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Join our Little Printer and BERG Cloud team

We’re looking for someone to join our engineering team to work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud!

This is a full-time role in our London studio, and is primarily focused on the backend systems that power Little Printer and all other BERG Cloud products. You’ll need a strong core knowledge of Ruby on Rails, and a few other skills we’ve listed in our Stack Overflow Careers job listing.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/26841/backend-ruby-engineer-web-connected-physical-berg

Little Printer is the first of many ideas we want to bring to life. If you’re the kind of person who’s fascinated by the prospect of writing code not only for the Web but for actual physical objects, then we’d love to hear from you.

Email us at jobs@berglondon.com to get in touch.

Little Printer available for pre-orders now!

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.

Our practice Little Printer Hack Day

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!

Announcing a little something

You should definitely check out our new product: Announcing Little Printer and BERG Cloud.

Available 2012.

More about Little Printer here.

I am over the moon!

Week 431

“I don’t know why I find pictures of robots so exciting, but I do” – is a conversation I can hear going on right now. This week the studio is excited about film special effects and Grand Theft Auto 5. I am trying not to get sucked into a conversation about Breaking Bad. Don’t tell me.

What else is going on? Well, roughly this:

Little Printer
ASJ / NL: New Little Printer back end stuff, fixing bugs, finishing web sockets and generally making everything better.
AJ: Getting a stand ready for Future Fest
AB: Getting ready to go to xoxo in Portland. (Are you going too? Make sure you look after Alice and say hello. She has Little Printer badges.)
DW: IA, planning and writing.

Chaco
DF / DB / JS / NU / TH are all working on this. There’s a lot going on and it’s looking really nice. (I can say that without boasting as it’s nothing to do with me.) MC is overseeing things from one side, and DF has the other side covered.

Sinawava
AJ / JM are working hard on various aspects of this. Laurence is still with us too – “working on cloth and hair simulation”. This is something that surprised all of us. MC is overseeing things here too.

Devboards
AH is working on these – he’s also giving a talk at the V&A.

Pretending to be Matt and Helen
MW and HR are both away this week. We have JS covering in their absence and he seems to be doing quite well. We’ll never tell him though, it just goes to his head. KS is also working on this, doing a sterling job of email wrangling, so that MW doesn’t drown on his return.

Onwards!

week 430

I’m doing weeknotes this week, Matt is away on holiday in the US somewhere between deserts and mountains. I’ll be kicking off a new chaco brief we’re hoping to talk about in a month or so with Neil and our friends Tom and Durrell at Luckybite. Helen and Fraser are fighting institutions, HMRC and DHL respectively. Helen and I are also filling Matt’s shoes in his absence. Berglett, Gyfo, and Denise are working on bergcloud and little printer stuff. Adam is around 90% of the way through the new architecture and now has only the remaining 90% to finish. Joe and Laurence continue their epic journey in tech and animation for Sinawava.

Nearly… bloody… there….

Week 429

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!

Welcome Phil Gyford

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.

Week 425

‘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!

 

 

 

 

Week 424

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.

Week 423

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.

Week 422

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.

Week 421

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.

Friday Links

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.

corridor

Week 418

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

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.

Friday Links

It’s been a while since the last Friday Links. But I fear the Wrath of Alice, and as it’s my turn this week I’m posting them now before we get caught up in Friday Demos – and the Oculus Rift that Nick has bought in to the studio.

It’s been week of showing physical things here, really. Jack’s been rushing about like a man possessed with bits of paper, bits of plastic and things with wires hanging out the back. More #Flocks are being released into the world, and Alex and Andy have received new bits of the dev kit which are looking very nice indeed. Alice has also shared some awesome work on front end design and development for Remote (Little Printer) and so we’ve been looking at that too.

All of which is lovely of course, but it wont fill anyone’s need for productive procrastination. Things that are kind of work related but not so much they’re like doing *actual work* on a Friday afternoon.

Well, connected objects are the future as are wired/wireless homes, so here’s something that will help your research, shared by Alex:

The WiSee: WiSee uses WiFi signals to detect gestures from anywhere in your house
“Since WiFi signals are capable of passing through walls, WiSee can detect gestures made from neighboring rooms, breaking free from the line-of-sight method relied on by devices like Kinect and Leap Motion.” Insane.

And another, an augmented object, shared by Joe:

smarter objects – radio from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

Joe also shared a link to this piece on the Five Best Time Machines. We’ve made a time machine actually but we don’t really like to talk about it.

Joe also shared this:

And Adam responded with Lockitron (he sent this response last week – he’s been away on holiday this week. The time machine works, but just backwards and forwards a week or two at the moment.)

Alex also shared a link to a connected sign post, and in response, Joe linked to a piece by the London agency Greyworld.

And finally, a non-work link (for the office dweller). What on earth is this person doing? Whatever it is, it made me feel slightly sick.

Have a good weekend, and don’t try that at home. We’ve seen how it all ends.

Week 417

It is week 417. Matt has calls and meetings before he goes to Cambridge for the Springboard demo on Friday. Fraser is duelling with Zendesk in the absence of Kari. Alice and Alex are continuing to refresh the remote for Little Printer and BERG Cloud. Mark is grinding out emails and exploring new retail opportunities for us, later he is doing a talk. Gyfo is finishing some stuff on GitHub and designing some new Little Printer publications to hang off Google and Eventbrite. Helen is working on box build stuff for LP and wrapping the studio in cotton wool so she can go on holiday next week. Joe has invented a new design technique called reflexive wire framing (?). He’s working with a guest animator Laurence on Sinawava which kicks off this week. He’s also got some speculative r&d pots on the boil with me too. I’m working a lot with Lucky Bite on new products and Andy is as usual knee deep in hardware, Dev boards, flock and LP. All coming home to roost in a single lump of time. Neil is on the same train, assembling hardware and wrangling some packaging issues. Nick is debugging and sneezing, he has the fever.

Week 416

This week, we’ll take a whistle stop tour around the Berg studio, courtesy of Vine and a low quality smartphone camera.

Let’s begin at the entrance to Epworth House, where we pass through a set of sleek revolving doors.

If you’re on a bike, please feel free to drop it off in our temporary cycle storage facility.

Before we head into the studio, the top floor of the building provides a good view of London’s bustling Tech City.

A lift takes us to the studio.

Inside, the reception area offers people a chance to take the weight off their feet and have a chat about code.

Ahead of us, we find the engineering department. Complete with tools, hacking and hardware.

Through these blinds we can see the numbers and accounts being carefully handled.

In the corner we can see the Little Printer newsletter being written.

At lunch, designers, developers, engineers and business minded folk gather around the red tables to compare food and share stories.

If you want a cup of tea or coffee we have a small kitchen, replete with gentle reminder to wash up when you’re done.

We are lucky to share a studio with the brilliant Newspaper Club

And Luckybite

At the end of the week we present what we’ve been up to at Friday Demos. If it’s particularly good it might even get a round of applause.

And that’s about it. What better way to wrap things up and head to the pub for a quick pint in the evening sun.

See you next week!

Week 415

The 415 runs from Tulse Hill station to Elephant & Castle, it is also the name of a hostel in Bulgaria and a German type VIIC U-boat famous for nearly sinking the HMS Hurricane.

For BERG, 415 is the week when:

  • Helen caught 11 carp, tried not to catch a duck and then caught a cold.
  • Matt did a BERG shaped PechaKucha in the design museum.
  • Joe and Denise wrapped up for Uinta.
  • Jack stoked the fires in the NPD skunk works.
  • Kari  continued to power through the Royal Mail’s bureaucratic krypton factor to get compensation for lost little printers.
  • Alice grafted hard on a re-mastered BERG Cloud remote whilst plotting how to cerebrally maim the luddites at her intellectual showdown in Hay on Wye.
  • Alex lent his hand to some lovely circuit board cartography for our BERG Cloud Dev Board.
  • Fraser contemplated little printer publications on the Zendesk.
  • Andy, Adam and Nick tirelessly honed and fine tuned the Dev kit for our partners at Fabrica.
  • I found a rare picture of a specific German type VIIC submarine.

 

Helen fish

Week 414.

Taking Alex’s lead (oops) here are last week’s notes:

The 2nd Little Printer run is rolling on and Helen has been steering the good ship, ensuring the various parts don’t lose momentum. It’s a good chance to review the processes involved in bringing it into the world.

Matthew was out in various meetings and interviews. For the most part discussing this and latterly this. Mark’s been involved in such things too, among myriad other avenues of exploration.

Neil and I have been wrapping up some of the finer details of Kachina in time for delivery to the first recipient. Neil’s also been working on an as-yet-un-code-named project with Jack: much sketching. I’ve also been working with Phil W. on the BERGCloud hardware dev tools and doing some specific factory wrangling.

The illustrious Adam and Alice have been making some obvious and some less obvious improvements to remote and the BERG Cloud infrastructure in general. Nick’s been on that too, as well as prepping for some upcoming talks. Fraser and Kari have been fielding Zendesk curveballs and shipping out our paper refills. By the end of the week, Phil had was able to show us some of the cracking publication work he’s been doing (and you can see some of it too) at our delightful cheese and wine demos. See?

cheeseandwine

Joe and Denise have been working on another Uinta project which has been coming on nicely, and Denise is also collating interesting family-based uses of Little Printer. If you’ve any stories you’d like to share then please get in touch.

Toodle-oo.

Week 413

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!

Week 412

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!

Thursday links

Its Friday links, transposed to Thursday as I’m off to the beach tomorrow! Here’s a run-down of some of the what’s been flying around the studio mailing list this week.

Kokeshi Matches

Neil spotted some VERY cute matches on That Should Be Mine. As Denise pointed out, there’s loads more at www.kokeshi-m.com.

Alex spotted an article on factmag.com about artist Patrick Flanagan who uses “robot” drummers.

Alice passed round an article on Microsoft’s Illumiroom concept as reported on The Verge, augmenting your television by letting the content spill out into the surroundings.

hereistoday

Lastly Denise linked to a lovely site about the scale of time called hereistoday.com.

Although not strictly Friday Links material, I also made a post on engineering.bergcloud.com about our dev board progress, including a little animated gif showing it booting up.

Week 411

“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.

Week 410

Welcome to week 410. It’s almost like spring outside which means of course, that by the time you read this we’ll all be buried under 6ft of snow.

Oh well. Onwards!

This week, the general plan of action is:

Meetings:
Matt, Jack, Mark

Kachina:
Neil, Andy, Adam
(Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you what this is soon)

BERG Cloud:
Nick, Matt, Alex, Alice, Me

Little Printer & Remote:
Alex, Alice, Fraser, Kari, Helen, Phil, Me

NPD:
Joe, Jack

Another coming-soon thing that is currently nameless:
Helen

Admin:
Kari, Helen

So if you need us, you know where to find us. See you there.

Week 409

Welcome to week 409.

Phil is now officially in the building. Described as notorious we’re glad he’s found a new home here at BERG.

Lots of projects keeping us busy in the new office, not least Kachina which is coming to a head next week, and Sinawava which we are hoping to move on to the next stage.

What’s keeping most of us busy are plans for the new Dev Boards (more to come on that soon) and a refresh of bergcloud.com to give a better overview of how we talk about BERG Cloud.

Early-dev-board

Matt is mainly lunching and emailing and pivoting

Nick is mostly conducting end to end testing on Kachina, dev board meetings, and was last seen heading to an IoT event at Imperial College

Alice is starting a new BERG Cloud sprint, new publications display for remote and was receiving some sage advice on how to win at panels

Andy is dividing his time between Kachina and putting up shelves

I’m meeting clients working on our sales plan for the next 18 months and drinking lots of tea

Fraser is working his way through Zendesk emails and preparing a blog about submission process for publishers

Helen is going global on Little Printer fulfilment and looking at sales in other countries outside of the EU and US. Ambitious.

Adam is making sure Kachina talks to everything it needs to

Jack is doing sales and NPD and researching new components in his spare time

Alex is fixing up a new version of remote and preparing the new pages for bergcloud.com

Neil is making and making and making on Kachina

Phil is learning Ruby and making publications, publications, publications

Denise is harmonising all of our sales and marketing

Joe started the week a poor ill person, but has bounced back like Tigger by time of writing

Week 408

It’s week 408 and the new studio is looking nice. With bunting aplenty and BERG bits occupying all corners of rooms it’s now much less like an office and more like a home.

Here’s a few interesting facts about the new place for you:

– It’s opposite (what looks like) a castle and next to a strip club.

– It has two front doors and EIGHT windows. Real windows from which I can see birds. Sadly there are no birds outside today because it is snowing, again.

– Yesterday there were 19 pints of milk in the fridge. Today there are only 11. Oh and here’s a not very interesting fact about Old Street for you: Nowhere sells Nesquik.

– There is a very tall building which I can see from my desk that glows lilac in the evening light and has, on top, two very beautiful bright red lights. (Shame my  iPhone camera fails to captcha this).

IMG_0413

–  Newspaper Club are here too! (They brought bunting as well). I sit with them. They laugh a lot.

IMG_0416

Interesting facts aside. In this week’s All Hands, we discussed Weeknotes. What are Weeknotes? Why do we do them,? Who reads them? Should they continue?

Well, apparently Neil’s Mum reads them and this is as good a reason to continue as any, so here’s what’s happening this week…

– Matt is meeting people in the flesh and on the internet (Skype, not dating).

– Jack has also been in and out of meetings and will be spending the end of the week in Russia.

– Alice is busy with the shop, the remote site, and the future of BERG hack days.

– Kari is Zendesk-ing, emailing and wrapping up bits from the move.

– Fraser is also Zendesk-ing but accompanying it with outreach and writing blogs.

– Adam is making exciting things work for Kachina.

– Joe is Kemp.

– Nick is push publication-ing all over the place whilst tweaking networks and Kachina-ing.

– Neil and Andy are prototyping prototyping prototyping.

– Alex is doing some IA and Little Printer things whilst chasing suppliers about paper.

– Denise is Little Printer all the way.

– I have been doing things I haven’t done for three weeks and, last but not least, we hope Mark is having a wonderful time on a well earned holiday with the fam.

Regenerations

Regeneration

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.

schulze & webb in their technoshed

Untitled

Untitled

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.

hewett street

Tom Armitage became Employee#1…
First day

21 July (London 11)

It was also where Olinda was launched…
Olinda launch party, Schulze and Webb HQ

…and Matt crowdsourced a large amount of tiny cattle.
DSC_0003.NEF

“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.

Concentration

It was also where the regeneration of S&W into BERG took place…

Wall of BERG

Wall of BERG

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.

10 October, 18.08

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.

Shelving

23 June, 17.46

05 March, 17.47

05 July, 18.28

24 January, 16.32

11 October, 18.32

19 April, 10.18

18 April, 18.17

11 November, 11.24

23 June, 16.28

I think, like Tom Baker is “my” Doctor, this version of the BERG space feels like the one I’ll remember most fondly…
29 November, 17.07

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.

18 January, 11.08

16 January, 11.49

18 January, 11.09

24 January, 12.57

Neil Usher

It also meant, that once LP was out in the world we had room to invite folks round for hackdays…

Hacking

Hack day and Dads' track

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.

Unpacking

CEO

Clock/Monolith

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…

Final Friday links from Corsham Street

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.

Week 406

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!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

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!

Week 405

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.

Week 404

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.

Sunny All-Hands

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.

Friday Links

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.

What Friday Demos are like

Friday Demos are, well, every Friday in the studio – where we, yes, demo what we’ve all been working on that week. It’s the highlight of most of our weeks, catching up with all the projects in the room over cheap beer bought from the store on the corner – and getting wowed by a surprise or two, usually from Andy, Nick, Alice or Adam…

I know it’s Tuesday, but I meant to post this little Vine experiment a while back… so thought I’d do it today before I forgot.

Week 402

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?

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.

 

Week 401

Notes from the red table.

Alice Bartlett : Berg Cloud and Little Printer. Preparing for, and generating publicity for, the forthcoming Little Printer Hack Day.
Nick Ludlam : Saguaro, Kemp, Berg Cloud. Implementation of developer kit. Prototyping.
Helen Rodgers : Little Printer. Following up emails. Putting in place an inventory system.
Neil Usher : Kachina and Little Printer. Prototyping phase. Repairs.
Andy Huntington : Kachina, Little Printer, Kemp. Preparing dev board. Chasing up paper.
Fraser Lewry : Berg Cloud and Little Printer. Communications. Zendesk. Customer care. Blog.
Adam Johnson : Berg Cloud and Little Printer. Alleviating reliability problems.
Mark Cridge : Chevelon and Berg Cloud. Business and client relations.
Joe Malia : Shiprock and holiday. Final concepts for presentation.
Jack Schulze : Shiprock, Chevelon, Berg Cloud. Sales and presentations.
Matt Jones : Shiprock. Presentation.
Denise Wilton : Chevelon. Presentation.
Alex Jarvis : Berg Cloud, Little Printer, Saguaro. Preparing site update.
Matt Webb : Berg. Business planning.

Week 400

 

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.

 

Week 399

It’s week 399 and there are 14 people around the table discussing what we’re all up to.

There’s a substantial chunk of Little Printer and BERG Cloud work ongoing: tweaking, forecasting, serving, responding, reviewing, developing, testing, planning, prepping-for-Chinese-New-Year-ing, fixing, repairing, updating, deploying, designing-for-installing, and sprinting (which is resulting in some exciting things).

Shiprock, the name for another Chaco project, is progressing well. Kachina is moving too and there are workshops for new clients in the offing and the calendar.

There’s a lovely internal project which it has been deemed appropriate to name ‘Kemp’ and that’s going to be making good use of Joe, Nick, Neil and my time prototyping.

The search for a new studio space continues, one in which it’ll be possible to continue running the Little Printer after school club.

IMG_7169

(NB. that’s tomorrow!)

In other news, Joe’s taken temporary custody of 2 hamsters, which Helen said appeared to her in canine form in a dream.

hamster

Enough! Back to it.

Week 398

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.*

Welcome Adam

I’m very happy to announce that Adam Sven Johnson has joined us at BERG to work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud. After our successful Little Printer launch in December, this year is going to be filled with interesting challenges around building out and scaling our infrastructure. Adam brings a huge passion for the physical domain into that cloud infrastructure work.

Before joining us, Adam employed his wide-ranging skills and knowledge at Art Finder and Reevoo where he worked on both the front and back-end code. He’s also the runaway winner when it comes to BERG employees with the largest number of Github repositories.

In what is rapidly becoming a tradition for new developers starting here, Adam has already shipped live code affecting every BERG Cloud user within his first two weeks. Inside that short time, he’s got to grips with our codebase and unleashed his brilliantly analytical brain on a number of thorny issues that arose over the Christmas period. In fact, one of the underlying problems he discovered with MySQL was so obscure that he’s soon to be writing a entire separate post on the topic.

With his feet firmly under the table, I’m delighted to be able to officially welcome him to BERG and look forward to all the exciting work we’ll do together in the future.

(Belated) Week 397

I forgot to write my weeknotes last week, so a whole day before week 398 is due I’m going to attempt to redeem myself. Just imagine that today is in fact last week, and we’ll be fine.

Last Wednesday the BERG Cloud / Little Printer team gathered at an undisclosed London location for a day of planning and roadmapping, to figure out what it is we’ll be doing this year. It was all very exciting and productive, but unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about it, so you’ll have to keep an eye on the BERG Cloud Blog and the BERG Cloud Twitter account to see what we have planned. Afterwards, as a mini celebration for shipping the first batch of Little Printers in December, we made some cocktails with Felix of the Manhattans Project, which was very very very good.

Aside from planning meetings, Little Printer related work continues – Andy’s newly crowned ‘Little Printer Hospital’ kicked into action, Nick kept a keen eye on some ‘flat green lines on a graph’ as well as continuing to brief Adam on all things LP. Denise worked on some odds and ends, while Helen, Kari, Fraser & Simon continued to man customer services.

There’s a lot going on aside from LP though, however I’m losing track of project codenames. Matt W, Mark and Joe were at a workshop for Logan for a couple of days. Neil, Andy and Joe worked on Kochina.

We’re just about to jump into our first bi-weekly BERG Cloud planning meeting, so I must dash.

Friday Links

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.

Week 396

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!

Weeks 392 and 393

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!

Lamps: a design research collaboration with Google Creative Labs, 2011

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

 


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?

Supergirl, trapped behind glass

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.

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


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.

Week 390 and 391

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!

 

Friday links

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.

Week 389

It’s the three hundred and eighty ninth week since BERG began. Simon Pearson is down to do weeknotes but he is away with Matt Webb at Future London demoing Little Printer so I have swapped with him. Matt Jones is still away on paternity leave looking after two tiny humans. Andy is back after his stint of paternity leave and the studio also welcomes Kari who is back after what seems like a very long time away after her case of The Babies.

By project, this week is as follows:

Paiute work continues. Pawel has done some very slick looking graphics for it, Denise even did a weird squeal when she saw them (a pretty good sign). Jack continues to shepherd this project to it’s conclusion which I hope won’t be too soon because that possibly means Pav will have to go on to another contract in another place. And if Pav goes then who is going to get the pardy started?

BERG Cloud and Little Printer are very close to shipping indeed. I am putting the final flourishes to the front-end, James is getting his head into logging for the many bridges that will soon be connecting, Simon is coordinating factories and shipping containers, Helen and Kari are preparing themselves to give the best damned customer service this side of Newspaper Club, Alex is sending me the kind of ‘could this be two pixels lower, please, sorry, thanks’ emails that I know mean our remote site is going to look really good.
Nick is lining up interviewees for the position of The Next James Darling. If you think you fill this spot, head over here for more information.

Neil (now ships with custom BERG shop coat) is working on Auryn with studio friend Greg Borenstein in New York. This involves a lot of waving things at screens, much to my entertainment.

Director of Consulting, Mark Cridge, is taking care of business. He continues to show the office how the big boys do it in an array of shirt jumper combos and the occasional blazer. I keep trying to call his bluff and see if he is wearing a shumper, but as yet his shirts remain gloriously unstitched to his jumpers. What a pro.

Saguaro is beginning to look like a real thing which is lovely to see. Phil is implementing Alex’s design, the writing continues apace, all presided over by Matt Walton.

Sinawava is in the final push. Joe is doing a lot of gleeful dancing which I keep trying to capture a GIF of, but he’s too damn fast. Leo and Nick are finishing off the software, and Paul South continues to astonish with the things he pulls out of the bag.

Matt Thomas, Ollie Wright and Eddie Shannon are still grafting on Lamotte. There is a lot of very charming character design happening at that end of the room, which I enjoy watching evolve.

As always then, a busy studio.

Friday Links

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.

Week 386

Hello people of the Internet. I’m the newest member of BERG and this is my very first blog post. It’s a very short list of stuff that’s going on during week number 386. Enjoy…

Lamotte is kicking off again and we have Eddie Shannon in the studio, he has worked with BERG before and seems to be a much loved – I don’t really know him yet, all I have discovered about him so far is he takes three teabags in his tea.

Sinawava continues and Joe seems to be doing actual work this week as opposed to his usual endless schedule of meetings. The project is getting very exciting with high fidelity models and technical prototypes emerging by the day.

Paiute is getting a lot of attention from Jack, Denise and Alex not forgetting Pawel who continues to be fixated with look and feel.

Little Printer is edging ever closer to landing on peoples door mats. Andy, Nick, Alice and James have all got their sleeves rolled up and are tinkering with publications, BERG Cloud and Box build.

Matt Webb is getting involved with a new project called Oso as well as putting in time on Auryn and Lamot. He’s also looking into finding us a new home because by all accounts our lovely studio is getting knocked down in May.

Helen seems to be doing lots of different reports peppered with some accounting.

Simon appears to be doing almost everything.

I’m supposed to be working with Greg Borenstein on Auryn this week but due to a spot of rain in NYC  he couldn’t make it over to the UK. Seriously, good luck to Greg and everybody across the pond having to deal with the damage and chaos of Sandy.

That’s it, a short and sweet first foray on the BERG blog from me i’m afraid  – its a busy week…

Week 385

So, it’s week 385 and here’s what’s happening in the studio.

Simon, Helen and I are drawing together the last stages of the Little Printer production following a cracking bit of field work done by Nick and Phil W. last week. Neil’s building up a sample of devices, two of which will be being taken to the Wired Test Lab event on Thursday evening (if you’re there, do say hello). Neil’s also unpacking some hardware we’re researching for the ongoing Auryn work with Greg.

Saguaro is moving on with Phil G. typing quickly, even by his own standards; Alex reviewing graphics with Denise – all of which is feeding into Matt Walton’s planning. Matt Webb will also be joining them, when he’s not ensconced in spreadsheets.

Alice continues to update BERG Cloud and the developer tools. James is battling nature to deploy fixes to server software and entirely new implementations. Every few days they post an itemisation of what’s changed to the studio mailing list, it makes for a lengthy but comforting read, ‘though we’re all doing our bit to ensure the list is never empty. Fraser is particularly good at this it seems as he continues to work with publishers and deals with incoming queries from the wider LP community.

The many streams of the Sinawava project: software, electronics, legal and model making are starting to be drawn together in more detail by Joe this week. I haven’t been around for Friday demos (the hour or so on a Friday afternoon when people can give a short update on any of the work they’ve been doing, particularly useful for those not involved directly with a project) for the last couple of weeks so I’m excited to see how things have been going. Also providing good demo material is the work that Pawel, Denise and Jack are doing on Piaute. Mark is talking to new and potential clients, making sure that the table of codenames grows. I think between us all and dropbox, we can just about remember them.

Roll on Friday demos, and Nick Ludlam’s Friday Links.

Friday Links

Sunday is the new Friday, and at the end of a busy week, it’s always nice look to back and realise what a fab bunch you’ve spent it with. Of late, we’ve had lots of freelancers in the studio and these links are a celebration of a few of them.

Greg Borenstein, straight from the U.S. of A., who very kindly sent some last minute links to the group and reminded me that I should be doing this. Greg is being superman this week. Evidence below.

Ever been to an airport? Greg has. Ever seen carpet? Greg has.

Carpets for airports

Know species of bees that make plastic? Greg does. Nuff said.

From pollen to polyester

Saar Drimer has been making magical hardware things that I’ve pretended to understand for weeks now. He likes hot sauce and went to Lennie’s when no one else would. This week, Saar and Alex sent round links for designing circuit boards online.

 http://www.circuits.io/       http://upverter.com/

Fraser Lewry, besides being master baker and all-round music aficionado, has been helping out with all things copy. He’s been writing our Little Printer blog for weeks and it’s worth Sunday afternoon read if you haven’t been keeping up.

Pawel Pietryka is nuts. He’s a bit German, bit Polish, and likes to make ze pardy. Aside from telling us to “Shhhhhtop it”, he’s in charge of making things look beautiful (and make them look beautiful he does). What’s funny about our relationship with Pawel is that he thinks we’re odd. This became apparent when he sent us all an email entitled ‘Explains some of your behaviours BERGlers

Week 384

I’m pretty sure when I started here my weeknote-notes took up half a page in a small notebook. I’ve got a bigger notebook now, and I wrote two whole pages of notes on what everyone’s up to.

So what’s going on this week? The studio’s been pretty busy of late and today it’s pretty quiet – Nick and Andy are in Cambridge today for super important Little Printer EMC testing, Nick and Phil W were away earlier in the week streamlining our production lines and finessing the PCB flashing process for the LP Bridge, Joe and Simon are in Paris meeting developers, Matt Webb is sick (feel better!), and various other people are out for various reasons.

What are we all working on? Little Printer continues to be at the forefront of a lot of our minds as we press towards shipping. Late last week we rolled up our sleeves, loaded a van up and sent the packaging and a few other components off to our box builders. Siniwava continues and develops, and is looking really really nice. Phil G’s been doing some sterling work on Saguaro as we move into the build phase. There’s various other projects ticking along which I can’t wait to hear a bit more about.

James Darling has bought himself a new pair of trousers which were the talk of the studio this morning, and our studio soundtrack for the early part of the week was Fabric 66 mixed by Ben Klock, which seemed to go down very well.

Week 383

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.

Mark Cridge joins BERG as Director Of Consulting

I’m delighted to say that Mark’s joined BERG as our new Director of Consulting this week.

The Cridge

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.

Week 381

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.

Week 380

Oh how smug I felt to be second in this morning, spot on time, watching all the stragglers stumble in, rain pouring down their faces. How mighty was I, sitting smug and dry, on my new swivel desk chair. Self assured and warm, until the reminder from Simon (who was also on time, I might add) that indeed I had neglected the weeknotes that should have been posted last Tuesday. Last Tuesday, that’s pretty bad. So, tardiness, that is the topic this morning. Last week was a whole different affair…

Matt Webb spent lots of time out of the studio, at the Design Museum with other Matt and Jack on Wednesday, at a conference in Greece (ooh er) Thursday and Friday, and doing salesy / proposally things when not otherwise engaged.

Simon was doing millions of things (as ever), resourcing for upcoming projects, managing ones that are currently happening and making sure everything else was running smoothly.

New boy, Neil, was prototyping his mind off for Sinawava, he was also mumbling something about Movida but I didn’t catch what he said. (SPEAK UP, NEW BOY!)

Nick was finishing the bridge, planning when to visit Slovenia, working with James on final prep for the architecture, and both Alice and James on the prep for the Facebook hack day.

Fraser continued to blog his socks off and has been managing all our Little Printer queries like a silver-tongued machine.

Annika was finishing off her Pauite interviews and re-arranging post-its in a desperate attempt to make sense of the masses of information she’d extracted from people in previous weeks.

Pavel was aligning the tools and feel of the design for our Sinawava app. as well as doing some motion exploration (I saw him zooming around on his deskchair so I guess that comes under that).

Andy, like a dog with a hoover, was chasing plastics, testing electrostatic discharge, finding cork boards and ensuring certification for all the materials we’re using.

Alex was deep in Saguaro exploration as well as making sure all his Little Printer bits were looking ship shape before offing on his holiday to Spain. In a bizarre series of events it turns out Denise had exactly the same week lined up, but instead is off to Venice (alright for the design team eh?).

Jack was immersed in a pool of sales based endeavours and new product development, whilst taking some time to think over BERG’s design values.

Alice was rounding off publication bits and continuing to answer all tech related questions on the developer tools. She also spent some time on Vallecito and travelled to Oxford on Wednesday to point and laugh provide moral support for James, who was talking at a geek convention.

Beside the principal’s day out, Matt Jones was doing lots and lots of meetings and chatting to Pavel about the Sinawava app design.

Phil Gyford was working out how to display stuff in his one day in, before his one week off.

Matt Walton was thinking comparatively, resourcing and tidying up before his week off.

I was being ill and looking after an old dog (not a euphemism), as well as frantically making sure everything was up to date before Matt went off on his hols.

 

Week 379

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

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

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.

Week 375

Oh I don’t know.

Something must have happened this week, right?

Week 373

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.

Guardian Headliner: The newspaper that looks back at you…

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”

Headliner: Final Prototype

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

Headliner: Final Prototype

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.

Headliner: Final Prototype

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.)

Antero face.com experiments

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.)

Headliner: Early Graphic Studies

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.

Headliner: Final Prototype

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.

Headliner: Design Development

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.

Headliner: Design Development

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.

Headliner: Design Development

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.

Headliner: Design Development

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.

Headliner: Design Development

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.

Week 372

Without sounding a bit cheesy, I think we all missed the studio a lot when we were temporarily dislodged last week. It’s nice to be back.

So, week 372. Matt Jones seems to think I’ll work out a way of linking this to a car, but instead I’m going to link to a boat. The USS Williams (DE-372) was a destroyer escort acquired by the US during World War II – tasked to escort and protect ships in convoy.

