As we get closer to shipping SVK, there’s a bit more appearing about it.

Matt ‘D’Israeli’ Brooker, our incredible artist and co-creator is interviewed in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine this month.

Alongside insights from the man himself about working with Warren, the technology and techniques he employed to illustrate SVK – there’s a bit of a scoop…

…in that there’s a sneak peak of his awesome cover art for SVK…

I’ve been thinking about new employee orientation lately. We’ve had four new people join BERG since the start of 2011 and we’re about to add two more, so there’s been a lot of orientating going on here.

When I worked at a company with more than 600 employees and was directly responsible for hiring and training a team of 10 employees, we had a very in-depth orientation programme that lasted for weeks and had been continually refined over a couple of decades.

New employee orientation for a small, relatively new company like BERG is obviously a very different thing. For one thing, since we’re so much smaller, it takes a lot less time to learn about the organisation and the people in it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s any less important to have some sort of induction process.

Early in 2010, shortly after I started working at BERG, Matt Webb – being the wise and good company manager that he is – had me start compiling a checklist of all the things we needed to make sure happened when a new person joined us. At the time it was mostly geared toward short-term contractors since that’s mostly who were joining us in the spring and summer of 2010. Since then the list has grown and evolved and its focus has turned toward full contract employees. It seems like every time a new person comes on we think of two or three more things that need to be added to the list. The checklist is divided into four categories:

1. Things the new employee needs to be provided with (keys, an email address, computer kit, access to the network server)
2. Things the new employee needs to provide us with (biog and headshot for the website, details to get on payroll)
3. Things the new employee needs to know (who everyone else is and what they do, general company policies, how to request holiday, location of the first aid kit)
4. Admin that needs to happen (add their details to various spreadsheets, get them on payroll, add them to the blog rota)

I’ve been wondering if there’s anything else that we’re missing – other things we should be doing to ease new people into the BERG culture besides having a checklist. I had a quick browse around the internet which wasn’t particularly helpful – most of what I found was either blindingly obvious or not especially relevant for very small companies like BERG. I did stumble across a couple of things, though, that seemed relevant for companies of any size and worth sharing.

The first was from William H Truesdell who, in 1998, wrote on The Management Advantage Inc’s website:

Explain your organisation’s mission and its philosophy of doing business.

• “The way we do things around here…”
• “We believe that our customers are…”
• “Nothing is more important than…”

Those would be good things for a company to think about and have an answer to even if they aren’t doing it for the sake of new employee organisation. It seems to me that last one in particular – “Nothing is more important than…” could give a lot of great insight in the space of just one sentence to a new person joining the organisation.

The second thing was from Alan Chapman on businessballs.com. Chapman has quite a lot of material there about new employee orientation and training which emphasises ‘whole-person’ development, and he suggests saying something along these lines to a new employee:

“You’ve obviously been recruited as a (job title), but we recognise right from the start that you’ll probably have lots of other talents, skills, experiences (life and work), strengths, personal aims and wishes, that your job role might not necessarily enable you to use and pursue. So please give some thought to your own special skills and unique potential that you’d like to develop (outside of your job function), and if there’s a way for us to help with this, especially if we see that there’ll be benefits for the organisation too (which there often are), then we’ll try to do so…”

A little later he says,

So much of conventional induction training necessarily involves ‘putting in’ to people (knowledge, policies, standards, skills, etc); so if the employer can spend a little time ‘drawing out’ of people (aims, wishes, unique personal potential, etc) – even if it’s just to set the scene for ‘whole person development’ in the future – this will be a big breath of fresh air for most new starters.

Based on my experience, I think he’s probably right.

That’s a little bit of BERG’s still very new and very evolving New Employee Orientation story. If your company does anything interesting or creative for new employees that you’ve found to be helpful, fun, innovative, etc, we’d love to hear about it!

He’s already received his shop coat and has teamed up with Alice to form BERG’s crack cryptic crossword team, so after a good 4 months of working with us it’s high time I gave our newest team member, Phil Gyford, a proper welcome post!

Phil has been an extraordinary presence in the UK web industry ever since I first got to know him back in the late 90s, and I’ve admired his work throughout the intervening time. He’s not only a first class Creative Technologist, having designed and implemented many beautiful, innovative websites, he’s also been an actor, model maker, illustrator and futurist. This diversity is rare to find in somebody who is also capable of focus and execution. His own website gyford.com is testament to his vast back catalogue.

For me one of the most valuable things Phil brings into the team is an incredible attention to detail. You only have to look at his recent work on our Github account to see that in full effect. When creating the relatively straight forward Little Printer Miniseries engine in PHP Phil’s written over 3000 words of documentation and examples as well as fully commented code. This is great in and of itself, but the fact that it immediately opened up Little Printer to people who’d previously considered it out of their reach proves how powerful great documentation can be.

As BERG Cloud grows in terms of capability and features, demonstrating and communicating these becomes ever more important and Phil’s going to be key in making that happen.

At the beginning of 2011 we started a wide-ranging conversation with Google Creative Lab, discussing near-future experiences of Google and its products.

We’ve already discussed our collaboration on “Lamps”, the conceptual R&D around computer vision in a separate post.

They had already in mind another brief before approaching us, to create a physical product encapsulating Google voice/video chat services.

This brief became known as ‘Connection Box’ or ‘Connbox’ for short…

For six months through the spring and summer of 2011, a multidisciplinary team at BERG developed the brief based on research, strategic thinking, hardware and software prototyping into believable technical and experiential proof of a product that could be taken to market.

It’s a very different set of outcomes from Lamps, and a different approach – although still rooted in material exploration, it’s much more centred around rapid product prototyping to really understand what the experience of physical device, service and interface could be.

As with our Lamps post, I’ve broken up this long report of what was a very involving project for the entire studio.

• The Connbox Backstory
• Unpacking the brief
• Material Exploration
• Prototyping: Technical and Experiential
• Proto #1: Polar Bear
• Proto #2: Domino
• Product/industrial design development
• Proto #3: Testing the experience and the UI
• Connbox: Film
• The importance of legible products
• Conclusion: What might have been next?
• Then and now – how technology has moved on, and where we’d start now
• Notable Precedents

The videophone has an unusually long cultural legacy.

It has been a very common feature of science fiction all the way back to the 1920s. As part of our ‘warm-up’ for the project, Joe put together a super-cut of all of the instances he could recollect from film and tv…

Videophones in film from BERG on Vimeo.

The video call is still often talked about as the next big thing in mobile phones (Apple used FaceTime as a central part of their iphone marketing, while Microsoft bought Skype to bolster their tablet and phone strategy). But somehow video calling has been stuck in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ for decades. Furthermore, the videophone as a standalone product that we might buy in a shop has never become a commercial reality.

On the other hand, we can say that video calls have recently become common, but in a very specific context. That is, people talking to laptops – constrained by the world as seen from webcam and a laptop screen.

This kind of video calling has become synonymous with pre-arranged meetings, or pre-arranged high-bandwidth calls. It is very rarely about a quick question or hello, or a spontaneous connection, or an always-on presence between two spaces.

Unpacking the brief

The team at Google Creative Lab framed a high-level prototyping brief for us.

The company has a deep-seated interest in video-based communication, and of course, during the project both Google Hangouts and Google Plus were launched.

The brief placed a strong emphasis on working prototypes and live end-to-end demos. They wanted to, in the parlance of Google, “dogfood” the devices, to see how they felt in everyday use themselves.

I asked Jack to recall his reaction to the brief:

The domain of video conferencing products is staid and unfashionable.

Although video phones have lived large in the public imagination, no company has made a hardware product stick in the way that audio devices have. There’s something weirdly broken about taking behaviours associated with a phone: synchronous talking, ringing or alerts when one person wants another’s attention, hanging up and picking up etc.

Given the glamour and appetite for the idea, I felt that somewhere between presence and video a device type could emerge which supported a more successful and appealing set of behaviours appropriate to the form.

The real value in the work was likely to emerge in what vehicle designers call the ‘third read’. The idea of product having a ‘first, second and third read’ comes up a lot in the studio. We’ve inherited it by osmosis from product designer friends, but an excerpt from the best summation of it we can find on the web follows:

The concept of First, Second, Third Read which comes from the BMW Group automotive heritage in terms of understanding Proportion, Surface, and Detail.

The First Read is about the gesture and character of the product. It is the first impression.

Looking closer, there is the Second Read in which surface detail and specific touchpoints of interaction with the product confirm impressions and set up expectations.

The Third Read is about living with the product over time—using it and having it meet expectations…

So we’re not beginning with how the product looks or where it fits in a retail landscape, but designing from the inside out.

We start by understanding presence through devices and what video can offer, build out the behaviours, and then identify forms and hardware which support that.

To test and iterate this detail we needed to make everything, so that we can live with and see the behaviours happen in the world.

We use the term ‘material exploration’ to describe our early experimental work. This is an in-depth exploration of the subject by exploring the properties, both inate and emergent of the materials at hand. We’ve talked about it previously here and here.

What are the materials that make up video? They are more traditional components and aspects of film such as lenses, screens, projectors, field-of-view as well as newer opportunities in the domains of facial recognition and computer vision.

Some of our early experiments looked at field-of-view – how could we start to understand where an always-on camera could see into our personal environment?

We also challenged the prevalent forms of video communication – which generally are optimised for tight shots of people’s faces. What if we used panoramic lenses and projection to represent places and spaces instead?

In the course of these experiments we used a piece of OpenFrameworks code developed by Golan Levin. Thanks Golan!

We also experimented with the visual, graphic representation of yourself and other people, we are used to the ‘picture in picture’ mode of video conferencing, where we see the other party, but have an image of ourselves superimposed in a small window.

We experimented with breaking out the representation of yourself into a separate screen, so you could play with your own image, and position the camera for optimal or alternative viewpoints, or to actually look ‘through’ the camera to maintain eye contact, while still being able to look at the other person.

One of the main advantages of this – aside from obviously being able to direct a camera at things of interest to the other party – was to remove the awkwardness of the picture-in-picture approach to showing yourself superimposed on the stream of the person you are communicating with…

There were interaction & product design challenges in making a simpler, self-contained video chat appliance, amplified by the problem of taking the things we take for granted on the desktop or touchscreen: things like the standard UI, windowing, inputs and outputs, that all had to be re-imagined as physical controls.

This is not a simple translation between a software and hardware behaviour, it’s more than just turning software controls into physical switches or levers.

It involves choosing what to discard, what to keep and what to emphasise.

Should the product allow ‘ringing’ or ‘knocking’ to kickstart a conversation, or should it rely on other audio or visual cues? How do we encourage always-on, ambient, background presence with the possibility of spontaneous conversations and ad-hoc, playful exchanges? Existing ‘video calling’ UI is not set up to encourage this, so what is the new model of the interaction?

To do this we explored in abstract some of the product behaviours around communicating through video and audio.

We began working with Durrell Bishop from LuckyBite at this stage, and he developed scenarios drawn as simple cartoons which became very influential starting points for the prototyping projects.

The cartoons feature two prospective users of an always-on video communication product – Bill and Ann…

This single panel from a larger scenario shows the moment Bill opens up a connection (effectively ‘going online’) and Ann sees this change reflected as a blind going up on Bill’s side of her Connbox.

Our early sketches on both whiteboards and in these explorations then informed our prototyping efforts – firstly around the technical challenges of making a standalone product around google voice/video, and the second more focussed on the experiential challenges of making a simple, pleasurable domestic video chat device.

For reasons that might become obvious, the technical exploration became nicknamed “Polar Bear” and the experimental prototype “Domino”.

Prototype 1: A proof of technology called ‘Polar Bear’

In parallel with the work to understand behaviours we also began exploring end-to-end technical proofs.

We needed to see if it was possible to make a technically feasible video-chat product with components that could be believable for mass-production, and also used open-standard software.

Aside from this, it provided us with something to ‘live with’, to understand the experience of having an always-on video chat appliance in a shared social space (our studio)

Andy and Nick worked closely with Tom and Durrell from Luckybite on housing the end-to-end proof in a robust accessible case.

It looked like a polar bear to us, and the name stuck…

The software stack was designed to create something that worked as an appliance once paired with another, that would fire up a video connection with its counterpart device over wireless internet from being switched on, with no need for any other interface than switching it on at the plug.

We worked with Collabora to implement the stack on Pandaboards: small form-factor development boards.

Living with Polar Bear was intriguing – sound became less important than visual cues.

It reminded us all of Matt Webb’s “Glancing” project back in 2003:

Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

We needed to come up with new kinds of behaviours for an always on, domestic device.

This was the biggest challenge by far, inventing ways in which people might be comfortable opening up their spaces to each other, and on top of that, to create a space in which meaningful interaction or conversation might occur.

To create that comfort we wanted to make the state of the connection as evident as possible, and the controls over how you appear to others simple and direct.

The studio’s preoccupations with making “beautiful seams” suffused this stage of the work – our quest to create playful, direct and legible interfaces to technology, rather than ‘seamless’ systems that cannot be read or mastered.

In workshops with Luckybite, the team sketched out an approach where the state of the system corresponds directly to the physicality of the device.

The remote space that you are connecting with is represented on one screen housed in a block, and the screen that shows your space is represented on another. To connect the spaces, the blocks are pushed together, and pulled-apart to disconnect.

Durrell outlined a promising approach to the behaviour of the product in a number of very quick sketches during one of our workshops:

Denise further developed the interaction design principles in a detailed “rulespace” document, which we used to develop video prototypes of the various experiences. This strand of the project acquired the nickname ‘Domino’ – these early representations of two screens stacked vertically resembling the game’s pieces.

As the team started to design at a greater level of detail, they started to see the issues involved in this single interaction: Should this action interrupt Ann in her everyday routine? Should there be a sound? Is a visual change enough to attract Ann’s attention?

The work started to reveal more playful uses of the video connection, particularly being able to use ‘stills’ to communicate about status. The UI also imagines use of video filters to change the way that you are represented, going all the way towards abstracting the video image altogether, becoming visualisations of audio or movement, or just pixellated blobs of colour. Other key features such as a ‘do not disturb blind’ that could be pulled down onscreen through a physical gesture emerged, and the ability to ‘peek’ through it to let the other side know about our intention to communicate.

With Luckybite, we started working on turning it into something that would bridge the gap between experience prototype and product.

The product design seeks to make all of the interactions evident with minimum styling – but with flashes of Google’s signature colour-scheme.

The detachable camera, with a microphone that can be muted with a sliding switch, can be connected to a separate stand.

This allows it to be re-positioned and pointed at other views or objects.

This is a link back to our early ‘material explorations’ that showed it was valuable to be able to play with the camera direction and position.

Final technical prototypes in this phase make a bridge between the product design and experience thinking and the technical explorations.

This manifested in early prototypes using Android handsets connected to servers.

Durrell Bishop narrates some of the prototype designs that he and the team worked through in the Connbox project.

The Connbox design project had a strong thread running though it of making interfaces as evident and simple as possible, even when trying to convey abstract notions of service and network connectivity.

I asked Jack to comment on the importance of ‘legibility’ in products:

Connbox exists in a modern tradition of legible products, which sees the influence of Durrell Bishop. The best example I’ve come across that speaks to this thinking is Durrell’s answering machine he designed.

When messages are left on the answering machine they’re represented as marbles which gather in a tray. People play the messages by placing them in a small dip and when they’ve finished they replace them in the machine.

If messages are for someone else in the household they’re left in that persons bowl for later. When you look at the machine the system is clear and presented through it’s physical form. The whole state of the system is evident on the surface, as the form of the product.

Making technology seamless and invisible hides the control and state of the system – this path of thinking and design tries to place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making interfaces evident.

In the prototype UI design, Joe created some lovely details of interaction fusing Denise’s service design sketches and the physical product design.

For instance, I love this detail where using the physical ‘still’ button, causes a digital UI element to ‘roll’ out from the finger-press…

A very satisfying dial for selecting video effects/filters…

And here, where a physical sliding tab on top of the device creates the connection between two spaces

This feels like a rich direction to explore in future projects, of a kind of ‘reverse-skeuomorphism‘ where digital and physical affordances work together to do what each does best rather than just one imitating the other.

At the end of this prototyping phase, the project was put on hiatus, but a number of directions seemed promising to us and Google Creative Lab.

Broadly speaking, the work was pointing towards new kinds of devices, not designed for our pockets but for our homes. Further explorations would have to be around the rituals and experience of use in a domestic setting.

Special attention would have to be given to the experience of set-up, particularly pairing or connecting the devices. Would this be done as a gift, easily configured and left perhaps for a relative who didn’t have a smartphone or computer? How could that be done in an intuitive manner that emphasised the gift, but left the receiver confident that they could not break the connection or the product? Could it work with a cellular radio connection, in places where there no wireless broadband is found?

What cues could the physical product design give to both functionality and context? What might the correct ‘product language’ be for such a device, or family of devices for them to be accepted into the home and not seen as intrusive technology.

G+ and Hangouts launched toward the end of the project, so unfortunately there wasn’t time in the project to accommodate these interesting new products.

However we did start to talk about ways to physicalize G+’s “Circles” feature, which emphasises small groups and presence – it seemed like a great fit with what we had already looked at. How might we create a product that connects you to an ‘inner circle’ of contacts and the spaces they were in?

Since we started the Connbox project in the Spring of 2011, one could argue that we’ve seen a full cycle of Moore’s law improve the capabilities of available hardware, and certainly both industry and open-source efforts in the domain of video codecs and software have advanced significantly.

Making Connbox now would be a very different endeavour.

Here Nick comments on the current state-of-the-art and what would be our starting points were we (or someone else) to re-start the project today…

Since we wrapped up this project in 2011, there’s been one very conspicuous development in the arena of video chat, and that is the rise of WebRTC. WebRTC is a draft web standard from W3C to enable browser to browser video chat without needing plugins.

As of early 2013, Google and Mozilla have demonstrated this system working in their nightly desktop browser builds, and recorded the first cross-browser video call. Ericsson are one of the first groups to have a mobile implementation available for Android and iOS in the form of their “Bowser” browser application.

WebRTC itself is very much an evolution of earlier work. The brainchild of Google Hangout engineers, this single standard is implemented using a number of separate components. The video and audio technology comes from Google in the form of the VP8 and iLBC codecs. The transport layer has incorporated libjingle which we also relied upon for our Polar Bear prototype, as part of the Farsight 2 stack.

Google is currently working on enabling WebRTC functionality in Chrome for Android, and once this is complete, it will provide the ideal software platform to explore and prototype Connbox ideas. What’s more, it actually provides a system which would be the basis of taking a successful prototype into full production.

While not exhaustive, here are some projects, products, research and thinking we referenced during the work…

• RCA Helen Hamlyn Centre Video Chat Work
  http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/3994-4006/all/1/Window-on-the-World.aspx
• Push-to-talk and the intimacy it creates
  http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2003_11_01_blogger_archives.php#106787988957888590
• Clearboard
  http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/CB.html
• Ambient Awareness
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_awareness
• Leisa Reichelt on Ambient intimacy
  http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
• Project Stargate (always-on Skype)
  http://danielodio.com/project-stargate-always-on-skype-video-connection-for-remote-offices
• Matt Webb’s Glancing project
  http://interconnected.org/notes/2003/09/glancing/

Thanks

Massive thanks to Tom Uglow, Sara Rowghani, Chris Lauritzen, Ben Malbon, Chris Wiggins, Robert Wong, Andy Berndt and all those we worked with at Google Creative Lab for their collaboration and support throughout the project.

Thanks to all we worked with at Collabora and Future Platforms on prototyping the technology.

Big thanks to Oran O’Reilly who worked on the films with Timo and Jack.

Preface

This is a blog post about a large design research project we completed in 2011 in close partnership with Google Creative Lab.

There wasn’t an opportunity for publication at the time, but it represented a large proportion of the studio’s efforts for that period – nearly everyone in the studio was involved at some point – so we’ve decided to document the work and its context here a year on.

I’m still really proud of it, and some of the end results the team produced are both thought-provoking and gorgeous.

We’ve been wanting to share it for a while.

It’s a long post covering a lot of different ideas, influences, side-projects and outputs, so I’ve broken it up into chapters… but I recommend you begin at the beginning…

• Introduction
• Material Exploration
• Influences and Starting Points
• The $700 Lightbulb
• “Lamps that see”
• Sketching in Video, Code and Hardware
• Little Brain, Big Brain
• Rules for Smart Light
• Smart Light, Dumb Products
• What happened next: Universe-B
• Postscript: the scenius of Lamps

Introduction

At the beginning of 2011 we started a wide-ranging conversation with Google Creative Lab, around near-future experiences of Google and its products.

Tom Uglow, Ben Malbon of Google Creative Lab with Matt Jones of BERG

During our discussions with them, a strong theme emerged. We were both curious about how it would feel to have Google in the world with us, rather than on a screen.

If Google wasn’t trapped behind glass, what would it do?

What would it behave like?

How would we react to it?

This traces back to our studio’s long preoccupation with embodied interaction. Also, our explorations of the technologies of computer vision and projection that we’ve talked about previously under the banner of the “Robot-Readable World”.

Our project through the spring and summer of 2011 concentrated on making evidence around this – investigating computer vision and projection as ‘material’ for designing with, in partnership with Google Creative Lab.

Material Exploration

We find that treating ‘immaterial’ new technologies as if they were physical materials is useful in finding rules-of-thumb and exploring opportunities in their “grain”. We try as a studio to pursue this approach as much as someone trying to craft something from wood, stone, or metal.

Jack Schulze of BERG and Chris Lauritzen, then of Google Creative Lab

We looked at computer-vision and projection in a close relationship – almost as one ‘material’.

That material being a bound-together expression of the computer’s understanding of the world around it and its agency or influence in that environment.



Influences and starting points

One of the very early departure points for our thinking was a quote by (then-)Google’s Marissa Meyer at the Le Web conference in late 2010: “We’re trying to build a virtual mirror of the world at all times”

This quote struck a particular chord for me, reminding me greatly of the central premise of David Gelernter‘s 1991 book “Mirror Worlds“.

I read “Mirror Worlds” while I was in architecture school in the 90s. Gelernter’s vision of shared social simulations based on real-world sensors, information feeds and software bots still seems incredibly prescient 20 years later.

Gelernter saw the power to simply build sophisticated, shared models of reality that all could see, use and improve as a potentially revolutionary technology.

What if Google’s mirror world were something out in the real world with us, that we could see, touch and play with together?

Seymour Papert – another incredibly influential computer science and education academic – also came to our minds. Not only did he maintain similar views about the importance of sharing and constructing our own models of reality, but was also a pioneer of computer vision. in 1966 he sent the ‘Summer Vision Memo‘ “Spend the summer linking a camera to a computer, and getting the computer to describe what it saw…”


Nearly fifty years on, we have Kinects in our houses, internet-connected face-tracking cameras in our pockets and ‘getting the computer to describe (or at least react to) what it saw seems to be one of the most successful component tracks of the long quest for ‘artificial intelligence’.

Our thinking and discussion continued this line toward the cheapness and ubiquity of computer vision.

The $700 Lightbulb

Early on, Jack invoked the metaphor of a “$700 lightbulb”:

Lightbulbs and electric light went from a scientific curiosity to a cheap, accessible ubiquity in the late 19th and early 20th century.

What if lightbulbs were still $700?

We’d carry one around carefully in a case and screw it in when/where we needed light. They are not, so we leave them screwed in wherever we want, and just flip the switch when we need light. Connected computers with eyes cost $500, and so we carry them around in our pockets.

But – what if we had lots of cheap computer vision, processing, connectivity and display all around our environments – like light bulbs?

Ubiquitous Computing has of course been a long held vision in academia, which in some ways has been derailed by the popularity of the smartphone

But smartphones are getting cheaper, Android is embedding itself in new contexts, with other I/Os than a touchscreen, and increasingly we keep our data in the cloud rather than in dedicated devices at the edge.

Ubiquitous computing has been seen by many as in the past as a future of cheap, plentiful ‘throw-away’ I/O clients to the cloud.

It seems like we’re nearly there.

In 2003, I remember being captivated by Neil Gershenfeld’s vision of computing that you could ‘paint’ onto any surface:

“a paintable computer, a viscous medium with tiny silicon fragments that makes a pour-out computer, and if it’s not fast enough or doesn’t store enough, you put another few pounds or paint out another few square inches of computing.”

Professor Neil Gershenfeld of MIT

Updating this to the present-day, post web2.0 world – where if ‘it’s not fast enough or doesn’t store enough’ we request more resources from centralised, elastic compute-clouds.

“Clouds” that can see our context, our environment through sensors and computer vision, and have a picture of us built up through our continued interactions with it to deliver appropriate information on-demand.

To this we added speculation that not only computer-vision would be cheap and ubiquitous, but excellent quality projection would become as cheap and widespread as touch screens in the near-future.

This would mean that the cloud could act in the world with us, come out from behind the glass and relate what it sees to what we see.

In summary: computer vision, depth-sensing and projection can be combined as materials – so how can we use them to make Google services bubble through from the Mirror World into your lap?

How would that feel? How should it feel?

This is the question we took as our platform for design exploration.

“Lamps that see”

One of our first departure points was to fuse computer-vision and projection into one device – a lamp that saw.

Here’s a really early sketch of mine where we see a number of domestic lamps, that saw and understood their context, projecting and illuminating the surfaces around them with information and media in response.

We imagined that the type of lamp would inform the lamp’s behaviour – more static table lamps might be less curious or more introverted than a angle-poise for instance.

Jack took the idea of the angle-poise lamp on, thinking about how servo-motors might allow the lamp to move around within the degrees of freedom its arm gives it on a desk to inquire about its context with computer vision, track objects and people, and surfaces that it can ‘speak’ onto with projected light.



Early sketches of “A lamp that sees” by Jack Schulze



Early sketches of “A lamp that sees” by Timo Arnall

Of course, in the back of our minds was the awesome potential for injecting character and playfulness into the angle-poise as an object – familiar to all from the iconic Pixar animation Luxo Jr.


And very recently, students from the University of Wellington in New Zealand created something very similar at first glance, although the projection aspect is missing here.

Alongside these sketching activities around proposed form and behaviour we started to pursue material exploration.

Sketching in Video, Code & Hardware

We’d been keenly following work by friends such as James George and Greg Borenstein in the space of projection and computer vision, and a number of projects in the domain emerged during the course of the project, but we wanted to understand it as ‘a material to design with’ from first principles.

Timo, Jack, Joe and Nick – with Chris Lauritzen (then of Google Creative Lab), and Elliot Woods of Kimchi & Chips, started a series of tests to investigate both the interactive and aesthetic qualities of the combination of projection and computervision – which we started to call “Smart Light” internally.

First of all, the team looked at the different qualities of projected light on materials, and in the world.

This took the form or a series of very quick experiments, looking for different ways in which light could act in inhabited spaces, on surfaces, interact with people and things.

In a lot of these ‘video sketches’ there was little technology beyond the projector and photoshop being used – but it enabled us to imagine what a computer-vision directed ‘smart light’ might behave like, look like and feel like at human scale very quickly.

Here are a few example video sketches from that phase of the work:

Sketch 04 Sticky search from BERG on Vimeo.



Sketch 06: Interfaces on things from BERG on Vimeo.

One particularly compelling video sketch projected an image of a piece of media (in this case a copy of Wired magazine) back onto the media – the interaction and interference of one with the other is spellbinding at close-quarters, and we thought it could be used to great effect to direct the eye as part of an interaction.



Sketch 09: Media on media from BERG on Vimeo.

Alongside these aesthetic investigations, there were technical explorations for instance, into using “structured light” techniques with a projector to establish a depth map of a scene…



Sketch 13: Structured light from BERG on Vimeo.

Quickly, the team reached a point where more technical exploration was necessary and built a test-rig that could be used to prototype a “Smart Light Lamp” comprising a projector, a HD webcam, a PrimeSense / Asus depth camera and bespoke software.

Elliot Woods working on early software for Lamps

At the time of the project the Kinect SDK now ubiquitous in computer vision projects was not officially available. The team plumped for the component approach over the integration of the Kinect for a number of reasons, including wanting the possibility of using HD video in capture and projection.

Testing the Lamps rig from BERG on Vimeo.

Nick recalls:

Actually by that stage the OpenNI libraries were out (http://openni.org/), but the “official” Microsoft SDK wasn’t out (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx). The OpenNI libraries were more focussed on skeletal tracking, and were difficult to get up and running.

Since we didn’t have much need for skeletal tracking in this project, we used very low-level access to the IR camera and depth sensor facilitated by various openFrameworks plugins. This approach gave us the correct correlation of 3D position, high definition colour image, and light projection to allow us to experiment with end-user applications in a unified, calibrated 3D space.

The proto rig became a great test bed for us to start to explore high-level behaviours of Smart Light – rules for interaction, animation and – for want of a better term – ‘personality’.

Little Brain, Big Brain

One of our favourite things of the last few years is Sticky Light.


It’s a great illustration of how little a system needs to do, for us to ascribe personality to its behaviour.

We imagined that the Smart Light Lamp might manifest itself as a companion species in the physical world, a creature that could act as a go-between for you and the mirror-worlds of the digital.

We’ve written about digital companion species before: when our digital tools become more than just tools – acquiring their own behaviour, personality and agency.


Bit, Flynn’s digital companion from the original Tron

You might recall Bit from the original Tron movie, or the Daemons from the Philip Pullman “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Companions that are “on your side” but have abilities and senses that extend you.

We wanted the Lamp to act as companion species for the mirror-worlds of data that we all live within, and Google has set out to organise.

We wanted the lamp to act as a companion species that illustrated – through its behaviour – the powers of perception that Google has through computer vision, context-sensing and machine-learning.

Having a companion species that is a native of the cloud, but on your side, could make evident the vast power of such technologies in an intuitive and understandable way.

Long-running themes of the studio’s work are at play here – beautiful seams, shelf-evidence, digital companion species and BASAAP – which we tried to sum up in our Gardens and Zoos talk/blog post , which in turn was informed by the work we’d done in the studios on Lamps.

One phrase that came up again and again around this areas of the lamps behaviour was “Big Brain, Little Brain” i.e. the Smart Light companion would be the Little Brain, on your side, that understood you and the world immediately around you, and talked on your behalf to the Big Brain in ‘the cloud’.

This intentional division, this hopefully ‘beautiful seam’ would serve to emphasise your control over what you let the the Big Brain know in return for its knowledge and perspective, and also make evident the sense (or nonsense) that the Little Brain makes of your world before it communicates that to anyone else.

One illustration we made of this is the following sketch of a ‘Text Camera’

Text Camera from BERG on Vimeo.

Text Camera is about making the inputs and inferences the phone sees around it to ask a series of friendly questions that help to make clearer what it can sense and interpret.

It reports back on what it sees in text, rather than through a video. Your smartphone camera has a bunch of software to interpret the light it’s seeing around you – in order to adjust the exposure automatically. So, we look to that and see if it’s reporting ‘tungsten light’ for instance, and can infer from that whether to ask the question “Am I indoors?”.

Through the dialog we feel the seams – the capabilities and affordances of the smartphone, and start to make a model of what it can do.

The Smart Light Companion in the Lamp could similarly create a dialog with its ‘owner’, so that the owner could start to build up a model of what its Little Brain could do, and where it had to refer to the Big Brain in the cloud to get the answers.

All of this serving to playfully, humanely build a literacy in how computer vision, context-sensing and machine learning interpret the world.

Rules for Smart Light

The team distilled all of the sketches, code experiments, workshop conversations and model-making into a few rules of thumb for designing with this new material – a platform for further experiments and invention we could use as we tried to imagine products and services that used Smart Light.

Reflecting our explorations, some of the rules-of-thumb are aesthetic, some are about context and behaviour, and some are about the detail of interaction.

24 Rules for smart light from BERG on Vimeo.

We wrote the ‘rules’ initially as a list of patterns that we saw as fruitful in the experiments. Our ambition was to evolve this in the form of a speculative “HIG” or Human Interface Guideline – for an imagined near-future where Smart Light is as ubiquitous as the touchscreen is now…

Smart Light HIG

1. Projection is three-dimensional. We are used to projection turning a flat ‘screen’ into an image, but there is really a cone of light that intersects with the physical world all the way back to the projector lens. Projection is not the flatland display surfaces that we have become used to through cinema, tv and computers.
2. Projection is additive. Using a projector we can’t help but add light to the world. Projecting black means that a physical surface is unaffected, projecting white means that an object is fully illuminated up to the brightness of the projector.
3. Enchanted objects. Unless an object has been designed with blank spaces for projection, it should not have information projected onto it. Because augmenting objects with information is so problematic (clutter, space, text on text) objects can only be ‘spotlighted’, ‘highlighted’ or have their own image re-projected onto themselves.
4. Light feels touchable (but it’s not). Through phones and pads we are conditioned into interacting with bright surfaces. It feels intuitive to want to touch, grab, slide and scroll projected things around. However, it is difficult to make it interactive.
5. The new rules of depth. A lamp sees the world as a stream of images, but also as a three-dimensional space. There is no consistent interaction surface to interact with like in mouse or touch-based systems, light hits any and all surfaces and making them respond to ‘touch’ is difficult. This is due to finger-based interaction being very difficult to achieve with projection and computer vision. Tracking fingers is technically difficult, fingers are small, there is limited/no existing skeletal recognition software for detecting hands.
6. Smart light should be respectful. Projected light inhabits the world alongside us, it augments and affects the things we use every day. Unlike interfaces that are contained in screens, the boundaries of the lamps vision and projection are much more obscure. Lamps ‘look’ at the world through cameras, which mean that they should be trustworthy companions.

Next, we started to create some speculative products using these rules, particularly focussed around the idea of “Enchanted Objects”…

Smart Light, Dumb Products

These are a set of physical products based on digital media and services such as YouTube watching, Google calendar, music streaming that have no computation or electronics in them at all.

All of the interaction and media is served from a Smart Light Lamp that acts on the product surface to turn it from a block into an ‘enchanted object’.

Joe started with a further investigation of the aesthetic qualities of light on materials.



Projection materials from BERG on Vimeo.

This lead to sketches exploring techniques of projection mapping on desktop scales. It’s something often seen at large scales, manipulating our perceptions of architectural facades with animated projected light, but we wanted to understand how it felt at more intimate human scale of projecting onto everyday objects.

In the final film you might notice some of the lovely effects this can create to attract attention to the surface of the object – guiding perhaps to notifications from a service in the cloud, or alerts in a UI.

Then some sketching in code – using computer vision to create optical switches – that make or break a recognizable optical marker depending on movement. In a final product these markers could be invisible to the human eye but observable by computer vision. Similarly – tracking markers to provide controls for video navigation, calendar alerts etc.



Fiducial switch from BERG on Vimeo.

Joe worked with physical prototypes – first simple nets in card and then more finished models to uncover some of the challenges of form in relation to angles of projection and computer vision.



For instance in the Video object, a pulley system has to connect the dial the user operates to the marker that the Lamp sees, so that it’s not obscured from the computer vision software.

Here’s the final output from these experiments:

Dumb things, smart light from BERG on Vimeo.

This sub-project was a fascinating test of our Smart Light HIG – which lead to more questions and opportunities.

For instance, one might imagine that the physical product – as well as housing dedicated and useful controls for the service it is matched to – could act as a ‘key’ to be recognised by computer vision to allow access to the service.

What if subscriptions to digital services were sold as beautiful robot-readable objects, each carved at point-of-purchase with a wonderful individually-generated pattern to unlock access?

What happened next: Universe-B

From the distance of a year since we finished this work, it’s interesting to compare its outlook to that of the much-more ambitious and fully-realised Google Glass project that was unveiled this summer.

Google Glass inherits a vision of ubiquitous computing that has been strived after for decades.

As a technical challenge it’s been one that academics and engineers in industry have failed to make compelling to the general populace. The Google team’s achievement in realising this vision is undoubtedly impressive. I can’t wait to try them! (hint, hint!)

It’s also a vision that is personal and, one might argue, introverted – where the Big Brain is looking at the same things as you and trying to understand them, but the results are personal, never shared with the people you are with. The result could be an incredibly powerful, but subjective overlay on the world.

In other words, the mirrorworld has a population of 1. You.

Lamps uses similar techniques of computer vision, context-sensing and machine learning but its display is in the world, the cloud is painted on the world. In the words of William Gibson, the mirrorworld is becoming part of our world – everted into the spaces we live in.

The mirrorworld is shared with you, and those you are with.

This brings with it advantages (collaboration, evidence) and disadvantages (privacy, physical constraints) – but perhaps consider it as a complementary alternative future… A Universe-B where Google broke out of the glass.

Postscript: the scenius of Lamps

No design happens in a vacuum, and culture has a way of bubbling up a lot of similar things all at the same time. While not an exhaustive list, we want to acknowledge that! Some of these projects are precedent to our work, and some emerged in the nine months of the project or since.

• Steve Mann’s Telepointer project (1998) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepointer
• Moveable Projected Displays using Projector Based Tracking (2005-2007) by Jonny Chung Lee, Scott E. Hudson, Jay W. Summet and Paul H. Dietz
• Microsoft research: 6th sense (2009)
• Jamie Tunnard’s anglepoise projector (2010) http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/3147/all/1/Desklampprojector.aspx
• Omnitouch by Chris Harrison, Hrvoje Benko and Andrew D. Wilson (2011)
• Camara-Lucida by Christian Parsons and Mariano Tepper (2011)
• University of Tokyo: “Invoked Computing” (2011)
• Pico projection of interfaces onto surfaces from Darmstadt University (2012)
• SketchSynth by Billy Keyes of CMU (2012)
  

Here are a selection of less-academic projects using projection and computer-vision that Joe picked out from the last year or so:

• Display Cabinet by Ben Bashford : http://journal.benbashford.com/post/4530562245
  
• TSUMIKI by PPP : http://vimeo.com/31836098
• Evolution of Mobile by VodaphoneUK : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=883UlMNOuX4
• Receipt racer by undef and Joshua Noble : http://vimeo.com/24987120
• Real-life Minecraft Block by Ben Purdy : http://vimeo.com/28124800
• SHOWROOM RICHTI-AREAL by PROJEKTIL : http://vimeo.com/22946428
• Playstation 3 Promos : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrgWH1KUDt4, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_cKsOe7hLI

Huge thanks to Tom Uglow, Sara Rowghani, Chris Lauritzen, Ben Malbon, Chris Wiggins, Robert Wong, Andy Berndt and all those we worked with at Google Creative Lab for their collaboration and support throughout the project.

We don’t often post on our blog when we’re looking for folks to help out on projects – we’re blessed with a great network of collaborators, some frequent, some less regular. But sometimes acts of God happen, and a Game Artist we had lined up for some brilliant work with us has just been offered a year-long project of a lifetime! Which is super news for him! But it means we’re looking for someone to help us on a project which is slightly more humble but which still promises to be excellent fun.

We’re looking for someone to pick up a super, slightly unusual Android smartphone game which we’ve made an early prototype of, and to run with it to develop the visual design / graphics further for a new version of the game. It’ll be an 8-week contract gig ideally working here in our studio near Old Street, working to create simple, playful and characterful graphics with some animations, working with another game / UX designer here, plus sound designers. The game will be built by a development team based elsewhere who will be heavily consulted throughout.

If this sounds up your street (or up the street of someone you know), please get in touch with me at sp@berglondon.com. We’re looking for someone to start immediately!

Update on Friday 26 October: We have now filled this position. Thanks very much to everyone who helped spread the word and to those who got in touch  – I’ll be in touch individually with everybody over the next couple of days.

Back in 2009, we started the work that would become http://howbigreally.com and http://howmanyreally.com with the BBC, releasing those two prototypes over the last two years under the banner of “BBC Dimensions“.

Our intention from the beginning was to design the service as a module that could be integrated into bbc.co.uk at a later date if they proved successful with audiences.

Earlier this year, Alice worked with the engineers at BBC News to do just that, and now the first BBC News stories featuring the “How Big Really” module are starting to appear.

Here are a couple of examples – a story on the vast amount of space given over to car parking in the world, illustrated with the module juxtaposing the total space used by parked cars over the island of Jamaica!

…and a more recent example showing the size of a vast iceberg that has just broken free of a glacier on Greenland.

Of course, as with the original http://howbigreally.com prototype, you can customise the juxtaposition with the post-code of somewhere you’re familiar with – like your home, school or office.

The team worked hard to integrate the prototype’s technology with BBC News’s mapping systems and the the look/feel of the site overall.

Here’s Alice on some of the challenges:

We worked with the BBC Maps team to create a tool that could be used by editors, journalists and developers to create How Big Really style maps. Chris Henden and Takako Tucker from the team supplied me with the BBC Maps Toolkit and did a great job of explaining some of its more nuanced points, particularly when I got into trouble around Mapping Projections.

The tool takes an SVG representation of an area, including a scale element, converts it to a JSON object that is then rendered onto a map using the BBC Maps Toolkit. Immediate feedback allows the map creator to check their SVG is correct, and the JSON representation of the shape can then be used to build the map in future.

