I'm Anthony Churnside, a Trainee Research Engineer currently
working in our 'North Lab', R&D's new home in Manchester. You have
probably heard about the , and I
probably don't need to tell you that 5 major departments are moving:
´óÏó´«Ã½ Children's, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Five Live, and parts
of
´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media and Technology. Research and Development are part of
´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media and Technology and, like the other departments moving,
we will be up and running in the new building in 2012.
A
discussion as to why the ´óÏó´«Ã½ needs to move departments to the North is
beyond the scope of a blog post, so rather than going into that I'll
focus on the impact of moving part of the R&D department to Manchester.
Not all of R&D is moving north; the
planned building capacities mean there will be fewer engineers working
in the North than the South. This means a department that is used to
working out of a single location has to get used to working from dual
sites located about 200 miles apart. We have been thinking about ways
to ease this geographical split, for example we have a video link
between our North and South bases that is used for everything from
discussing work to catching up on gossip. Also, in our free time
Matthew Shotton, an Industrial Trainee, and I have developed a robotic
virtual telepresence which allows one site to drive an audio/video
enabled robot around the other.
Moving
R&D up from the South will move it closer to other ´óÏó´«Ã½ departments;
Kingswood Warren (R&D's soon to be vacated base in the South) is
around 20 miles from Television Centre. The 'North Lab' in Manchester
(much like R&D's new home in West London) is physically much closer
to the rest of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ than R&D ever has been. I hope this has the
effect of raising the awareness of some of our research areas in the
wider ´óÏó´«Ã½, and perhaps our work can inspire, and be inspired by content
producers who may not know what goes on in the department.
At
the ´óÏó´«Ã½ there is a big push towards building valuable relationships
with external partners. The ethos behind the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in the North is to be
more 'open'. This should mean it will be easy to work with other industrial
and academic organisations. ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D has a strong history of
collaborating with others and this tradition of Open Innovation is one
we are keen to continue. For example, my current project which is
researching the future of surround sound, has seen me in contact with
in the Midlands, the and the to explore ares of common interest. The ability to work in
partnership rather than in competition with external organisations
should mean a lot more can be achieved. There is certainly no shortage
of creative digital industries in the North which, along with the large
number of Universities, offer a massive opportunity for partnerships.
A
presence in the North is not entirely new to R&D. We have had a
small number of engineers working from Manchester for 18 months or so,
and when I started working on my first R&D placement here
I found myself joining them, working in a small office in a corner of
New Broadcasting House. This small office had worked in the past, but
as more people were moving up and the work being done up here was
becoming more diverse, R&D was outgrowing this modest space
and needed an interim home, before the move to in 2012.
Due
to the very nature of R&D it is often hard to predict exactly what
research will be important to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ a number of years down the line
and with this in mind, flexibility of workspace is of great importance.
There are general functional requirements for a Research Lab, such as a
space to demonstrate project work, a laboratory area suitable for
hardware work, an air-conditioned apparatus area for somewhere to house
servers and an office area for software engineering. Quite a lot
of the work going on up here at the moment is software based, but extra
space is often needed for ad-hoc equipment associated with project
work. For example, right now I'm sat with both an external sound card
and a Soundfield microphone on my desk, and Bruce Weir, a Research
Engineer sat opposite me, has an HD camera mounted on a tripod right
behind him.
Peter Salmon, Head of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in the North, and Matthew Postgate, Controller of R&D, seen with the R&D (North Lab) team earlier this month at the opening of the interim lab
Rowan De Pomerai was given
the job of co-ordinating the development a workspace suitable for the
engineering team up here and for the movers planing on coming along
before 2012. He talks more about it in his blog entry. Rowan did an
excellent job of getting the space set-up and four weeks ago in the
opposite corner of New Broadcasting House to the small office where I
first started working for R&D, 'The North Lab' was opened by Peter
Salmon (Director of ´óÏó´«Ã½ North) and Matthew Postgate (Controller of
R&D). The building meets our current requirements and in the process of
specification, design, implementation and actually moving, the whole
team has learnt valuable lessons which can be applied to the larger
scale move to Media City we face in two years.
As 2012
approaches R&D will be ramping up our advance team and with this
flexible lab-space, we can be sure that the area where we work at Media
City will allow the department to continue to offer the technical
innovation it has been able to in the past.
Comment number 1.
At 26th Nov 2009, dukeofearl wrote:Pleased to hear that someone in R&D is working on surround sound - I haven't heard much of it on the 5.1 channels of ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD yet...
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