Week 498 - Interesting links

Digital transformation at Wellcome Collection

It seems that almost every large company and public sector organisation is undertaking a programme of “digital transformation”. I’ve found it hard to work out in practice what that means in practice for some of the clients and companies we’ve spoken to. In this article Tom Scott gives a lot of practical detail on the digital transformation project at the Wellcome Collection and some of their successes and challenges to date. — CL

Better Radio Experiences: Prototypes, Hackdays and Evaluation

Libby Miller talks about a project that has recently finished at BBC R&D. The aim of the project was to explore some ideas for radio devices and how BBC audiences will listen to radio in the future. One of the major problems with developing new ideas is, according to Libby:

… if you show an app to someone to get their opinion and it looks like it’s finished, they will critique the appearance and not the functionality. In this particular project, we were not interested in whether a button on a screen should be a certain colour, but whether the underlying feature is worth putting more time and effort into.

In this post Libby talks about how developing low-tech prototypes using a hackable, web-standards based prototyping platform helps to get past the superficial aspects of an idea and test its real contribution.

The rapid prototyping environment we worked on for BBC R&D has a similar ambition for testing ideas for smart-speaker devices such as the Amazon Alexa. — CL

Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same

French game studio Motion Twin talk about their co-operative structure and their discussion of the challenges around flat-pay, consensus-based decision making and maintaining a healthy work-life balance sound very similar to those we face at Go Free Range. But the benefits are clear - the company has been around for 2 decades and everyone who is involved in their successful projects benefits equally. — CL