It’s really satisfying for us to see something that started as a conceptual prototype back in 2009 find it’s way into a daily media production system of the scale and reach of BBC News.

Thanks to all the team there – also Chris Sizemore, Lisa Sargood and Max Gadney for shepherding the project from whiteboard sketches to become part of the BBC journalist’s digital toolkit.

This is a blog post about a type of work we find successful – namely, video prototyping – and why we think it’s valuable.

We’ve made quite a few films in the last couple of years, that have had some success – in how they describe products, technologies and contexts of their use in public.

We’re lucky enough to work with Timo Arnall, as creative director, who guides all of our film output and is central to the way that we’ve been able to use the moving image as part of our design process – more of which later.

Film is a great way to show things that have behaviour in them – and the software, services and systems that literally animate them.

A skilled film-maker can get across the nature of that behaviour in a split-second with film – which would take thousands of words or ultra-clear infographics.

They can do this along with the bonuses of embedding humour, emotional-resonance, context and a hundred other tacit things about the product.

Film is also an easy way to show things that don’t exist yet, or can’t exist yet – and make claims about them.

We’ve all seen videos by corporations and large design companies that are glossy and exciting illustrations of the new future products they’ll almost certainly never make.

Some are dire, some are intriguing-but-flawed, some are awesome-but-unbelievable.

This is fine!

More than fine!

Brilliant!

Ultimately they are communications – of brand and ambition – rather than legal promises.

Some of these communications though – have enormous purchase on our dreams and ambitions for years afterwards – for better, or for worse.

I’m thinking particularly of the Apple ‘Knowledge Navigator’ film of 1987, important in some of the invention it foreshadowed, even while some of the notions in it are now a little laughable.It was John Sculley‘s vision – not Jobs – and was quite controversial at the time.

Nevertheless, designers, technologists and businesses have pursued those ideas with greater and lesser success due to the hold that film had over the collective psyche of the technology industry for, say, 20 years.

Hugh Dubberly was working at Apple at the time points out some of the influences the film in a piece on his studio’s website:

“We began with as much research as we could do in a few days. We talked with Aaron Marcus and Paul Saffo. Stewart Brand’s book on the “Media Lab” was also a source—as well as earlier visits to the Architecture Machine Group. We also read William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and Verber Vinge’s “True Names”.

Of course the company that authored it, Apple, I’d argue built it eventually to some extent with the iPhone.

The gravity well of the knowledge navigator was enormous, and fittingly, Apple punched out of it first with real product.

As Andy Baio and Jason Kottke has pointed out – their predicted time horizon for some of the concepts realised in the iPhone 4S and particularly Siri was uncannily accurate.

This ‘communications gravity’ – the sheer weight of the ‘microfuture’ portrayed shifts the discussion, shifts culture and it’s invention just a little bit toward it.

They are what Webb calls (after Victor Papanek, I believe) ‘normative’ – they illustrate something we want to build toward.

They are also commercial acts – perhaps with altruistic or collegiate motives woven in – but commercial all the same.

They illustrate a desirable microfuture wherein Brand-X’s product or services are central.

Dubberly, in his piece about Knowledge Navigator points out the importance of this – the influence the film had on the corporate imagination of the company, and of competitors:

“What is surprising is that the piece took on a life of its own. It spawned half a dozen or more sequels within Apple, and several other companies made similar pieces. These pieces were marketing materials. They supported the sale of computers by suggesting that a company making them has a plan for the future.

…

One effect of the video was engendering a discussion (both inside Apple and outside) about what computers should be like. On another level, the videos became a sort of management tool.

They suggested that Apple had a vision of the future, and they prompted a popular internal myth that the company was “inventing the future.”

Very recently, we’ve seen the rise of two other sub-genres of concept video.

It’s very early days for both, but both are remarkable for the ‘communications gravity’ they generate for very different commercial endeavours.

First of all – what Bruce Sterling has called the ‘vernacular video’ – often of products in use – created for startups and small companies.

Adam Lisagor has been hailed as the leader in this genre by Fast Company – and his short films for the like of Flipboard, Square and Jawbone have in many ways been defining of the vernacular in that space. They are short, and understated – and very clear about the central benefit of the product or service. Perfect for the sharing and re-sharing. Timo’s written about Adam’s work previously on his personal blog, and I’d agree with him when he says “He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest interactions”. They serve as extraordinarily elegant pitches for products and services that are ‘real’ i.e. has usually already been made.

Secondly – the short videos that illustrate the product intentions of people on Kickstarter, often called ‘campaign videos’ – outlining a prototype or a feasibility investigation into making a product at small scale.

They are often very personal and emotive, but mix in somewhat of a documentary approach to making and construction around prototypes. They serve as invitations to support a journey.

So far, so what?

Video is a well-known way of communicating new or future products & services that reaches the mainstream – and we are seeing a boom in the amount of great short communication about design, invention and making with ever-higher production value as the tools of creation fall in cost, and the techniques of using them become available to small, nimble groups of creators.

Well, we think that’s just half of the potential of using video.

There is a great deal of potential in using video as a medium for design itself – not just communicating what’s been designed, or imagined.

Jack and Timo drew this for me a couple of months ago when we were discussing an upcoming project.

We were talking about the overlap between invention and storytelling that occurs when we make films, and how and why that seems to happen.

On the right is the ‘communications gravity’ that I’ve already talked about above – but the left-hand circle of the Venn is ‘product invention’.

During a project like Mag+ we used video prototyping throughout – in order to find what was believable, what seemed valuable, and how it might normalise into a mainstream product of worth.

In the initial workshopping stages we made very quick sketches with cut-up magazines, pasted together and filmed with an iPhone – but then played back on an iPhone to understand the quality of the layout and interaction on a small screen.

From these early animatics to discuss with our client at Bonnier R&D, we moved to the video prototype of the chosen route.

There were many iterations of the ‘material quality’ of the interface – we call it the ‘rulespace’ – the physics of the interactions, the responsiveness of the media – tuned in the animation and video until we had something that felt right – and that could communicate it’s ‘rightness’ in film.

You find what is literally self-evident.

You are faking everything except this ‘rulespace’ – it’s a block of wood, with green paper on it. But as we’ve written before, that gets you to intuitions about use and gesture – what will make you tired, what will feel awkward in public places, how it sits on the breakfast table.

Finding the rulespace is the thing that is the real work – and that is product invention through making a simulation.

We are making a model of how a product is, to the degree that we can in video. We subject it to as much rigour as we can in terms of the material and technological capabilities we think can be built.

It must not be magic, or else it won’t feel real.

I guess I’m saying sufficiently-advanced technology should be distinguishable from magic.

Some of that is about context – we try and illustrate a “universe-next-door” where the new product is the only novelty. Where there is still tea, and the traffic is still miserable.

This increases belief in our possible microfuture to be sure – but it also serves a purpose in our process of design and invention.

The context itself is a rulespace – that the surface and behaviour of the product must believably fit into for it to be successful. It becomes part of the material you explore. There are phenomena you discover that present obstacles and opportunities.

That leads me to the final, overlapping area of the Venn diagram above – “New Grammar”

This summer I read “The Nature Of Technology: What it is and how it evolves” by W. Brian Arthur. I picked it up after reading Dan Saffer’s review of it, so many thanks to him for turning me on to it.

In it, Arthur frames the realtionship between ‘natural phenomena’ as discovered and understood by science, and how technology is that which ‘programs phenomena to our use’.

“That a technology relies on some effect is general. A technology is always based on some phenomenon or truism of nature that can be exploited and used to a purpose. I say “always” for the simple reason that a technology that exploited nothing could achieve nothing.”

“Phenomena are the indispensable source from which all technologies arise. All technologies, no matter how simple or sophisticated, are dressed-up versions of the use of some effect—or more usually, of several effects.”

“Phenomena rarely can be used in raw form. They may have to be coaxed and tuned to operate satisfactorily, and they may work only in a narrow range of conditions. So the right combination of supporting means to set them up for the purpose intended must be found.”

“A technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use. Or more accurately I should say it is a collection of phenomena captured and put to use. I use the word “captured” here, but many other words would do as well. I could say the phenomenon is harnessed, seized, secured, used, employed, taken advantage of, or exploited for some purpose. To my mind though, “captured and put to use” states what I mean the best.”

“…technology is more than a mere means. It is a programming of phenomena for a purpose. A technology is an orchestration of phenomena to our use.”

This leads me to another use of film we find valuable – as documentary evidence and experimental probe. What Schulze calls ‘science on science’.

The work that he and Timo did on RFID exploring it’s ‘material’ qualities through film is a good example of this I think.

It’s almost a nature documentary in a way, pointing and poking at a phenomena in order to capture new (often visual) language to understand it.

Back to W.Brian Arthur:

“…phenomena used in technology now work at a scale and a range that casual observation and common sense have no access to.”

I think this is what Jack and Timo are trying to address with work such as ‘Immaterials’, and reffering to in the centre of their Venn – creating new grammar is an important part of both design investigation, and communication. It is an act of synthesis that can happen within and be expressed through the film-making process.

Arthur’s book goes on to underline the importance of such activities in invention:

“A new device or method is put together from the available components—the available vocabulary—of a domain. In this sense a domain forms a language; and a new technological artifact constructed from components of the domain is an utterance in the domain’s language. This makes technology as a whole a collection of several languages, because each new artifact may draw from several domains. And it means that the key activity in technology—engineering design—is a form of composition. It is expression within a language (or several).”

He goes on to quote Paul Klee on the the importance of increasing the grammar we have access to:

“…even adepts can never fully keep up with all the principles of combination in their domain. One result of this heavy investment in a domain is that a designer rarely puts a technology together from considerations of all domains available. The artist adapts himself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of his paintbox. “The painter… does not fit the paints to the world. He fits himself to the paint.” As in art, so in technology. Designers construct from the domains they know.”

I think one of the biggest rewards of this sort of work is finding new grammar from other domains. Or what Arthur calls the importance of ‘redomaining’ in invention.

“The reason… redomainings are powerful is not just that they provide a wholly new and more efficient way to carry out a purpose. They allow new possibilities.”

“A change in domain is the main way in which technology progresses.”

“…a single practitioner’s new projects typically contain little that is novel. But many different designers acting in parallel produce novel solutions: in the concepts used to achieve particular purposes; in the choice of domains; in component combinations; in materials, architectures, and manufacturing techniques. All these cumulate to push an existing technology and its domain forward.”

“At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation, some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half-conscious suggestion.”

“…associates a problem with a solution by reaching into his store of functionalities and imagining what will happen when certain ones are combined.”

“Invention at its core is mental association.”

It’s not necessarily an end product we are after – that comes through more thinking through making. And it also comes from a collegiate conversation using new grammars that work unearths.

But to get a new language, a map, even if it’s just a pirate map, just a confident sketch in an emerging territory – is invaluable in order to provoke the mental association Arthur refers to.

We’re going to continue to experiment with video as a medium for research, design and communication.

Recent efforts like ‘Clocks for Robots‘ are us trying to find something like a sketch, where we start a conversation about new grammar through video…

About a decade ago – I saw Oliver Sacks speak at the Rockerfeller Institute in NYC, talk about his work.

A phrase from his address has always stuck with me since. He said of what he did – his studies and then the writing of books aimed at popular understanding of his studies that ‘…sometimes the stories are the science’.

Sometimes our film work is the design work.

Again this is a commercial act, and we are a commercial design studio.

But it’s also something that we hope unpacks the near-future – or at least the near-microfutures – into a public where we can all talk about them.

You may remember Suwappu, our toy invention project with Dentsu — those woodland creatures that talk to one-another when you watch them through your phone camera. You can see the film – the design concept – here or (and now I’m showing off) in the New York at Moma, in the exhibition Talk to Me.

Here’s the next stage, a sneak peek at the internal app prototype:

Direct link: Suwappu app prototype video, on Vimeo.

It’s an iPhone app which is a window to Suwappu, where you can see Deer and Badger talk as you play with them.

Behind the scenes, there’s some neat technology here. The camera recognises Deer and Badger just from what they look like — it’s a robot-readable world but there’s not a QR Code in sight. The camera picks up on the designs of the faces of the Suwappu creatures. Technically this is markerless augmented reality — it’s cutting-edge computer vision.

And what’s also neat is that the augmented reality is all in 3D: you suddenly see Deer as inside a new environment, one that moves around and behind the toy as your move the phone around. It’s all tabletop too, which is nicely personal. The tabletop is a fascinating place for user interfaces, alongside the room-side interfaces of Xbox Kinects and Nintendo Wiis, the intimate scale of mobiles, and the close desktop of the PC. Tabletop augmented reality is play-scale!

But what tickles us all most about Suwappu is the story-telling.

Seeing the two characters chatting, and referencing a just-out-of-camera event, is so provocative. It makes me wonder what could be done with this story-telling. Could there be a new story every week, some kind of drama occurring between the toys? Or maybe Badger gets to know you, and you interact on Facebook too. How about one day Deer mentions a new character, and a couple of weeks later you see it pop up on TV or in the shops.

The system that it would all require is intriguing: what does a script look like, when you’re authoring a story for five or six woodland creatures, and one or two human kids who are part of the action? How do we deliver the story to the phone? What stories work best? This app scratches the surface of that, and I know these are the avenues the folks at Dentsu are looking forward to exploring in the future. It feels like inventing a new media channel.

Suwappu is magical because it’s so alive, and it fizzes with promise. Back in the 1980s, I played with Transformers toys, and in my imagination I thought about the stories in the Transformers TV cartoon. And when I watched the cartoon, I was all the more engaged for having had the actual Transformers toys in my hands. With Suwappu, the stories and the toys are happening in the same place at the same time, right in my hands and right in-front of you.

Here are some more pics.

The app icon.

Starting the tech demo. You can switch between English and Japanese.

Badger saying “Did I make another fire?” (Badger has poor control over his laser eyes!)

Deer retweeting Badger, and adding “Oh dear.” I love the gentle way the characters interact.

You can’t download the iPhone app — this is an internal-only prototype for Dentsu to test the experience and test the technology. We’re grateful to them for being so open, and for creating and sharing Suwappu.

Thanks to all our friends at Dentsu (the original introduction has detailed credits), the team here at BERG, and thanks especially to Zappar, whose technology and smarts in augmented reality and computer vision has brought Suwappu to life.

Read more about the Suwappu app prototype on Dentsu London’s blog, which also discusses some future commercial directions for Suwappu.

Update, February 2013: Howmanyreally.com has now finished its prototype trial, and is no longer live.

One of the concepts was called ‘Dimensions’ – a set of tools that looked to juxtapose the size of things from history and the news with things you are familiar with – bringing them home to you.

About a year ago, we launched the first public prototype from that thinking, http://howbigreally.com, which overlaid the physical dimensions of news events such as the 2010 Pakistan Floods, or historic events such as the Apollo 11 moonwalks on where you lived or somewhere you were familiar with.

It was a simple idea that proved pretty effective, with over half-a-million visitors in the past year, and a place in the MoMA Talk To Me exhibition.

Today, we’re launching its sibling, howmanyreally.com

You can probably guess what it does from the URL – it compares the numbers of people who experienced an event with a number you can relate to: the size of your social network.

For example, the number of people who worked at Bletchley Park cracking codes and ushering in the computer age…

I can sign in with my Twitter account

and I’m placed at the centre…

Clicking to zoom out shows me in relation to those I follow on Twitter…

Zooming out again places that group in relation to those working at Bletchley Park in 1945.

Which, in turn, is then compared to the Normandy Landings

…and finally the 1.5m people in the Home Guard

Despite the difference between the size of the final group and your social network, it can still just be made out at the centre of the diagram, helping us imagine the size of the group involved in these efforts during World War 2.

Of course this visualisation owes much to the pioneering work of the Office of Charles & Ray Eames – particularly their “Powers of 10” exploration of relative scale, which is a shared source of inspiration in the studio.

There is another type of comparison featured in the prototype – one which during development we likened to an assembly in a school playground – where your friends are gathered into different groups.

For example, this one looks at home ownership in England and Wales:

Starting again from your twitter network…

This visualisation starts to arrange your social network in groups…

relating to the different experiences…

and you can also rollover the individual avatars in this version, to see the individual’s experience…

All the ‘dimensions’ in howmanyreally.com allow you to post what you’ve discovered to your social networks, if you want…

There are a lot of influences on howmanyreally – both from the Eames, and in the case above – the work of Isotype, which I hope we’ll go into in a further post.

But for now let me encourage you to explore howmanyreally.com yourself. It’s little bit of a different animal from its sibling IMHO, which had such an immediate visual punch. This is a slower burn, but in my experience playing with it, I’ve found it can be just as powerful.

Both human history and current affairs unfortunately feature an high percentage of turmoil and tragedy.

While I’ve selected some rather neutral examples here, juxtaposing your friends with numbers of those injured, enslaved or killed through events in the past can really give one pause.

In its way, I’ve found howmanyreally.com a tool for reflection on history. A small piece that I can loosely join to a larger exploration of the facts. I really hope that’s your experience too.

If you don’t wish to use your social network accounts in connection with howmanyreally, you can enter a number you’re familiar with to centre the comparison on – for instance the size of a school class, or those in your office perhaps.

Or you can choose one of the comparisons we’ve prepared – for instance the number of people typically in a large cinema…

As with howbigreally.com – if the prototype is successful, these new visualisations are designed to be incorporated as an element within the bbc.co.uk history and news sites. So do give your feedback to the BBC team through the contact details on the site.

It’s just left to me to say thanks to the team at the BBC who originally commissioned these explorations into history at human scale, including Lisa Sargood, Chris Sizemore, and Max Gadney.

Howmanyreally (and Dimensions as a whole) has been a fascinating and rewarding piece to work on, and thanks many members of the studio who have made it happen: Nick Ludlam, Simon Pearson, Matt Webb, Denise Wilton – and the core team behind its genesis, design and development: Alex Jarvis, James Darling, Peter Harmer and Tom Stuart.

Jack and I taught a short class at SVA’s Interaction Design MFA this July.

We’d visited previously for a week in the Spring, and Liz Danzico was kind enough to invite us as part of their Summer School programme.

The two days started with thinking-through-drawing exercises we like to call “Hopeful Monsters” based around an exercise we’ve described on the blog before, and other drawing activities around generating ‘Inbreds and Hybrids’ that we were introduced to by our friend Matt Ward from Goldmsith’s Design faculty.

Initial thinking and brainstorming about cheap, ubiquitous, mundane technologies leads to fantastic leaps as the particpants draw on the whiteboard.

As always there are dead ends and flights of fancy – but, as always – there are a couple of intriguing combinations and mutant products that have an itchy promise to them…

The mutating, morphing quality of drawing our hopeful monster objects on the whiteboard…

Always contrasts interestingly with the more procedural, mechanical evolutionary drawing produced by tables of post-it-pixels…

On the second day, we deployed our secret weapon!

We were lucky enough to have Durrell Bishop of the mighty Luckybite join us, and set us all an incredible brief for the day – design a mouse trap, and a ghost trap…

We’d asked the group to think about their favourite traps overnight, and come back with a drawing.

My favourite I think was this diagram of the boulder trap in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So much peril encapsulated in a stick figure!

The day saw the group tangle with the realities of catching mice, and then swap to the more symbolic, reality-shaping nature of designing a ghost-trap.

Some favourites – from many – include…

Jill’s self-composting mouse-trap

Rafa’s CCTV gargoyle ghost-trap

Peter’s ghost-traps, including the awesome ‘Dark Sucker’, which we hope he builds…

And… Nora’s Black Cat/White-Cat ghost-trap service

Fantastic fun, and everyone produced really excellent, surprising stuff.

Thanks again to Liz Danzico, Qing Qing Chen and, of course, the group who attended the workshop and threw themselves into it so fully in the NYC heat…

Finally – I had great fun one of the afternoons taking photos of the group with an iPhone and a magnifying glass while they drew…

Talk to Me, MoMA’s new exhibition about design and the communication between people and objects opened this week at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. We’re very proud to be a part of a show that pulls together so many potent strands of contemporary design:

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.

There is an enormous amount of work that we value and admire across the exhibition. A range of games from the experimental Passage, Chromaroma and Sharkrunners to Little Big Planet, SimCity and Spore. It’s great to see Usman Haque’s Pachube alongside other sensor networks and platforms such as Homesense and Botanicalls.

There are physical interactive products such as David Rose’s ever-impressive connected medicine container Glowcaps, the exquisitely crafted musical interfaces Monome and Tenori-on, the empowering iOS payment interface Square and the characterful and playful Tengu, alongside popular apps like Talking Carl and Wordlens.

There’s a wide range of mapping work, from the early and potent They Rule to Prettymaps, Legible London, Ushahidi and Walking Papers. And there is plenty of work that defies classification such as Camille Scherrer’s The Haunted Book, Kacie Kinzer’s wonderfully simple and affective social Tweenbots and Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented (hyper) Reality.

BERG has seven works in the show. The bendy maps Here and There, the interactive exploration of scale BBC Dimensions, the films made with the Touch project exploring the qualities of touch and RFID: Nearness and Immaterials: Ghost in the Field, our collaborations with Dentsu London on Media Surfaces: Incidental Media, The Journey and the augmented toys Suwappu.

For such a broad exhibition it is great to see all of the works curated and presented with such thought and attention to the quality of each piece.

The exhibition takes place in the MoMA Special Exhibitions Gallery, from 24 July until 7 November 2011. Thanks to Paola Antonelli and the Talk to Me team for the excellent and patient work in putting this all together.

I am very happy to officially welcome Alice Bartlett to BERG! She has joined us as a Creative Technologist, and will be employing her wide ranging technology skills in bringing our various creations to life.

I like to think that there’s a common feeling of optimism and enthusiasm that we all share at BERG, and Alice is no exception. She is a great communicator, highly engaging in how she talks about her work, and I’m looking forward to her future contributions to the studio immensely.

She joins us from Assanka, where she was involved in numerous projects, most recent, the ground-breaking Financial Times HTML5 application for tablets. Her old colleagues were also helpful enough to point out those parts of the old job she would most like to continue with.

For the last two weeks, Alice has been involved with a studio project which has served as an introduction to our working practices, as well as getting some practical Rails experience under her belt. From Schulze’s original brief, Alex Jarvis has worked on the look and feel of the site, and Alice on the HTML and Rails backend.

Shipping your code is arguably the most important part of any development work, which means this internal project was designed to have public visibility. It also helps ensure that matters like deployment and ops are encountered, and given the eventful first couple of hours we had with the SVK launch, that’s important experience indeed!

To that end, I would like to unveil shuu.sh. Quoting from the site, it is:

“… a web-based twitter reader that displays the updates of the people you follow in relation to the frequency of their tweets. It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.”

Alice and Alex have both done a brilliant job in a short amount of time, and if you’re a Twitter user, you should go have a look.

A glut of interesting stuff on the studio list this week.

Matt Jones sent round an intro to Biophilia, Björk’s new multimedia project. As you’d expect from the small Icelandic bundle of re-invention, her new work is a departure from her previous oeuvre; Biophilia isn’t just an album, it’ll be accompanied by ten iPad apps. Her tour isn’t simply a tour. Starting with the Manchester International Festival, she’ll be continuing with a number of residencies across the world involving live performances and workshops.

Yesterday I watched the making of her new iPad-controllable celeste, the Gameleste. I love it, especially the little burst of Bach’s Invention No. 13 in A minor on organ in the middle:

The Gameleste – a custom instrument for Björk from Andy McCreeth on Vimeo.

Next door, RIG have been pumping out Robyn this morning [“I’ve got some news for you / Fembots have feelings too“], which seemed fitting as Matt Jones sent round Kevin Grennan‘s work The Smell of Control: Fear, Focus, Trust from this year’s graduate show of Design Interactions at RCA. It explores the blurring lines between robot and human interaction.

“The contrast between the physical anti-anthropomorphic nature of the machines and the olfactory anthropomorphism highlights the absurd nature of the trickery at play in all anthropomorphism”

Robot with sweat gland, from The Smell of Control

Mr Jones also sent round this genre mashup video. If only Amazon really sold a choose-your-own-adventure plot device button to sex up the weekend.

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Timo and Alex had their interest piqued by Nizo, which promises to bring Super 8 film goodness to the iPhone. I like the scrolling effect on their homepage. A nice way of tease-introducing the features which the app will contain.

Terminator 2 is twenty years old on Sunday. This stop-motion tribute is totally mesmerising:

Splitscreen: A Love Story was filmed entirely on a Nokia N8 and sent round the studio by Denise. Nicely shot, and not without a healthy dollop of romance-cheese.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

Happy weekending!

So I’m terribly pleased to announce that this week we are formally joined by Andy Huntington. We’ve known Andy for many years and began working with him as “Schulze & Webb” on the Olinda project. More recently, for the last year or so, he’s been designing and prototyping products with us.

Andy’s joining us as a Hardware Producer & Designer. He’ll be shifting between the design landscape and the dark pit of component sourcing, board design and manufacture. No doubt he’ll rub shoulders with Nick too in embedded software stuff. Initially his focus will be split between physical prototyping on Chaco and internal new product development on Barringer.

I first knew Andy during our studies at college. I sat at the next desk. Much of Andy’s work is around design of sound installations and musical instruments. I can only hope that his indentured servitude here can pay back a small percentage of the psychic debt he incurred at college during the development of his tappers project.

tap tap tap……..

tap…

tap..

*solder solder*

tap tap tap…

I still wake up screaming from the taps.

He’s a great force and I can’t wait for him to punch products into the world.

It was a busy week last week, so Friday links have rolled over to Tuesday.

Lots of historical things this week. A brilliantly curated and annotated collection of movie title cards and trailers. A work of incredible devotion by Christian Annyas via @LukeScheybeler:

An early colour autochrome photograph of equally early airshows, via Claes Källarsson:

Some early photos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Matt Webb says: “There’s something uncanny about these unstudied portraits of people taken before they got to be such presences in the world.”:

And another historical artefact from Steve Jobs on marketing, branding and values, this is why Steve is absolute #1 mind-gangster. Via O’Reilly radar / gnat:

In one of the stranger moments last week Durrell Bishop reminded us of Maggie Thatcher killing a multi-million pound British Airways branding project with a simple gesture:

As tomorrow is a holiday, the weekly BERG links post is coming to you one day early this week!

It’s been a rather quiet week on the BERG studio list, but we (where “we” mostly = Matt Jones) did manage to dig up some interesting things from the internets.

Jason Kottke linked to Clement Valla’s collection of “melty roads” – Google Earth images where the 2D-to-3D mapping doesn’t quite work. Browsing through the images invokes an Inception-like world.

Via Khoi Vinh we discovered the brilliant “Back of a Web Page” Tumblr. Ever wonder what those Twitter birds do behind the scenes?

One afternoon we heard some odd bloopy music coming over the studio speakers, and Matt Jones confessed he’d been playing with Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata, a generative sound sequencer.

Go over and have a play yourself!

Via Mike Migurski came Xiaoji Chen’s Isochronic Singapore. It’s fascinating to see the city of Singapore expand and contract like a living, breathing thing as average travel times change from hour to hour and day to day.

Chen has been playing with other dynamic maps of Singapore as well:

Finally, via our neighbour and RIG super group member Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, a list of Robots, Cyborgs and Computers in Film and TV. It seems that list hasn’t been updated in at least five years (and therefore actually feels rather short), but for me the best thing about it is it reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: the TV show Small Wonder. Ah, mid-80s American family sitcoms. Most of them are best forgotten, actually…

Vicky the robot child!

The studio’s experiencing some turbulent times at the moment – all good – as we get busier, reach further and grow.

On that last note, I have an awesome announcement to make. Our long time friend and collaborator Timo Arnall is joining us full-time as a Creative Director here at BERG. He needs little introduction – he is a accomplished researcher, designer, photographer, film maker and conference speaker.

We’ve been working with Timo in various ways since Matthew and I formed Schulze & Webb back in 2006. Our collaborations increased in scale as we began working on the Touch project investigating Near Field Computing at AHO. For instance, we went from this RFID Hacking Workshop in 2006 through to the “Immaterials” and “Nearness” film work in 2009.

Timo’s thinking, film-making and interaction design knowledge was also a huge contributor to our work on Mag+, and subsequently, he collaborated with us on the design of Popular Science+. This is to name just a few of the projects he has contributed to.

Timo is among that rare category of people with a broad, inventive literacy across the design, technology and product spectra as well as having awesome deep trenches of skill across graphic design, product design, design research, writing, photography, video production, post-production, drawing, lighting, and architecture.

He also has a long standing dedication to Nike Footscape.

In addition to leading product and service design projects with our clients (alongside Denise) as Creative Director, his responsibilities will also include managing and directing BERG’s communications output.

Timo is a capable designer in many traditional forms – but in many ways his preferred design medium for exploring interactions is video. His responsibilities will begin on a brief for Chaco, but we also have the pleasure of including him in some client workshops on Uinta.

On a personal note, I’ve known Timo since childhood – I look forward to his continuing influence on me personally, also to watch both how he affects the room, and it affects his work.

Many cheers for the acquisition of the blonde-posthuman-photon-railgun Timo Arnall!

Happy days…

Dentsu London are developing an original product called Suwappu. Suwappu are woodland creatures that swap pants, toys that come to life in augmented reality. BERG have been brought in as consultant inventors, and we’ve made this film. Have a look!

Suwappu is a range of toys, animal characters that live in little digital worlds. The physical toys are canvasses upon which we can paint worlds, through a phone (or tablet) lens we can see into the narratives, games and media in which they live.

Dentsu London says:

We think Suwappu represents a new kind of media platform, and all sorts of social, content and commercial possibilities.

Each character lives in different environments: Badger lives in a harsh and troubled world, Deer lives in a forest utopia, Fox in an urban garden, Tuna in a paddling pool of nicely rendered water. The worlds also contain other things, such as animated facial expression, dialogue pulled from traditional media and Twitter, and animated sidekick characters.

The first part of this film imagines and explores the Suwappu world. Here we are using film to explore how animation and behaviours can draw out character and narrative in physical toy settings. The second part is an explanation of how Suwappu products might work, from using animal patterns as markers for augmented reality, to testing out actual Augmented Reality (AR) worlds on a mobile phone.

We wanted to picture a toy world that was part-physical, part-digital and that acts as a platform for media. We imagine toys developing as connected products, pulling from and leaking into familiar media like Twitter and Youtube. Toys already have a long and tenuous relationship with media, as film or television tie-ins and merchandise. It hasn’t been an easy relationship. AR seems like a very apt way of giving cheap, small, non-interactive plastic objects an identity and set of behaviours in new and existing media worlds.

Schulze says:

We see the media and animation content around the toys as almost episodic, like comic books. Their changing characters, behaviours and motivations played out across different media.

Toys are often related as merchandise to their screen based counterparts. Although as products toys have fantastic charm and an awesome legacy. They feel muted in comparison to their animated mirror selves on the big screens. As we worked with Dentsu on the product and brand space around the toys we speculated on animated narratives to accompany the thinking and characters developed.

In the film, one of the characters makes a reference to dreams. I love the idea that the toys in their physical form, dream their animated televised adventures in video. When they awake, into their plastic prisons, they half remember the super rendered full motion freedoms and adventures from the world of TV.

Each Suwappu character can be split into two parts, each half can be swapped with any other resulting in a new hybrid character. Each character has its own personality (governed by its top half) and ‘environment’ (dictated by its bottom half). This allows the creatures to visit each other’s worlds, and opens up for experimentation with the permutations of characters personality and the worlds that they inhabit. It’s possible to set up games and narratives based on the ways that the characters and their pants are manipulated.

This is not primarily a technology demo, it’s a video exploration of how toys and media might converge through computer vision and augmented video. We’ve used video both as a communication tool and as a material exploration of toys, animation, augmented reality and 3D worlds. We had to invent ways of turning inanimate models into believable living worlds through facial animation, environmental effects, sound design and written dialogue. There are other interesting findings in the exploration, such as the way in which the physical toys ‘cut out’ or ‘occlude’ their digital environments. This is done by masking out an invisible virtual version of the toy in 3D, which makes for a much more believable and satisfying experience, and something we haven’t seen much of in previous AR implementations.

We all remember making up stories with our toys when we were young, or our favourite childhood TV cartoon series where our toys seemed to have impossible, brilliant lives of their own. Now that we have the technology to have toys soak in media, what tales will they tell?

^ Denise Wilton by matlock, on Flickr

I’m so happy that Denise is joining the studio as Creative Director.

She’s been one of my favourite designers for such a long time, and has incredible instincts for product strategy and voice, service design and user interface across both digital and physical domains.

Her understanding of community and systems to support them from her time at both b3ta.com and moo.com is second-to-none. The depth of craft and care she brings to work is awesome.

She’s also a lovely illustrator, for instance this treatise on robotics:

I think we first met through Cal Henderson and Tom Coates who were working with her at Emap way back when, but – I got to work with her and really understand what an incredible designer she is back in 2005, when she help me design and illustrated a game/toy I was making as part of my research into ‘Play’ at Nokia Insight & Foresight, with Tom Hume and our friends at Future Platforms.

Twitchr was defined by Denise’s beautiful work and art direction. Her dedication to detail she displayed on its design and the playfulness she pours into every one of those details is something I can’t wait to see her bring to our work at BERG.

Welcome onboard, Denise!

We weren’t at SxSW, but some of our friends were – and via their twitter-exhaust this report by David Sherwin of FrogDesign from a talk by Intel’s Genevieve Bell popped up on our radar.

In her panel yesterday at South by Southwest, Genevieve Bell posed the following question: “What might we really want from our devices?” In her field research as a cultural anthropologist and Intel Fellow, she surfaced themes that might be familiar to those striving to create the next generation of interconnected devices. Adaptable, anticipatory, predictive: tick the box. However, what happens when our devices are sensitive, respectful, devout, and perhaps a bit secretive? Smart devices are “more than being context aware,” Bell said. “It’s being aware of consequences of context.”

Here’s a lovely quote from Genevieve:

“[Today’s devices] blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device [in the future] might know when NOT to blurt out the truth.”

This in turn, reminded me of a lovely project that Steffen Fiedler did back in 2009 during a brief I helped run at the RCA Design Interactions course as part T-Mobile’s ongoing e-Etiquette project, called “Instruments of Politeness“.

These are the titular instruments – marvellous contraptions!

They’re a set of machines to fool context-aware devices and services – to enable you to tell little white lies with sensors.

For instance, cranking the handle of the machine above simulates something like a pattern of ‘walking’ in the accelerometer data of the phone, so if you told someone you were out running errands (when in fact you were lazing on the sofa) your data-trail wouldn’t catch you out…

If you’ve missed that today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, well, you’ve not been spending much time on Twitter today, have you? Here are a few links in honour of the day:

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have started a movement with their book Half the Sky. (The title comes from an ancient Chinese proverb: “Women hold up half the sky.”)

When Fangirls Attack collects links (LOTS of them) to articles on gender in comics.

The Guardian list their Top 100 women. Tellingly, only two of the 100 fall in the category of Technology.

Channel 4 Food have a list of the most inspiring foodie ladies in Britain.

TEDWomen is a treasure trove of talks and performances by awesome, inspiring women.

Today is a great day to re-read Sojourner Truth’s 1852 speech Ain’t I A Woman. (Or, even better, hear it read by Maya Angelou.)

And finally, if you really have been absent from Twitter today and haven’t seen EQUALS‘ video of 007, er… Daniel Craig dressing in drag to make a point about gender inequality, please watch it now:

;

Woodwind is the protagonist in SVK, the comic we’re publishing by Warren Ellis and Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker in April 2011.

This is one of Matt’s early character sketches for Thomas Woodwind, who is quite the piece of work…

Here’s Warren’s character notes from an early treatment:

THOMAS WOODWIND:  I’m seeing a man of six feet or so, quite lean, with a good Patrick Stewart-ish skull fuzzed with very short pale hair. Paranoid eyes. Tending to very long black coats, probably with poacher’s pockets sewn on the inside.  A bluetooth earpiece cupping each ear, with front facing limbs (where the IR LEDS are). Also wears black gloves, I think – no fingerprints, reduction of epithelials.

Like I say – a piece of work all in all. He’s a classic Ellis character, with a mind like a steel-trap and a sharp tongue to match. He also makes Jason Bourne look like he’s trying too hard…

We’ll have some more news about the project likely next week, but I also want to point you at the site we’ve built where SVK will live. There’s not a lot there yet… but for now you can sign up for news about SVK’s release at getsvk.com

Some sad-but-proud news!

Tom Armitage

Tom Armitage was employee #1, making the leap to join BERG before it was named BERG. For 2 years he’s been both creative technologist and writer, leading technology on several projects, and also running the online face of the studio through his blogging and longer form pieces. When he’s coding, he has the rare gift of solid interaction design intuitions. And in the room, he seems to know of every weird design project and obscure game ever, and can hook you up with relevant links to whatever you’re researching.

And now he’s off! Tom is joining the London game design studio Hide & Seek as a Game Designer. We’ve been watching Hide & Seek for a while — they’re an exciting practice in the rapidly growing area of games and public experiences. And Tom is passionate about games and what they mean to people. Check out his recent talk, Things Rules Do.

It’s a great move for Tom, and we’re very proud of him.

Matt Brown

Matt Brown has been with us as senior designer and chief of music since mid 2009. He’s a wide-ranging and inventive talent, as deft with illustration and composing music as he is prototyping procedurally generated graphics and crafting beautiful and natural interfaces. He’s grown into running projects with us, and working directly at the weird creative coherence where multiple design strands overlap and coincide. When I talk about BERG as a studio, producing work which is inventive, beautiful and populist, it’s Matt’s work which has been right at the centre of that.

And at the end of March, he’s off too. Matt is moving from London to Cupertino, to invent the future as part of a jaw-droppingly impressive team. He’s joining the Human Interface Device Prototyping group at Apple as a designer/prototyper.

The news of his leaving is countered only by our terrific pride at seeing our boy done so good.

Culture

Our culture and way of working is what makes us BERG. And our culture is made by our people. Everyone here has a colossal impact on the life of the room. Nobody just “fits in,” we grow together — learning, teaching and developing as we go. Tom and Matt B are irreplaceable, we’ll miss them enormously!

That said, one of the things that makes me most pleased is that the studio is a place that people travel through and move on from. I’m proud of our alumni! When they achieve great things, I admit I take a good deal of satisfaction that a fellow traveller has carried a little bit of BERG into the world.

We keep it quiet, but the secret history of our name is that is stands for the British Experimental Rocket Group. Our experimental rockets are our people.

So what next?

The studio will grow and change. We’re established enough that we can treat these moments as opportunities. It was surprising and gratifying to have Fast Company place us #4 in their list of most innovative design firms, in such illustrious company as Stamen, IDEO and Pentagram!

And so I have more changes to announce — soon, when the ink is dry. I can’t wait to tell you.

In the meantime, please lift a glass to Tom and Matt! Congratulations fellas, well done both of you, and thank you for being part of the journey.

Sticky Light is an installation that projects a laser that sticks to lines and solid objects. There’s no camera – just a laser and a photodector. It’s incredibly responsive, and completely captivating. The dot of light takes on a surprising amount of personality, darting around, occasionally getting lost and confused, and then suddenly slipping away to explore its surroundings when released.

That such a nuanced impression of character could be formed from such a seemingly simple actor reminded me of Ken Perlin’s Polly: a prism that walks around a surface. That may not sound like much, but once you start playing with the various animation loops programmed into it, you might well change your mind. “Dejected” is heartbreaking. And yet: it’s a triangular prism. Marvellous.

Two pieces of graphic design that caught my eye. First, via Paul Mison, a spread from Marie Neurath’s Railways Under London. There’s a bit more on the output of the Isotype Institute, and some lovely examples of their work for children, over at the Science Project blog.

Secondly, via Frank Chimero, this lovely selection of covers for Kafka’s books by Peter Mendelsund. Mendelsund has a great blogpost on the design of the covers for publisher Shocken.

Finally, two music videos with interesting visual treatments. Firstly, Echo Lake’s Young Silence, which used a Kinect’s depth camera to film the band. It’s not a raw output, of course. There’s a lot of visual processing, and compositing of co-ordinates that’s followed up, but it makes the video very striking – and much like a low-budget take on Radiohead’s House Of Cards video, filmed on LIDAR.

And, to end, Chairlift’s Evident Utensil. This came up in discussion in the studio when we were talking about the aesthetics unique to video in the digital age, such as stabilisation, or as in these videos, what happens when keyframe data goes missing. The answer to the latter can be seen in the Chairlift video – and in several other examples of Datamoshing.

We love comics.

Comics break the rules of storytelling, invent new ones, and break them again – more often than almost any other media.

We are also fortunate to know – and occasionally enjoy the twisted guidance of – one of the best writers in comics and speculative fiction: Mr Warren Ellis.

Warren is actually to blame for coming up with the name BERG for us back in the summer of 2009, based on our shared love of Nigel Kneale.