We passed a massive Little Printer milestone early this week which had been at the forefront of Nick, Andy & Phil’s attention for a while. Work continues on everything else LP related though, mainly:

  • Denise managing the publications and making sure everything looks beautiful
  • Alice working wonders on the shop (and being very patient with me), so that we can sell them to people
  • Andy, Nick & Phil working on various LP Bridge bits, and Andy trying to navigate a bag of colour pellets which are somewhere in the world
  • I’m finishing a few print projects related to LP, and starting to work on the latest version of the mobile UI
  • Simon ran his super efficient planning meeting yesterday which was both terrifying and exciting, somehow
  • And Matt Webb is doing a bit of LP reach out.

James Darling was at a festival all weekend so I’m not sure what he’s doing. I hear rumours of there being quite a good Friday demo of it though.

A lot of other stuff is going on too. Joe is working with contractors (Eddie and Ruth) and clients making sure Lamotte is progressing smoothly, as well as revving up for the beginnings of Sinawava phase 2 later on in the week. Helen’s taken up key cutting as a hobby and is making sure we can both unlock and lock the doors on a daily basis, as well as planning studio space for the next few months with Simon. Matt Jones just had his hair cut, and is writing up a few things as well as planning for projects coming up. Jack wasn’t here for all hands on Tuesday but from what I know, he’s working on Vallecito and a few other bits.

Week 372, powered primarily by coke floats and desk fans.

 

 

Week 371

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.

Week 370

It’s week 370. The eye of the storm. We have a week with fewer deadlines than we’ve become used to, but we can see more on the horizon. An opportunity to perhaps prepare and regroup, but also to attack the things that are important, have been at the back of our minds, but aren’t directly deadline driven. This is good. Structural plussing.

Most of our client work seems to be in this middle stage, phases have ended, time to think about the next phase for each. Thoughts, proposals, flights, meetings and workshops.

This is also where Little Printer is. In this post-hackday world we are now in, we are buoyed by the relief that the fundamentals have worked, and the beauty of the things made. Our foundations have been proved, and we can continue building upwards. Phew and wahoo!

In celebration, we have been getting deep into re-working a lot of BERG Cloud’s internals, rethinking how every component works, and how they work together with the new knowledge we have from the last year of work.

There is also the online shop being built, hardware moving around the world, being tested and debugged, printers primed, plastics perfected and finances prepared.

Regroup, prepare and onwards.

Week 369

3, 6, 9
The goose drank wine
The monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat

—-

Aside from all that, week 369 is shaping up nicely. We’ve almost got a full house and we’ve just about recovered from a very productive Hack Day at the weekend.

Like everyone this week, I’m pretty busy, so here’s a lightning fast tour round the studio in the time it takes a kettle to boil:

Helen is knee deep in VAT returns, travel planning and finance.

Joe is working with Eddie on Lamotte, video prototyping, gesticulating wildly, and looking forward to presenting a finished piece of work on Friday.

Alex is dealing with print. He’s getting samples and talking to suppliers about things for Little Printer, while also working with Timo, who’s in the UK for a few days. Together they’re working on the photography for the updated BERG Cloud site, and it’s going to look rather nice. Timo is also working on a proposal document, and generally catching up with what’s been going on in his absence.

James is refactoring. Anything, everything. If you put it down for long enough, he’ll refactor it. This is a good thing.

Nick is looking at database models, and processing some of the excellent feedback from Hack Day. (And Alice, is taking a few days off after doing brilliant job of organising it.)

Andy is working on more CAD models and taking care of the larger Little Printer supply chain. He’s juggling about 10 things at once, but still managing to do it with a smile. This could be due to the fact there are biscuits left over from Hack Day.

Vanessa is busy writing documentation, and Simon is keeping everyone under control, juggling projects both present and future.

Matt W is working with Helen on some of the financial aspects of the business, dealing with client contracts and looking at some of the internal BERG processes, with Matt Jones and Jack

Matt Jones is working with Jack and I on Ouray, and like Joe and Eddie, we’re also aiming for a finished piece of work for Friday.

Which means I’d better get on with it.

Week 368

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. 

Week 367

Under normal circumstances, weeknotes are written up promptly, at the point where we’re poised and ready to throw ourselves enthusiastically into the work at hand. Sometimes there’s so much underbrush to hack your way through that you end up giving a more retrospective view, and right now the studio has that “jungle” feel.

Matt Webb has been touring the globe with Little Printer, giving people a glimpse of the near-final product.

Joe arrived back triumphant in the office after an extremely well recieved presentation of his recent labours on Sinewava. Although I can’t go into specifics, the work is beautiful and inspiring, and embodies exactly what BERG is about. We’re incredibly proud of the whole team that were involved.

Joe is also working with Eddy on the early design phase of work on Lamotte, and next week will see the first designs being built out into working prototypes.

James has been working on our machinery that brings Little Printer to life, refactoring old code and sketching in new connections. Alice is applying her considerable talent to intricate HTML templating work, bespoke code designed to wow audiences shown LP, and organising our developer “materiel”. Alex is working on various aspects of the ever-so-soon-now launch, in addition to the content that MW has been touring with.

Denise and Alex were busy designing and preparing the content of Matt’s demos and other Little Printer artifacts that are part of the Out Of Box Experience.

Andy and I have been down in amongst the wires, oscilloscopes and bench power supplies in order to conquer invisible gremlins that are manifesting in our circuit boards. Andy also returned from his trip to China last week bearing strange exotic foods, and a beautiful set of injection mouldings that capture how the molten plastic flows inside its steel cavity.

Jack, Vanessa and Simon are all working on bringing in fresh work to the studio, and beyond that I can’t add much until the potential becomes more definite.

Phil Gyford and James King are currently in our studio, working on Antero, and have linked to form a Design Voltron of epic proportions. It’s in the early stages of development, but they will be showing off their work at our Friday Demos gathering, and I can’t wait to see how it’s taking shape.

Lastly but not least, Matt Jones is currently off the grid, having a very well deserved break from all his recent efforts.

Friday Links

Dear diary,

Today is Monday. Imagine that! I am starting Friday links a full four days before they are due. This is in part because Friday links have been coming at weird times lately and I’m keen to demonstrate that some people still uphold the Fridayness of Friday links, but also on-timeness is in my nature. A very dear friend once told me I was his ‘on time’ friend. Not exactly the highest of compliments, but I can’t argue with the truthfulness of the statement. I’m rarely late.

Today Helen sent a link to PointerPointer. I’d like to know how they made this. Pattern matching to find things that look like pointing? I really hope it’s that. Write in if you know the answer to the usual address!

http://www.pointerpointer.com/

Tuesday’s link is this: http://www.core77.com/blog/transportation/formula_one_car_cutaway_22600.asp

Alex writes:

Interesting engineering decisions like having the fuel tank in 3 sections so that when it depletes it doesn’t slosh about around corners and disrupt the centre of gravity.

On Thursday from the depths of scandoland, Timo sent us this lovely piece of work:

THE MARMALADE Identity from schoenheitsfarm production on Vimeo.

And today Denise linked to the Little Bits Beta, an “open source library of electronic modules that snap together with magnets.” https://community.littlebits.cc/bits

Week 366

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.

Week 365

With the Diamond Jubilee festivities on Monday and Tuesday of this week, it’s a short week here in the studio. Double-concentrated!

Matt Jones is about to go on a well-earned holiday and has been rounding off work on Sinawava with Joe, as well as overseeing the beginning of a couple of new Uinta projects Ouray and Lamotte (part 2).

Matt Webb is also away next week and is taking Little Printer away on a short roadtrip.

Jack has split his time between writing up a new proposal for Silverton and work on Ouray. Last week he made a chocolate and avocado cake which was outstanding and I secretly hope another materialises in the studio soon.

Vanessa is working on a couple of proposals for potential upcoming projects.

Denise has been working on Ouray and continuing with Little Printer publications.

Andy has been managing the detailed production of electronics and is about to go and oversee the very final modifications to our Little Printer housings and dealing with the final parts of the puzzle – assembly, which is edging nearer.

James is working on Little Printer publication deliveries and configuration, adding some slightly more advanced functionality here.

Alice continues to do a sterling job building the shop with help from Alex, who having expertly managed the production design and delivery is now turning his keen eye to some of the finer details of design work of Little Printer, in-package and beyond.

Joe has been overseeing the last stages of Sinawava and beginning Lamotte with Eddie.

Nick and Phil have been closing down last bits of low-level code to do with our Bridge, including tweaking the user experience and fixing a couple of low-level issues.

Helen has been helping get new projects up and running, managing the financials around other projects ending, arranging travel and generally excelling at a host of other things which keep everything running smoothly.

Week 364

In 364 BC Chinese astronomer Gan De is reported to have spotted the largest moon in the Solar System, orbiting Jupiter. Almost two millennia later, German astronomer, Simon Marius, published ‘Mundus Iovialis’ in which he named the moon Ganymede. Marius took the name from a Greek myth in which a beautiful Trojan youth called Ganymede was carried off by Zeus to be the cupbearer for the Olympic gods. The people of Greece built a temple to honour Zeus in Olympia, said to be the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games. These games have survived in one form or another to this very day. This year, the site of the Olympic Stadium is Stratford, only 4.5 miles from the BERG studio. It is the 364th week since BERG’s original inception and now …

Matt Webb and Matt Jones are running three days of product invention workshops in a tiny room at the far end of the studio. Through a glass window I can see lots of Post It notes on walls and sketches on whiteboards, looks intriguing.

Vanessa is working on a string of project proposals and settling into studio life.

James Darling is ensuring that the LP infrastructure is robust enough scale and carrying out performance tests.

Denise was away on holiday and is now back, working on publications for Little Printer.

Alex is designing the Little Printer Shop. We’ve just seen the packaging that he worked on with Burgopak and it looks lovely!

Helen is working on progress reports and ensures that the everything keeps ticking along.

Simon, also away now back, is working on resourcing, planning and the next phase of a project for Uinta.

Alice is implementing Alex’s designs for the shop.

Andy is pushing on, elbow deep in electronic components and technical schema.

Nick is carrying out bridge board testing procedures while going very ‘low level’ on something to do with pins and electricity.

I wonder what Gan De would have made of it all.

Week 363

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.

Sunday Links

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!

Week 362

362 is 2 × 181, a Mertens function returns 0, and it’s both nontotient and noncototient. The 362 bus in London goes from Grange Hill (Whaa-dy Waa-waaaaaaa) to King George’s Hospital, which James Darling’s dad used to work nearby.

Apparently.

This week, James reports he is doing “boring but important things” on Little Printer‘s infrastructure. He has also been wearing some spectacular trousers.

Simon has left us for a well-earned couple of weeks away, driving through California, but up til then he’s been doing Little Printer planning – technical prioritisation, meeting lawyers and various people about manufacturing ramp-up. He’s also been working with Vanessa on handing over things, particularly around our new business processes before his holiday.

Andy’s been focussing on Little Printer too – preliminary EMC testing in Cambridge, bridge board prototypes, soldering and ordering… and sending things to Slovenia. He’s also been assembling a robot arm we bought ages ago at Maplin for fun in the evenings…

Matt Webb’s been working on sales mainly, had a couple of speaking gigs, and has been meeting lawyers about T&Cs for Little Printer. He’s deep into some of the ‘Dark Matter’ of selling physical consumer products globally. Interesting stuff…

Neurosis MindWave

He’s also been wearing a brainwave monitor… more about his experiments over at his ever-interesting Interconnected.org

Nick’s working closely with Phil and Andy as always – wrapping up work on the BERG Cloud bridge, talking manufacturing considerations with Andy, and perfecting the OTA update routines with Phil amongst loads of other things.

Alice is finishing our “Miniseries” publishing platform for Little Printer, and working on some of the launch partner publications. Alex is working on some design considerations for the Bridge, and wireframing some of Little Printer’s web presence. Denise has been working on some forthcoming new business, which looks very promising and designing loads of stuff for LP’s user-experience.

Joe’s been working on project Sinawava – which is a consulting job that has loads of different aspects, all of which he’s leading magnificently. This week there’s been product design work, strategic roadmapping conversations, technical prototyping and some experience prototyping with a packaging consultancy, as well as designing app concepts for the project.

Eddie Shannon’s been in with us this week again, working with Joe on Sinawava and being very generous in his tea-making!

As for me, I’ve been supporting Eddie and Joe on Sinawava, helping MW with sales, trying to do some long-delayed blog post writing and wrapping-up Project Chuska.

Jack and Timo were in Stockholm at the beginning of the week, presenting the results of the first stage of our partnership with Ericsson’s UX lab to the wider research group there. We blogged about that project yesterday. I worked a little on it and had a tremendous time doing so! Nice to see it in the world.

Timo’s back in Norway now, finishing his PhD for the summer. He’ll still be working with us regularly on special projects and research while that wraps up. He is missed!

And finally… Jack has started designing BERG Cloud product #2… Vallecito!

BERG x Ericsson: ‘Joyful net work’ and Murmurations

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.

14 March, 17.46

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

2012-03-18 | 20-31-44

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.

Week 361

It’s fast approaching the end of 361, arguably it’s passed already, but for this purpose I’ll stick with the ISO definition promoting Monday as the first day week.

A slightly shorter working week due to a Bank Holiday Monday in the UK, although the processes in motion around Little Printer don’t obey such things. It’s really a case of shovelling coal to keep the furnace burning as hot as possible!

So what’s been going on?

Matthew has been following up new leads, developing existing proposals and working with Helen and Simon as the year end figures start to be compiled. Matt Jones has returned from the US and brought us Hobo Bread from the Henry Ford Museum, this filled the studio with a amazing aroma of maple toasted walnuts and inspired James to bake his very own.

Jones has also been working with Joe on Sinawava drawing together the last few weeks worth of material across the different elements of the brief. We’ve enjoyed the company and exceptional handiwork of Eddie Shannon whose been further developing some of that work too.

Alex has been splitting time between Chuska and BERG Cloud, working with Jack and myself on graphics for the hardware.

Meanwhile Nick has been bouncing around the different levels (from user experience to chip level voltage transitions) of the BERG Cloud stack as we push ever closer, ably assisted by James and Alice chipping away at codebase items to do with partworks and scaling with delightful results.

Denise was ill for a bit, but it was grand to have her back, and to have Little Printers emitting her lovely proofs.

Jack’s been back in working on Chuska, LP and Bergcloud too.

I’ve been working quite closely with Simon around timings for LP and responding as quickly as possible to different suppliers at rather different times of the day.

Onwards!

(ps. 361 part of the Mian Chowla Sequence, apparently.)

Week 360

360 is a highly composite number. It’s also a 5-smooth number, which sounds fantastic. It’s also a model of Ferrari which succeeded the 355 and was replaced by the F430.

It’s not as nice as the best Ferrari ever made though, which was the F40. F40 will never come up in weeknotes so here’s a crudely wedged in picture of what I consider to be automotive perfection.

But I digress. What are we up to this week?

Little Printer is consuming a lot of the office’s time at the moment. We’re just about to press the button on packaging manufacturing. Andy is working on Bridge boards and a million other things. Alice is working with Denise on API documentation and font testing, and meeting people to talk about publications. Nick and James are working on the claiming process, with lots of diagramming and whiteboarding and speaking. Matt Webb is meeting a lot of people and introducing Little Printer. It’s brilliant to see it all coming together.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on as well. Myself, Alice, James, Matt Jones and Jack are all working on wrapping up Chuska. Joe is back from his holiday and working on Sinawava – a few workshops, a bit of UI, and a bit of everything else. Helen and Simon are working their usual magic and making sure everything project and office related is running smoothly. Matt Jones is currently in the US and making me jealous with his pictures of nice looking beer. Jack is back in the office and flitting to and fro getting up to date with what’s been going on. Vanessa isn’t in today but is working a bit with Jack on sales stuff. Timo’s still away. I think we’re all looking forward to him coming back.

I think that’s it. It’s been fairly quiet today so far after a slightly radgy week last week (thank you Matt Webb for introducing me to that word, by the way). I like to end weeknotes on a musical edge though, and James did a sterling job yesterday of easing us into Monday with a nice bit of vintage Trojan Records amongst other things. See you on Friday for some Friday links.

Friday Links

SubMap is a visualisation for time and location data on distorted maps. The example above is a point of view map — a projection on a sphere around a particular point.

Planetary Resources is uncloaked this week as a company set up to mine the asteroid belt of our solar system. Yeah. We live in the future.

Planetary Resources is backed by, amongst others, James Cameron, the film director, and Larry Page, CEO of Google. Personally I am somewhat keen on getting society into space. But I didn’t expect it to be done by the International Legion of Billionaires. Brilliant that they’re doing it. Thanks, billionaires!

We are very much in love with Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera, which instead of a picture produces a text description of what you shoot, printed on a thermal printer!

Corner of a wood floored room with a tool chest, bike, stack of books, box leaning against the wall, an open door with a bag hanging off the doorknob, and a pair of closed double doors with cables hanging on the handles.

Gorgeous.

It gets better: the text descriptions are produced by anonymous individuals distributed around the world, and compensated for their work through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I love imagining the crowd of the internet all teeny tiny, all inside the camera.

Let’s wrap with a bit of self promotion.

The Lytro lightfield camera is one of those WHOA products — photos that you can refocus at any time. It’s magical. When I ran into them last week, they took a photo of Little Printer. Check it out! You can click to refocus (requires Flash).

Week 359

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.

Breaking Out & Breaking In at Studio-X, NYC, Monday 30th April

Columbia University’s Studio-X NYC is hosting a fascinating evening that I’m going to be part of to close-out their “Breaking In & Breaking Out” virtual film festival focusing on the interplay of architecture with daring heists and escapes in the movies.

I’m going to speak a little bit about infrastructure, phones, watches, time and timetables – following on from this short post of mine from a while back.

But – mainly I’m going to listen – to the amazing line-up of actual serving and ex-FBI heist experts that has been assembled for the evening…

Hope to see you there.

Week 358

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.

Week 357

Checking back in the archives, my last weeknotes were for week 345, back in January. Just like 345, 357 is also a sphenic number; a positive integer which is the product of three distinct prime numbers. And just like week 345, this week also sees Matthew in the USA. Coincidence? Undoubtedly – I’ve seen his calendar and I don’t think he’s got time to plan around the sphenics, but if you’re curious, I’ll double check on his return.

We had a bank holiday in the UK yesterday, and so this is a short week. Here’s what everyone is planning for the next 4 days…

MJ and Joe are working on Sinawava this week – perhaps with a bit of input from me. There’s much to get done before a review on Friday and a ‘what next?’ decision next monday.

Alex, Alice and James are working together on Chuska, getting things ready for review on Thursday. There’s been a lot of conceptual work so far, this week sees rapid prototypes and things to play with, which is always good.

Nick and Phil will be working on Little Printer – and I’ll be ‘helping’ by presenting them with the mother of all flowcharts for things too long-winded to explain here. I hope it makes sense to them though, because I’m really excited to see what happens next.

Timo has run away to Norway for a while, which leaves the studio a little sad. I’m keeping his memory alive by stealing his mug which happens to be the biggest in the studio. He’ll be working on Silverton – again with a bit of input from me too.

Andy is out of the studio today but in for the rest of the week, and working on Little Printer. Everything he’s doing involves abbreviations, things written in initials and companies with the word Tech or Tek in their name.

Simon is working across all the projects we have on the go at the moment, from Little Printer through to every client project. He’s busy either planning or wrapping up work, and sorting out invoices with Helen.

And I think that’s everyone – time to get started.

Week 356

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.

“Companion Species” in Icon’s special edition on Mobile Phones

Icon #106

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.

Week 355

It’s a relatively quiet week, with a number of people out of the studio either engaged on client work, or simply working remotely. Those of us here have continued to bask in the sunshine streaming though our gigantic roof windows.

Andy has been chasing suppliers, partners and manufacturers, as well as working with me on joining up computer code with actual electrons in wires. I’ve cryptically written the phrase “COCO POPS” next to his name in my notebook, but what that means is anyone’s guess. Tuesday feels like such a long time ago.

Alex, James and Alice have all been splitting their efforts between Chuska and Little Printer. Within LP, Alex is working on website and packaging designs, James is bringing the website designs to life, and Alice is implementing interfaces that will enable us to maintain all the aspects of BERG Cloud in good order.

Helen is balancing the straight-forward world of tax payments with the exciting, nondeterministic world of predicting when invoices get paid, allowing us to avert problems before they’ve even happened.

Denise is also working on LP packaging, as well as some super secret design work which she’ll reveal at a later point in time.

Timo is working on project Silverton from an undisclosed location deep in the Italian countryside, and his occasional instagrams are making us all very jealous.

Matt Jones, Matt Webb and Joe are out of the studio, working on the newly initiated project Sinawava, and Simon and Vanessa have been writing proposals for future studio work. Good future grist for our studio mill.

Lastly, I’ve been writing cryptographic hashing functions, and enjoying a tiny lemon meringue pie sold by our favorite purveyor of caffeinated beverages, Giddy Up Coffee. If you find yourself in the Old Street area of London, I highly recommend them!

Week 354

Happy equinox! As the summer approaches and the sun appears more each day, patches of light are cast down through the skylights into the studio. Currently the light illuminates just the north wall and the table, meaning I was able to bask in it during our weekly meeting.

Following the requisite discussion of what the number 354 means, including some eye-rolling from me about how much time Mathematicians seem to spend finding and naming patterns in numbers that are seemingly of zero consequence, we proceed with what everyone is up to this week.

James, Alex and I are working on Chuska, a four week run at a short brief with sketches in code, and a lab notes style approach to working. We are also continuing work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud.

Matthew is focussing on business development.

Nick is writing software for Little Printer. I’m not sure I can be any more informative than that or the Infosec police will come for me in the night.

Andy is doing an awful lot, all Little Printer related. Chasing colour sheets to send to China, technical files for certification (Little Printer has some exams to sit), paper testing, spending time looking at Gantt charts with Simon, quotes, bombs, stepper motors.

Timo is rezzing concepts with Joe for Silverton. They are sat on the sofa right now chuckling and looking at gadgets that might be real things or might be models, I can’t tell from here. Timo is also completing some video sketches, and continuing his quest for the sales Steak Knife set.

Simon is massaging the starts of some projects and then ends of others. He is also managing Little Printer and our time around that.

Helen has finished a record stint of cake buying. There have been four birthdays in four weeks, each requiring a cake. This week she is helping Simon with POs and NDAs and setting up various profiles and passwords for our new team member.

Denise is doing a little project with Matt Jones, working with Tim on some Uinta stuff and managing all of the enquiries and comments we get from the many people whose attention Little Printer has grabbed.

Matt Jones is overseeing Chuska, working with Denise, doing some bits and pieces on Silverton and some preparation for Sinawava.

So that’s week 354.

Week 353

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.

Week 352

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.

Sunday links

Soon, we’ll get back to managing to publishing Friday links on Friday – but for now it’s Sunday night and I’ve got time to round up interesting things that flew around our studio mailing list this week.

First of all a bit of a meta-point… Often things will be sent to the list with the prefix ‘X-Watch’ where X is a preoccupation of the studio. James decided to run a script across his mail to see what the most popular ‘watches’ were…

  • 12 Parallax
  • 4 Product page
  • 2 Music Video
  • 2 Printer
  • 1 Injection Moulding
  • 1 Baby
  • 1 Bridge
  • 1 Things on dogs
  • 1 Kickstarter
  • 1 weird skeumorphotablet
  • 1 Car software
  • 1 incidental media

What that tells you about us I don’t know…

Anyway. Onwards.

Our friends at RIG have been working on making jeans a bit more spime-y with Hiut Denim.

Joe found these lovely animations forming a children’s guide to critical thinking.

We discovered this amazing photograph from the ISS via Gavin Starks on Twitter

Nick and Matt Webb both pointed out this kinect-hacked shopping trolley companion species. Nick suggested that we should forget our ongoing search for a studio dog, and get this as a pet.

I think I’ll keep looking for a suitable pooch for us…

CoffeePhysics from Andy, and a car interiors tumblr from Alex, via ex-BERGler Tom Armitage.

The recent rash of babies from BERG might explain why this made the list… “…the first ever wireless, biosensor baby pajama.” [sic] Don’t worry. We restrained ourselves from wiring up Kari’s newly-arrived little boy with some arduinos when he made his inaugural visit to the studio this week.

MW liked this illustration of a speech-jamming gun a lot:

The new Nike store thats opening in a shipping container near us looks like it has a lot of interactive elements, some of which will hopefully be the human staff, but y’know.

Alex found this collection of googly-eye-enhanced bits of the planet, but he also found what I think was my favourite thing I saw on the list this week – an absolutely wonderful bit of manga illustration by Yusuke Murata, that uses the physicality of paper and folding to amazing optical effect.

Lovely.

Week 351

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.


AOB: I’m pleased to report the lights in the loo work, there’s a good deal on Innocent veg pots at the local supermarket which have pretty much dominated lunch for 50% of the studio, and we had a cracking return for BERG Drinks last night at The Reliance, where much amber fluid was drunk and Yahtzee was played by our friends from MakieLab.

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.

Daffodil
^ Daff Photo by BERG Alumni Paul Mison

Other than that – Happy St. Davids Day, and happy week 351!

Week 349

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.

BERG in Fast Company’s list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies

I’m super proud to see BERG at #44 in Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.

It’s an incredible list to be on! Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon, Square and Twitter are all there — and to pick just a few of the others, Jawbone, Polyvore, and Kickstarter.

Thanks!

Little Printer gets a shout out — our product for the home that prints you a miniaturised personal newspaper, daily.

It also seems like BERG is the only design consultancy on the list. We spend 50% of our time collaborating with clients, people like Intel and the Guardian, prototyping and producing everything from cute toys that talk in augmented reality to the first magazine (and magazine platform) for the iPad.

We’re currently planning our work across March and April. If you’d like to work with us, inventing and innovating, do drop me a line. The email is info@berglondon.com

In the meantime here’s our profile in Fast Company’s list: #44 Berg – For wildly imagining the marriage of the digital and physical worlds.

Thanks FastCo, and thanks team!

Robot Readable World. The film.

I recently cut together a short film, an experiment in found machine-vision footage:

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

As robots begin to inhabit the world alongside us, how do they see and gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? The robot-readable world is one of the themes that the studio has been preoccupied by recently. Matt Jones talked about it last year:

“The things we are about to share our environment with are born themselves out of a domestication of inexpensive computation, the ‘Fractional AI’ and ‘Big Maths for trivial things’ that Matt Webb has spoken about.

and

‘Making Things See’ could be the the beginning of a ‘light-switch’ moment for everyday things with behaviour hacked-into them. For things with fractional AI, fractional agency – to be given a fractional sense of their environment.

This film uses found-footage from computer vision research to explore how machines are making sense of the world. And from a very high-level and non-expert viewing, it seems very true that machines have a tiny, fractional view of our environment, that sometimes echoes our own human vision, and sometimes doesn’t.

For a long time I have been struck by just how beautiful the visual expressions of machine vision can be. In many research papers and Siggraph experiments that float through our inboxes, there are moments with extraordinary visual qualities, probably quite separate from and unintended by the original research. Something about the crackly, jittery but yet often organic, insect-like or human quality of a robot’s interpetation of the world. It often looks unstable and unsure, and occasionally mechanically certain and accurate.

Of the film Warren Ellis says:

“Imagine it as, perhaps, the infant days of a young machine intelligence.”

The Robot-Readable World is pre-Cambrian at the moment, but machine vision is becoming a design material alongside metals, plastics and immaterials. It’s something we need to develop understandings and approaches to, as we begin to design, build and shape the senses of our new artificial companions.

Much of our fascination with this has been fuelled by James George’s beautiful experiments, Kevin Slavin’s lucid unpacking of algorithms and the work (above) by Adam Harvey developing a literacy within computer vision. Shynola are also headed in interesting directions with their production diary for the upcoming Red Men film, often crossing over with James Bridle’s excellent ongoing research into the aesthetics of contemporary life. And then there is the work of Harun Farocki in his Eye / Machine series that unpacks human-machine distinctions through collected visual material.

As a sidenote, this has reminded me that I was long ago inspired by Paul Bush’s ‘Rumour of true things’ which is ‘constructed entirely from transient images – including computer games, weapons testing, production line monitoring and marriage agency tapes’ and a ”A remarkable anthropological portrait of a society obsessed with imaging itself.’. This found-footage tactic is fascinating: the process of gathering and selecting footage is an interesting R&D exercise, and cutting it all together reveals new meanings and concepts. Something to investigate, as a method of research and communication.

Week 347

I think this is roughly who’s working with who.

This week is mainly: a Uinta workshop, Little Printer progressing, Kari’s final day before maternity leave and Helen’s first full day, sales sales sales.

The new studio is bigger,

and (I noticed when I got back from travelling in the US for most of January) weirdly quiet. It’s as if people don’t know what to do in all the space. Then when one person goes into the kitchen – the kitchen is teeny weeny, the size of a broom cupboard – two or three more people pile in and there’s a kitchen party. In the last couple of weeks it’s been getting gradually noisier as we settle in. A welcome improvement.

Nick’s gone out to get a few coffees. Good-o. Caffeine please!

Week 346

A good plane based number this week. The DFS 346 was a German rocket powered swept wing aeroplane, completed and flown in the Soviet Union after World War II. The Alenia Aermacchi M-346 Master is a military transonic trainer aircraft, based on the Yak-130. I’ll pretend you all knew that anyway though.

Our fearless leader Matt Webb has returned from 3 weeks in the US, with considerable jetlag, and tales from CES. He’s been taking Little Printer on a whistlestop tour all over the country, so will be unpacking meetings this week when his head is back on UK time.

Simon’s doing his usual incredible balancing act between making sure our client work is running smoothly, keeping all aspects of Little Printer and BERG Cloud on track, and managing the last few bits of new office sorting out. He’s also sorting through job applications (there’s still time to apply if you’re interested, we’re closing applications this coming Friday the 27th). It’s Kari’s last full week in the studio before she heads off on maternity leave, so she’s training Helen up on the last handful of bits. We’ll miss her!

The majority of the office are still pressing ahead with all aspects of Little Printer and BERG Cloud. Andy and Jack are working on the hardware and the industrial design. I’ve been doing a bit of design work for the shell, and working on the sales and out of box experience for when we launch. Andy’s sitting at his new soldering desk with a load of new circuit boards. Alice did tell me what she was working on, but all I wrote down next to her name was ‘moving’. Based on what she’s shown us at Friday demos for the last couple of weeks though, it’s pretty mind boggling and very exciting. James is similarly working on different but again very exciting backend stuff for Little Printer, as well as working on the IA for the mobile website with Denise, who displayed an impressively vast Illustrator document on Friday covered in wireframes. She’s also manning the BERG Cloud CS desk with Simon and Kari. Nick and Phil are as always working on the real backbone of the entire system, with a lot of brief writing and organisation of meetings.

Joe is putting the final touches to his Uinta work which is looking and sounding brilliant. Both him and Jones were in the recording studio yesterday.

Jack is mostly on the industrial design and manufacturing of Little Printer, but is also having a few catchups with Webb and Jones, and working with Timo on the final stretch of a bit of Uinta work. Timo’s doing a little bit of filming, a little bit of editing, and is also talking at the Design of Understanding this Friday. Matt Jones is on some Uinta project work, a few sales meetings, and is getting his hair cut tomorrow.

That’s pretty much it for week 346, fuelled by the 1.125kg of Haribo we’ve consumed as an office in under 2 days, and with the soundtrack of Pinch’s Fabriclive 61 mix, which I entirely recommend.

Friday Links

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.

Week 345

Week 345 is upon us, and progressing nicely. In number theory, ‘345’ is a sphenic number, but I would imagine you know that already. On to things you might not know; what’s going on in the studio.

We’re almost fully settled into the new space. There’s a bit more painting to be done, some insulation to be pumped into the roof and a large delivery of teabags on order. We’ve worked out most of the major issues – like where to go for lunch, but it has to be said, certain BERGians are missing the coffee hut. I’ve yet to see anyone come back with coffee and look happy about it.

