Introducing arts organisations to app development

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Arts & Culture

Summary

In partnership with Arts Council England, Calvium presented a series of three App Development workshops, specifically designed for cultural and arts organisations in the South West of England.

Over 3 days, 22 participants from a mixture of cultural organisations took part in workshops exploring how to develop compelling, content-rich, mobile phone applications and enhance their organisation’s digital capacity. Calvium offered a combination of presentations, discussion and hands-on practical work centred on mobile app ideas from the participants, providing participants with little experience of digital strategy with an introduction to the process, and everyone with a taste of how they could leverage the power of apps within their organisations.

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Workshop Structure

The workshops were designed to maximise interaction, encourage questions and allow everyone to engage. From initial discussion about everyones favourite apps during introductions, we explored the aspects of good & bad apps and identified the pitfalls and successes of app development.

With everyone full of ideas, we asked attendees to give mini-pitches for an app idea, then vote for the three most interesting ideas to use as case studies for the rest of the day. The different organisations formed teams around these ideas, based on their relevancy to their own needs.

For the rest of the day, Calvium facilitated the prototyping of the three ideas using our AppFurnace app making tool, enabling everyone to try their hand at design and development, and turning their ideas into prototype apps that worked on their own smart phones by the end of the session.

Throughout the day, we interspersed teaching with hands-on activity to give attendees both a strategic understanding of apps, and a practical knowledge of development tasks and skills required – giving them a clearer idea of what kind of timescales and resources their own strategies might require.

Feedback

The feedback we received showed a large increase in the participants knowledge of app development, as the chart from one workshop below shows, most participants entered with no knowledge of app development, and everyone left with at least some understanding of the process:

Arts Council Workshops: Learning Charts

Over the three workshops, participants shared ideas and furthered their organisation’s capabilities to commission or create apps themselves, as well as creating interesting new partnerships between organisations in attendance.

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