So, we were thrilled when he said yes earlier this year to Jack’s proposal of working together on a storytelling project.

The result, coming in early 2011, is SVK.

What is SVK?
It’s going to be a very beautifully-printed object – a graphic novella, drawn by one of our very favourite artists – Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker – who Warren collaborated with on “Lazarus Churchyard” back in 1991. I think I’m right in saying it’s their first major collaboration since then…

We can’t tell you too much more just yet, as they are both currently hard at work on it, but Warren describes SVK as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”.

Brilliant.

It’s also a story about looking, and it’s an investigation into perception, storytelling and optical experimentation that inherits some of the curiosities behind previous work of the studio such as our Here & There maps of Manhattan.

For us – it’s also an investigation into new ways to get things out in the world, and as a result we’re talking about SVK now because we’re looking for people, brands and companies who would like to be in the SVK project…

Looking for advertisers
There are going to be a small number of opportunities to feature advertising – which will be as inventive as the story itself. We’re talking to people now, so that we can go to print with them in February 2011.

If you’re in advertising or marketing, and you’d like to talk more about it, email info@berglondon.com with “SVK” in the subject.

So we made a film with Dentsu London called Making Future Magic: light painting with the iPad. “Making Future Magic” is Dentsu London’s big creative statement.

The film was crazy popular, a million views in 2 weeks, and played out on national TV.

It showed a novel technique mixing light painting and stop animation. And it’s beautiful to watch!

More than the film…

If you’re a fan, you can get the music from iTunes (and read the liner notes).

Or you can buy the print-on-demand book, which collects the best still images, and adds behind-the-scenes photos.

Now if you want to get involved, meet Penki! Penki is an iPhone app to help you create the same light painting you saw in the film. There’s a Penki Flickr group so you can share photos. Or you can use it in your personal projects.

Beyond these, there are two other films: Media Surfaces: Incidental Media and Media Surfaces: the Journey. Where the light painting film communicates a brand through technique and aesthetics, these are video sketches that put forward concepts as discussion points.

And there’s been a lot of really good discussion.

What’s going on here?

A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.

What I think we’re doing is designing media.

It’s not like the old days where you just had TV or radio or newspaper, and you were stuck in a “broadcast” world or a “visual” world or whatever.

Now every element of this Making Future Magic project contributes to a brand space which has been designed to be a beautiful spectacle but also inviting to fans and people who want to join in, with a sprinkling of conversation starter.

Instead of thinking about a film, what we’re really thinking about is the relationship between Dentsu London and its audience/friends/coinhabitants-of-the-world!

And given that relationship, we consider what artefacts can we drop in and what media we can use to build the relationship, create a conduit for conversation, and demonstrate Dentsu London’s very particular brand of Making Future Magic.

We create content and create media all at once.

Mix and match! It feels like cooking up a potion. Designing media.

Mercury

In 2057, the Sun is dying, and the Earth is freezing. So the ship Icarus 2 goes on a mission to reignite it with a massive bomb. This is the movie Sunshine, and if you get a chance to see it, watch it on a big screen. The crew themselves watch the Sun close-up, awestruck, from a view-port the exact dimensions of a movie screen, so the Sun fills your picture too and you spend half the film bathing in powerful yellow light. Like some kind of church.

On the way, they slingshot past – and watch – Mercury, and this sequence is accompanied by one of the best tracks on the remarkable soundtrack (Paul Murphy/Underworld).

Venus

Earth is crazy over-populated and an effort to colonise Venus has begun. But nobody wants to go, because Venus is a terrible place to live. The Space Merchants (Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth) is about an executive at the advertising agency with the account to sell Venus as an idea.

This is against the back-drop of a world gone totally consumerist. A terrorist organisation named ‘the Consies’ fights against the status quo. I wrote about this on my personal blog in 2007.

Earth

Most people die in some kind of unknown pandemic. Ish Williams lives, and Earth Abides (George Stewart) tells of the next 80 years, from the scrabble to survive, the re-use of the useless artefacts of civilisation, and the early days of fragile rebuilding. The story goes into great detail, and is utterly convincing. In the third section, our main character is elderly and frail, and the narrative comes at you as a patchy, foggy lucidity, as is as excellent a meditation on old age as I’ve read anywhere, sci-fi or otherwise.

Mars

The first words on Mars are spoken by John Boone: “Well, here we are.” He later joins the First Hundred, the groups that colonises Mars in 2026. Over the following decades, terraforming begins, other colonists arrive, John travels, and cities are built. In 2056, he makes a speech at Nicosia, a new city, and is murdered.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars tells the story of 200 years of future history. It is a trilogy about friendships, science and nature and people and the social negotiation between and of all of them, terraforming, politics and constitutions, space elevators, and the solar system.

Jupiter

Jupiter is the destination of the spaceship Discovery in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I fell in love at a young age with the infinity of Jupiter and the artificial intelligence, HAL. Stanley Kubrick spoke about HAL in this 1969 interview:

One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.

(Kubrick interview via kottke.)

Jupiter also features in Ken Macleod’s books. I’ll repeat what I said in week 279:

There’s a bit in Ken Macleod’s sci-fi quartet, the Fall Revolution series, where Dave Reid’s company “Mutual Protection” are in orbit around Jupiter, building a massive, complex structure to instantiate a wormhole to the edge of the universe. It takes several years. To build it they have whole populations of uploaded human consciousnesses that occupy and run construction robots (uploaded minds are easier than writing artificial intelligences). They call these robot clusters macros.

Saturn

Before the planets formed, the solar system was the accretion disc, a vast spinning disc of trillions of asteroids and planetoids. Here lived the space spiders, and I’ll quote from the book:

On plains of web as broad as continents, palaces of silken thread arose. On silken parachutes the spiders’ young went soaring outwards on the solar wind to colonise clumps of lonely stone still further from the Sun. Spider musicians stretched harps of web across the sky, and filled the aether with their music. Spider artists caught sunlight in great discs of web, and broke it into rainbows.

Beautiful. That was a billion years ago. Now the spiders live in a much reduced accretion disc: Saturn’s rings. Philip Reeve’s book is sci-fi meets steampunk meets Victorian adventure yarn: Larklight.

Uranus

There’s not much that springs to mind for me about Uranus, other than it moves around the Sun by rolling, like a ball, rather than spinning like all the other planets.

Neptune

In 2 billion years, Neptune is the home of the 18th species of humankind. Humanity’s history has been one of alternating triumph and tragic almost-extinction (Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon.) Each species is human in a different way: with music at their heart, or artificial giant brains, or born to live in the air, or squat like crabs.

The 18th human has dozens of sexes, six legs, and an eye in the top of its head which – when they link together in planetwide telepathic communion – lets them see far into space like a single large area telescope.

Also Neptune is my favourite colour blue, and it has all kind of magical resonances for me which you can read about in the final slides of my presentation, Escalante.

The talk ends like this:

Blue is a good colour. It’s the colour of Neptune, of course; it’s the colour of the future of humanity. It is the colour of deep seas and of Cherenkov radiation. When we finally move on from Earth in the late 24th century and take over the solar system, our city-sized generation ships will take off into clear blue skies just like this.

And so on.

(Here are two previous talks of mine about sci-fi: Sci-fi I like (2006); and A science fictional tour of the solar system (2008).)

Following iPad light painting, we’ve made two films of alternative futures for media. These continue our collaboration with Dentsu London and Timo Arnall. We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.

“The Journey” is the second ‘video sketch’ in the pair with ‘Incidental Media’ – this time looking at the panoply of screens and media surfaces in a train station, and the opportunities that could come from looking at them slightly differently.

The Journey

The other film can be seen here.

There’s no real new technology at play in any of these ideas, just different connections and flows of information being made in the background – quietly, gradually changing how screens, bits of print ephemera such as train tickets, and objects in the world can inter-relate to make someone’s journey that bit less stressful, that bit more delightful.

There’s a lot in there – so I wanted to unpack a few of the moments in the film in this (rather long!) blog post and examine them a bit.

The film can be divided into two halves – our time in the station, and our time on the train.

The train journey itself is of course the thing at the centre of it all – and we’re examining how what we know about the journey – and the train itself, in some cases – can pervade the media surfaces involved in ways that are at once a little less ‘utilitarian’ and a little more, well, ‘useful’…

The first group of interventions could be characterised as the station wrapping around you, helping you get to your seat, on your train, for your journey, with the least stress.

Let’s start at the ticket machine.


The screen supposes two things – that it knows where it is (it doesn’t move around much) and it knows where your train (in this case, “Arthur” – trains are people too!) is leaving from, and when. So why not do a simple bit of reassurance here? It’s twenty minutes to Arthur’s departure and it’s a 3 minute walk.

You’ve got 17 minutes to play with! Get a sandwich? A coffee? Or go and find your seat…

Before we do that I just want to point our something about the ticket machine itself…


There’s the screen we’ve been interacting with to get our ticket, but there’s also a LED scroller above that.

As you can see in the concept sketch below, we’ve supposed that the scroller could give reassurance to the people in the queue behind you – maybe displaying the average turn-around-time of serving tickets to travellers, so if there is a queue, you’ll know how quickly it might move.



I think when I was drawing this I had in mind the awesome-but-as-yet-unrealised scheme by Lisa Strausfeld and Pentagram NYC for a videowall in Penn Station.



I think I first saw this presented by Lisa Strausfeld at a conference some 8 or so years ago now, but it’s still wonderful. The large video wall has loads of different layers of information kind of interpolated and displayed all at once, at different ‘resolutions’.

So that if you’re approaching the station from down the street you read some overall information about the running of the station that day, and the time, and as you get closer you see news and stock prices, then closer again and you actually see the train times when you get close enough to crane your neck up at them.



Really clever, and a huge influence on us. The notion of several ‘reads’ of the information being presented on the same surface – if handled well, as in the Pentagram proposal – can be very powerful.

We’ve taken a much less high-tech approach, using the multitude of existing screens in the station, but staging the information they present intelligently in a similar way as you approach the platform and your train itself.

For instance, little messages on concourse screens about how busy the station is overall that morning…



As we get to our platform we get the message that the train is going to pretty full but the station systems know where the bulk of reserved seats are, and can give us a little timely advice about where to hunt for a free place to sit…


We’ve hinted in this image at a little bit of nice speculative quiet new technology that could be placed by the station workers: magnetically-backed e-ink signs – again displaying reassuring information about where the busy portions of the train will be.


These little inventions have hopefully got you to your train (Arthur, remember?) on time, and in a more of a relaxed state of mind. So, as we board the train we might have time to note that this is Arthur’s favourite route…


If not, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a functional improvement to your journey but these touches lead to an appreciation of the service’s scale or reach and, if you are a regular traveller, inject a bit of recognition and delight into the otherwise routine.

Once onboard, we continue to explore opportunities for these incidental, different reads of information to both inform and delight.

In the first film ‘Incidental Media’, we introduce the concept of “Print can be quick” – looking at all the printed ephemera around us and how it can be treated as a media surface for more personalised, contextualised or rapidly-updated information.

After all, most of the printed matter associated with a train journey is truly print-on-demand: your tickets, your receipts and, as in this example, the printed reservation stub placed on the seat by the train attendants.


Here we wanted to look to the reassurances and reads that one takes of the reservation stubs as you move down the carriage – either with a reserved seat to find, or perhaps without a reservation on a busy train, opportunistically looking for an unoccupied seat that might be reserved for a latter portion of the train’s total journey.

In one of our concept sketches below we’re exploring that first case – could your ticket be the missing jigsaw piece to the reservation stub?

A bit Willy Wonka magic ticket!


Privacy would be preserved by just using your first initial – printed large with salutations, attracting your eye easily to zero in on your seat as perhaps you struggle down the aisle with your baggage.

The final version used in the film takes this on board, but balances it a little more with the second use-case, that of the opportunistic search for a free seat by someone without a reservation. To answer that case, the portion of the journey that the seat is occupied for is clearly legible, whereas the initials of the traveller are only visible on scrutiny.



If it is indeed your reserved seat, on closer scrutiny you’ll also notice the weather forecast for your destination…

Again – worth noting brilliant past work in this area that’s an influence on this idea. Our friend Brian Suda’s redesign of an airline boarding pass that uses typographical hierarchy of the printed object to reassure and delight.



Here you can see that the time of your flight is clearly visible even if your boarding pass is on the floor.

Lovely stuff.

Finally, some pure whimsy!

We wanted again to examine the idea that print can be nimble and quick and delightful – creating new forms of post-digital ephemera for collecting or talking about.

First of all, using the ticket to introduce you again to Arthur, your train, and perhaps extending that to recognising the last time you travelled together.



But let’s go further.

We know that we’re going to be passing certain places at certain times, to some accuracy, during our journey.

The burgeoning amount of geo-located data about our environment means we could look to provide snippets from Wikipedia perhaps, with timings based on how they intersect with your predicted journey time – alerting you to interesting sights just as they pass by your window.



These tiny, personalised, collectable paper-spimes provide a kind of papernet augmented-reality – giving a routine journey an extra layer of wonder and interest.



As with “Incidental Media”, we’ve tried in “The Journey” to illustrate ‘polite media’ tightly bound to and complimenting one’s context. Media that lives and thrives usefully in the interstices and intervals of everyday routine and technology – indeed ‘making future magic’ instead of the attention arms race that the near-future of urban screens and media could potentially devolve into.

The Journey is brought to you by Dentsu London and BERG. Beeker has written about the films here.

Thank you to Beeker Northam (Dentsu London), and Timo Arnall, Campbell Orme, Matt Brown, and Jack Schulze!

Following iPad light painting, we’ve made two films of alternative futures for media. These continue our collaboration with Dentsu London and Timo Arnall. We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.

Incidental Media is the first of two films.

The other film can be seen here.

Each of the ideas in the film treat the surface as a focus, rather than the channel or the content delivered. Here, media includes messages from friends and social services, like foursquare or Twitter, and also more functional messages from companies or services like banks or airlines alongside large traditional big ‘M’ Media (like broadcast or news publishing).

All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.

I recently encountered this mixing in surfaces. An airline computer spoke to me through SMS. This space is normally reserved for awkwardly typed highly personal messages from friends. Not a conversational interface with a computer. But now, those pixels no longer differentiate between friends, companies and services.

Mixing Media

How would it feel if the news ticker we see as a common theme in broadcast news programmes begun to contain news from services or social media?

I like the look of it. The dominance of linear channel based screens is distorted as it shares unpredictable pixels and a graphic language with other services and systems.

Ambient listening

This screen listens to its environment and runs an image search against some of the words it hears. I’ve long wanted to see what happens if the subtitles feed from BBC television broadcast content was tied to an image search.

It feels quite strange to have a machine ambiently listening to words uttered even if the result is private and relatively anodyne. Maybe it’s a bit creepy.

Print can be quick

This sequence shows a common receipt from a coffee shop and explores what happens when we treat print as a highly flexible, context-sensitive, connected surface, and super quick by contrast to say video in broadcast.

The receipt includes a mayorship notification from foursquare and three breaking headlines from the Guardian news feed. It turns the world of ticket machines, cash registers and chip-and-pin machines into a massive super-local, personalised system of print-on-demand machines. The receipt remains as insignificant and peripheral as it always has, unless you choose to read it.

Computer vision

The large shop front shows a pair of sprites who lurk at the edges of the window frames. As pedestrians pass by or stand close, the pair steal colours from their clothes. The sketch assumes a camera to read passers-by and feed back their colour and position to the display.

Computer vision installations present interesting opportunities. Many installations demand high levels of attention or participation. These can often be witty and poetic, as shown here by Matt Jones in a point of sale around Lego.

We’ve drawn from great work from the likes of Chris O’Shea and his Hand from Above project to sketch something peripheral and ignorable, but still at scale. The installation could be played with by those having their colours stolen, but it doesn’t demand interaction. In fact I suspect it would succeed far more effectively for those viewing from afar with no agency over the system at all.

In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.

Incidental Media is brought to you by Dentsu London and BERG. Beeker has written about the films here.

Thank you to Beeker Northam (Dentsu London), and Timo Arnall, Campbell Orme, Matt Brown, and Matt Jones!

PaperCamp 2 was on Saturday. It was ace.

PaperCamp is all about, well, paper. As the PaperCamp 1 wiki says,

“whether that’s looking at material possibilities of paper itself, connecting paper to the internet and vice-versa with things like 2d-barcodes, RFIDs or exotic things like printing with conductive inks… it’s about the fact that paper hasn’t gone away in the digital age – it’s become more useful, more abundant and in some cases gone and got itself bionic superpowers.”

Roo and Ben have done a couple of lovely write-ups. As Ben said, “Stuff is happening at the moment that I feel we’ll look back upon and enjoy saying, I was there. Papercamp was one of those.”

Anyway, I rambled a bit about some things, and gave everyone a few behind-the-scenes glimpses of some ideas we’ve had around paper over the last few months at BERG, so I thought I’d share a few slides here. But first, here’s some stuff we like.

Making and thinking with paper

I remember doing tons of these Albers paper studies at school. You know, just lovely bits of material exploration. Finding the inherent properties of things. And there was loads of it going on throughout the day on Saturday.

Cutting and folding paper is a common way of exploring the material of other ideas too. Say, mathematics. There must be something in the crossover of immaterial and material, and the ease and immediacy of making as thinking. Say, people like Gerry Stormer, who makes gorgeous “Origamic Architecture”…

… and David Huffman (the same David Huffman that invented Huffman encoding), who is really into curved folds.

And then of course, there’s this magical self-folding origami that came out of MIT and Harvard a few months back. It’s clumsy but mind-blowing. During the talk, we were told by Ben that it works because “it’s covered in stuff”.

Paper and data and storytelling

Seeing as we’re reading from screens more and more in our everyday lives, maybe the pressure might be off books and paper as things that need to impart information. They’re being freed up as something we can do new things with. And, of course, the web has given us loads of new ways to feed information back on to (and into) paper itself.

It makes me think of things like Bruno Munari’s brilliant Look Into My Eyes…

…or the colossal Star Wars pop-up book by Matthew Reinhart, which I think would be loads better if it had no text.

What if we ignored printing altogether, and imagined what we could do with just data and paper? Datadecs (by our mates RIG and Andy Huntington) looks at this idea in a typically charming way (OK, they’re not made of paper, but you know).

And Nick O’ Leary’s Paper Graphs point at some similar loveliness. Now I’ve got my christmas decorations, I want data-driven presents under the tree too.

Then there are the projects that take the best bits of everything: the web; printing; paper; maps; context of use and so on. James Bridle’s A Wide Arm Of Sea is a fully immersive, locative, pervasive, contextually-aware, haptic, 3D augmented reality experience. All printed on a bit of newspaper.

Some recent BERGian papery thinking

We’ve been dancing with a few ideas around paper here at BERG in a few recent projects too. They haven’t made it into the world (yet, maybe), but we thought that they’d be worth sharing.

One idea that didn’t make it past the drawing board for BBC Dimensions was Post-Digital Printed Augmented Reality. Or, Sticking A Bit Of Paper In Front Of Your Face.

If we knew, say, the height of the Saturn V rocket; roughly what height you are, and how far away the horizon is, maybe we could make a paper sextant to help you imagine where the tip of the rocket would be if it were in front of you.

Or how about how the silhouette of a Spitfire if it was zooming over you, x distance away at x altitude?

Or how about how big the Great Pyramid of Giza would be if it was on the horizon?

I know, I know. But it could totally work!

Also, here are some of the experiments around the cut-out-and-keep schools we did for Schooloscope back in July. We already had all the parameters in place to draw a picture of a school on the site, so why not use the same variables to draw data-driven pop-up postcards, that fold up and lock together without needing glue? We didn’t get time to look at this in as much detail as we’d hoped to at the time, but it’s there in the idea drawer.

Getting the fold to lock into place nicely was important – the thinking being that this could be a little souvenir that could sit nicely on a desk or wherever. You can imagine the little school sitting on a road, maybe with the sky painted in behind, or pointing to other schools nearby, and so on. We think there’s something really exciting in combining dry datasets with the graphic language of cereal boxes, or Pokemon cards or whatever.

Anyway. I told you this would be a bit of a ramble. Hopefully it points at bigger, cleverer, juicier things happening around paper and the web. I can’t wait to see what else pops up (sorry) over the coming months.

About a year ago we did some workshops with the BBC, to look at new ways in which history could be explored and explained using digital media. We came up with 30 or so ideas which got narrowed down to 5 ‘microbriefs’ for possible future prototyping.

One of our favourites from the off was an idea we called “Dimensions”.

From our original concept document:

“We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The Apollo 11 Moon walk explored an area smaller than Trafalgar Square; the distance between your WW1 trench and the enemy could only be as much as from your front door to the street corner.
Dimensions is a feature on websites that juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood. You’re hearing about the span of the base of the Great Pyramids, or the distance of the book depository from JFK, or the extent of the Great Fire of London… Dimensions overlays this map on a satellite view of where you live.”

Earlier this year we began to design and build a public prototype of the BBC Dimensions concept which we’re putting live today.

It lives at http://howbigreally.com and it’ll be available as a trial for the next few months.

Let me give you a little tour.

The home page is a collection of what we’ve been calling ‘packages’ – themed collections of ‘Dimensions’. For instance here: ‘The War On Terror, ‘Space’ and ‘Depths’

What’s a Dimension then? Well, basically what it says right there on the homepage: “Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.”

You can have a play right there and then by entering your postcode or a place name. It understands most things that google maps understands. We’ve built the prototype using google maps, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t work on top of another mapping system eventually.

As we were building the prototype, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil-spill disaster occurred, and you might have seen the excellent visualisation at http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/ by Andy Lintner.

When we saw that and how well it was received – we knew we were on the right track! Dimensions is a platform to explore a lot more in that vein.

Wandering into the ‘Space’ package reveals a few different types of dimension – sizes, plans, routes.

The routes, such as that taken by the Apollo 11 moonwalkers mentioned in the original concept really can be revealing when juxtaposed on your postcode, or an area you know well…

For instance if I type in our studio’s postcode…

I can see that Buzz and Neil would have barely left the building’s carpark…

Some Dimensions let you go a step further, literally – by allowing you to plot a route around your neighbourhood, or perhaps your commute, or perhaps a nearby bit of countryside – so that you can viscerally experience the distances involved.

You point and click on the map to make your walk like so – a little gauge runs along the bottom so you can see how far you have left to plot…

…and when you’re happy with your route you can print out a map to take on your dimensional ramble.

The distance just about takes us from the front-door of our studio to a refreshing pint in one of our locals, The Book Club. Just the thing after a moonwalk.

And that’s Dimensions!

One of the things I love about it is things like that – where something huge and momentous is made grokkable in the familiar. I also love that that’s all it really does.

It’s a bit like a digital toy – that just does one thing, very clearly (we hope) and delights in doing so.

It’s imagined that if the prototype is successful, it will be integrated into the main BBC site for embedding into history and news storytelling online.

The prototype system that we’ve made allows designers and producers at the BBC to create as many Dimensions as they want to using standard SVG creation tools. It’s also possible that this system could be opened up for local history enthusiasts to create their own dimensions to contribute.

The BBC worked with KeltieCochrane to create the initial content that’s in this prototype, and it was fantastic to see the system we built fill up with their work. My favourite’s The Colossus of Rhodes. Brilliant.

We’ll write some more here about both possible futures and the behind-the-scenes of Dimensions later. In the mean-time, many thanks to Matt Brown, Tom Armitage, Matt Webb, Phil Gyford and Paul Mison who worked on this with me, and Max Gadney for giving us a lovely brief.

Alan Kay once said that “A change of perspective is worth +80 IQ points”– that’s the goal of BBC Dimensions. So long as it delivers tiny bursts of that along with the little grins of ah-ha it seems to generate, we’ll be very happy.

You can find the BBC Dimensions prototype at http://howbigreally.com

I liked this take on what a Digital Holga might look like (the Holga, if you’re not aware, is a little toy camera). It’s well presented and has some lovely illustrations, but the two things I liked most were: the rotatable control panel, making it simple to convert for left-handed use; and the idea that, whenever it might exist, it should always use a previous generation of sensor technology. Built-in nostalgia.

A couple of links from Matt J: first, Greg Allen linking to Alvy Ray Smith on displays, and pixels: His point turns out to be, not that pixels aren’t squares, but that square pixels suck.

And secondly, for the materials science folder: new research that makes the ability to print lasers much closer to reality – which, of course, points to several interesting futures.

Nick found this NPR website designed specifically for the iPad as an interesting example of what websites designed for touch look like.

Giles Turnbull coined a nice neologism in his write-up of Economist direct – “impulscriptions“; not a true subscription, but one-click issue purchasing when the current edition takes your fancy. Lovely service.

And finally, I really enjoyed this paragraph from Robin Sloan’s link to Matt J’s previous post (on Hopeful Monsters and the Trough of Disillusionment):

“Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge.”

Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.

The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.

For instance, RFID was down in the trough when Jack and Timo did their ‘Nearness’ and ‘Immaterials’ work, and many of the components of Availabot are trough-dwellers, enabling them to be cheap and widely-available for both experimentation and production.

While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.

In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.

After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…

Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.

These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.

Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.

The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…

It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!

• Mobsploitation (a.k.a. Crowdsourcing…)
• Artificial Intelligence
• <512mb thumbdrives
• Blinking Lights (esp. in shoes)
• Singing Chips (esp. in greetings cards)
• Desktop Web Apps
• Cameras
• Accelerometers
• MS Office Apps
• Physical Keyboards
• Mice
• Cords & Wires in general
• Non-Smart Phones
• RSS
• Semantic Web
• Offline…
• Compact Discs
• Landline Phones
• Command Lines & Text UIs
• Privacy
• P2P
• MUDs & MOOs
• Robot Webcams & Sousveillance
• Google Wave
• Adobe Flash
• Kiosks
• Municipal Wifi
• QR Codes
• Pager/Cellphone Vibrator motors
• Temporary Autonomous Zones

It’s Easter break in the UK – a pair of public holidays on Friday and Monday that give us a long weekend – and so we’re off for a few days. To send you on your way: some pictures and films, presented with citation and links, but without comment. Have a happy Easter.

Eyke Volkmer’s SF covers, via but does it float.

Huge David Lynch Head Sculpture by Jamie Salmon, via Dangerous Minds.

The work of Julian Vallée, via ISO50

Nilgun Kara’s photography (via Mappeal)

ENIGMATICA via Brandon

A Turing Machine

My talk at DxF2009 in Utrecht last week was an hour’s wander around the idea of Time, particularly historical and cultural ideas of time.

My focus was time as a material for interaction design that we should deconstruct and reconstruct in order to create products and services that take advantage of new real-time web technologies.

We’re extremely happy to be included alongside friends and colleagues such as SixToStart, Poke and Dunne & Raby – as well as in the company of such established design industry heavyweights as SeymourPowell in the UK Trade & Investment “Creative Industries” supplement in November’s Monocle magazine.

Some great exploration around the idea of personal informatics in this fantastic post from Lee Maguire, which hinges nicely on this question:

So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?

Far more interesting than the “write” of home automation is the “read” of gathering personal informatics.

HP have been marketing their “personal servers” recently, but exploring the site reveals that they think the primary purpose of a home server is being a smart NAS: storing media. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to have a home server that ran applications, gathered informatics? And to do so in a simple, consumer-friendly manner.

This is the pattern that devices like the Current Cost embody: it sits in your house, and sucks up information. It’d be nice for that to be part of a platform, perhaps one I can get at over my home broadband connection.

Right now, this is all doable, but at the geekier end of the spectrum. Andy Stanford-Clarke put his house on Twitter (the account is now private, but there’s a good screengrab here) – its energy consumption, its water consumption, its doorbell, its telephone. This was lots of work and fiddly, but wouldn’t it be nice if it was easier? Andy’s collected some links about the project here.

If there was to be a personal informatics server – rather than a baby-NAS – then it could be even smaller, even simpler than the HP models. It’d be something more at a router scale. One of the best examples on the market of a product that’d be an ideal personal informatics server is probably the Netgear NSLU2 (discontinued, but available secondhand); whilst it’s designed to turn USB hard disks into network-attached storage, it also works very well as a silent, low-power Linux server, ideal for performing simple, network-connected tasks. Even more interesting is the Viglen MPC-L – a low-power, AMD-Geode based computer with keyboard, mouse, and Xubuntu distribution for £99. Whilst it’s underpowered for most desktop computing tasks, it’s an ideal miniature server. Whilst Viglen haven’t made that use of it explicit, it’s surely in the back of most geek’s minds. Andy Stanford-Clarke has connected some notes on the Viglen here.

The next question: how do you get that kind of functionality/platform out of complex, bespoke Linux boxes and onto routers (or digiboxes, or similarly pervasive white boxes), with a UI anyone could use?

I’m not sure. But you could do worse than starting them early on the idea of personal informatics – exactly what the Power Hog does. It’s a piggy bank that plugs into an electrical outlet. The pig’s nose is another outlet, but one that can only be activated by putting coins into the piggybank. The piggybank can, of course, later be emptied; but what a lovely way to teach children about the cost of energy. And it’s a smart piece of product design: because the nose (and, presumably, tail) are removable components, the Power Hog can be internationalised with a set of adaptors, rather than through multiple, costly, SKUs.

One bit of consultancy we’ve done recently has been on new programme formats for mobile devices. It was a bit of a dash–just a few days thinking and writing, and a week to pull together communication material.

The brief was set by the BBC, and there was a progressive clause in the contract: S&W do the thinking, produce communication material and present to the project team there; the BBC can use any of the ideas without restriction, but we retain copyright on the report itself.

So while I could, in theory, copy and paste the report into this blog, it seems fairer to let the folks have a good run at developing the programme ideas themselves. I’ll talk a little about our approach and the deliverables instead.

Approach

The brief was this: what would successful programmes broadcast to mobile devices be? Put aside, for the moment, interactivity and on-demand programming.

(The BBC are looking ahead a little, as you can see.)

It seems to us that successful programming has to acknowledge three factors: the technological constraints, possibilities and expectations of the medium; the interests of the audience, and; the situation in which the programming and audience meet.

TV and radio have long histories as media and are well understood. For TV, the audience varies and so we have different channels to cater for demographics and interest (the situation is more-or-less fixed, though there are different TV channels for certain situations like gyms and bars). The situation of radio varies more, but again different stations cater for focused and backgrounded listening. And of course, programming content varies over the day for both TV and radio–whether it’s late night or mid afternoon is a great predictor of the audience and its constraints.

Programming for mobile devices, on the other hand, will land in unpredictable and highly variable situations… it’s a huge factor compared to the variability of the audience (and we can forget the constraints of the medium, for the moment, given it’s too new to have historical momentum).

We focused on finding a way to talk about the experience of different situations.

Two axes seem important:

• Mobility. Can the viewer/listener devote 30 minutes to this programme, or are they grabbing a few minutes that could end at any moment? That is: can they sit, or must they move?
• Attention. Must the viewer/listener background the programme because the situation demands attention, or can they concentrate?

Using these two axes we can break the situation of members of the audience down into four archetypical situations. The situation will demand…

• attention (but the viewer can control their movement): like being at work.
• nothing (the viewer can concentrate, and control their movement): home.
• mobility and attention: it’s like being out shopping.
• just mobility (but the viewer can concentrate on something else): on the bus.

(Incidentally, if persona are archetypal people, what would be a good word for archetypal situations?)

Given that – and the technological possibilities of the medium – we can take basic programme ideas and coerce them into being particularly good for the common audience situations, rather than just so-so.

We ended up with three main clusters of programme concepts:

• News (at various attention levels)
• Radio-like: High mobility and backgrounded
• TV-like: Low mobility and focused

Other factors come into play too, of course. Mobile devices – in particular mobile phones – are very intimate devices. We did some experiments with video and found the full face, straight to camera pieces were significantly better for these devices than presenters talking from behind a desk (Ze Frank‘s natural medium, perhaps). Oh, and the way people use their phones when they’re killing time… there’s some fascinating research there too.

But anyway, I don’t want to say much more. Just that frameworks like these aren’t a replacement for inspiration and thinking… it’s important to take them with a pinch of salt and be ready to discard them. What a framework is good for is as an explanatory tool, communicating the rationale of a nuanced concept through an organisation so that it can be developed and not reduced as it gets passed on.

Deliverables

Usually for this kind of consultancy we develop a slide deck in workshops with the client, or turn up and present. Since these programme concepts needed to transmit through the BBC, a different form was called for.

The image at the beginning of this post is of two of the three posters we delivered (each A2: 16.5 x 23.4 inches).

On the left, the poster discusses the background to the project, frameworks, and how the ideas could develop with interactivity and location awareness in the future. The poster on the right presents news and three other programme concepts (including a development of Ambient EastEnders).

Below is the third poster. It presents three more concepts, and some thoughts about successful forms of mobile video. All three look pretty tremendous printed large.

Experimental posters

Producing posters was an experiment for us–successful, I think. We were pleased to work with Alex Jarvis, who brought to bear his exceptional talent on the graphic design and illustration.

Plus we got to explore the idea of a poster as a kind of zooming user interface, where there are a series of self-similar levels of detail that progressively reveal as you move closer to the paper. So when you stand across the room, half the paper is legible with a title and a huge graphic. Moving closer, half of the rest (a quarter) become legible with a subtitle for the main segment and more concept titles. At the closest level of reading, the poster functions as a page of broadsheet. The next time around I’d like to investigate that more.

Thanks

I’d like to thank Dan Pike and the project team at the BBC for choosing to bring us in to work on this, and for their open approach. I look forward to seeing where the concepts are taken in the future!

So where did all this work end up? Metal Phone is a project that comprises a mobile and a machine, and talks to all the strands we’ve been investigating: personalisation, manufacture, materials and so on. Read on for a discussion of the themes and lots of pictures.

Metal Phone, melting

Briefly, we’ve been using a low-melting point alloy that allows us to cast and recast a mobile phone shell using only hot air or water. It’s a remarkable piece to hold in your hand, mainly because it looks like a regular phone as if it were made by the ancient Egyptians, or found on the sea floor. (It’s also really heavy because it’s mostly lead.)

The ease of this manufacture means that we get to discuss the local factory angle of personalisation. That is, could purchasing a mobile phone be more like a performance of manufacture? Could it be more like a vending experience? To this end, Metal Phone comes with a machine that melts and reforms a phone around the internals of a standard Nokia handset (the 5140i).

Jack has been working a lot on this project over the past couple of months and he’s currently showing it at the Royal College of Art’s Summer Show 2006 in London (on till 2 July, if you want to see it).

There’s a lot more to say about this project, and also the other investigations we’ve commissioned that took us to this point, but for the moment I just wanted to post the text from the leaflet that goes with the project, and show you some photos.

For members of the press, print-quality photos of everything you see here are available if you mail us at info@berglondon.com.

Melting metal in a saucepan

INTRODUCTION

Metal Phone is a mobile phone within limits. You’ll need strong pockets. The metal reduces the effectiveness of the aerial so you’ll need to be closer to the transmitter. If you leave your mobile on the dashboard of your car on a hot day, you’ll come back to find the components in a pool of liquid metal. It’s not advisable to hold the phone in your hands for too long—cadmium is present in a low concentration.

Side-by-side with the Nokia N70

FLUIDITY

The Nokia 5140i is an illusory object. Disconnected from the network when you’re underground, it becomes a lump of plastics and metals. Although safe in your hands, you wouldn’t want to eat the components. It, too, would lose its shape in an oven—in time, it would break apart anyway.

The appearance of solid edges to this phone—in time, space, and the market-place—is maintained at great effort. The Nokia is a brief confluence in the flows of all these materials, held in place by utilising glues, factories, the entire knowledge of the behaviour of plastics; college degrees and health and safety and the insistence marketing has on a handset (rather than separate pieces) in the first instance.

The mobile phone acts as a thing because material science and market forces make it a thing. Consumer electronics do not drop into the world formed like rocks and trees. They exist because of human endeavour.

RECHANNELLING

If this endeavour was rechannelled, could the Metal Phone be other things? Could its natural fluidity be sped up and used in the co-design of the object, instead of being locked out of the production line?

Insert SIM

EXPECTATIONS

In the hand, Metal Phone asks questions of our expectations of mobile phones, pushed by its aesthetic and material qualities. The weight and seemingly permanent form is set against the ephemeral nature of the alloy housing. Of course Metal Phone isn’t permanent—it also explores personalisation in mobile phone products. The project looks at people’s ability to alter and choose the form of their phones and what affects this, as much as the effect the static form has on their beliefs and ideas around those objects.

The phone mold, open

PERMANENCE INVERSION

Though fluid, Metal Phone offers a new kind of permanence: it offers relief from sculpted plastic forms yet makes no attempt to accommodate interface by changing the surface shape. The shape is no longer defined by constraints such as manufacturing cost or the fashion in electronics. A consumer may upgrade the interior and the screen interface a dozen times, but keep the weight and form of the shell the same for a decade.

The recasting machine

CONSUMER MACHINE

Metal Phone seeks to undermine the current experience of choosing a plastic replica fastened by a security tag to the wall of a handset outlet. The machine represents a vending model for fabrication of the phone in-store, extending the production line to the buyer’s palm. Metal Phone proposes an experience in which consumers witness and participate in the fabrication of their products through novel techniques at the point-of-sale and subsequently.

Melting apparatus close-up

FUTURE

Schulze & Webb are continuing their work with Metal Phone and are developing a more consumable range of transformable products. Metal Phone is an extension of work for Chris Heathcote of Nokia, Insight Foresight Group (now NEXT) to develop prototypes exploring personalisation in mobile phones.

Tuesday was super incredible. Kari’s been studio manager for three whole days (she works one day a week), and she’s already running payroll. She’s an incredible cultural fit, I’m really pleased.

Also Tuesday I was surrounded by conversations about different projects. Kendrick! Ashdown! Bonnier! The studio can tip from total silence to conversations bubbling about multiple projects. It’s a joy to sit here and hear Nick figuring out some element of hypnotic ambient iPhone interfaces, Tom and Matt B chewing over Ashdown, sketching and prototyping, and an ad hoc crit bouncing between Campbell’s computer and the whiteboard, reviewing and drawing. Trying to conjure up the feeling of it now, all I can see is the mid afternoon tropical storm in a rainforest, intense and noisy, blood heat, it fills you brim full and overfilling, verdant and electric. And then suddenly it subsides and there’s a humid air with crystal clarity, and the invisible and deafening sound of insects.

I don’t care if you don’t understand. It’s awesome to be in the room.

And then the rest of the week, wow, what can I say. Great meetings with great opportunities. But more than that, the pipeline is good. Two small projects that have emerged over the last few weeks are both going ahead. Two huge ones moved excitingly closer. And two other huge ones are tantalisingly close to landing. We’ll have to choose between them, which is tragic, but there are worse problems to have. But we’ll have to be careful. Some projects are all-consuming, and if we grow much more then that’s maybe too fast — we’d risk our culture. So, you know, jigsaw the projects, make sure we don’t grow/shrink/grow/shrink but maintain core teams, that sort of thing.

This bit of bringing work in is hard. Fortunately Jack and Matt J do it really well.

So you know I came into the studio the other weekend and did planning, scenarios and strategies? It was so I’d be prepped for quick decisions if a bunch of these things came off. And happily, I feel prepped. It turns out we live in scenario 4.

And so this is maybe a good a time as any to declare an end to the era we’re in at the moment, the one that started back in August 2009 at the birth of BERG, the one we’ve called the Escalante. Goodbye! It’s been great!

We’re not at cruising altitude, but we’re the right animal now to keep climbing. The past couple of weeks have been focused more on execution than positioning. Super good. We’re having the right conversations with friends and clients, the foundations have been laid, blah blah blah. It was funny — on Tuesday I brought my old 2006 sketchbook in the studio. I’d dug it out to read the first business plan I wrote for Schulze & Webb, from September 2006 when we started taking it seriously as an enterprise. I’d divided the plan into short, medium and long term, and thought about what would characterise our work, our clients, and what we’d need to do to get there. And you know what? We’re just about lifting into the “long term” section of that plan. Not bad.

So yeah, to speak at least for me and Jack and Matt J, we’re exhausted, have had nights this week not sleeping because everything is happening at once, a beautiful nightmare as Jack said, it’s riding the crocodile, it’s an emotional roller-coaster, or rather emotional pinball, whew – the future doesn’t arrive gradually but in giant sloppy waves, in/out/in/out another rhythm, deep blue water then bare wet sand, smacking you and washing through you, then pulling you under and out before rolling in and over again, a Pacific rip-curl that punches you and takes your breath away – and goodness I hope it all really comes off because there are some terrific projects out there and we might just get to be part of them.

Hello life in Scenario 4.

It’s been a busy week as ever here, and so I’m writing these quickly while I’m backing up my laptop.
Why don’t you read these while you back up yours?