Matthew is still in the USA, where he’s been since the beginning of the year, he should be back soon. Jack is not 100% well, and so has been in and out of the office, trying not to infect us all. When he’s not in quarantine he’s working on the physical aspects of Little Printer with Andy. This involves mechanics and graphics, a mix we’re rather enjoying.

James is back in the office for the first time this year. He’s working on some behind the scenes Little Printer tech with Alice. Nick and Phil are working on a bit of refactoring too, but both of them seem rather cheerful about it. Alex and I are also working on Little Printer – a mix of things from packaging ideas, to IA. I’m also trying to keep on top of the feedback we’ve been receiving (there’s been a lot of it, and people have been lovely, thank you).

Joe and Timo have both been working on two separate projects for Uinta.. The end is in sight for the work Joe has been doing – and it’s looking beautiful. It requires some voice over work from Jones, which should be entertaining. Timo is working on editing, directing and interviewing for the film he’s making. We saw some work in progress last week and it’s everything we were hoping for – magic included.

Kari has been helping to get Helen all settled in. She’s also been battling with studio and finance admin. Simon has been here there and every where, organising the last bits of the studio, getting the timesheets in for last year (no, pressure, Nick) and sorting through job applications.

And I think that’s it.

Week 344

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…

Hiring

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!

Friday links

This has been a quiet week for links, but here’s a little something for the weekend. Denise spotted an interesting video on the topic of underwater fishing.

Denise also spotted that the Bus Tops project is now live, so congratulations to everyone who was involved.

And lastly, a dog on a trampoline.

Week 343

Happy new year! So what is BERG up to at the moment? Well for the most part it feels like we’re awakening from a deep slumber, and there’s been a lot of blinking, yawning, stretching and replenishment of caffeine levels.

We’ve been busy unpacking the remaining crates from the Big Office Move of December. Schulze unearthed some unfamiliar output from early studio work that predates many of us. The terseness of the summary page does not do justice to the splendour of the tools it spawned. Schulze is also deep in project work for Uinta, Chaco, and our very own Little Printer.

Denise has been doing a fantastic job fielding the enquiries about Little Printer and BERG Cloud, and is also driving a lot of design thinking around Little Printer as it comes more sharply into focus.

Andy has been unpacking and setting up the workshop area of our new space, and is also working on various aspects of the physical form of Little Printer. The rest of us have been enjoying Andy and Jack’s ongoing argument over what needs to be thrown away, and what is actually valuable enough to earn precious shelf space.

Alex is wrapping up Uinta work, working on designs for our studio stationary, and writing briefs for product packaging design. He’s also managed to set up a studio speaker system which in all likelihood will cause serious structural failure if anyone were to turn the volume up to 10.

Kari has been catching up on studio admin and finance tasks, answering studio queries, and keeping on top of Zendesk tickets. At the end of this month she’s going to head off for some much deserved maternity leave.

Alice has been taking care of address and content updates to our various websites, and is now engaged in some code sketching of Little Printer developer tools. She’s been wonderfully scathing of our local coffeeshop’s customer service.

Phil is porting some embedded code in advance of vendor meetings happening next week, in addition to helping me set up our Little Printer development bench.

Timo rejoined us on Wednesday and is working his magic on a timeline full of exciting footage that was shot last month. He’s also got his VFX Supervisor hat on, and is overseeing some effects work for his Uinta video work.

There are a few notable absentees this week. Webb, Jones and Malia are together in the US and are gradually going to be reabsorbed into the fold over the course of this month. Our last missing person is James Darling, currently in India and rejoining us later this month.

Lastly, I’ve been doing relatively mundane things like making sure our office network is working properly and remembering how to write in whole sentences. This concludes the very delayed summary of week 343!

Gardens and Zoos

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.

Week 341

We have moved office. Joe, Alex, James, Timo, and Nick are on holiday this week. Kari, Denise, Andy, Jones and I are taking holiday for some of the week.

Our new office is so big that all-hands now requires people to move to the same space, acting under an unspoken consensus about where that should be. In our old space I could participate in a conversation with anyone without having to move at all.

As I started taking notes for weeknotes, the tiny human that Kari is currently carrying started kicking her in the ribs. Maybe he wanted to be included in weeknotes too.

There is a list of snags for the new space on the whiteboard. It includes things like “EXTRA COAT OF PAINT ON FOOD AREA PROJECTION WALL” and “LIGHT SW. MEETING ROOM SWITCH DOWN TO TURN ON (REVERSE STATE)”. Simon is managing the snags list this week, along with his usual schtick of chivvying projects and people. Andy is putting up lights and hanging shelves, as well as tidying up the old space and returning keys. He has also taken to bringing bacon sandwiches from the Shepherdess for people who want them, which we’re all very pleased about.

Matt Jones is finishing some work for Uinta. Kari is showing Berg 9 to people who might want to make it their own. She is also training Helen, pushing various bits of accounting admin, and doing something that I have written down only as ‘printers’. This could mean anything, really, do I mean SVK printers? Little Printers? the office printers? I should have taken better notes.

Jack is working on the industrial design for Little Printer this week. He has a seemingly bottomless collection of tops in subdued colours with zips, and today he has brought out a grey knit one that I have not seen before.

Matt Webb is fighting off a sickness that he caught from an Australian and taking Jack out for cake.

Week 341 then, Merry Christmas.

Week 340

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.

USA trip in January

A couple of our favourite clients are in the US, but the time I spend in the country is always filled with workshops. (BERG is based in London, UK, and we travel for product invention workshops.) So I don’t get to spend enough time meeting new folks. It’s time to sort that out!

I’m spending a few weeks travelling next month to meet new BERG clients, and new partners and opportunities for Little Printer.

My itinerary, all in the first weeks of January 2012:

  • Portland, OR: Wednesday 4th – Monday 9th. The daytimes of Wed-Fri are full already.
  • CES: Afternoon Tuesday 10th – afternoon Wednesday 11th. I’ve never been to CES before and we don’t have a stand, so if you’d like to meet then please suggest how we do it!
  • The Bay Area (based in San Francisco): Thursday 12th – Monday 16th. Tuesday will be a travel day.
  • NYC: Wednesday 17th – late Saturday 21st.

My flights are flexible but that’s basically it.

If you’d like to meet to talk about work or Little Printer or whatever, do drop a line to info@berglondon.com and we’ll get something sorted! Please add a note about what you’d like to chat about and where your office is.

(And, friends in various cities, I can’t wait to see you — let’s make plans!)

Week 339

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.

Week 338

It’s been quite a week.

BERG Cloud & its first product, Little Printer were announced. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response – it’s been amazing.

As a result, our weeknotes are very, very late.

Schulze was on duty, and before he departed for Africa, he left me these scribblings from our weekly ‘all-hands’ meeting on Tuesday morning (2hrs before we pushed the button on BERG Cloud!):

AJ: final designs on Uinta, working on some Little Printer stuff too

DW: Little Printer! Little Printer! Little Printer!

JM: Uinta, working with Tim Bacon on 3D and also a little on other Uinta brief w Alex and timo. Very husky. Design wookie.

MJ: Working on Uinta projects, teaching at the RCA.

NL: working on Berg Cloud – on radio telemetry and reception testing.

JD: Berg Cloud timezones and being a fashion maverick

AB: finishing the Berg Cloud website, also dev on some final-stage BBC Dimensions work

TA: Finishing the Little Printer film. Uinta material exploration and video prototyping.

MW: Internet provocateur Anne Galloway is sleeping on his couch. He is in Athens for TEDxAthens and working with Schulze to tie down the wild stallion that is Little Printer.

Simon is busy, coordinating all our projects, the BERG Cloud launch, and our impending studio move. Kari is off on holiday and Schulze is on wings to Africa. Before he flies he is stretching versions of the world in his mind to line up a working process that causes molecules and radiation to synchronise into thousands of little printers.

Normal (whatever that is) service maybe resumed in week 339…

“Sometimes the stories are the science…”

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.

Embedded in Time.

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.

Public Prototyping = New Grammars

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.

Why we make models

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.

Tomorrow’s World

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!

Tomorrow's World - Alice Taylor

Thanks to our great speakers: Alice Taylor, James Bridle, Karsten Schmidt, Fiona Romeo, Jamais Cascio, Russell Davies and Warren Ellis.

Tomorrow's World - Russell Davies

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!

Tomorrow's World - Fiona Romeo

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!

Week 335

This week there’s an enormous amount of things going on. There’s a Hopeful Monsters workshop being run in the US, software and hardware development for both project Uinta and project Chaco, and filmmaking on location for both of those projects. Models and UX prototypes are coming back from modelmakers and contractors. On top of that, internal projects Weminuche and Barringer are ramping up towards a demonstrator and filmable prototypes. There’s also a little sold-out BERG event tomorrow, and a conference on Thursday. Very exciting.

Week 334

Usual weeknotes with a little surprise at the end – I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the kind of music we listen to in a normal week in the office. Enjoy.

Matt Webb is deep in business development – working on a new office space, lots of presentations for the end of the week, and lots of future work possibilities. Always exciting to hear what’s coming up.

Matt Jones is on sales this week, as well as preparing a few workshops, and working on various aspects of Uinta.

Jack and Timo are preparing for some upcoming film work, as well as working with Joe and Durrell on some Chaco related business which is looking lovely. They’re lodged over in our new (temporary) overflow space.

Kari’s doing her usual sterling job of keeping the office (and us) in check.

Myself, Denise, James, Alice, Nick and Andy are all deep in various aspects of Weminuche – design, manufacturing, code, you name it. The progress in the last few weeks has been phenomenal, I wish I could say more about it. Soon!

Joseph Malia is doing baffling things Uinta related, on top of some Chaco work for Jack.

Alice is working on the final bits of Dimensions on top of Weminuche.

Simon is producing what I’m expecting to be the world’s largest gantt chart, and generally keeping his very capable eyes on most of our work to make sure it runs swimmingly.

Finally, here’s a few samples of what we’ve been listening to in the office this week:

Oh, and I very nearly forgot Storm Queen’s ‘It goes on’, which I think is only coming out on a limited 12″.
Until next time…

 

 

Week 331

331 – the week that shall henceforth only be known as Plague Week. Leaves are falling, temperatures are dropping, and the dreaded rhinovirus has claimed no fewer than five victims of our small cohort of thirteen this week. We have a policy in the studio that as soon as someone begins to look a little green, sniffly or generally grotty they are immediately banished, not to return until risk of contagion subsides. Unfortunately it seems our policy hasn’t worked too well this week. Biohazard suits are next.

Last Friday, our weekly demos were stunning. Ninety minutes of brilliant work on all projects. It’ll be hard to follow that this week, especially with so many people out of the studio.

If Barry were a rollercoaster, we’ve just gone over the top of a reasonably lengthy climb and are enjoying the thrill of sudden progress, speed and excitement, though there is still much to come. After various re-planning sessions last week, and a couple of eureka moments this week, things are really happening. Both Matthews, Jack, Denise, Alex, James, Alice, Andy, Nick and Phil have all been working tremendously towards our various short-term goals for this. You know things are going well when Andy becomes an excited one-man percussion extravaganza in the back room.

Last week we started working with partners Future Platforms on some elements of the Uinta and Chaco projects. Progress so far is good, and as they run their projects in fortnightly iterations, as well as our day-to-day communications Joe and I will be spending every other Wednesday with the FP team in Brighton to review what’s been done and plan the next iteration of work. It’s a similar process to that which we’re using for Barry internally.

We’re at the stage where we’re gearing up some communications work around Chaco, Uinta and Barry. Jack and Timo have been sketching and I’ve spent time with them to sketch out timings and logistics. It’s going to be a busy few months for those guys.

Between her numerous other responsibilities, Kari’s been pounding the streets scouting out slightly larger spaces for us to move to locally. Matt Jones and Matt Webb have been looking at our pipeline of work into 2012 and I’ve been supporting by looking at our likely capacity into the new year. They’ve also been out at Wired 2011, returning to the studio rather excited about brainwave-controlled cat ears. And why not.

Thanks Steve.

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.

The design behind How many really

How big really is now just over a year old, released just before I started work at BERG, and I still find myself totally engaged with the simplicity of the concept. It’s a solid, easy to digest punch of information that translates unknown quantities into something instantly recognisable. How many really is the second part of the experiment, and I was tasked with working on the design. This is a little write up of the design process.

We started off by following a workshop Webb & Jones had run with the BBC to kick off the initial concept of examining quantity. Myself, James Darling & Matt Brown spent a week whiteboarding, sketching and iterating, to try and nail down some initial ideas.

The first thought was the variables with which we could use to convey changes in quantity. Time, movement, zoom & scale were all identified as being potentially useful.

We started to construct sentences that could tell a story, and break down into portions to allow new stories to slot in.

Looking at splitting grids into sections to show different variables.

We thought a bit about avatars, and how to use them in visual representations of data, in this case combining them with friends’ names and stories.

Looking at combining avatars with ‘bodies’. Bird suits, vehicles, polaroids.

An early narrative concept, setting up the story early on and sending you through a process of experience. We thought about pushing bits of stories to devices in real time.

After a bit more crunching and sketching, we broke everything down into two routes:

  • Scale – influenced by Powers of 10, used to compare your networks to increasing sizes of numbers,
  • Grouping / snapping – used to take your contacts and run them through a set of statistics, applying them personally to historical events and comparing them against similar events in different times.


What became clear after the sketching was the need to show a breadcrumb trail of information, to give the user a real sense of their scale compared to the numbers we were looking at. Eames’ Powers of 10 video achieves this – a set of steps, with consistent visual comparisons between each step.

Perfect for showing the relevance of one thing in relation to the next, or a larger collective group. But the variation in the stories we’d be showing meant that we didn’t want bespoke graphics for each individual scenario. We tested out a quick mockup in illustrator using relatively sized, solid colour squares.

Despite the lack of rich textures and no visual indicators of your current position in the story, the impact was there. We added Facebook / Twitter avatars for signed in states, and worked on a colour palette that would sit well with BBC branding.

The next problem was dealing with non-signed in states. How many really was always designed to work with social networks, but we wanted it to be just as relevant with no Facebook or Twitter credentials – for classrooms, for example. We took a trip to the V&A to view the Isotype exhibition that was on at the time.

 

That’s 85 year old iconography and infographic design that looks as relevant today as it did back then. A real sense of quantity through simple pictograms. Completely fantastic. We set about designing a stack of isotype influenced icons to work with the site when users weren’t signed into their social networks.

And the icons in context…

We used a bit of Isotype inspiration for the organisation of the grouping stories – evenly spaced grids of icons or avatars.

The rest of the site was intended to stay consistent with How big really. We used photography in place of bespoke graphics for the story panels, as the graphical output varies for each user.

How many really is an entirely different beast to How big really. Rather than each dimension being a solid, one shot hit, the value is in backing up simple visuals with interesting narratives. We spent almost as much time on the written aspect of stories as we did on the aesthetics and interaction. I hope it gives a little context to numbers and figures we often take for granted. Please do have a browse around!

Week 328

I’m writing these notes on the bus back to London. We have a rota to write weeknotes – everyone has a turn – and after months of teasing people when they don’t put notes up early in the week, on Tuesday after All Hands, it’s a little shoddy to have left it till Friday myself.

It’s been an eventful week!

  • Tuesday, How Many Really? launched, a website with the BBC that shows you populations from significant historical times compared to your own social network.
  • We put out a short video product sketch of clocks for robots.
  • On Wednesday, we started furnishing our new overspill office. It’s just over the road, and all Chaco work is shifting over there. It’s far from optimal to split the room like this, but we’re really packed in at the moment, and it’s stifling. So pending the big studio move (we received, and agreed, top-level numbers this week too), we have the overspill office on a short-term lease. The upside here is that James and Alice, who sit in Statham, can sit in the main room with everyone else. But it’s going to be weird and difficult and we’ll have to pay a lot of attention to the split to make sure it’s not damaging. An aside: somehow the office is becoming called “BERG 9 Overspill Area.”
  • And on Thursday, Nick consolidated all our email, calendars and what-not on Google Apps for Business. Our IT has all been a bit organic up till now – the less polite way of saying it would be haphazard and often broken – so this is a good step.

To stick with that Thursday Google consolidation for a second… it’s a shame to no longer allow the variety of email systems and calendar applications that we had before, but there’s a huge benefit in having everyone use the same tools, and having all the tools built by the same company. There’s some kind of network effect — a benefit in sharing protocols and originators.

I don’t like the word “ecosystem” because it feels like something else: maybe all the Google tools align in the same crystal lattice. I choose a crystal because electrons move freely and quickly in the regularity of structure, pausing when they have to cross boundaries where the grain of the lattice changes.

So I have these various lattices in which I live my electronic life. There’s Google for email, calendar, apps etc. Apple for phone, music, photos, and my place of work — my desktop, truly, and my metaphorical pens and paper too really. HDMI at home, which is the lattice that music and video travels through on the way to the speakers and projector after it leaves the Apple lattice. Since I standardised on HDMI (upgrading a couple of bits of kit, discarding handfuls and handfuls of interim convertors and cables), my home AV is way simpler and I get to play music and watch telly without having to remember what switch needs to be turned to whatever setting.

Consolidations of protocol. I don’t know, there’s something in this I want to think about more.

Let me say a little about what projects are on.

Our two Uinta projects are gathering momentum. Simon, Joe, and Matt J were in Brighton on Monday for a meeting with potential collaborators.

Chaco continues, and is well underway. Jack and Timo have been filming this week, and Timo has a shiny new iMac on his desk dedicated to editing and doing maths on pixels. The projects (Chaco is a family of projects) are huge and ambitious, and we’re going to need a broader team to pull them off — in part, that’s what my blog post this week about vacancies was for. (And I encourage you to have a read! There’s hardware and software and all sorts of things we’re interested in.)

Weminuche – the platform – and Barry – the first instance of it – continue too, and almost everyone is involved in some way or another. Looking down my list from All Hands, Denise, Alice, Nick, Alex, Simon, James, Timo, Jack and I all mentioned time spent on that. I’m being cryptic I know. But part of the purpose of these weeknotes is personal, so I can look back one day and remember “ah, that was what we were doing in week such-and-such” and memories will come flooding back. So I pair people names and project names in order to drop a future-anchor into the here and now.

As if that wasn’t enough, SVK second print run sales continue, and we continue to debug our fulfilment and customer service processes. I’m proud of SVK, as an internally run project. It’s hard to push work into the world when you don’t have a client because the temptation is to wait until perfection. But unless you get out into the world, all that work is for nothing anyway, and the experience of making your work public is so transformational to a project that you have to leave time and room to understand and build on that transformation. Launch unfinished, I say! Easy to say, hard to do. Mother birds push their chicks out of the nest before they can fly, but who’s going to learn to fly when somebody’s bringing food to you the whole time? Mother birds must feel horrible. Baby birds must resent them.

And there’s also some more work with Dentsu that I cannot wait to show you. Not long now.

This week I’ve started trying to think about two areas I’m not in the habit of thinking about: sales, and process.

We have a very simple sales model at the moment. We sell the product of our time and thinking. But there’s something in the vague area of long-term research projects, product partnerships, IP, that kind of thing. I don’t know, to be honest. My commercial sense is very undeveloped. All I know is that I know very little, and I see in-front of me a broad, grey, undifferentiated space. So I want to work on that, feel it out, and get to better understand commercial reality.

The other area I want to get deeper on is process. I feel very naive around process right now. I observe that we’re a design company, with a design culture built over 6 years, yet we’re having to cultivate a new engineering culture that sits within it and alongside it, and the two have different crystal grains. It’s good that they do — engineering through a design process can feel harried and for some projects that does not lead to good outcomes. And vice versa. But it throws up all kinds of questions for me: do we really want two domains of engineering and design; what is the common protocol – the common language – of engineering culture, and indeed of our design culture; how do these lattices touch and interact where they meet; how do we go from an unthought process to one chosen deliberately; how is change (the group understanding of, and agreement with a common language) to be brought about, and what will it feel like as it happens.

Again, not things I have much experience with.

And again, as I did last time, I read back over my weeknotes and wonder whether it’s worth thinking about these kind of things. You know, I’ve just spent an hour bus ride noodling about things that maybe only make sense when a company is 100s of people, rather than a dozen plus change. Couldn’t I have spent my time replying to email?

I genuinely don’t know. Other people appear to construct and grow companies without any need for this kind of abstract introspection. Maybe it’d be better to pick the first thing that seems to work and just go for it.

Then again, maybe not. My metric for thinking about this is: ensuring the best possible environment for happiness and invention. Happiness feels like the easier of the two to work towards. It’s more easily identifiable, if not always easy to reach. Invention I see only out of the corner of my eye. Mostly you can only identify invention in retrospect. It is rare and fragile. Keeping hold of that feels worth a bus-ride thinking.

Vacancies!

Update: We’ve had a bunch of great responses! We’re no longer looking to meet folks through this route — keep an eye on the blog for future vacancies and more formal hiring. Thanks! -Matt.

So, we’ve got a few projects coming up, and I’d like to expand our network of awesome collaborators.

We’re a little studio — there are only 13 of us permanent, plus a handful of totally excellent regulars. We’re always busy, researching and developing media and tech for a wide variety of companies. And we work on our own stuff too.

There are a handful of roles that I’d like to find folks for, probably as contractors. I’m not going to write up these as full job specs yet, because it’s still early days. This is a gentle testing of the waters, and I won’t treat it like a full skills screen/interview/etc process. If we meet and hit it off, brilliant, we’ll make some magic. Otherwise I’ll put out a more formal call in a month or so!

Given all of that… if any of these gigs sounds like you, drop a note + your CV to info@berglondon.com, and we’ll sort out a coffee if it looks like we have a match.

Those gigs:

  • Book-keeper: 1-2 days/week. We’re looking for an assistant to Kari, our studio manager. As part of her job, she runs payroll, does the book-keeping, receives and pays invoices, run VAT returns, and provides information to our accountants at year-end. Kari has written an operations manual on how our book-keeping works, and the position will start with shadowing her for a month or more. This will be an ongoing, part-time role, ideally kicking off before the end of the year. Experience with Xero (our accounts software) highly desirable.
  • Designer-coder(s) au fait with openFrameworks (we’ll be looking at public code contributions), projection mapping, and live video manipulation, for a project or two beginning later this year. Experience in computer vision is a plus, as is the ability to blog publicly about work. The project definitions will start off pretty loose — we’re looking for collaborators to work with the software and ideas we’ll have already developed, and find and show off new possibilities. We’re looking at starting very early in 2012 for this, maybe earlier, and would like to start meeting people now.
  • A developer highly skilled with 3D and manipulating 3D models, large polygon counts, and graphics. Additional skills: making beautiful visual output; tight code for future mobile output. The first iteration is a clearly defined project, for delivery before the end of the year for an internal prototype. This would be a contracting position, starting as soon is practical.
  • Producer with experience working with specialists in interaction design; product design; short-run manufacture; electronics; software development. We’re increasingly getting projects that run from experimental prototyping to speculative short-run manufacture of physical products with screens and electronics. While we have project management and hardware producer/R&D skills, in the long-term I’d like to expand the team, and so this is a good opportunity to work with a new contractor producer dedicated to a single project. Great communication is a must: this is a client-facing role, and being able to define and demystify roadmaps will be a big part of it. So a background in prototyping and/or embedded software would be very useful. I reckon this a 50% role for 3-6 months, and will likely involve a little travelling. It starts as soon as we meet the right person.

All roles are based out of our East London studio — we’re not quite big enough for remote working. No guarantee that we’ll actually take anyone on at this point. It’s all contingent on finding the right brilliant person!

Anyway, drop info@ a note if any of these gigs resonate.

Thanks, and please feel free to pass this on!

BBC Dimensions: How Many Really?

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


About two years ago, we started work with Max Gadney on a series of workshops looking at how digital media could be used for relating stories and facts from both history and current affairs.

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

BBC Dimensions: How Many Really

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…

bletch_home

I can sign in with my Twitter account

bletch_1

and I’m placed at the centre…

bletch_2

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

bletch_3

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

bletch_4

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

bletch_5

…and finally the 1.5m people in the Home Guard

bletch_6

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:

homes_home

Starting again from your twitter network…

homes_1

This visualisation starts to arrange your social network in groups…

homes_2

relating to the different experiences…

homes_3

homes_4

homes_5

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

homes_hilight

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

homes_post_to_twitter

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.

own_numbers

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

thing_numbers

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.

Bringing the London Bus Network home

The afternoon Transport For London quietly launched countdown.tfl.gov.uk, a desk-beer was in my hand after our Friday Demos. Countdown tells you when busses are arriving at any of London’s 18,541 bus stops. I was due for a meeting in a pub in 20 minutes, but I thought I’d have a poke around. It quickly became clear that whilst there was not yet an official API for the data, the website itself was running from an internal API. It only took a little bit of playing before I was able to programmatically access the data and within my spare 20 minutes I had written and deployed a tiny web application redisplaying TFLs data.

I had enough to start exploring what’s possible with this data. The simplicity of the website allowed it to work on any device I tried at any size. Where could this service fit best in mine and others lives? With another 20 minutes, auto-refreshing and a bus stop search page, it was ready for the world.

I quickly got feedback from people who had made it into an OS X dashboard widget or added to their iPhone screen. Having it accessible from your pocket or work desk was unsurprisingly but pleasantly very useful.

bus.abscond.org on an iPhone

But what about our friends’ and indeed our own work on media surfaces, secondary screens, information radiators and the like? I’ve always wanted to explore what can be done with the Kindle as a relatively cheap web enabled e-ink display, and it worked on mine straight away. So I taped it to the inside of the BERG office front door.

Kindle showing live bus times taped to door

It sits there, quietly updating every 15 seconds. Not glowing, not demanding attention, only offering it at the quickest of glances. As comfortable as a wall clock. From my limited testing, the 6 month old Kindle can do this for about 48 hours before needing a recharge, a figure I’m sure could be increased with some effort.

The Kindle came home with me that night (soldiering on in my bag with unnoticed updates over 3G). I tried it out in various places. The living room was my first thought, but updates from the big city outside didn’t fit well in there. Maybe, like the office, on the front door might work, but by that point I have already committed to leaving the house. All that told me was how long I was going to have to wait, enforcing the world on me, not empowering me to adapt.

Kindle showing live bus times next to a toaster

It found it’s eventual home next to my toaster. I’m not a morning person, and my mornings are usually reactive, not routine. I will try and grab breakfast at home, but often end up grabbing a bagel en-route to work. Now my kitchen tells me if I have enough time for toast.

A service involving 8,500 GPS enabled busses and many servers is very impressive, but it really comes into its own when it doesn’t show off.

SVK is back on sale

We’re pleased to say that SVK is back on sale.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, SVK is a collaboration we’ve published between writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Crooked Little Vein, RED), artist Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker (Stickleback, Lazarus Churchyard, 2000AD).

It’s an experimental graphic novella about looking – an investigation into perception, storytelling – and printing with UV ink…

SVK cover

The first print run sold out in 48 hours, and our second print run is now ready.

If you missed out the first time round, getsvk.com now…

Week 325

It is week 325 at BERG. The number 325 is the same as the number in the year 325 AD, which is when Gladiatorial combat was outlawed in the Roman Empire. This week is the holiday season, so lots of people are away for all or parts of the week, Jones, Ludlam and Pearson are all taking rests.

Things continue to build across the various projects we have in hand. Everything feels larger than it did before, more potent and charged. Sometimes I wince with it like preparing to touch a metal button in a hotel lift with nylon carpets.

Andy is working on some special PCBs, we nearly have a final design for one set which means we can push ahead with prototyping in East Asia. This represents a tipping point for the project, most of the design and technical frameworks have been established in the physical. We are now at the stage of resolving problems and evolving a prototype towards production. Andy also ran a thirty meter ethernet cable from a little box along the ceiling and into another room. I’m told that this will improve things for Nick.

Alex is resolving the brand thinking for Barringer, it’s exciting to see a visual language grow around a product concept we’ve known for so long. Later in the week he will be sketching concepts for the early design thinking for Uinta which I’ll be working closely on.

Denise and James are chewing hard on the IA for Weminuche, this is a tough task with technical and behavioural overhead as well as some unresolved known unknowns. Alice is waiting for resolution on this like a coiled nuke.

Timo is directing some of the Chaco work. He and I met with Phil Baines mid week to discuss typographic grids for an article we’re writing.

Joe is back from holidays and beginning second phase video work with Timo and I for Chaco, his sketches are great. The milling machine purrs, phones buzz, Alice’s fingernails shine in an ocean of glamourless Dell monitors. Someone has stolen Nicks display port to mini display port cable. That is what’s happening.

Friday Links

It’s Friday, just after 4pm; It must be time for links!

First up –

Eindhoven’s Bart Hess, explores and applies a number of video techniques from time slicing to the utterly captivating, if not slightly nauseating, motion stabilisation.

Stabalise Motion from bart hess on Vimeo.

Jerry’s Map, has been steadily gathering views on Vimeo after 2 years, brought to our attention by @infovore it sensitively tells a story of an extraordinary endeavour which sits between collage and world building.

Jerry’s Map from Jerry Gretzinger on Vimeo.

An altogether different imagining of a world came through from a bldgblog post describing Simone Ferracina’s Theriomorphous Cyborg project, courtesy of Jones.

Alex picked up on this visualisation of the increasing variety of colours in the Crayola palette from 1903-2010 …

… while also scaring us all with a bit of downward scrolling terror (with sound).

There was a little unpacking of Laptops and Looms of which Denise and I attended all, and some respectively last week. It was a 3 day experiment/conference summed up by Paul Miller and decompressed by Rachel Coldicutt. In addition to the talks it was also an amazing chance to visit some parts of the British Industrial Past while discussing it’s potential future.

Happy (Bank Holiday in the UK) Weekend.

Friday Links

Last weekend we were looking at a pioneering ’50s Synthesizer that was unearthed in a French barn. The photo above reminded us of Norman McLaren’s early experimental films where he not only scratched the animation directly onto celluloid, but created the soundtrack by scratching the optical track too.

In order to create music on the Oram, a composer painted waveforms directly onto 35mm film strips which were fed into the machine. Inside, photo-electronic cells read the light pattern and interpreted it as sound.

Lovely! It was built by Daphne Oram in 1957, a year before she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Alice Bartlett unearthed this uncanny movie of ‘Swarmanoid’ modular robots that specialise in ‘manipulating objects and climbing, some in moving on the ground and transporting objects, and some in flying and observing the environment from above‘. Amazing to watch these little beings adapt around our human environments. In similar territory, we’re monitoring the development in drone technology, including the ‘Raven‘, a military drone that is somewhat like a model airplane that fits in a backpack. “At its simplest, a Raven acts as a flying pair of binoculars that can look over the next hill”. Fast, cheap and out of control.

Many in the studio have been experimenting with (and like Chris Heathcote giving up on) Tiny Tower with its tiny, AI-driven version of Facebook. James Darling has been experimenting with other forms of software-generated social avatars with Weavrs, discovering that his mutant creation is a bit of an arse. The studio is very much enjoying the astutely-observed impersonation that is Peter Molyneux 2, especially his comments on the rumours of pico-projectors in next-gen consoles.

A recently unearthed Apple patent for “schematic maps” reminded us very strongly of Linedrive research from Siggraph back in 2001 and of course of Walking Papers by Michal Migurski.

Bill Buxton’s collection of 30 years of UIs and devices is great, via @kaeru.

We’re enjoying Charlie Stross on the next 50 years of security, which is actually a brilliant bit of general near-futurism on the security implications of Shannon’s limit, energy, lifelogging, DIY genomics and democracy:

From being an afterthought or a luxury – relevant only to the tiny fraction of people with accounts on time-sharing systems in the 1970s – security is pushed down the pyramid of needs until it’s important to all of us. Because it’s no longer about our property, physical or intellectual, or about authentication: it’s about our actual identity as physical human beings.

