Posts tagged as concertclub

Much of this week was spent refactoring Muncaster – the Playable City codebase.

It’s the kind of code that gets fiddly to work with quickly. In making a conversational interface, you quickly move away from the kind of architecture that’s very simple to model in Object-Oriented languages and frameworks, and into something that’s much more about flow and state. As such, there’s lots of flow control and logic.

The catch here is that, in the Playable City design, there’s very little complexity to the “state” end of things, and very little happens on state-transition; instead, most of the weight of the work comes down to the flow control: what to say next, given what we know.

It’s been very easy to get into a “mazy of twisty passages, all alike“, especially as we try to adapt and modify the code based on playtests; there are so many dependencies that you end up walking through the control flow yourself as you code it a lot.

So my goal this week was to build something more final to build upon, tearing out things that didn’t work, and removing as many if statements as possible.

By the end of the week, a large amount of conditional logic had been torn out, and replaced with many, many tiny POROs, all responsible for building up fragments of a conversation, and none of which know anything about state other than the conversation they’re given to work with as input. In some ways, it’s not much simpler, but it’s proving much easier to modify, tweak, and extend, and that feels like it’s been really worth it. Logic has been torn out of the ActiveRecord models, and also become far less dependent on the database, which feels like an architectural win – and should make delivering Week 33’s playtest easier.

On Tuesday, I took part in a collaborative experience design workshop, run by Experientia. I said “yes” to this in part to see what that process was like from the other side of the table, and watch another design firm at work. It was super-rewarding on that front, and gave me some useful thoughts about future practice; also, I got to make lots of drawings with felt pens, which possibly bemused the other participants, but was a great work-out for my design brain.

And, of course, the other big news of the week was that Caper launched Concert Club. This is Detling: the project I’ve been talking about for the past couple of months. I’m really glad to see it in the world, even for its limited prototype lifespan: there are some interesting lessons to learn from it, and it’s been a lovely build process. I wrote more about it in this longer post last week, and I’d encourage you to find our more if you haven’t already.

Week 32 was a lot of code, then, and the usual last-minute wranglings to get a project live, but lots of nice pay-offs. In Week 33, we’ll get to put that code to use.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Concert Club – a prototype previously referred to on this site as Detling.

Concert Club is a prototype site I built with Caper, in a project funded by the Technology Strategy Board and supported by BBC Radio 3.

The brief we responded to was to ‘bring the live music experience home‘ for listeners who couldn’t attend concerts. For us, the live experience of classical music is something experienced in quiet reflection: it’s complex, and demands a lot of your brain. It’s not like sport; you don’t tweet halfway through a Mahler symphony about how great the wind are.

But it’s still a very social experience: planning what to see, inviting friends, discussing it afterwards. So how could we share that feeling?

We’ve come to explain Concert Club as book groups for classical music. The book group is a great model: a way of friends engaging with culture they otherwise might not; taking it in turns to take the lead about where the group will go next; discussing a complex work after the fact. It feels like what many people do after a concert, too – and so Concert Club provides a tool to facilitate that model for live classical music concerts on Radio 3.

First, it provides a window onto Radio 3’s upcoming Live In Concert listings, letting you see concerts that are on iPlayer or coming shortly. You can invite friends to listen through the site – and once you’ve created a listening group (or accepted an invite) you’ll be reminded when the concert comes onto iPlayer, and just before it leaves. And once you’re listening, you can share that fact with the world on Twitter.

We haven’t built any discussion facility, quite deliberately – maybe you’ll want to talk about the concert on Facebook; maybe you’ll want to talk about it at someone’s house over a cup of tea, or in the pub. That facility already exists, so why rebuild it? But then, when you want to schedule something to listen to, or discover new music: Concert Club is there.

And if classical music is all a bit daunting, the site also features editorial guides that provide thematics ways in to the Live In Concert catalogue. We’re really keen that these reflect a somewhat different tone to the Radio 3 website, bridging classical music to culture listeners might already be more familiar with. And because the concerts available are always shifting, so are the “relevant concerts” linked from these guides.

It’s an early prototype built swiftly, but it has a first pass at a “complete loop” of interaction: discovery, invitation, listening, sharing. It’s live for two months, for now, and it’s going to be interesting to see how people use it. Even in this state, it’s already got all of us in the team listening to concerts far more.

And it was a pleasure to work on: Caper built a great team (hat tips to Dean, Audrey, and Tim, along with Rachel and Sophie from Caper) and in a tight build cycle I think we built something somewhat unusual, a little provocative, and with real scope to grow.

It’s live for a few months, and we’re interested in feedback from real users. It’ll be interesting to see what grows from it.

http://concertclub.wearecaper.com