Here are the links this week as they arrived in our inboxes:

Monday
Dw: An overview of a new font design app

Tuesday
MW: The acquisition of Lanyrd by Eventbrite (Congrats from all of us!)
AJ: Surreal Animated GIFs of Faceless People With Moving Mechanical Parts in Their Heads
DW: Following on from a lunchtime discussion about the aesthetics of deserted cities in Elysium
MW: The Q Camera

Wednesday
DF: Zip bags from Japan (not to be confused with Heatherwick’s)
HR: Lovely drawings created by an illustrator and her four year old child

Thursday
KS: Technology Will Save us Makathon

Friday
MW: An oral history of Apple design, in six parts. First four parts have been published so far, two to come next week.
Part one
Part Two
Part Three
Part four

That’s all for now.

Another four day week for #429 as we were all off yesterday enjoying the sunny Bank Holiday Monday. The 429 is a bus that goes from Crockenhill to my home town of Dartford, or the other way, of course. It’s also the model number of a rare Ford Mustang variant named the Boss 429, which is one of the better looking muscle cars. Oh, and a Bell 429 Helicopter, which is less interesting.

Work themes this week: Chaco, Siniwava, Little Printer, Lawyers, insurance.

Music themes this week: A lot of people are going to see a lot of bands (with guitars) that I’ve never heard of. Adam’s going to see a band I’ve never heard of here, which looks pretty good.

New trends this week: Fraser’s been walking around with half a stamp stuck to his elbow. Bold, take note.

People not in the office at the time of writing this blog post: Kari, Nick, Phil.

Two main work streams this week that don’t involve lawyers or insurance consolidation. Denise, Alice, Adam, Fraser, Alex (me), and Andy are working on Little Printer / BERG Cloud things including: servers, hardware, social media, customer service, hackdays, design. Jack, Neil, Andy, Dan and Mark are working on various aspects of Chaco, whilst Joe, Charlie (remotely), Laurence (remotely), Saar (remotely) and me (Alex) are working on bits of Siniwava. Helen is keeping the office running perfectly and making sure we all get paid, as usual.

We haven’t had that much music on in the office lately, but I’ve been digging through past FACT Magazine Mixes for some background music. If you like that kind of thing, you might also enjoy MJ Cole’s Panoramic EP, which is brilliant.

Bye!

‘Tis the season for summer holiday, and we are operating with a skeleton crew this week.

Mark, Denise, Joe, Andy and Neil are all enjoying some well-deserved holiday. Matt is sorting a house move. Jack isn’t on holiday, but he isn’t here either due to the fact that he is Stateside for Chaco purposes. We’re wishing him “Happy birthday!” from afar today.

Which leaves the other seven of us plus the delightful contractors (namely Charlie, Saar and our long-term buddies Fraser and Phil W) who are gracing us with their presence these days.

Nick, Charlie, Saar and Alex all have a hand in Sinawava this week. At the moment, it seems to be a lot of iPhone and Bluetooth and getting graphics to work right. We had a lovely message of appreciation from the client on that project at the end of last week, and the recognition of the incredible work that our crew has been doing was gratifying, to say the least.

Alice, Alex, Adam, Phil G, Phil W and Nick are doing their regular superb work on various bits of BERG Cloud and Little Printer. Phil W is revising screens on the dev board in order to provide physical things with their own BERG Cloud address. Alice is working on messaging and developer relations and doing some general needed maintenance on the site. Adam is keeping an eye on everything as more Little Printers come online to make sure that nothing falls over. Nick is implementing updates to make it possible for Little Printer to upload as much data as it downloads. Alex is doing some design around messaging and is helping with a bit of ad hoc packaging design. He’s also been playing a bit with a brand new A1 printer that was just randomly given to us. (Right place at the right time, that.)

More Little Printers arriving in people’s homes means lots more questions about what Little Printer can and can’t do and why it’s not doing what its owner expected it to do. Sometimes that’s because of misplaced expectations. Sometimes it’s a matter of wishful thinking and we agree that yes, it would be great if Little Printer could do that and it may well be able to do that someday, but in the meantime, look at the awesome things it does RIGHT NOW! And every now and then it’s because there’s actually a technical glitch (often to do with connecting to the owner’s internet router) and we do the best we can remotely to troubleshoot and try to get the Little Printer and his/her owner humming along together as quickly as possible. That’s what Fraser and I have mostly been doing. Fraser is also busily keeping the BERG Cloud blog updated with fresh content. (That’s me practicing lingo for my next career as a social media consultant. Seriously, though, it’s good. You should read that blog too.)

Last but most definitely not least, Helen is heroically defending us from suppliers whose customer service – to put it mildly – leaves something to be desired. At least we’re learning a good lesson in what not to do when you’re providing customer service. She’s also doing her usual bang-up job of making sure that all the pounds and pence are accounted for and slotted in exactly where they should go.

We’re having the first proper grey, rainy day that we’ve had in weeks, but in lieu of sunshine, we all had free cake. Which was nice.

I think that’s it from our little corner of Shoreditch. Have a good week wherever you are!

This week you find us in a hot and humid London. Rumours of thunder and lightening abound, and as ever with the weather around the city, there’s disagreement as to whether we really had a storm last night or some people just have an overactive imagination. Last time I checked it was raining frogs – it’s not my fault people were too busy with ‘computers’ to see it for themselves.

There’s a lot of people in the studio this week, all hands on deck on the following projects:

Sinawava: Charlie / Mark / Joe / Laurence / Nick / Saar / Alex

Chaco: Daniel / Neil / Jack

Customer Service: Fraser / Kari / Helen

Little Printer: Phil G / Alice / Adam / Denise / Nick

Finance: Helen / Matt

Fulfilment: Helen / Andy / Matt

Birthday: Andy

Keen eyed readers will spot a few people working on multiple projects, dashing from one to the other like the kids that used to appear in both sides of those long, long school photos. I’d better go before one whizzes past and all the papers on my desk swirl off into the middle distance.

Week 424, we are in you.

Area Code 423 is a US area code in Tennessee that covers two separate areas of East Tennessee.

Principal cities in the northern part of the area code region are Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport (more commonly known as the Tri-Cities). The principal cities in the south are Chattanooga and Cleveland.

I was fortunate enough to see Sweet Bird of Youth, by Tennessee Williams at the Old Vic on Friday night starring Kim Cattrall (of Sex and the City fame). The play was really quite wonderful and I highly recommend you go to see it. However the theatre was uncomfortably cool so I’d suggest you take along a jumper or cardigan.

It’s also quite cool inside our office – as London swelters outside, we have aircon providing comfort and Adam, when not tinkering with picture messaging on Little Printer, made some cold brew coffee for us all yesterday which was quite refreshing.

You can find out how to make cold brew coffee yourself here.

Going through the studio this week we remain busy on the two nice projects from Chaco, and Sinawava continues to draw in more help with Charlie, Laurence and Saar all joining us for the next few weeks.

Alex is also joining team Sinawava to bring in some much sought after top notch graphic design.

The big news this week is that Little Printer batch two will be shipping this Thursday! If you haven’t already done so you can order yours here as they are selling out fast.

Helen, Fraser and others are calmly and efficiently preparing the BERG Cloud for a doubling in numbers which is extremely exciting.

Nick is helping out in small ways in lots of places, ensuring everything BERG Cloud related work as planned.

The learning continues from last week and Denise who continues to wrangle After Effects is finding the experience less painful, she is also doing some very smart thinking around Berg Cloud communications.

Kari is fulfilling her full job description for half of this week. Then off to Amsterdam without her kids. She is excited beyond measure.

Laurence, is working through a frankly huge list of animations. Charlie, is performing the tricky task of making these animations play at exactly the right time on the iPhone – this is harder than you might think.

Phil is keen to join team Sinawava as he has heard that ‘this where the action is at’. Until then he’s tweaking faces on Little Printer.

Fraser as well as tweeting and blogging about the Little Printer shipment, will be shipping a whole bunch of Little Printers to Australia, with new plugs and everything.

I’m busy shepherding some of our projects through the studio.

Alice will be diligently sticking to deadlines.

Neil, has finished assembling all of the Flocks which just need to be greased up, flight tested and packed up for shipping.

Andy will be receiving samples from China and thinking about future printers.

Joe is learning more than he could have imagined about Bluetooth LE.

Matt is undertaking some logistical work behind the scenes, and when not playing with Dev Boards and Arduinos will be consulting his calendar trying to avoid odd meetings.

Jack is busy on Chaco & Chaco, and is further developing partnerships for Sandbox.

In other news we have run out of storage.

That’s right. Two Fridays. Double the links. So kick back, put on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1mUMbhZ8Go and settle in for some bits of the studio list for the last couple of weeks.

Dogs http://twentytwowords.com/2013/06/28/dogs-dress-in-their-owners-clothes-pose-for-professional-portraits-8-pictures/

Cats http://vimeo.com/69181785

Fish http://vimeo.com/68721490

Text http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Wool https://twitter.com/Natalie_KateM/status/352408583171895296/photo/1

Light http://www.wired.com/design/2013/07/the-invisible-images-coming-from-our-favorite-devices

UI http://goodui.org/

Slarcle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol and http://timoarnall.tumblr.com/post/42094840547/no-smartphones-symbol-traditionally-no-phone

Maps http://wearedata.watchdogs.com/start.php?locale=en-EN&city=london

Pi http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-microwave/

Robot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkBnFPBV3f0

Cars http://carinteriors.tumblr.com/

Bikes http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2013/july/rain-not-train

Weekend.

It’s week 422.

The year 422 BC was known as the “Year of the Tribunate of Capitolinus, Mugillanus and Merenda”, a year in which the Spartans routed the Athenians in the Battle of Amphipolis. Back in London, in 2013 (known as the “Year After the Year of the London Olympics”), bus 422 transports travellers between North Greenwich and Bexleyheath, a journey you can experience for yourself, somewhat rapidly, in this phantom ride video:

Obviously, the bus itself is invisible but, for your education and entertainment, here are plenty of photos of various bus 422s.

Meanwhile, back in the air-conditioned BERG studio, there is a lot of building, testing, reinstalling, organising and learning going on.

Mr Cridge is juggling two “incredibly interesting” Chaco projects and celebrating the approval of the third part of the third phase of Sinawava. He will also be reformatting his Samsung Android telephone in an effort to regain some virtual space. We wish him well.

Mr Ludlam is doing some BERG Cloud bridge socket work, continuing the development of dev board firmware, and writing a blog post about last weekend’s Maker Faire, which excited and impressed all who attended.

Mr Lewry is, as ever, elbow-deep in Zendesk, calmly fielding excited queries about the increasingly-imminent deliveries of the next batch of Little Printers. He is also doing his ongoing, and excellent, “bloggy, tweety stuff”.

Ms Rogers is preparing administrative details for the next Little Printer production run, testing a “dashboard thing”, and battling the ever-present demons of accounting. Godspeed, Ms Rogers!

Ms Bartlett is working on exciting things to do with Little Printer messaging, and anticipating some secret work that will arrive any day now. She is also eating biscuits, even, it has been noted, before elevenses. The author was warned from divulging this revelation, so let us keep it between ourselves.

Mr Usher is filling more #FLOCK clock houses with the magical “bits” which imbue the mechanical birds with avian life, and also doing remarkably clever things with dev boards.

Mr Jarvis is, like Ms Bartlett, working on new Little Printer messaging tools, plus continuing to learn the many secrets of Processing, and also bringing home the Little Printer that was working so hard at the Designs of the Year exhibition.

Mr Huntington is continuing his intricate work with the dev board, and folding up things he learned while at Fabrica into “useful stuff”. He will also be reinstalling Mac OS X in an effort to conjure new life into his computer.

Mr Johnson has his ever-typing hands full with web sockets, “exciting new features” for Little Printer, and behind-the-scenes #FLOCK work, all before, in a well-deserved break, seeing ‘Tristan & Yseult’.

Mr Webb is “going to meetings and parties this week”, plus a panel discussion at Creative Bytes, and an internet of things event with the BBC. He will be having some respite from this socialising by getting to grips with the mysterious workings of an Arduino.

Ms Wilton is, among her always-admired graphical and linguistic duties, attempting to conquer another of Adobe’s fearsome beasts, After Effects, because “apparently animated GIFs don’t cut it anymore”. We await her cursing with covered ears.

Your author, Mr Gyford, is currently immersing himself gently in Ruby on Rails in order to enable the creation of more, almost mythical, “exciting new features” for Little Printer.

Outside of the studio – indeed, outside of this kingdom – Messrs Malia and Schulze, along with the nimble-fingered fellows of Luckybite, are orchestrating further workshops at Fabrica, photos of which are appearing at an impressive rate in the Instagram feed of said institution’s Mr Hill.

And that is all the news we have for you. We thank you for reading this bulletin for week 422, the HTTP Status Code representing “Unprocessable Entity”. May your entities, dear reader, remain fully processed.

THIS WEEK AT BERG

Joe, Jack, a long lost Timo, and a very special guest are working on a top secret Chaco project.

Sinawava is now ‘Awesome and happening’.

Matt has a bazillion meetings to attend, is helping at Bethnal Green ventures and is speaking at an IOT gig in Greenwich.

Alice is reworking some BERG Cloud functionality and meeting up with a friend of BERG about a very cool use for Little Printer,

Alex is continuing to get to grips with the basics of processing and wangling some bits for the next run of Little Printers.

Denise is doing some copy bits and bobs as well as working on some very exciting new BERG Cloud features with Alex and Alice.

Andy is finishing off hardware for Fabrica, reviewing his learning from last week’s trip to Italy and speaking at a hardware startup in Brighton.

Neil’s finishing off #flock, making some dev boards and helping with Chaco when needed.

Mark is working on Sinawava, chatting with Chaco and selling Little Printers.

I am finishing off the year end accounts, finalising details for fulfilment and organising the next production run.

Phil is doing his own thing.

Kari is shipping out paper and ensuring all the pre-orders are up to date and as they should be.

Fraser is blogging, tweeting, packing, chasing, emailing, selling and Zendesking.

And last but not least, Nick is working with Andy and Adam on the dev boards, doing some bridge server business, performing dev board investigations and going to the Mini Maker Faire with Matt, Alice and Adam on Saturday. They’d love to see you there.

TINY VERSIONS OF YOU

BRILLIANT TURNTABLE BASED AUDIO VISUAL EXPERIENCES

Social Satan from Sculpture on Vimeo.

TOM ARMITAGE AND FRIENDS DOING GREAT WORK

AN EXCELLENT ROBOT ARM

A SMART CLOCK

NEIL USHER HASN’T SEEN MARY POPPINS

KANYE WEST’S NEW ALBUM

3D MAPPING THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

Cosmography of the Local Universe (FullHD version) from Daniel Pomarède on Vimeo.

HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!

I can’t remember how this came up over lunch, but it turns out there’s a horror movie about QR codes that re-program your mind to not see them. Or something. Here’s the trailer.

It’s time for you to see the fnords.

The big news of the week – apart from the fact our governments are spying on everything – was the reveal of iOS 7, with lots of pretty pastels replacing the photorealistic textures that used to dominate the user interface. Even the BBC ran an article called What is skeuomorphism (with a few quotes from yours truly).

For me, the highlight of the Apple keynote was Anki:

Remote control toy cars, all driven by Bluetooth from the phone, all independently steering themselves with artificial intelligence? What’s not to like.

Some stuff to read:

The Internet of Actual Things, by Giles Turnbull at The Morning News.

“Your light bulbs will narrate their agonizing deaths.”

The New Aesthetic: James Bridle’s Drones and Our Invisible, Networked World, at Vanity Fair. Awesome to see multiple friends-of-BERG (including our own Matt Jones) in a brilliant and well-deserved profile of James. Says Bridle: “It’s the thing we’re living inside, and I’m keeping an eye on it.”

Fnord.

Hey, so Little Printer exists in the Marvel universe.

And finally, the science fiction corridor archive.

Week 418 is muggy. This new office doesn’t have working air con, and so everyone looks a bit shiny like they could do with patting down with some kitchen towel or one of those talcum-laced anti-shine papers that they sell in Boots. Everyone, that is, except Andy Huntington whose complexion is mysteriously matte. Maybe he has a secret stash somewhere in the crowded shelves of his workshop.

This week Denise has gone to Sweden to speak at Creative Summit. I hope she’s having a good time and has figured out how to pronounce Å and Ä.

Helen is on a holiday, she’s in Tunisia. The studio hasn’t quite fallen to pieces in her absence, but I did just have to read a HMRC PDF about VAT so let’s just say I’m excited for her to return next week.

This week, along with his usual responsibilities of making up creative new nicknames for people in the studio and trying to cuddle-monster Mark Cridge and Tom Taylor, Jack is in meetings and doing a lot of R&D.

Adam is back from France, and this week is working on the dev board site for BERGCloud. The first prototype dev boards arrived last week. They have this brilliant map of Old St on the back of them.

Dev Boards for Fabrica

This week Neil is soldering components onto these using our brand new soldering oven.

Phil G is working on new publications, earlier today he and Alex finished off a new one for kids, you can check it out here. Alex has also been putting the final touches to the new design for the BERGCloud remote site, which we launched yesterday.

Joe is working on Sinawava with Laurence.

Kari is calendar wrangling and doing admin.

Fraser revealed to us at all hands that the spoonerism for his name is almost “Lazer Fury” and I was laughing too much at that to write down what he said his tasks were for this week. I can only imagine that they are writing the newsletter and responding to suport requests as usual.

Nick is helping Phil W, Adam and Joe on their respective pieces of work.

Mark is responding to emails.

Matt Webb is listening to me complain about VAT, writing emails and having meetings.

Andy is keeping an eye on the Little Printer second run assembly, helping Neil to assemble the dev boards, planning for the BERGCloud sandbox at fabrica and getting #Flocks up and running.

I am writing weeknotes, shipping the new remote design and fixing any bugs, boggling about Android Chrome’s weirdness around -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch and grumbling about VAT.

Onwards.

Very late weeknotes. Alice was on holiday last week but I fear I’d have been told off if she was around. Although, strangely it’s easier to write a summary of the week once it’s finished. So what’s been going on?

Like a tiny army we carried a fair few (read: lots) of wrapped, stickered and sealed Here & There maps to the Post Office across windy Old Street to send on their ways, near and far. (There’s still some available, if you like that sort of thing). Helen wins employee of the week for some extraordinary Post Office endurance.

Loads of Little Printer / BERG Cloud things happening as usual. Tying loose ends for manufacture / Remote edits / Website planning / sales / firmware / hardware / operations / Dev Kit progress / picking and packing (we’re selling paper for Little Printers now if you missed it… it comes in a nice box)… it’s quite exciting selling actual things to actual people, and we’re all learning a lot.

The workshop reminded me of my Grandad’s aviary this week, as Andy and Neil fine tune sounds for #Flock. Unlike ‘Sounds of the Serengeti’ which has become an off-key regular on bergtunes, I quite enjoyed this. I might pinch the sounds from Andy next week.

Aside from all of that business, there’s been a lot of workshop consolidation, Keynote’in, customer service and the other stuff that keeps the office ticking along. Looks like the weather’s turned in typical British fashion, which gives us another week to try and work out how to turn the air conditioning on in the new office.

And because I like inflicting my musical wanderings during my time on this blog, this week I’ve been enjoying the skippy niceties of Kaytranada. Until next time!

With Here & There available again for a bit Denise found this Inception style advertisement for Telenor in Norway:

Telenor – Dekning from Nordisk Film Shortcut – Oslo on Vimeo.

Phil shared around Chris Heathcoate’s kindleframe info screen.

Timo and Jack were both excited by the NeoLucida kickstarter.

My twitter stream threw up this slightly scary glimpse into the future of 3D websites.

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   The candy merchant

And thanks to Nick we are all trapped in a world where candy is currency trying to farm lollipops with aniwey’s amazing ascii art adventure game Candy Box.

It feels like a while since I’ve written weeknotes. Partially that’s because last week I was on holiday – watching cricket, soaking in the sun, ambling through crowded markets – and this week I’ve spoken at two conferences with all the attendant prep, etc, that brings. And so I’ve been in a different headspace for a while and even two weeks ago feels like a lifetime away.

^ this is where I was the week before this. Sigh.

The view from the beginning of the week

This was what things looked like at All Hands on Tuesday, if I pick out a single point for each person…

Phil G was drawing graphs for Little Printer publications.

Kari was on Here & There.

Andy had started assembling the new dev boards.

Alex was finalising Little Printer paper sale details.

Denise was reviewing a proposal for Uinta.

Alice was doing everything, but mainly lots of Little Printer shop things. She’s on holiday next week.

Helen has been on Little Printer sales to, helping out with opening the shop to Australia and New Zealand.

Fraser: Newsletter week.

Nick… working on the next version of the firmware and OS for the upcoming batch of BERG Cloud Bridge units.

Neil is restarting Little Printer Hospital.

Jack and Joe were both in a workshop with Hogum, and that’s run all week. (The meeting room is coated in post-its, the funny sharpie sketches on the walls look hilarious, and it sounds like it was a good strategy and invention workshop all round.)

Adam was at Alton Towers. That was just Tuesday. The remainder of the week consisted of fewer roller coasters.

Mark was away.

I was speaking at Write the Future and Point, both in London. At #WTF13 I spoke about treating products as people, as a response to the alienating complexity of technology, and Meg Jayanth has written a brilliant response: Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Digital. Buses that flirt! Singing cities!

The view from the end of the week

Now I’m finally getting a moment to catch my breath, I’m reviewing what’s been going on over the past couple of weeks – while I’ve been away – and I’m becoming increasingly amazed and proud at what the team have been up to.

Look at what’s launched…

• New! BERG Cloud Dev Kits — the same platform that we used to build Little Printer is now available for anyone. Develop using Arduino or Raspberry Pi, then snap on the BERG Cloud dev board to get APIs, user management, fleet management, and loads more. This is a huge shift for BERG, a real glimpse of where we’re heading. Let’s connect everything.
• Our first 3rd party using BERG Cloud is… Twitter! Here’s #Flock, the connected cuckoo clocks that sings when you’re retweeted, followed, or faved. Twitter is giving away these limited edition items to select partners. The first was awarded to O2 (Telefonica).
• You need more paper for Little Printer? You can buy more paper for Little Printer! BPA-free (BPA is the chemical traditionally used in thermal paper. You wouldn’t put it in food, so we prefer not to put it in paper), with a recycled and recyclable core.
• Little Printer now on sale in Australia and New Zealand for the first time ever, in addition to the USA, Canada, and EU including UK. So wherever you are, you can get your Little Printer now. You won’t have long to wait.
• The New York Times on Little Printer! Can I say that again? The New York Times on Little Printer! We’re currently rolling out a major new capability in the API for Little Printer: push content. Where the existing API allows users to receive scheduled content (say, headlines at 7am daily), the Push API allows for notifications at any time — if there’s breaking news, you wanna hear about it right away! I am super, super proud that we have a breaking new push publication from such a high-calibre publisher. I know everyone’s worked very hard to make this happen, so thank you all! There are more terrific new publications too — read more here. Go to your BERG Cloud Remote to subscribe to these publications and many more.

And, in a blast from the past, legendary Schulze & Webb era map-projection-R&D-masquerading-as-art project “Here & There” – now part of the New York MoMA permanent collection – is back on sale! In our recent studio move we found the last remaining 180 pairs of maps (you receive both the uptown and downtown Manhattan maps when you purchase), so up on the shop they go! I think we have only 60 left now – from the original 1,000 – and when they’re gone they’re gone. Get yours now.

I should go away for two weeks more often

In the busy-ness of the past two weeks, it’s easy to concentrate on the hectic rushing around and miss the big picture… that this was when BERG turned hard into the corner. Increasingly we’ll work on Little Printer, and our platform BERG Cloud. On supporting developers and the community, and collaborating with clients to validate their ideas and then bring their connected products to life.

What you can see in these launches is a deepening of our offer — everything from the Dev Kits – as proved with #Flock – to the new publications which really show where Little Printer is going. And this is a challenging and competitive space we’re moving into.

That the team is riding these rapids, negotiating these changes, and launching so much… well, I’m a proud fella. What a great team. Thanks folks!

Disney continue to make me want to work in their research department with this smart light project HideOut.

Hideout board game by Disney Research.

I found this excellent page of CSS creatures (make yours and submit via twitter): http://bennettfeely.com/csscreatures/

Tom Stuart sent this JavaScript ray tracer (http://zenphoton.com/), which is pretty lovely but does rather warm up my computer.

Here is a topical animated GIF about football that made me laugh aloud:

“Andy’s looking a bit Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing,” quoth Helen. (Apparently it’s the black t-shirt.) And thus began our weekly All Hands meeting this morning.

Happy St George’s Day! It’s a beautiful day in Shoreditch. The sun is shining, the windows are open, the scent of blossoming trees wafts on the breeze… it feels like spring is finally here.

The beautiful weather certainly has had an impact on people’s moods. Yesterday at lunch time everyone sat around munching on their sandwiches and looking at their phones. Today people were conversing and joking and lingering. On both days Alice and Phil G were preoccupied with the Guardian’s Cryptic Crossword puzzle. Some things don’t change regardless of the weather.

Here’s the 411 (geddit?) on what’s happening at BERG this week in case you’re interested:

Jack: writing proposals for partnerships around BERG Cloud and the dev kits that we announced last week. He’s also spending a lot of time in meetings, meetings, meetings. (Possibly with you?)

Mark: sales, sales and more sales. Writing a blog post. Handling a small tsunami of interest that followed on from the announcement of the dev kits and #FLOCK.

Joe: doing some fun exploration of physical interfaces.

Adam: working on making the BERG Cloud Bridges more efficient and getting Kachina onto live BERG Cloud.

Alex: working on Remote v2 graphics and behaviours as well as the Dev Shield design.

Neil: doing some more work on #FLOCK. (A lot of people did good work to get #FLOCK into the world. Neil the Night Owl is probably the only one who consistently did so at 2:00am.)

Helen: running lots of numbers and figures around Little Printer second run production.

Fraser: Little Printer customer service & PR and doing some work towards making it possible to sell Little Printer in some more countries than those we are currently certified to sell in. (Fingers crossed!) Also working on the announcement of a product that will soon be going on sale. (Watch this space!)

Phil G: diagramming what happens when you subscribe to a publication for Little Printer and rationalising the code around certain publications. Also working on developing some new pubs.

Denise: planning for future IA around Little Printer and Remote. Also doing some development on the dev site.

Andy: working on the dev boards and Kachina and getting the workshop ready for Luckybite to move into this week. We’re looking forward to having them around!

Alice: working on the web shop for the product that will be going on sale soon as well as some publication changes on Remote.

Nick: chatting with the folks in Slovenia who are involved with Little Printer production (and will soon be playing their part in the second production run), working with Phil W and Andy on dev board firmware, and going to talk to some school kids about promising careers in hardware, software, etc. Here’s to the next generation!

Matt: enjoying a well-deserved holiday! Well, we know he’s on holiday. We trust he’s enjoying it. And we hope he’s not spending too much time looking at his email. (Matt!)

People are BUSY this week!

As for myself, I’m mostly doing my usual mix of customer service, diary wrangling and general studio management. Also compiling a long list of things that Matt has to deal with when he gets back. (It will wait, Matt!)

The forecast is for winter to return next week (ugh), so we’re enjoying the sunshine while we can. That may or may not involved bunking off early to enjoy a pint in the sunshine. I’ll never tell.

There have been a couple of launches this week. So the first link is the announcement of our Dev Kits over at BERG Cloud. Exciting times for us, and lots to build on there.

Joe and I are working on some physical interface stuff at the moment, and Joe sent this video of interchangeable controls for the Teenage Engineering OP-1. We love the rubber band controlled knob at the start of the demo.

More from Malia. We love the work of David O’Reilly and he writes about the changing use of time in animation:

I made these videos to illustrate more clearly how contrast in timing was something that has a clear progression from the 30s to the 90s

I like the annotation for movement in animation he uses too.

From Helen, wringing out a water-soaked cloth in space.

Bunny Huang writes about the $12 feature phone he found in a market in China.

We need someone with a cat to get one of these.

Matt Webb pointed us towards an interesting Kickstarter. Dropbox meets Bittorrent meets local private storage.

Denise unearthed this video explaining Japanese research project looking at gesture based UI and projection. It’s great to see a different tack in the area of the Lamps project we produced last year.

Stop-motion fruit and veg in a music video. DJ Yoda Feat. Roots Manuva and Kid Creole & The Coconuts – U No Likey Like That

Projection mapping ahoy. Willow – Sweater

Colourful cables from Tricot Light

Processing extension for Illustrator drawscri.pt

Cloud Party! Looks like Second Life; works in your browser!

Hyperlapse is all over the web this week. Awesome fly-throughs of Google Streetview journeys.

Drawnimal App. Gorgeous!

The term regeneration (also known as renewal), in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, is a biological ability exhibited by Time Lords, a race of fictional humanoids originating on the planet Gallifrey. This process allows a Time Lord who is old or mortally wounded to undergo a transformation into a new physical form and a somewhat different personality.

Yesterday and today we’ve been moving into what will be the 7th BERG office (counting S&W’s premises and our secret spin-office, BERG#9) – it’s my fourth.

A bit like Doctor Who’s different incarnations, while still the same company, the spaces we’ve worked in have created very different feeling BERGs.

And, a bit like Doctor Who, I guess you have one incarnation that you always think is the best, or ‘yours’.

115 Bartholomew Road
Jack and Matt worked together first of all in 115 Bartholomew Road, Kentish Town. I visited their space a couple of times while they worked on projects for me and Chris Heathcote at Nokia.

Hewett Street
Hewett St saw S&W move to London’s fashionable Shoreditch, just before Matt Biddulph jokingly dubbed it “Silicon Roundabout”. It saw the beginning of our habitual co-habiting with RIG and Newspaper Club. It was also where I started working more formally with Jack and Matt as an advisor while I spent most of my time on Dopplr.

Tom Armitage became Employee#1…

It was also where Olinda was launched…

…and Matt crowdsourced a large amount of tiny cattle.

“Sh*t Office”
I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but my joining full-time coincided with us moving to a tiny room, heated by a sunlamp, at the less-than-salubrious end of Scrutton Street. It was quickly dubbed “Sh*t Office”. Matt Brown joined us, as did Nick Ludlam.

It was also where the regeneration of S&W into BERG took place…

The BRIG
We moved, with RIG to the other end of Scrutton Street, to a floor of a former printing company that quickly became known as The Brig.

We had a bit more room to work and make, we were able to customise the space modestly and this space was really where BERG started to fire on all cylinders IMHO.

I think, like Tom Baker is “my” Doctor, this version of the BERG space feels like the one I’ll remember most fondly…

Corsham St
After a couple of years in the BRIG we moved to our Corsham St space at the beginning of 2012. Much bigger than any of our previous studios, and we weren’t sharing with any of our friends.

A bit more grown-up perhaps, and to start-off with I felt a bit like we rattled-around in it, but as soon as the final push to launch Little Printer kicked in, the place started to hum.

It also meant, that once LP was out in the world we had room to invite folks round for hackdays…

I think that’s when Corsham Street felt really alive, when it was full of friends and new acquaintances, all working really enthusiastically on something.

City Road
And now, BERG has just regenerated into it’s latest incarnation, an eyrie on the edge of “tech city” where BERG Cloud can be taken to the next level!

We’ve got our friends from Newspaper Club back in digs with us, and it’s going to be interesting to see how this new, quite different, more cellular space influences the way BERG works.

It’s a step that I won’t be around to see first-hand, as today’s my last day at BERG, and this is my last blog post.

It’s a bittersweet moment, to look back on four years of working with incredible people on awesome projects. I’ve been very lucky to be in each one of the rooms above.

We’re going back to Corsham St now, to have a leaving party – where I’ll raise a glass to the next regeneration of BERG…

So we’re packing up and moving out, this is the last set of Friday links from Corsham Street. I’ll keep this simple.

– Knolling

– Toast

Super Mega Mega Toaster from Scott van Haastrecht on Vimeo.

– Naked gun iPhone attachments

– The Story of my app

– Cat on a Roomba / Cats on Roombas

– Awesome projection bike lights

– Seeing in circles

Seeing in circles from Oscar Lhermitte on Vimeo.

– Meshworms

– The Death of Laptops

– Wooden computers

– The sounds of algorithms

– Tube touch ins/outs

And finally – a few musical numbers that have been on the studio sound system to see you through the weekend –

Did the rounds months / years ago but Cyril Hahn’s remix of Destiny’s Child ‘Say my name’ is still very good

As is his remix of Mariah Carey (no really)

And finally because I make no attempt to hide that I love a bit of garage, NDREAD’s ‘About your love’ is a wicked little track.

Have a lovely weekend, we’ll see you next week from new BERG.

It’s moving preparation week here, and the studio is dominated by a cheerfully coloured pile of packing crates, waiting for us to fill them with our accumulated possessions. This coming Tuesday, we’re packing up and moving to our new space across the other side of Old Street roundabout.

In amongst the preliminary packing and new space preparation, it’s business as usual. Andy, Neil and I have been working on Kachina, and as I write this we have some filming happening in the studio, documenting the development process and surfacing the hidden layers of work that go into finished products.

Jack and Joe are continuing their discussions and prototyping around physical interfaces. Joe also flew over to Belfast and ran a short workshop with design students on the University of Ulster’s MFA Multidisciplinary Design course.

Helen and Kari have been working out the studio move logistics, involving the moving company, insurance, locksmiths and all sorts, and Fraser has been working his usual magic with Little Printer customer service and outreach.

On to Little Printer. Alex and Alice have been working on the preparation and running of LP at the Design Museum for the Design of the Year 2013 exhibition. Adam has been putting the final touches to our new Push Publication API which we’ll making some exciting announcements about next week. Denise has also been working hard on the future direction of LP’s interface and interactions, as well as design work for Kachina.

Simon’s been spinning a number of plates, including helping with Kachina and the Design Museum work, scouting the Ideal Home Show and finalising handover plans for next week. Matt Jones has been working on the Hogum workshop plan, and lastly Matt Webb has been overseeing work with the accountants, and has a meeting diary so densely populated that it’s in danger of collapsing in on itself.

This was week 406!

I mentioned back in October that we’d fallen off the end of our business plan. Well-regarded consultancy, prototyping products with major clients? Tick. Our own products? Tick. So when we shipped Little Printer, I’m not kidding it was the oddest feeling – I felt like we were done.

Actually, we’ve just begun.

Since I got back from vacation mid January we’ve been working on a new business plan, one that takes us right into the idea of BERG Cloud as a platform. Over 2012, our consultancy focused more and more on connected products: In 2013, we’re actively prioritising collaborations that use and build our technology. In 2012, we shipped our first consumer product. Now, we’re working on on-ramps to the platform for everyone. Dev boards are in progress!

The network is the new electricity. Connecting products is the electrification of the 21st century. And we want to be a big part of that.

But announcements of our work in these areas are to come. Sadly, we have some other changes… Two of the team are moving on.

Matt Jones

Way back in 2005, when this place was still called Schulze & Webb Ltd, our first client was Nokia, our first project was Continuous Partial Attention, and the fella who hired us there was one Matt Jones. Then, in 2009, we joined forces. A little later the company became BERG, and we built the awesome, inventive, ambitious, fun, consultancy-and-product-hybrid that is the studio we have today.

BERG has loads to thank Matt for. The consultancy business is a reflection of his insights and practices, and a good part of our intellectual foundations also come from him — our abiding interest in computer vision, “be as smart as a puppy,” immaterials… And, personally, I simply love his presence in the room.

Circumstances change. Last year, Matt started a family and became a brilliant dad. And then he was approached about a terrific job that fits incredibly well with his plans for 2013 — I’ll let him say more about that elsewhere. Long story short, at the end of March, Matt Jones is off to New York City. We’ll miss him! But we’re not letting go entirely…

Matt’s keeping an involvement in the company, so we’ll still get the benefits – albeit less frequently – of his smarts, energy, and vision. So we can have that as consolation! We’ll continue to be fellow travellers.

Simon Pearson

Simon’s been with us for two years, initially as our very first project manager – his remit was to invent the “BERG way” of running projects – and over time he’s taken on involvement in pretty much every part of how the company functions: Sales, budgeting, ops, supply chain and fulfilment, and more. Latterly he’s been Head of Little Printer, and he’s steered our first product from factory-ready to factory gate, then onto prioritising and launching features with the team, bridging product and marketing.

Simon is creative and energetic — his first love is music, and he’s off for a new journey into that. We wish him the best of luck!

We can’t replace Simon, just like we can’t replace Matt. We’ll each take on part of their old jobs, but I know there will still be something left undone… And I think what we’ll find is that whoever we bring in will have their own uniqueness, and they’ll fill that gap but do much more besides, and we can’t guess what that’ll look like.

Rockets

The secret of the name BERG is that it’s an acronym: the British Experimental Rocket Group. I said once that our experimental rockets are our people and that I’m always proud to see what BERG alumni move onto and accomplish. My aspiration is that at BERG we learn to think big – to invent culture! – and one day we’ll have a PayPal Mafia all of our own.

So I’m proud, yes, of Matt Jones and Simon both, excited to see what they’ll do next, but it’s bittersweet because we’ll miss them!

I’m prouder still of what the team is creating here at BERG. There are always opportunities in change. Our 2013 strategy is a corner-turn, and we’ll be able to grow in new directions from this. We’re moving premises, too, at the end of March – to somewhere higher up, somewhere with carpets instead of concrete floors, somewhere quieter with double glazing, a place for making and building. So that’s a geographic accompaniment to the changes. It’s a new chapter for us.

Matt, Simon — I raise a glass to you both! Thank you for being with us on this journey, and all the best for your own new chapters!

405: Method not allowed.

BERGs collection of objects -people, tools, the furniture, our new kettle…- is moving studio in two weeks, and whilst there are many things we’ll all miss about our current housing, the heating is not one of them. In the middle of another cold snap and we are all freezing. There are some other weird things about this building, yesterday something large and heavy fell onto the roof, it made quite a frightening noise but we have no idea what it was. The office meeting room has sprung a leak as has the window above Alex’s desk. One of the toilet windows has a mesh instead of glass making a trip in there something you really have to summon the courage for.

It was my birthday yesterday, Kari bought a cake and managed to fit 26 candles on it, which was actually quite alarming. Everybody sung happy birthday.

This is what working at BERG is like, celebrations and leaky windows.

Work with Kachina continues. Simon, Mark, Nick, Neil (Usher usher usher), Andy, Matt Jones and Denise are all interacting with it in various ways. Bringing their own special sauce to the table.

Nick is looking quite French these days, I think it’s a new scarf and the fact that the wind is giving his hair considerable volume. He is working on our BERG Cloud developer borad, which will bring BERG Cloud to new products.

Adam is looking down the wrong end of the telescope, implementing an OAuth provider for a new version of the BERG Cloud publications API which publishers will be able to push to. I have been involved in this work as well, roleplaying the developer of such a publication.

Joe is working on Kemp. Tomorrow he is giving a two hour workshop on skecthing and thinking at the RCA with service design students.

Alex is working on an installation for the Design Museum, which Little Printer will be at. He is also finishing a revision of the design for BERG Cloud remote.

This Thursday is BERG Cloud newsletter day, so Fraser is pulling together content for that. I’m always surprised how much changes in a fortnight around here, more than you could put in a news letter, for sure. If you want to subscribe to the mail out, you may do so here: http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

Kari is planning The Big Move. Doggedly tracking down the people in charge of our new building and demanding answers to hard hitting questions like “Where do we take the bins out to?” and “how do we get our post?”.

Andy is chasing up a the colour additive for Little Printer, as with every part of a supply chain, hussleing is required.

Mark is looking at the way businesses can interact with BERG Cloud.

Matt Webb is in meetings. He is also ████████████ and █████████ ███████ ███████.

I’m finishing off a publication that has been in the making since about June last year, more about that in the news letter (hint hint). I’m also doing other things: documentation and tooling for v2 of the publications API, keeping the number of emails flagged in my inbox down at 0, writing the software for the Design Museum installation, and simplifying the publication submission steps for developers.

Jack is on a baby retreat. Presumably for his children. Helen is looking after a sick person but will be back tomorrow.

The temptation to leave this post blank, or not write it at all, was overwhelming this week – given the obvious HTTP status gag, but I couldn’t bring myself to.

Last Saturday we had our second Little Printer Hack Day, and although the kettle blew up 10 minutes prior to folks arriving, we are enormously thrilled with how successful the day was and how many good ideas came out of it. Alice wrote about it in lots more detail over on the BERG Cloud blog.

This week sees Andy at the soldering bench for project Kachina, making accidentally tuneful motors and strange hamster noises, whilst Neil makes sketches and models out of foam board. Nick, as usual, is helping make sure the digital nervous system that connects all the moving parts works seamlessly. They are a good team.

Jack has been helping Joe, who is creating a social network of all the apps and hardware on his desk, making everything talk to everything, some for the first time, and the result is called Kemp (not Ross, although there are some similarities…). In fact, everyone’s gone a bit multi-disciplinary this week. Jack even joined github.