From Matt Jones, news that IBM is creating chips based on the human brain, battling the Von Neumann Bottleneck with neurosynaptic chips, where ‘the integrated memory is represented by synapses, computation by neurons and communication by axons‘. This apparently is aimed towards our sensor heavy future:

“If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”

Matt Jones also discovered this visual essay about the design of displays in Star Wars films. Dan O’Bannon and Bob Greenberg created realistic computer simulations and displays with traditional rostrum animation methods inspired by Douglas Trumbull, and went on to collaborate with Larry Cuba on vector-based computer graphics.

The highly credible look of these displays went on to influence other simulated computer systems and displays in films like Alien and Blade Runner. These tropes are still clearly visible in cinema today, over 40 years later. An incredible legacy that Dan O’Bannon should be proud of.

Loosely related: the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise (via Khoi Vinh).

Just as Matt Webb returned from the Worldships conference at the Interplanetary Society, Nick Ludlam discovered that SpaceX has been given permission to start flights up to the International Space Station. Perhaps there is hope in spaceflight yet.

We’re still not sure if we agree with the analysis, but the Meat to Math Ratio is an interesting provocation:

“In a data-driven world, the true measure of any organization, from a regional government to a global conglomerate, is its meat-to-math ratio. This sounds like a cold statement, saying machines are better than people. That’s not the point here: machines are better with people, and companies that can’t augment their employees with data and tools, that cling to antiquated ideas like broadcast, and that can’t turn their data exhaust into insight and innovation, are doomed.”

Via @janchipchase is this $80 Android phone from Huawei, which, although suffering from limited memory and battery-life problems, is apparently selling very well in Kenya. Making the OLPC look less like a failure and more like a mistake in product category.

A cinema-furniture hybrid, this Inception Chair by Vivian Chiu has ‘hand-cut grooves that notch inside each other, securely connecting them together but making it easy to disassemble‘.

Alex Jarvis found this Gorgeous furniture by Rupert Blanchard (via @LukeScheybeler) who only uses “broken, discarded and odd drawers that no longer have a carcass” and sets himself a rule “to only use objects that no longer fulfil the purpose for which they were originally created.

And finally brilliant long-exposure photography from the front of trains, incredible how three-dimensional these images feel.

Friday links

Last time I wrote Friday Links, a few weeks ago, I was suffering from a serious fish finger sandwich lethargy. This memory, which maybe now permenantly entwined with my Friday Links experience, is making me really want a fish finger sandwich again. Luckily, its Friday, and I have a can of Lech Premium. Almost as good.

The first link I’m sharing is a website dedicated to robot art. This came from Timo. When I first saw this, I thought it was going to be a site of art created by robots. Some people think that art cannot be created by robots, that art requires some deeper intellectual thought that can’t (yet) be recreated artificially. I think these people might consider that in this context the robot is just an extension of it’s creator (who is not a robot) and so any art the robot creates is actually the product of the creator.

Anyway, this site isn’t robots doing art, it’s art doing robots:

robot art

 

Nice!

 

Alex supplies our next link, this very lovely project from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

This table has a little “mole” living in it, which moves around and can be hooked up to a depth sensor to interact with people. The video explores the possibility of playing games using the mole to move objects around, and interacting with the mole itself.

 

Matt Jones sent round the astonishing KinectFusion project, which uses a Kinect to map a room. As well as mapping the room in time with the user moving the Kinect around it, the video also shows what happens when you throw a little particle system into the mix, at round 4.00 there is a really impressive augmented reality ‘explosion’.

Really nice stuff.

 

Bit more art now, this time from Denise.

From http://www.changethethought.com/mobius-federation-square/:

Created by environmental design group Eness, MÖBIUS is a sculpture comissioned by the city of Melbourne that was photographed and animated over two weeks in May 2011. The piece consists of 21 green triangles that can be configured into several cyclical patterns creating the optical illusion of motion. This is a really fantastic example of public artwork, as the individuals who interact with the space inevitably become part of the art itself.

 

MÖBIUS from ENESS on Vimeo.

 

And thats all my links. Have a good weekend all.

Friday links

We start this week’s links sent to our studio mailing list with one from Jack, that combines three subjects close to our heart – robotics, short-run manufacture by small companies, and small companies talking about trying to do new things so others can learn from it. This blog from Modular Robotics is a wonderful insight into all three.

Timo sent http://thenounproject.com/ adding that it was “A bit like an updated http://www.gerdarntz.org/isotype, and includes quite a lot of icons from http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/.

To follow on with another icon, as it were… Alex pointed us to this Dieter Rams interview

We got a little excited about the potential of the WIMM platform despite the (IMHO) rather anodyne product video!

Timo unearthed this gorgeous 1964 footage of the building of the Victoria Line – the website reveals “This was to be British Transport Films largest single project in terms of the quantity of footage that was shot.”

More British Transport ephemera from Matt Webb, on how cars and cities chat to each other using magnets:

In Southampton when I was growing up, we had one of the world’s first adaptive traffic routing systems, where the traffic light delays would alter dynamically depending on traffic. At night they would switch to an “on demand” model: the main route at a crossroads would remain green, while the minor route would only go green 15 seconds after a car had approached it.

Since this was detected by the induction loop, and since an induction loop only has magnetic flux through it when a material is *moving* over it, if you sat in a static car waiting for the traffic light to turn from green to red again, it would never reactivate. (I sat for 15 minutes one, still at a red light on a minor route, to make sure it didn’t come on by accident. It turned green as soon as I moved the car just a little bit.)

Here’s a nice hack:

Ambulances had *moving* parts underneath them, to trigger a stronger signal in the induction loop. In Southampton, this was used to identify emergency vehicles moving up to the lights, and preferentially change traffic lights green a hop or two ahead of them on likely routes.

Some people build these into their cars to get better treatment by these routing systems.

http://www.wikihow.com/Trigger-Green-Traffic-Lights

Finally, all that remains is Alice’s recommendation of a Chrome experimental video by the band OK Go & Pilobolus, which allows us to put their best feet forward in order to say happy Friday from all of us in the studio…

The Robot-Readable World

QR

I gave a talk at Glug London last week, where I discussed something that’s been on my mind at least since 2007, when I last talked about it briefly at Interesting.

It is rearing its head in our work, and in work and writings by others – so thought I would give it another airing.

The talk at Glug London bounced through some of our work, and our collective obsession with Mary Poppins, so I’ll cut to the bit about the Robot-Readable World, and rather than try and reproduce the talk I’ll embed the images I showed that evening, but embellish and expand on what I was trying to point at.

Robot-Readable World is a pot to put things in, something that I first started putting things in back in 2007 or so.

At Interesting back then, I drew a parallel between the Apple Newton’s sophisticated, complicated hand-writing recognition and the Palm Pilot’s approach of getting humans to learn a new way to write, i.e. Graffiti.

The connection I was trying to make was that there is a deliberate design approach that makes use of the plasticity and adaptability of humans to meet computers (more than) half way.

Connecting this to computer vision and robotics I said something like:

“What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world”

After that I ran a little session at FooCamp in 2009 called “Robot readable world (AR shouldn’t just be for humans)” which was a bit ill-defined and caught up in the early hype of augmented reality…

But the phrase and the thought has been nagging at me ever since.

I read Kevin Kelly’s “What technology wants” recently, and this quote popped out at me:

Three billion artificial eyes!

In zoologist Andrew Parker’s 2003 book “In the blink of an eye” he outlines ‘The Light Switch Theory’.

“The Cambrian explosion was triggered by the sudden evolution of vision” in simple organisms… active predation became possible with the advent of vision, and prey species found themselves under extreme pressure to adapt in ways that would make them less likely to be spotted. New habitats opened as organisms were able to see their environment for the first time, and an enormous amount of specialization occurred as species differentiated.”

In this light (no pun intended) the “Robot-Readable World” imagines the evolutionary pressure of those three billion (and growing) linked, artificial eyes on our environment.

It imagines a new aesthetic born out of that pressure.

As I wrote in “Sensor-Vernacular”

[it is an aesthetic…] Of computer-vision, of 3d-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts. Of LIDAR and laser-speckle. Of the gaze of another nature on ours. There’s something in the kinect-hacked photography of NYC’s subways that we’ve linked to here before, that smacks of the viewpoint of that other next nature, the robot-readable world. The fascination we have with how bees see flowers, revealing animal link between senses and motives. That our environment is shared with things that see with motives we have intentionally or unintentionally programmed them with.



The things we are about to share our environment with are born themselves out of a domestication of inexpensive computation, the ‘Fractional AI’ and ‘Big Maths for trivial things’ that Matt Webb has spoken about this year (I’d recommend starting at his Do Lecture).

And, as he’s also said before – it is a plausible, purchasable near-future that can be read in the catalogues of discount retailers as well as the short stories of speculative fiction writers.

We’re in a present, after all, where a £100 point-and-shoot camera has the approximate empathic capabilities of a infant, recognising and modifying it’s behaviour based on facial recognition.



And where the number one toy last Christmas is a computer-vision eye that can sense depth, movement, detect skeletons and is a direct descendent of techniques and technologies used for surveillance and monitoring.

As Matt Webb pointed out on twitter last year:



Ten years of investment in security measures funded and inspired by the ‘War On Terror’ have lead us to this point, but what has been left behind by that tide is domestic, cheap and hackable.

Kinect hacking has become officially endorsed and, to my mind, the hacks are more fun than the games that have published for it.

Greg Borenstein, who scanned me with a Kinect at FooCamp is at the moment writing a book for O’Reilly called ‘Making Things See’.

It is a companion in someways to Tom Igoe’s handbook to injecting behaviour into everyday things with Arduino and other hackable, programmable hardware called “Making Things Talk”.

“Making Things See” could be the the beginning of a ‘light-switch’ moment for everyday things with behaviour hacked-into them. For things with fractional AI, fractional agency – to be given a fractional sense of their environment.

Again, I wrote a little bit about that in “Sensor-Vernacular”, and the above image by James George & Alexander Porter still pins that feeling for me.

The way the world is fractured from a different viewpoint, a different set of senses from a new set of sensors.

Perhaps it’s the suspicious look from the fella with the moustache that nails it.

And its a thought that was with me while I wrote that post that I want to pick at.

The fascination we have with how bees see flowers, revealing the animal link between senses and motives. That our environment is shared with things that see with motives we have intentionally or unintentionally programmed them with.

Which leads me to Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins talks about how we have evolved to live ‘in the middle’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html) and our sensorium defines our relationship to this ‘Middle World’

“What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it’s useful for dealing with the real world.

The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey’s brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole’s software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider’s brain doesn’t need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott flatland.”

Middle World — the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with –is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colours. We’re blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast.”

At the Glug London talk, I showed a short clip of Dawkins’ 1991 RI Christmas Lecture “The Ultraviolet Garden”. The bit we’re interested in starts about 8 minutes in – but the whole thing is great.

In that bit he talks about how flowers have evolved to become attractive to bees, hummingbirds and humans – all occupying separate sensory worlds…

Which leads me back to…



What’s evolving to become ‘attractive’ and meaningful to both robot and human eyes?

Also – as Dawkins points out

The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are.

That is, to say ‘robot eyes’ is like saying ‘animal eyes’ – the breadth of speciation in the fourth kingdom will lead to a huge breadth of sensory worlds to design within.

One might look for signs in the world of motion-capture special effects, where Zoe Saldana’s chromakey acne and high-viz dreadlocks that transform here into an alien giantess in Avatar could morph into fashion statements alongside Beyoncé’s chromasocks…

Or Takashi Murakami’s illustrative QR codes for Louis Vuitton.



That a such a bluntly digital format such as a QR code can be appropriated by a luxury brand such as LV is notable by itself.

Since the talk at Glug London, Timo found a lovely piece of work featured by BLDGBLOG by Diego Trujillo-Pisanty who is a student on the Design Interactions course at the RCA that I sometimes teach at.

Diego’s project “With Robots” imagines a domestic scene where objects, furniture and the general environment have been modified for robot senses and affordances.

Another recent RCA project, this time from the Design Products course, looks at fashion in a robot-readable world.

Thorunn Arnadottir’s QR-code beaded dresses and sunglasses imagine a scenario where pop-stars inject payloads of their own marketing messages into the photographs taken by paparazzi via readable codes turning the parasites into hosts.

But, such overt signalling to distinct and separate senses of human and robots is perhaps too clean-cut an approach.

Computer vision is a deep, dark specialism with strange opportunities and constraints. The signals that we design towards robots might be both simpler and more sophisticated than QR codes or other 2d barcodes.

Timo has pointed us towards Maya Lotanʼs work from Ivrea back in 2005. He neatly frames what may be the near-future of the Robot-Readable World:

Those QR ‘illustrations’ are gaining attention because they are novel. They are cheap, early and ugly computer-readable illustration, one side of an evolutionary pressure towards a robot-readable world. In the other direction, images of paintings, faces, book covers and buildings are becoming ‘known’ through the internet and huge databases. Somewhere they may meet in the middle, and we may have beautiful hybrids such as http://www.mayalotan.com/urbanseeder-thesis/inside/

In our own work with Dentsu – the Suwappu characters are being designed to be attractive and cute to humans and meaningful to computer vision.

Their bodies are being deliberately gauged to register with a computer vision application, so that they can interact with imaginary storylines and environments generated by the smartphone.

Back to Dawkins.

Living in the middle means that our limited human sensoriums and their specialised, superhuman robotic senses will overlap, combine and contrast.

Wavelengths we can’t see can be overlaid on those we can – creating messages for both of us.

SVK wasn’t created for robots to read, but it shows how UV wavelengths might be used to create an alternate hidden layer to be read by eyes that see the world in a wider range of wavelengths.

Timo and Jack call this “Antiflage” – a made-up word for something we’re just starting to play with.

It is the opposite of camouflage – the markings and shapes that attract and beguile robot eyes that see differently to us – just as Dawkins describes the strategies that flowers and plants have built up over evolutionary time to attract and beguile bees, hummingbirds – and exist in a layer of reality complimentary to that which we humans sense and are beguiled by.

And I guess that’s the recurring theme here – that these layers might not be hidden from us just by dint of their encoding, but by the fact that we don’t have the senses to detect them without technological-enhancement.

I say a recurring theme as it’s at the core of the Immaterials work that Jack and Timo did with RFID – looking to bring these phenomena into our “Middle World” as materials to design with.

And while I present this as a phenomena, and dramatise it a little into being an emergent ‘force of nature’, let’s be clear that it is a phenomena to design for, and with. It’s something we will invent, within the frame of the cultural and technical pressures that force design to evolve.

That was the message I was trying to get across at Glug: we’re the ones making the robots, shaping their senses, and the objects and environments they relate to.

Hence we make a robot-readable world.

I closed my talk with this quote from my friend Chris Heathcote, which I thought goes to the heart of this responsibility.

There’s a whiff in the air that it’s not as far off as we might think.

The Robot-Readable World is pre-Cambrian at the moment, but perhaps in a blink of an eye it will be all around us.

This thought is a shared one – that has emerged from conversations with Matt Webb, Jack, Timo, and Nick in the studio – and Kevin Slavin (watch his recent, brilliant TED talk if you haven’t already), Noam Toran, James Auger, Ben Cerveny, Matt Biddulph, Greg Borenstein, James George, Tom Igoe, Kevin Grennan, Natalie Jeremijenko, Russell Davies, James Bridle (who will be giving a talk this October with the title ‘Robot-readable world’ and will no doubt take it to further and wilder places far more eloquently than I ever could), Tom Armitage and many others over the last few years.

If you’re tracking the Robot-Readable World too, let me know in comments here – or the hashtag #robotreadableworld.

Friday links: flashed faces, buttons, rapping paper, alternative ipsum, Ford and Beeker

With at least a quarter of the studio gone on any given day this week, it’s been a bit quiet on the studio email list, but there have still been a few gems popping up.

Alice sent round a link to “The Flashed Face Effect”: the phenomenon that normal faces flashing by look monstrous when you’re viewing them with your peripheral vision. It’s another one of those fascinating things the brain does, and scientists still aren’t really sure why.

Denise pointed out Bill DeRouchey’s SXSW presentation on The History of the Button. It’s a fascinating walk through the past century looking at how buttons developed, what they signified, where we’ve gotten to now and where things might be going.

Matt Jones found the utterly delightful Rapping Paper. I’d be tempted to just frame the Run DMC “It’s Tricky” paper and hang it on my wall.

Nick pointed us to Bacon Ipsum, for when your Lorum Ipsum needs to be a little meatier. Simon countered with his friend Katie’s Vegan Ipsum for those among us that eschew meat and meat products.

Another last minute entry from Jones: his friend Steve Murray created “Forty Fords”, a tribute to Harrison Ford in commemoration of his 40th credited big screen appearance.

And finally, just for fun (we do quite like a bit of fun round here after all), I will leave you on this lovely Friday with the inimitable Beeker, doing an impressive multi-dubbed video rendition of Ode To Joy. That is, until it all goes a bit… err… badly.

Have a great weekend!

‘Talk to Me’ at MoMA

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.

Friday links

Just discussing the fact we’re a Mattless office for the day (they’re both in NY). It’s not something that happens often, and so to soothe this slight unease, it feels fitting that we start Friday links with a BBC archive of the Moon landings, from Matt Webb. It has “lots of telly clips from the past 42 years”, including interviews, episodes of Panorama and a very young looking Patrick Moore, hosting The Sky at Night.

Apple Stoer

You might well have seen this by now, as it’s been quite widely discussed online, but Andy sent around this post on fake Chinese Apple stores earlier this week, titled ‘Are you listening, Steve Jobs?’ It’s quite extraordinary – and a little bit ‘uncanny valley’, if it’s possible to use that in this context. It’s almost right, but you can sense something’s up.

We had a bit of discussion about the Window to the World concept, from Toyota, a link discovered via @antimega. In the end we got slightly sidetracked by the comments. The fury at the child’s parents for not buckling her into a seatbelt, and the wrath of others for bringing that up. Feel free to dream about the future, but make sure you sweat the details.

James and Nick discussed Tubetap, an app that enables you to apply for a refund from Transport for London at the tap of a button – or several buttons. And on that note, Fix My Transport from MySociety is in beta testing at the moment – but for commuters like me, on multiple forms of public transport – looks like it could be great. (Also, it has the best tagline ever.)

Nick also found a bunch of Little Fellas over on Craftzine. You can’t always spot them in the wild, so why not make one?. I’d like to see them applied to the LittleDog Robot mentioned last week.

Robot eyes

Broken SVK torches and what we’re doing to fix the problem

We published SVK two weeks ago today — it sold out the whole run of 3,500 copies in 48 hours (more copies went to advertisers and contributors). We’ll shortly print our second run! A quick recap for newcomers: SVK is a comic by Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, published by us, with a twist that part of the story is printed in invisible ink, readable only with a special object that you get when you buy it. SVK is available only from BERG, and we’ve set up an online shop, etc, to make that happen.

But we’ve had an embarrassing trip-up: in the last two weeks, we’ve replaced 9% of our customers’ SVK torches which were dead on arrival or not quite working.

9% is way too many by any standards. It’s disappointing and annoying for our readers.

It’s also embarrassing. Sorry Warren and Matt, and sorry people who bought SVK.

Let me tell you what happened, what we’re doing, and what we’re going to do for the reprint.

Background

As it says on the product page, SVK is an experimental publication. We were trying loads of things for our first time, from publishing to shipping, and from sourcing objects from China to customer service.

So before we went on sale, we brainstormed 20 problems that might occur, and what we’d do about each. Personally I though we’d have problems with postal systems — last time, when we sold maps, we had a lot of post go missing. This time we were sure we were organised, and even if things did go wrong then we had made sure we could respond promptly.

Out of all the possible problems, once SVK started arriving at people’s homes, we quickly found out that some of the torches were broken. We had planned for there being some kind of hiccough, and it looked like peaking at 2-3% initially. And okay, 2-3% is a problem, but a just-about acceptable problem if we respond fast, and it’s understandable to have some kind of glitch or another. We had already decided to ship free replacement torches out to anyone who wasn’t totally satisfied, so we started doing that.

But if you look at the @berglondon Twitter stream you’ll see the volume is much higher than 2-3% — we’ve redirected a large number of people to our customer service email address. It grew gradually to 9% of customers. What happened?

Where the broken torches come from

The torches come to us in cartons of 100. We’ve now checked carefully through 3 cartons, and the numbers are these:

Even before shipping, 2% are totally dead. 2% have only 1 of the 2 LEDs working. A further 2-3% not broken but unsatisfactory in other ways: the light flickers or is a little weak, or the power button is too easy to click. These are ones that would clearly die in transit.

That makes 6-7%. These should have been rejected before they left our hands, and we knew that not all the torches would work straight from the factory: There was in fact a QA (quality assurance) step planned during package assembly, which would have caught these, but it appears that this was lost. It shouldn’t have been missed, and it’s our fault for not ensuring it happened.

This leaves 2-3% of torches unaccountably broken on arrival, and we believe it’s due to the battery discharging in transit — some of the torches have looser power button mechanisms than others, and these might activate under a heavy weight. Or maybe all the torches are susceptible to that, and it’s only a small fraction of packages that have the necessary pressure applied while in the post. We hadn’t anticipated this.

We didn’t believe broken torches would be a problem because our initial checks hadn’t revealed any torches that were dead on arrival, and the packaging appeared to be fine. It turns out we weren’t thorough enough with our checks.

What we’re doing

First, anybody with a broken torch should contact shop@berglondon.com and we’ll ship a replacement, free, ASAP. We’re monitoring Twitter to let customers know there too. Replacement torches are checked before packaging, and wrapped in bubble wrap. That’s a picture of the replacements being packaged, above.

Second, for the reprint:

We’re going to be stricter on the QA during packaging, and to ensure it takes place, we’ll ask to see rejected torches (we’re not doing the packaging in the studio). If there aren’t 6% rejected, we know QA has failed and we won’t ship that batch.

We’ve also sourced bubble wrap envelopes to put the torches in, in addition to the regular packaging. This appears to deal with torches that are discharged in transit.

And we’ll continue with the free replacements for torches with one or both LEDs dead on arrival. (Update 6 August: it’s been a month since the initial sale, and there are very few people getting in contact now. So we’ll close this offer at the end of the week — the 11th. We’re currently looking at other ways to distribute replacement torches.)

Last, I’m writing this blog post to explain what happened, and how we’re responding. The best thing is to be open about it.

Finally

Thanks here to Kari and Simon, who have been doing a sterling job manning customer service, talking to people over email, and packaging and dispatching new torches. And thanks to Denise and Matt J who have been super responsive on Twitter.

In terms of the experimental nature of this project, we’ve done a number of things right, and we’ve got a new appreciation the important of and how to do quality assurance. This is good team knowledge to have for future projects, but I didn’t want to acquire it like this.

The whole team wishes this torch problem hadn’t happened, and we’re all working to make up for it, and to fix it for the next run.

Friday Links

This week I, Alice Bartlett, have been given the keys to the blog and the responsibility for curating the very cream of the BERG mailing list links for your Friday enjoyment. I’ve eaten a rather large fish finger sandwich for lunch, so you’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little sluggish.

First up, a video in which Walt Disney explains the multipane animation camera. Walt shows very plainly how the multipane camera works whilst accompanied by a classic Disney soundtrack and Mickey Mouse.

Next, things get a little creepy. Here is a robot dog. It’s creepy isn’t it?

This led to a discussion about how you make creepy things likeable. The robot dog in this next video is disturbing until you see it get kicked, at which point it becomes vulnerable and not something to be afraid of.

Here is a blog post about hacking cheap cameras to remove the infra-red filter, meaning you can see how different things (plants, mainly) reflect infra-red and near infra-red light.
http://www.publiclaboratory.org/tool/near-infrared-camera

Finally, here is a bit of thinking on the rise of the faux-vintage photograph: http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/12/the-faux-vintage-photo-part-iii-nostalgia-for-the-present/

And so that concludes Week 318 links, and also my first post on the BERG blog. Happy Friday everybody.

Week 318

It’s a little difficult to work out exactly what’s going on in Week 318 because THERE IS SO MUCH. (“Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” It feels like that.)

Projects that are on the go or bubbling up again this week include:
Chaco x3
Dimensions
Barry / Weminuche
Suwappu (with Dentsu London)
Schooloscope
SVK
Here and Then

All Hands on Tuesday morning was a little head spinning as fourteen different people reeled off all the things they were working on this week. Most folks have their hands in more than one project at a time. Simon and Matt Webb, because of the nature of their jobs, are each trying to pay attention to at least five different projects over the course of the week if not all in one day. Lord bless ’em.

A major project on the boards this week is a Chaco presentation which Matt Jones and Jack will be bringing to New York at the end of the week. Alex and Timo are both contributing their respective talents to that along with Matt and Jack.

In addition to that, Timo is working on creating films about the different Chaco projects. Every now and then he points his camera at something for a while, moves some things around and points his camera again. And then goes back to his computer to make it into magic. Joe is helping out by contributing animations.

There’s plenty of ongoing work on the various Chaco projects. Nick is tweaking software so that it can be shipped and just work. (Seems like a worthy use of time to me: I like it when things just work.) Andy and Simon are both doing a lot of liaising with our external collaborators some of whom are literally on the other side of the world.

Now that Shuush is in the world and getting some attention, Alice is working on making some tweaks to that. Most of her time is being spent on Barry, though, so she has temporarily relocated to Statham 2 which could also be called The Barry War Room. Also working on Barry / Weminuche this week are Alex, Denise, James, Nick and Andy.

Tom and Alex are pushing Dimensions closer and closer to a deliverable thing. Tom has swapped places with Alice for the week and it’s been very nice to have him in the main room. He’s a lot more talkative than I thought.

And the Suwappu project with Dentsu (carrying on from this) is kicking off this week. That’s another project where we have third party collaborators. Just keeping track of all the external collaborators is a job in itself around here – mostly down to Simon.

Schooloscope has been a tad neglected of late due to available hands to work on it, but it’s getting a bit of a polish this week thanks to James.

And now that SVK is in the world and, for the last week, has been landing in customers’ hands, we’ve moved on to the Customer Support phase – which is how I’ve been spending most of my week with lots of help from Simon and Matt Webb. (They are angels, really.) On the one hand, it’s frustrating that there are glitches and things need remedying, but on the other hand, most requests for customer service are accompanied by exclamations of delight at the comic itself, the packaging, the overall product, etc. It’s very gratifying to hear from so many people who really, really like a thing we did. (Note: if you didn’t manage to grab a copy during the 48 hours that it was on sale before selling out, add your email address at getsvk.com to be notified when the second printing becomes available!)

Phew! I’m sure there’s stuff that I missed, but I think that’s probably an adequate summary.

It’s Thursday morning and it’s actually kind of sunny outside and Matt Jones is playing Django Reinhardt on the studio stereo. Happy Bastille Day!

Friday links: instrumentation, smelly robots and love stories

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!

Week 316

It’s a muggy week here in London. Yesterday the temperature topped 30°C, today the air is thick with electric anticipation. The sky is dark and grumbly. This is the occasionally oppressive London summer. Our windows are flung wide, in an attempt to dissipate the heat from the thirteen human radiators working inside our little studio. This is how full it’s become:

BERG Studio, Friday 23 June 2011
23 June, 16.28, by Timo

Thinking and doing continues. Dimensions 2 is being refined, thought about, refined some more by Tom, Alex and Matt Jones. It’s nearly ready.

Alice (who incidentally has already been sitting in two different desks since joining as we shuffle around) has been working on a studio project which I’ve just taken a look at over her shoulder. It’s looking great. More will be revealed shortly on that.

Chaco is beginning to coalesce and the material exploration work is really taking form this week. Timo and Joe are making, creating, and will later be filming. Matt J is writing. Nick has spent most of the day in our meeting room calibrating, lining up, tweaking. Andy has been busy doing similar with some other bits of the project, as well as buying and testing lots of bits and bobs from our good friends Maplin and Farnell. He just bought a new soldering iron with SmartHeat technology and has reassured us all this is a very good thing indeed.

Being from a primarily digital background it’s been refreshing and eye-opening to work on SVK at this crucial final stage where we’re getting it ready to go. The many steps involved between printing and launch have taken time. Lead times are long when dealing with physical products. Whilst we wait for the necessary shipping processing tasks to be completed we’re not sitting on our hands. We’re writing, tweaking, photographing, designing, coding and testing. Lots of testing. Nick, Alex, and especially Matt Jones have been very busy on these elements. Matt Webb and Kari have been masterminding our customer service strategy and tools. It’s all very close now.

Nick, Jack, Denise and Timo are sitting on the sofa discussing barry slightly breathlessly. Deciding what’s important and what’s next. It’s the one project I haven’t put my arms around yet. It’s as though I’m saving it for last like a delicious truffle.

I’ve been here for four weeks now, getting up to speed with the studio and getting stuck in with day-to-day organisation, making lists of immediate priorities on live projects. I’ve also doing some metawork outside of this, tracking project spend, and forecasting resource for future projects for the next six months with help from Matt Webb. It’s exciting. So many good things to do.

This week we’ve been listening to The Minutemen, Jim O’Rourke, and we’re currently listening to Tony Tribe’s version of Red Red Wine, part of a suitably summery reggae mix by Alex. Later in the week I’m going to sneak some Janelle Monáe onto the speakers following her super set at Glastonbury on Saturday night.

Fat raindrops are falling, people on the pavement outside are scurrying past clutching umbrellas. The studio lights have become brighter than the sky.

Thinking and doing continues.

Friday Links believes that the aliens are already among us

Here’s a video called Mark Wahlberg talks to animals:

(Thanks Jack.)

About half-way through the video, Wahlberg speaks to a chicken. This reminds me: you know how many birds there are in the world, actual individual birds? One hundred billion.

You know what birds there are most of? Domesticated chickens. There are 24 billion domesticated chickens alive right now. That means that if you are talking to a bird, there is a one in four chance it is a domesticated chicken.

Origin of birds: birds are tiny dinosaurs.

An iPhone docks that expresses alarmclockness:

Alarm Dock, by Areaware.

From via frog’s product design team, who say:

Alarm clocks, calculators, and cameras are some of these disappearing products. The smart devices themselves are shrinking so much that they don’t offer a lot of opportunity for formal expression either – especially since most of their physicality happens to be a screen. … [but this is also an opportunity.] These iPhones serving as alarm clocks now could use a dock that expresses “alarm clock” as well as those flip clocks did years ago. Like the feeling of a phantom limb, there is a form that feels right and like it has always been there. Augmented by a flip clock app, this dock made by Areaware returns meaningful form to the sliver of a device that will wake you up.

From Denise, a little pointer to Emily Post’s 1922 guide to etiquette, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. The chapter on Conversation contains some advice which might be well-taken for users of social media:

A FEW MAXIMS FOR THOSE WHO TALK TOO MUCH—AND EASILY!

The faults of commission are far more serious than those of omission; regrets are seldom for what you left unsaid.

The chatterer reveals every corner of his shallow mind; one who keeps silent can not have his depth plumbed.

Don’t pretend to know more than you do. To say you have read a book and then seemingly to understand nothing of what you have read, proves you a half-wit. Only the very small mind hesitates to say “I don’t know.”

Above all, stop and think what you are saying! This is really the first, last and only rule. If you “stop” you can’t chatter or expound or flounder ceaselessly, and if you think, you will find a topic and a manner of presenting your topic so that your neighbor will be interested rather than long-suffering.

Remember also that the sympathetic (not apathetic) listener is the delight of delights. The person who looks glad to see you, who is seemingly eager for your news, or enthralled with your conversation; who looks at you with a kindling of the face, and gives you spontaneous and undivided attention, is the one to whom the palm for the art of conversation would undoubtedly be awarded.

Here is the Hindenburg flying over Manhattan in 1936/1937:

Not Just a Perch for King Kong, via david galbraith on the twitters.

