- Posts tagged BBC R&D Manchester
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Building Our North Lab
[This post is re-produced from my post on the all new BBC R&D Blog]
I'm Rowan de Pomerai, a technologist at BBC Research & Development. I've recently returned to London having spent around 7 months in our northern lab in Manchester. As Anthony mentioned in his post, the last year has seen BBC R&D's presence in Manchester grow from a handful of engineers to staff numbers in the double digits, with plans to keep that number rising as more staff move north in advance of the move to MediaCity:UK. Where the first few early movers got by with a small office space and a basic broadband-type connection to the R&D network in the south, that situation was rapidly becoming untenable. Physically we were bursting at the seams, and the lack of facilities was restricting the work we could do to certain types of software development and little else. We needed more space and more facilities if we were to grow a lab which could match the breadth of output provided by the London base.
R&D Workspaces: Some Quotes
One of the challenges I work on in developing BBC R&D North's new premesis (both the interim solution and our long term base at MediaCity:UK) is figuring out just what we as a department need to do our work. I've talked a little about the technology, but the physical environment is important too. Just what makes a space that engineers can work effectively in? I'd love to hear any suggestions you may have (use the comments), but I also thought I'd share some quotes I found when trying to quantify and communicate the environment we're trying to create.
Box + Pipe = Lab ?
It's been quite a while now since I started working on BBC R&D's North Lab. I've thoroughly failed to provide any updates, for which I apologise, but I think it falls under the category of "the more is happening, the less time you have to blog about it"! We've been ploughing ahead with our interim lab which will tide us over for the next two years or so on the existing BBC Manchester site, and planning for MediaCity:UK at Salford, which is our longer-term solution. My main focus was to be the former, but I've increasingly been pulled in to helping plan for MCUK; as you can probably imagine, it's a very large project requiring a lot of effort. But perhaps we're starting to work out just what it takes to build an R&D lab...
A Boring Blog Post
It's been quite a while now since I moved to Manchester... 6 weeks to be precise. (I had to go look at my calendar to work that out!) So what's happened? Well, everything and nothing really. Life continues much as normal, and though I've been desperately looking for a funny story to share with you, an anecdote of life up north that will make you smile, I've failed thus far. This can probably be seen as a guarantee that this post will be dull as dog poo, but I'll try to give you a brief update anyway.
Welcome T' Frozen North
Manchester greeted me yesterday with howling winds and a few brief showers. Not the best of starts weather-wise after the glorious sunshine that bathed London last week. However I'm now sitting in the Research & Development office of the BBC's New Broadcasting House in Manchester, getting settled in. How I came to be here was somewhat of an interesting story, and I explained a little here. But what I'm doing over the next 6 months will be even more interesting, and it's a journey I hope some of you might like to join me on. We have the task of establishing a new Research & Development lab in Manchester ahead of the BBC's move to Salford Quays. Setting up a new broadcast and media research lab isn't something that happens often, so just how we go about it will be full of creative and technical challenges.