Little Printer is stateside at SxSW as part of Hackney House Austin – so if you’re lucky enough to be there then do swing by to say hello. Back in London, work in the LP team continues on a chunk of new technical functionality, readying new shop additions and co-ordinating a couple of upcoming exhibition appearances.

Matt Webb and Mark have a busy week having various meetings in various places, like electrons – you know they’re there and feel their influence, but not quite sure where.

Matt Jones is in the middle of a big piece of writing about Scrobblers, and just brought some Revels in for us all. I hope I don’t get a coffee one.

Yo, whassup?

My rhymes blow your mind and you think it’s tyrannical
If a rapper tries to step I’m gonna get puritanical
Flow so radical, make the fellas all company
My rhyme profile makes the ladies accompany
If you can’t handle this then you’re nothing but a diner
Sweeter than molasses, and stronger than a Shriner…

/drops the mic

Anyway. Enough about me. More about Friday links.
First up Alex shared the RapBot, a freestyle 80s battle rap generator (via BERG friend Ben Bashford). It works really well. And talking of both Ben and autogenerated text, I’m still enjoying Robot Bashford on Twitter.

Alex also shared a link to this animated gif of crowds leaving Wembley Stadium:

You have to watch it right to the end, when all the people are gone… (A little Friday humour for you there).

Simon reminded us that the Bristol Maker Faire is on 23rd March. and Fraser shared a link to the Kinetica Art Fair which has just opened in London.

Matt Jones (via Gene Becker & Nicolas Nova on twitter) sent us this video, showing stabilisation for spinning cameras:

And Andy pointed us at this video, containing a bike, a man and a very nice cat:

Matt Jones also mentioned the new Google+ Sign in, which is outlined on their developer blog.

And I think that’s it for now. If you’re still looking for something to read, earlier this week MJ posted a summary of some work we completed last year, for Google Creative Lab. It’s one hell of a blog post and has more links than you could shake a stick at.

Have a great weekend.

Mount Lushan

In 402 AD The Pure Land school of Buddhism founds a monastery upon the top of Mount Lushan, from the beautiful slopes of which they contemplated timeless mysteries of existence – including perhaps why the HTTP Status code 402 ‘ Payment Required’ is as yet so underused.

Week 402 in the BERG studio sees a number of folk on holiday – Simon and Mark are missed, while Helen has subjected herself to Wildfire Protocol and as a result is home fighting a cold.

Joe is in Belgium as I type, giving a talk about some of the studio’s processes, habits and approaches to work. I had a sneak preview yesterday and it’s a cracking presentation – hope it makes it online.

So, to business.

Jack lectured at the RCA Design Products course yesterday, and for the rest of week will be occupied with thoughts and writing about future BERG Cloud products, pursuing some sales proposals, and working on Chevelon.

Nick’s finishing some work on Saguaro, then the rest of the week is devoted to all things BERG Cloud: bolstering our monitoring capabilities, working with phil wright on some revisions to new electronics for Chelly, and some software revisions to the infrastructure of BERG Cloud so it’s more able to accommodate things other than Little Printer in the near-future… He’ll also be leading chats with the team around improving the BERG Cloud API.

Andy’s working on Kachina, nudging the Chelly dev board along, and pursuing purchase orders for the next round of LP manufacturing with the attendent international supply chain  and sourcing fun. He also informs me of a PB he scored on his bike this morning, coming over Highgate Hill…

Adam’s making servers in BERG Cloud better, paying special attention to scaling; and participating in the BotWorld design thinking.

Alice is making some important changes to our shop, to be able to sell new rolls of paper to people!

Neil’s working with Andy on Kachina, and spending some quality time in Little Printer Hospital fixing people’s LPs to send back to them.

Denise is working on Chevelon, Saguaro’s final-final-final tweaks, and then devoting the rest of her time to some new Little Printer stuff coming your way soon…

Alex is doing some work on the next iteration of the BERG Cloud Remote UI, thinking and designing how we organise and present the panoply of LP publications we are starting to get,  getting prepped for the next LP hack day, and excitingly, helping to design the Little Printer exhibit for the upcoming Designs Of The Year show at the Design Museum.

The Olympic Cauldron vs Little Printer. Which would you rather have in your kitchen?

We’re up against the London Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick in the product design category, so to make sure we’re not upstaged I’m imagining he’ll be bringing his best Danny-Boyle-showman-instincts into play and we’ll be getting LP to abseil into the museum from Tower Bridge or something.

Kari’s doing her usual awesome job of BERG Cloud and Little Printer customer service, particularly at the moment sending out paper rolls to keen folk who have been printing like the clappers since they got their Little Printer.

Fraser’s talking to prospective Little Printer publishers, and dealing with some upcoming public appearances for the little fella at some exhibitions and events, including we think, SxSW…

Matt Webb in his own words, is “on the hustle” this week, which constitutes – amongst other things – property negotiations (we have to move out of our current studio building soon as it’s being demolished!), interviews (with him), sales, and deputising for Simon on projects.

Charlatan/Martyr/Hustler by Joey Roth – sits in the entrance to our studio…

It’s also his birthday week – he’s a spritely 35!

I’m working remotely with Timo, to document some past project work we hope to put public soon, writing weeknotes and pursuing some sales opportunities for future studio work.

We really want to line-up some exciting projects in the domain of connected products, services and hardware for the summer, so if you have something you’d like to work with us on, please get in touch.

I know Sunday is an unusual day to publish the weeknotes but working aboard the good ship BERG is not a nine-till-five. God put his feet up on Sunday, but just think what he might have created if he wasn’t so lazy…

Light-hearted blasphemy aside, here’s a retrospective look at the highlights of week four hundred.

Norsk harbinger of sublime design, Timo Arnall, was in the studio at the beginning of the week, diligently flexing his final cut and blog-writing muscles. He has now returned to Oslo to continue his PHD work –  hopefully we’ll be able to see the fruits of his labour soon. Phil Gyford also returned to Corsham street this week to do some final work for Sagguaro.

Matt Jones finally brought his baby twins Olive and Bryn in to meet the studio and there was much cooing and delight from everybody. I was simply amazed to see they weren’t wearing Vulpine onesies…

Joe has been working hard on Shiprock and he’s really not used to proper work anymore so now he’s made himself ill. While he was at home keeping Lemsip in business, we all enjoyed seeing and playing with the first prototype of his brainchild known as ‘project Kemp’ (Joe believes projects should be named after fictional hard-men rather than Colorado rocks). Get well soon Joe!

Little Printer in one form or another is on the minds of most of us in the studio. There is so much complexity, unique work and bubbling potential hidden in that cute white cube, and it is carefully being unlocked as the weeks go by with Alice, Alex, Denise (who’s also been in client workshops this week), Adam and Nick  all  working on new publications and features. Simon, Helen, Kari and Fraser have also been working hard with Little Printer-related endeavours, dealing with customers and organising further production.  As well as working on project Kemp and Kachina, Andy and I have been trying to get to the bottom of physical performance issues with Little Printer, conducting post-mortems on customer returns and testing new parts.

In some ways it feels like BERG is more McLaren than Macintosh; Little Printer is a piece of mass-produced consumer electronics, but rather than simply shifting units designed to be obsolete when the next lot of SKUs is shipped, we are honing, tuning and learning from our creation, developing new features, functionality and flexibility to improve the customer experience. It is quite unique to work in this way, and Jack and Matt W have been working hard the last few weeks to ensure we continue to do so.

Week 401 starts in 3 hours, so I bid you all goodnight.

Good morning citizens of the Internet! My quiet revolution to bring back Friday Links is limping along, inasmuch as some people always remember and some people always forget. My latest idea is maybe what we need is an animated glitter GIF? Also, maybe some confused metaphors? What if that’s what’s missing?

SO what hairballs of greatness have the cats that I work with coughed into my litter box this week?

Alex sent us an animated GIF of how a lock works. You’ve likely seen this already being the hip plugged in individuals that you are, but in case you haven’t, behold:

If you would like to see inside a key factory (the answer is ‘YES’), there is a video for that too:

Denise went to Design of Understanding last Friday, it sounded excellent. She returned with many stories, chief among them, that of the ex-mayor of Bogota:

“Famous initiatives included hiring 420 mimes to make fun of traffic violators, because he believed Colombians were more afraid of being ridiculed than fined”

–Wikipedia

Alex shared this video about mechanical principles:

Denise shared Autographer, “the worlds first intelligent, wearable camera”, made by the amazingly named OMG PLC. (Calm down everyone, OMG stands for ‘Oxford Metrics Group’). Autographer combines a bunch of sensors and an camera to take photos at the best moments throughout the day.

Matt Jones sent an article about building moon bases using 3D printing with the materials available on the surface of the planet.

And that concludes Friday Links! Happy Friday everybody. February will be better, I promise.

I took comprehensive notes at All Hands on Tuesday, in order to write this.

But my laptop had a catastrophic failure mid-week, and I had to blow away the drive and reinstall everything. I’m pretty good with back-ups, and I keep pretty much everything in Dropbox or in some cloud or another. But I had about two and a half un-filed documents that I lost. So, yeah.

It seems quieter than we’re used to in the studio. December ended with a flurry, and a trillion brilliant contractors. It was crowded. 2013 has begun with a more intense focus on Little Printer and the BERG Cloud operating system, and that means it’s mainly just the core group in the room.

I’m loving it, though it took a week or two for me to get used to the tempo change. Less like a sprint, and more like a hike. I tell you what’s wonderful, and that’s the feeling that everything we do is building on this platform for Web-powered things that we’ve created, and it slowly but surely gets better and better.

So I’ve spent most of 2013 putting together our new business plan. There’s a lot to do! Like: Where are we going to be in 10 years? So how are we going to get there? What’s a realistic product roadmap? Given all of this, what do we need to do… well, *tomorrow?*

Almost there. Still a spreadsheet or two to do.

One of the consequences is that we have new criteria to choose our client collaborations. We’re prioritising looking for and taking work that helps build BERG Cloud, either directly, or by helping us build expertise in particular tech or areas of UX.

That’s not to say we’re *only* working with clients on platform projects. Last week, three of us were out workshopping on a hardware accessory. This week, it’s product invention for mobile, and some hardware prototyping (both slightly longer projects).

And I guess it’s the workshops at client offices, and the crazy number of meetings that have contributed to the mellow vibe.

Um, what else happened?

I had some lunches.

I spent about 90% of my time either talking face to face, or on my own thinking things out with whiteboards and post-its. A lot of it is that business plan I mentioned. Such an incredible week to be able to spend most of it letting ideas about the future turn over in my head. So helpful.

I am STUPID behind on email. (Kari has been off sick, and without her help my inbox is a disaster zone.)

Is that it? I think so, and besides we’re heading to the pub now to see some friends. Sorry it hasn’t been very specific. Honestly, had you seen my notes, you would have been *amazed.*

A good variety in last week’s links!

From Adam, Losing My Religion on a major scale rather than minor. Mostly works.

From Matt W, How much would it cost to build a deathstar?

Also from Adam, why President Obama would choose to fight the horse-sized Duck

From Joe, Wii U with panorama view

From Denise, Rudiments – the new tiny robots from Microsoft Research.

And finally, From Alex, the slightly incredible World of Warcraft theme park in China.

In typical January style everyone’s a bit all over the place putting into action all the bits they’ve been thinking about over Christmas but settling down nicely. In random mood fashion there’s been a whole bunch of odd bits shared since we got back.

My personal favourites are those shared by Denise. The first of which I can only imagine is a link to what she imagines people with iPhones get up to at the weekends followed by a link to a digital pencil microscope – that’s right – a HD Digital LED Microscope that looks like a pencil.

On a slightly more surreal note Alex shared what it would look like if a whole bunch of fireflies appeared out of nowhere, max’d up their glowing power, and stormed towards each other to create a black hole. At least I think that’s what it is.

From far off lands, Timo linked us to a short film entitled THE FUTURE OF CINEMA with Douglas Trumball followed up with a related article in which Jacob Kastrenakes points out that without realising it, in 24 frames-per-second films, ‘we’ve allowed ourselves to exist in an Impressionistic world of filmmaking’.

Matt Jones shared an abundance of links including:

– a micro-examination of how the new gmaps for iOS displays maps by Mike Migurski

– an interesting piece from Twitter about how they’re going to monitor and utilise the live data from tweets

– a Japanese infoviz from 1887

– and a link for those not wanting to aggravate people when redesigning apps.

Joe forwarded a link to Teenage Engineering’s new, and lovely, wireless speaker. Slightly bizarre that the majority of the comments at the bottom are discussing the title of the article but a nice thing nonetheless. On a different subject entirely he also sent round a link to Streetview Explorer. An ‘old project that permits a new way to look upon Google’s visually arresting 3d flatland’.

Matt Webb shared a video selection of some e-things at CES as well as a link about why the width of his face doesn’t matter.

Andy, whilst using a hosepipe to suckle petrol from next door’s lorry, came across wireless device-to-device charging. Much more impressive.

We’ve also spent a little time reflecting on the wonder that is Kickstarter with a round up of the team, what it achieved in 2012 and a couple of current projects:

The world’s thinnest watch

 Good night lamp

Happy January all.

Happy New Year!

So here we are: the first blog post of 2013. This is my first time with the keys to the blog since coming back from maternity leave, which is a bit exciting and a bit daunting.

It has been interesting coming back after being away for nine months. A lot changed in the time that I was away. I arrived back to a studio with about twice as many people in it as when I went away. Two of those additions were regular staff (Neil and Mark), the rest were contractors working on various projects that had been taken on while I was away. So not only were there a bunch of people around that I didn’t know, they were working on a lot of projects that I had no clue about. It was rather disorienting. This is BERG we’re talking about, though, so of course they were a bunch of really lovely people working on some amazingly interesting projects and doing a genius job of it. That’s pretty much the way things go around here.

A lot of those projects wrapped up before Christmas so now we find ourselves in a bit of a lull period. Helen, Fraser and I are spending a lot of time on customer service for Little Printer including trying to track down Little Printers that never made it to their intended homes. We shipped 1,000 of them and the vast majority were delivered with no problem, but when you are relying on human beings to do the actual sorting and delivery of anything, it’s inevitable that there will be a few that will go AWOL. Thankfully most people have been remarkably understanding and patient about that fact, and we are doing our best to get replacement Little Printers out as quickly as possible.

(By the way, even if you aren’t a Little Printer owner or particularly interested in becoming one, may I suggest that you have a look at the BERG Cloud blog, especially this entry in which Fraser posted some lovely photos of Little Printers in their homes. Thanks again to the folks who have been sharing those with us!)

Just before the holidays we said goodbye to James Darling, and last week we said hello to Adam Johnson who has joined BERG as a software engineer. Nick put him right to work on a BERG Cloud bug which Adam had sorted in very short order.

As for the rest of us… Alice is doing a fab job supporting Little Printer publication developers and also has her hands in Kachina, a new internet connected product that we’re working on with a client. Andy is trying to get to the bottom of some issues with Little Printer paper jams. Alex is working on various aspects of BERG Cloud as well. Denise is having a go at creating a Little Printer publication. Joe and Jack and doing classified new product development. Neil is recovering from what is either food poisoning or a really nasty stomach bug. Simon is trying to schedule a cocktail mixing workshop. (Seriously. He’s also doing his usual fab job of keeping projects running!) Mark is doing what he says on the tin and developing new consulting opportunities as well as keeping current consulting projects moving along. Matt Jones is doing a bit of sales and a bit of studio shepherding.

—–

Seven years ago, Matt Webb wrote a business plan for Schulze & Webb, the company that became BERG. (You can see that actual business plan right here.) In it, the long term plan included making and selling our own products. With the shipping of Little Printer last month, we have now fallen off the edge of that business plan.

So Matt has been doing a lot of thinking about the future of BERG and when I say a lot, I mean a LOT. He shared his mullings with us today, and his brain dump filled up three very large whiteboards. It’s a great story, but you’ll just have to stay tuned to see how that all turns out, I’m afraid.

We hope you have a great 2013!

Another double header of Week Notes that recognises what a frantically busy period we have just been through. A time of lots of projects wrapping up and finishing on what’s been a pivotal BERG year.

Lamotte came to happy Swindon based conclusion after an unexpected and rather tedious three hour much delayed train journey for Eddie, Olly and Simon. Fortunately work was accepted warmly and we’re into the last stages of voiceover recordings and finishing touches.

Paiute was also wrapped up this week by Jack, Denise and Simon (with lots of previous help from Pawel) and we’ll see where that leaves us for more great work in the next stages on that project in 2013.

Our first work on Oso was done, dusted and delivered in double quick time over the past three weeks – with Matt, Matt Ward and Joe’s Sao Paolo suntans fading from that workshop we hope for more collaborations with what we hope will be a great client in 2013 as well.

We’ve reached a pivotal point on Sinawava with two major phases of work recently complete, including a little collaboration with LSU led by Mark and Joe. We await a decision on if this very smart device will see the light of day, will find out where we stand early in the New Year.

And of course on Little Printer we’re tying up the last loose ends on the first batches of deliveries which are now ensconced in homes around the world. Our diagnostics are showing around half of the first batch online during the day at anyone time and we expect that to increase further when Santa delivers the last lot to their final homes on Christmas day. If you haven’t already noticed there should be a special Christmas themed messaging treat available for each printer.

Over a year after completing the project Matt returned from paternity leave to deliver an awesome and well worth a read post which goes into an amazing amount of detail on the wonderful lamps project we conducted with Google Creative Lab last year. He was very chuffed about getting that out as was a good cross-section of twitter.

Two new projects have begun already this week, including a new project for a new client, Kachina. More on that in the Spring when things are further along.

Our Christmas bash at the Eagle was a great success, hat tip to Kari for making that happen last Wednesday. Heads were sufficiently sore the next morning but not overly so.

Oh, and of course Matt Webb got married on Saturday to the lovely Angela! Many BERGers were in attendance and lots of poor quality dancing was enjoyed by all, helped along by a huge Battenburg cake and wedding disc jockey action from Alex (who managed to trigger the noise alarms in the Barbican twice).

So that’s it for 2012. The world did not end today. Loose ends have been tied up. Unused holiday is being taken and we’ll see you for a fresh start in early 2013.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

So apparently the world was scheduled to end today. I haven’t checked properly yet, our studio seems okay; the sky doesn’t appear to be on fire and no locusts have found their way in yet either. I’ll pop out for lunch in a bit and find out for sure, first I have to publish FRIDAY LINKS…

Sorry to disappoint all the people who diligently stockpiled supplies and nuke-proofed their garden sheds, but the 21-12-12 doomsday was first predicted in an issue of Gran’t Morrison’s The Invisibles and later verified by Mulder and Scully. The Mayan calender in fact goes on for another 7000 years or so.

DARPA and Boston Dynamics  have been continuing their ever enduring quest to create sky-net and released another video of ‘Big-Dog’. Now it responds to voice commands and is called LS3. At some point they’ll realise that they’ve just developed  a really, really expensive and slightly rubbish donkey. Don’t get me wrong, the work they’ve been doing is nothing short of amazing but Big-Dog has a long, long, long way to go before it could come close to being able to do this.

NASA have been working on allowing their astronauts to squat, lunge and sit cross legged with a delightful new space suit, Don’t get too excited, you may have seen it before…

This is supposed to be a Xmas edition of Friday links so here is a video of people punching, massaging, stretching and throwing giant lumps of sugar  as well as a link to some wonderfully festive ‘ChristmasGifs’ for you to send to your friends and loved ones.

Merry Xmas!

Ten things that happened in the last ten days at BERG:

1) After an intensely busy time for the whole Little Printer team, and in particular Nick, Alice, Fraser, Helen and Alex, we finally began shipping. We celebrated with bunting! Today we started seeing the first pictures of Little Printers in the wild. Massively, massively rewarding. And, whilst we monitor our servers and publications and customer service channels, obviously, we’re also planning our next bits of functionality and shipments. More of that over on the BERG Cloud blog in due course!

2) Joe, Matt Webb and Matt Ward went to Sao Paulo for a workshop. It is currently 23 degrees warmer there than in London.

3) We said goodbye to James Darling and Pawel Pietryka. They are off to new exciting things, via jagermeister and beer. You should hire them both, if not for their amazing respective technical and design skills, then for their killer fashion instincts. They brought the Hip to BERG, in that they look like they’d be at home in an episode of Blossom from 1991. I miss them greatly.

4) Jack moved house. He must have lost his razor in the process; he is now the hairiest he has ever been. It’s quite something. In contrast, Matt Webb was on CNN last week talking about Little Printer looking very well coiffed indeed.

5) Andy returned from his most recent bout of The Babies (four people have caught The Babies this year at BERG, and Matt Jones is hoping to return next week after his case) and then lost half a tooth.

6) Eddie, Matt and Ollie continued to bring Lamotte a stage closer to real life with some focussed client workshopping (which involved a fair bit of giggling).

7) Saguaro was passed round for us all to play with and test, and it’s a beautiful thing. As that project nears its finish, we must say ‘see you later’ to Matt Walton and Phil Gyford this week, too. Hopefully, on the upside, that also means we can have some more cake.

8) The mighty Neil and Greg Borenstein wrapped up project Auryn last week – a challenging project, but one we learned a lot from.

9) Neil, Luke, Denise and Jack are all hard at work finishing up Paiute, for which Alice’s internet-famous nails are going to make another special appearance tomorrow.

10) Kari organised our Christmas dinner and also got us a brand new recycling bin!

It’s Friday. I wasn’t expecting that… It’s been a busy week. We’ve got demos any minute and so these are some links to give you a five minute break from your work too.

This week, Eddie shared a link to a game created for the Norwegian milk company, Litago, which uses players photographs to create playable platforming levels.

Andy shared a link ‘in equal parts OMG and WTF'; the papers selection for this years’s SIGGRAPH:

James found this Warner Brother’s site hiding at the back of the internet attic.

Phil G shared a Sound Slice, made by Adrian Holovaty, who (co)created Django, and ChicagoCrime.org and EveryBlock. A smooth interface, it lets you annotate guitar videos to help you learn new songs.

And Saar shared this a little while ago, but I’ve only just had time to watch it. Dumb ways to die.

I should to go. My head’s on fire. Have a great weekend.

Welcome to Friday Links. Today I am going to provide the links with wild assertions about what bigger categories of BERG interest they fit in.

Internet of Things Meta Watch

As the concept of Internet of Things continues to seep into more people’s brains (A waiting list of 57 for the next IoTLDN, with Matt Webb speaking!), naturally, the common patterns get pulled out and satirised. isittheinternetofthings.com does this well.

Music Hacking Watch

It’s been great to see Music Hack Days move from purely data driven (eg listening data) hacks to more artistic ones. My favourite meeting of the two so far has to be The Infinite JukeBox

Influencing Culture Watch

“Design is about cultural invention” is, to me, one of Jack’s founding principals of BERG. So you can imagine how excited we were to see that the new Avengers comic has Tony Stark owning a device that sounds awfully like a Little Printer.

Browser War Watch

As someone who wasn’t ‘in the business’ during the first browser wars, I’m more used to years of IE6 apathy. So watching the new browser war unfold, with adverts everywhere, very odd. But accompanying it is the commissioning of some great HTML experiments. Like Chrome Experiment’s ‘Stars’, this weeks example.

Infrastructure Hacking Watch

Any time I see a bit of software toying with massive infrastructure, I get tingles. This week’s tingle supplied by Randomized Consumerism.

Atom Watch

Shipping atoms is hard. Whilst I sat in my tower of software, watching the hardware being developed for Little Printer was a very eye opening experience. I hold a new reverence for atoms. Read about Jawbone’s process of developing Up to get a little bit of this.

3D Printing Watch

3D Printing. Proper good 3D printing.

Software Defined Radio Watch

Software Defined Radio is something that seems to rapidly moving from hobbyists to something that could be quite game changing for many products. See it’s first strides here .

‘Plussing’ Watch

We’re a big fan of Walt Disney’s ‘plussing’. So we admire this.

Toys with AI Watch

Speaking of Walt Disney… loosely… there’s a new company making some promising looking AI toys.

Have a great weekend.

There are four major projects in the studio at the moment.
There are twenty three people working hard to create beautiful and inventive products.
There has been a studio reshuffle so everyone has new neighbours.
We’ve seen exciting drawing sessions, electronic prototyping, cardboard models, coding, meetings, group lunches, wooly hats, graphics, new shoes, 3D prints, business strategies, pints, project planning, engineering, Frazzles crisps, CAD models, Lemsip, PCBs, presentations, GUIs, video games, characters illustration, information design and more.
All to a milling-machine soundtrack.
Oh, and we’ve just found out that we’ve been drinking double-strength tea.
Probably a major reason the studio such a busy and exciting place to be.

This is my first Friday links. First up is attention to detail which is something we all take very seriously.

Joe found this brief DVD extra from the excellent (and very Scottish) Brave from Pixar where they went to extraordinary levels of detail right down to the modelling of individual threads

A slightly longer example of this level of detail was picked out by James from back in the day on Wall-E.

It’s always nice to see something that we’ve put out in the world get picked up and adapted somewhere else. Timo found this library of objects inspired by our own iPad light painting.

This example even has an audio guide track to help with the painting.

Running Man from Hugo Baptista on Vimeo.

I’m writing this whilst BERG drive time plays in the background so it is fitting that two musical links tickled our fancy this week. The first found by Fraser suggests that;

“Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic “pictures of sound” dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio.”

Not sure what that actually means but worth a look at dust-digital.com/feaster

At the other end of the spectrum the good folks at Google Creative Labs have put together another Chrome experiment so you can ‘Jam’ in real time at jamwithchrome.com. I have it on good authority that if you hold down the keys A. C. I. D. at the same time you get an 303 drum machine as an easter egg (but that may not be true).

All around us we see the cost of new technology dropping precipitously, not least with the Txtr Beagle e-reader costing a mere £8 and which Jack found recently reviewed in the Guardian.

We were really impressed until James noted that;

“The txtr beagle can be offered at such a low price because its cost will be subsidised by mobile carriers. The beagle itself won’t be sold individually; you’ll only be able to get one is by purchasing it when you sign up for a mobile phone contract on specific carriers.”

So how much does it cost really?

Finally I’m very relieved to say that even your Jeans can now get involved in Social Media.

Denise found this over at PSFK and I’m sure you will be glad to hear you can share your ‘happiness level’ featuring eight different modes to choose from – how did we ever cope until now?

It’s Friday, and therefore time for a look at what’s been flying around the studio mailing list!

Timo sent in a link to a Bat for Lashes cover story on Pitchfork which features some well paced parallax and animation effects.

Staying in the same vein, Saar posted a link to a BBC News article cum infographic entitled James Bond: Cars, catchphrases and kisses.

Joe shared the latest Boston Dynamic / DARPA robot video that was allowed to become public. Just think what they must have left on the cutting room floor.

Alex posted a video of an odd looking experimental car from Nissan called the Deltawing.

In commemoration of CEEFAX closing down this week, I posted a link to a lovely, nostalgic Twitter client called Twefax.

Lastly, I’m sneaking this in as a bonus, since it didn’t get posted to our internal mailing list, but it’s an interesting peek into the hidden infrastructure that is needed to run very large scale web services.

That’s a wrap. Have a good weekend folks!

It’s the end of the week and I’m late with weeknotes, which I was supposed to write on Tuesday.

Right now it’s Friday Demos and Andy has just phoned-in his demo in from a van on the motorway, where he and Simon are driving back from delivering all kinds of packaging and components to the Little Printer assembly team some hours north.

Honestly I couldn’t understand very much of what he said. Motorways and speakerphone don’t mix terribly well!

So, quickly:

I’ve spent this week in lots of meeting people, and dipping my feet back in a couple of projects I’m picking up from Matt Jones now he’s away for a couple months. Some cracking stuff. One mobile project, in which Alex is getting tarty with his design and Phil G is getting all motion graphics with his HTML5. The combo is powerful, that to-and-fro… When we were doing Mag+, the actual app development, it was conspicuous that the process of going from animations in After Effects to iOS code on the iPad was a real one-way street. Not so good, because the design of motion under your fingers is so dependent on the micro-experience of the moment, and you want that iteration. It’s lovely to see that iteration present in the animations and interactions in Alex and Phil’s work. They’re able to back-and-forth, design and build and experiment between them, make and try and iterate. Good. It makes for good work, that practice. A second project involves smartphone peripherals and a connection between the real world and the screen. And gosh – it’s been on whiteboard and then in diagrams and then on circuit boards and bench tests and now… seeing it all come together in demos, our first end-to-end, today was a treat.

I have to be cryptic until 2013, sorry!

Plus! Alice and I went to the Birmingham NEC yesterday to set up Little Printer at Grand Designs Live. Lots of fun! I like to show Little Printer to people, I like to see Little Printer in the world, and I like people in the studio – like Alice – to see Little Printer in the world too, especially seeing how people respond to it. It builds empathic connection with our customers.

Other big news this week is that we now have one of those spring door closers on the studio door, so the door closes automatically. OH HAPPY DAYS!

But mainly I’ve been enjoying Mark Cridge, our brand new Director of Consulting, properly getting his feet under the table and beginning to make some noise. It’s brilliant, provoking all kinds of thoughts and discussions about the next and upcoming unfolding of BERG.

Which means we’ve been having lots of strategy chats, and we’re all writing presentations and plans to have more discussion around, and the results of that are

[redacted]

or at least, currently. More on that soon! We’re doing our first annual reviews at the moment; once we wrap those we’ll give ourselves a couple of weeks to digest, then launch our latest plans. Internally anyway, externally the proof is in the pudding.

Plans are good.

The way you have to think about things is very different between, well, five people and fifteen going on twenty.

Hey, I was going through an old notebook the other day to find this, and I thought you might get a kick out of it too. It’s from back when BERG was Schulze & Webb and it was just two of us – Jack Schulze and me – and, if I remember correctly, we’d just decided to turn down any work we were offered that only used one of us. So we’d only work together and together we would change the world, yeah! And we imagined that the world would leap at us, you know, that we’d be drowning in work. And of course we weren’t, because nobody knew we were alive, and those who did didn’t know what we were about.

So I wrote a business plan, my first business plan, over six years ago now back in September 2006!

I don’t know whether the business plan helped us get work right there at the beginning. We got some great advice about marketing ourselves too, in a low-fi and very human but effective way, and yes things eventually worked out, and now here we are.

Some perspective: the iPhone was announced January 2007. A business plan from before the iPhone! Ancient history.

Disclaimer. I feel like an idiot sharing this.

And was it useful? Kinda. It made me feel like there was a plan.

Did we follow it? Kinda. I like to think it kept us on the same page. We’ve fallen off the end of it now. We are longer than the long term. Deep space.

Here it is.

I’m delighted to say that Mark’s joined BERG as our new Director of Consulting this week.

Mark’s a friend that Jack, Matt and myself have known for some years now. While he was piloting the giant digital media and communications spaceship called GlueIsobar, we’d get together for a pint or three and ask him for advice. He founded Glue and built it into not only a mighty commercial force, but a culture that prized invention and creativity.

So, it was natural for us when we found out he was looking for a new challenge (over a pint or three) that we suggest BERG was just that.

We’ve built BERG over the last 6 years into a busy studio that creates not only what we think are pretty inventive connected products for ourselves to take to market (like Little Printer), but consults on connected products, services (and the strategy behind them) for some of the biggest technology, media and consumer brands in the world.

But we want to do more of that work – inventing the near-future and getting it into the world – with more clients, and get more fantastic inventive people in the studio to do it.

Mark is just the right person to help us grow our consultancy and he’s written a little bit about joining the studio from his perspective on his blog. I’m really happy he’s decided to come on board for the next phase of BERG as a colleague and a friend.

FRIDAY LINKS IS BACK, BABY.

It has been six weeks since the last Friday Links, I googled “friday links” and the top two hits were both BERG. It was then that the gravity of the situation hit me. Many people employ offices full of gap year arts students to write fluff pieces linking to their blog in order to gain the coveted top hit on Google. We got there just by tirelessly posting links every Friday. And then they just slipped away.

Well, this is the relaunch. Friday Links is Britney, and the last six weeks were it’s 2007. I’ll be fighting tooth and nail and bullying who I have to bully to get Friday links on the blog each week from now on.

FIRST LINK:
http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
This post has been all over Twitter and for good reason. In a lengthly but well worth reading essay Bret Victor responds to the Khan Academy’s online environment for learning to program. What results is a brilliant specification for an interactive environment for acquiring the mindset for coding. I hope somebody takes this design and runs with it.

NEXT UP:
I saw this via @fat on Twitter. Swiping though GIFs! I dare you not to lose 15 minutes just clicking and swiping.

PENULTIMATELY:
So, do you want to see what the guy who lead the team that invented the Roomba, Rodney Brooks, is up to now? (The answer is a definitive ‘yes’). Since leaving his post as CTO of iRobot in 2008, Brooks has been working on a robot that he hopes will revitalise American manufacturing:

“My aspirations are high for this robot. This is the first mass-produced, slightly sentient humanoid robot”

Here’s the video:

Check out the full article

AND FINALLY:
This article about the cave systems that run under Nottingham has made me want to visit Nottingham quite a lot: http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/caves-of-nottingham_11.html

Feel free to tweet about our exciting relaunch using the #fridaylinks hashtag.

If the first 16 prime numbers created a club, the club would be called ‘381’, because that’s what they add up to. And naming clubs after numbers is cool.

I’m on weeknotes this week. Weeknotes is a funny one these days, as there’s so many people and so much going on that a) it turns into a long list and b) my notes from All Hands make no sense to me now. So I’m going to describe the studio as it is now.

Right now, I’m sitting in Alice’s After School Club. There are 10 Little Printer publishers sitting around the office dining table, comparing methods of printing greys.

We’ve now squeezed in the final pair of desks we’re going to fit in these offices. We have 24 now! That’s a lot. When I joined 18 months ago, we had 10. I’m interested in what has scaled and what hasn’t.

We still have All Hands every Tuesday, where we make sure everyone knows what everyone else is up to. We also have Friday Demos, where we show off that work in person. Both of these still work great, taking a bit longer, but definitely worth it. We moved Friday Demos to later in the day as we discovered that beer goes very well with it. It’s now the last thing we do in the week before heading to the pub with dizziness over just how much work gets done in this office every week.

One massive cultural shift for me has been the number of conversations in the office. With fewer of us, there was only ever one conversation that everyone was involved with. Now there are many.

We still have decentralised buying of snacks and milk. Today we had custard creams, chocolate digestives and salty pretzel sticks.

We currently get through 1,000 teabags a month.

This week feels a bit like the start of a new term for a few reasons:

1) I’ve just returned from a week-long holiday split between Sweden and Spain, which (as all good holidays should) felt much longer.
2) Lots of new projects are just underway [Lots of new people! Lots of new desks! A bit cosier for all of us!]
3) It’s early September, the days are shortening and folks are donning their workcoats again [How do we work the boiler again?]

The changing of the season and the slightly more crowded studio has predictably led to wildfire (which I’ve written about before), which is currently affecting Mr Joe Malia, Matt Jones and James Darling. Get well, all!

Fraser has been writing about Little Printer over on the BERG Cloud blog. Alice has been fervently working on Little Printer developer tools, which are looking pretty comprehensive now. Nick and Andy have been pouring over some more graphs about electronics, reports and I’ve been talking with publishers about producing publications.

Sinawava has seen action from Tom, Durrell, Pawel, Neil, Joe and Saar on many fronts including filming, electronics production and testing, Solidworks business, milling beautiful graphics, and today, music. Next week this particular project soup will be simmered down into its essence.

Annika has been talking to people far and wide for Paiute along with Jack.

Our phones have been buzzing all week with early prototypes for Saguaro which has been created between Alex, Denise, Matt Walton and Phil Gyford. That project is at its widest point, where the ideas start to merge and coalesce and come back together.

Otherwise the day-to-day activities of the studio continue – Matt Webb is working on a couple of proposals and attending a few events (he’s speaking at PSFK tomorrow morning where he’ll be making a little announcement about Little Printer). Helen has her hands in everything as usual, though this week I mean that quite literally as she’s been doing a bit of hand modelling in addition to keeping us all well behaved and well organised.

And that’s week 379.

Week 378, and there have been a number of new faces in the studio. Paiute continues apace and Annika Bruysten has joined us in the studio to work on the research phase of that project, guided by Jones and Jack.

Everyone working on Saguaro (Alex, Matt Walton, Denise, Jones and Phil) has been down in the material exploration mines, doing quick sketch implementations of the various ideas which came out of the initial workshops. The rest of us in the studio have been participating as users, offering feedback on what’s working well, and what needs refinement. All very positive.

On to Little Printer. Alice is on holiday in Italy, but has been keeping in touch, as is now the tradition. James, Andy and I have been pushing forward on many fronts. Software stack improvements, optimisation and the next batch of boards to test for EMC.

Neil has been making us some clever programming jigs using the milling machine (and a lot of Dremelling) that will help us mass produce the physical circuit boards. We’ve also had some time for a bit of creative fun involving the iPhone camera. More details are up on the BERG Cloud blog. Speaking of the blog, Fraser and Helen are continuing to do great work in fielding the inquries coming in to Zendesk.

Pawel Pietryka has joined us for the next few months working on Sinewava and other projects, and has started off helping Joe with some slick graphic design work which we got to see at our Friday demos.

We just about made it through last week with Simon being away, and this week we’ve all breathed a huge sigh of relief as he’s back and doing his usual marvellous job keeping all of our projects running smoothly.

Lastly, Webb has been involved numerous meetings and a mountain of email, some relating to the business in general, and some specifically to current projects, all of them helping the company scale.

That was the week that was!

Week 377 in the studio. There were no week notes last week because nobody reminded Jack. The fault lies with all of us really, and we’re all feeling the consequence of our actions. Jack is well known for writing the best week notes.

Last week, to get you up to speed, saw a great reshuffle of desks. I am now so far away from Alex Javis, who I previously sat opposite, that I can barely see him. Joe’s eyebrows are also now out of my peripheral view. It’s a lot easier to concentrate on my screen down this end of the office, but I sure am going to miss those eyebrows. The reason for this shuffle is that we are taking some new people in to help with a couple of big projects. Our office has three new desks to accommodate all these bodies, which include Phil “Send me back to the BRIG” Gyford, Matt “another Matt” Walton, Saar “Phil’s not the only hardware guy in town” Drimer and Neil Usher (no relation to actual Usher (maybe some relation? (no, not really))).

Aside from acclimatising to our new desks this week goes like this:

Work on BERG Cloud and Little Printer continues, James Darling has done ALL HIS TICKETS. You go, James Darling. This week he embarks on another ‘too secret for week notes’ bit of BERG Cloud. Nick is doing more EMC work on the Bridge. He is also (in his spare time) hacking an absolutely sick iPhone prototype app for Little Printer. We have to wait for him to demo it but there are whispers that it is, as Jack would say, “AMAZEBALLS”. This week Matt Webb is stacking the papes, pressing the flesh, and other glamorous sounding ways of saying “having meetings”. He is also filling in for Simon as best he can whilst Simon is on holiday. I am working on developer tools for publishers and hackers who want to make Little Printer publications. Last week I delivered a Printer to Lanyrd so they can test their publication and have a go with our developer tools alpha. I’m also putting our render stack through it’s paces sending weird and wonderful publications that have been sent in by eager developers around the world. Last week I discovered that Little Printer can speak Hebrew, and at the weekend I tested the SVG->PNG element of Webkit with great results. If you’ve got an idea for a publication, here’s the address publishers@bergcloud.com.

Matt Jones, Joe Malia, Neil Usher (…usher …usher), Saar Drimer and Jack Schulze are working on various Sinawava projects. Tom and Durrell are making regular appearances at the studio for this work too. When BERG week notes jumps the shark, I hope someone has the wherewithal to give those guys a spin-off series. Matt Jones is also going to see some Paralympics on Friday. Saar is getting a lot of fun looking electrical components in the post. It’s good to see someone challenging Andy’s post monopoly finally.

Matt Jones and Jack are also working on an unpronounceable project. It’s spelt Paiute, if anyone would like to do an audioboo of how it’s actually pronounced here is my attempt: http://audioboo.fm/boos/936977-pauite. You can hear in my inflection that I am not at all sure that I’ve got it right.

Denise, Alex and Phil Gyford are doing design work for Saguaro. This involves a lot of experimenting with code and graphics. Denise and Alex are also doing a bit of design work for BERG Cloud.

Helen is doing numbers, contracts and payroll. She has great nail varnish on today, a ‘very now’ minty green that I reckon is probably made by Barry M. I read a great article about the cosmetics brand Barry M the other day. The guy that founded it is actually called Barry.

Andy is in India this week, he is communicating with us via a Little Printer on his desk though, much to my delight. Timo remains in the wilderness, advancing all of human knowledge with his PhD. Kari is still on maternity leave. I’m hoping she’ll swing by the studio soon, this weekend she was definitely at the Green Belt festival.

That’s your lot. Send me your Audioboos though, for the good of the studio.