Alice recommends Beyonce’s performance of “Run the World” at the Billboard Awards 2011:

Too right! The play between illumination, Beyonce, real/projected, and huge screens is electric. It’s like you can see her aura, and her aura is performance. Powerful!

Hey, humans could have geomagnetic sight (via @bruces):

The ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, thought to be restricted to sea turtles and swallows and other long-distance animal navigators, may also reside in human eyes.

Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Two immediate associations:

ONE – this is the North Paw anklet from Sensebridge.

A North Paw is an anklet that tells the wearer which way is North. The anklet holds eight cellphone vibrator motors around your ankle. A control unit senses magnetic north and turns on and off the motors. At any given time only one motor is on and this motor is the closest to North. The skin senses the vibration, and the wearer’s brain learns to associate the vibration with direction, giving the wearer an intuitive sense of which way is North.

TWO – you know that light is polarised? That is, it wiggles in a direction, like up/down or side-to-side. In 3d theatres, the lenses in the glasses are polarised in two different ways to pick up two different pictures.

Yet human beings are already able to perceive the polarisation of light. The sense of it is called Haidinger’s brush. It is very faint, and visible because the blue cones on the retina lay circularly around the centre of the retina. Each cone molecule is longer than it is fat, and responds better to light which is wiggling in the same direction it lies. Sweet.

I would like to see the magnetic field-lines of pop.

From Simon, here is a cat caught barking like a dog by a human, which then resumes meowing:

Cats are parasites on the flows of social interaction between living things.

Between all particles in the universe, there is a constant interchange of exchange particles carrying force, virtual particles popping in and out of existence, negotiating interaction.

Between all people, there is a constant flow of favours, emotion, status, power, love, hate, redirected attention. Cats feed on these, like whales filtering plankton from the sea.

Whale baleen.

Humans never worked to domesticate animals. They flocked to us to feed on us, thriving on us like the weird pockets of life around deep ocean volcanic vents.

Who’s to say that there aren’t similar pockets of life emerging on the internet, feeding off the energy expended by YouTube comment fiends, and the vast computing capacity dumped into the internet oceans by spam engines?

The Search for Internet Intelligence:

A non-human intelligence operating within and at the scale of the global communications network is possible. Such an intelligence would have a huge impact on our global civilization. We seek tools and skills for detecting such an intelligence with falsifiable and scientific evidence.

(Thanks Matt Jones.)

Alien life could already be here.

Oh, here’s a thing:

Rainmaking bacteria that live in clouds may have evolved the ability to spur showers as a way to disperse themselves worldwide, a recent study found.

There’s life in the clouds.

Week 315

As I write this it’s actually Saturday, before the beginning of week 315, and I’m in the studio doing a few odds and ends, browsing the web, and listening to music.

Odds and ends include: configuring Zendesk to use as our customer support help desk once SVK goes on sale, and thinking. I’m not really working hard, just idling.

I don’t get enough time to think. There’s always something else to do. I get good thinking done when I go out for dinner on my own, as I did last week. Before my food arrived, I wrote in my sketchbook some problems with how we currently structure long-term client engagements, then I wrote some opportunities, and then I made some notes about a better engagement structure and what we need to do to bring that about. More of that later.

Dinner was at Viet Hoa where I had chicken in tamarind and egg-fried rice, and fizzy water.

I’m listening to the Amelie soundtrack and before that to Nero’s Dubstep Symphony, which was on the studio speakers a whole bunch in week 314. Good BWAAA BWAAA sounds, played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. There’s no-one else in, and outside it’s alternating between heavy showers with thunder, and bright sun.

#

Idling: They say dreaming is the brain’s way of processing the day’s events and emotions. A necessary process of defragmenting, filing, and letting things come to rest and join up. Idling is a waking dream, time to be with work but not to be working, to let events and activity settle out and resolve, and let ideas and strategy take form in an unforced way. A necessary process.

#

A few hours later – still Saturday – I’m reading an article called A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600-2100 section by section, and interspersing this with reading the monthly Profit and Loss and Balance Sheets of the company from the past year.

While the P&L (actual and projected) is my main tool to make financial decisions day-to-day, the Balance Sheet – the ledger of the company’s assets and liabilities – determines how well I sleep at night.

I use the at-hand assets of the company in a number of ways:

  • as a “safety net” in the event that we can’t make payroll for a number of months. This is because the new work pipeline is 3 months long. If we screw up at the beginning of the pipeline (regarding positioning and new prospects), that mistake might only be visible 2-3 months later. (Aside: we visit the pipeline once a week, in a meeting led by Matt Jones, who is head of sales. The pipeline runs from prospects through meetings, proposals, contract, and finally through to Work in Progress. Like a gut, all stages should be equally full, and work prospects should move continuously and smoothly.)
  • as tax savings, for annual corporation tax and quarterly VAT.
  • to spend and then earn again afterwards, for example in the printing and sales of SVK. This is an investment, which has associated risk: the money might not be earned back, but there is also a possibility it will multiply. This can be directed at a number of projects simultaneously.
  • as savings against future, unknown large expenditure.
  • as a buffer to invest in growth. For example, taking on a new space or growing the staff are both expenses, but they should result in being able to accept more work or higher paid work. There is a time lag before the money is made back.
  • as security on future new product development, to provide backbone during that time. It would put us in a weak position, for example, to only be able to afford to print the comic if we took external investment. That would result in a bad deal. Cash in the bank to afford NPD means you have a strong BATNA, and that means you can be choosier over your path. (I was able to put a name to this instinct after reading Getting to Yes, which I recommend highly.)
  • to smooth the natural oscillations that emerge from variable payment terms, expenses, etc.

Each of these has an associated risk profile. For example, I might want to call on the safety net once every 24 months. Printing SVK has a risk profile that reduces the overall capacity by £x,000 for 30 days, and I’m also exposed to a certain probability that the risk capacity is reduced permanently.

The P&L represents flows that continuously replenish and discharge the risk capacity. High flow is both good and bad: a high turnover means there’s always room to do a bit of belt tightening or delay paying expenses, so that’s helpful. But a high turnover also exposes us to great potential oscillations.

You have to have turnover though. If you’re not moving, it’s hard to start. Turnover has inertia.

My sleepness nights are caused when I feel that risk is over-extended, for whatever reason: flow drops (or flow projection drops), available capacity decreases, capacity demand increases, more uses become apparent, several low-probability risk events look like they may coincide. All of these mean me having to make an intervention, which itself has to occur over time and is therefore concerted, so has a possibility of failure – and this is where I get nervous. The level of exposure at which I am prepared to hold risk, at what capacity, is my tolerance.

I attempt to run the company perpetually at medium-risk, with occasional forays into high-risk to grow – trusting ourselves to surf this tightrope – don’t laugh at the mixed metaphor, that’s what it feels like – and sometimes it takes a while to get my sea legs at a new scale, to discover what a tolerance of “medium” feels like when the numbers themselves change. Your sensitivity and tolerance improve only with practice. I wish I’d been given toy businesses to play with at school, just as playing with crayons taught my body how to let me draw.

I’ve written in these weeknotes before how I manage three budgets: cash, attention, risk. This is my attempt to explain how I feel about risk, and to trace the pathways between risk and cash. Attention, and how it connects, can wait until another day.

#

Reading about the history of the corporation reminds me about my public discussion with Mark Leckey at the Serpentine, before I went on holiday. During the Q&A, I mentioned my belief that products and companies are both regarded better as entities transcendent from humans, with their own goals and motivations, rather than being reducible to human use or human intentions.

This caused some consternation in the audience.

But I think it’s true. The company’s decisions aren’t actually the shareholders’ decisions. A company has a culture which is not the simple sum of the opinions of the people in it. A CEO can never be said to perform an action in the way that a human body can be said to perform an action, like picking an apple. A company is a weird, complex thing, and rather than attempt (uselessly) to reduce it to people within it, it makes more sense – to me – to approach it as an alien being and attempt to understand its biology and momentums only with reference to itself. Having done that, we can then use metaphors to attempt to explain its behaviour: we can say that it follows profit, or it takes an innovative step, or that it is middle-aged, or that it treats the environment badly, or that it takes risks. None of these statements is literally true, but they can be useful to have in mind when attempting to negotiate with these bizarre, massive creatures.

(Also, in contradiction, companies are made out of people, at least partially, and we are responsible for their actions. It’s not simple.)

#

It’s raining again outside, and it’s time for me to walk home to get ready for a night out.

#

I said I wouldn’t speak about attention, but here’s a sneak peak of what I would say. Attention is the time of people in the studio, and how effectively it is applied. It is affected by the arts of project and studio management; it can be tracked by time-sheets and capacity plans; it can be leveraged with infrastructure, internal tools, and carefully grown tacit knowledge; and it magically grows when there’s time to play, when there is flow in the work, and when a team aligns into a “sophisticated work group.”

Attention is connected to cash through work.

Attention is connected to risk via feelings. A confident Room is a risk-taking, resilient company. A company over-extended in risk will sap attention. Between attention and risk, where the rubber hits the road, are confidence, the group mentality, ability to read the present and the future, desire and ambition, happiness.

#

Now I really have to go.

#

It’s Monday afternoon, and we’ve just had a visit from a dozen of so students from the design faculty of the University of Delaware. We talked to them about how the studio works, product invention workshops, material exploration (which I once wrote up as “thinking through making”), Tuesday All Hands and Friday Demos, and so on. We didn’t chat about balance sheets, or risk, or attention or cash.

In fact, I don’t know whether it’s necessary to think about these things to have a company. I doubt it is.

But I do enjoy it.

#

Don’t think just because I’m banging on about the company that I don’t care about the work. I do, you should see it! There are projects that make me feel like I’m witnessing new stars being born. The studio is a nebula. But I can’t talk about them yet.

#

Also I enjoy interrogating my own decision making, and giving names to my instincts.

#

A little sketch of the studio: it’s mid afternoon. Everyone is occupied with work and there’s no chatter. Unusually there is gentle blues on the speakers, a female vocalist. It’s busy enough that every couple of minutes somebody walks in or out of the door. Click clack. I can see Nick’s screen, which is showing a lot of code, and Matt J’s, who is typing emails. Joe’s screen I can’t see, but he is moving between drawing on paper, and looking at his screen, holding the mouse in one hand and his chin in another. He’s sort of twisting his head at his monitor, like a labrador trying to figure out one of those Magic Eye pictures. It’s raining outside and the room feels only just slightly too dim for June.

#

On SVK:

Let me get off my chest what everyone in the studio is feeling about SVK right now. It is frustrating. Warren and Matt Brooker finished the comic weeks ago. And then it’s just been one thing after another. Getting the layouts correct. Proof-reading. Waiting for time at the printers. Printing (actually that was very handsome). Assembly. Delivery to the warehouse, followed by inventory of the delivery, followed by breaking up the pallets into individual items and a second inventory (this all takes a lot of time). Delivery tests, and final tests of the payment, fulfilment, and invoicing systems. That’s the critical path — other tasks slot in alongside and don’t add to the elapsed time: preparation of launch publicity materials, the customer support system, bookkeeping integration, etc. So much time, and damn, we just want to get it in your hands.

On the upside, the story is awesome, and the art is brilliant. The comic as an artefact is better than I had hoped. It’s actually an excellent yarn, well told and clever and tight and funny. There was a risk that the twist would be gimmicky, but nope. Warren is astounding.

Also, SVK is a little crystal business.

We’ve integrated systems to do warehousing, fulfilment, accounts, and customer support, with the minimum of overhead. One of the big difficulties of working with physical things is supply chain management, the work of channeling flows of raw materials into products, and directing them into the hands of customers. It’s easier when you have infrastructure, so that’s what we’ve set up.

I feel like I’ve got a new hammer, and now I’m looking around for things to warehouse and sell.

So if we can do our own sales and distribution, that actually opens up a lovely area of business. I spoke about this in an interview on GigaOM: “If you own your own distribution, you can afford to spend more on making a quality product instead, made for a smaller number of more discerning people. You avoid the trap of needing a hit that sells millions and millions of something — but spending most of that on marketing and distribution, and having a bunch of failures — which is the trap I believe a lot of big mass manufacture companies are in. ‘Product’ will be reinvented, just as music and media were reinvented by iTunes and blogs: there is a world appearing in between the big guys and the little hobbyists. The middle is getting filled in.”

The happy middle! It means we get to work with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, that’s what it means.

I like having the knowledge in the Room of how all this stuff works. It means we’re putting where our money where our mouth is, to an extent, and can speak with a little more knowledge with clients.

But really I like it because I enjoy putting together a machine for channeling flows with minimum intervention, a toy business, a machine that hooks together with well-oiled joints, and runs with smooth and happy regularity.

Turns out I’m becoming a supply chain management fan.

To this point, the folks next door, Newspaper Club, are an inspiration. They have a website for people to design newspapers, they print newspapers with partners, they ship newspapers, they have customer support, all joined up. A well put together, well-oiled machine.

What else can you do with that?

Deleuze and Guattari called this an abstract machine, which I like because it implies that the machine is virtual – an arrangement rather than a single constructed edifice – and also that it can be copied, reused. It is independent, a bit, from that which is being produced. So when I see a particular abstract machine I wonder: what else you can do with that?

#

That reminds me: a funny thing happened when Simon started as project manager. As he got up to speed, projects went much smoother, Jack and Matt J spent more time on the sales pipeline, and suddenly all the work proposals piled on top of each other like an oppressive stack. It turns out that – because they were connected by being rivals for the same people’s time – project management and sales were geared together. The machine was at equilibrium before, but we were depending on part of it sticking. Simon fixed that, and now we have a different problem: sales is running too fast. This is also, as it happens, an opportunity: we can attempt to combine these proposals into fewer, larger engagements, now we have the attention to try it.

Our pattern used to be to do workshops, and then engage in larger projects. Maybe now we’re larger, we can do projects, and then those turn into retainer relationships. Retainers would last for a year or more, and include month by month research, out of which projects would bubble. That’s what I was sketching at dinner the other night, and I wrote it up as an email and then a presentation today.

Also recently I’ve been making spreadsheets to track capacity, and Simon has been working on spreadsheets to report on project budget usage. Infrastructure! Tools!

Simon is planning to write up these systems as a kind of operations manual, a Choose Your Own Adventure for how to deal with projects. (Kari’s already done this for financial and general admin.) What else can you do with that?

We used to have ways to do these things, approximations at least, but we had 7 people on the payroll in January, and we have 13 this month (lost 2, gained 8). In a growing company all your processes are broken.

Plus we’re all learning as we go.

The room, the physical room, is full, and sometimes it feels like a pressure cooker. I can’t look into space and think without my gaze landing on a person’s face. Bubble bubble. I can’t joke about it, it’s not fun. When everyone gets drunk on Friday night and goes to the pub, they have a quiet word and complain about it to me. It’s on my radar folks.

#

I guess another reason I spend a lot of time thinking about the company is because I’m pre-occupied with failure. I’m confident that the work will be beautiful, inventive and mainstream. And I’m confident that we’re aware of how important it is that the Room is a happy one. The company as a corporate entity feels like my responsibility. My job is to let the studio do what the studio wants to do, and to not crash it or stall it.

Two ways we fail:

The first is ignorance–we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude–because in these cases the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

(The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Guwande, summarising Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility, Gorovitz and MacIntyre, 1975.)

I don’t buy it, at least not in the field of invention.

Ignorance is a marker of somewhere interesting to dig. “Thinking through making” is really a dialogue between the designer and the material, one which reveals the unknown unknowns. Once you’ve become aware of your ignorance, you can do something with it, trade it in for interesting things. Also naivety gives you strength.

Ineptitude is a worry. You have to pay due diligence to your own ineptitude. But again, if you’re not getting shit wrong a good proportion of the time, you’re not learning hard enough.

Here’s another description of failure, from Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees.

So, the Colonel thought, here we come into the last round and I do not
know even the number of the round. I have loved but three women and have lost them thrice.

You lose them the same way you lose a battalion; by errors of judgment; orders that are impossible to fulfill, and through impossible conditions. Also through brutality.

So I look out for these, these are what I look out for.

#

Two more moments from Monday, week 315:

First thing this morning, Joe bought Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs for everyone in the studio. They have prizes inside. Matt Jones got an aeroplane. Alex got a small car with a website written on the bottom, and if you go to that website, you can play a game of driving around a racetrack where you hold your hands as if you’re holding a steering wheel, and the game figures out what to do by looking at you with the webcam. Computer vision. I got a coquettish hedgehog.

Right now, in the evening, we’re moving places so that people who need the big desks have the big desks, and people who don’t so much have either have the two-thirds-length shared desks, or share a desk (I now share a desk with Kari). I’m writing this as everyone is moving objects around and wiping tables. It seems to involve a lot of collisions, and a little bit of dancing, and painfully hard high 5s. We’ve moved our massive plant pots outside, and replaced them with smaller ones that perch on shelves or on the corners of things.

#

Time passes.

#

Now we’ve just had Tuesday All Hands, it’s traditional that I give a run-down of what people are doing this week. But 13 people were speaking, so maybe I should do something more impressionistic.

More people are working on the Chaco projects this week, as the work kicked off with various external contractors comes to fruition and it’s time for the various streams to converge. It seems like, with these projects, we’re going through a tipping point from exploration to minimum viable product (MVP) and its associated communications. You go for the MVP because you need to get to an end-to-end experience as soon as possible. You can’t tell how well something will work until it’s sitting there in your sweaty palm.

That tip-over is an important part of our process, and it’s tough. It often feels like a crisis moment, when you are forced to shear off branches of the infinite exciting possibilities and come down to one.

Another important part of our process is to think about the MVP and its communications simultaneously. I’m inspired by Apple in this respect: I’ve heard that they have strong Product Marketing roles. That’s clever, to have final responsibility for the product features and for the way the product is understood in a single person, in a single brain.

People involved: JS (who is on holiday in New York, but has been having meetings), MJ, DW, JM, NL, TA, AH, SP, me (a little). External contractors involved include software engineers, model makers, and product designers.

Dimensions 2, the follow-up to How Big Really with the BBC, is going through what TS calls “productionising.” It’s working, fully, in WebKit browsers, but it needs to work with a broader set, and it’ll also need to go through tuning, and then the project launch process.

People involved: TS, DW, SP, AJ.

AB is finding her feet (only her second week!) and learning new computer languages through the project called Flagstaff. Other people involved: JM, AJ. It’s a good training project, and should have some public results.

Then there’s SVK (people: MJ, AJ, DW, NL, KS. I’m running a help desk training session shortly), and our other new product development (DW, NL, JD, AH, JS, PW, plus a number of external companies). The NPD all happens in the back room, the one we call New Statham.

#

There’s a lot going on. It’s a good Room, even if it is rather full to the brim.

What else can you do with that?

#

It feels like the studio has plumped out nicely the last few months. We’ve got the right group of people to do the work and projects we were attempting to do, we’ve grown into ourselves. Maybe we’ve reached a plateau of sorts, a place to concentrate on the work and on making this particular abstract machine work well — time to nurture the interconnections, feed the rhizome.

And so we’re ready to do what’s becoming the goal and approach for BERG: build an awesome Room, then – by design and hard work – ignite some beautiful, inventive singularity right in the middle of it, one that changes how people think and produces massive and unpredictable new opportunities. My aspiration: to be the best at knowing how to improvise through these provoked singularities and, in the hot heart of them, to forge new culture.

Week 314

Glancing over my shoulder I catch sight of Nick enter purposefully from the adjacent room. He’s clutching an electronic rig and wearing an expression that tells me ‘something has worked’. He sets the contraption down on a table and takes a step back. Jack leans in to probe the item and seems pleased if a little taken aback. A flurry of exchanges spin up and ebb into conversation of possibilities and more experiments. I get the feeling that something new is being invented. A feeling that is becoming increasingly familiar as I settle into life at BERG.

The group has expanded quite a bit recently and that pattern continues this week as we welcome Alice Bartlett to the fold.  She has taken the helm of a new project we’re calling Flagstaff and I overheard her describe it as ‘worryingly easy’ yesterday. It’s nice to see her adapt effortlessly to the studio milieu and I’m looking forward to working with her in the near future.

It would seem that Britain is the only place where the weather has a sense of irony. It’s June yet the skies appear to have been drawn from the pen of Cormac McCarthy. Bleak.

With some kind of oracular insight, Matt Webb has dodged much of the gloominess by spending the past week in Cyprus. He’s back in the studio now and described his return to work as. “that bit in Finding Nemo where the fish stick fins into the turtle current and get whipped across the world at a thousand mph.” If email piled up on the floor like post when you return from your holiday I imagine he’d be really struggling to get through his front door right now. He’s also spent time meeting with Uinta, reviewing aspects of Chaco and overseeing project running. Cyprus probably feels very far away.

Matt Jones has also carefully outmanoeuvred the dour weather by compassing half the globe to Foo Camp in California. In spite of his absence from the studio his echoes still ripple though the BERG blog. I understand he’ll be back with us tomorrow; likely tanned and equipped with many tales of far off lands. While in sunnier climes he’s also been meeting with Uinta people, reviewing Dimensions 2 copy and preparing for, what has been dubbed, SVK Friday. No doubt there will be much more about this to follow shortly, so definitely keep a UV sensitive eye out.

Schulze has now left the studio, bound for the States on a short break (and a few meetings). I spent the early part of the week working with him on Chaco and intermittently throughout the week on Chaco alongside the excellent Tim Bacon. Jack is dividing his time between every aspect of Chaco while planning the layout out a new potential studio space. We had a brief stroll to peer through the window on Monday; it looks big. In addition to all this, he’s also hoovering up a lot of admin which leaves very little time to for him to enjoy his Grazia.

Nick has Physics tied up in the room known as Statham. It’s cooperating now

With so many people out of the office early week the development team emerged from Statham and took up residence in the main studio. Nick is now tapping away a few desks across from me focussing the online SVK lasers on tomorrow. He’s managing development on all things Chaco while ensuring that Alice grows with the grain of the studio without hitting any knots. He’s also keeping track of developments from Elliot in South Korea.

Andy has has introduced an eclectic melange of deep funk to the speaker system which has lead to much imitation slap bass around the studio. When not setting the Scrutton St alight with his musical oeuvre, Andy is spending much of his time planning and reviewing work on Chaco. He’s also lending his skilful touch to Barringer, sourcing components and pestering PCB manufacturers.

James’ time is largely being devoured by the implementation of Weminuche, the rest is given to helping out Alice on Flagstaff. A powerful team by my reckoning. James and I have hatched a plan to go to yoga one day. We’re going to keep it that vague for now.

Tom is predominantly polishing off Dimensions 2 now. So close now. He and Alex have conversations about whether a panel should be moved one, or two, pixels to the left. Tom demonstrated the project to the studio last week at Friday demos to a warm reception. I’m looking forward to see it live in the world now

Kari has pulled out the induction sheet once again for Alice. Keys have been dispatched, general directions provided and contracts issued. She is also juggling emails about Schooloscope and lending a deft touch to the preparations for SVK Friday.

I can see a slither of Alex’s face between two large monitors, he looks like Goliath bearing down on Stonehenge in an, as of yet, unwritten fantasy novella. He’s putting together the final pieces of SVK and generating assets for Dimensions 2 with Tom and Simon. He also maintains close radio contact with Peter Harmer who continues to unearth invaluable stories for the project from afar.

Timo is firing photons across the entire Chaco spectrum. I’ve caught glimpse of the video of some experiments he’s currently editing together and it’s pretty special. The work is leading the project into fresh domain where rules have to be invented to help navigate new paths of enquiry. All part of a days work. He was also clever and has been abroad for much of the week.

It’s Simon’s third week now and I’ve noticed his masterful technique of organising people without making them feel like they’re being organised. Consequently all the projects appear to be running like clockwork now. It’s great to have him around.

When I look at Denise’s screen I see a flood of charming sketches for Chaco. It seems that there is a lot of work to do in a short space of time but the foundations are being set with rigorous thinking and sketching. She’s currently chatting to Simon about copy for Dimensions 2.

Phew! That’s everyone.

It’s sunny now.

Icon’s “Rethink”: turning receipts into ‘paper apps’

Icon magazine asked us to contribute to their monthly “Rethink” feature, where current and commonplace objects are re-imagined.

Icon #97 Rethink: redesigning the receipt

We continued some of the thinking from our “Media Surfaces” work with Dentsu, around how retail receipts could make the most of the information systems that modern point-of-sales machines are plugged into…

Icon #97 Rethink: redesigning the receipt

A little quote from our piece:

We’ve added semi-useful info-visualisation of the foods ordered based on “what the till knows” – sparklines, trends – and low-tech personalisation of information that might be useful to regulars. Customers can select events or news stories they are interested in by ticking a check box.

We think the humble receipt could be something like a paper “app” and be valuable in small and playful ways.

Icon #97 Rethink: redesigning the receipt

Read all about it in this month’s Icon #97, available at all good newsagents!

Week 311

So. Week 311. A full studio, even without everyone here. Not too full to prevent the entertaining of visitors though.

Timo is away today in Berlin, braving the ash-related disruptions which threatened to keep me out of the studio for the last part of the week. Ash hasn’t kept Chaco away either – here for another couple of days workshopping with Jones and Jack.

Joe has been fleshing out some lovely UI ideas for Uinta bringing this phase to a close. This might leave him with some spare headspace for Jack to fill gleefully. It’ll be great to get his eyes on more things in the coming weeks.

Denise and Alex are valiantly making those final shuffles towards pressing the big PRINT button attached to the SVK machine. There’s black light at the end of the tunnel. Not. Long. Now.

Kari mentioned in our weekly all hands meeting, that this week, like most others, she’ll be doing the usual. We asked her to elaborate. A (partial) explanation followed: year end considerations; ordering parts; chasing project activity; payroll; contracts; property searches; insurance admin… leaving us all somewhat stunned and wholly grateful – spontaneous applause followed.

Nick’s engaged in high and low level project discussions in addition to briefing early-riser Tom Stuart who’s here to add some additional code sauce for a while.

Matthew’s been in contract negotiations, meetings around town, working through project timelines and architectures while bemoaning the lack of a compiler on his laptop. Still, he’s got iTunes and he’s not afraid to use it. Thursday morning’s BPM have nary been so high.

There has been more material exploration, sketching and treatment writing at the hands of Jack and Timo. Jack’s also been working with myself and collaborators to map out the next few weeks for Barringer. Lots of little pushes on a project with many, many parts. Such plans cause me to think in lists – something which has infected this week note.

Jones? Well, in addition to his (extensive) usual, he’s mostly been having his picture taken with William Gibson. Visitors are good.

Sensor-Vernacular

Consider this a little bit of a call-and-response to our friends through the plasterboard, specifically James’ excellent ‘moodboard for unknown products’ on the RIG-blog (although I’m not sure I could ever get ‘frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future’).

There are some lovely images there – I’m a sucker for the computer-vision dazzle pattern as referenced in William Gibson’s ‘Zero History’ as the ‘world’s ugliest t-shirt‘.

The splinter-camo planes are incredible. I think this is my favourite that James picked out though…

Although – to me – it’s a little bit 80’s-Elton-John-video-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-‘Cheekbone‘-stylist-too-young to-have-lived-through-certain-horrors.

I guess – like NASA imagery – it doesn’t acquire that whiff-of-nostalgia-for-a-lost-future if you don’t remember it from the first time round. For a while, anyway.

Anyway. We’ll come back to that.

The main thing, is that James’ writing galvanised me to expand upon a scrawl I made during an all-day crit with the RCA Design Interactions course back in February.

‘Sensor-Vernacular’ is a current placeholder/bucket I’ve been scrawling for a few things.

The work that Emily Hayes, Veronica Ranner and Marguerite Humeau in RCA DI Year 2 presented all had a touch of ‘sensor-vernacular’. It’s an aesthetic born of the grain of seeing/computation.

Of computer-vision, of 3d-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts.

Of LIDAR and laser-speckle.

Of the gaze of another nature on ours.

There’s something in the kinect-hacked photography of NYC’s subways that we’ve linked to here before, that smacks of the viewpoint of that other next nature, the robot-readable world.


Photo credit: obvious_jim

The fascination we have with how bees see flowers, revealing animal link between senses and motives. That our environment is shared with things that see with motives we have intentionally or unintentionally programmed them with.

As Kevin Slavin puts it – the things we have written that we can no longer read.

Nick’s being playing this week with http://code.google.com/p/structured-light/, and made this quick (like, in a spare minute he had) sketch of me…

The technique has been used for some pretty lovely pieces, such as this music video for Broken Social Scene.

In particular, for me, there is something in the loop of 3d-scanning to 3d-printing to 3d-scanning to 3d-printing which fascinates.

Rapid Form by Flora Parrot

It’s the lossy-ness that reveals the grain of the material and process. A photocopy of a photocopy of a fax. But atoms. Like the 80’s fanzines, or old Wonder Stuff 7″ single cover art. Or Vaughn Oliver, David Carson.

It is – perhaps – at once a fascination with the raw possibility of a technology, and – a disinterest, in a way, of anything but the qualities of its output. Perhaps it happens when new technology becomes cheap and mundane enough to experiment with, and break – when it becomes semi-domesticated but still a little significantly-other.

When it becomes a working material not a technology.

We can look back to the 80s, again, for an early digital-analogue: what one might term ‘Video-Vernacular’.

Talking Heads’ cover art for their album “Remain In Light” remains a favourite. It’s video grain / raw quantel as aesthetic has a heck of a punch still.

I found this fascinating from it’s wikipedia entry:

“The cover art was conceived by Weymouth and Frantz with the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Walter Bender and his MIT Media Lab team.

Weymouth attended MIT regularly during the summer of 1980 and worked with Bender’s assistant, Scott Fisher, on the computer renditions of the ideas. The process was tortuous because computer power was limited in the early 1980s and the mainframe alone took up several rooms. Weymouth and Fisher shared a passion for masks and used the concept to experiment with the portraits. The faces were blotted out with blocks of red colour.

The final mass-produced version of Remain in Light boasted one of the first computer-designed record jackets in the history of music.”

Growing up in the 1980s, my life was saturated by Quantel.

Quantel were the company in the UK most associated with computer graphics and video effects. And even though their machines were absurdly expensive, even in the few years since Weymouth and Fisher harnessed a room full of computing to make an album cover, moore’s law meant that a quantel box was about the size of a fridge as I remember.

Their brand name comes from ‘Quantized Television’.

Awesome.

As a kid I wanted nothing more than to play with a Quantel machine.

Every so often there would be a ‘behind-the-scenes’ feature on how telly was made, and I wanted to be the person in the dark illuminated by screens changing what people saw. Quantizing television and changing it before it arrived in people homes. Photocopying the photocopy.

Alongside that, one started to see BBC Model B graphics overlaid on video and TV. This was a machine we had in school, and even some of my posher friends had at home! It was a video-vernacular emerging from the balance point between new/novel/cheap/breakable/technology/fashion.

Kinects and Makerbots are there now. Sensor-vernacular is in the hands of fashion and technology now.

In some of the other examples James cites, one might even see ‘Sensor-Deco’ arriving…

Lo-Rez Shoe by United Nude

James certainly has an eye for it. I’m going to enjoy following his exploration of it. I hope he writes more about it, the deeper structure of it. He’ll probably do better than I am.

Maybe my response to it is in some ways as nostalgic as my response to NASA imagery.

Maybe it’s the hauntology of moments in the 80s when the domestication of video, computing and business machinery made things new, cheap and bright to me.

But for now, let me finish with this.

There’s both a nowness and nextness to Sensor-Vernacular.

I think my attraction to it – what ever it is – is that these signals are hints that the hangover of 10 years of ‘war-on-terror’ funding into defense and surveillance technology (where after all the advances in computer vision and relative-cheapness of devices like the Kinect came from) might get turned into an exuberant party.

Dancing in front of the eye of a retired-surveillance machine, scanning and printing and mixing and changing. Fashion from fear. Quantizing and surprising. Imperfections and mutations amplifying through it.

