By Simon Jones, Managing Director at Studio 24
I had a great day at the annual Cambridge Summit that we held on Tuesday 28th October. We were hosted by the University in the beautiful Old Schools buildings, right next to the famous Kings College chapel.
We had a series of interesting talks and discussions on different aspects of digital. Barney Brown, Head of Digital Communications at University of Cambridge, talked about how his team audited cookie usage across the top university websites. No mean feat when you have 1000s of websites managed by disparate and independent parts of the university.
Barney talked about the clever use of Playwright and Scrapy (Python browser automation tools) to help detect cookies used on different university websites. Governance can be challenging in large organisations but compliance issues like cookie consent makes it easier to align people to a common cause and get things done.
The discussion moved on to the university’s use of storytelling tool Shorthand. Barney’s team had to initially spend a lot of time building accessible themes for the tool. User engagement isn’t much different to normal web pages, however, web editors really enjoy creating content with Shorthand - a valuable benefit since it means more quality content gets created.
Product and design leader Johanna Halfmann followed up with an interactive workshop on product success. She asked the group to think about what defines product success and then brought social value to the discussion, which made us all think differently. Talking in groups is always a fun part of these days and I found this an engaging and interesting workshop.
Another highlight was Paul Jervis Heath’s engaging talk on design process in an age of AI. Nice storytelling (Paul started with 18th century monks and electricity experiments!). I liked the stuff about modal versus procedural thinking.
Emma Horrell, from University of Edinburgh, talked about her digital sustainability work. They decided to focus on 2 metrics to review progress: page weight (KB) and carbon emissions per page (CO2). They also appointed a summer internship to help work specifically on sustainability initiatives. You can follow their sustainability journey on their blog.
I talked about Tim Berners-Lee’s new memoir This is for Everyone, noting a few highlights including Tim’s ongoing work to keep the web open and for the public good (not necessarily where it’s at now). It’s a great read and recommended if you want to know where the web came from and Tim’s vision for its future. My agency is proud to have built the website for the book.
There were many interesting talks from others on AI (of course!), business model canvas, the Cynefin framework, user research and more.
It’s always an engaging, fascinating day talking to other digital leaders about how to do our work better, often with an angle on how we can do good for society and the planet. Thanks to Barney Brown for the beautiful rooms at Old Schools and Janus Boye for bringing everyone together.
We finished at our Studio 24 Cambridge Film Festival gala, with lots of clients and friends. Drinks and nibbles in the bar followed by the beautiful and surreal The Love That Remains by Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason.
Learn more
The conversation naturally continues in our peer groups at conferences in Europe and North America. Why not join us and be a part of it?
You can naturally also reach out to Simon and his team at Studio 24. Studio 24 is a thriving digital design and technology agency in the heart of Cambridge.