We’re celebrating! Little Printer is available for pre-orders from today.

* Read the blog post announcing pre-orders
* Check out new features on the product page
* Pre-order Little Printer!

This is an incredible feeling.

I love this studio. Awesome work, folks.

This week we travel to Mars vicariously through the Curiosity Rover.

Firstly, a panorama!

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA16029_modest.jpg

Secondly, a GIF!

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674831main_pia16014_full.gif

And let’s not forget about the Opportunity rover which has been there since 2004.
One of the many panoramas it sent back:
http://www.panoramas.dk/mars/greeley-haven.html

Lastly, a sunset sent home by the Spirit rover in 2005, and I reiterate … FROM MARS!!
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_481.html

Strange times are these in which we live. Exciting too.

N.B. Thanks to http://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com/post/29049627659/are-those-pictures-of-mars-from-the-curiosity-rover for fact straightening. Via Alice Bartlett. And Andy Huntington received an honourable mention for providing much moral support during the curation of these links.

“It would appear that ‘the future has taken root in the present.” (1) “The hardest thing is deciding what I should tell you and what not to.” (2)

Matthew, Jack and Matt J are out of the studio today to “take a deep breath of life and consider how it should be lived” (3) because “your focus determines your reality” (4) and these are the focus pullers of BERG.

Everyone else is seated around a long red table for our weekly catch-up, proclaiming what the week ahead will bring. “It’s funny how different things look, depending on where you sit.” (5)

Simon continues to project manage LP, Lamotte et al. with aplomb, deftly applying his “very particular set of skills; skills acquired over a very long career” (6) wherever required.

Alice harnesses “the world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud” (7) to “prepare something special” (8) for users of LP. Particularly, dev tools and the shop. “It’s a beautiful system.” (9) “Cue the cheesy inspirational music.” (10)

On Monday and Tuesday James worked hard on LP. For the remainder of the week he’ll be at a festival of music in Winchester. For those of you that don’t know, Winchester “is a major party town” (11) and home to the “best party ever!” (12) I may be exaggerating but it does sound like it will be a good one.

Alex has taken the week off work to perform live at the festival. He DJ’s with a crew known as ‘Merk Chicken’, and “when (people) hear the music, (they) just can’t make their feet behave.” (13) Their sets are garnering an ardent following. Keep an eye out for them.

Anyway “let’s forget about the music right now”. (14) Elsewhere in the studio, Nick is exploring the LP code mines to see “just how deep the rabbit-hole goes” (15)

Andy is holding a soldering iron and performing intricate open-heart surgery on LP. “It’s kind of a delicate situation,” (16) I wouldn’t disturb him if I were you.

Denise is fine-tuning the print and pixels that form the LP launch material, preparing for the day that it will be “out there properly, in the public domain.” (17)

Helen is tending to the responsibilities associated with a studio manager in the second week of the month. She also watched live Olympic hockey this week, which sounds like tremendous fun, in spite of Team GB dramatic loss. Personally, “I’m much better at video hockey” (18) but I don’t think it qualifies as an official part of the worlds biggest sports festival. Yet.

Ruth and Phillip are doing heroic things with code, character animation and late nights. It all “sounds like hard work to me.” (19) Looking forward to the end-of-phase presentation on Friday.

Fraser is new to the studio! “Welcome to ‘The Program'” (20) Fraser. He’ll be writing copy for LP and manning the customer services desk after launch.

Nationally, eyeballs are fixed on the Olympics because “if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.” (21) And everyone’s mood seems buoyant. “More please” (22)

“That’s the way it crumbles… cookie-wise.” (23)

The quotes peppering this update are taken from a totally arbitrary selection of movies. How many did you get?

1. Excalibur (1981)
2. The Terminator (1984)
3. Man of La Mancha (1972)
4. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
5. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
6. Taken (2008)
7. Hackers (1995)
8. The Illusionist (2006)
9. The Net (1995)
10. Bruce Almighty (2003)
11. Cabin Fever (2002)
12. 21 Jump Street (2012)
13. Grease (1978)
14. Kickboxer (1989)
15. The Matrix (1999)
16. Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
17. In the Loop (2009)
18. Big (1988)
19. Clue (1985)
20. The Bourne Legacy (2012)
21. Grease (1978)
22. The Simpsons Movie (2007)
23. The Apartment (1960)

Mid-week notes.

This is week 373 and the first week of the Olympics in London. The roads are a little clearer, public transport eerily quiet and everyone is cycling home like they’re Wiggo.

The studio is roughly 50/50 working on Lamotte and Little Printer. We have the enjoyable, continuing presence of folk over from the States to progress the technical aspects of Lamotte in parallel with the design being lead by Joe. Much tea is flowing.

Little Printer is an extraordinary, but non-competitive game of Downfall, with the red team working on the shop, BERG Cloud functionality and some behind the scenes delight. The green team are testing and identifying issues with hardware, tidying embedded software and cranking the supply chain handle. We have to make sure the right number of the right coloured balls fall in the right order. Right.

Jones has been out speaking this morning at Hackney House and is generally on call for Lamotte. He’s been passing large volumes of text to Jack, which Jack will be reciprocating.

After a fallow patch we’ve hit on a rich seam of birthdays featuring Jack and Denise. Helen, while juggling costs, LP budgets and general studio management has not shown any lack of determination when it comes to celebratory cup cakes. Exceptional.

Headliner is an experiment in online reading that BERG conducted in a short project with The Guardian. It uses face detection and term extraction to create “a newspaper that looks back at you”

It’s part of a series of experiments and prototypes that they are initiating with internal and external teams. You can try it for yourself here: http://headliner.guardian.co.uk

Jack led the project and we got a dream-team of past collaborators to work with on it: Phil Gyford, who had already done loads of thoughtful designing of new reading experiences for the Guardian with his ‘Today’s Guardian‘ project, and brilliant designer James King who we had worked with previously on the Here & There Maps.

I asked Jack, Phil and James to share their thoughts about the process and the prototype:

Jack Schulze:

Faces come up in News articles a lot, editors exercise artistry in picking photos of politicians or public figures at their most desperate. Subjects caught glancing in the wrong direction or grimacing are used to great effect and drama alongside headlines.

Headliner makes use of face detection to highlight the eyes in news photographs. It adds a second lens to the existing photo, dramatising and exaggerating the subject. It allows audiences to read more meaning into the headline and context.

Graphically Headliner departs from the graphic rules and constraints news has inherited from print. It references the domain’s aesthetic through typography but adopts a set of behaviours and structures only available in browsers and on the web.

Phil Gyford:

We wanted to retain much of what makes Today’s Guardian a good reading experience but find more in the text and images that we could use to make it less dry. We decided to rely solely on the material we can get from the Guardian’s API, alongside other free services and software.

We looked at various ways of extracting useful data from the text of articles. It had been some years since I’d last dabbled with term extraction and I was surprised that it didn’t seem wildly better than I remembered. We settled on using the free Calais API to pull useful terms out of articles, but it’s quite hit and miss — some places and peoples’ names that seem obvious to us are missed, and other words are erroneously identified as significant. But it gave us a little something extra which we could use to treat text, and also to guess at what an article was about: we could guess whether an article was focused on a person or a place, for example.

We wanted to do more with the articles’ images and focusing on faces seemed most interesting. We initially used the Face.com API to identify faces in the images and, in particular, the eyes. This worked really well, and with a bit of rotating and cropping using PIL we could easily make inevitably small pictures of eyes. (All the article text and images are pre-processed periodically on the back-end using Python, to create a largely static and fast front-end that just uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript.)

Unfortunately for us Face.com were bought by Facebook and promptly announced the imminent closure of their API. We replaced it with OpenCV using Python, which is trickier, and we don’t yet have it working quite as well as Face.com’s detection did, but it’s a good, free, alternative under our control.

Enlarging the cropped eye images looked great: eyes that seemed guilty or angry or surprised, emphasising the choices of picture editors, stared out at you below a headline. We tried giving these images a halftone effect, to emphasise the newspaper printing context of the stories, but unfortunately it didn’t work well with such tiny source images. (Here’s the code for the half toning effect though.)

Browsers treated the drastically zoomed images differently. Chrome and Safari tried to smooth the grossly enlarged images out, which sometimes worked well, but we liked the effect in Firefox, which we could force to show the now-huge pixels using `image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;`. The chunky pixels made a feature of the cropped portions of images being so small, and we wanted to show this very raw material on all browsers. This was easily done on the front-end using the excellent Close Pixelate JavaScript.

If we didn’t have any detected eyes to use, we didn’t only want to enlarge the supplied photo — we wanted some variety and to use more of the data we’d extracted from the text. So, if we’d determined that the article was probably focused on a place, we used Google’s Static Maps API to display a satellite image centred on the location Calais had identified.

We put all that together with a front-end based, for speed, on the original Today’s Guardian code, but heavily tweaked. We make images as big as we possibly can — take advantage of that huge monitor! — and enlarge the headlines (with the help of FitText) to make the whole thing more colourful and lively, and an interesting browsing experience.

James King:

To start with, we were most interested in how we might integrate advertisements more closely into the fabric of the news itself. Directing the readers attention towards advertising is a tricky problem to deal with.

One of the more fanciful ideas we came up with was to integrate eye-tracking into the newspaper (with support for webcams) so that it would respond to your gaze and serve up contextually relevant ads based on what you were reading at any particular moment.

This idea didn’t get much further than a brief feasibility discussion with Phil who determined that, given the tight deadline, building this would be unlikely! What did survive however, was the idea that the newspaper looks back at you.

Eyes are always interesting. Early on, we experimented with cropping a news photo closely around the eyes and presenting it alongside a headline. This had quite a dramatic effect.

In the same way that a news headline can often grab the attention but remain ambiguous, these “eye crops” of news photos could convey emotion but not the whole story. Who the eyes belong to, where the photo is taken and other details remain hidden.

In the same way that we were summarising the image, we thought about summarising the story, to see if we could boil a long story down to a digestible 500 words. So we investigated some auto-summarising tools only to find that they didn’t do such a good job of selecting the essence of a story.

Perhaps they take a lot of customisation, or need to be trained with the the right vocabulary, but often the output would be comical or nonsensical. We did discover that Open Calais did a reasonably reliable job of selecting phrases within text and guessing whether it referred to a person, a place, an organisation etc. While we felt that Open Calais wasn’t good enough to draw inferences from the article, we felt we could use it to emphasising important phrases in the headlines and standfirsts.

Typographically, it made sense to use Guardian Egyptian for the headlines, although we did explore some other alternatives such as Carter One – a lovely script face available as a free Google font.

Headliner was a two-week experiment to explore the graphic possibilities of machine-learning and computer vision applied to content.

Not everything works all the time, it’s a prototype after all – but it hints at some interesting directions for new types of visual presentation where designers, photo editors and writers work with algorithms as part of their creative toolbox.

– “We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish”

– Cat Tunnel Sofa

– Lightning at 7,207 FPS

– Sprouts

– 5,500 pixels illuminated by digital light

– The first CGI? From 1963

– “Knightmare: Television for the videogame generation”

– And finally, retro-interactive-olympics themed niceness from the guardian.

It’s currently Monday of Week 372, and I’m writing this regarding last week. So I’m late with these notes and I’ll not talk about what everyone’s been up to but instead I’ll talk about what’s in my head.

For one reason and another (I’ll tell you over a coffee, remind me) we were locked out of the studio for a couple days last week and had to variously bunk at the offices of generous friends in the neighbourhood, and work at home. Disruptive.

Over the week Matt Jones pointed me at a Wikipedia article about black start. A black start is (and let me quote from the article here) “the process of restoring a power station to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network.”

Like, let’s say you have a hydroelectric plant. You need falling water to drive the turbines. But how do you open the sluices without a pre-existing supply of electricity?

Or let’s say it’s summer and the power grid has been down for a while. As soon as you boot it up, aircon will come on all over the city, a demand much greater than aircon switching on and off in the “steady state” situation, so suddenly you’re overloaded. Which means you need a rolling power-up.

“Black start” is full of considerations and strategies.

Like bootstraps: a battery starts a diesel generator, starts a hydro station, energises a subset of the grid, ignites a coal station, restarts the nuclear plant.

I was burgled recently, and between my partner and myself we had no house keys (all gone), no cash and no cards, and the knowledge somebody might come back. The boot-up was all from our phones. Use the phone to get an emergency credit card; scrabble around for pennies to get the bus to get the card; get cash, get a locksmith, get security on the house. Once stable and secure, get more cards, get replacement gear, etc.

You know, I remember reading this great book, Lion’s Commentary on UNIX, an annotated version of the source code of an early operating system. And in it you can see the very first moment of the sun, the code that runs to declare what is a “file” anyway, and what a “process” is, and then you can use those concepts to bootstrap the next level of complexity.

I find these deeply fascinating ideas!

Because we’re in our own black start right now.

Not just getting back into the studio last Friday morning, although that’s what made me draw the connection.

But we’re starting a design studio whose mission is to use the network to transform every existing product, and to invent new ones.

Little Printer is a part of that — bringing into the world something that isn’t quite a product, isn’t quite a service, and isn’t quite media. Something new. And meanwhile battling such immaterial forces as radio (don’t talk to me about radio frequency interference, although we’re past that particular corner now) and risk/finance/law (which turns out to be a hideously complex part of setting up the supply chain and sales).

Also the consultancy. We just finished our first unabashed product design work right in the middle of the “smart product” sector. Networked kitchenware with [redacted] as a client. And I’m super proud of it. It’s beautiful, inventive, and – mostly importantly for me – accessible. This product won’t be just for smart product connoisseurs, it’ll be for everyone. We’re just starting on the second phase now.

Other consultancy work touches various parts of what smart products mean, to experience, for interfaces, in terms of new norms, for companies and for humans. So one our ways of transforming products will be influencing their design by collaborating with the R&D departments of major technology firms. But this kitchenware work is the sharp end of it: thinking through making, in order to invent products that end up in people’s homes. More of that please.

And all this is tough, you know, starting up an autopoietic system from scratch, trying to get every single part to move simultaneously.

So getting a studio like this up-and-running feels like a black start.

One day we’ll be our own power station, humming along and lighting up a city of smart products, ones touched by particular BERG values — happiness and hope, whimsy, socialising, play, excitement, culture, invention.

In the meantime: we do what has to be done. Fire up the diesel generators! Jump start the heavy turbines by flashing the electricity grid with a solar flare to create a potential difference across 2,000 miles! (Can we arrange that? I suppose not, but it’s worth a go.)

You take on work to build capabilities to generate experience and expertise. You punt the ball as high as possible into the air, judging that you can get a team beneath it before it comes down. You jumpstart. You do things during the process that you wouldn’t do in operation. But during the start, there’s no point waiting. It’s the order that matters. Order and speed.

And I look at the things that I’m doing, and when my intuition tells me that something isn’t right – because that’s not what a fully operating machine would do – or when my intuition tells me something is necessary but my logic queries it — I try to remember that this is just where we are in the process, and double-check my assumptions. Remember this: These are the revolutionaries going town to town in Cuba, doing what needs to be done to close in on Havana. One day someone will have to figure out the national endowment for the arts. But not today. This is the bootstrap, where you cut through and do what has to be done because this is what you’ve got, and you gotta get to the point where the run loop runs. This is the colonisation of Ka, of Thalassa, of Reiradi, of Sindychew. It’s the runway, it’s why people take funding (we didn’t, we’ve been going 7 years and every 24 months it’s a bigger bootstrap), it’s what you do to make the reaction self-sustaining so you can light up the city. It’s the black start.

So yeah, that’s what was on my mind last week, in week 371. And then over the weekend I relaxed by spending a couple of days in the sun watching the cricket. South Africa methodically trounced England, if you really want to know.

The black start.

As Little Printer gets closer to launch, we’re figuring out how to best work with publishers — not just creating the simplest possible way to get content on LP, but also how to share design tips and work closely to invent the handiest, most delightful publications.

So to learn, we asked a couple dozen of our smartest – and most forgiving – friends to the BERG studio for a practice Little Printer Hack Day. (A Hack Day is a day spent with a load of people all coding side-by-side to make and show off neat ideas.)

It was hugely energising. Lots of pizza, beer, and demos of the publications everyone made.

Alice organised, and did a fantastic job! It was fun, super creative, and we received incredibly valuable feedback and ideas on the technical method of integrating with Little Printer, and more generally on the usage and service.

I got my hands dirty too, and I’ve not coded for ages. The publication I made wasn’t as pretty as the other dozen or so demos, but hey it’s me writing this blog post so I get to show what I made:

Alice has a write-up of Little Printer Hack Day — go read it!

And just to say: Now we have a better idea what we’re doing, we’re keen on having more events like this soon. Thank you Alice, and thank you everyone who was able to come!

It’s customary to say ‘thank God it’s Friday’, but I’m not religious, so instead, ‘Thank the internet for Friday links!’

This week’s line-up features an abundance of robots, flying things, invisible stuff and bears, so if you like flying robot stuff (and bears), you’re in for a treat.

ROBOT STUFF

• Asimo vs Big Dog
• Robot grabbing

FLYING STUFF

• Human powered flight
• Dragons
• Drones as pets
• Quadrotor dancing (FLYING ROBOT STUFF)

INVISIBLE STUFF

• Bikes
• Tube stations
• Skateboards
• Sporty data viz

BEARS

• bear71 
• Baby bear in garage

Happy weekend-ing all.

OK, so I’m still relatively new to week notes (and all this number stuff), so, unlike other folk in the studio, I find the number thing quite interesting, which, is rather annoying, as 368 is bit rubbish. That said, it is a song by Jamie T and a bus route that goes past my old hangout in Chadwell Heath. Do with that what you will.

This week in the studio, things are hotting up. Somewhat because Alice is in shorts, but mainly due to the impending launch of Little Printer, and a whole host of other exciting projects. This is what we’re all up to:

Alice is finishing phase one of our shop which is looking lovely, and more importantly, works. She is also spending time prepping for Saturday’s ‘practice hack day’ which looks to be lots of fun.

Nick is dealing with some firmware and coding, and working with Andy to finish tweaking boards. Andy is also ‘looking at plastics’. I imagine this means he’s at the checkout at Tesco watching people struggle to open the bags, but there’s no way he’d be watching the bags and not eating the food, so one can presume it is to do with Little Printer.

Simon continues to watch over everyone’s activities, ensuring things run smoothly whilst helping Jack finish an epic Silverton proposal. He is also shaping Phase II of Sinawava and reading through lots of legal stuff.

Matt Jones is back in the studio and reacclimatising to life outside a yurt . Conversation on Monday was particularly difficult but now he’s back in the swing of things and using this period of adjustment to get down to writing ‘proposals and things’.

Jack is here, there and everywhere. Where is he? No one knows. We do know however that he is making an important decision today. He is also doing a little bit on Ouray, helping Matt Jones ‘back into the dough like a fine yeast’ and taking some time out with Matt Webb to discuss BERG plans.

Apart from chats with Jack, Matt Webb is out and about at various talks / meetings, and is hoping to spend what little free time he has running through some company admin.

James is refactoring server database structures amongst other things, which, makes a lot of sense if you know what’s going on, but is too complex for me to explain in week notes.

As is the way of Denise, she is being a helper and a guider, and doing a little bit of lots of things, most notably helping Alex with Little Printer stuff and continuing her super cute work on Ouray.

Alex is continuing his Little Printer marathon this week by arranging photoshoots, working on instruction manuals, sticky labels, and an array of UI bits.

Aside from the regulars, we have the continued pleasure of Eddie Shannon and Phil Gyford’s company, with them working on Lamotte and Antero respectively. Eddie has been whittling down a mass of exciting concepts to around 10/11 ‘super solid ones’, aided by Joe who is also doing some video prototyping. Phil is being his usual fantastic self and ‘glueing together stuff from last week’.

I am elbow deep in spreadsheets, working on budgets and end of month/year things. I am also helping Alice with the weekend’s activities and writing week notes on Tuesday. 

Every time we do our all hands I try and rush us past the bit where we talk about the significance of the number associated with the week. Personally I find it boring. You can all go look at the Wikipedia page for 366 if you like, but since I am in the driving seat this week and I’m feeling scrappy, I’m not going to tell you anything about it.

This week sees the start of a new project, Antero. We have pulled in two superstars to help with it, James King and Phil Gyford. Phil is the reason I have a “Phil 4-eva” sticker on my laptop, I’m very excited to have the BRIG crossword team back together. James, I would say, is in my top 5 all time favourite Jameses. He is surprisingly tall, but has the approachability of a regular height person.

This week Simon is managing the certification for Little Printer, lots of pulling together of technical documents for submission to the Department of Safety First (I made that name up). He is also running planning meetings and chasing parts of the Little Printer component supply chain that are moving a little slowly for our liking.

Nick, CTO to the stars, has been at the front line of weird antenna problems, right down there in the hex dumps with Phil mining for bugs and frying them with his tremendous brain. It’s tough work and I feel for them, but they seem to have found a fix for last week’s problems and came in this week with the gusto of people who know they’re unstoppable.

James King is doing sketching on Antero. I don’t know if anyone has told him about Friday Demos yet, but I am hoping to see some of his work then. He is currently sat in Matt Jones’ chair whilst Jones takes a well earned holiday.

Alex is finishing some graphics for the Bridge. He’s waiting for some new sneakers in the post that he stayed up until midnight to order, I’m quite excited about seeing them. This week he is also helping me with the shop, cutting up assets for me to drop in to various parts of Shopify.

I am writing week notes. HIYAAA! Also chipping away at the shop from which you will be able to buy Little Printer, and putting the documentation for the Publications API in to a sensible and beautiful format.

Helen is doing ‘P11D’ forms. I have no idea what those are. I could google it, but I’m actually not sure it would aid my understanding. She is also putting together the annual return and, ominously, “making sure money comes in on time”.

Denise is working on Ouray. I can see her screen from my desk, there is some extreme cuteness going on for this project. She is also keeping her hand in Little Printer work, slinging out assets like a boss.

James Darling is working on what he describes as “either too secret or too obscure” for week notes.

Joe is wrapping up Sinawava and getting a haircut. Shepherding all the pieces of a project that started in the week I last wrote week notes is no mean feat.

Eddie Shannon continues to work with us on research for Lamotte. He was out last week, but now he’s back and aggressively making tea for everyone in the studio.

Jack is working with Denise on Ouray, watching over the finer points of Little Printer design, and sketching on Vallecito.

Absent form the studio this week are Matt Jones, Matt Webb and Andy. Jones is in a yurt (we think). Webb is in California for Foocamp and a holiday. Andy is in Shenzen visiting the factories making the Little Printer / Bridge casing. He’s also possibly eaten chicken feet.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding”

The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound. Annotated using Soundcloud comments.

Circuit pens over at Wired.

A stop-frame animations about the expansion of Oslo Airport.

Meshu create jewellery from 4SQ data.

Aga get connected

Sculptural data visualisations

SketchSynth enables people to draw controls onto paper and operate software using them.

Week 363 or CCLXIII as the Romans would have noted it. The year 363 only became 363 after the introduction of Anno Domini in year 525, which was not widely used in Europe until the middle ages, so year 363 was not then what it is now! The number 363 is the sum of nine consecutive primes (23+29+31+37+41+43+47+53+59) and any subset of 363 is divisible by 3.

As this is my first weeknotes, I’ll introduce myself: I’m Vanessa. I’ve been working with BERG since March, so I’m the newest member of the team and still learning lots. I’m responsible for Business Development.

This week has seen the hottest day of the year so far at a sunny 27 degrees – summer has finally made an appearance. With such a jump in temperatures, we’ve all been melting in the studio as the sun pours through the skylights. But we’re not complaining…sunshine is always welcome!

Sinawava were in the studio this week for the last review before the final few weeks of the project. Joe has been working on this – and on CAD models and technical experiments with Luckybite along with preparing to set up the packaging designers and model makers for the next phase of the project.

Nick and Andy have been to Slovenia and have arrived back with gifts of Slovenian chorizo-type sausage once again. They’ve been testing prototypes and tiny components for Little Printer: tiny enough to inhale…apparently.

Alice has been working on the Miniseries platform for Little Printer and supplying us with very welcome ice-pops and iced-coffees to keep us cool.

James, who I haven’t seen yet this week, has been doing lots and lots of bits for Little Printer in Codebase and working a special demo for Matt Webb show off.

Little Printer has also been the main focus for both Denise and Alex. Denise has been working on publications and Alex has been working on wireframes and visuals for the shop.

Matt Webb has been busy with a number of sales meetings with some prospective new clients and meeting with Sinawava on Wednesday. He’s also been in meetings with the lawyers and been on a flip-flop buying mission.

Matt Jones has had a mostly sales-focused week apart from Wednesday with Sinawava visiting the studio. He was supposed to have Friday off but has turned into more of a work-from-home day instead of time off.

Jack has been working on sales, Sinawava and…the next BERG cloud product!

Simon is still away in sunny California and definitely missed, so we’ll be delighted to have him back in the studio next week when we can breath a sigh of relief!

I have been writing proposals for a number of really exciting new projects involving weird existing technologies. I’ve also been drafting phase 2 for an existing client, so the next few months should see some more really interesting projects in the studio.

Well, inevitably after I gave the others loads of stick for not getting the weekly links out on a Friday, I don’t manage it either. Humble pie for brekkie on Monday when I see them all next.

Anyway!

Here’s what was flying around the studio e-mail list this week.

Alex found this 121-megapixel satellite photo of Earth

Denise pointed us at these lovely British birds made of Lego.

Andy caused much excitement (and used many exclamation marks in his email) when he announced there was a new Katamari Damacy soundtrack…

A slo-mo jumping (portly) cat!

James pointed to the interesting, elegant UI details used in the new iteration of the (already-rather-good) Soundcloud.

Take a look at the video here of a flying robot that swoops to perch on a human’s hand like a falcon. It gets incredible around a minute and thirty seconds in…

Andy pointed out this very interesting development in home automation and ‘domotics’ from a startup called “Electric Imp” as reported on Gizmodo:

Electric Imp came out of hiding today, announcing a line of Imp cards that can be installed on any electronic device to put it online and even control it. The little cards appear almost identical to standard SD cards, but have WiFi antennae and embedded processors. You can install them to existing devices using some of the circuit boards Imp sells, and the company is in talks with OEMs to get them Imp slots pre-installed on a range of products. Once installed, they connect to the Internet and Imp’s cloud-based software controls, allowing them to both be controlled remotely and work in conjunction with other connected devices.

One to watch perhaps.

Matt Webb pointed out this interesting company, http://www.quadrigram.com/ who market themselves as a visual programming language for creating visualisations from complex streams of live data (for instance from sensor-laden nets of things…)

Andy pointed to http://chirp.io/ who’s stated aim from their website is to ‘teach the machines to sing’ but making links into music…

James shared http://littlebigdetails.com/ with the list, which does precisely what it says on the tin. Lots of very nice UI touches of the sort that lift a product or service to an extra level of consideration, commodity and delight.

And finally, as a nod to the biggest film of the year so far, and tribute to the recently-deceased illustrator/author, here’s how Maurice Sendak might have drawn the Avengers.

Have a great week!

Ericsson’s UX Lab have recently been doing some important and brave work around the Internet of Things. We have been particularly intrigued by their concept of using social networks as a model to understand complex networks.

This is smart, it builds on our innate familiarity with social networks, but also acts as a provocation for us to think differently about the internet of things. It also happens to cross over with many of the BERG’s interests including Little Printer, BERGCloud and very close to the ‘Products are people too‘ concept that has been guiding much of our work.

So over the last few months BERG and Ericsson have been working in partnership to explore some practical and poetic approaches to networks and smart products. We have been developing concepts around the rituals and rhythms of life with connected things, and creating some visualisations based on network behaviours. Phase 1 of this project is complete, and although we can’t talk about the entire project, we thought it would be good to show some of our first sketches.

You can also read more about the collaboration from Ericsson’s perspective here.

We kicked off in a product invention workshop where some really strong themes emerged.

There are huge areas of network-ness, from the infrastructure to the protocols, from the packets to the little blinking lights on our routers, that are largely ‘dark matter‘: immaterial and invisible things that are often misunderstood, mythologised or ignored.

There are a few long-term efforts to uncover the physical infrastructure of our networks. Ericsson itself has long understood the need to both explain the technology of networks and their effects.

But – we mostly feel like the network is out of our control – tools to be able to satisfyingly grasp and optimise our own networks and connected products aren’t yet available to us. Working towards products, services and visualisations that make these things more legible and tangible is good!

Joyful (net)work: Zen Garden Router

Inspired by Matt Jones’ idea of a ‘Zen garden router’ this video sketch focuses on the ongoing maintenance and ‘tuning’ of a domestic ecosystem of connected products, and the networks that connect them. We have modified a standard router with a screen on its top surface, to make network activity at various scales visible and actionable at the point at which it reaches the house. We’ve used a version of the beautiful ‘Toner’ maps by our friends at Stamen in the design.

This looks to metaphors of ‘joyful work’ that we engage with already domestically – either mechanisms or rituals that we find pleasurable or playful even if they are ‘work’. Here there are feedback mechanisms that produce more affect and pleasure – for instance the feedback involved in tuning a musical instrument, sound system or a radio. Gardening also seems to be a rich area for examination – where there is frequent work, but the sensual and systemic rewards are tangible.

Network Murmurations

Different network activity has vastly different qualities. This is an experiment using projection mapping to visualise network activity in the spaces that the network actually inhabits.

When loading a web page a bunch of packets travel over WiFi in a dense flock. While playing internet video packets move in a dense stream that persists as long as the video is playing. On the other end of the scale a Bluetooth mouse or a Zigbee light switch where tiny, discrete amounts of data flow infrequently. Then there are ‘collisions’ in the network flow or ‘turbulence’ created by competing devices such as microwaves or cordless phones.

We use as inspiration a ‘murmuration‘ of starlings, a beautiful natural phenomenon. In this visualisation the ‘murmuration’ flits between devices revealing the relationships and the patterns of network traffic in the studio. Although this sketch isn’t based on actual data on network traffic, it could be, and it seems that there is great scope in bringing more network activity to our attention, giving us a sense of its flows and patterns over time.

The network is part of our everyday lives. Seeing the network is the first step to understanding the network, acting on it, and gaining an everyday literacy in it. So what should it look like? These video sketches are part of our ongoing effort to find out – a glimpse of our first phase of research, there is more work in the pipeline that we hope to be able to talk about soon.

Thanks to the Ericsson’s UX Lab for being great R&D partners.

A slightly delayed summary of what’s been floating around the BERG mailing list in the last week.

Matt Webb sent us Music for Programming:

A series of mixes intended for listening

while programming to aid concentration

and increase productivity (also compatible

with other activities).

In our ongoing email series entitled ‘HTML5 watch’, we found Suit up or Die Magazine and the browser version of ‘Cut the Rope‘.

Simon sent us the IBM Glass engine, which ‘enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.’

I really like this blog from the people behind the NYT graphics department, showing some of the data sketching behind their infographics.

Nick found this really nice prototype for a cursor based iPad keyboard.

This is what happens when you put a Kinect and a projector over a sandpit:

And finally, this has blown my mind this week. Araabmuzik plays live sets on Akai MPCs. There’s a lot of clips floating around of him making hiphop beats on the fly, but this dubstep clip is particularly good. Enjoy.

Okay so week 359 is a bit mad.

We take it in turns to write weeknotes (there’s a rota on the wall), but I wasn’t around for All Hands this week. Matt Jones kept the following notes and emailed them to me afterwards.

Wolf 359 is an awesome star!

It's also where the stand against the Borg takes place.

MW - visits from the taiwanese and swedish. sales meetings. dealing with studio stuff

SP - sales and new project set-ups, capacity planning. LP publications.

VOC - working up proposals, case-studies, target list of consumer products companies, proposition development

NL - bridge code to get claiming working under the new crypto scheme with james, documentation of apis. more cleverness under the hood

AH - going to slovenia, LP production ready boards, bridge production

AB - chuska wrap-up, working on LP 

JD - working on realising the service design of LP with denise and nick, a lot of whiteboarding

DW - publications stuff for LP, packaging with alex, sales and proposals

HR - a mountain of scanning, making sure everyone gets paid, helping simon with his studio dashboard spreadsheets

AJ - LP packaging - deadline this week... wrapping up chuska...

MJ - working on sales, helping alex with wrapping up chuska and doing some work on sinawava

JS - ???

Thanks Matt!

So here’s what’s occupying my head this week…

1. I’ve been to a bunch of brilliantly exciting client meetings this week. One of the things that seems to have changed in how we approach projects, in 2012, is that there’s more collaboration with clients earlier in their initial process of developing the brief. We get to poke at much more why the project is happening, and what it’s meant to achieve, and we get to feed in what we find super interesting right now, and our intuitions. So I’ve spent a good amount of time every day this week very enthusiastic about this, setting up brilliant briefs, feeling expansive with ideas and possibilities.

Then for some reason there have been lots of meetings with interesting people this week: a trade delegation from Taiwan, organised by UKTI and hosted by ustwo; a group of executives from the Bonnier Group on a training day; more with individuals. These are good opportunities to speak out loud about projects and about BERG, and I find that talking is an act of recall, improvisation, and renewing of mental tracks during which valuable thinking happens.

Alongside that, to be honest, I’m having a pretty heavy week, dealing with some of that kind of stuff where (a) the best person in the company to deal with it is me, and (b) it’s tiring to think about.

Switching rapidly between conversations that delight me and mental work that grinds me down has its own particular effect: to be fully involved in each activity, the feelings appropriate to the other activity have to be contained or suspended for the moment, and it’s that continual packing/unpacking/repacking that creates a novel kind of tiredness, a kind that I can only describe as – I don’t know whether this word exists outside the UK – radgy.

Which means I’m having to watch myself. If I look at something and I don’t like it, is that a real opinion or am I just a bit annoyed at everything? If I think somebody is agitated about something, are they actually or is it my own agitation I’m seeing?

It’s good to be aware of this I suppose, but phew, turbulence is tiring.

2. Here’s the thing. If you asked me to sum up the mood of the studio this week, I’d say frazzled and radgy. Is that because it’s me that’s frazzled and radgy and so I’m seeing it where it doesn’t exist and focusing on it where it does? Or is it because everyone’s tired at once, certain streams of Little Printer are coming to a head and that’s pressured, a couple of recent projects might have been recently or might be currently in the middle of their “lost in the fog” phase (which often happens but you need to find your way out of it by knack or luck), we’ve had a crunchy couple of weeks of multiple projects at crunchy points anyway, and I’ve not been paying the Room enough attention?

Some combination of the two I suppose. These things happen.

And I guess this says a bunch about my temperament but I’m reminded of running and those real grinds of hills you sometimes encounter that make your muscles burn and your lungs feel like hot raisins. I love that feeling.

Mainly what I’ve been saying this week (about my own week) is “it’s all a lot of fun.” It’s not the kind of fun that I go to the pub for, sure, but it’s the kind of fun where you listen closely to your muscles and you cuddle up to the sting and you feel the push to keeping running up the hill as a resolved exuberance. And boy it stings, you can’t think of anything else.

As fun as it is, you make sure to do your stretches afterwards so that it doesn’t sting next time.

3. I haven’t done weeknotes for a while, and it’s a shame my turn on the rota has fallen on a week I’m feeling particularly introspective!

So let me also say that this week my general (and hidden from the studio) obsession with David Bowie’s 1972 single Starman continues.

Here it is on YouTube:

As you listen, listen out for (from this description by Thomas Jones) the build-up of tension as the song opens, and the sense of as he says “release and climax” when the chorus kicks in. Here’s what’s happening:

What happens is that for the first time, the melody hits the tonic; Bowie gets through 15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ he hits two of them, an octave apart.

It’s astounding to hear once you know what’s going on, grab your headphones and listen to it now. That first staaaar-maan gives me shivers.

I believe that the reason I can’t stop listening to the song is that here, in week 359, our own chorus hasn’t yet kicked in, and I’m impatient, I can’t wait.

It is, just about, week 358. Last night we were dancing for Matt Jones’ birthday. Simon has just brought in bacon sandwiches for everyone.

The week has been, like the weather, changeable. Right now it is sunny, so I am writing the week notes now. On Tuesday, when we have our all-hands catch up, it was not sunny, and there were only 7 of us in the studio, so this week’s list is not comprehensive.

Alex, among lots of other things, is wrapping up (geddit?) the packaging work for Little Printer. Simon and Andy went to Leatherhead for some reason. Denise has been doing all sorts of Little Printer stuff, bar a short break to do some D&AD judging. Matt W is working on Sinawava (as is Joe), a workshop and sales. He’s also went to Milan design fair to show off Little Printer. Alice and I are working on Berg Cloud internals. Andy is doing circuit designs. And…

Jack is back! He’s working in the afternoons, currently mainly with Joe on Sinawava. It’s good to have him back.

This is the sort of week you look back on fondly. It was a hard week, but worth it. And the dancing helped.

The project we ran in the spring with the Goldsmiths Design BA course was not ‘live’ in the sense that there was a commercial client’s needs informing the project, but it was an approximation of the approach that we take in the studio when we are working with clients around new product generation and design consultancy.

It was also an evolution of a brief that we have run before at SVA in New York with Durrell Bishop – but with the luxury of having much more time to get into it.

Our brief was in two parts – representing techniques that we use in the early stages of projects.

The first half: “Death To Fiction” stems from our love for deconstructing technologies, particularly cheap everyday ones to find new opportunities.

It’s a direct influence from Durrell – and techniques he used while teaching Schulze, Joe Malia and others at the RCA – and also something that is very familiar to many craftspeople – having at least some knowledge of a lot of different materials and techniques that can then inform deeper investigation, or enable more confident leaps of invention later on in the process. It also owes a lot to our friend Matt Cottam‘s “What is a Switch?” brief that he’s run at RISD, Umea, CIID and Aho…

We asked the students to engage with everyday technology and manufactured, designed goods as if it were nature.

“The Anthropocene” has been proposed by ecologists, geologists and geographers to describe the epoch marked by the domination of human influence on the Earth’s systems – seams of plastic kettles and Tesco “Bags For Life” will be discovered in millions of years time by the distant ancestors of Tony Robinson’s Time Team.

There is no split between nature and technology in the anthropocene. So, we ask – what happens if you approach technology with the enthusiasm and curiosity of the amateur naturalist of old – the gentlemen and women who trotted the globe in the last few centuries with sturdy boots, travel trunks and butterfly nets – hunting, collecting, studying, dissecting, breeding and harnessing the nature around them?

The students did not disappoint.

Like latter-day Linneans, or a troop of post-digital Deptford Darwins – they headed off into New Cross and took the poundstretchers and discount DIY stores as their Galapagos.

After two weeks I returned to see what they had done and was blown-away.

Chewing-gum, Alarm-clocks, key-finders, locks, etch-a-sketches, speakers, headphones, lighters, wind-up toys and more – had all been pulled-apart, scrutinised, labelled, diagrammed, tortured, tested, reconstructed…

And – perhaps most importantly I had the feeling they had not only been understood, but the invention around communicating what they had learnt displayed a confidence in this ‘new nature’ that I felt would really stand them in good stead for the next part of the project, and also future projects.

It was all great work, and lots of work – the smile didn’t leave my face for at least a week – but a few projects stood out for me.

Charlotte’s investigations of disposable cameras, Helen’s thought-provoking examination of pregnancy tests, Tom’s paper speakers (which he promised had worked!), Simon’s unholy pairings of pedometers and drills, Liboni and Adam’s thorough dissections of ultrasonic keyfinders and the brilliant effort to understand how quartz crystal regulate time by baking their own crystal, wiring it to a multimeter and whacking it with a hammer!

Hefin Jones’ deconstruction of the MagnaDoodle, and his (dramatic, hairdryer-centric) reconstruction of it’s workings was a particularly fine effort.

The second half of the brief asked the students to assess the insights and opportunities they had from their material exploration and begin to combine them, and place them in a product context – inventing new products, services, devices, rituals, experiences.

We’ve run this process with students before in a brief we call “Hopeful Monsters”, which begins with a kind of ‘exquisite corpse’ mixing and breeding of devices, affordances, capabilities, materials and contexts to spur invention.

We’d pinched that drawing technique way back in 2007 for Olinda from Matt Ward, head of the design course at Goldsmiths so it only seemed fitting that he would lead that activity in a workshop in the second phase of the brief.

The students organised themselves in teams for this part of the brief, and produced some lovely varied work – what was particularly pleasing to me was that they appeared to remain nimble and experimental in this phase of the project, not seizing upon a big idea then dogmatically trying to build it, but allowing the process of making inform the way to achieve the goals they set themselves.

We closed the project with an afternoon of presentations at The Gopher Hole (thanks to Ossie and Beatrice for making that happen!) where the teams presented back their concepts. All the teams had documented their research for the project as they went online, and many opted to explain their inventions in short films.

