the site more sticky?
Below are some of the links Frank shared with us:
Channel 4 commissioning editor Matt Locke’s blog. Read his 3-part post Commission for Attention. Also, check out one of the projects he commissioned called Battlefront .
Some multiplatform projects with TV components:
Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies
Swedish television’s Emmy award winning program, The Truth About Marika.
Cross-posted on the Story2.OH blog.