Beyonce’s bright-green chromakey socks might be the first, positive step into the real aesthetic of the early 21st century, out of the shadows of how it begun.

Let’s hope so.

Week 309

We’re all back in the studio.

The week begins early monday morning with Webb and myself wondering whether we can move the desks around to accomodate some more people. This week feels like a gathering of momentum, a breath before another push, change-down, dig-in.

As the evenings get longer and lighter, and our little room gets fuller – so do the pavements outside the studio with drinkers in the local pub.

Summer is coming.

Constructive Summer, hopefully.

This week Schulze is co-writing seven documents at once, like some kind of crazy prog-rock rick-wakemanesque figure on keyboards. He’s continuing to direct the work overall on Chaco, planning that a bit more after some great leaps with the combined BERG/client team on that last week. He’s also having fun with lawyers, and writing an article for Eye that I’m looking forward to reading. He’s also working a bit with Denise on Barringer.

Denise is in the final pre-press throes of SVK, discussing last details with the printers. She’s also writing a ‘bible” for barry – editorial and design choices that will define it. I keep glimpsing it over her shoulder – it’s full of the sort of care and detail I’d expect from her.

Joe is into the last two week of the current project for Uinta, teleporting between 30,00ft views of the system concept to the detail of individual interactions and aesthetic touches. He’s cranking. I make him a lot of tea.

[I forgot that I put the kettle on when I started writing this and had promised a lot of people in the studio tea. BRB.]

[Ok. Back]

Kari is working on monthly dashboard stuff that she and MW produce to figure out how we’re all doing. She was also chasing our SVK torches around the UK’s customs infrastructure.

And got results!!!

SVKs

They arrived yesterday.

MW is on Barry planning, meetings, consolidating our project management tools and processes, trying to find us new property, scrutinising our sales and resources pipeline for the coming months. I am making him a lot of tea also.

Timo is Brussels, and joining us occasionally as a little floating head, via Skype. He’s co-writing with Jack, working on some awesome material and video explorations for Chaco, doing some process and planning work.

He’s also thinking about making. We had a conversation at the end of our weekly ‘all-hands’ meeting about better ways of recording and presenting the various experiments we do (that don’t have a direct client or product outcome, we’re always fiddling with something or scratching some itch) without slowing down the work or becoming less nimble about it. There are little curiosities and tests that might be half-formed in our studio that could be public, faster.

MW recalled his lab book from university (he was a physicist, once, after all) as a great quick structure for writing up experiments.

This isn’t it – it’s one of Alexander Shulgin’s – but it’s nice to think of a template or format where things can be methodically and quickly observed and shared.

I just bought one of these.

It’s a weatherproof bird-watching journal, and it’s structured to capture all of the information a bird-watcher would want. What notebooks should we have for material explorations, or for prototyping?

Anyway.

Alex is working on Chaco, Uinta, SVK final bits and bobs – and he’s out this afternoon teaching at the LCC.

Nick’s been meeting some freelance developers, working on a Barry sprint with Denise, looking after SVK online shop work, hardware chatting with andy, and beginning writing a technical spec for some of the Chaco work. Andy’s chatting about documentation with suppliers, Chaco planning/speccing, and thinking about how to use contractors on it.

And finally, I guess, me.

I’ve been helping Joe on Uinta, a bit of writing and thinking for Chaco, and lots of admin stuff for the studio. Mainly that’s been looking at the pipeline with Jack and Matt.

I’m learning more and more (primarily through talking it out with MW) about the ‘biodynamics’ of a small-but-growing studio like ours. Where you need to leave things to grow, and what needs to be encouraged or watched more carefully. Iterating and improving the tools and ways to do that is something that sometimes feels like wasted time when you could be designing or making something, but it’s not.

You have to have macroscopes for these tides and turns in the system you’re embedded in or you can’t see them creeping up on you. It’s good to spend a bit of time on that, so that you can really focus on the quality of the work being produced without too much worry.

Our friend James Wheare built a bit of a macroscope – called twitshift. It sends you your twitters from exactly a year ago.

Exactly a year ago I was congratulating Matt Brown and Tom Armitage on launching Schooloscope.

They’re no longer in the room with us (and Matt Brown’s not even in the same country anymore – it was his first week at Apple this week I think…), so I’ll put my 1st birthday congrats to our awesome alums here…

Lab-books, macroscopes, Shenzen, hardware, people, place.

All in this busy little room. All in week 309.

Culture “comfort food”

Due to a lack of time and a lack of inspiration, I asked my Berg colleagues to help write my blog entry this week. Inspired by a recent NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, I asked them what they would consider their pop culture “comfort foods”: music, movies, books, TV shows, games, etc that they return to time and again because they are comfortable and familiar, bring you back to a happy place, create a certain feeling in you, etc. NPR’s Linda Holmes described it as things that “we turn to when we get into a cultural rut and want to reawaken our love of the things we love, as it were.”

I can think of so many things that fit in this category for me. Here’s a few:

  • The Sound of Music (both the film and the soundtrack)
  • Pride and Prejudice – both the book and the films (both the Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle version and the Keira Knightley & Matthew Mcfadyen version)
  • The West Wing
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • U2 – Achtung Baby (brings me right back to my first year at university)
  • Hem – Eveningland
  • A House Like a Lotus and A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

I’m happy to say that everyone in the studio humoured my request. Here’s what they had to say:

Jack Schulze:

  • Point Break
  • Winnie the Pooh

Timo Arnall:

  • Midnight Run, must have watched it 50 times. The most re-watchable film of all time.
  • Also Rhubarb and Custard (As a kid I slept under the animation table at Bob Godfrey Studios on Neal St, still remember Bob doing the voices).
  • I still return to many of Kieslowski’s films, they were formative in my understanding of film.

Matt Jones:

  • Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
  • The Invisibles
  • “Can’t buy a thrill” by Steely Dan

Andy Huntington:

  • Princess Mononoke
  • Yo La Tengo – Little Honda just for the distortion sound if nothing else
  • Any video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe I can find
  • The drum battle where Steve Gadd (he starts at 2.45 in the clip below) launches a stomp attack on Vinnie Colaiuta and Dave Weckl and their supple wrists.

Joe Malia:

  • Spirited Away
  • Mario
  • Robocop

Nick Ludlam:

  • Asimov’s “Robots of Dawn”
  • Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes
  • Underworld’s “Second Toughest In The Infants”

Matt Webb:

  • Once Upon a Time in the West, which has the single best concentrated set piece scene of any film at any period in history. It is beautiful, epic, speaks truth to humans, society, and history, and I can watch it infinitely.
  • Starship Troopers, the book, and actually any sci-fi stories from the 1940s to the 1970s I can find in second hand shops or Project Gutenberg
  • 30 Rock

Alex Jarvis:

  • ‘F-Zero’ / ‘Unirally’ for games
  • Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder for music
  • ‘C’était un Rendezvous’ for moving image

Denise Wilton:

  • Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
  • And the films: My neighbour Totoro (for the scene at the bus stop)
  • Bourne Ultimatum (for the scene at Waterloo station)
  • This nutrigrain ad from a billion years ago, which I don’t think ever got aired but gets better every time you watch it:

So how about you? What are your culture “comfort foods”?

Creating a warm welcome

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!

Week 307

It’s a short week in the UK, and so far the sun is shining on the three working days that make up week 307. We have two ill people (get well soon, James and Nick!), and everyone else is busy.

I have on my desk

  • Pantone Books
  • Alan Moore’s ‘Yuggoth Cultures (and other growths)’
  • print proofs
  • paper samples
  • a mock up of SVK
  • the biggest cup of tea in the office

I’ve been working on SVK and Weminuche this week, two very different projects.

SVK is a comic, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Matt Brooker. BERG are publishing it – and you’ll be able to get hold of it online really soon.

As someone with a past involving magazines, it’s been fascinating to see the way a comic gets put together. I’m used to pre-agreed flatplans, to sending off pages out of sequence to the reader but in the right section order for printing, moving pages about when ads change. A comic is completely different. There’s a script first, roughs at different stages, a story that evolves. The evolution is amazing – as is watching Matt J’s reaction to each new page of artwork. Such a look of sheer delight you’d think he didn’t know what was coming. I’m very excited to see this printed – but I think we might need medical help for Jones.

Weminuche is a lot of fun, although I’m not allowed to talk about it. Between you and I, it currently involves moustaches and the possibility of a soul patch. This is an idea I’ve thrown into the mix, we’ll see if I can make it work. It means I get to look at facial hair on the internet, which is an area of research generally neglected by the Bergians in the past.

Other project work continues. Alex and Joe have been teaming up to work for a client we’ve code-named Uinta. (Is it just me, or do we seem to choose difficult-to-spell project names?) There’s been post it notes, discussion and a lot of progress made recently. Joe (sitting next to me) is currently creating some beautiful mock-ups of a world to come.

Timo, Jack, Matt J and Andy are starting to work for Chaco (another client code name). There’s a couple of projects on the go and ideas have been shared out loud for the past few weeks. It sounds like there’s a real opportunity for delight here, and I can’t wait to see how it all pans out.

Matt W has been catching up with everyone and planning current and future projects. He’s also been thinking about ways we can squeeze more desk space out of the office. It’s not an easy task. Kari has been helping him look for new studio space and generally keeping us all in order.

There’s a partitioned room in the office, which is where Andy is currently hiding. He’s knee deep in bits of physical hardware and says little when you drop in except ‘I think it’s time for ice-cream’.

I think he could be right.

 

Week 306

Three of the last four weeks have seen at least part of the BERG team decamping to the States – California, then Oregon, then New York – for client meetings. This week, the most exotic place anyone is traveling for BERG work is Swindon. But mostly we’re all here. Which is nice.

Work on the two newest projects – Uinta and Chaco – is revving up. Matt Jones and Joe, the newest Bergian, have been furiously sketching on Uinta in order to wrap up the ideation phase for a presentation this afternoon. Over in the other room, Timo is doing sketching for Chaco.

Lots of people have their fingers in SVK: testing processes, wrangling adverts, solving problems, chasing quotes, and generally trying to get answers to lots and lots of questions that are still hanging in the air. Alex is doing a tremendous job of making sure we’re remembering what all those questions are that still need answering. We’re learning a whole lot about production, warehousing, promotion and sales – which was a big reason for doing this after all. And we’re kinda making up project management via trial and error as we go.

As I type, Jack, Nick, Denise and Alex have put their heads together to try to answer some more questions and make some more decisions around Weminuche. Elsewhere Andy is updating Gantt charts and chasing manufacturers to get production quotes. This is a long project with a lot of little exciting developments along the way. And as with SVK, there’s lots and lots of learning happening almost daily.

This week it’s Nick’s turn to do interviewing: we’re hoping to add another creative technologist to our midst soon. Project manager interviews are wrapping up this week. And since the addition of two more team members means we’ll be busting out of our lovely little space here on Scrutton Street, Matt Webb has just been out having a look at some potential new space. And I’ve been trawling the internet looking for more options. (My conclusion: there are waaaaay too many websites that promise to help you find office space in London, and the vast majority of them are rubbish. At least for our purposes.) As Matt said on Twitter today, “What I’d really like is someone in East London with a spare massive loft. Anyone?”

Today there were cupcakes to celebrate Matt Jones’ birthday (which is technically tomorrow). I suspect there may be more food later as RIG are hosting a Tupperware party next door. Awesome.

Outside the sky is bright blue and the sun is shining brilliantly. It’s the hottest day of the year so far. I predict, based on the weather forecast, that this week will include plenty of Silicon Carpark lunches and Magnums.

Welcome Timo Arnall

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.

04 September 2010 - 18.28.41

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…

Suwappu: Toys in media

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.

Suwappu Deer and Tuna

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.

Suwappu real-time AR tests

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.

Suwappu 3D registration

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?

Hiring!

Update on Thursday 31 March: We’ve been contacted by some great folks! So we’ll stop accepting applications for these particular roles on Sunday. But please don’t let that stop you getting in contact if you’ve got something really special! We look at all CVs and portfolios, even when there aren’t any positions open, and keep everything on file for when there are.

So, we’re looking to grow a little!

BERG’s a small design studio, just nine of us at the moment. We’re always busy, researching and developing media and tech for a wide variety of companies. And we work on our own stuff too.

And I’m looking for a couple of folks to join the team.

First, a project manager. We’ve never worked with a project manager before, so a lot of this is about you being a great fit with the room. But we also know we’re a bit scatty and divided between too many projects, so we’re ready for a cracking communicator with top-notch organisational skills to manage development and delivery across the whole studio.

Second, a creative technologist. You’ll be working on new and existing projects, in small teams and alongside other technologists. You’ll be a self-starter, pushing forward development using your own good product instincts. And you’ll have different technical skills and itches to bring to the room too, ones we don’t currently know we need.

If either of these positions sounds like you, download the job descriptions here.

If it sounds like someone you know, please do pass this on!

And then send your CV with a cover note to Kari at ks@berglondon.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. We’re planning to interview in early April, and make decisions soon after.

Week 302

It’s a nice day today.

I’m sitting in the small back room of the BERG office. Four of us (Nick, Matt B, Andy and I) have set up shop in here to get stuck into Weminuche for a little while. It’s a room to get immersed in the project – the walls, whiteboards and desks are covered in thoughts and experiments.

On Monday there was a clean, empty desk where Tom usually is. He’s gone to be a games designer, a beautiful fit. But already we have a new human to boost the studio back up to a cosy over-capacity. Denise is new BERG! (Proper welcome post coming soon). Denise is one of the many people I knew of and admired long before I met them or had any career of my own, but have never told. We went to have a welcome lunch in the sun today.

Matt J and Jack are away doing boss things in far away places. Instagram tells me they are still eating.

Matt Brown, as well as drawing things for me to make, as well as lining everything up for the SVK launch, is mind melding with Denise before his life is packed into boxes and flown to Cupertino.

Alex is taking the work the two of us have done on Dimensions 2 and moving it to the next level, along with other SVK bits and bobs.

Kari is handling all this arrival and departure of staff, smoothly as ever.

Andy is working on things that I can’t figure out how to describe without breaking secrets. He’s also breaking keyboards.

I was unconvinced about week 302 when it started – I couldn’t find a single good thing about the number 302, there was a bit of unwell hanging in the air and I got a rubbish hair cut. But now the windows are wide open, the weather is perfect, Scrutton Street feels homely and we have a Denise! It’s a nice day today.

Coffee? Yes please!

You don’t have to spend much time around BERG to work out that when it comes to coffee, supermarket grounds and a cafetière don’t cut it – at least not for long. Coffee geekery has an important place in the life of the studio, and the Shoreditch area of East London (where BERG’s current studio is located) is a great place to be based if you are a coffee geek. In fact, it becomes easy to take for granted the access to fantastic coffee that we have here.

I’m not going to go into the recent history of London’s coffee scene because that’s been covered rather exhaustively, recently by Bean Scene magazine. Also, I’m not going to try to list all the best coffee shops in East London because that’s been done a lot too (just google “London best coffee”), and besides there’s an app for that – and the folks who created it are on Twitter. I’m just going to highlight a few things that you might like to know if you’re planning to visit BERG or East London any time soon and want to know where to get a great cup of coffee.

Coffee stall on Whitecross St. - perhaps better than Coffee@

Less than a half mile away from the studio up on Shoreditch High Street you’ll find Prufrock tucked into the front of clothes shop Present. It’s very much a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of place. I have no idea how many times I walked past it without ever noticing that it was there. Prufrock founder Gwilym Davies was the 2009 world barista champion. If you’re going to be around for more than a couple of days, you may want to have a go at Gwilym’s disloyalty card which he created to encourage coffee fans to patronise other high quality coffee shops around London. (I recommend Nick Wade’s lovely account of his disloyalty card tour and accompanying photos.) If you want to visit Prufrock, look for the “The Golden Horn Cigarette Company” sign outside. Prufrock Café has also recently opened in Leather Lane.

A mile and half from the studio in Bethnal Green is the home of Square Mile Coffee Roasters. Square Mile’s director James Hoffmann was the world barista champion in 2007 and is a prominent figure in the London coffee scene. You can’t buy Square Mile coffee at that location but they have an online shop. They also do a monthly subscription service. Last month James started a short weekly video podcast about coffee. One of the most interesting things Square Mile have done lately is collaborate with London-based Kernel Brewery to create Suke Quto Coffee IPA. It’s quite lovely!

Of course, with all this revitalisation going on in the London coffee scene, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to put on a festival. Sure enough, on August 8th-11th 2011, the folks who run The London Coffee Guide are putting on The London Coffee Festival at The Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. That’s just a half mile walk from the studio.

Any discussion about BERG and coffee wouldn’t be complete without a mention of The Shed (aka The Hut, The Shack, etc). It’s a branch of Taylor Street Baristas located in a little garden shed in a car park just off of New North Place. Since it opened late last year, we only have to walk about 200 feet to get really good coffee. Lucky us!

New! Awesome coffee around the corner from us!

p.s. Want to know how to make great coffee at home using Science? Scientific American is here to tell you how.

Instruments of Politeness

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…

Week 301

It’s my turn on the blog rota this week, which means I get to do weeknotes!

We usually start our Tuesday 10am weekly standup with both a) theme music (this week was Hoyt Curtin‘s rousing theme music for “Battle Of The Planets”) and b) a fact about the week number.

301 is:

…the sum of three consecutive primes (97 + 101 + 103), happy number in base 10, and a HTTP status code, indicating the content has been moved and the change is permanent (permanent redirect).

This week, we are both a happy number – but also going through some permanent change.

Week 301

It’s Tom’s last week with us before he heads to the golden lands of games design, and we’re going to be sending him off in style at the end of it.

For now though, BERG Employee #1 is documenting all of the awesome work he’s done in the last two years and change. He’s also working on the website and e-commerce system for SVK, and setting up some maintenance dashboards behind the scenes for Schooloscope.

Matt Brown is cranking on Barringer. As we garner more knowledge about how we’re going to make it, that’s leading us into more confident exploration of its aesthetics.

Matt’s been pulling together beautiful moodboards, references, material samples and examples under the umbrella of what he calls “New British Modern“.

I’ll bet we’ll be talking more about “NBM” here soon. The voice and surface of the product is almost there – it’s tantalising. He’s also working to support Alex on Dimensions2 and SVK this week.

Alex is wrangling ad production for SVK, and working hard on getting the interaction design and visual direction of Dimensions2 together for an end-to-end demo for tomorrow at a client workshop.

Dimensions2 is a slightly different beast to the original “HowBigReally.com” prototype – and it’s revealing nice new corners and opportunities as Alex gets deeper into the detail of both the visuals and the cracking bits of code-sketching that James is doing alongside him.

James is also creating some more end-to-end demos in code for Weminuche this week. Looking forward to Friday Demos on that one.

Jack has a bunch of meetings with potential new clients, but his studio time is divided between work with Timo bringing Haitsu home, and sketching with me and Timo on work for a new project: Chaco.

Which means, wonderfully – that Timo is in the studio with us this week!

Andy is busy with supplier meetings and research on Barringer. Nick is consulting on Chaco, Haitsu and working with James on Barringer. Matt W. is talking with accountants about R&D and lawyers about IP – as well as attending various new business meetings with Jack and myself. Kari is keeping the machinery of the studio going with process, prodding and peerless music selections.

I’m helping out with Dimensions2, SVK, going to a few meetings and typing – always typing… But – very excited about starting to sketch a little on Chaco. It’s in the very early stages but it involves working again with a favourite immaterial of mine – SpaceTime…

There. I think that’s everything! Busy times.

The content has been moved and the change is permanent. 301.

Three cheers for Plumen: Design Of The Year

Plumen_4

Hearty congratulations to our friends at Plumen/Hulger, who have just been named as winners of Design Of The Year by London’s Design Museum.

Shipping atoms is hard.

Shipping atoms when you are a small company is harder.

Shipping populist, beautiful atoms at affordable prices that aim to change the world a little tiny bit is the hardest thing.

But it’s not impossible now, and should always be applauded and recognised.

So glad that Plumen is getting this applause and recogniton.

It’s all deserved.

Friday Links – Kinects, jittergifs, and robots

Chris O’Shea’s Body Swap is a Kinect-based installation that lets two people control “paper cut-outs” of one another. Especially fun, as the video proves, with two people of very different height – and the provision of music to encourage acting and play is a nice touch.


Photo credit: obvious_jim

Another Kinect-related link: this Flickr set shows what happens when you map depth data (from a Kinect sensor) to a traditional digital camera photograph – and then pivot and distort it in three dimensions. The above image is probably my favourite, but the whole set is worth a look – if only for the way the set progresses through increasingly distorted takes on the original photographs.

3ERD is a tumblelog of jitter-gif photographs from Matt Moore. He’s using a stereoscopic compact camera (a bit like, say, the Fuji W1) to take stereoscopic images – but then turning the left and right image into a two-frame animated gif. The results are uncanny. It’s hard to comprehend that both frames were taken at the same time, however simple the idea may seem; the translation of two images separated in space into two images separated by time is a strange one to wrap your head around. A little slice of bullet-time.

Teriyaki blog

50 Watts’ Space Teriyaki is a wonderful collection of Japanese futurist art and imagery from the seventies and eighties. It veers between the bleak and gynaecological; throughout, though, there’s a fascinating use of colour and form.

And finally: a robot arm, repurposed into a physical feedback system for a racing computer game. It brings a whole new meaning to “force feedback”.

Week 300

Three hundred weeks!

Everybody likes a number ending in zeroes.

Matt J and Jack are still in New York, where they’ve been teaching at the School of Visual Arts. They return tomorrow morning, landing straight back into the thick of things at the studio. (Well, they land at the airport really. They’re not falling out of the sky back into their seats, though it’s an amusing thought).

Matt W is also away, talking at FITC Amsterdam. He’ll be back on Thursday, I think.

Everyone else is here, and busy.

I’m working on Schooloscope this week – scraping new Ofsted inspections, little bits of maintenance. I’ve also been working around SVK – firming up the infrastructure around selling things. That’s coming together nicely out of several disparate pieces.

Alex is hard at work on various different design elements relating to SVK – working with advertisers, promoting the product, designing websites to sell it. Important stuff.

Nick’s darting around between a selection of technical prototypes, as well as ongoing work on Weminuche. Every now and then he waves people over to his desk to show us some magic working; every time we wander over, he shows us magic.

A box of fruit arrived this afternoon, which is all down to James. This scheme – wherein various people through Brig put a pound in an envelope, and we get a box of fruit delivered a week, has been christened Fruit Club; Alex even designed a logo. I am enjoying the fruits of Fruit Club as I type.

Workwise, James is attacking both Dimensions and Weminuche this week – the former likely heading towards a nice demo on Friday.

(We’ve started doing Friday demos – sometime in the middle of the afternoon, anyone who, on Monday said they’d have something to demo, shows it to whoever’s around. We usually all try to cram around monitors, or break out the projector; it’s really exciting to see work you’ve not been involved with emerging. James and I will definitely be showing things this week; there might be more Weminuche to show, too).

Matt B is mainly focused on Barringer, but he’s also got some fingers in SVK this week – including hitting “go” on some exciting buttons.

Last week, Kari was inside mass of dense accounting and reporting work, which has now been complete, and we await the results of it. This week, she’s writing a bit, keeping on top of admin, and keeping track of the flows of information and work, in and out of the company.

I went over to the studio doors just now, to check the list Kari maintains of what everyone’s doing – she updates it every Tuesday after our standups. At the top is the week number – and this week, 300 is in a different colour, a larger size.

Which made me smile.

SVK decloaks in Wired magazine

Wired UK magazine gets the scoop on the secret of our upcoming comic collaboration, SVK:

Why should superheroes have all the fun? In SVK, a new one-shot comic by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan) and Matt Brooker (2000 AD), you get a power of your own: mind-reading.

Shine the special torch (bundled with the book) on the page and you reveal the characters’ thoughts, printed in UV ink.

Boom!

I gotta tell you, it’s magical.

(That’s a little of Matt Brooker’s test art.)

Read more at Wired: How Warren Ellis is using torchlight for his latest comic.

We’re due to publish Ellis and Brooker’s creation in April 2011. Sign up for news of SVK’s release at getsvk.com.

Week #299

Everyone in the room has gasped at least once this week.

I’ve just glanced over Nick’s shoulder. Every time I look, he’s working on something different. Many, many strange and brilliant things are brewing in the dark recesses of his terminal windows.

Out in the room known as New Statham, Weminuche grows. We all creep in, feeding it with whiteboard drawings, spreadsheets, gantt charts, collaborative experiments and wordplay. Some weeks it simmers; other weeks, people stride out, fists clenched in triumph. That’s happened more than once.

Kari continues to tame the beast that is managing the studio. Her work this week has looked even more intense than usual.

Alex and James glide back and forth between desks and whiteboards, sharing and iterating code sketches, drawings and animations. They’re at the point where they’re starting to really crack the back of something, and keep revealing things that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little.

Tom is in deep integration mode, tightening the bolts on structures and systems that will fuel BERG’s longer term plans, occasionally looking up to send the usual brilliant, obscure links around the studio mailing list, before diving back down, brow furrowed, earphones in.

There’s a little sneak peek at SVK, the comic we’re publishing with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, in this month’s Wired. I’ve been helping to pull the various strands of it together over the past few months, and from where I’m sitting, it looks to be an absolute belter.

Mr Jones and Mr Schulze are in New York, teaching at SVA and scheming on new projects. They’ll be back mid next-week with tales of derring-do under the influence of weapons-grade Haribo.

Mr Webb has been zipping around, having lots of meetings, each time coming back into the room wide-eyed with new possibilities. I would love to be able to jack directly into his brain this week.

The room has been calm, yet fizzing with energy.

Friday links

Hello! Here is some scoopage from the studio mailing list this week.

Timo, Einar and Jørn launched their new, beautiful lightpainting film looking at the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces:

Mr Jones found this delightful little idea for an RFID record player by Bertrand Fan:

Tom spotted these magical ‘diorama maps’ of London and Tokyo by Sohei Nishino:

diorama_london

Everyone enjoyed Alice Bartlett’s “machine that dispenses chocolate according to nice or mean things that people say on twitter“…

All of it

… and here is a 3D macro lens.

Also, we have been listening to some Justin Bieber slowed down 800%, playing a lot of Tiny Wings, and watching some workmen practicing capoeira outside in the street.

That is all. Happy Friday!

The Hopeful Monsters of New York

SVA

We’re wrapping up our week teaching at SVA on the interaction course tomorrow.

It’s been an amazingly fun week – with an excellent group of students throwing themselves into material explorations, generative drawing, prototyping behaviour and surfaces and more.

It’s like Sterling’s cave of Taklamakan, made from post-it notes and acetates.

We’ve had a little blog for the week set up where we’re posting the work as it’s produced, and have put the briefs etc.

Our experimental rockets are our people

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.

Artificial Empathy

Last week, a series of talks on robots, AI, design and society began at London’s Royal Institution, with Alex Deschamps-Sonsino (late of Tinker and now of our friends RIG) giving a presentation on ‘Emotional Robots’, particularly the EU-funded research work of ‘LIREC‘ that she is involved with.

Alex Deschamps-Sonsino on Emotional Robots at the Royal Institution

It was a thought-provoking talk, and as a result my notebook pages are filled with reactions and thoughts to follow-up rather than a recording of what she said.

My notes from Alex D-S's 'Emotional Robots' talk at the RI

LIREC‘s work is centred around a academic deconstruction of human emotional relations to each other, pets and objects – considering them as companions.

Very interesting!

These are themes dear to our hearts cf. Products Are People Too, Pullman-esque daemons and B.A.S.A.A.P.

Design principle #1

With B.A.S.A.A.P. in mind, I was particularly struck by the animal behaviour studies that LIREC members are carrying out, looking into how dogs learn and adapt as companions with their human owners, and learn how to negotiate different contexts in a almost symbiotic relationship with their humans.

December 24, 2009_15-19

Alex pointed out that the dogs sometimes test their owners – taking their behaviour to the edge of transgression in order to build a model of how to behave.

13-February-2010_14.54

Adaptive potentiation – serious play! Which lead me off onto thoughts of Brian Sutton-Smith and both his books ‘Ambiguity of Play’ and ‘Toys as Culture’. The LIREC work made me imagine the beginnings of a future literature of how robots play to adapt and learn.

Supertoys (last all summer long) as culture!

Which led me to my question to Alex at the end of her talk – which I formulated badly I think, and might stumble again here to write down clearly.

In essence – dogs and domesticated animals model our emotional states, and we model theirs – to come to an understanding. There’s no direct understanding there – just simulations running in both our minds of each other, which leads to a working relationship usually.

14-February-2010_12.42

My question was whether LIREC’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction of emotions would be less successful than the ‘brute-force’ approach of simulating the 17,000 years or so domestication of wild animals in companion robots.

Imagine genetic algorithms creating ‘hopeful monsters‘ that could be judged as more or less loveable and iterated upon…

Another friend, Kevin Slavin recently gave a great talk at LIFT11, about the algorithms that surround and control our lives – that ‘we can write but can’t read’ the complex behaviours they generate.

He gave the example of http://www.boxcar2d.com/ – that generates ‘hopeful monster’ wheeled devices that have to cross a landscape.

The little genetic algorithm that could

As Kevin says – it’s “Sometimes heartbreaking”.

Some succeed, some fail – we map personality and empathise with them when they get stuck.

I was also reminded of another favourite design-fiction of the studio – Bruce Sterling’s ‘Taklamakan

Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin.
“Why do they look so crazy?”
“‘Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them.”
Katrinko glanced up.

Another question from the audience featured a wonderful term that I at least I had never heard used before – “Artificial Empathy”.

Artificial Empathy, in place of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Empathy is at the core of B.A.S.A.A.P. – it’s what powers Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots, and it’s what Byron and Nass were describing in The Media Equation to some extent, which of course brings us back to Clippy.

Clippy was referenced by Alex in her talk, and has been resurrected again as an auto-critique to current efforts to design and build agents and ‘things with behaviour’

One thing I recalled which I don’t think I’ve mentioned in previous discussions was that back in 1997, when Clippy was at the height of his powers – I did something that we’re told (quite rightly to some extent) no-one ever does – I changed the defaults.

You might not know, but there were several skins you could place on top of Clippy from his default paperclip avatar – a little cartoon Einstein, an ersatz Shakespeare… and a number of others.

I chose a dog, which promptly got named ‘Ajax’ by my friend Jane Black. I not only forgave Ajax every infraction, every interruption – but I welcomed his presence. I invited him to spend more and more time with me.

I played with him.

Sometimes we’re that easy to please.

I wonder if playing to that 17,000 years of cultural hardwiring is enough in some ways.

In the bar afterwards a few of us talked about this – and the conversation turned to ‘Big Dog’.

Big Dog doesn’t look like a dog, more like a massive crossbreed of ED-209, the bottom-half of a carousel horse and a black-and-decker workmate. However, if you’ve watched the video then you probably, like most of the people in the bar shouted at one point – “DON’T KICK BIG DOG!!!”.

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.

It’s heart-rending.

But, I imagine (I don’t know) it’s an emergent behaviour of it’s programming and design for other goals e.g. reacting to and traversing irregular terrain.

Again like Boxcar2d, we do the work, we ascribe hurt and pain to something that absolutely cannot be proven to experience it – and we are changed.

So – we are the emotional computing power in these relationships – as LIREC and Alex are exploring – and perhaps we should design our robotic companions accordingly.

Or perhaps we let this new nature condition us – and we head into a messy few decades of accelerated domestication and renegotiation of what we love – and what we think loves us back.


P.S.: This post contains lost of images from our friend Matt Cottam’s wonderful “Dogs I Meet” set on Flickr, which makes me wonder about a future “Robots I Meet” set which might illicit such emotions…

Monday Links: UFOs, fractal lightshades, power cables, and discount coffee

UFO On Tape (iTunes link) is a game for iOS that simulates tracking a UFO with a video-camera. The magic is in the game’s total commitment to an aesthetic: the grainy, fuzzy simulated video; the panicked advice from a girl next to you; and, best of all, the way the iPhone embodies the video camera – it is, after all, also a camera itself – as you fling it around, oblivious to the real world, tracking an imaginary flying saucer. Good stuff.