Here’s a selection:

• http://roadsmata.wordpress.com/
• http://berg-ers.tumblr.com/
• http://printergame.tumblr.com/
• http://inventosaurs.tumblr.com
• http://Bergdesign.tumblr.com

A special mention to the ‘Roads Mata’ team, who for me really went the extra-mile in creating something that was believably-buildable and desirable – to the extent that I think my main feedback to them was they should get on KickStarter…

There were sparks of lovely invention throughout all the student groups – some teams had more trouble recognising them than others, but as Linus Pauling once said “To have a good idea you have to have a lot of ideas”, and that certainly wasn’t a problem.

I wonder what everyone would have come up with if we had a slightly longer second design phase to the project, or introduced a more constrained brief goal to design for. It might have enabled some of the teams to close in on something either through iteration or constraint.

Next time!

As it was I hope that the methods that the brief introduce stay with the group, and that the curiosity, energy and ability to think through making that they obviously all have grows in confidence and output through the coming years.

They will be a force to be reckoned with if so.

It’s Friday 13th, and at the time of writing, all is well. There will be thirteen of us around the table for demos later on though, and if the Last Supper or Norse myths are anything to go by, Wikipedia doesn’t fancy our chances. Better get on with Friday links while I still can.

Simon started the week off with the Hackday Manifesto. A handy list of things to think about if you’re organising a hack day. (One of the more memorable hack days I attended got struck by lightening. It sent the building into panic mode and large vents opened in the roof as the rain fell on our laptops. It’s not on the list, but try to avoid that if you can.)

Nick sent around this video of a robot…

…And Alex spotted a ham boning robot in the related links.

Andy, shocked to find that ‘it’s not all internet of things and albums on Kick Starter’, shared a link to the Sisters of the Lattice: Mystical Conjoined Twins Tour + Film, and Alex got us back on track with Pebble, an E-paper watch for iPhone and Android.

I enjoyed this lovely use of ASCII on Twitter, spotted via @mildlydiverting. Use the J key to go forward, and K to reverse.

MW returned from the USA to share these optical illusions with us, and MJ finished up with texts from dogs.

That’s all for now – we’re just discussing boiling a can of condensed milk for four hours, so I’d better go.

There’s been lots of exciting things circulating the studio this week; bacon butties, choccies, beer, the usual, but with the most notable of all being the simply delectable mango, courtesy of our Simon (and I think Sainsburys – good work guys). All the edible things aside, here’s some bits for you to enjoy.

A solar powered calculator preparing to take on the world.

What life was like in the swinging sixties.

The robot company bought by Amazon… Simply astounding.

An article about why you can’t stop throwing those birds.

The future of comics?

And finally… the biggest Creme Egg you’ve ever seen. (Bigger than a kettle):

Happy Easter all.

IT’S NEARLY EASTER which means chocolate (and beers) for all. So, in preparation of the short week (and beers), everyone at BERG is suitably busy and the studio is buzzing.

This week, Silverton continues with a bit of filmmaking from Timo and Joe alongside other bits with Denise and Matt Jones. Timo is also putting together some words for Chuska whilst mentally preparing for some exciting weeks ahead.

Alex, Alice and James are working their socks off juggling being creatively brilliant for Chuska, whilst each having their own BERG Cloud bits to do to ensure it’s coming along nicely. Denise is also working with Alex on Little Printer to get the packaging looking beautiful.

Nick is stitching together his crytographic layers (I’m not even sure what that means but I think it involves coding ’til his fingers drop off), and getting down to some problem solving.

Andy a.k.a. Busy BERG Barringer Bee is living up to his name and, in true Andy style, is pulling together lots of bits of everything Little Printer related.

Matt Jones and Matt Webb are off to a surprise workshop and engaging with future work proposals before Wednesday, when Jones is booked in for a talk, and Thursday when Webb is off to Vegas to win some money… I mean, attend an awards ceremony.

Vanessa is settling in nicely and, alongside helping Andy speak Irish, is putting together some case studies for us whilst helping Webb, Jones and Simon with proposals. Simon is also spending some time this week cracking on with an exciting Little Printer mini-project. 

This is an exciting week for myself as it’s first time on the blog and thus into the world of BERG online. I’m also only in 2 days this week, so have lots to do in little time. Adieu.

Will Wiles, the Deputy Editor of the design magazine Icon, asked us recently to contribute to a special issue on Mobiles Phones alongside James Bridle, Kazys Varnelis, Marko Ahtisaari and Will Self, among others.

I wrote a short piece on smartphones as ‘companion species’, that reflects a lot of ongoing themes and discussions in the studio around designing the behaviour of sensate devices with ‘fractional intelligence‘.

They see the world differently to us, picking up on things we miss.

They adapt to us, our routines. They look to us for attention, guidance and sustenance. We imagine what they are thinking, and vice-versa.

Dogs? Or smartphones?

Mobile devices (can we still call them phones?) are being packed full of sensors, processing power. They are animated by ever-more-sophisticated software, dedicated to understanding the world around them (in terms of advances in computer vision and context-awareness) and understanding us (speech recognition and adaptive ‘agent’ software such as Apple’s ‘Siri’)

They are moving – somewhat awkwardly – from being our tools to becoming our newest companion species.

Donna Haraway, theorist on our transformation into cyborgs, published ‘The Companion Species Manifesto’ in 2003. It addresses the relationship between domestic dogs and humans, but there is much in there to inspire designers of smartphones, apps and agents.

“Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways.”

Using inspirations from theory such as Haraway, and fiction – such as Philip Pullman’s ‘Daemons’ from his ‘Dark Materials’ books – we can perhaps imagine a near-future that is richer and weirder than the current share-everything-all-the-time/total-gamified-personal-productivity obsessions of silicon valley.

A future of digital daemons would be one of close relationships with software that learned and acted intuitively – perhaps inscrutably at first, but with a maxim of ‘do no harm, with maximum charm’.

Intel’s Genevieve Bell recently spoke of the importance of designing relationships with – and crucially, between our technologies – so that we not in the centre of an arms-race of ever-more-complex 1-to-1 interactions with our phones, tablets and apps. She memorably quoted a research subject that likened her collection of digital devices to a ‘needy backpack of baby birds’

Much better to have one faithful, puppy-smart daemon device, working at our side to round everything (and every thing) up and relate what it senses to us?

At BERG we are fond of quoting MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks – who said that fifty years of sustained work by the brightest and the best in artificial intelligence would get us things that were ‘smart as puppies’ if we’re lucky.

This seems like a fine goal to us, rather than creating uncanny, flawed and frustrating analogues of human intelligence and interactions – such as Siri, or if we cast our minds back a decade – Microsoft’s ‘Clippy’.

This future might also free the form of our devices – from glowing rectangles that suck our attention from the world, to subtler physical avatars representing our companions – things that listen, watch, speak – to us and for us.

Our companion species as are likely to inhabit the biomimetic descendants of the Nike fuelband or the now-mundane bluetooth headsets as Ive’s perfectionist slabs of glass and alloy.

Also, companion species might be shared, as a family pet is now – bound to home and hearth rather than the predominant 1-to-1 ‘personal computing’ paradigm of the last 40 years or so.

What forms might these ‘household spirits’ take? Nest’s smart thermostat has pursued the Ives/Rams route of tasteful (if ironically, cold) elegance, whereas our own Little Printer takes a rather different approach…

There will be more diverse responses to these new categories of digital/physical extensions to ourselves, our homes, cars and cities. Which is as it should be.

I hope it triggers explosion of form and interaction beyond the glowing touchscreen hegemony. The advent of ‘digital companion species’ should be a cambrian moment for design.

I am going for a bike ride in Kent tomorrow, so this is the state of my inbox as of the end of Thursday.

Timo shares “Warriors of the Net” -a video from the 1990’s that I am pretty sure I watched in an ICT lesson at school. It is probably the root cause of my deep seated fear of sysadmin, and anything lower down the TCP/IP stack than the application layer. Leave that stuff to the neck beards, I say. I do wish BERG videos had more gravel toned voice overs though.

It also has this natty website: http://www.warriorsofthe.net/about.html

Timo also shared Robin Sloan’s Fish. I had to borrow an iPhone to experience this, but it was well worth it. A lovely and thought provoking thing.

Stamen’s maps were also all over the web this week. Most impressive is the watercolour view, but I also really like the toner view.

Timo (again) shared this video from Nature and MIT about seeing round corners with lazers.

Denise shared these brilliant stereographic drawings: http://robotmafia.com/stereographic-drawings-by-dain-fagerholm/

Denise also shared this story about an author who has written software to automate writing sports reports. This is both pretty impressive AND gives me a great idea for Friday Links…

From Nick, piccolo, the tiny CNC bot:

Piccolo the tiny CNC-bot from diatom studio on Vimeo.

From Denise, Dog Ear, a new publication on a bookmark by Fallon:

From Alex, Synchromy – an animation by Norman McLaren from 1971 created by using an optical film printer:

From Timo, Intersections in the age of driverless cars. This gave me the willies.

Matt Jones shared this picture of a Hydroelectricity Plant, which reminded me of John Glen-era Bond movies:

James, like the rest of us, really like the new design of Fix My Street, especially the way it scales for different sizes of devices. Check out what needs doing near our studio.

From Jack, reaDIYmate – build an internet-connected thing in 10 minutes:

Shouts to @alruii for sharing Terry Wogan’s Secret Pirate Radio, brainchild of the marvellous Peter Serafinowicz:

It’s 4:55pm on Wednesday, and this is my most frequent type of view on Week 353 – the week calendar. Most of what we’re up to is here. With all the minutiae removed, I wonder if it’s possible to guess who is who?

It just so happens that a number of client projects have recently finished or are wrapping up at the moment, at much the same time, and several new ones are kicking off. The processes around getting everything in place to start & finish are numerous and I’m running through my checklists to make sure everything is set up correctly. Helen’s been doing similar, arranging travel and keeping the finances in check.

Matt Jones, Timo and Joe are all involved in a kick-off workshop for Silverton this week and our clients are here with us. Today we can just about hear animated conversation coming from our meeting room. It’s the first time we’ve run a workshop in our new studio space, which we’ve well and truly settled into now. Matt Webb has been involved in this a bit too, alongside writing proposals for upcoming projects, making decisions about Little Printer and bringing delicious curry to the studio for lunch.

Alex has been furthering the packaging design for Little Printer, as well as producing assets for the next iteration of the remote site ready to be built. He’s also going to be leading a new project, Chuska, in the coming weeks with Alice and James, who are also working on publications and infrastructure for Little Printer and BERG Cloud. They’ve also been out and about filming with Timo for Lamotte, and making toast at 5pm, which makes the whole studio a bit peckish.

Denise has been drawing owls and foxes for Lamotte (for Timo, who will be making them fly) and generally steering the design and content of Little Printer.

When Andy isn’t strong-arming the studio into drinking coffee or eating doughnuts, he’s overseeing the tooling and production of the various parts that go into the physical Little Printer, tweaking electronics, ordering parts and lining up all the hoops we’ll be jumping through en-route to announcing pre-orders. He’s also been shouting numbers and letters that I don’t fully understand across the studio to Nick who’s been working fervently on immediate tweaks to the lower-level software on Little Printer, and working with Phil on the remaining functionality we want to implement.

Jack and Kari are both missed, although occasionally pictures of tiny humans who look a little like them are sent around the studio.

Last but not least, please let it be known that the number 353 is a double sexy prime – that is, the numbers which are six away on either side (347 and 359) are also primes. Ooh-err.

(It’s good at the beginning of projects to research what’s come before, and Joe is pretty spectacular at finding references and explaining what’s interesting about each one. He’s done this for a few projects now, but we’ve never made his research public. Last year Joe put together a set of appearances of videophones in film. It’s a lovely collection, and it was a stimulating way to think around the subject! So I asked him to share it here. -Matt W)

Metropolis (1927)

Features wall-mounted analogue videophone. Joh Fredersen appears to use four separate dials to arrive at the correct frequency for the call. Two assign the correct call location and two smaller ones provide fine video tuning. He then picks up a phone receiver with one hand and uses the other to tap a rhythm on a panel that is relayed to the other phone and displayed as flashes of light to attract attention.

Transatlantic Tunnel (1935)

Features two very different pieces of industrial design at either end of the call.

This device displays similarities to the form of a TV set…

And this one has been designed to appear more like furniture. The screen is low down in a self-contained wooden unit designed a seated caller.

Out of the Unknown (1965)

User’s own image is reflected back to them until a connection is made. Possibly to confirm that the camera is working correctly. The hexagonal screen is an extension of a mobile chair.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

A public booth containing a large phone unit. The system communicates that it is in a ‘ready’ state through the screen. A call is made by entering a number into the type-pad and a connection established on pickup

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

We see five or six openly shared phones and connected screens sitting on a desk in the White House.

It is apparent that a single video feed can be broadcast to multiple screens in parallel, as below, or exclusively to a single one.

Space: 1999 (1975-1977)

The monotone blue phone screen has been designed into the very architecture of the craft.

And here requiring a key to connect.

Blade Runner (1982)

An outdoor, public phone service. Network information is displayed on screen implying that it is subject to change. When Deckard begins to dial a ‘transmitting’ notification appears. The cost of the call is shown when the receiver line is closed.

The screen is used as a canvas, covered in scrawled messages. A cross indicates the optimal position for viewer’s head.

Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Marty McFly is contacted by Needles his coworker. The video feed features personal information about the person in view, favourite drinks and hobbies.

Real-time message input can be expressed as video overlays.

Or push print-outs.

When not in use the screen displays a Van Gogh self portrait.

The Jetsons (1962-1988)

Videophones throughout the series. Rather than command desk space they lower from the ceiling when required. They appear to come with either a handset or microphone.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Circular screen set into a square frame emerging from a pillar unit.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Shows a AT&T VideoPhone 2500 prototype with space for hand written addresses. When the video feed is lost the system defaults to a voice exchange through the handset.

Star Trek Nemesis (2002)

Pop-up screen set into the desk. Appears when call is received. Only visible when required.

The Rock (1996)

One way video stream displayed on multiple, wall inset screens.

The Simpsons: Lisa’s Wedding (1995)

A “Picturephone” uses a rotary dial to make calls. A camera housed in the device is distinctly visible in a trapezium above the screen. Set in the future, the device seems to be a new invention that Marge isn’t quite used to yet, as she visibly crosses her fingers guaranteeing that Homer will behave at the forthcoming wedding.

Moon (2009)

Ruggedised video phone for use in zero gravity. No function available for hiding outgoing video stream is evident as Sam Bell uses his hand to cover the camera.

And finally… the super cut of all of them

Watch the videophones supercut on Vimeo.

There is a general sense of curiosity held by the people who work in this room.



It’s evident through the sheer volume of web links exchanged each week.
Some of these fall away quickly but others gather such traction that they live on for days as a sort of rolling cultural Katamari Demacy.



Tracing lines back through these threads imparts individual preoccupations and quietly reveals the collective interests of the studio.

So, here are a few things that people have been up to and what’s captured their attention in week 352.

Andy has been chasing up sizeable quantities of power adapters and continued to receive ‘proof of life’ for atoms in constellations of his design. You can read more about this intriguing image at:
http://bergcloud.com/blog/



He also sent around the output of a collaboration between visuals artists Memo Akten and Quayola.


http://vimeo.com/37967381

These animations are described on thecreatorsproject.com as ‘a study of the relationship between the human body and movement’ rendered through abstract 3d forms. This prompted a discussion about the visual queues required to convey a sense of human movement. Matthew discussed the conflicts and payoffs between 2d and 3d. And Timo highlighted the capacity for the simple lines and dots of ‘motion capture’ to create hugely characterful movements. “There’s a magic about seeing human movement in the simplest of forms, like this.” (examples below).

Denise spent time designing characters for a forthcoming animation that plays a part in a project for Uinta. And readying an exciting proposal for a potential client.

She forwarded this little poem to the group:


http://pinterest.com/pin/106749453637547898/

And the beautiful Clouds project by Amsterdam based Berndnaut Smilde. This sparked some conversational speculation on the possibility of channeling this into the design of consumer electronics.


http://the-design-ark.com/2012/03/clouds-by-berndnaut-smilde/

Then, of course, the inevitable question of whether we could keep a cloud as a studio pet cropped up. It’s yet to be answered.

James, the impenetrable logic dynamo and fashion maverick, has spent the week sculpting code and sharing some splendidly weird links.

First up, this animated gif of a chirpy chap spotted in a couple of eggs, which I looked at for way too long.


http://www.lememe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/57890589505.gif

He also suggested that if Jack were to design an album sleeve it might look something link this:



Timo prepared the Silverton workshop for next Tuesday and managed to find time to write an excellent blog post with Nick entitled: ‘Swiping Through Cinema, Touching Through Glass’. (Read it here: http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/03/08/swiping-cinema-touching-glass/)
He’s also been filming and editing for Uinta and Chaco projects with Oran.

He shared this NASA image from the March 6. A “Multiple-wavelength View of X5.4 Solar Flare”.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6962299865/

And also this slice of optical motion capture processing (mentioned above)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dMzTTgAZ4

Helen spent the week coordinating with different parties to ensure ongoing organisational legitimacy and defend the studio against exposure to fire or other catastrophes.

Alice, the Little Printer whisperer, has managed to convince the the device to send and receive picture messages. I now have My Little Pony and Power Puff Girls receipts on my desk.
Her other major triumph this week has been to discover an image of Rihanna throwing up ribbons. On loop.


http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luvkboF9zC1r31cpxo1_500.gif

Nick can usually be found lurking in the Linux mines. Or Tooting.
He sent around a link to the ‘Freescale Mechatronics Robot’ coupled with the message, “Anyone fancy a walking development board? Now with added ‘face’.”



http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=FSLBOT

And a project by Fay McCaul concerned with “….embedding reflective material into cotton yarn and using fibre optics and iridescent acrylic to create unconventional materials”


http://www.tentlondon.co.uk/news/exhibitor-profile-fay-mccaul#overlay-context=news-category/exhibitor-news (more info: Fay McCaul.)

Jones stands upon stilts, like a shepherd of the Landes, extending his field of vision for a string of sales meetings, workshops and presentations.


http://woodtrekker.blogspot.com/2010/11/mouleyre-shepherd-of-landes-france.html

He’s also been very active on the mailing list.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcph/5290175436/

The new iPad app from Bloom.io


http://biologic.bloom.io/

A PhD research project making AI that can design, evaluate and develop entire video-games.


http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/

Spacewalking helmet, fully loaded: 3 videocams, old lights and new LEDs, plus nose pad to clear ears inside.


From a tweet by chris hadfield
https://twitter.com/#!/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/177375221437833216

Wearable projector makes any surface interactive by Hrvoje Benko of Microsoft Research.


http://www.psfk.com/2012/03/wearable-interactive-projector.html

And evidence of tool use in bears.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17264679

Alex spent much of the week fusing artistry with pragmatism to find fitting ways to present the LP systems architecture to the user.
He’s also been hyperactive on the studio mailing list, in a very good way.

Starting with ‘Fresh Guacamole’ in which the director, PES, ‘transforms familiar objects into fresh guacamole’.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMO6vjmkyI

The stunning stunts of Jorian Ponomareff.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9VG4N5DfY

He also pointed out a post by Stephen Wolfram on his attitude towards the quantified self.

“One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.”


http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

A new supermarket scanner that recognises food by it’s colour and shape, no barcodes needed.


http://designtaxi.com/news/351869/New-Supermarket-Scanner-Recognizes-Food-No-Barcodes-Needed/

LEGO Space Shuttle Launched Into The Stratosphere.


http://designtaxi.com/news/351818/LEGO-Space-Shuttle-Launched-Into-The-Stratosphere/

And finally the latest DARPA robot named ‘Cheetah’ sets speed record for legged robots.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2D71CveQwo

Simon is the gravity to which all projects are subject. Involved in everything to some degree.

This week he described the similarities and differences between Channel 4’s new service …

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-03-08/channel-4-launches-new-channel,-4seven

and the BERG project Shownar: http://berglondon.com/projects/shownar/

He also showed everyone the Dollar Shave Club website which features one of the finest corporate videos I’ve seen in recent memory (which admittedly doesn’t say much, but it is very good).


http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/

Webb distinguishes scale from perspective in a series of sales and logistical meetings. He and Jones presented the outcome of the Kletting project to Uinta and he generally mans the helm of this good ship.

In response to Andy’s post about ‘Form’ he wrote this: “A 2d animation can do anything at all. When you watch this …”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4

“It mimics a 3d scene, like a live-action movie, but it’s not 3d: it’s constructed to look awesome to the viewer. Micky’s ears exist outside the 3d world, they exist entirely for the viewer and the screen, you can’t even imagine what they might look like to anyone else in the frame, they transcend the world of the cartoon.”

“But when you watch a Pixar movie – a 2d render of a 3d scene – or this thing, the magic of the moving screen is replaced by a view into a world which has to obey the physics of the 3d. Its potential is somehow made smaller. It exists independently from me, and so somehow there’s less room for it to explode into magic.”

In other dispatches, he notified people of the Microsoft holoreflector project to which Alex pointed out that the typing position is under and behind the display. It was agreed that this is Odd! Neat!


http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120293-microsoft-research-shows-off-see-through-3d-display-holoreflector-illumishare

And excitedly sent around the Sim City announce trailer:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kztNWdhRdnw

Finally, I have been feeling somewhat under the weather and a tad delirious. But you’ve probably noticed that.

The studio is continually interested in the beautiful and inventive stuff that can happen when you poke and prod around the edges of technology and culture. Mag+ emerged from a curiosity from both Bonnier and BERG about reading on tablets while Making Future Magic emerged from experiments with light painting and screens.

Early last year we were experimenting with product photography for a retail client pitch. We wondered how we could we use cinematic techniques to explore product imagery.

Watch the video of our experiments on Vimeo.

What would happen if instead of a single product image or a linear video, we could flick and drag our way through time and the optical qualities of lenses? What if we had control of the depth of field, focus, lighting, exposure, frame-rate or camera position through tap and swipe?

Swiping through cinema

This is a beautiful 1960’s Rolex that we shot in video while pulling focus across the surface the watch. On the iPad, the focus is then under your control, the focal point changes to match your finger as it taps and swipes across the object. Your eye and finger are in the same place, you are in control of the locus of attention.

Jack originally explored focus navigation (with technical help by George Grinsted) in 2000, and now Lytro allow ‘tap to focus’ in pictures produced by the ‘light field camera‘.

The lovely thing here is that we can see all of the analogue, optical qualities such as the subtle shifts in perspective as the lens elements move, and the blooming, reflection and chromatic abberations that change under our fingertips. Having this optical, cinematic language under the fine control of our fingertips feels new, it’s a lovely, playful, explorative interaction.

Orson Welles’ Deep Focus.

Cinematic language is a rich seam to explore, what if we could adjust the exposure to get a better view of highlights and shadows? Imagine this was diamond jewellery, and we could control the lighting in the room. Or to experiment with aperture, going from the deep focus of Citizen Kane, through to the extremely shallow focus used in Gomorrah, where the foreground is separated from the environment.

Cold Dark Matter by Cornelia Parker.

What if we dropped or exploded everyday objects under a super high-frame rate cinematography, and gave ourselves a way of swiping through the chaotic motion? Lots of interesting interactions to explore there.

Touching through glass

This next experiment really fascinated us. We shot a glass jar full of thread bobbins rotating in front of the camera, on the iPad you can swipe to explore these beautiful, intricate colourful objects.

There is a completely new dimension here, in that you are both looking at a glass jar and touching a cold glass surface. The effect is almost uncanny, a somewhat realistic sense of touch has been re-introduced into the cold, smooth iPad screen. We’re great fans of Bret Victor’s brilliant rant on the problems of the lack of tactility in ‘pictures under glass‘, and in a way this is a re-inforcement of that critique: tactility is achieved through an uncanny visual re-inforcement of touching cold glass. This one really needs to be in your hands to be fully experienced.

And it made us think, what if we did all product photography that was destined for iPads inside gorgeous Victorian bell jars?

Nick realised this as an App on a first-generation iPad:

Each of the scenes in the Swiping through Cinema app are made up of hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of individual images, each extracted from a piece of real-time HD video. It is the high speed manipulation of these images which creates one continuous experience, and has only become possible relatively recently.

During our time developing Mag+, we learnt a great deal about using images on tablets. With the first-generation iPad, you needed to pay careful attention to RAM use, as the system could kill your app for being excessively greedy, even after loading only a handful of photographs. We eventually created a method which would allow you to smoothly animate any number of full-screen images.

With that code in place, we moved onto establishing a workflow which would allow us to shoot footage and be able to preview it within the app in a matter of minutes. We also consciously avoided filling the screen with user interface elements, which means that the only interaction is direct manipulation of what you see on-screen.

With the Retina display on the third-generation iPad, we’re really excited by the prospect of being able to move through super crisp and detailed image sequences.

We’re really excited about re-invigorating photographic and cinematographic techniques for iPads and touchscreens, and finding out how to do new kinds of interactive product imagery in the process.

351 is a Harshad number, sum of five consecutive primes and also the designation of an extremely-loud V8 engine by Ford from the 1960s.

Here’s what’s revving at BERG this week, as recounted around our big red table on Tuesday morning…

Simon as per usual is running all our projects in the studio and also making sure Little Printer and BERG Cloud gets delivered on time. This week we’re finishing up a few client projects, so he’s helping wrap them up and deliver them to their respective homes. He’s also working on documentation for Little Printer, and helping with our ongoing sales process.

Timo’s working with Oran O’Reilly on editing some films for Chaco, and planning some Uinta filming with me. He’s also been doing some design research with Nick that hopefully we can show very soon. He’s the lead on one of the new client projects coming into the studio, codenamed ‘Silverton’, so he’s starting some research on that.

Andy’s working hard on Little Printer – paying particularly attention to assembly, diagnostics, testing samples, and certification. He’s also been investigating manufacturing options for Ojito – an invention of ours that we may revisit shortly.

Alice’s week is full of Little Printer dev work and Guardian Cryptic Crossword wrangling at lunchtime around our big red table, with our visiting cryptic expert, Phil Wright.

Nick’s working on Little Printer hardware and software with Phil and James Darling – and as I mentioned doing a spot of design research and filming with Timo.

James is helping NL with all of the LP work to get us to the next milestone, which is a list on a whiteboard with words on it I am not clever enough to understand. Luckily for me, James, Nick, Phil and Alice are more than clever enough.

Joe’s working pretty much full-time on the final presentation for Uinta’s Kletting project, making storyboards and images with Alex to communicate new service concepts.

The graphic style of the deliverable that they’ve come up with is lovely – halfway between storyboards, comic books, system diagrams and arresting montages of images that communicate some quite complex things really clearly.

Alex has been heads down on Kletting final deliverable work with Joe, teaching at the LCC for a day today, finalising our online shop designs for BERG Cloud, packaging design for Little Printer and starting to do some really brilliant product graphic experiments for the BERG Cloud ‘Bridge’ unit.

Denise has been supporting Joe and Alex as the creative director on the Kletting work, applying her service-design expertise to Little Printer stuff. In her non-copious spare time thinking about some iPad experiments with typography and doing a little bit of character design for an animated sequence Timo and myself are planning for a Uinta film.

MW’s been really pushing on our sales process to make sure it’s bringing in the right sort of work for the studio and in tandem with that thinking about project planning for the different shapes of new projects that are coming in, which will stretch us in new and interesting ways we hope. He’s also dealing with our finances along with Helen, and getting used to using a Windows Mobile phone after years of iOS…

Helen’s deep into spreadsheets, running the studio, replying to people getting in touch with us with various requests and helping MW with the finances.

I’ve been helping with the finishing stages of our current projects for Uinta, all of which I’m pleased as punch with – and concentrating on sales with MW to line up what we’re doing for clients through the spring and into summer.

We had a visit from our friend Einar of Voy, and we’re expecting some students from his university AHO in Oslo later this afternoon.

^ Daff Photo by BERG Alumni Paul Mison

Other than that – Happy St. Davids Day, and happy week 351!

What have we been looking at this week?

Telecommunications services for the 1990s

Friend of BERG Tom Stuart is writing a book for O’Reilly: Understanding Computation

answering questions about computation and the fundamental mechanics of programming languages: how do they really work? what can they really do? what do the programs we write in them really mean?

Music video watch:

“lonely AI whose efforts to reach out to its creators ends in tragedy” by @johnpavlus.

Injection moulding watch:

Injection moulding of 72 screw caps in less than 3 secs

Mattel’s Apptivity iPad toys enhance ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Cut the Rope’, and ‘Angry Birds’ gameplay

Pneutu.be

Nine block pattern generator

Wrap Your Head Around These Gears

The Strongest Weapon In the World a.k.a. Weapons of Mass Happiness / 2006

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Nike+ new sensor array using Bluetooth LE.

The Mu

Weekend in SF from robert mcintosh on Vimeo.

Related: CINESTAR-360 COMPLETE PACKAGE

And the quest for a studio dog continues, Maddie is our inspiration.

Suwappu – the augmented-reality toy we invented with Dentsu London is a nominee this year in the Digital category of the Designs Of The Year show at London’s Design Museum.

It’s in great company – with other nominees in the category such as the Kinect, the Guardian’s iPad app (which we also consulted on, with Mark Porter and the brilliant internal team at the paper), High Arctic by UVA and others.

The Suwappu certainly get around a bit – here they are last year where they went to Pop!Tech with me to speak about toys, play and learning in a Robot-Readable World.

And last year they also lived for a while at MoMA, at the Talk To Me exhibit…

We worked with Dentsu London from their original idea to bring them to life through model-making and animation, and then build working prototype software on the cutting-edge of what’s possible in computer-vision on smartphones.

It’s great to have partnerships like this that can rapidly get all the way from a strategic idea ‘What if toys were a media channel’ through to working, real things that can be taken to market.

That’s our favourite thing!

Of course – it’s a lovely bonus when they get recognised in a wider cultural context such as MoMA or the Design Museum.

As well as making our own products, we spend most of our time in the studio working closely in partnership with clients to create new things for them – making strategy real through research, design, making and communication.

Do get in touch if you and your company would like to work with us this way.

Back in 2009, BERG created Here & There — a horizonless projection of Manhattan, and a new kind of city map that let you see simultaneously where you are and where you’re going. (The art prints are not currently on sale, and we’re not currently planning a reprint.)

Last year, the uptown and downtown maps were included in Talk to Me, an exhibit at MoMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York – about design, things, technology and people, alongside some incredible peers and inspirational design work. (Read about Here & There on the Talk to Me website.)

(Here & There at Talk to Me, photo by Fiona Romeo.)

Last week, our Here & There maps became the latest addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

I feel privileged and proud that our maps of Manhattan now have a permanent home in New York and at MoMA!

Many thanks to MoMA’s Acquisition Committee, and huge congratulations to the team: Jack Schulze, James King, and Campbell Orme.

If you’d like to read more, our previous blog posts about Here & There dig into the appearances and design influences of the project.

(A thought… we’ve been wondering about Here & There for other cities, perhaps as public display and taking the concept in new directions. It would have to be in partnership with a brand, so if you have any ideas then do get in touch: info@berglondon.com.)

A prime, the sum of 3 consecutive primes, and the number of seats in the Swedish Parliament it would seem.

Retrospective (and rather list-like) week notes this week, and what a week! Not least, there have been 3 babies born, safely and I’m sure soundly. Hooray!

In the studio it’s been busy as usual. Simon’s been out and about wrapping up a project for Uinta. Matthew’s been juggling a mix of sales and interviews around Little Printer.

Nick has been doing a marvellous job traversing the full height of the Little Printer/Berg Cloud stack, and moving house, to top it all.

Joe, Alex and Denise have also been working on a part of the Uinta wrap up (called LaMotte) while cracking on apace with the comms surrounding another project (called Kletting).

James and Alice have been licking the cloud-side bits of Berg Cloud into shape. Some significant heavy lifting going on.

Denise is continuing to refine information architectures and feeding into Kletting, whilst joining Alex, Simon and myself for some Little Printer packaging design. Good stuff.

Timo was away for the start of the week, but back in time to launch our next BERG event at St. Bride’s on March the 21st, and in time to see it sell out!

We’ve just had another cracking Friday demos, with a special guest appearance from Matt Biddulph, who’s here for 2 weeks. Lovely.

Things are moving apace. We’ve just had cake to celebrate Matthew’s birthday. It’s drive-time.

That was week 349.

Friday links for week 346, a few things that have been zipping around our mailing list for the last 5 days. I’m keeping it image heavy this week.

Jones sent around the slightly terrifying ‘math blind AI that teaches itself basic number sense’. He also pointed out this article from Don Norman on AI:

The point is that AI is now powerful enough to be commonplace. Not only does it assist in such mundane tasks as restaurant selection, but it helps out in critical safety situations such as military applications, the control of industrial equipment, and driving.

Timo found this discussion on the ethnography of robots.

After reading the Steve Jobs biography this came as no shock, but this post on Apple’s attention to detail with packaging is a good read, and something we’re going to be obsessing over as a studio in the coming months.

There was also a lot of discussion over Ubuntu’s new interface, dismissing menu bars for a launcher style UI:

In our continuing quest to invent a reason to buy a quadcopter to fly around the beams of our new office ceiling all day, Alice sent around this clip of an autonomous flying tracking robot:

We’ve had a lot of incredible pictures of the solar storm flying around. This is a good one:

This is another good one:

And on a similar note this timelapse video of the Yosemite National Park is worth a watch.

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

Via Tom Armitage we found this knitted waveform scarf of the amen break by Andrew Salomone:

Which also revealed the ‘Recursive Cosby Jumper‘:

And the ‘Bitmap balaclava‘:

That’s it for this week. Here’s a picture of a tiny smiling pig. Enjoy your weekends.

We started this week, as all weeks should be started. With a video of a creature, on YouTube. Not a kitten, but a corvid. A crow.

There’s something completely delightful about this. As I watched it slide down the roof I found myself thinking – ‘Ha! nice, but lucky’. As I watched the rest of the video, I thought it was less luck, and more that the crow was having fun.

There’s some discussion about it here. I thought this was interesting:

‘… when humans look at a crow doing something human-like, they have a very hard time not seeing themselves as the crow.”

It reminds me of Hello Little Fella, where people see human faces in — as Wikipedia puts it — ‘vague and random stimulus’. Turns out there’s a word for that, and it’s Pareidolia. There’s also a word for the loss of this ability, ‘Prosopagnosia’. It’s taking a huge amount of strength not to fall down a Wikipedia worm hole right now, but the links are there if you have more time. (Chuck Close, a painter of hyperrealistic portraits has prosopagnosia. Apperceptive prosopagnosia is particularly interesting.)

Anyway, to continue.

Alex shared a link to a beautiful 360 degree panorama from the Shard at dusk, and this periscope rifle. I hope the two are unrelated.

After some time out of the office, Matt Jones has been on a link-sharing roll this week. There’s an open source espresso machine (which came via Jennifer Magnolfi), and a piece entitled “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, by BERG friend Jamais Cascio, discussing the problems of future technology prediction.

There was also this Sinclair advert from 1983, and a rather spectacular advert for a dishwasher — a question of which Matt asks: “Is this the best advert ever? Lady fighter pilots, jetpack robot transforming baby bjorn dishwashers and coffee…”

Nick sent us this link of a 3d printing machine that works with concrete. It’s beautiful to watch…

And Alex also shared this link of a record player that plays slices of wood…

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

And that’s all for now. Early links this week – so enjoy the rest of the day, and have a great weekend.

Apologies for the late Friday links post! I had a rather epic Friday the 13th. Apparently there are two more of them in 2012 which is a lot for one year. (Damn these leap years that start on a Sunday!) I think I’ll spend those other two in bed. Or better yet, a cave. Anyway, to the good stuff…

Matt Jones sent us a link to this blog entry about the portrayal of Mars as a communist utopia in Russian popular culture. It’s worth having a look for the images if nothing else.

Also via Jones came a link to the new BMW Art Car designed by Jeff Koons which Jones described as “well new aesthetic“:

Joe sent us a link to this BBC News story about Sesame Street teaming up with Microsoft and using the Kinect to create “two-way television”.

Nick sent a link to this video of dynamic face remapping which is both fascinating and quite creepy:

Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Simon sent us a link to PINOKY which looks like it might be fun to play with for all of about 15 minutes:

Finally, via our friend and former BERG colleague Tom Armitage we discovered Fingle, the iPad game based around the thrill of touching someone else’s fingers:

Fingle Gameplay Trailer from Game Oven Studios on Vimeo.

That’s it for this last week’s links! Enjoy your week!

Factoid of the week: the year 344 was a leap year starting on a Sunday. As is 2012. How about that.

Week 344 in the BERG studio has a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Joe rejoined the studio (back from the US trip with Jones & Webb) on Tuesday. Jones stayed in the US for a couple of extra days but has just arrived back in the studio, straight from the airport. What can I say, he is hardcore. Webb was at CES in Las Vegas yesterday (we can’t wait to get his report) and continues his US mini-tour in San Francisco today. James Darling is still on a tropical beach somewhere. Other BERG folk have been out to see GPs and osteos, track down packages, run various errands, etc. At the same time, we’ve had a number of visits from clients/partners and also have several contractors spending time in the studio this week. So it’s still felt like the busy, buzzing hub that it usually is.

Let me say a quick word about two people who have been mentioned in passing in previous weeknotes without much other explanation as to who they are. Phil Wright is a contractor who has been helping us out with the development of Little Printer since April of last year. He spends most days in the studio and has his own desk and everything, so although he remains on contract status, he feels like part of the regular BERG team. Helen Rogers joined us for two afternoons a week at the beginning of December to start training to take over for me as our Studio Manager when I go on maternity leave at the beginning of February. From this week she’s up to four afternoons a week, and from the start of February, she’ll be four full days a week. It’s been a treat to work with her thus far as she is super clever and catches onto everything so quickly. It’s nice knowing that the studio will be in very competent hands when I step away in a few weeks. Watch for more info about her to show up in the Studio section of the website soon!

As for the rest of the BERGians, this week Simon is doing some rounding off of project costs for 2011 and looking at capacity planning for 2012, leading some workshops on the continued development and future of Little Printer, coordinating various bits of Uinta projects that we have on the go, and working through the final issues that still need to be resolved in the new studio. In case you missed it, he also posted adverts for two new positions that we’re looking to hire for. If you’re interested in working for BERG, please do have a look to see if either of those describes you!

Nick has been working on the technical architecture for BERG Cloud, thinking about chips and font rendering for Little Printer and doing some work on the Suwappu app.

Joe has been catching up on what he missed being out for a week and getting his feet back under him. He’s mainly working on integrating animation in a couple of Uinta projects.

Denise is still very generously handling most of the enquiries that come in about BERG Cloud and Little Printer. She’s also continuing work on the UI and IA for the internet side of Little Printer.

Alex has the fun job of developing the brief for the Little Printer packaging and unboxing experience. He’s still doing some work on Uinta this week and is also helping to make the new studio a happier, more accommodating place with a functional doorbell and signage.

Alice is also involved in the font rendering work for Little Printer and is doing some early stage investigative work into dev tools for people who want to create their own publications for Little Printer.

Timo is working on a Uinta animation brief and is also doing some shooting for a 90 second test pilot. I’m sure more will be revealed about that in good time, but it’s potentially pretty exciting.

Andy is making good use of our CitySpring courier account, sending various components hither and yon. He’s also having conversations about what should be printed on the back of Little Printer. I suppose most people don’t really think too much about the copy on the back of their electronics, but it turns out it’s pretty important.

As for me, I have been doing all the usual financial admin, trying to wrap up some last bits of business around moving studio, ordering office supplies, handling all the general (i.e. non-Little Printer or BERG Cloud) enquiries that come in to the studio, etc. Today I get to teach Helen how to run the quarterly VAT return. (Exciting stuff, eh?) And I’ve been getting kicked in the ribs (from the inside) pretty much the whole time I’ve been typing this. Maybe that second cup of tea wasn’t such a great idea after all…

Quick update on Monday January 23rd: thanks to all who’ve applied already! We’ll be accepting applications for these positions until Friday 27 January.

We’re looking to expand the studio a little more as we begin 2012.

BERG is a thirteen-strong design studio at present, made up of a mixture of multi-skilled designers and creative technologists researching and developing media and technology. We also have a super team of extras who help us out. There’s more about our work here.

We’re beginning the search for a couple of new people to join us!

Firstly a Business Development Manager, part time. This person will manage our pipeline of upcoming consultancy work, finding and shaping new projects, working with existing clients and finding new ones with whom BERG can do exciting work.

Secondly – another Project Manager. You’ll be working across a few of our internal projects like Little Printer and BERG Cloud as well as client projects, ensuring things run smoothly and efficiently in the studio.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, then you can download the full job descriptions.

To apply, please send your CV with a covering note in to info@berglondon.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

This is a version of a talk that I gave at the “In Progress” event, staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine.

It builds on some thoughts that I’ve spoken about at some other events in 2011, but I think this version put it forward in the way I’m happiest with.

