Content

Accenture Festival of Ideas

2012

Imagine you’re the CEO of a big consulting firm. The country you’re based in has had a chellenging few years. You need a plan. So you make that plan, gather the troops, and start reading from your powerpoint deck. But we all know this isn’t going to work, those people are asleep already.

Accenture Ireland’s ‘Festival of Ideas’ changed that script. 900 consultants related their own experience to the direction set by the executive team. Through an internal market, 200 topics had been decided on, topic leads and note-takers chosen, and as these focussed discussions played out over the day, we captured it all. Myself and a team of creatives visualised the parallel conversations in realtime, while surfacing trends and producing summaries.

The outcome? A better strategy, bought-into.

Diary entries

festival of ideas » 900 people and 20 hexayurts

a big convention centre, not so much sleep, and it’s barely dawn: back to high-stakes corporate events. there’s a good reason for taking some time out from the phd to be here: this is interesting, innovative stuff, embracing what a live event can bring, and doing it a long-term context of strategic and organisational renewal.

the photo – credit matthew thompson – shows the bulk of those people, and a smattering of the twenty hexayurts it was their first task of the day to build.

festival of ideas » in those yurts, 200 conversations

and why the twenty hexayurts? they were there to partition off the main business of the day: facilitated conversation in small groups. some form of internal market had been conducted in advance to arrive at the best 200 suggestions for topics, and the proposers were there to host each session. suffice to say, there were going to be a lot of ideas. and this is where we came in: could we capture them? visualise them? archive them?

“we” were stef and i, reforming our rave-era visuals partnership in our decidedly more rarified present – he a webby winner, clore fellow, top five of the observer future 500 (need i go on!?), and me deep on a journey of reorienting live events from the passive observation of ever more spectacle to something that builds on the character of liveness as i’ve experienced it, that exploits the potential of here and now of us together.

stef told me of the blue-sky conversations he’d had with the event’s mastermind, inspired arts producer boz temple-morris who had earned the trust of a corporate client to really explore what their events could be, and more importantly be for. this time, it all seemed to be around yurts, facilitated conversation, and the event being precisely the opposite of a bubble – the lynchpin of an on-going process yes, but that on-going process very much the thing.

a day or two later, stef had taken a conversation annotation web-app from idea to prototype. this was serious, and so i introduced stef to ford vj, kinetxt and how my *spark titler was changing the game of running screens at organisation’s events. there was something big and interesting that we could do here.

in the photo above, there’s a facilitated conversation in full flow, and on laptop the stef’s corporate-IT grade version of that original prototype[1]. most importantly, its enmeshed with all the other instances of the web-app in the room, and – drumroll – with our setup.

hardening and security is one thing, just don’t talk to stef about last minute requests for IE8 support on XP…


  1. ↩︎

festival of ideas » and portraits taken of everybody, by everybody

if you’re going to gather all your staff for a one-off event, why not take the opportunity while you’re at it to make a company portrait? this being a boz affair, however, its not a case of a photographer marshalling the troops into one shot. rather, everybody is tasked with taking everybody else’s photo - cue each pair having that connected moment of “oh, i don’t want a disastrous photo of me: do as you’d like done to you”. and, this being this, we also had them caption themselves with their favourite place to think and suchlike, and that camera and app was also wirelessly linked to our setup.

festival of ideas » all feeding into 'the brain'

This is the Brain.

We are using experimental thought-casting technology to display in real-time the ideas and thoughts are emerging at this moment, inside the Hexayurts and elsewhere. Come join our artists and coders in drawing it all together: talk to us, doodle with us as we find the emergent themes, trends and stories.

festival of ideas » interfaced, interpreted, illustrated

clockwise from top left

  • ciaran lucas illustrating key ideas and playing with post-its and sharpies across the venue
  • stef lewandowski live coding
  • caroline beavon plugging the data into spreadsheets galore on the data-journalism tip
  • carolyn jones wrangling everything and everybody together
  • yours truly, at this moment dealing with the good problem of having so much data coming in, the visualisation needed re-scaling

the physicality doesn’t match up to kinetxt’s, but there are definite and deliberate echoes here. its not a big ‘visual rock band’ performing realtime story-telling from audience contributions, but perhaps released from the demands of that, we finally delivered on some of those original ideals of transforming a sea of contributed snippets into something meaningful and coherent.

photo credits matthew thompson

festival of ideas » channeled through *spark screenrunner

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

festival of ideas » animating around a 3d diorama of post-its and plastic

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

festival of ideas » and out into the venue

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all[1]. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Amazing event. Loving the Brain! #festivalofideas
Alice Murphy @almurph75
Thanks. We’re having a brilliant day too!
Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Over 2000 ideas have flown through ‘the brain’ @ @Accenture_Irl #festivalofideas.
Andrew Hetherington @a_hetherington
Wow & we’ve still got the afternoon!
Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget
@TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time…
Eithne Harley @EithneHarley


  1. i’m learning: never has under-promise and over-deliver been so clear in my mind! ↩︎

business to arts award

happy to report the festival of ideas has won a business to arts award. it was a really satisfying project to be part of, and i’m really proud of how it responds to the ‘liveness’ of that kind of live event.

interestingly, it won the ‘staff engagement’ category. my research on liveness has led to audiences and interaction, so ‘staff engagement’ is a good fit there. what i find interesting is that in having recently talked about my ‘engagement with liveness’ agenda in entrepreneurial circles, it’s the ‘organisation innovation’ consequence of this that really hit home to them… and here we have that reinforced. there were plenty of other categories the festival of ideas could have won in, and plenty of other aspects of the event they could have chosen for that accompanying photo.