With game plays in excess of 14 million and numerous awards and nominations (SXSW, BIMA + BAFTA), we thought it time to write a post on how we made 1066. 

Getting started

1066 was our first project with C4 Education, commissioned to coincide with a two-part TV drama produced by the nice folks at Hardy Pictures. Keen to repeat their previous game success, C4 gave us a small chunk of development money to put together a game prototype in late September 2008.

C4 Education's brief was to develop a game that was both entertaining and educationally robust. The subject matter suited this brief perfectly, and working alongside Greg Jenner (the historical consultant) and Hardy's Art Department we collected historic and visual resources to act as reference for our early ideas.

Alongside this research, we also conducted some qualitative research with school children who helped steer us towards a blood-thirsty, strategic incarnation ("I just like to hit penguins": Child, aged 7). This loose direction formed the basis for our concept development and further game research.

Game design

The game's design references some of our favourite games (Total War, Desktop Tower Defence, Worms, Another world) but the biggest influences came from the awesomely styled Patapon and 'strategy-made simple' Advanced Wars. Additional to this, Channel 4 lobbied for the inclusion of mini-games to introduce a more casual aspect to the gameplay. This mixed bag of of references became the starting point for the game design process.

The Prototype + User Experience

Retrospectively it seems a simple hybrid, but at the time we were mildly concerned whether these different genres could be successfully combined. A simple paper and dice prototype was constructed to test the turn-based strategic system and balance of units but a technical protoype was needed to properly test the interplay between the side-on battle view, the strategic game-play grid and the mini-games. We took the plunge, and in about a week had a quick and dirty proof of concept. The different game elements seemed to work really nicely together.

After this, we developed a set of user flows and wireframes to document the user experience. At this stage the in-game interface was already quite advanced, having being iterated constantly in the prototype. The wireframes and user flows concentrated, mainly, on the pre-game screens such as unit management and the multi-player processes involved in starting games and challenging friends. These were then tested thoroughly, becoming the blueprint for design work that followed.

Visual Direction

The TV drama concentrates on the rural farmers who made up the armies, rather than the Kings who commanded them. Recreating groups of individual soilders was our way of maintaining this human element. The silhouettes became the perfect visual solution for achieving this level of detail as well as the realism required for the game to work alongside the live-action series.

Following the visual research, aided greatly by Hardy Pictures art department, and creation of moodboards (one, two), the look and feel came together very quickly. We focused on the battle field, creating something stark that reflected the lonely brutalness of being in battle. The dark textured earth held the GUI perfectly and contrasted strongly with the blood soaked, evocative sky.

The original 1066 look & feel - see more

With the Channel 4 team happy, a style guide was produced extrapolating this intial style into a more detailed set of elements. This document became the visual toolkit, creating consistency across the game and speeding up workflow massively. Combined with wireframes, the design of the game screens became a relatively simple skinning exercise. This process worked really well (even with the usual last minute minor alterations).

The 1066 design style guide - see more

Final design : 'Hand-to-hand combat' mini-game - see more

Building the army

A huge part of the game was bringing the individual soldiers to life. After some intial animation tests in Poser, we charged Sliced Bread with the job of delivering three armies worth of troops.

Rigged in Maya, each army have a defining set of physical attributes, weapons and behaviors. To minimise work, shared animations cycles (walking, fighting, charging, firing, dying etc.) were constructed, applied to each army and then delivered to us as animated vector flash assets. In total 154 character and nine flag animations were delivered. It goes without saying that Sliced Bread totally nailed it.

Model of the Norman Soldier and horse

Telling the story

With cut-scenes being the first thing skipped in most games, we knew we had to instantly engage the player and tell the story quickly and succinctly. In total we created four cut-scenes coming in at just over 3 minutes. You can view the original storyboards here and final cut-scenes here.

We also managed to highjack one of the programme's voice-over sessions to get Sir Ian Holm to record the narration for our cutscenes. A true honour. 

