The Boat Hack That May Change TV, and How Corporate Culture Affects Design

I just finished MIPTV, where I was liveblogging like crazy with fellow journo/blogger Stuart Dredge. This year MIPTV held an event called MIPCube, which focuses on better acquainting TV producers and network execs with the digital folks of whom they're so wary.

Over the weekend MIPCube hosted a Hack Day event in partnership with Rewired State. In short, a passel of hackers were put on a yacht and given less than 48 hours to hack something that would improve our TV experience. On Saturday night they presented all their projects, a whopping 12 of which 10 properly work and are now online.

But only one could win judges' hearts, and that was GrabMagic!, featured above. It was developed by Aral Balkan.

What I love about this Kinect hack is that it really does feel magical. It doesn't just produce a fluent connection between your TV and phone; it creates one between you and those devices as well. You behave like a connected organism, moving muscles without thinking, and that's beautiful.

During the Hack Day presentations I asked Aral how he avoids feature creep in his design. This was his response.

 As a designer, your greatest asset is the ability to say no. But that's simplistic - sometimes it's not your inability to say no, it's the structure of the organisation itself that doesn't allow you. If the organisation is design-led, it's easy; but otherwise designers may not have the authority.

A lot of organisations, because of their corporate cultures, because of their corporate structures, make simple design impossible. It isn't because of a team. That's very low level.

User experience begins at the top and trickles down.

See the other projects from the boat hack at MIPCube.

Catch Us at MIPTV.

I'm at MIPTV to liveblog the sessions alongside The Guardian's Stuart Dredge and Fearless Leader James Martin. Here is our first-ever videoblog. More to come, and I'll be doing them, so huzzah for experiments!

This afternoon we'll be meeting a bunch of hackers on a yacht called the Mojito. Their challenge: to hack up some game-changing TV-mutating magic in the next 48 hours. Can't wait to see what they've got on the plate, but more crucially: will there be hot tub hacking?

Keep An Eye On: Mind Control

3D printers? So last season. If you're not at home prototyping your own gear cubes (or statuettes of your likeness), consider yourself left behind as of last week.

Thankfully, there's hope. Today's big wave is mind control -- that is, our minds controlling other stuff (at least for now).

Last week during MIPTV's Connected Creativity segment, Baroness Susan Greenfield talked about how the mind works and is changing as a result of our technology adoption. She began her talk with an interesting statement that the mind is a place that (ideally) can't be hacked.

That's increasingly less true, and Greenfield betrays this herself by admitting we do change as a function of how we use technology.

We've opened APIs to our minds. We are constantly experimenting with new -- even bionic -- capabilities. We readily throw out what doesn't work, and keep what does, from the most banal -- vigilantly recording our present whereabouts on Foursquare and Facebook, stringing thoughts into something coherent to publish on Twitter -- to the large-scale and networked: organising to elect our first black President, to raise funds for the Japan tsunami, to remotely rebuild the Rainbow Warrior alongside Greenpeace.

Where to go from here? Directly to the source, with minimal middleman between point A (the brain) and point B (the intended outcome). And there's work in that direction. Two technologies I've seen this past week include:

• The elusive E-Mote. Basically a neurons-reading remote control. We only have a vague understanding of how it works -- or is meant to work -- coupled with a slick video of people changing TV channels with their minds, bringing delightful new hijinks to family dynamics:

• Emotiv. For the time being this is an enclosed platform with apps built to work specifically with the technology. It is marketed to developers and researchers and costs a trifling $299. At MIPTV, Gavin McGarry claimed he tried it and was, like, crushing human heads with his superbrain and whatnot. (We survived, but I can see Gavin being the Carrie of the new millennium.)

I haven't any thoughts on where this is going (my opinions are heavily influenced by fringey Star Trek characters who used USB ports in their heads to hack safes at constant risk of brain damage by firewall). I do think we are moving in a direction where technology grows closer to the body, more like an extension of our own appendages, and we'll see ever more experimental (and cheap!) takes on closer human/machine integration.

I say this because as we grow more dependent on items like the iPad and iPhone, and their myriad capabilities that change our whole days, we must move toward carrying less technology with us, not more. These items are already quite small, intimate and relatively close to us all the time.

