Stop hiding in R & D, make it fast and move on.

Claire Reddington asked the Books and Print projects 'Are we hiding behind the physical?'. Our project, Digitising the Dollar Princess is intrinsically woven with the physical book as we are invite people to explore Mary Curzon's life by flipping their way backwards and forwards through the pages of a digital book. As we talk to possible persona's, we are very much aware that we might be asking them to step too far outside of their comfort (and hardware) zone. Having put together a swift 10 question survey, one that we hoped would open people up and get them feeding back, a librarian friend informed me she couldn't answer the survey as it she didn't understand it. So for the time being, it feels like our book backdrop strikes a reassuring balance between the traditional and the new.

'Just make something and move on'. I'm very conscious of this as we've been considering the impact of Mary's archive materials, which stories to tell and therefore which content to express order. On the practical side we've deliberated on colour boards and iconic images for each of our tabs that allow the readers to explore the book, but with 4 weeks to go it's time to draw a line - and move forward with what we've got. 

'Make something fast' is another sandbox mantra courtesy of Leila Johnston . We've had an outstanding theme of Ceremony to design (partly as key to this theme was Mary Curzon's famous peacock dress at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire ), encouraged by how the conversation is progressing we penned the shape of Ceremony on the train up to the PM studio. Picking up an email from Pat, the developer we learned that we can hook into the Dropbox api. This means that by setting up content container folders in dropbox for Nicola to deposit her authored text - the app can sync and grab, sworphing* the words through the clouds and onto the page. (Ahem new word recently learnt: the act of swiping and morphing = sworph). The last bit of train project serendipity (you see our supposed 'fast train', turned into the slow, stop everywhere sort which gave us space to work fast) was our homework 'Describe your project in a tweet' this was a definite nudge for us as a team, even though time's short putting our social media and marketing opportunities to the bottom of the list is a sin. So we posted our first @marycurzon tweet, here it is. What do you think? 

Lady Curzon's life: explore, navigate & research materials through an illuminated digital biography app