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I'm Rowan de Pomerai, a technologist at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development. I've recently returned to London having spent around 7 months in our northern lab in Manchester. As Anthony mentioned in his post, the last year has seen ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's presence in Manchester grow from a handful of engineers to staff numbers in the double digits, with plans to keep that number rising as more staff move north in advance of the move to . Where the first few early movers got by with a small office space and a basic broadband-type connection to the R&D network in the south, that situation was rapidly becoming untenable. Physically we were bursting at the seams, and the lack of facilities was restricting the work we could do to certain types of software development and little else. We needed more space and more facilities if we were to grow a lab which could match the breadth of output provided by the London base.

Clearly we needed more desks and more space, that much I'm sure everyone can understand. But why all the fuss about facilities? What exactly did we need? Well, there's some staff who do just need a relatively 'normal' office setup. That might include those doing certain types of software development, or those that look after our partnerships and external engagements, or some of the people doing audience testing and research. But then there's people working on bigger IT infrastructure testing, who might need racks of noisy and hot-running equipment, or image processing experts, who are writing software but also need cameras, space to film things, and video connections between rooms. There's people who need to test hardware with signal generators and oscilloscopes, or need to build electronic circuits and so need soldering facilities. And of course we're regularly demonstrating our work to others (after all, what use is new technology if nobody outside the lab ever sees or uses it?) so we need space for that.

Shortly before I arrived in Manchester, Adrian Woolard had been working with Michael Sparks to acquire and begin planning the use of some office space on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Manchester site at Oxford Road. I took on managing the fit-out, building on the work that had been started before I arrived and working with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Workplace and the IT folks to get the space ready to meet the needs of Research and Development. The space in question was originally built as the base of operations for Radio Outside Broadcasts, and next to the garages for OB trucks is a little building with some office space on the first floor. That floor has become the home of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's North Lab.

The building contains essentials like toilets and a kitchen (meaning we can make our own cups of tea rather than always having to buy them - a big benefit!) as well as two small rooms and a fairly large open plan office. The basic planning of what facilities we would need over the next 2 years led us to a list comprising an apparatus room (where servers and broadcast equipment sit in racks), a laboratory (where hardware work can be undertaken), a space for demonstrations, some meeting and breakout space, and an office area. Some simple maths shows us that there weren't enough rooms for this, but we managed to make it all fit by agreeing that the meeting, demo and breakout space could be one flexible room, and arranging to re-instate a wall which had previously been removed, dividing the large office into a slightly smaller office and a separate laboratory. Thus was born the room plan. Once we finally got the project started, the installation was relatively quick. The new wall went up, a heavy-duty air conditioning system was installed to keep the apparatus room and laboratory cool, the walls were painted and the carpets cleaned.

But the space is only half the story. The other investment was in connectivity. Within the building there were nowhere near enough network ports to support 25 engineers, many of whom use multiple computers for their work. So we has a lot of extra networking put in, as well as extra power sockets to supply the computers, cameras, test equipment and more. Audio and video connections now connect the office, laboratory and apparatus room, so noisy equipment can be used remotely from the office, or signals fed from the new satellite dish into the office. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting the north lab to the south. Until the interim lab was connected, a single connection - much like the one that probably supplies your home broadband - was all that connected the two sites. With more engineers working and high-data applications needed (such as streaming full-quality HD video or moving huge datasets between sites), something better was needed. An interim solution is now in place using existing ´óÏó´«Ã½ networking, providing well over 10 times the bandwidth we had before, with gigabit an option we're perusing if we need it going forwards.

To top it all off we have a few little extras to help us do a broader array of work and have a little fun too. Tony secured use of a disused radio studio in the main New Broadcasting House building, allowing his exciting work on future audio technologies to gather pace. And back in the main office, I was tasked with attempting to divide the space. There is a push in many organisations towards open-plan, and while we like the feeling of openness and community, many of the engineers find this sort of environment too distracting to concentrate on difficult problems. How do you divide the space and reduce distractions without losing openness? Well that's a question I couldn't possibly answer fully, as there is no single answer. I've written a little more about it on , but let's just say we're experimenting... below you'll see our blue sound-absorbing blocks, great for sitting on, a little impromptu wall building, or even fort-building when some of our staff get their hands on them.

All of this is a drop in the ocean compared to MediaCity, where we'll have more engineers doing a wider variety of work. Extra facilities needed there include a , which looks much like a domestic living room and allows us to study user behaviour when interacting with new technology, as well as viewing and listening rooms for critical audio and video work. But that's a whole new chapter in the story of R&D's north lab, and one I don't have time for here. Suffice to say, the future looks exciting!