A selection of frames from a cut-scene storyboard - see more

A scene from a final cut-scene - see more

Development

The development of the game began with the prototype. This way we could test any ideas that came forward and allowed for the build process to align with the aspirations of the project right from the beginning.

The game was built using the Flash Flex builder, which with the game being so visual worked really well. We designed directly into the Flash file, adding visuals and animations whilst the game developers worked within the Flex structure creating the engine.

The biggest challenge technically was keeping the game running smoothly when displaying so many animated vector assets. Initially we had a lot more troops and movement within the units but we found that the processor hit was just not practical. After some fairly laborious optimisation we found a workable middle ground which we felt happy with.

The single-player AI was also a big challenge, the goal was to produce an AI which felt like another human player, making decisions tactically and responding to it's opponents actions in order to defeat them with minimal casualties to it's own army.

The AI works by constantly evaluating a set of metrics for it's own units and it's opponents. This produces a weighting for each unit based on their health, attack strength, defensive strength and morale. The AI then evaluates possible targets for each of it's units and compares the weightings of those targets to it's own in order to decide whether to attack, defend or retreat.

Each unit also has a predefined behaviour which affects the result of the weightings, so for example a unit with a cowardly behaviour will more often choose to retreat compared to a unit with the aggressive behaviour which will almost always attack.

The final feature of the AI was to balance how many actions it chooses for it's units compared to the human player. This works by measuring the average time taken by the player to select each action and restricting the AI to choose an action at the same time interval. The result is a more balanced game with an even number of unit actions on both sides for each turn.

Sound design

Sound plays a big part in the final game. We were fortunate enough to have all the assets from the TV drama including the original musical score and the battle SFX from Aquarium (the sound guys who worked on the TV series).

Our final job was creating the historically accurate(ish) taunts, so a group of us headed to the local park for a spot of early morning taunting and blood curdling screaming. Needless to say we got a few funny looks, but even the dodgy French accents almost worked.

Things that never made it

At the end of every project, there is always stuff remaining on the 'nice to have' list.

We had always planned for the environment to be richer with random weather conditions affecting gameplay. For example, heavy rain would slow charging horses and lower a unit's morale quicker. We also wanted the colour of the skyline to change as the battle progressed, getting increasingly red as lives were lost.

As well as standard functionality like leaderboards and weapon upgrades we never got around to doing the simple things like saving your army setups. We also had a seemingly brilliant system for customising your flags but just ran out of time.

We also had multi-player chat built and implemented in 'Challenge a Friend' mode but decided to remove it to simplify the experience.

Conclusion

Key to the success of any project is a shared vision and being given the space to just get on with it. Channel 4 Education know this, having the right mix of strong opinions balanced with total trust in their indies.

1066 currently stands as the most played game Preloaded has produced. It has has also been warmly received in the wider gaming community with reviews in Edge magazine, Kotaku, RockPaperShotgun, JayisGames and WaterCooler (to name a few). Having just picked up the Best Educational Resource at SXSW and Best Game at the BIMA awards it also seems our contempoaries like it too.

With a project of this scale there is obviously loads we haven't covered in this post, but if anyone has any questions feel free to leave a comment below and we'll try and answer it.

From: Preloaded

On the eve of release, this is a retrospective on all the work we’ve done on the WATCHMEN campaign. Hopefully, if nothing else, it may help some of the people I’ve neglected over the last few weeks/months/years understand why that might have been.  I offer it not as a justification, merely an explanation.

_ _ _

Fifteen years in the making

PPC started talking about the WATCHMEN campaign about five years ago, when the movie was being produced by Paramount, with Paul Greengrass set to direct. I sat down with our creative director at the time and we talked through a few ideas. Guess that would have been some time in 2004.

At the heart of what we were discussing was the idea of how we could take the ‘metanarrative’ that runs through WATCHMEN – present most explicitly in the little vignettes appearing at the end of each chapter – and realise this through a range of different media, including video, print and the web.