Last week, Matt J gave a crit to final-year students in Wassim Jabi’s ‘Digital Tectonics Studio’ at the Welsh School of Architecture. He shared this footage of a model by Tom Draper, exploring the idea of a mechanical screen in front of a building that would cast shadows similar to a dragon curve fractal. In order to explore what this might work like – what it’d feel like to experience those shadows, how you might mechanically create those shadows out of rods – he had to build. Thinking through making. There are also some lovely photos of the model.

Lineblock

Line Block by Korean designers Junbeom So, Lee Ji Eun, Yi-Seo Hyeon, Heo-Hyeoksu and Jeong Minhui proposes an alternative to cable tangles: power cables that can be joined together through tongue-and-groove rubber. I also liked that, in the cross-section, the cable is a surprised little fella. (via Yanko Design)

These links are a bit late because last Friday I was at The Design Of Understanding – a day-long conference at the St Bride Library. It was a cracking event, with lots to chew over – I’ll see if I can get my notes up soon.

Friend-of-Berg Chris Heathcote talked about New New Media – a swift overview of ubicomp and other aspects of situated computing. One highlight was when he took apart the common example of coffee shops offering you a discount as you walk by, asking:

…what ratted on you? Your Nike+ talking shoes, using a credit card nearby, your car number plate being recognised, your phone reporting your location, or your Oyster card informing the system that you’ve just come out of Oxford Circus tube?

The whole example is good – but I liked the idea of ubiquitous computing devices tattling on you, like naughty children; Chris’ use of “ratted” reminds us that such behaviours can be as much a hindrance as a help. The full talk is definitely worth your time.

Tinker says goodbye

This is sad! Tinker is closing (by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, CEO and Co-Founder). Tinker were pioneers in the design and creation of the Internet of Things — you can see from their projects that they’ve run the gamut from fun, interactive, physical installations, to useful smart objects for the home. Through workshops, publicity and use, Tinker was also instrumental in popularising Arduino, a valuable and open source electronics platform for prototyping interactive objects, aimed at designers and hobbyists. That’s a big deal. As computation fills the products and rooms around us, it has to happen in simple, delightful, and mainstream ways. How to do it? As a thoughtful design studio with massive technical chops, Tinker was making those discoveries for us, and helping others make those discoveries for themselves.

On a personal note, we’re friends and neighbours with those at Tinker (we’ve shared a building for the last couple of years), and it’s not going to be the same in the London scene without Tinker’s presence.

However!

Read Alex’s valedictory blog post again: at least three little entities are blossoming out of Tinker already, and the old team will have their own journeys too. Tinker’s ideas, knowledge and sensibilities will spread widely and influence many companies, both new and established, and that can only be a good thing.

Thank you Alexandra! As she says, Onwards!

In which a new year begins

Hello 2011!

2010 was awesome. We made the first digital magazine platform for the iPad. And a light painting short film that went viral and ended up on national TV. And more projects and more people. And lots of silliness. I’m very happy to be working with these folks, and to be doing this.

So what does 2011 hold? Lots more unexpected stuff I hope. There are some things I really want to tell you about, but I have to keep my mouth shut for a little while still.

In the meantime: we’re making a comic! Go check out the announcement — we’re looking for advertisers.

Non-personal computing: sketching a multi-user UI for the iPad

The iPad feels like a household device.

Sofa computing: passable from person-to-person, parent-to-child… And sharable as a ‘multiplayer magic table’ surface, as discussed here previously.

Magic table games

And yet, at time-of-writing, it’s a personal computer.

While parents of my acquaintance have found work-arounds, such as placing their children’s favourite apps on specific ‘pages’ of the homescreen, it’s a device bound to a MacBook or iMac, and an iTunes account – ultimately to an individual, not a small group.

While travelling last month, my wife and I managed to use the iPad as our shared device by basically signing-in and out of our Google accounts. Do-able but laborious.

Switch seems like a useful step in the direction of “non-personal computing”, allowing multiple user accounts for browsing, with a single password for each.

But I thought I’d quickly sketch something that built on the ‘magic-table’ mock-ups I’d been playing with back in the summer – looking enhancing the passable and sharable nature of the iPad as an object in and of the household.

Multi-user iPad UI Sketch

It’s pretty simple, and not much of leap, frankly…

Multi-user iPad: Portrait

The ‘person-in-each-corner’ pattern can already be seen in iPad games such as Marble Mixer and Multipong, so this really just uses the corners of the device in tandem with the orientation sensors to select which of the – up to four* – different users wants to access their apps and settings on the device.

Activity notifications could be displayed alongside the names on the lockscreen so that you could quickly see at a glance if anything needed your attention.

Multi-user iPad: Landscape

And, if you wanted a little more privacy from the rest of your housemates or family, then just a standard iOS passcode dialog could be set.

Multi-user iPad: Passcode

That’s it really.

Just a quick sketch but something I wanted to get out of my head.

The individual nature of the UI and user-model of the iPad seems so at odds to me with its form-factor, the share-ability of its screen technology and it’s emergent context of use that I can imagine something (much more elegant) than this coming from Apple in the near-future.

Of course, they may just want to sell us all one each…


* as well as the four user limit being a simple mapping to the number of corners the thing has, this seems like a very Apple constraint to me…

Conversational UI: a short reading list

When we first started discussing Havasu, I prepared some notes around the topic: prior art, interesting ideas about language we might like to include, interfaces that are more conversational than you might expect. I thought it might be worthwhile sharing that list – not only to show you what was going around my head whilst I was building Havasu, but also because I think it’s interesting. Here’s what I wrote.

Tom Carden – “Chatbots for to-do list management

Friend-of-Berg Tom Carden wrote this four years ago, about a to-do list shaped like a push-pull stack, that’s addressed over IM. There’s only one bot, which every user talks to privately. But most important was this line:

“It’s a chatbot rather than a command line utility or a website because I want it to follow me home and I want it to be private and immediate.”

Private and immediate feels important.

Grice’s Maxims of Conversation

These are proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, and are a fair dissection of what conversation looks like. They’re also great guidelines for UI. Consider the Maxim of Quantity:

  • Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
  • Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The former is obvious, but the latter’s as important in conversational interfaces – by not offering up too much, you help restrict the types of information a user will return.

Matt W pointed out to me that the most important part of the maxims is the foundation they’re built upon – the Co-operative Principle, which he explained thus (again, on Interconnected, a few years ago):

“Participants assume that a speaker is being cooperative, and thus they make conversational implicatures about what is said”. What this means is that the bot must make maximum use of all that the user [interviewer?] has said, or at least make conversationally clear what’s understood and not.

The Jack Principles (PDF)

These have come up in conversation from time-to-time over the years. They’re the founding principles Jellyvision used when building videogame-cum-quiz-show You Don’t Know Jack.

The PDF is clear, concise, and right about many things. They feel a lot like Grice’s Maxims for interactive forms of media; very much required reading if you’re interested in conversational UI. I’d end up reproducing the whole thing if I’m not careful, so instead, one quotation about conversations, which Jeff Atwood cited in 2004:

in a conversation, you can’t unilaterally decide what gets discussed. The other person is not a machine. He can place his own limits on the conversation. He can steer the conversation in one direction, just as much as you can. The control of the conversation is shared.

Interactive Fiction

I’m a fan of Interactive Fiction – which is generally used to refer to what once might have been called “text adventures”.

Some IF games like to play games with the parser itself – the interface the player uses to interact with the game world.

Violet turns the parser into a character. It’s not just the interface that understands the player’s language; it’s an imagined version of the player character’s absent girlfriend, pleading with him to finish the thesis he promised he would. Failure in the game is responded to with polite disappointment; misunderstanding the player’s intention turns to sweet confusion. The parser doesn’t have a personality; it’s adopting a persona. It gives the parser a softer, more tolerant feeling than one that says “command not recognised” or “I can’t do that”.

(Violet, is, incidentally, my primary recommendation for anyone looking to try IF at the moment).

Lost Pig is a game about an orc, called Grunk, who has lost a pig. Grunk is somewhat stupid – he’s nowhere near as literate as the player. As such, you realise you’re “commanding” someone less intelligent than you, and are less surprised when they’re stupid or can’t understand. You also end up keeping your instructions much simpler. Again, an example of how the language/tone of the interface alters how users address it, without having to provide direct instructions on the sort of language necessary to communicate with it.

SNAP

SNAP appears in my existing information flows – in the original example we supplied, RSS. It politely observes the conventions of that space. Conversational UI should do this, too – if a UI is going to exist on Twitter, it should be well- behaved and follow the conversations of the space. So, in the case of a Twitter bot, it shouldn’t be high-traffic; it shouldn’t hold conversations in public that ought to be private.

BASAAP

By making a parser/client/bot that’s only as smart as it need to be, you don’t get the cognitive dissonance of something that looks smart but falls apart when you get your syntax wrong. (Compare, for instance, with Applescript or ELIZA). Good bots don’t pretend to be anything they’re not.

From this point I got thinking about BEAM robots, and specifically, the way that approach considers sensors.

So: if you know what appendages a bot has, you know what it’s capable of. And so, really, a chatbot shouldn’t pretend to have eyes and ears – or “see” or “hear” – because it doesn’t. It has a text parser; it has scrapers; it has rules. Finding a way to be honest in the parser without using inaccurate metaphors is important.

BASAAP also suggests lots of little, single purpose bots, acting together. Matt J and I chatted about this and discussed the idea of things that aren’t really things – Twitter lists, groupings of friends in Facebook or IM, to-do lists, calendars – gaining little, chatty, BASAAP AIs that represent them and act as conversational UIs to them

Interconnected, Feb 2002

Another take on many-small-bots, in an old post from Matt W’s blog:

“The user path has to be short… Instead of one bot, have several”.

Several bots again. I like the idea that the bot is the “verb” – rather than choosing complicated instructions to tell one bot, you choose the appropriate bot for the task, and then tell it simple things. Choosing a bot narrows what you’re going to say.

If bots are to communicate with one another, could that be public too? Everyone should use the same messaging bus, human or machine. If I talk to them on Twitter, they should talk to one another on Twitter. Unless it can’t be avoided, but then they should at least talk about it. (“I sent JohnBot a package of binary data too big to put here.”)

Nonne and Num

This is a personal thing I always come back to, and here seems relevant to talking to bots in simple language. Nonne and num are words in Latin that appear in questions, and all they really do is indicate the expected answer. They are sometimes loosely translated as “surely”. For instance: “Surely you’re coming out with us on Friday night?” is a nonne question, and “surely you’re not going to eat that?” is a num question.

I like the idea that you can shape the language someone will use in an answer by the language you ask the question in. What are the equivalents in a conversational UI?

Packrati.us

Packrati.us is a nifty service – it watches your Twitter stream, and when you post any links, it automatically posts them to Delicious for you. So it’s not conversational like a chatbot, but it’s conversational like Lanyrd is – it’s a polite listener, eavesdropping, and being useful/busy in the background, but not overstepping its boundaries.

Moving a conversation between platforms

When I first wrote chatbots, more of my conversation happened on IM. Now, IM is reserved for more higher priority conversation; I tned to use Twitter for low-level, occasional banter, like sending URLs to friends. I like the idea that a conversation might move between platforms – an eavesdropping bot might work things out from my Twitter stream and trickle information back to me; but, if it needed something detailed, or urgent, or required information that could only really emerge in a conversation… an IM bot could take over the same conversation. And when it was done, the outcome and remaining announcements would flow back somewhere else.

Links for a Friday Evening: Maps and Rivers, Space and Kinetic Sculpture

pistil.jpg

Pistil SF make customised blankets based on OpenStreetMap imagery. The custom maps can be centered around any latitude/longitude, and are available in a variety of custom colour schemes thanks to the Cloudmade styles. Freely available data turned into a beautiful, desirable product.

mr-switch.jpg

Andy spotted Mr Switch – a switch blanking plate designed by John Caswell, that injects character (and a little fella) into any light switch.

romance-river.jpg

I loved James Bridle’s Romance Has Lived Too Long Upon This River. It’s a really abstract representation of the height of the Thames, manifesting as a single-serving webpage. It’s also a synecdoche for the whole river, perhaps even the city of London; a glanceable manifestation of nature, in a window on your computer, or on your tablet, or on your phone. James explains the technicalities – and the romance – over on his blog.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis 2 is a kinetic sculpture: 1200 toy cars racing around a colossal series of tracks. Brilliant. The noise sounds deafening. (via Kottke).

The noise of Metropolis II reminded me of this delightful marble run around a the edges of a room. I particularly like the way deftly curved lengths of wood are used to slow the marbles. It embraces momentum, rather than artificially killing it.

spacelog.jpg

Several of us have been admiring Spacelog this week. It’s a really lovely representation of the space missions it covers, taking original radio chatter and mapping it to not only mission personnel, but also the phases of the mission itself. It’s another kind of macroscope: the many small actions of the vast teams at NASA, distilled into a few hours of spaceflight, and explained through careful representation of that data.

John’s Phone

johnsphone-1.jpg

I mentioned the John’s Phone on the studio mailing list last week. We ended up getting one to look at in the studio; it arrived this week, and I spent some time exploring it.

The John’s Phone is a simple mobile phone made by Dutch design firm John Doe. The phone came about as an attempt to take the ultra-simplicity of their From The Supermarket to a mobile phone. To quote their blogpost on the subject:

We’ve always wondered why most affordable phone looks so dull and boring. All cell phones are great high-tech product we like to use every day. Why not spend more time in designing. It’s the things we don’t see that are the most essential to creating a great design. A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

johnsphone-2.jpg

It’s a really immediate product: the entire front face is devoted to the keypad and physical interface. The top of the phone has an LCD display, positioned much like an old-fashioned pager; the side of the phone, which you can just see in the pictures above, has a rocker switch for volume, a SIM card slot, a switch for the ringer volume, and a power switch.

The phone makes its intention clear: the immediacy of use and that interface is more important to it than any screen or display-based interaction. It’s all about phone calls and phone numbers.

The John’s Phone is almost exactly the same size as an iPhone 4 – but its keypad takes up as much space as the touch screen does on the iPhone. The touchscreen has become a focal point of the design of smartphones, the hardware being designed around that bright rectangle. The John’s Phone is equally designed around its interface (or, at least, the “input” element of that interface) – it just happens to be a physical keypad.

johnsphone-3.jpg

There are delightful, surprising touches. There’s a biro hidden down the side, where you might expect a stylus on an old touchscreen phone. You can use it to write in the addressbook hidden in the back of the phone.

But that paper addressbook sums up some of the problems with a phone this simple. Is that simplicity for the purpose of simplification, or to support an aesthetic of simplicity?

The website for the phone claims that it’s “the world’s simplest cellphone“. That’s true – if you agree with their idea of what a cellphone is.

For instance, if you believe text messaging to be a fundamental feature of a cellphone, then the John’s Phone doesn’t even live up to your expectations of what a mobile phone is. But if all you want your mobile phone to do nothing but send and receive calls – which is true of many phone owners – then it really is a simple, satisfying expression of that goal. Satisfaction with the device comes down to what your expectations – or requirements of it – are when you first pick it up.

That aesthetic of simplicity is at times complicated by the technology the phone runs on. Whilst John Doe promote the paper addressbook as the best way to store your phone numbers, reading the manual reveals that there is a ten-number memory built into the phone.

How do you put numbers into that memory? By typing **1*01234567890# (to put “01234 567890″ into slot “1”).

Doesn’t that, as an interface, feel totally at odds with the aesthetic the physical device is cultivating?

(Of course, “reading the manual” seems like an activity also at odds with a device already so explicit in its physical form; had I not done so, I’d have been perfectly happy not knowing about that feature.)

button-closeup.jpg

At first, the character-design on the “hello” and “goodbye” buttons seems at odds with the restrained, minimal physical exterior.

As you use the phone, though, you’ll get to see a lot more of that character. He’s called Fony, and he appears throughout the phone’s operation. He’ll wave hello and goodbye to you when you turn the phone on and off.

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When the phone’s asleep, you might see him tucked up in bed.

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When you charge the phone, he gets electrocuted from time to time (which seems curel to a character I’d imagine I was supposed to be sympathetic towards).

I can appreciate the care and attention in the realisation of Fony. He’s charming and never intrusive on the phone’s screen, often explaining what the phone’s currently doing through his appearance (rather than through text, which there’s very little space for). John Doe say (in their explanation of his design) that “Fony makes John’s a friendly phone“. I think he’s part of that friendliness – but not nearly as much as the much more immediate friendliness of the clear, simply designed hardware.

It’s important to factor the price of the product into any discussion of it. The John’s Phone costs €70 – about £50. That puts it in line with fairly cheap pay-as-you-go phones. (And: the John’s Phone is sold unlocked from any carrier, so that’s £50 without any carrier-subsidy).

Price changes the the relationship to a product. At £150, this would be a premium product designed for a wealthy few as a provocative statement – but likely a “second phone”.

At the current price, it’s a much more relevant purchase for a wider audience. If that price were even lower, new – and larger – audiences become available.

johnsphone-4.jpg

It’s only fair, in the end, to criticise the John’s Phone in light of that initial quotation from John Doe, which serves as a kind of design brief:

A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

A device that makes you happy; a device that is a delight every time you pick it up. By those criteria, the John’s Phone is clearly a success. Everyone who’s seen ours wants to pick it up and take a look; everyone who picks it up smiles, and plays with it, explores its secrets; everyone wants to answer the question “is it really a phone”?

Yes, it is. And it’s not just an ultra-simple phone; it’s an affordable ultra-simple phone, that you can buy right now. All credit to John Doe for taking their vision of what a mobile phone could be, and making it real, at the right price.

Media Surfaces: The Journey

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: ticket vending

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…

Media Surfaces: The Journey: ticket machines that calm down the queue

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Screens for the queue & you

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…

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Stations that talk to you

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…

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Platforms that talk to you

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Expectation-Setting

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…

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Arthur's favourite journey

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Can I sit here?

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!

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Reservations sketch

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Reservations sketch

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: Train factoids

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.

Media Surfaces: The Journey: paper-based AR

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

Media Surfaces: The Journey: paper-based AR

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!

Tom at Interesting North, 13th November

I’m going to be speaking at Interesting North in Sheffield on Saturday 13th November. Alongside a great lineup of speakers, I’ll be giving a talk called – at the moment – Five Things Rules Do, which I’ve summarised thus:

The thing that make games Games isn’t joypads, or scores, or 3D graphics, or little bits of cardboard, or many-sided dice. It’s the rules and mechanics beating in their little clockwork hearts. That may be a somewhat dry reduction of thousands of years of fun, but my aim is to celebrate and explore the many things that games (and other systemic media) do with the rules at their foundation. And, on the way, perhaps change your mind at exactly what rules are for.

It’s already sold out, but if you’ve got a ticket – perhaps see you there!

5 iPad magazines now on the Mag+ platform

I wanted to point out a little milestone!

You may remember we built Popular Science+ for the iPad — available on the day the iPad was launched (3 April), it was the first magazine available, and based on our Mag+ concept from December 2009 with Bonnier.

What you might not know is we spent that time building a platform. Mag+ is

  • a way to read magazines on tablets, and a file format to package up editorial, assets and interactions
  • InDesign integration to go from existing paper magazines to the Mag+ format, with custom tools to aide design, iPad previewing, and publishing
  • e-commerce and customer relationship servers, and integration

Over the summer, we took this system from prototype to hand-over: for the past months, Bonnier have developed the platform, deepened the integration, and are now rapidly adding features and titles.

First is was Popular Science…

…now there are five magazines on the Mag+ platform! In three languages. All launched on the App Store, all published every month.

Read more about the platform and see the magazines at magplus.com.

And have a look at PopSci’s write-up of the four new mags. They’re really worth a look.

The various art directors are really beginning to understand the visual design possibilities of Mag+, the layouts are moving way beyond the simple right-column, left-photo place we started. It’s exciting to see, and exciting to imagine what comes next.

I’m really pleased to see Bonnier developing the platform so well, and to see the seeds we planted together blossom so beautifully.

(Read more about the Mag+ project here.)

Week 280

The milling machine is buzzing away next door. It’s been dormant a long while: mainly because we needed a new bit for it. A few weeks ago we acquired said bit, and now it’s being put to use. I’ve never heard it in action since I joined Berg.

The studio sounds different this week.

There’s a different mixture of voices, for starters. Jack’s out at meetings with clients a lot right now, so his desk is quiet. Matt W’s on a well-deserved holiday until next week. Matt J is off to Barcelona tomorrow to talk at the Mobile Design Conference, as part of Barcelona Design Week. Daniel Tull started on Monday and is working with us – mainly Nick – for a few weeks on some iOS work.

New sounds on the stereo. The speakers have moved to the middle table where, at the moment, Matt B, Alex, Daniel and I sit, which means we’re often in charge of the studio’s soundtrack. Alex put on a lot of New Jack Swing this morning; a lively start to the day. (Well, I liked it).

There are new project names on everyone’s tongues: Wupatki; Havasu; Gallup. New projects bring new Dutch to the conversations about them – “Dutch” being what we call the domain-specific vernacular that projects evolve, which Matt has talked about before.

Who’s doing what right now: Alex is working on Gallup, which is looking great; I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it in the not-too-distant-future. Right now, though, I’m hacking away at a small internal brief we’re calling Havasu, which is a material exploration into a territory we’re interested in.

(I’m also writing a weeknote for the first time. I’m not quite sure if I’m doing it right).

Nick, Daniel, and Campbell are working on Wupatki; Matt J’s been dropping in and chatting with them, giving a little bit of a steer now and then; he’s just left the studio for a meeting. Kari’s been digging out some assets for Gallup, and is catching up with everyone about progress. Matt B and Andy are working on Barringer today, and are responsible for the buzz of the milling machine.

Or, rather, they were responsible for it. The milling machine has stopped.

What the studio sounds like now: Lamb on the stereo, heavy rain outside, typing conversation. Time for me to get back to my state machines.

Links from around the studio: paper computing, computer vision, simple and small

Matt J was busy running Papercamp last Saturday. One of my favourite things to emerge from the day was Basil Safwat’s Processing.A4. It’s computational cardboard; you follow the instructions on it to replicate the output of the Substrate Processing script.

Troika have launched their new artwork, Shoal, in Toronto.

Spanning across a 50 meter long corridor, 467 fish-like objects wrapped in iridescent colours and suspended from the ceiling rotate rhythmically around their own axis to display the movements and interdependency typical to school of fish.

Beautiful, though.

Niklas Roy’s My Little Piece of Privacy is a delightful computer-vision project:

My workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, I’ve decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.

I really enjoyed his video of it – first, the project displayed-as-is, and then a detailed explanation of what the computer’s “seeing”. Through both parts, the hilarity of the little, jerkily moving curtain is not lost.

I’ve been enjoying dataists – a new blog about the science and interprtation of data – a great deal recently. Today’s post about What Data Visualisation Should Do is particularly good:

…yesterday I focused on three key things – I think – data visualization should do:
1. Make complex things simple
2. Extract small information from large data
3. Present truth, do not deceive

The emphasis is added to highlight the goal of all data visualization; to present an audience with simple small truth about whatever the data are measuring.

That felt like a nice addition to some of the topics covered in Matt J’s talk at citycamp and my own talk on data from a few weeks ago – but do read the whole post; it’s an insightful piece of writing.

Finally, some stop-motion animation. Our friends Timo Arnall and Matt Cottam recently linked to the videos some of their students at the Umeå Institue of Design produced during their week working on stop-motion techniques. They’re all charming; it’s hard to single any of them out – they’re all lovely – but the dancing radio (above) was a particular favourite.

“Post-Digital Printed Augmented Reality”

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

Bruno Munari "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.

Prototype Paper Pie Chart

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.

Multiple Screens

Earlier in the week, Matt W asked if there were any games that took advantage of outputting on more than one screen. Not necessarily the usage of side-by-side screens to increase the field of view, either – but different screens that perform totally different functions.

I pointed out that there was some precedent – although not a lot – and what began as a conversation quickly became a list that was worth sharing and explaining a bit.

forza-3-screens.jpg

This isn’t the kind of thing Matt meant. Whilst it’s definitely a part of this conversation, the Forza Motorsport series’ use of multiple monitors to increase the field of view is the kind of thing that’s not actually very interesting. It doesn’t alter the game in any significant way. It’s also a brute force solution: each screen is rendered by its own Xbox, and all the consoles are slaved together over a local network.

I think what Matt meant was separate screens performing different functions.

At the very simplest level, second screens can act as contextual displays – parts of the HUD or interface broken out to their own display.

supcom2.jpg

The strategy game Supreme Commander allows players to use a second monitor for a zoomed-out tactical map. Rather than reducing the map to the corner of the screen (as many strategy games do), or forcing the player to constantly zoom in and out, the second screen provides a permanent context for what’s going on the primary screen.

vmu-1.jpg

A similar type of contextual screen can be seen on the Sega Dreamcast. The VMU memory unit was designed as a miniature console itself, with a screen and set of controls. When docked with the joypad, it acted as a second screen in the player’s hands.

The VMU was not used as effectively in the role of “second screen” as it might have been, although there were exceptions. Resident Evil: Code Veronica, for instance, used the VMU to display the player character’s health (which was otherwise only visible in the status menu).

nintendobs.jpg

Of course, there’s a limit to how many secondary screens are sensible; shortly after the announcement of the Nintendo DS, the above spoof was widely circulated. It’s a good point: lots of little screens right next to each other aren’t very different from one big screen.

The most interesting usage of multiple screens is in their capacity to affect gameplay itself. What sort of games would you design when players can have different viewports onto the world?

pacman-vs.jpg

Pac-Man VS is my favourite answer to that question so far. It’s four-player Pac-Man, on the Nintendo Gamecube. Three players play ghosts: they play on the TV, with Gamecube pads.They have a 3D-ish view of a limited part of the map, and a radar in the bottom-right to know where each other is.

The fourth player is Pac-Man; they don’t use a Gamecube joypad. Instead, they play on a Gameboy Advance, plugged into the Gameube with a connection lead:

gba-connection.jpg

The Gameboy screen shows the Pac-Man player the entire map. Pac-man’s superpower over the ghosts is context; he has knowledge of the whole map. The ghosts are more powerful, but can’t see nearly so much.

Here’s a nice video of it all playing out, the Gameboy screen on the left, the TV on the right.

It’s marvellous: fun, social, and utterly ingenious. There were a few other games for the linkup cable designed around players having their own screens – Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Zelda: Four Swords are the obvious examples – but Pac-Man VS remains the stand-out, for me.

ipad-scrabble.jpg

One recent example of this sort of approach is Scrabble on the iPad, which lets you use the pad as a board, and other iOS devices for each player to hide their tiles. But it feels so unimaginative: the secondary screens feel like they’ve been used simply because it was possible; they’re no more than direct analogues for real-world objects. (It’s also an absurdly expensive way to play Scrabble.)

Nintendo’s DS focused on the usage of a secondary screen as context and extra information – but in a parallel universe, I’m sure there’s a DS that looks much like this:

facing-ds-for-blog.jpg

This imaginary affords all manner of games based on hidden knowledge and incomplete views of the world. And, just like a tandem, it looks wrong without someone else playing with you; it indicates how it wants to be used, inviting a second player.

My imaginary console is entirely symmetrical in its design. It’d be a shame to only encourage games that gave symmetrical abilities for both players, in the same way as games like Guess Who? or Battleships. Asymmetric games – where players have very different abilities, or viewpoints, much like Pac Man VS above – are, for me, a more interesting notion to explore with multiple screens. Imagine games where players may have not only very different abilities or tasks to one another, but also might be played on totally different types of screen from one another.

Super Mario Galaxy demonstrated a co-operative approach to asymmetric play. Rather than being another avatar in the world alongside Mario, a second player could use their Wiimote to scoop up star bits as they passed. They did nothing else, and could drop in and out when they liked; theirs was a purely additive role. It allows a player with different capabilites – or attention – to drop in and out of the game, always helping, but not being critical to Mario’s success.

To extend that idea to screens: what are the gameplay modes for a friend with a touchscreen tablet, whilst I’m playing on a console attached to the TV? Mechanic to my racing driver? Coach to my football team? Evil overlord planting traps in the dungeon I’m exploring?

I don’t know yet. This at least feels like the start of a useful catalogue of multiple-screen play. And as screens become smarter, and “screen” and “device” increasingly become synonyms for one another, the world of multiple-screen play feels like an exciting, and ripe area to explore.

Open Data for the Arts – Human Scale Data and Synecdoche

This is a short talk that I gave as part of a 45-minute workshop with Matthew Somerville at The Media Festival Arts 2010. As part of a session on how arts and cultural bodies can use open data, I talked about what I felt open data was, and what the more interesting opportunities it affords to are.

What is open data?

I’d describe “open data” as: “Making your information freely available for reuse in practical formats with no licensing requirements.

It’s not just sticking some data on a website; it’s providing it in some kind of data-format (be it CSV, XML, JSON, RDF, either via files or an API) for the intended purpose of being re-used. The more practical the format, the better.

You can still own the copyright; you can still claim credit. That doesn’t stop the data being open. But open data shouldn’t require payment.

More importantly:

What isn’t open data?

It’s not just sticking up web pages and saying it’s open because you won’t tell me off for scraping it.

It’s not any specific format. One particular crowd will tell you that open data has to be RDF, for instance. That is one format it can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

The success of your open data platform depends on how useful people will find it.

How do I know if it’s useful?

A good rule of thumb for “good open data” – and, by “good”, I mean “easy for people to use”, is something I’ve seen referred to as “The P Test“, which can be paraphrased as:

“You can do something interesting with it – however simple – in an hour, in a language beginning with P.”

Making something super-simple in an hour in Perl/PHP/Python (or similar, simple scripting language, that doesn’t begin with P, like Ruby or Javascript) is a good first goal for an open data set. If a developer can’t do something simple in that little time, why would they spend longer really getting to grips with your information? This, for me, is a problem with RDF: it’s very representative of information, as a data format, but really, it’s bloody hard to use. If I can’t do something trivial in an hour, I’m probably going to give up.

What are the benefits of open data?

The big benefit of open data is that it gets your “stuff” in more places. Your brand isn’t a logo, and it isn’t a building; it’s this strange hybrid of all manner of things, and your information is part of that. That information might be a collection, or a catalogue, or a programme. Getting that information in more places helps spread your brand.

As well as building your profile, open data can also build collaboration and awareness. I can build something out of someone else’s information as a single developer messing around, sure – but I can also build products around it that stand alone, and yet build value.

schooloscope-od.jpg

For instance, Schooloscope. Schooloscope looks at data about UK schools and put it together to give you a bigger picture. A lot of reporting about schools focuses on academic performance. Schooloscope is more interested in a bigger picture, looking at pupil happiness and change over time. We built this site around DFE data, Edubase data, and Ofsted reports. We’re building a product in its own right on top of other people’s data, and if the product itself is meaningful, and worthwhile… then that’s good for both your product and the source data – not to mention that data’s originators.

But for me, the biggest thing about open data is: it helps grow the innovation culture in your organisation.

The number-one user of open data should be you. By which I mean: if your information is now more easily accessible via an API (for instance), it makes it easier to build new products on top of it. You don’t have to budget for building interfaces to your data, because you’ve done it already: you have a great big API. So the cost of innovation goes down.

(A short note on APIs: when you build an API, build good demos. When I can see what’s possible, that excites me, as a developer, to make more things. Nothing’s worse than a dry bucket of data with no examples.)

