Feature Speaker Focus


Three trends to watch from


H+K Strategies


Vikki Chowney, chief content strategist at H+K Strategies UK, is giving a morning keynote at FutureBook 17


Live content is still one of the most exciting and impactful ways to deliver content. It’s the most familiar as well. We all understand the mechanics of reporting in real time, but as social networks change the very understanding of what “live” is (and consumers’ expectations of this) means we have to be more robust in the ways we deliver a live experience. This isn’t just about the Guardian’s fantastic live-blogging coverage, but about partnerships that enable us to curate content live. It’s about using media in more interesting ways to capture people’s attention in the places they go for more information when an event or celebration is happening in the moment.


Co-creation is also coming of age. It’s been a buzzword in the past few years; many have preached that they collaborate with artists, influencers or other brands to produce joint work, but so much of this has remained a one-way, briefed process. Now technology is enabling us to crowdsource in a more interesting way. Communities and networks are better established, quality is higher, understanding of the rules of the game is greater. Fresh blood, new thinking and diverse ways of creating are being made possible by the ease of access technology provides us.


Then the big one: artificial intelligence. The most sci-fi of all the trends, the most scary, but also the most transformative. For me, this doesn’t have to be unachievable. Cognitive technologies can shorten and improve research processes that would have taken months just a few years ago. The power of analysis and the generation of insights from consumer behaviours has phenomenal potential. We can now overlap multiple sources of data that once would have seemed impossible, and it’s not as expensive as you’d think. This is where the magic happens; when human creativity is augmented by smart technology, not replaced by it.


kind of work coming out in developmen- tal psychology, about how children learn languages, what the differences are across ages, cultural differences, and we’d put the start-up in touch with somebody who has that kind of early-years learning expertise. It’s trying to raise the level and qualit of the conversation about what it means to say: “This educational way of working or educa- tional technology is effective.”


Four questions about UCL’s Educate project


with Rose Luckin (above), professor of Learner Centred Design at UCL Knowledge Lab


Tell us more about the EDUCATE project running at UCL.


The whole mission is to help connect people who develop technology that supports learning and teaching with the people who use [that tech] and the people who research how those things can be used effectively. Say, for example, we had a start-up who wanted to develop a toy for three to four- year-olds to develop language skills. We wouldn’t just look at existing evidence about toys and language, we would also look at the


Five things that are


inspiring... Chantal Restivo-Alessi,


HarperCollins’ chief digital officer and executive vice- president, international


www.thebookseller.com


Hardware The mobile phone. I know it’s obvious, but I believe we have not seen its full impact yet. It has revolutionised the way we communicate and work, but how it will revolutionise the way we consume books is still in the making. As someone who needs to remain in contact with offices in time zones around the world, it allows me to be connected 24/7—which is good and bad...


Where should start-ups begin with efficacy research? At least 90% of the people we work with want to do an experimental piece of work that demonstrates that their particular thing is beter than something else, or beter than nothing. We take a deep breath and go: “OK, it’s probably not the way you want to go about it.” Because actually, that is a very narrow way of looking at things. If the evidence doesn’t demonstrate that, what have you learned? Not much. A much more sensible way is to say: “What has actually happened? How are the learners using it?” The number of times I have looked at a piece of technology, and you realise when you look at what learners are doing with it, they’re not actually using a key feature that the designer believes is the best thing since


Software Basecamp, and any other collaboration tool. In [HarperCollins’] case, this has enabled us to work in a truly co-ordinated fashion, sharing digital assets and publishing and marketing plans much more quickly and easily.


Book


It’s not a single book, but Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an ongoing publishing endeavour in its own right. The project tested the limits of our global publishing plan. We all worked towards a near single-day lay-down, co-ordinated with Warner Bros., managed the piracy risk, and ultimately released 96 different editions of six books across 20 markets in 16 languages.


sliced bread. So you need to try and look at the process as well as the product.


What’s the ideal timescale for a research project? Oſten the evidence actually takes years [to accumulate]. When I was first lectur- ing, I taught a group of first-year computer science students soſtware design, and they hated the course because it made them work in groups—they didn’t want to. Two years later they would come [to me] and say, ‘That was the best course I ever did.’ Sometimes you can’t immediately see the effect of something.


What’s the potential in this field right now? The more people interact with, or are observed by, technologies, the more infor- mation there is about how they are learn- ing, and the more things we can understand about how we can support them to learn beter. There’s a lot of information we can potentially get now that we have never been able to get before—so whether you are a researcher, teacher, publisher or edtech company, the existence of that information is in and of itself really interesting. I think it’s a fascinating time to be doing research.


Idea


The idea of bridging global and local publishing in the publishing world. It is not just an idea, it is something I am committed to building every day in the interest of authors and HarperCollins, as a true partnership.


Person There is not a single person I would like to quote as an inspiration, but the team of people I am fortunate enough to work with every day across the organisation. Our business truly requires teamwork, innovation and openness to change. Every author and every project is a new adventure, and I am really fortunate to be working with so many capable and inspiring people and authors.


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