Around the same time, Emma’s friend Kate got in touch. She was assisting Greengrass at the time, and was working on their version of the script. She’d heard that WATCHMEN had featured in my English Lit. dissertation, and wanted to get hold of a copy.

Unfortunately, I had to explain that the only hard copy of my dissertation had died with my academic career back in 1999. It was an expansive and somewhat tedious tract entitled ‘Taking Liberties: Ideas of Freedom in the Graphic Novel’ in which I examined various themes permeating what I considered to be the most significant graphic novels ever written.

This included not only WATCHMEN but also Alan Moore’s V FOR VENDETTA, Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Grant Morrison’s ARKHAM ASYLUM, many of the key frames of which were reproduced within my dissertation in glorious technicolour, harnessing the extraordinary power of a computer system residing in the Edinburgh University library.

Unfortunately, the cost of printing the bastard thing was so extortionate I had to turn a few tricks just to run off the copy I had to hand in. As for keeping a digital version, I would have needed a dongle the size of a cricket bat to take it anywhere, even if such a thing as a dongle had even yet existed.

The little I do remember about the substance of what I wrote was my focus on themes and ideas I had grown up with, living through the decade in which WATCHMEN, V and THE DARK KNIGHT all came into being – the eighties.

I examined the pervasive presence of television, the spectre of nuclear armageddon, and a growing sense of moral ambiguity ushered in by an age of scientific enlightenment, religious disenfranchisement and the emergence of the all-powerful media industrial complex (of which I am now such a loyal and trusted servant).

I found that these recurred within the significant graphic novels of the era, both in terms of narrative development, and as visual elements, framing characters existing within a menacing grey area beyond the childish binary of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.

Meaning that when Kate and I sat down and talked about how Watchmen could be adapted into a post-9/11 PG-13 superhero story, I was stumped. I was all up for trying – I’ve long ago shaken the mindset that shit film adaptations somehow compromise the integrity of the source material. As far as I’m concerned, all shit films compromise is the people who make them.

It wasn’t really working though, at least not when Kate and I were trying to get to grips with it, and the news that Paramount had pulled the plug on the project was met on my part with a measure of relief, as well as disappointment. (I’m sure with hindsight Greengrass is far happier that he went on to make his other post-9/11 project, UNITED 93.)

Fast forward to 2007, and I’m sitting in Hall E of the San Diego Convention Centre waiting for Zack Snyder to tell me and 4,999 other feverish fanboys what he has planned for WATCHMEN. I’ve travelled to Comic-con under the auspices of getting the inside track on a few of the movies slated for 2008-9, but this is the real reason I’ve routed my quarterly trip to LA through southernmost California.

It takes a certain type of person to address a crowd of 5,000 people and have each of them feel as though they’re having a one-to-one conversation. Probably the same kind of person it takes to inspire a team of hundreds, thousands even, to give themselves over to the production of a $120m movie depicting a group of men and women dressing up and ostensibly failing to save the world.

What we learned at Comic-con was that the film was set to be a period piece, that it would be R-rated, and that it would star no-one in particular. Each of these details seemed to resonate with everybody present – by the end of the session I believe every one of us shared a palpable sense that WATCHMEN was in safe hands.

_ _ _

Making it (y)our own

We must have produced more than fifty different movie widgets in the last twelve months, but the WATCHMEN widget is unique in a couple of key respects:

a) A typical movie widget goes live 8-10 weeks out from release, sometimes even less.  It’s not ideal, but movie marketing – every bit as much as politics – is the art of the possible.

The WATCHMEN widget went live ten months out.

That probably only happened because…

b) We built the WATCHMEN widget without waiting to be asked.  It wasn’t much to look at – just a countdown clock and a smiley face – but it was enough to get it signed off and get started.  When the widget went live, we were still almost 300 days from release.

(I’m looking at it now, and I’m seeing 14 hours, 39 minutes and 7 seconds.)

