Desert Island Discs was created by Roy Plomley in 1942, and the format is simple: a guest is invited by Kirsty Young to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island. Due to its longevity it has a rich heritage and a dedicated audience. The range of prolific guests invited to tell their stories and talk about the memories that certain pieces of music invoke creates an engrossing programme.
Recently our team was given access to historical data about the programme, so in the spirit of creativity and innovation myself, Mark Channon (Technical Team Lead) and Chris Lowis (Software Engineer) organised a two day hacking workshop, involving software engineers, client side developers and designers to build prototypes that illustrate how the data can be used in new and creative ways.
To kick off the workshop we started with some brainstorming exercises to get ideas flowing. The first exercise involved everyone grabbing a partner and asking them questions about music and objects that they would take to a desert island and why.

What would you take to a desert island and why?
The second exercise was focused on generating ideas that could be potentially prototyped. To do this everyone split up into groups to discuss thoughts and ideas and sketch them.

A sample of the prototype ideas
After a number of ideas were jotted down we then launched into another exercise to help each group develop their concepts further using a word association technique called random input. This involved taking a random word from the luxury items that were noted in the previous exercise such as ‘cloak’, ‘piano’ and ‘bed’ and then using these words to spark off ideas around the initial concepts that had been written down so far in the ‘generating ideas for the prototype’ exercise.

After completing this exercise it was time for the groups to decide on which ideas to take forward. Due to the short timescale we all decided that a maximum of five ideas would be a resonable number to pursue. So in order to whittle down the huge number of concepts that everyone had generated to a manageable number Mark led us onto another exercise using a technique created by Edward de Bono called Six Thinking Hats.
This technique is particularly useful in a group situation where you need to make decisions quickly and encourage everyone to look at decisions from a number of perspectives.

Six thinking hats exercise
The following criteria enabled the group to evaluate each idea in turn and decide whether or not it was worth pursing within the context of the workshop.
- ideas – what is the idea?
- value – what value will this idea give to the group and the audience?
- risks – what are the risks involved? Do we have enough time? Do we have the right skills?
- feel – how does this idea make people feel?
- info – do we have the information available to make this happen? if not where do we get it from?
- solution – what do we need to do to make this idea a reality?

Six thinking hats worksheet
After going through this process (I’ve made it sound simple but its a lot of hard work and there was a healthy level of debate and discussion to) we arrived at five ideas. Everyone then split up into five teams of varying numbers to design and build them and I’ll go through each one in turn.
Pete Otaqui and Wai-Tai Li produced Last Island a project that uses your LastFM profile, or manually entered musical tastes, to connect you to Desert Island Discs castaways. Once these connections are made, other recommendations can be made to you – programmes on the BBC, books to read, or even luxury items!
This screenshot is an example of the interface for manually selecting your musical tastes.

Last Island - Love, Hate interface
Once you have done that you can then view your recommendations.

Last Island Recommendation
My Desert Island Memory created by Andrew Hilton, David Rogers, Hannes Jentsch, Tim Broom and Paul Kane is an app that enables you to leave a memory on a map.

Early concept sketch by Hannes
The concept was inspired by how guests on the Desert Island Discs programme talk about their memories in the context of locations. Using My Desert Island Memory its possible to navigate a google map and then select an area to leave your memory.

My Desert Island Memory - map interface
The team also created a mobile version, the advantage being that you can leave a memory on the exact spot that you are standing in and also upload content such as photos straight from your phone.

Mobile interface
There are some really nice touches such as the ability to specify your mood and its also possible to leave more than one memory on the map which creates a nice narrative as you navigate between locations.

Exploring memories
Using the Desert Island Discs data Paul Duncan created Desert Island Discs – The Quiz. During the brainstorming exercise lots of game ideas were discussed ranging from a match the item to the Castaway to more complex multiplayer games. However in the time available Paul settled on a simple quiz.
The game demonstrates the usage of Desert Island Disc data but also other BBC and web sources. For example question three, ‘Voyage of the Beagle’ shows how the Castaway’s book was also discussed on In Our Time and a link to the programme page provides cross program integration. Paul also explored how to integrate music clips from /music along with artist information.

Who wants to take The Voyage of the Beagle?
Desert Island Districts by James Sheppard, Martyn Wilkinson, Chris Thorne was an idea created to explore similarities between castaways, and represent those similarities as groups of islands with distances indicating how “close” different castaways are.
One part of the project looked at understanding similarity, or “relatedness”. Initially this was based on which castaways had chosen tracks by the same artist, but could be extended to choosing books by the same author, or having related luxury items. The group also worked on a visualisation of related castaways represented by an island.

Desert Island Districts
Each island has two labels – the top is an identifier, and the bottom is a relatedness score with respect to the “parent” island. The higher the score, the closer the islands. Clicking on an island re-centres the view on that island and shows related islands. This way, the entire castaway archive could potentially be navigated by clicking on other related islands.
Chris Lowis, Yves Raimond and Melanie Seyer worked on an interesting concept called Desert Island Discs Explorer that involved analysing transcriptions to create a different way of navigating the programme content. These screenshots illustrate the concept.
The starting point is a word cloud that is produced by analysing transcriptions and picking out popular words. Clicking on a word reveals the guests that have mentioned it in their interview.

Word cloud interface created from analysing transcriptions
Its then possible to start listening to a segment of audio that relates to the keyword mentioned.

Rich audio interface
As the audio progresses its possible to show visual content related to that section, for example pull quotes or photos that relate to the keywords in that segment.
At the end of the two days each team presented their ideas to a packed out room from everyone in the department. Usually with any workshops we do on this scale we wrap up with a presentation to a wider group. This is to motivate the people participating, enable them to demo and articulate their concepts to a diverse group of people and inspire others with what is possible within a short amount of time.
I can’t stress enough how important workshops like this are. There are a number of benefits of holding such events as it brings together people who often don’t get a chance to work with each other, new skills are learnt, it is an opportunity for people to explore and solve problems from different perspectives and it creates an energy and buzz not only within the group that is participating but also when the ideas are presented to the rest of the department. Overall its a great way to stimulate creativity and innovation within a team.
Finally to make workshops like this succeed there are number of tips I’d like to share.
Preparation – this is key, make sure you you plan ahead and think about how the workshop will be structured including what material (physical and digital) you need to make available. In the case of this workshop Chris made sure all the data was available in a format that could be used by the software engineers and he organised servers for development.
People - its important to make sure you have a good mix of people who are all able to contribute. Think about having a two or three people who may be strong in a particular area whether its design or development, this helps in situations where teams want to be really ambitious even when there is less than 24 hours!
Space – it really helps if the group have a space away from their day to day office to explore and generate ideas as well as having the right tools like wi-fi, pens, paper and food!
Facilitation – Brainstorming is an art. Its often the norm to kick off workshops with a little brainstorming in the morning to get people warmed up and generating ideas that they can pursue for the rest of the day. How this brainstorming is facilitated is critical. Prior to the workshops we discussed and thought about how to approach this and the outcome was a series of exercises that enabled the group to move from a broad range of ideas to then decide on one thing.