Having said that, I took the name of the event literally – it’s a bit of a work-in-progress, still.

It might more properly be entitled ‘Pets & Pot-plants’ rather than ‘Gardens & Zoos’ – but the audience seemed to enjoy it, and hopefully it framed some of the things we’re thinking about and discussing in the studio over the last year or so, as we’ve been working on http://bergcloud.com and other projects looking at the near-future of connected products.

And – with that proviso… Here it is.

Let me introduce a few characters…

This is my frying pan. I bought it in Helsinki. It’s very good at making omelettes.

This is Sukie. She’s a pot-plant that we adopted from our friend Heather’s ‘Wayward Plants‘ project, at the Radical Nature exhibit at the Barbican (where “In Progress” is!)

This is a puppy – we’ll call him ‘Bruno’.

I have no idea if that’s his name, but it’s from our friend Matt Cottam’s “Dogs I Meet” flickr set, and Matt’s dog is called Bruno – so it seemed fitting.

And finally, this is Siri – a bot.

And, I’m Matt Jones – a designer and one of the principals at BERG, a design and invention studio.

There are currently 13 of us – half-technologists, half-designers, sharing a room in East London where we invent products for ourselves and for other people – generally large technology and media companies.

This is Availabot, one of the first products that we designed – it’s a small connected product that represents your online status physically…

But I’m going to talk today about the near-future of connected products.

And it is a near-future, not far from the present.

In fact, one of our favourite quotes about the future is from William Burroughs: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out…“

A place we like to ‘cut into the present’ is the Argos catalogue! Matt Webb’s talked about this before.

It’s really where you see Moore’s Law hit the high-street.

Whether it’s toys, kitchen gear or sports equipment – it’s getting hard to find consumer goods that don’t have software inside them.

This is near-future where the things around us start to display behaviour – acquiring motive and agency as they act and react to the context around them according to the software they have inside them, and increasingly the information they get from (and publish back to) the network.

In this near-future, it’s very hard to identify the ‘U’ in UI’ – that is, the User in User-Interface. It’s not so clear anymore what these things are. Tools… or something more.

Of course, I choose to illustrate this slightly-nuanced point with a video of kittens riding a Roomba that Matt Webb found, so you might not be convinced.

However, this brings us back to our new friends, the Bots.

By bot – I guess I mean a piece of software that displays a behaviour, that has motive and agency.

Let me show a clip about Siri, and how having bots in our lives might affect us [Contains Strong Language!]

Perhaps, like me – you have more sympathy for the non-human in that clip…

But how about some other visions of what it might be like to have non-human companions in our lives? For instance, the ‘daemons’ of Phillip Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials‘ trilogy. They are you, but not you – able to reveal things about you and reveal things to you. Able to interact naturally with you and each other.

Creatures we’ve made that play and explore the world don’t seem that far-fetched anymore. This is a clip of work on juggling robot quadcopters by ETH Zurich.

Which brings me back to my earlier thought – that it’s hard to see where the User in User-Interfaces might be. User-Centred Design has been the accepted wisdom for decades in interaction design.

I like this quote that my friend Karsten introduced me to, by Prof Bertrand Meyer (coincidentally at professor at ETH) that might offer an alternative view…

A more fruitful stance for interaction design in this new landscape might be that offered by Actor-Network Theory?

I like this snippet from a formulation of ANT based on work by Geoff Walsham et al.

“Creating a body of allies, human and non-human…”

Which brings me back to this thing…

Which is pretty unequivocally a tool. No motive, no agency. The behaviour is that of it’s evident, material properties.

Domestic pets, by contrast, are chock-full of behaviour, motive, agency. We have a model of what they want, and how they behave in certain contexts – as they do of us, we think.

We’ll never know, truly of course.

They can surprise us.

That’s part of why we love them.

But what about these things?

Even though we might give them names, and have an idea of their ‘motive’ and behaviour, they have little or no direct agency. They move around by getting us to move them around, by thriving or wilting…

And – this occurred to me while doing this talk – what are houseplants for?

Let’s leave that one hanging for a while…

And come back to design – or more specifically – some of the impulses beneath it. To make things, and to make sense of things. This is one of my favourite quotes about that. I found it in an exhibition explaining the engineering design of the Sydney Opera House.

Making models to understand is what we do as we design.

And, as we design for slightly-unpredictable, non-human-centred near-futures we need to make more of them, and share them so we can play with them, spin them round, pick them apart and talk about what we want them to be – together.

I’ll just quickly mention some of the things we talk about a lot in our work. The things we think are important in the models, and designs we make for connected products. The first one is legibility. That the product or service presents a readable, evident model of how it works to the world on it’s surface. That there is legible feedback, and you can quickly construct a theory how it works through that feedback.

One of the least useful notions you come up against, particularly in technology companies, is the stated ambition that the use of products and services should be ‘seamless experiences’.

Matthew Chalmers has stated (after Mark Weiser, one of the founding figures of ‘ubicomp’) that we need to design “seamful systems, with beautiful seams”

Beautiful seams attract us to the legible surfaces of a thing, and allow our imagination in – so that we start to build a model in our minds (and appreciate the craft at work, the values of the thing, the values of those that made it, and how we might adapt it to our values – but that’s another topic)

Finally – this guy – who pops up a lot on whiteboards in the studio, or when we’re working with clients.

B.A.S.A.A.P. is a bit of an internal manifesto at BERG, and stands for Be As Smart As A Puppy – and it’s something I’ve written about at length before.

It stems from something robotics and AI expert Rodney Brooks said… that if we put the fifty smartest people in a room for fifty years, we’d be luck if we make AIs as smart as a puppy.

We see this an opportunity rather than a problem!

We’ve made our goal to look to other models of intelligence and emotional response in products and services than emulating what we’d expect from humans.

Which is what this talk is about. Sort-of.

But before we move on, a quick example of how we express these three values in our work.

“Text Camera” is a very quick sketch of something that we think illustrates legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP neatly.

Text Camera is about making the inputs and inferences the phone sees around it to ask a series of friendly questions that help to make clearer what it can sense and interpret. It kind of reports back on what it sees in text, rather through a video feed.

Let me explain one of the things it can do as an example. Your smartphone camera has a bunch of software to interpret the light it’s seeing around you – in order to adjust the exposure automatically.

So, we look to that and see if it’s reporting ‘tungsten light’ for instance, and can infer from that whether to ask the question “Am I indoors?”.

Through the dialog we feel the seams – the capabilities and affordances of the smartphone, and start to make a model of what it can do.

So next, I want to talk a little about a story you might be familiar with – that of…

I hope that last line doesn’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…

But – over the last year I’ve been talking with lot to people about a short scene in the original 1977 Star Wars movie ‘A New Hope’ – where Luke and his Uncle Owen are attempting to buy some droids from the Jawas that have pulled up outside their farmstead.

I’ve become a little obsessed with this sequence – where the droids are presented like… Appliances? Livestock?

Or more troublingly, slaves?

Luke and Uncle Owen relate to them as all three – at the same time addressing them directly, aggressively and passive-aggressively. It’s such a rich mix of ways that ‘human and non-human actors’ might communicate.

Odd, and perhaps the most interesting slice of ‘science-fiction’ in what otherwise is squarely a fantasy film.

Of course Artoo and Threepio are really just…

Men in tin-suits, but our suspension of belief is powerful! Which brings me to the next thing we should quickly throw into the mix of the near-future…

This is the pedal of my Brompton bike. It’s also a yapping dog (to me at least)

Our brains are hard-wired to see faces, it’s part of a phenomena called ‘Pareidolia‘

It’s something we’ve talked about before on the BERGblog, particularly in connection with Schoolscope. I started a group on flickr called “Hello Little Fella” to catalogue my pareidolic-excesses (other facespotting groups are available).

This little fella is probably my favourite.

He’s a little bit ill, and has a temperature.

Anyway.

The reason for this particular digression is to point out that one of the prime materials we work with as interaction designers is human perception. We try to design things that work to take advantage of its particular capabilities and peculiarities.

I’m not sure if anyone here remembers the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot?

The Newton was an incredible technological attainment for it’s time – recognising the user’s handwriting. The Palm instead forced us to learn a new type of writing (“Graffiti“).

We’re generally faster learners than our technology, as long as we are given something that can be easily approached and mastered. We’re more plastic and malleable – what we do changes our brains – so the ‘wily’ technology (and it’s designers) will sieze upon this and use it…

All of which leaves me wondering whether we are working towards Artificial Empathy, rather than Artificial Intelligence in the things we are designing…

If you’ve seen this video of ‘Big Dog’, an all-terrain robot by Boston Dynamics – and you’re anything like me – then you flinch when it’s tester kicks it.

To quote from our ‘Artificial Empathy’ post:

Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.

Of course, before we get too carried away by artificial empathy, we shouldn’t forget what Big Dog is primarily designed for, and funded by…

Anyway – coming back to ‘wily’ tactics, here’s the often-referenced ‘Uncanny Valley’ diagram, showing the relationship between ever-more-realistic simulations of life, particularly humans and our ‘familiarity’ with them.

Basically, as we get ever closer to trying to create lifelike-simulations of humans, they start to creep us out.

It can perhaps be most neatly summed up as our reaction to things like the creepy, mocapped synthespians in the movie Polar Express…

The ‘wily’ tactic then would be to stay far away from the valley – aim to make technology behave with empathic qualities that aren’t human at all, and let us fill in the gaps as we do so well.

Which, brings us back to BASAAP, which as Rodney Brooks pointed out – is still really tough.

Bruno’s wild ancestors started to brute-force the problem of creating artificial empathy and a working companion-species relationship with humans through the long, complex process of domestication and selective-breeding…

…from that point the first time these kind of eyes were made towards scraps of meat held at the end of a campfire somewhere between 12-30,000 years ago…

Some robot designers have opted to stay on the non-human side of the uncanny valley, notably perhaps Sony with AIBO.

Here’s an interesting study from 2003 that hints a little at what the effects of designing for ‘artificial empathy’ might be.

We’re good at holding conflicting models of things in our heads at the same time it seems. That AIBO is a technology, but that it also has ‘an inner life’.

Take a look at this blog, where an AIBO owner posts it’s favourite places, and laments:

“[he] almost never – well, make it never – leaves his station these days. It’s not for lack on interest – he still is in front of me at the office – but for want of preservation. You know, if he breaks a leg come a day or a year, will Sony still be there to fix him up?”

(One questioner after my talk asked: “What did the 25% of people who didn’t think AIBO was a technological gadget report it to be?” – Good question!)

Some recommendations of things to look at around this area: the work of Donna Haraway, esp. The Companion Species Manifesto.

Also, the work of Cynthia Brezeal, Heather Knight and Kacie Kinzer – and the ongoing LIREC research project that our friend Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is working with, that’s looking to studies of canine behaviour and companionship to influence the design of bots and robots.

In science-fiction there’s a long, long list that could go here – but for now I’ll just point to the most-affecting recent thing I’ve read in the area, Ted Chiang’s novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” – which I took as my title for a talk partly on this subject at UX London earlier in the year.

In our own recent work I’d pick out Suwappu, a collaboration with Dentsu London as something where we’re looking to animate, literally, toys with an inner life through a computer-vision application that recognises each character and overlays dialogue and environments around them.

I wonder how this type of technology might develop hand-in-hand with storytelling to engage and delight – while leaving room for the imagination and empathy that we so easily project on things, especially when we are young.

Finally, I want to move away from the companion animal as a model, back to these things…

I said we’d come back to this! Have you ever thought about why we have pot plants? What we have them in the corners of our lives? How did they get there? What are they up to?!?

(Seriously – I haven’t managed yet to find research or a cultural history of how pot-plants became part of our home life. There are obvious routes through farming, gardening and cooking – but what about ornamental plants? If anyone reading this wants to point me at some they’d recommend in the comments to this post, I’d be most grateful!)

Take a look at this – one of the favourite finds of the studio in 2011 – Sticky Light.

It is very beautifully simple. It displays motive and behaviour. We find it fascinating and playful. Of course, part of it’s charm is that it can move around of its own volition – it has agency.

Pot-plants have motives (stay alive, reproduce) and behaviour (grow towards the light, shrivel when not watered) but they don’t have much agency. They rely on us to move them into the light, to water them.

Some recent projects have looked to augment domestic plants with some agency – Botanicalls by Kati London, Kate Hartman, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi equips a plant not only with a network connection, but a twitter account! Activated by sensors it can report to you (and its followers) whether it is getting enough water. Some voice, some agency.

(I didn’t have time to mention it in the talk, but I’d also point to James Chamber’s evolution of the idea with his ‘Has Needs’ project, where an abused potplant not only has a network connection, but the means to advertise for a new owner on freecycle…)

Here’s my botanical, which I chose to call Robert Plant…

So, much simpler systems that people or pets can find places in our lives as companions. Legible motives, limited behaviours and agency can illicit response, empathy and engagement from us.

We think this is rich territory for design as the things around us start to acquire means of context-awareness, computation and connectivity.

As we move from making inert tools – that we are unequivocally the users of – to companions, with behaviours that animate them – we wonder whether we should go straight from this…

…to this…

Namely, straight from things with predictable and legible properties and affordances, to things that try and have a peer-relationship, speaking with human voice and making great technological leaps to relate to us in that way, but perhaps with a danger of entering the uncanny valley.

What if there’s an interesting space to design somewhere in-between?

This in part is the inspiration behind some of the thinking in our new platform Berg Cloud, and its first product – Little Printer.

We like to think of Little Printer as something of a ‘Cloud Companion Species’ that mediates the internet and the domestic, that speaks with your smartphone, and digests the web into delightful little chunks that it dispenses when you want.

Little Printer is the beginning of our explorations into these cloud-companions, and BERG Cloud is the means we’re creating to explore them.

Ultimately we’re interested in the potential for new forms of companion species that extend us. A favourite project for us is Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs” – a fantastic example of legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP.

Natalie went to communities near reclaimed-land that might still have harmful toxins present, and taught workshops where cheap (remember Argos?) robot dogs that could be bought for $30 or so where opened up and hacked to accommodate new sensors.

They were reprogrammed to seek the chemical traces associated with lingering toxins. Once release by the communities they ‘sniff’ them out, waddling towards the highest concentrations – an immediate tangible and legible visualisation of problem areas.

Perhaps most important was that the communities themselves were the ones taught to open the toys up, repurpose their motives and behaviour – giving them the agency over the technology and evidence they could build themselves.

In the coming world of bots – whether companions or not, we have to attempt to maintain this sort of open literacy. And it is partly the designer’s role to increase its legibility. Not only to beguile and create empathy – but to allow a dialogue.

As Kevin Slavin said about the world of algorithms growing around us – “We can write it but we can’t read it”

We need to engage with the complexity and make it open up to us.

To make evident, seamful surfaces through which we can engage with puppy-smart things.

As our friend Chris Heathcote has put so well:

Thanks for inviting me, and for your attention today.

FOOTNOTE: Auger & Loizeau’s Domestic Robots.

I didn’t get the chance to reference the work of James Auger & Jimmy Loizeau in the talk, but their “Carnivorous Robots” project deserves study.

From the project website:

“For a robot to comfortably migrate into our homes, appearance is critical. We applied the concept of adaptation to move beyond the functional forms employed in laboratories and the stereotypical fictional forms often applied to robots. In effect creating a clean slate for designing robot form, then looking to the contemporary domestic landscape and the related areas of fashion and trends for inspiration. The result is that on the surface the CDER series more resemble items of contemporary furniture than traditional robots. This is intended to facilitate a seamless transition into the home through aesthetic adaptation, there are however, subtle anomalies or alien features that are intended to draw the viewer in and encourage further investigation into the object.”

And on robots performing as “Companion Species”

”In the home there are several established object categories each in some way justifying the products presence through the benefit or comfort they bring to the occupant, these include: utility; ornament; companionship; entertainment and combinations of the above, for example, pets can be entertaining and chairs can be ornamental. The simplest route for robots to enter the home would be to follow one of these existing paths but by necessity of definition, offering something above and beyond the products currently occupying those roles.”

James Auger is currently completing his Phd at the RCA on ‘Domestication of Robotics’ and I can’t wait to read it.

Monday is the new Friday. We were moving studio last week, so it was a quiet week for links. Here we go:

Trillion frame per second video is pretty astonishing. “Nothing in the universe looks fast to this camera” according to MIT researcher Andreas Velten:

Here’s a Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher. This is the first time I’ve seen a reptile using a tablet device – I hope it’s not the last.

Timo was intrigued by looking behind the scenes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

These weeknotes are coming live from somewhere between Gatwick Airport and Haywards Heath, travelling at about 37mph. Joe and I are on our way to see Future Platforms who are doing some development work with us, and our fortnightly review and planning meetings are quite animated.

340 is the number of words that Betsy the Border Collie from Austria can understand. James Darling has hitch-hiked along the A340 near Aldermaston in Berkshire.

At the end of this week we are migrating to our new studio space. Co-ordinating the move of thirteen people from two locations in short time has been a bit of a challenge, and has involved much hard work from people with larger muscles than I. Here’s a little teaser of how our new space looks and how it’s changed over the last two weeks.

In the midst of packing up, we are still very busy on all projects. Timo, Alex and Matt Jones have been moving around Shoreditch by night filming for Uinta, stopping occasionally to watch footage and talk excitedly about what to shoot next over pizza and cola.

Work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud continues on many fronts. James D, Andy, Denise, Alice and Nick are variously looking at IA, infrastructure, manufacture plans, communications, whilst keeping up with the queries and comments we’ve been receiving via bergcloud.com, which have been super. They’ve have been keeping me, Matt W, increasingly-pregnant Kari and Denise busy in particular. If we haven’t quite got to your email yet we apologise, we’re doing our very best!

In January, Matt W (who you can hear on yesterday’s Radio Roundabout) will be clocking up at least 13,090 miles in the air en-route to a Uinta workshop, before dropping in on CES and meeting people to talk about Little Printer across the US. His itinerary is here if you’d like to catch him. Matt J and Joe will be attending at least the first part of this adventure.

This is a mere fly-by of what we’re up to, as usual, but I must now disappear to pack more things into crates.

Tonight, we are having a traditional Christmas dinner and a thimble of sherry to celebrate a year of good work (which I’ve been lucky enough to be part of for the past 7 months or so). I’ve been informed Matt Jones is bringing party games and Joe Malia may do a dance. I’m bracing myself.

After weeks of breathless hyperfunction, the studio has finally decompressed into a state of relative quiescence. This momentary intermission has witnessed a dispersal of people like dandelion seeds riding a collective sigh of relief. Did I really just write that? Jack can be found scaling the spectacular mountains of South Africa while Alice is shrouded in the shadows of York’s historic architecture. Denise spent the early week relaxing amongst the vineyards of Southern France and Nick chose to recuperate in Balham. In front of Battlefield 3 no doubt.

Back in the studio, the Little Printer announcement triggered a wave of public attention that quickly grew to a towering tsunami of electronic enquiries. Zendesk is fast becoming Application Of The Week and customer service is faster becoming a widely held expertise.

Simon has continued to display superhuman project management prowess until today when he conceded the fragility of a mortal shell and bowed out early with an unpleasant sounding cold. He has been involved heavily in pretty much all studio work and continues to be an organisational epicentre from home.

Kari spent the afternoon concurrently introducing Helen to the studio systems and pushing LP emails under the appropriate eyeballs.

Matt Jones is working hard to steer multiple projects for Uinta with one hand while orchestrating proposals and ‘sales’ with the other. It’s like watching Fantasia but with robots and rockets where enchanted brooms once stood.

Alex shifted his attention from creating nicely thought through visual design for Little Printer to nicely thought through visual design for Uinta. He continues to stick rigidly to ‘New Health Century’ when most have failed. Namely, myself.

Denise lends an assured lilt to customer service and continues to carefully broaden Little Printer’s personality.

When not wrapped up in paper suppliers, Andy is working closely with Uri on manufacture and with Durrell and Tom on “the Bridge”. He also attached some LEDs to a pair of gloves which looks well glam and most people thought was proper ace.

Timo has been joined by Alex in Berg 9 this week. It is said that is you listen carefully, at quiet moments in Shoreditch, you can hear the sound of Drum ‘n’ Bass emanating from their lofty tower. I think I saw Alex drag a sub-woofer up there the other day. I hope they’re ok. Timo is working on a proposal for Silverton while editing footage for Uinta and guiding UI thinking.

Matt W is working tirelessly to transform short emails into long phone calls and casting telescopic thoughts into the future to create the roadmap for Little Printer. He is also working on accounts.

James can be found scouting for ways to improve the LP IA. He returns with answers to questions we didn’t know we had. He briefly wore a snood like a sweatband and still looked cool.

Nick has returned from Balham and is now working closely with Tim Bacon to draw a vector between video, data and 3D software to mind bending effect. I just had a glance some work in progress. It’s difficult to comprehend what it all means but it looks incredible.

Lots will change next week. The mounting anticipation is hotter than a … you get the idea.

It’s week 337, which is a permutable prime. I imagine they’re pretty rare.

For our All Hands this week there were only 6 of us in the studio space, intended for 6. We could breathe. Jack, Timo and Denise were out filming our freshly returned Barry prototype. Nick was almost certainly with them, but he was on holiday so he ought not to have been. Joe and James were quarantined. Jones returned from a NESTA breakfast event where he was sparring with Usman Haque about the Internet of Things.

The remainder of the week was more of the same for the majority above, including the quarantine in Joe’s case. We’ve had just about enough of studio fever round here. Otherwise Alice, James and Alex are presently fighting the wall of todos in the run up to exciting things. Matthew is writing a talk and going over contracts.

There’s a new project with Uinta kicking off, while work on the existing briefs continues apace and new studio space preparations are high on the agenda. We’re excited about moving, but we’ve only got 5 days to have the space turned from an art gallery into a functioning studio with a meeting room and workshop which as yet, don’t exist. Plenty of site visits, photos, details and logistics filling up fair chunk of Simon, Kari and myself’s week.

Also taking up most of the week, from my perspective, was some longer-than-anticipated dental treatment. And due to these week notes being from my perspective, they reflect my week at BERG: quite short. Sorry.

That’s all from me. Back to the studio.

A bumper crop of videos this week.

Denise pointed to this from Wired UK, 2D patterns assembling into 3D objects once exposed to light.

You’ve probably all seen this ISS timelapse by now. But I can’t stop watching it.

Chairman Bruce‘s Venn diagram on product invention merits study.

In the ‘things you can spend money on dept.’ Matt W pointed to this New Aesthetic backpack, and Alex pointed out that our friend Brendan Dawes has got his new Beep store up and running which is awesome.

From our ‘robot-readable world dept’, Kari shared this advert she saw for a children’s toy video camera with face tracking A.R. capabilities

In the ‘giant nutty land-art dept’ Andy shared this sculpture in Germany

Alex shared this ‘superhydrophobic’ nanotech

Reminds me of ‘The Man in The White Suit’…

Robofold! Robot-Readable-haircuts for footballers!! Rhianna vomiting ribbons!!!

Finally, Kari won ‘subject line of the week’ prize with her email to the list entitled ‘Big Brass Nuts’… Which turned out to be this marvellous film about hand-casting a short run of beautiful metal things rather than a meditation on Schulze’s sales techniques…

Have a great weekend!

We staged a small event for Internet Week Europe – a night of drinks and ten minute talks. We were totally suprised when it sold out in under ten minutes!

Thanks to our great speakers: Alice Taylor, James Bridle, Karsten Schmidt, Fiona Romeo, Jamais Cascio, Russell Davies and Warren Ellis.

At the end of the night, I asked the packed little room at The Gopher Hole whether we should do it again – and the result was a resounding “yes” – so stay tuned in the new year!

Thanks to Beatrice, Kevin and all at The Gopher Hole, Penny Shaw at Internet Week Europe and most importantly everyone who came along on the night!

As the world starts testing Siri, with all the usuals, Alex found an interesting link discussing Siri’s personality. It’s fascinating times for copywriting in its many forms. As we get frustrated with product copy becoming over friendly, it’s tricky line to tread for the writers of AI. Siri seems to have it nailed, but it’ll be fun looking for the inevitable imitations over the next few years. (How many witty answers can you give to ‘What’s the meaning of life?’)

While we’re talking about Apple, Matthew sent around this link pointing to the origins of the iCloud logo. The golden ratio! So perfect. Only Apple could create such visual magic. Oh.

Matthew also sent around a link to this Monocle radio (above), which he spotted via @antimega. Described as ‘An update of the Heritage model’ it now has an iPod/iPhone remote control application and full coverage of DAB. Perhaps this heritage design (or the price tag) will ‘nurture the desire to keep':

“If you build in emotional value, people will keep products longer and take more care of it; this of course saves energy and materials. It is the difference between selling an ordinary hi-fi and selling amazing sound.”

Which is discussed further in this article, relating to products in general — found by Alex, on Core77.

Like everyone else we’ve been looking at the Lytro camera (above) – with its ‘shoot now focus later’ technology. Timo, sent around the first link to a written review, and Alex followed up with this additional review with videos.

We all loved this video of ‘quantum levitation’, too, first spotted by Alex.

Matthew pointed us at this waste reclamation power plant in the heart of Copenhagen:
“It’s a massive incinerator that burns household rubbish to make electricity.
Two things:
1. they’ve shaped it like a mountain, and in the winter it’ll have snow and 3 ski runs down from the top

2. it emits smoke—well, CO2. But instead of a plume, the smoke stack stores up the CO2 until it reaches 1 ton, and then puffs out a smoke ring.”

Wonderful!

The cold but sunny London mornings see us in the middle of week 332. We’re all much healthier this week, with last weeks human bugs all ticketed, fixed and filed.

Jack and Matt Jones are in New York as I type. They’ve gone for a mix of reasons; secret client meetings and non-secret public speaking.

As nice as NY is, it’s an exciting time to be in the studio. It feels like everything has come on leaps an bounds in the past few weeks. Projects are getting more visual—more tangible—by the day. Andy has just unwrapped a package which saw us all trailing in his wake on the path to Statham (the tiny back room in Berg). This is another part of Weminuche falling in to place—and it’s so easy to see how everyone’s different type of work will manifest itself now.

Alex and I have been creating the visual side of Weminuche, working closely with James and Alice. There’s a general feeling of delight as wireframes become working prototypes. (As a visual designer working on digital design, I still get so excited as things start working that I wish I could pick stuff up and squish it).

My part of the design is also uncovering bugs for Nick to wrangle. He’s extremely gracious every time ‘Oh, that’s good… It’s good to know that might happen, I’ll look into it now’. And he does. I keep waiting for the ‘ARGH! Enough! Can’t you just leave it for 5 minutes?!’ but it’s not happened as yet. Nick is working closely with Andy too, who is often buried headfirst in spreadsheets, and schematics.

Nick is also working with Joe and Simon, on the Uinta project. Again, it’s such a delight to see this developing, Joe’s design is beautiful, despite the fact that every time you talk to him he’s had some new kind of technological disaster. (Latest: laptop monitor has stopped working).

Timo is planning and editing new films. Due to our office space issues, he’s hidden away in our temporary other office (known as BERG 9), but does appear now and again for cups of tea and the odd meeting. I’m looking forward to seeing the plans for the next film, which will support some of the work Matthew is doing.

Kari and Simon are, as ever, the people that keep us going. Kari by booking flights for new workshops and continuing the ever frustrating search for new office space. It sounds like we’re getting there, but it’s certainly not been easy. Simon has been keeping control of client and internal projects, and doing a good job of keeping us in touch with some of the people outside the office we’re also working with.

All in all, interesting times.

The BERG studio list has been a bit quiet this week. I don’t know if it’s that everyone has been so buried in their work that they haven’t had much time to follow interesting links, or if it’s just been a quiet week out on the internets in general. A few noteworthy things have come floating past, though.

Via Matt Jones we discovered a simple but ingenious tool for any amateur tree climber: First Branch, “for when you want to climb a tree, but the first branch is just out of reach.”

Alex alerted us to Fast Company’s article about the NewProductWorks Collection where you can find “every product in food, beverage, household, health & beauty care, baby care, pet products, etc” going back as far as the 1960s. Of course “you” would need to be in a particularly qualified position because it is not, unfortunately, open to the public. I wonder if working for BERG would get me in. I would so love to see that.

Matt Jones sent this video of the Recon Scout Throwbot, a throwable robotic reconnaissance agent for use by the military, which doesn’t just seem like something out of science fiction, it actually is. (Sort of. Minus the intelligence anyway. So far…)

Also via Jones came news of a new ultrasound accessory for your smartphone. I’m sure there are plenty of celebrities who will be relieved to know that they only need to shell out $8,000 for their own private, in-home ultrasound equipment rather than $100,000. More seriously, this could be a great advance for global healthcare.

And finally, Joe delighted us with a magnetic liquid hedgehog from Russia:

Which then sent me into a rabbit hole of Ferrofluid videos on YouTube. There’s some pretty awesome stuff out there.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Congratulations to all the team at The Guardian for launching their iPad app this week.

BERG played a small role at the very beginning of the process with initial product workshops, Nick contributing his experience on iOS prototyping and Jack consulting on the interaction design with Mark Porter and the team.

Andy Brockie who led the internal design team there has put together a great ‘behind-the-scenes’ gallery of the process, and newspaper design guru Mark Porter has an in-depth blog post about his involvement here.

From that post, a snippet about some of the ‘algorithmic-art-director‘ workflow the team invented:

Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

It’s not quite the “Robot Mark Porter” that Schulze and Jones imagined in the workshops, but it’s as close as we’re likely to see in my lifetime. Of course robots do not make good subs or designers, so at this stage some humans intervene to refine, improve and add character, particularly to the article pages. Then the InDesign data goes into a digital sausage machine to emerge at the other end as HTML.

Fascinating stuff, and perhaps a hint of the near-future of graphic design…

It was a pleasure working with the team there, and Mark especially. The final result looks fantastic, and more importantly perhaps reads beautifully and downloads extremely quickly. Well done to all involved!

And now, we can now finally exclusively reveal our prototype sketch for Robot Mark Porter…

It’s Friday the 7th of October, and this is Berg Friday Links.

The recommended soundtrack for this edition of Friday Links is Keygen Jukebox, provided by Andy, and my favourite link of the week.

Alex provided us with this link to a 1971 Nintendo product.

We got excited enough about this new Roland 3D hobby mill that we started talking about the games consoles we used when we were kids.

There’s been a bit of interest in Point Of View videos on the list, bringing up these examples: The Stampede by Biting Elbows, Cinnamon Chasers – Luv Deluxe, Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW) and the game Mirror’s Edge.

We also had a mini discussion on the greater debate around what now seems to have been coined wackaging. Denise, the person I would most trust on this issue, gave us this:

Main thing is that writing in that style and doing it well isn’t easy. And it’s not quick. It doesn’t just trip off the tongue, its not like writing an email to your mates. Get it right, and people like it. Get it wrong and it’s really offensive. It’s also very difficult to tell people how to get it right. Christopher Hitchens explains it better:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

Alex provided us with this animated gif:

And finally, from Denise via She Went of Her Own Accord, is New Old Jokes Home:

My robot wife has gone to the Carribbean.
Jamaica?
No, she came ready-manufactured.

Have a good weekend.

We probably wouldn’t be doing what we do if Steve Jobs hadn’t done what he did.

To mark his passing this week, I asked the studio for their stories of first contact with Apple.

Kari:

In 1983 when I was 10 years old, my school got about 10 shiny new Apple IIe computers and decided that we should learn a little basic programming. They divided us into two groups. Half of the class learned Basic, and the other half – the group that I was in – learned Logo. I remember feeling like we were pretty important and very cool for learning how to do computer programming. And I loved that I could change a few letters and number and make the turtle do different things. It gave me a great sense of autonomy.

Alex:

The thing about buying an apple product is that you’re sold an experience. It’s not all about the industrial design of the product, or the UI, or anything else, it’s the russian doll effect of unpeeling layers of a sealed box and feeling like you’ve bought something really special, which is something I’d never really experienced with a consumer product until I bought my first iBook at uni. If you can make people smile before they’ve even lifted the product out of the box, I think you’re almost half way there.

Denise:

My first introduction to the word of computing was at home. We had a commodore PET and graduated to the BBC Micro. I have only one sibling, so aside from a few fights over who got to play space invaders next, we were lucky enough to be able to use a computer when we wanted to. It was never a big deal, there was no fear involved for six year old me.

Two things changed this. First, the BBC moved from the front room to my father’s study. Home computing was work computing, not a play thing. Second, we started ‘doing computers’ at school. This meant looking over the shoulders of 30 other kids at the one, perhaps two, computers available. It meant a fight to get to the front—a fight I wasn’t that fussed about joining. (I’d already seen a computer anyway).

And so I didn’t touch a computer again until university in the early 90s, by which time I’d learnt to fear them. We weren’t trained in ‘desktop publishing’ on my degree course. Yet again, scheduling educational computer time involved a bit of a fight, and so I squared up to a Mac at last, and wondered how the hell I was going to get the file I’d just made off the desktop and on to a disk.

After a split second’s thought, I picked up the picture of the file and put it on the picture of a disk. Seemed obvious. Was obvious. Worked. Turned out that using computers was really easy.

Better than that, it meant that when I said yes to my first design job as a penniless graduate, was handed a magazine to design and a deadline for the end of the week I had a tool to use. Not quite as easy as using a pencil, but not so far off.

At the end of the month, I got paid. Thanks Steve, for feeding me.

Joe:

One of my first encounters with a Mac was back in 1996 during a High School ‘Design & Technology’ lesson. I think it was a Macintosh LC 580. Anyway, it was reasonably new but already grubby with the greasy fingerprints of overzealous teenagers. I turned it on and the screen flickered with light. A blinking apparition of a disk appeared alongside a question mark. I remember taking this to mean that it had crashed so I reached back, opened my hand and struck the monitor really, really hard. The next thing I remember was a jolt of shock as the class teacher screamed at me from across the room. I got sent out. Apparently the question mark was normal.

The second and more favourable memory was the first time I saw pictures of the first iPhone on the internet. I remember looking at it and thinking that I was seeing the device that featured in so many of my sci-fi fuelled childhood dreams. A screen that you could hold in your palm. That would show you videos. That would let you communicate to your friends. Find your way around. Somehow Apple had made real something that I could only conjure up in my imagination and it felt magic to be part of the generation that got to see it happen.

Simon:

1994, using an Macintosh II in IT at secondary school. My only other prior exposure to computers had been Apricot and Amstrad (we had a CPC6128 with a colour screen). I was amazed by the tiny size and loading speed. No tapes! It was the first computer I’d ever used with more than one word processing font.

Matthew:

The first Mac I owned was an LC475, and that pizza box unit is still at my mum’s house, the insides chewed away by mice which is what happens if you leave computers hanging around in houses in the countryside. I loved that computer: I made fanzines and I made art. I connected to my first BBS, through a 2400 baud modem I bought from a classifieds ad at the back of a magazine. When I connected, that very first time, when I saw the future and everything changed, pivoted on the spot and pointed towards a much larger very different future, the stereo was playing Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The standout single from that album is called “Learning to Fly.”

The first Mac I saw was at a house of my dad’s friend, a man named Dave, and he had one of those all-in-one Macs, and I was very young. This was a long time before the LC475 that I had, and the strong memory of seeing it was the reason I would, when I was older, get that LC475. I was amazed at three things: the GUI which looked like pen-and-ink draftsmanship; that the power button was on the keyboard instead of being on the back of the box, and that the keyboard was a separate, independent thing; and that there was no computer: there was just the screen, the thing that you used. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at it for a long time.

Jack:

I don’t really care what anyone else than Steve does.

Timo:

‘Bloody Steve’ we used to shout, as Finder windows lost their positions, as CDs were teased with paperclips or the screens of Titanium laptops fell off. Schulze & I have lambasted Jobs over the years for faults in OSes and problems with Apple hardware, but that was before we realised how hard it is to do even basic hardware and software properly at scale. My respect for him grew enormously as Apple moved from computing and swallowed up ever more industries that I cared about. Perhaps the most significant thing I have learnt from Jobs is that his products were absolutely his politics.

My story:

It was 1986, I was 14, and working at Harris Printers in my hometown in South Wales after school everyday and most saturdays. I cleaned, collated, folded, packed print. Sometimes I got to make litho plates on the big Agfa camera, and sometimes I got to use the ancient treadle-powered letterpress. I sometimes got to do layout with Letraset and typesetting galleys from an IBM golfball printer. I convinced the owner that something called DeeTeePee was the next big thing, and we should buy a Mac Se30, Quark Xpress and Adobe Illustrator 1.0. I think with the Radius display and Laserwriter+ it must have come to about £20k or so. It was an incredible machine. What you saw was what you did was what you got. You moved things on a screen that seemed real, not abstractions. My only computer experiences, like most kids till then had been a BBC Model B, or a Vic-20, abstract and arcane. This was something that everyone, in the printers, in my family, my school friends – everyone – could see was different. It was when I first felt I wouldn’t have to choose between technology and art.

Thanks Steve.

Fact of the week: 330 is the number of dimples in a British golf ball according to Wikipedia.

So having been on holiday all of last week, I’m only just catching up with what’s been going on in the studio and am still not quite sure I’ve sussed it all out. Since I’m the one that actually makes up the blog rota, though, I have only myself to blame for assigning myself to write weeknotes the week after I’ve been on holiday. Trust me, I won’t do that again.

When I asked Matt Webb what last week was like, his summary was, “There was drama.” Unsurprisingly, when much of your work is dependent on the whims and wishes and ever-changing timelines of clients, things can go a bit pear-shaped. As regular readers of this blog will know, however, BERG is not a company that has all its eggs in one basket, so one client throwing us for a loop doesn’t completely knock us off balance. Nevertheless, there has been drama and so we’re having to deal with that.

In terms of what various folks are up to this week…

Matt Jones, Jack and Alex (who celebrated his one-year anniversary at BERG today!) are doing work on Uinta in preparation for a presentation on Thursday. Matt & Jack are also spending lots of time doing general company planning and re-planning and thinking about sales. Alongside all that, Jack has his fingers in Barry design. He’s also looking at lots of documents.

Barry is also occupying Alex, Denise, Alice, James, Nick, Matt Webb and Andy. Besides following up with various partners & suppliers and chasing China for quotes, Andy is specifically doing some reflecting on the last year of Barry development. (Side note: Because of my role and the fact that I don’t work on Fridays – thus missing weekly studio demos – I only get to see very small slivers of the progress that’s been made on Barry. I do catch a whiff of the excitement and anticipation around it every now and then, though. And I can say with some confidence: it’s going to be pretty spectacular, people.)

Simon, Alice, James and Nick had a meeting at the pub yesterday to make some decisions around Barry and are now working to implement those. There are still a number of near-term decisions that still need to be made, though. Since Nick, James and Alice are now sitting in the main room of the studio where I am (having previously been based in Statham next door), I’m overhearing lots more about the code and technology underlying Barry. Most of the time I have no idea what it means, but it’s rather fun to eavesdrop on anyway and to see them working to solve problems together.

Joe is mostly working on Uinta this week, fleshing out the system underneath the recently approved “look and feel”. He and Simon will be spending some time out of the studio this week meeting with partners who are doing some work on that project alongside us.

Simon is, as usual, skillfully balancing multiple project and clients and partners – this week it’s mostly Chaco, Uinta, Barry and Suwappu with the occasional random bit of SVK and other stuff thrown in. It involves lots and lots of post-it notes. Which is causing me a bit of anxiety because he’s out this afternoon and the wind is blowing the post-it notes around and I have no idea what sort of system he’s organised them into and if you come back and all your carefully assemble post-it notes are out of order, Simon, I apologise. Blame our need for fresh air.

And as well as dealing with the drama stirred up last week, Matt Webb is planning, thinking about finances & sales and having lots of coffee with various people. I hope for his sake some of that is decaf.

Timo’s holiday has stretched into this week and we’re looking forward to welcoming him back tomorrow.

As for me, I’m working furiously to catch up with all the bookkeeping, replying to lots of general studio correspondence, booking travel, updating spreadsheets, doing customer service for SVK (it’s not to late to buy one!) and chasing non-responsive suppliers and overdue invoices. And eating cake. There seems to be lots of cake this week.

I hope that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, there’s cake there too. Have a good week!

Alex shared this music video by Biting Elbows. Imagine what would happen if The Office met Peep Show and Doom. The first-person perspective makes this really engaging.

Matt W shared another first-person video from Cinnamon Chasers. Dark and compelling:

Jones shared this beautiful biological lightpainting:

Nick shared Kevin Karsch‘s work on inserting synthetic objects into still images.

Jones also shared Slate’s Robottke experiment. How easily could you be replaced by a robot?

And finally, though you’ve probably seen it already, this is some quantised dubstep dancing that Matt Webb sent round early in the week. If this could be synthesised, it’d make a great music visualisation.

Happy weekends, all (and an especially toasty one if you happen to be in the UK).