Tread lightly, mice and men. What comes next is bigger than compulsive live-published geolocal check-ins. And it will come with great responsibility (and probably a new iteration of Angry Birds).

I Am at MIPTV This Week. You Should Follow Along!

Once yearly I hit MIPTV to find out, and report on, what the world's networks and producers are passing around to appease the seething throng. You should follow along because our wee little team is covering all the sessions quite thoroughly. Where to go:

• The MIPWorld Blog. All our "liveblogs" will go up about half an hour after each session, complete with photos. (Videos of each session come up a day later.)
• The MIP Twitter account @_mip_.
• My Twitter account @luckthelady (although @_mip_ will be infinitely more relevant and all-encompassing. But you can follow me too for the occasional intelligent reflection and group project.

To situate you a bit, or if you have no idea what MIPTV is all about, self-orient with my pre-show post on what I most look forward to. I will be covering many of these topics and plenty of others, too. Stuff I covered today:

• MIPFormats: The Creator's Toolkit. A breakdown on producing and protecting your format. Also jam-packed with reflections on the birth and development of Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire?
• MIPDoc: Financing for New Co-Production. A primer on co-production, and a new financing model, for documentary filmmakers and producers.
• MIPDoc: Crowdsourcing: The Frontier of Documentary Funding. How crowdsourcing is changing the face of documentary funding. (Or could, in any case.)

Don't you feel smarter already? I kind of do but that might just be frozen headache. (Häagen-Dazs.)

Just So You Know That I'm Alive

Hokay, here's my wrapup post for MIPTV, which links to all the liveblogs I wrote for the conference over the course of the week. In terms of promise, creativity and where the future is, the last set of talks was my favourite -- and probably the least coherent in terms of post-session coverage.

One thing I got out of it was this data visualisation of SMSes sent in Paris when the New Year hit, courtesy of Orange and faberNovel!



Doesn't it make you happy to be alive right now, in a time when maps can share so much more than topography?

What's coming in terms of TV? More reality show fare, but the following three trends were cited as hot this year:

• Family/emotainment. And I don't mean friendly family fare like Step by Step; I mean reality shows about family members. One involved taking a mass of people and finding which family members went with which, then matching the completed family to their living room. Another locked strangers with vague and unknown familial ties together in a house, where a series of terrible events lead to the discovery of how they're related. There is much screaming and crying.
• Flashmobs.
• Mobile. You'll be seeing a lot of reality shows that incorporate smartphones heavily in the plot; networks like the BBC have gotten more imaginative, with live quizzes you can take on your phone while watching EastEnders, for example. (The quiz loads on your phone while the episode kicks off on TV. A microphone indicates to the software where you are in the plot, then shoots you an appropriate question.)

After MIPTV, drama involving a certain volcano turned travel into an arms race. Most of my UK-based colleagues for the week got trapped in the south of France. Not a bad place to be stuck, all things considered, but annoying nonetheless.

One of my favourite quotes of the week came from the editor of a major industry newspaper, who exclaimed, "A stupid volcano is affecting the TV industry! It's bloody inconsiderate."

(This is in the event you ever wondered which industry is more insane than advertising.)

I got back to Paris easily enough but not unscathed: since my return, I've spent most of my time emptying the contents of a red nose into enough sheets of Kleenex to clear a small community park. Sorry, Greenpeace.

Hope you missed me. As always you can catch my ad reviews on Culture Buzz or via AdVerve. Bob Knorpp recently also had me on the 100th episode of The BeanCast, where me and a pile o' smart girls talked about Twitter and, appropriately enough, who deserves to die. If you miss it, your soul will cry.

Family on the Cannes Croisette

...because I'd rather show you this than a larger-than-life potshot promotion of Korean reality TV.

On the Conference Docket Now

My conference moderator face.

There's a number of events I attended in the last few weeks that I wish I'd had time to mention earlier: Plugg Brussels, Marketing 2.0, TechCrunch Paris. But, deadlines being what they are and with the internet constantly throwing stuff like this at you, I never really got around to it.

Let's try moving backward.

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