This summer marks two years since the inception of the festivalslab project. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a showreel document which gives our highlights of what worked and what didn’t. Let us know what you think.

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Alongside the innovation work done by Festivals Edinburgh here at festivalslab, our colleagues here are also actively involved in developing a series of activities related to the environmental impact of the festivals.  Out of that work has come a new initiative called Creative Carbon Scotland and they together with Festivals Edinburgh are currently inviting responses to a tender to develop a major new portal for sustainability and the arts in Scotland.

It is worth up to £20k and responses are invited by July 18th.  The full brief is here.

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Thanks to support from the Open Innovation Project we’re delighted that one of the leading ideas from last year’s Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge is being built into a prototype project for this summer.  The idea is quite simple – to create a cross-festivals listings service targetted more for people with access requirements…although that simplicity does not belie some of the complexities therein!

We’re also delighted to be working with Alienation Digital and Artlink on the project, with the former working on the technical and design wizardry and the latter helping bring the expertise related to accessibility requirements that we ourselves do not have in depth.

This is a prototype project and in addition to that it is a digital project and therefore cannot be a complete solution to a challenge which is both broad and nuanced.  The festivals make every effort to ensure that the Festival programmes are accessible to everyone and as well as being committed to innovation and so the intention is that this project and any associated learning can be built upon both for refining this project itself but also with regards developing the area of accessibility and the arts which Artlink and other similar organisations across Scotland are such important pioneers of.

Good information is integral to a project like this and so while the festivals already have a significant amount of access data available, the project will allow channels for user-generated feedback as well as inviting venues to provide the project with more additional data.  This data capture exercise is currently ongoing and is being managed by Devon Walshe of FestivalsReview.com with his colleagues, Dan Do Rosario, Andy Robinson & Joe Anderson.

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Well I guess the post title says it all.  Check out the user guide to see how the API project works this year and then you can register here.  We’re here to help so please let us know if you need any assistance.

Thanks!

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Given that  the only idea that won both the public and the judges’ vote of the Edinburgh Festivals Ideas Challenge was related to accessibility, we’re delighted to announce that Festivals Edinburgh has just published a tender for a delivery partner to build a user-centred digital service targeted at attendees of the Edinburgh Festivals with accessibility needs.

Full details and the tender brief is available at www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk/jobs

The project has not been fully specified down to the final detail since we want to work together with the delivery partner and a relevant group of users to create the solution that best matches the expertise of the delivery partner and can generate the target outcomes.

Responses for this piece of work have to be in by April 27th so please get in touch if you would like to be considered for this project.  The fee is up to £9k and the project is generously supported by the Open Innovation Project and Interreg.

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This summer sees the end of the first two years of the festivalslab project and we’re in reflective mood.  We’ve got plenty of material on what might have been done better (!) so we’d really like your help to help us think about what we’ve achieved and what we might have stimulated.

So if there’s anyone out there reading this (and our google analytics means we know you’re out there!), if you’ve ever wanted to do us a favour in exchange of everything we’ve shared then please just write in the comments, email it on lab@festivalsedinburgh.com or tweet to @festivalslab your reponse to the simple question…

What has festivalslab and its various projects done for me? 

That’s all.

And thank you.

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The inaugural Culture Hack Scotland in Edinburgh proved to be one of the most productive and talked-about culture vs digital events in 2011. An incredible collection of talent made 30 amazing prototypes, many of which went on to have further life as more developed projects.

While the first event was hosted by us here at the festivals, Culture Hack Scotland is now part of Sync, an exciting new two-year programme all about prototyping and innovation in the Scottish cultural sector. But fear not, since the people producing Sync were the same people who made the first event happen, Culture Hack Scotland is in the safest of hands.

It travels down the M8 this time and will take place at the stunning SocietyM in Central Glasgow on April 27/28.

Full info and tickets are now available via www.welcometosync.com/hack

This year there will be a coding workshop for culture professionals who are interested in understanding how it all works. Those who take a coding workshop ticket also get access to all other elements of the event.

And if you are interested in being a data partner, spaces are still available so please contact hello@welcometosync.com

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Download the PDF version

As our final post before the New Year, here is a little gift from everyone here at festivalslab. We get a lot of people ask us about the thinking and approaches which go behind this quite unique programme of work and so we thought it might be fun to summarise it all together in a little manifesto.

So here is our quick guide to creating not own innovation lab…not the operational elements since that will be so different for different contexts…but the ways of thinking and do-ing that is the basis of all that we are do.

And passionate advocates of prototyping that we are, this is a work in progress and we shall publish another one in 2012 at the completion of our first two years so please let us know what you think and how we might make it better.

Happy holidays and good tidings to innovators one and all!