The key to a great movie widget is to start early, update often and seed aggressively off the back of all the major campaign milestones.

The moment the embargo came up on the teaser trailer, we had it live in the widget and were mailing around our blogger contacts to let them know that it was there for the taking.

Likewise the feature trailer, which saw Marc Berry and I up at 3am in the morning republishing files and emailing everyone we knew who might want to feature the trailer on their site.

In the background, we’ve been updating the widget on an almost weekly basis to include the steady flow of new video clips and production webisodes, campaign news, wallpapers, screensavers and all the other fanboy fare making up the backbone of any self-respecting interactive marketing campaign.

The bottom line is this – if you’re going to ask somebody to place what is essentially a free advertisement for your product on their homepage, blog, fan-site, social networking profile or whatever other digital smallholding it is they call their own, you better make sure it does something.  In the case of WATCHMEN, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode.

Coming into 2009, we took the widget and turned it into the centrepiece of what we can find no better words to describe than ’social media toolkit’.

www.I-Watch-The-Watchmen.com went live in early January, featuring a plethora – and I really mean, plethora – of tools and features.  I’m talking profile picture creators, blog, templates, site skins, social bookmarking and the rest, offering advanced compatibility with dozens of different blogging tools and social networks, as well as content created specifically for iPhone users.

I’m afraid I’m saying nothing about the number of widgets grabbed, or impressions generated, or profile pics created, unless its already out there in the public domain.  So when I say “PEOPLE LOVED THIS”, you’re just going to have to take my word for it.

_ _ _

Better blue than red, man.

Some of the ideas we pitch feel like complete no-brainers.  Others are submitted more in hope than expectation. When we sent Paramount our first pass at treatments for various 3-minute videos, each offering a different view into the world of WATCHMEN and the alternate reality in which it is situated, it never really occurred to me that several months later I’d be able to sit here and show you this…

…or this…

…or this…

[UPDATE 11:54pm 06/03/09] …or this…

…or that between them, they would be closing in on a total of one million views in less than six weeks. (The first of them, NBS Nightly News, did 200,000 views in just 48 hours.)

If it hadn’t been for the tireless persistence and imaginative energy of our creative director, Dan Skinner (a fellow fanboy, and Watchmen acolyte), I doubt these even would have made it in front of the client, let alone have gone on to become a reality.

No matter that the process of conceptualising them and co-writing the scripts was one of the most creatively stimulating experiences of my life, working or otherwise.

Nor that the time we spent designing the sets and filming the key material gave me a glimpse of what a remarkable thing it must be to spend your life working in film production.

The ultimate satisfaction is that these seem to be viewed by many as an extension of the entertainment, rather than just marketing materials. Tracking the comments online, we’ve seen a number of people mistake them for the work of the film-makers. From where we’re standing, that’s high praise indeed.

The videos are just three of the 50-odd artefacts making up The New Frontiersman, a website launched in order to explore the sprawling back-story of Watchmen with an attention to detail worthy of a Michelin star.  Like everyone, I have my own favourites, of which these are just a few:

From:

For my money, what’s worth enjoying about The New Frontiersman isn’t the fine-looking site we developed in order to deliver the wealth of custom-created content (every item of which had to be submitted for client and film-maker approval), but the fact that Youtube, Flickr, Friendfeed and Twitter are also used to aggregate and syndicate every single item, enabling a broad audience of subscribers to pick up our daily updates by whatever means they preferred.

We weren’t just paying lip service to social media, so that we could name-check fashionable web 2.0 brands in press releases.  Everything we did with these channels was driving towards finding a broader audience for our content, using the right tools for the right jobs, building a community of common interest around the unfolding back-story.

The numbers are all there if you want to look for them – evidence not only of quantity, but also of a quality of engagement going way beyond a hit to a website, or a click-through on a banner ad.  The kind of engagement you only really surpass once you’ve got people going ten-pin bowling dressed up as Nite Owl.

