What do people usually do when they, after failed verbal attempts, try and explain a concept to another person? Invariably, they start waving their hands. Hand-waving has served many a generation in explaining how you should pass the post office from the left to get to the railway station, pointing how the shoplifter ran to the second alley on the right, or showing just how big that runaway fish was.
The TV production industry has its fair share of hand-waving as well, which is nothing to be surprised about. TV show concepts are complex beasts, and a fresh combination of brilliant elements is what separates blockbusters from Tuesday morning re-runs. Explaining a new kind of concept clearly and effectively is a very challenging task indeed, and risky: shooting a TV show episode is so expensive that the decision of making a pilot episode, let alone an entire series of shows, can never be made lightly. When hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line, talking (or hand-waving) simply does not cut it.
Team YLE, a diverse band of design students from the universities Aalto and Stanford, has a solution to this problem. Team YLE has taken hand-waving from idea communication and put it in concept development, where it fits better. Using Immersion, a creativity room Team YLE has built, a team of TV show developers can step away from the dull hallways of the TV network’s office building and enter an entirely different world – and with slight movements of the hand, they can make the world a creation of their own. With the help of a specifically designed multi-touch interface, the team uses images, audio and lights to externalize their thoughts and ideas. The room is a private working space with minimal interruptions and maximal immersion.
The audiovisual experience created with the assistance of the room lets the development team experiment with the mood of the show under development and to catch a glimpse of what the viewer will feel, should the show under development reach the air. This feeling is an invaluable tool in communicating what the show is all about. On top of that, communicating by hand-waving is not very effective; developing ideas by hand-waving is just plain fun. More fun means more ideas – and it is among the many, not the few, that brilliant ideas are more likely to be found.
