大象传媒

Today we are starting a little experiment in the Prototyping team, a series of posts called weeknotes. Weeknotes are intended to give you an insight into what we鈥檝e been doing during the week, how we work and the kind of thing we do, rather than any specifics about projects. We can鈥檛 always talk about our projects because some of them are sensitive or confidential, but those that we are allowed to talk about publicly should get separate blog posts. And don鈥檛 forget that we鈥檙e R&D so everything you read about here are explorations or prototypes. The Prototyping team consists of 12 people within R&D (we vary with some part-timers, attachments and freelancers) and we are a mix of software engineers, designers and production staff.

Weeknotes will be written alternately by myself (lead producer), Chris (our program manager) and George (the team leader). The idea for weeknotes originally came from , and you can see other company鈥檚 weeknotes at .

Monday

Not a good start to weeknotes - I injured my knee over the weekend so I鈥檓 stuck at home. This week we鈥檙e kicking off a couple of new projects and we鈥檝e allocated half of the team on each, we鈥檙e trying to reduce the number of simultaneous projects because we鈥檝e had a few too many recently and it gets a bit crazy.

I was supposed to be running a workshop to kick off a week鈥檚 work on Signatures [a project investigating musical taste]. Despite this the team crack on with some deep conversations, but the problem鈥檚 quite a hard one and it鈥檚 a day of banging heads against table tops. We also started work on the Microblogging project [a project to support the 大象传媒 presence on microblogging platforms]. George has been writing story cards for this - to the team鈥檚 delight (it鈥檚 been a while since he 鈥渆mbraced鈥� agile).

In team news, Dave joins the design team for a few weeks starting from today. That means it鈥檚 double its usual size because we鈥檝e also got Ste, a design trainee, with us for a month. And Duncan releases one of his home/work projects, he seems to do them entirely on his train journey. It鈥檚 a Google Chrome browser extension to display Now and Next information for 大象传媒 TV and radio schedules. There鈥檚 .

Tuesday

I have a phone conference with the Signatures team in the afternoon, I think I ask too many questions and maybe set them back a bit. George has a shocker of a day - a finance telco, then our management meeting, then an EU telco, followed by a use case discussion for a project, then an interesting chat around possible new location based services.

Wednesday

George met his boss for breakfast first thing, and thus was bleary eyed from then on. I鈥檓 back in the office today and overnight Chris G has taken a step back from Signatures and has scribbled down a good framework to continue the work. I think we鈥檙e getting somewhere. We show Mythology [a recently completed project about narrative and stories] and some other projects to Adrian, down from R&D North, and they seem to go down well. There鈥檚 lots of whiteboarding going on in the Microblogging team, I鈥檒l have to ask them how they鈥檙e doing. They鈥檝e got a very exciting with pictures on. Turns out the designers on this were mapping out the various elements of the service. Ste then took on the graphing and Dave took the site layout.

The afternoon is taken up by a Resolver progress meeting with an external company who are doing the work. It鈥檚 primarily a feasibility study with a couple of weeks to go, but as it goes on, although we come up with more issues and problems, we now have some really good answers and ideas and it鈥檚 getting pretty exciting.

Thursday

Team standup in the morning, almost all the projects look good. Vicky is setting up our demo/meeting room for some Multitouch focus groups at the weekend [we鈥檙e investigating multitouch/multiuser interfaces] which means we have to find somewhere else for our Signatures workshop. We鈥檙e getting even more down about this now, but we start some competitor analysis to see where we might fit. Theo buys some exceedingly good cakes to keep us going.

Meanwhile Duncan鈥檚 been adding personalised reminders to his Chrome extension and playing with Webkit transitions and keyframes. And on Microblogging Sean has started writing code to access the data stream and is now looking at ways to chop up the data and the designers are iterating the design of the service and drafting some beautiful graphs.

Friday

Well, I鈥檓 tidying these notes and double-checking them with Chris G and George while thinking about Signatures. Theo鈥檚 taking a day off from Signatures to let his brain cool and think about his project documentation ideas instead, while Chris G and Chris N are ploughing on. I鈥檓 reasonably happy because although we may not crack this completely, we will at least have done a decent study of the problem area with a good list of product ideas.

Vicky hands over the multi-touch work to Conor and Maxine for tomorrow鈥檚 focus group testing and they do a quick run through of the demos, there are a couple of minor bugs but everyone seems happy. Bill T from the 大象传媒鈥檚 Archive team comes in to see some of latest projects and discuss possible collaboration, and immediately after Andrew from Vision meets us to talk about ideas for new services. A busy afternoon to round off the week.