_ _ _

No place like Home™

Two years ago exactly, I was sweating on an event we were running in Second Life to promote the release of Zack Snyder’s “300″.  I mean really sweating.  Working in conjunction with friend and collaborator Neville Hobson, we were inviting a number of very influential bloggers and journalists to an in-world event that had an inordinate potential to go wrong.

It didn’t go wrong.  It went off really rather well, after which I hid in an office in our building, called my wife, and broke down in tears.  It was that kind of project.

The “300″ film-maker Q&A became the starting point for a series of movie promotions in Second Life, each of which was more technically and creatively ambitious than the last, promoting movies including DIE HARD, TRANSFORMERS and IRON MAN.

PPC quickly established ourselves as peerless in the field of marketing movies in virtual worlds, which is maybe why Sony got in touch with us to talk about doing the same in PlayStation Home.

With Home going open beta in December 2008, the timing in relation to WATCHMEN couldn’t have been better.  December would see a sudden influx of many hundreds of thousands of PlayStation owners into Home, with Home cinema a likely first port of call.

We agreed to run a number of initiatives, starting with the release of the newly unveiled feature trailer in Home, making it the first trailer to play in the open beta.  This was accompanied by a video message from Zack Snyder, welcoming everybody to Home and encouraging them to look forward to more from WATCHMEN in weeks to come:

The best of what we’d learnt from our work in Second Life then came into play on the day of the UK junket, as we brought Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons together with a worldwide audience of journalists, bloggers and fans for a 45-minute Q&A in Silverscreen clubhouse.  The Q&A was broadcast live over Ustream, opening it up to a broader audience online, and enabling us to take questions both from Ustream and from Twitter through the course of the event.

The machinima event promo gives a far better sense of what went down than I could ever hope to do:

These events tend to rely on a precarious amalgam of new technology and logistical mayhem, and can be nasty things to get caught up in the middle of.  I ran three of them in Second Life, and drank a hell of a lot of vodka along the way.

With that in mind, I hadn’t really expected to be able to just hire somebody who could just step up and take over the reins.  That’s exactly what Marc Berry did, ably supported by long-term virtual collaborator Dom from Deluxe Corporation and our metaverse consultant from across the water, Annie Ok.

The way it basically played is that with about a week to go before the event I put the fear of god into Marc, in terms of all the potential problems he was likely to face over coming days, then disappeared up north for a week on a family holiday.  I got back just in time to join the audience – virtual and actual – for a perfectly executed event.  While I’m on the record, I have to give Marc HUGE kudos for pulling it off.

The icing on the cake has been the WATCHMEN digital merchandise we’ve created and released, at no cost, through the PlayStation store.  Annie’s staple involvement in the project was to cut us a rocking machinima promo showing off the Rorschach and Nite Owl costumes we produced, and that’s exactly what she did:

Again, you’re going to have to take my word for it that these have proven popular.  The great thing about them is that, rather than spending big on producing a themed environment, something like this is relatively cheap to produce and travels through Home to wherever it is the people are.  If our approach is about encouraging fans to wear there anticipation of a movie on their virtual sleeves, and to evangelize on its behalf, our work on Home on this campaign has to be scored as a ground-breaking success.

_ _ _

The bigger picture

WATCHMEN has been a big deal for PPC Group as a whole.  As well as everything here, we’ve worked on numerous international trailers and tv spots, a 30-minute programme, a 12-part press kit and a Metro cover wrap due to hit the streets in several European countries in just a few hours time.

[Update 12:45pm 06/03/09] The cover wrap looks thus:

It’s been a chance for PPC Interactive to show exactly what it is that sets us apart from the crowd, in terms of our preparedness to innovate and experiment, whilst retaining a clear sense of the need to deliver tangible results satisfying explicitly commercial criteria.  To some extent I’ve had to ask the guys I work with – Saffron especially – to indulge me, and to forgive an almost unprofessional preoccupation with a single campaign, albeit the single most creatively aggressive campaign we’ve ever taken on.