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[this article first appeared this week on the Guardian Cultural Professionals network to coincide with the launch of Festival Design DNA]

Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the experience of the twelve major Edinburgh festivals even better – for audiences, performers and the festivals organisations themselves. As part of this ongoing work, this week saw the launch of Festivals Design DNA, a project which began life as a simple question: what happens if we approached innovation through the eyes of a designer, and in particular a service designer?

Working together with Glasgow-based service design agency Snook, we have created a set of practical tools to help cultural organisations use the principles and approaches of service design to improve the experiences they produce – supporting the innovation process all the way from ideation to delivery.

But before I tell you why I think service design is the next big thing in the cultural sector, let’s just back up a wee bit and do the definition thing. Service design is famously difficult to define and like most important things is something that is neither new nor totally unfamiliar. But just as product design is a discipline where formal design methodologies and approaches are used to make your hoover, smartphone and car the best it can be for your needs and your lifestyle, service design does the same for experiences.

And since all we as a sector do is produce experiences, becoming more literate in service design can only be a good thing. But if you’re still unconvinced here are my four top reasons why service design is so important right now.

1. What people want isn’t always what organisations want

There is often an assumption running through arts management that what organisations want is the same thing as what people want. If service design is about anything, it is putting people at the very centre of the design process and making experiences deliver what people actually want and need rather than what we think they want and need. There is a lot of rhetoric around being people-centred organisations and service design gives us the actual pathways to realising that, but we have to be ready to work with the fact that our modus operandi which is based on our needs may need some revision.

2. We cannot afford to limit innovation just to technology

Obviously the rate of change in technology has had and continues to have a huge impact on the innovation agenda for us as practitioners, as organisations and as a sector as a whole. But we are missing a trick if we conflate innovation and technology. Not only are there many more ways to improve and innovate than getting some new digital thingy, but because the novelty of digital innovation practice can be inaccessible to many of us, we as cultural professionals can feel shut out of the innovation agenda. The only true prerequisite for someone getting involved in innovation practice – however big or small – is surely just the interest and motivation to do so and not any technological intelligence. Service design provides us with a route through innovation whatever our background.

3. We should be customising the wheel, not reinventing it

When we take the wider view we can see so many parts of society, government and enterprise struggling with the same problems that we are – thriving in challenging times, growing participation and creating a distinctive offer in the market. Here at festivalslab, we are particularly interested in the major themes there are in social innovation and public services, since we feel that, at an abstract level, cultural provision is a public service, and given the similarities between cultural infrastructure and that in the public and third sectors, innovation approaches working there have a good chance of working here in the cultural sector. There is currently great momentum behind service design as an approach to public service innovation and so why don’t we take advantage of all the work done in these parallel sectors and contexts and learn how to apply them powerfully to our own contexts, rather than waste time building something from the beginning.

4. We need a more established culture of prototyping

In 2011, events like Culture Hack Scotland and Culture Hack Day in London gave us remarkable evidence of the power of rapid prototyping as a catalyst in culture innovation. Prototyping is also totally central to the service design approach and provides an analogue route for those who might not know their way around an API or indeed what those three letters even are. In a sector where financial resources are relatively low, effective prototyping fills the innovation gap, reducing the risk of innovation practice and solving the problem of the innovation funding calls, which ask for detailed project proposals but often do not provide the guidance or tools needed to come up with the good idea that makes a great proposal. While the Culture Hack family of events is one way of doing that in the digital domain, service design is another set of processes that allows us to do that more generally.

Some of the ideas of service design are of course already used and applied across the cultural sector, but in an ad hoc and unsupported way. While a relatively small offering, our Festival Design DNA is the first systematic application of service design to the cultural sector and together with our service design partner Snook, we’re passionate that service design and the arts is a furrow worth ploughing and especially relevant to our times. Like our work on open data last year here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, the themes of our work are as much campaigns as they are projects and so we look forward to the successes, failures and conversations that follow.

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This week we launch our Festival Design DNA project which you can get to by clicking DESIGN in the bar above you.

While we’re sure that some of the bigger arts organisations out there may have formally used service design as part of their business improvement processes, we’re excited to be the first ones to have such an open conversation about it, for in that site you will find a set of tools and approaches for cultural innovation as curated through the eyes of leading Scotland-based service design agency Snook.

Of course the materials are customised for festivals and twelve in particular but all cultural organisations will find some value in there to match their interest.

And if you’re not sure what we’re talking about, here’s a piece that Rohan wrote for the Guardian Culture Professsionals about why he thinks service design is The Next Big Thing in cultural innovation.

While the publication of these materials is sort of an end, it is more a start – start of a new conversation about cultural innovation and hopefully the start of new projects supported and enabled by these tools. We look forward to hearing from you all about what you think of it

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