It’s also been a chance for me to work with some of the amazing talents in my broader creative vicinity, all the way through to clients and film-makers whose preparedness to trust us with a $120m movie goes way beyond anything I’ve ever encountered.

But best of all?  Well, if you’d sat me down, fifteen years ago, and talked me through what we were going to do with this movie, the fun we were going to have, the people I’d get to work with, and the story we’d have the opportunity to tell, and then you’d told me that someone was actually going to pay me to do it, I’d have kissed you on those cherry lips of yours, and called you a liar.

I got to live the absolute dream on this one.  I don’t know what comes next, but it’s going to have to be good.  Damn good.  Because here I am.  One minute to midnight.  And it’s never felt better ≠)

From: Dan Light

During the Lift conference, a team from frog design (the global innovation firm) will be roving amongst attendees, presentations and hallway discussions. Why? They will be acting like anthropologists, studying the Lift attendees in their “natural habitat” to find ways of improving the future Lift Experience. frog will be using a number of methods to gather insights, and will be looking for some volunteers to self-document their conference experience. These volunteers may also participate in a special brainstorming workshop. Results of this first-time ever “Lift under the design microscope” program will be shared at the end of the conference. Watch out for more details to be announced once LIFT 10 has started!

From: LIFT

In a recent BBH Labs post (Wind Tunnel Marketing, The Sequel: On the Need for Divergent Insight) that talked about the need for divergent thinking and stimulus in approaching problem solving (& creative ideation), Chaz Wigley, the Chairman of BBH in Asia Pacific, mentioned how the CIA’s (I’ve always wanted to link to the CIA) Problem Definition Checklist provoked precisely this kind of approach; rounded, many-faceted, flexible.

These questions are known as “context-free questions” and are designed “to encourage agents to look at a challenge from many different angles. Using Phoenix is like holding your challenge in your hand. You can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it up to another position, imagine solutions, and really be in control of it” (see the excellent, if chewy, paper on Exploring Exploratory Testing, for more here).

We now have from Chaz not only the list of questions the CIA use to define problems, but also (thanks to Iqbal Mohammed) the follow-up list they use to develop the plan. Which seems kind of important too.

My personal favourite question in the problem definition list is the somewhat open-ended: ‘what isn’t the problem?’.

Enjoy.

–

THE PROBLEM

Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?
What is the unknown?
What is it you don’t yet understand?
What is the information you have?
What isn’t the problem?
Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?
Where are the boundaries of the problem?
Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?
Have you seen this problem before?
Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?
Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown
Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?
Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?
What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?

THE PLAN

Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?
What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?
How much of the unknown can you determine?
Can you derive something useful from the information you have?
Have you used all the information?
Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?
Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?
What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?
Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?
How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?
What have others done?
Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result?
What should be done? How should it be done?
Where should it be done?
When should it be done?
Who should do it?
What do you need to do at this time?
Who will be responsible for what?
Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?
What milestones can best mark your progress?
How will you know when you are successful?

From: BBH Labs

datadecs

One of the points of starting RIG was to actually try stuff out - not just think and blog about things. Specifically - 'post-digital' things. That means doing things for ourselves, things without a client or a business model, things that are 'recently possible'. Obviously we hope some of these experiments will turn into something more, but if we were certain they would then they wouldn't be experiments would they? We've been lucky so far; TOFHWOTI turned into Newspaper Club, but who knows this time?

We've been wanting to play with 3D printers and custom manufacturer for a while, but weren't sure where to start. We'd never seen them in action, weren't sure what we could do. We thought about it idly through 2009 but then Cory Doctorow started serialising Makers and we started thinking about it harder. Various posts from Anne pushed the thinking further. And we were still thinking about it when I went to Oslo in October and set them this brief:

Inspired by that trip, we were thinking about it even more when we went to visit Ravensbourne and look at all their tools and machines:

That was inspiring too. Made it clear what was possible and what wasn't. The only problem now was what the heck to make.

We solved that on October 16th. On the back of an envelope. Look, there it is. We wanted something that materialised individual data in a way that could systematised. We wanted something designed for display and we wanted something trivial, playful and unimportant. Something we could send to our friends. So we decided to make Christmas decorations based on social network data.Obviously.

There were only two problems - we'd immediately given ourselves timing issues with Christmas not being far away, and we had no idea how to actually do it. So we found a man who did know how to do it; the extraordinarily talented Mr Andy Huntington without whom none of this would have been possible.

Our first thought was to make them all with a 3D printer, but it soon became clear that would be too expensive and too slow. So we decided to do one with the 3D printer and three with laser-cut acrylic.

This was the first one we thought of, representing monthly scrobbles on Last.fm

These represents miles travelled per month on Dopplr (initially the cloud size of the cloud was going to represent your annual carbon use but that proved to complicated)

These blue ones represent the apertures you've used over the year on flickr:

And these are the twitter snowmen. The bigger the head, the more followers you have:

 

(There's another datapoint hidden in there too, but no-one seems to have spotted that yet.) Getting the snowmen right was tricky. The data varied massively, from 10s of followers to 1,000s, but the heads still had to be recongnisable as heads - and not over-balance the whole object. Materialising data introduces a load of constraints on the design - you're suddenly working with the laws of physics as well as the boundaries of taste.

We realised we also needed something for when we couldn't find data, or when someone wasn't on a particular network, so we made this;

 

We went back and forth a while on how to make them, what they should look like, all that. Andy's written about that, and I bet Ben will shortly.

Once we got the prototypes back it started to be obvious that you could only tell what the objects 'meant' when you could see them alongside other people's. So we also made a card that showed you the context and the spread of shapes. This was the front cover:

 

The insides looked this:

I think that might be my favourite bit.

We then spent a bit of time spraying on glitter, attaching the nice string, putting them in boxes and sending them to people. Those in the UK (mostly) got those before Christmas. Our international friends mostly didn't. Sorry about that. I think there are some still on the way.

And then it was incredibly nice to see them popping up on flickr and twitter (which seem to be emerging as the new best ways of saying thanks.) People seem to like them - and as ever are writing smarter things about them than we could have done ourselves - Beeker, Julian, David, Anne, Iain.

And I think that's about it. It was fun. I think we learned by doing. And I think we have some interesting ideas about how to apply what we've learned. But more of that another time.

Anyway. 

(Thanks to Russell Duncan, and various flickr friends for the pictures)

From: Russell Davies' blog

Storyboarding

What it is

Storyboarding is a narrative technique adopted from the film industry and adapted to suit the needs of designers interested in ways to communicate the various features of a service design. Storyboarding can be used to test and evaluate ideas, as well as communicate them to others. Storyboards are normally presented as a series of ‘frames’ that communicate a sequence of events such as a customer journey.

What you get

If you’re using storyboards to represent your polished ideas you’ll get a visual and rich description of a service design that highlights key touchpoints and moments. The tone and quality of the descriptions of course depends on the style and skill of the storyboarder.

A storyboard storyboard!

If you’re using storyboards to explore ideas and check your thinking you’ll have a series of more ‘sketchy’ moments - its often best to draw these on postcards so you can re-order them and play around with the sequence of events.

When to use it

You can use storyboarding at many points during a service design exercise. For example to stimulate a focused discussion around key features; To imagine interactions in more detail; To gain useful insights to stimulate the prototyping phase; To provide the necessary detail to enable people to grasp some of the more complex features of a proposition.

From: Engine Design Group - Methods

For what its worth

The post on Client briefs and briefings seems to have got a bit of interest so I thought I'd make available a rudimetary briefing format for Clients to agencies.

I'm sure that it's not perfect but it may help, especially if your clients or you as a client don't have an approach to briefing that is set in concrete.

http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/