Similarly: the people who can innovate have now grown in number. If you’ve got information as CSV – say, your entire catalogue, or every production ever – then there’s nothing to stop somebody armed with Excel genuinely doing something useful. So, potentially, your editorial team, your marketing team, your curators can start exploring or using that information with no-one mediating, and that’s interesting. The culture begins to move to one where data is a given, rather than something you have to request from a technical team that might take ages.

And, of course, every new product that generates data needs to be continuing to make it open. Nothing’s worse than static open data – data that’s 12, 18 months old, and gets updated once a year as part of a “big effort” – rather than just adding a day to a project to make sure its information is available to the API.

What’s the benefit for everyone else?

This is just a short digression about something that really interests me. Because here’s the thing: when somebody says “open data”, and “developers using your information”, we tend to imagine things like this:

red-dot-fever.jpg

Schuyler Erle called the above kind of map “red dot fever”: taking geolocated data and just putting it all on a map, without any thought. This isn’t design, this isn’t a product, this is just a fact. And it’s about as detached from real people as, to be honest, the raw CSV file was.

So I think one thing that open-data allows people to do is make information human-scale. And by which I mean: make it relevant, make it comprehensible, move it from where the culture might be to where *I* am.

And that lets me build an ongoing relationship with something that might have been incomprehensible.

I should probably show you an example.

tower-bridge-od.jpg

This is a Twitter bot that I built. It tells you when Tower Bridge is opening and closing. I stole the data from their website.

Or rather: Tower Bridge itself tells you when it’s opening and closing. Things on Twitter talk in the first person, so it should be itself. It becomes another voice in my Twitter stream, not just some bot intruding like a foghorn.

It exposes a rhythm. I built it because I used to work near Tower Bridge – I saw it every day. I liked the bot most when I was out of London; I’d see it opening and closing and know that London was still going on, still continuing. It has a silly number of followers, but not many of them interact with it daily. And yet – when you do, it’s useful; some friends found it helpful for reminding them not to leave the office for a bit.

And: you learn just how many times it opens/closes, but not in a numeric way; in a visceral way of seeing it message you.

lowflyingrocks-od.jpg

This is Low Flying Rocks by my friend Tom Taylor. It’s a bot that scrapes NASA data about asteroids passing within 0.2AU AU of Earth (an AU being 0.2 of the distance from the Earth to the sun). That’s quite close! What you discover is a) there are lots of asteroids passing quite close, and b) we know that they’re there. You both learn about the universe, and a little bit about our capacity to understand it. And you learn it not in some big glut of information, but slowly, as a trickle.

It feels more relevant because it’s at my scale.

And that leads to my final point.

Synecdoche

I want to talk about synecdoche, because I think that’s what these kind of Twitter bots are.

Synecdoche’s a term from literature, best explained as “the part representing a whole“. That’s a terrible explanation. It’s better explained with some examples:

A hundred keels cut the ocean“; “keel” stands for “ship“. “The herd was a hundred head strong“; “head” stands for “cow“.

So: for me, Tower Bridge is synecdoche, for the Thames, for London, for the city, for home. Low Flying Rocks is synecdoche not only for the scale of the universe, all the activity in the solar system, the earth’s place in that – but also for NASA, for science, for discovery.

Synecdoche allows you to make big, terrifying data, human-scale.

I was thinking, to wrap this session up, about a piece of data I’d like if I was building a Twitter bot, and I decided that what I’d love would be: what the curtain at the Royal Opera House was doing.

curtain.jpg

It sounds boring at first: it’s going to go up and down a few times in a performance. That means once an evening, and perhaps the odd matinee.

But it’s also going to go up and down for tech rehearsals. And fire tests. And who knows what else. It’s probably going up and down quite a lot.

And, as that burbles its way into my chat stream, it tells me a story: you may only think there’s a production a day in the theatre, but really, the curtain never stops moving; the organisation never stop working, even when you’re not there. I didn’t learn that by reading it in a book; I learned it by feeling it, and not even by feeling all of it – just a tiny little bit. That talking robot told me a story. This isn’t about instrumenting things for the sake of it; it’s about instrumenting things to make them, in one particular way, more real.

Yes, from your end, it’s making APIs and CSV and adding extra functionality to existing projects that are probably under tight budgets. But it allows for the things you couldn’t have planned for.

Open Data allows other people to juxtapose and invent, and tell stories, and that’s exciting.

Making Future Magic: the book

There were an awful lot of photos taken for the Making Future Magic video that BERG and Dentsu London launched last week; Timo reckons he shot somewhere in the region of 5500 shots. Stop-frame animation is a very costly process in the first instance, but as the source we were shooting was hand held (albeit with locked-off cameras) and had only the most rudimentary of motion-control (chalk lines, black string and audio progress cues), if a frame was poorly exposed, obscure or fumbled, it left the sequence largely unusable. This meant that a lot was left on the cutting room floor.

In addition, we amassed a stack of incidental pictures of props, setups, mistakes, 3D tests and amphibious observers during the film’s creation.

Clicking through these pictures, it was clear that a book collecting some of these pictures, offering little behind-the-scenes glimpses alongside the finished graded stills used in the final edit, was the way forward. As well as offering a platform for some of the shots that didn’t make the final cut, the static prints want to be pored over, allowing for the finer details and shades (the animations themselves had textures and colours burnt into them in prior to shooting, so as to add a disruptive quality) to come through.

Our copies arrived today from Blurb. The print quality and stock is fantastic – especially considering it’s an on-demand service – and for us it’s great to have a little summary of a project that doesn’t require any software or legacy codecs to view it and will remain ‘as is’. We’ve made the book available to the public and in two formats; you can get your hands on the hardcover edition here, and the softcover here.

More images of the book are up here.

Week 276

Each week, Kari spends 5 minutes with each person in the studio recording what they’ve been up to. We do this so nobody has to keep time-sheets. Here’s my week.

Last Tuesday (the 14th), we launched the short film Making Future Magic. It hit 400,000 views in 2 days (it’s currently over double that). The video was picked up by Gizmodo, Stephen Fry, and William Gibson. I wasn’t on the film team, but helped with the launch preparation and saw it come together. The day Cam, Timo and Jack hit on the techniques that went on to become stop-motion light painting, it was electric just to have them in the room.

Also last Tuesday afternoon, we had the kick-off meeting for Project Blacklight. It has been slow to start, this one, as it’s a pretty unusual enterprise for us. One quirk is that the financials aren’t completely fixed yet, and they have to be before I continue conversations with potential backers and advertisers. The print tests and quotes over the next couple weeks will firm those up. Blacklight should make for an exciting start to 2011.

On Wednesday I had a meeting with a potential new client with Matt Jones. This particular client is interested in our product invention workshop, which we run either standalone or as a prelude to pretty much all our design work. It’s 3 days of intense knowledge download, concepting and co-creation, and sketching. The client ends up with around 5 “microbriefs,” which is what we call the sketches and descriptions of the products or services we come up with around their business and brief. They then take those briefs off to their existing agencies and internal teams, or ask us to make a proposal for one or more of them. (BBC Dimensions started this way, one of a half dozen products to come out of an invention workshop aimed at history storytelling and digital.)

I had a catch-up with Nick over lunch, covering everything from my current thoughts about the studio’s direction, to his progress meeting iOS developers, and what weird ideas are tickling him at the moment (I’ll make sure our proposals steer in that direction). It was really good. So I’m going to spend 45 minutes with each of the studio, individually, every two weeks on Wednesdays. It’s funny how, even in a small room, you can miss chances to really spend time together.

Jack and Matt J had a long-anticipated getting-to-know-you meeting with another possible client in the afternoon, and we spent an hour after that chewing over possibilities.

But mainly on Wednesday I was working on my talk for the Do Lectures, which was in Wales. I spoke on Thursday evening, and went from sci-fi, to the early years of electrification, to the idea that is really making me bubble at the moment: Fractional A.I. This riffs of Dave Winer’s application of fractional horsepower to the Web, where he says that new products can be made by taking an old one and scaling it down.

What if we had fractional artificial intelligence? This is another way of saying Matt J’s maxim to Be As Smart As a Puppy, and also a topic I covered in my Mobile Monday Amsterdam talk What comes after mobile. It’s a topic I’m fleshing out.

Thursday and Friday was talks, walks in the Welsh countryside (there’s a beautiful river there and you can take a short hike up the gorge. Lots of ancient woodland and slate landscapes), late-night conversations, and inspiration. You should watch the 2010 videos when they’re up.

Whilst I was away, a project proposal was accepted, and we’ll start that project off this week.

Euan Semple gave me a lift back to London on Sunday night, and I waited at Slough railway station for a train. While there, I found a stuffed dog in a box. The dog is called “Station Jim,” and he used to raise money for charity. He was quite a character by all accounts, and died in the closing years of the 1800s. I mentioned Station Jim on Twitter… and @stationjim replied! Fractional A.I. indeed. We had a little chat.

Monday, yesterday, we had a kick-off meeting for the next stage of Project Barringer. Andy is working with us a day a week to produce a pretty significant strand of the project. It’s nicely complex – lots of different skills and people involved – and a good blend of design and hard tech. But risky. So the next two stages are: prototype; detailed costings for production. We’ll have to do some pretty serious analysis at every stage of this one.

In the afternoon I caught up on a few projects. I wanted to get an update on the next film (it’s going well — the team have just been meeting to discuss the last few bits of copy), and Tom and Matt B have been working on league tables for Schooloscope and those are tantalisingly close now. I went out with Jack in the evening to run through contracts. After 40 minutes discussing “worst case scenarios” I got home a bit grouchy. It’s funny the ways in which work affects your personal life. Not just emails arriving late at night, feeling tired from working hard, or elated after a launch, but subtle emotional spillover. I try to keep an eye on that. I’m undecided yet whether a high level of self-knowledge is an advantage or hindrance for the kind of invention and design we do. But it’s important for general wellbeing.

Which brings us to today.

This morning we’ve had our All Hands, during which we had our first project updates from active new product development. These projects are like invisible people, so they deserve to have their say about their week’s activity.

I’ve set up, with Kari, an old laptop to run Dropbox. We’ve pretty much entirely shifted to Dropbox for file-sharing from our in-studio server, but that means our archives aren’t up to date. So: archiving.

A few copies of the Making Future Magic book arrived in the post (print on demand; designed by Cam. Very pretty). And I pointed Matt B at Tunecore because we’d like to put the film music on iTunes.

Jack and Matt J are at a workshop on Wednesday and Thursday, so I’ll help them prep that later. I think I’m sneaking in a massage after lunch (lunch is with some iOS developers, so we can keep them in mind for future projects). And this afternoon and over the rest of the week, I am way behind on keeping project proposals moving through the pipeline, so I want to concentrate on that. There are a bunch. Oh, and emails: way behind on those too. I have a little list of people to whom I really owe a Hello.

Last: Jack, Matt J and I were going to go out for dinner with an Interesting Person tonight, but that’s been moved to tomorrow. I can still make it — I’m not sure about the other two.

Otherwise, generally thinking about what’s happening next, and seeing where I can nudge or smooth the way as appropriate. To be honest, that’s most of my time.

So that’s my week!

Making Future Magic – a bit about the music

Some of you might have seen this film we released with our friends from Dentsu London the other day. At the time of writing, it’s had over half a million views. Whoa.

Also, a few people have been asking about the music we used, so I thought I’d chat a little bit about it. We wrote it ourselves, here in the studio. I pasted it all together, with direction and input from Schulze, Timo, Beeker and the rest of the Dentsu crew.

Some of the best bits about working at BERG are how everyone, despite having particular specialist skills, gleefully ignores boundaries, disciplines, labels and predefined processes, and allows themselves space to just run with things when they get excited. Deciding to do the music for the first Making Future Magic film ourselves was one of those moments.

“Yeah, so who are your influences then?”

About ten days ago, after the animation had reached a final(ish) edit, I happened to overhear Schulze, Timo and Cam batting a few ideas around about potential soundtrack music. I hadn’t really been involved in the project so far, but at this point I dropped what I was doing, went a bit Barry from High Fidelity, and started throwing some MP3s at them.

Over that afternoon, we chewed on some of Aphex Twin’s prepared piano robotics; the sinister, codeine-fuelled fizzes of Oneohtrix Point Never; the anodyne, bleepy piano washes of Swod and Jan Jelinek; the fuzzy felt collages of The Focus Group; the tranquil-yet-demented drone of Mandelbrot Set; Finnish free jazz kraut-metallers Circle; ultra-hip dub-glitchers Mount Kimbie; the electric guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca; some Eno-squelched dulcimer by Laraaji; downright weirdness by Basil Kirchin, and of course the obligatory Reichs, Glasses and Rileys. Maybe a dash of Yellow Magic Orchestra at the end, too, just for sheer melodic charm and natty suits.

That weekend, on a long train journey, and with a few hours to kill, I was listening back to the tunes we’d picked out, and thought I’d sketch out some musical ideas to accompany a few clips of the current edit, just as a little exercise. Like loads of people I know, I do enjoy a bit of noodling around with things like Ableton Live, Logic, Beatmaker on the iPhone and so on. So I had a crack at it.

On the Monday morning, everyone had a listen, and nudged me to do a little more, just to see where it went. Gradually, things began to firm up into a “proper job”. I’d never written music for a film (or anything else, for that matter) ever before, but hey, everyone knows the best way to learn something is simply to set a risky week-away deadline involving potential public ridicule. So here went nothing.

Designing the Music – first sketches

We all know that a lot of the unseen (yet most satisfying) work in design goes into getting rid of things. Tidying up. Wielding Occam’s Razor. Making things unnoticeable. Getting things under the hood working so well you forget they’re there. All that good stuff. There are obvious parallels to this in music, but I guess this applies even more so to making soundtracks.

Not your rousing, whistle-able belters of your Williamses or Morricones; I’m thinking more about Bernstein’s work for the Eames films, John Cameron’s haunting soundtrack to Kes, anything on the KPM label, or, say, Clint Mansell, whose Moon soundtrack got quite a rinsing here in the studio last year. There’s a quiet unselfishness to this type of music which I’m really drawn to – it’s kind of half-there, beckoning you to invent accompanying stories and pictures in your head, and sometimes it’s at its best when you don’t really notice it. I imagine this rings lots of little bells in the heads of anyone involved in design or making things – it definitely does for me.

As I say, I’d never really written any music before, so pretty much used these little scraps of what I know about design (and what I love about film music) as a way in. Finding the grain of a material and playing with it; hitting on an idea and not getting in the way of it; looking for patterns; making references to other, familiar concepts, using broad brush strokes first, then (quite literally) tuning and polishing – all the usual approaches, really. The same way we’d work with any (im)material here at BERG.

So, here are the three first sketches I did. The visual glitchiness of the animation was the main thing I wanted to complement, so I went outside, made some little field recordings on my phone, chucked them all into the computer, then pressed record and left it on. I assembled the samples into few rhythms, teased out little patterns of pitch, timbre and so on, and eventually, after a few hours, out popped a few bits and pieces. It took me about 6 hours of jamming to come up with three one-minute ideas. Told you I was new at this.

That was a bit Chris Isaak meets Twin Peaks. Bland. Nah. Next.

A po-faced Radiohead rip-off. Cheesy moody piano. Banal drum-and-bass-by-numbers rhythm. Overall, nah.

We all sat up at this one. Warm, bubbly ARPy synths; Reichy scales and patterns; plinky, poppy glockenspiels; pentatonic scales giving off a subtle whiff of J-Pop (which might sit nicely with the Dentsu folks), and it had the most potential to grow melodically. Tick!

Building out the musical structure

After that, it was time to work out how this sketch would evolve to fit across the whole film. The first task was to build the scaffolding we wanted to hang everything off, by translating the timing of each visual cut into bars and beats, which I did with a metronome and a few big sheets of paper. I grabbed Schulze, talked about where we wanted the main narrative pivots to be, and stuck those on post-it notes.

Since we had three sections to work with (Making, Future and Magic), everything pretty much finished itself after that. We’d built the scaffolding, so now all that was needed was the rest of the building – from the main zones down to furniture, textures, colours and so on. I blocked in the main themes and some large areas of texture, then just worked my way down to polishing little details. I don’t know much about how composers work, but this bit wasn’t all that different from we usually get from whiteboards and post-its down to pixels and working code.

Jack and Timo were still making edits to the film as I was composing, so I needed to leave a bit of slack here and there to adjust to their timings. I made little modular loops of different lengths (3, 4, and 5 notes, in different rhythms, at different speeds), which meant I could cut or extend little phrases here and there, ignoring strict time signatures as needed. Again, just simple, common sense stuff, really.

The final mix

After 3 or 4 days of tuning and polishing, we had an overall structure everyone was pretty happy with, so we got in touch with the chaps at Resonate to help us mix and master everything – the proper, detailed tuning. Big big thanks to Liam and Andy for being super helpful at such short notice! Aside from treating a novice like me very kindly, they brought a level of clarity and depth to the mix way beyond what my ears had previously heard. Here are the before and after versions. Spot the difference!

Before mixing:

Mixed and mastered:

And of course here’s the finished film.

Overall, the music took us about 6 or 7 days. A mere blip compared to the weeks of late nights that went into the animation, but a nice example of how when the studio is simmering nicely, everyone’s interests, hobbies and hunches tend to bubble to the surface and happily get put to use, all in the name of doing Good Stuff.

My piece on iPad magazines for Icon’s September 2010 issue.

Icon September Issue: piece on (near-)future of digital magazines by me

Outgoing editor Justin McGuirk asked me to write a little about the near-future of digital magazines for Icon #87, in which I talk a bit about challenges of the context they now find themselves in as a media form, as well as things we think we learned during the Mag+ project.

They’ve kindly allowed us to republish it here.

Since the launch of the Apple iPad six months ago, the world of digital magazines has seen fevered activity and hyperbolic punditry.

Big names such as Wired, Vanity Fair, Time and Popular Science (which our studio, BERG, helped to bring to the iPad with the Mag+ platform) have released editions into the App Store and made proclamations that it’s the future of magazines.

However, the very term “digital magazine” smacks of “horseless carriage”, Marshall McLuhan’s term for an in-between technology that is quickly obsolete. While nothing is certain about the future of any media, there is no doubt that the digital tablet form will grow in popularity, with the iPad being joined later this year by numerous other (possibly cheaper) competitors mainly powered by Google’s Android operating system.

So, what does the future really hold for digital magazines? We can identify some challenges and some opportunities. One certainty is that the manner by which we discover and purchase magazines will be given a hefty thump by the switch to digital. We are in a world of search rather than browse – which perhaps in turn leads to a change in the role of cover design, from “buy me, look what’s inside” to “you know what’s inside, but here is an incredible, evocative image”. In many ways it’s a return to the “classic” magazine covers of the 1950s and 60s, privileging the desirability of the object itself rather than shouting about every feature.

The bounded “object-ness” of the magazine embedded in the world of the endless, restless internet is seen by most as an anachronism, but it is also one of its greatest attributes. Research we received from our client Bonnier as part of the brief for the Mag+ concept indicated that people really were attached to the magazine as a form of media that creates a bubble of time to indulge in reading – and as a contrast to other, faster forms of media.

Meeting this need – while acknowledging the breadth, speed and interconnectedness of the internet – is a design condition that has not been satisfied fully by the current crop of digital magazine offerings, our efforts included. But stay tuned.

Another change in what we might term the “attention economics” of digital magazines is that their new neighbours in the app ecosystem are not other magazines, but games, spreadsheets, supermarket delivery apps, photography apps and so on. One device is now the conduit for vastly different activities and experiences.

And yet – at least in the current user-interface paradigm of Apple and Google – they all get pretty much the same real estate on screen. You have to decide between killing time with a magazine, playing Angry Birds or ordering your Ocado delivery based on the same visual evidence.

Perhaps future iterations of mobile and tablet operating systems will have a more media-led approach, as evidenced by the new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system (yes, that’s right, Microsoft has made a more media-centric user interface than Apple) – leading to magazine icons being bigger or more varied on the media surface.

Still, having such vastly different neighbours nestling so close creates a new context for an old form that has heavier production costs than its new competitors. A casual game developed by five people commands the same attention of a magazine produced by 25. That is remarkably imbalanced, but don’t think these attention economics will stand. The production and form of the magazine cannot fail to be affected. Internet-native publishers such as gadget expert Gizmodo, fashion maven The Sartorialist or critically minded gamer Rock, Paper, Shotgun are smaller and nimbler. And eventually they’ll be able to publish to the same canvas as the big boys and girls – and be able to charge for their expert curation and commentary.

Which brings us to some of what I’ve started to call “two-star problems”. In the consumocracy of the App Store, star ratings are all, and unfortunately most of the current magazine offerings have only two stars, compared to the four- or five-star world of games and other apps. Even Wired and, I’m sad to say, Popular Science garner a “must-try-harder” three stars. Consumer dismay at customer service, reliability, consistency, pricing and the overall offer seem to lead to these relatively low ratings. Consumers’ expectations are determined by the value they see offered by software producers compared to traditional media producers.

So where to head? What are the opportunities? I think they are supplementary to what magazine publishers see as their existing strengths in writing, curation and design. They will emerge from their less glamorous but equally deep knowledge of subscriptions, service and “belonging”.

Take the best of what you understand of your readership and the decade or so that many magazines have spent on the internet and look to exploit the social technologies of the web, rather than run to present your content as an isolated recapitulation of a mid-1990s CD-ROM.

Create hybrids and experiment – not with the empty (and costly) spectacle of embedding jarring 3D and video, but with data, visualisation, sociality, location-based services, semantic technologies.

There’s no reason that the feel of a well-designed, valuable, curated object shouldn’t be complemented when placed properly in the roaring, sparkling stream of the internet. And experiment not just with editorial content, but also with advertising. I’d rather have a live link to the latest Amazon price for a camera than a spinning 3D video of it.

Tablets promise to be transformative – in their context of use and how well they can display content – but they do not wish away the disruptive challenge (and opportunity) the internet presents to magazine publishers.

This is the beginning of a tumultuously exciting time for magazines and those who produce them – not an end to the “free-for-all” of the web as many would love to believe. More experimentation, not less, is what’s called for. As a reader and a designer, I’m looking forward to that.

The surprisingness of what we say about ourselves

Google Scribe is autocomplete meets word processing. It looks at everything you’ve typed so far, and predicts what you’re going to say next. For example, Scribe believes I am now about to write: they are not the only one who can not afford to pay for the cost of the project is to develop a new generation of protein database.

I feel like I’m connected to the spirit world, except that the spirit world is an amalgam of a billion Internet users and Google’s massive server farm.

What I like about Scribe is that you can see how surprising each word is. If Google can’t predict what you’re about to say, what you’re saying is truly novel.

So:

At the bottom of every page on this website, there’s a little statement about ourselves: BERG is a design consultancy, working hands-on with companies to research and develop their technologies and strategy, primarily by finding opportunities in networks and physical things.

I made a chart of word-by-word surprisingness: given the statement so far, could Scribe predict what would come next?

Here are the results:

Google Scribe surprisingness of BERG's studio description

I learn that about half of the statement is exactly what Google’s spirit world expects, which goes to show it could be more concise and higher signal-to-noise.

Use this technique to avoid redundancy in speech or writing.

Matt Webb speaking at The Do Lectures, September 16th, Cardigan, Wales

Matt’s going to be giving a talk on “Old Sci-Fi & Little Robots” at this year’s Do Lectures, in a tent in West Wales!

Having been to a previous Do, I’m very jealous. It’s a fantastic event, and all the videos from past Do Lectures are online – it’s a bit like TED but with fewer presidents or rockstars and more mud…

Ludichocolate

I’m very enamoured of Cadbury’s “Spots Vs Stripes” chocolate bars.

Spots Vs Stripes

There’s all sorts of adverts around London, covering every bus-stop, little loops on urban-screens, giving them a big push – and a fancy website full of the latest social-casual-game-flash-o-rama. But, the purity and brilliance of the chocolate bar itself is what really stands out.

You unwrap it (carefully… this was a bit of a point-of-failure with my first one…) and you discover three chunks of chocolate: one with spots on it, one with stripes on – and one labelled ‘winner’.

Spots Vs Stripes

Inside the wrapper is a challenge – to share with a friend – each of you adopting the side of spots or stripes. The winner, naturally gets the ‘winner’ chunk at the end.

Brilliant.

To see play and small-group-sharing designed into something everyday like this is inspirational. Amusingly, Cadburys appear to have been awarded the role of ‘Official Treat Provider’ by the London 2010 Olympics.

Spots Vs Stripes

The treat of Spots Vs Stripes is the play it affords, as much as the chocolate…

B.A.S.A.A.P.

Design principle #1

The above is a post-it note, which as I recall is from a workshop at IDEO Palo Alto I attended while I was at Nokia.

And, as I recall, it was probably either Charlie Schick or Charles Warren who scribbled this down and stuck it on the wall as I was talking about what was a recurring theme for me back then.

Recently I’ve been thinking about it again.

B.A.S.A.A.P. is short for Be As Smart As A Puppy, which is my short-hand for a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about… Ooh… Since 2002 or so I think, and a conversation in a california car-park with Matt Webb.

It was my term for a bunch of things that encompass some 3rd rail issues for UI designers like proactive personalisation and interaction, examined in the work of Byron and Nass, exemplified by (and forever-after-vilified-as) Microsoft’s Bob and Clippy (RIP). A bunch of things about bots and daemons, conversational interface.

And lately, a bunch of things about machine learning – and for want of a better term, consumer-grade artificial intelligence.

BASAAP is my way of thinking about avoiding the ‘uncanny valley‘ in such things.

Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies.

Cut forward a few years.

At Dopplr, Tom Insam and Matt B. used to astonish me with links and chat about where the leading-edge of hackable, commonly-employable machine learning was heading.

Startups like songkick and last.fm amongst others were full of smart cookies making use of machine learning, data-mining and a bunch of other techniques I’m not smart enough to remember (let-alone reference), to create reactive, anticipatory systems from large amounts of data in a certain domain.

Now, machine-learning is superhot.

The web has become a web-of-data, data-mining technology is becoming a common component of services, and processing power on tap in the cloud means that experimentation is cheap. The amount of data available makes things possible that were impossible a few years ago.

I was chatting with Matt B. again this weekend about writing this post, and he told me that the algorithms involved are old. It’s just that the data and the processing power is there now to actually get to results. Google’s Peter Norvig has been quoted as saying “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.“.

Things like Hunch are making an impression in the mainstream. Google Priority Inbox, launched recently, make the utility of such approaches clear.

BASAAP services are here.

BASAAP things are on the horizon.

As Mike Kuniavsky has pointed out – we are past the point of “Peak Mhz”:

driving ubiquitous computing, as their chips become more efficient, smaller and cheaper, thus making them increasingly easier to include into everyday objects.

This is ApriPoco by Toshiba. It’s a household robot.

It works by picking up signals from standard remote controls and asks you what you are doing, to which you are supposed to reply in a clear voice. Eventually it will know how to turn on your television, switch to a specific channel, or play a DVD simply by being told. This system solves the problem that conventional speech recognition technology has with some accents or words, since it is trained by each individual user. It can send signals from IR transmitters in its arms, and has cameras in its head with which it can identify specific users.

Not perhaps the most pressing need that you have in your house, but interesting none-the-less.

Imagine this not as a device, but as an actor in your home.

The face-recognition is particularly interesting.

My £100 camera has a ‘smile-detection’ mode, which is becoming common. It can also recognise more faces that a 6-month old human child. Imagine this then, mixed with ApriPoco, registering and remembering smiles and laughter.

Go further, plug it into the internet. Into big data.

As Tom suggested on our studio mailing list: recognising background chatter of people not paying attention. Plugged into something like Shownar, constantly updating the data of what people are paying attention to, and feeding back suggestions of surprising and interesting things to watch.

Imagine a household of hunchbots.

Each of them working across a little domain within your home. Each building up tiny caches of emotional intelligence about you, cross-referencing them with machine learning across big data from the internet. They would make small choices autonomously around you, for you, with you – and do it well. Surprisingly well. Endearingly well.

They would be as smart as puppies.

Hunch-Puppies…?

Ahem.

Of course, there’s the other side of domesticated intelligences.

Matt W.’s been tracking the bleed of AI into the Argos catalogue, particularly the toy pages for some time.

They do their little swarming thing and have these incredibly obscure interactions

The above photo of toys from Argos he took was given the title: “They do their little swarming thing and have these incredibly obscure interactions”

That might be part of the near-future: being surrounded by things that are helping us, that we struggle to build a model of how they are doing it in our minds. That we can’t directly map to our own behaviour. A demon-haunted world. This is not so far from most people’s experience of computers (and we’re back to Byron and Nass) but we’re talking about things that change their behaviour based on their environment and their interactions with us, and that have a certain mobility and agency in our world.

I’m reminded of the work of Rodney Brooks and the BEAM approach to robotics, although hopefully more AIBO than Runaways.

Again, staying on the puppy side of the uncanny valley is a design strategy here – as is the guidance within Adam Greenfield’s “Everyware”: how to think of design for ubiquitous systems that behave as sensing, learning actors in contexts beyond the screen.

Adam’s book is written as a series of theses (to be nailed to the door of a corporation or two?), and thinking of his “Thesis #37″ in connection with BASAAP intelligences in the home of the near-future amuses me in this context:

“Everyday life presents designers of everyware with a particularly difficult case because so very much about it is tacit, unspoken, or defined with insufficient precision.”

This cuts both ways in a near-future world of domesticated intelligences, and that might be no bad thing. Think of the intuitions and patterns – the state machine – your pets build up of you, and vice-versa. You don’t understand pets as tools, even if they perform ‘job-like’ roles. They don’t really know what we are.

We’ll never really understand what we look like from the other side of the Uncanny Valley.

Mechanical Dog Four-Leg Walking Type

What is this going to feel like?

Non-human actors in our home, that we’ve selected personally and culturally. Designed and constructed but not finished. Learning and bonding. That intelligence can look as alien as staring into the eye of a bird (ever done that? Brrr.) or as warm as looking into the face of a puppy. New nature.

What is that going to feel like?

We’ll know very soon.

Patina

leicam4.jpg

I saw this picture via The Online Photographer a few days ago. It’s a Leica M4, being sold second-hand right now on eBay, for the premium prices such cameras command.

I loved the wear at the edges, where the black paint has been worn away to reveal the brass underneath. It’s not broken; it hasn’t been mistreated. It’s just been well-used in its 35-year-odd lifespan.

And, in some ways, it’s more attractive for its wear. This isn’t a camera that’s been locked away in its packaging by an over-protective collector; it’s been well-used for its intended purpose. Part of the attraction to such an object isn’t just the aesthetic quality of its patina: there’s also something attractive about the action that wear represents. As a photographer, I’m attracted to this wear because in some ways, it represents the act of photography.

I’m not sure I’m explaining this well. Here’s another example.

prayer-feet.jpg

I was looking through my links for other articles about wear and patina, and I found this Reuters photograph from last year. It’s of the floor of a Tibetan monastery, where, over twenty years of daily prayer, Hua Chi has worn his own footprints into the floor.

He has knelt in prayer so many times that his footprints remain deeply, perfectly ingrained on the temple’s wooden floor.

Every day before sunrise, he arrives at the temple steps, places his feet in his footprints and bends down to pray a few thousand times before walking around the temple.

The footprints are three centimeters (1.2 inches) deep where the balls of his feet have pressed into the wood.

1.2 inches of prayer. There’s something beautiful about the smooth imprints of a human foot worn into wood. But the wear itself also comes to symbolise the action that led to it: in this case, Hua Chi’s prayers.

Patina is the effect of actions made solid; photography into worn paint, prayer into a worn floor. It is verbing turned into a noun.

Shared Lives

Nouns and verbs. That reminded me of this post about “The Life Of Products” by Matt W, from nearly four years ago. Matt wrote:

Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it.

Products can be verbs instead, things which are happening, that we live alongside. We cross paths with our products when we first spy them across a crowded shop floor, or unbox them, or show a friend how to do something with them. We inhabit our world of activities and social groups together… a product designed with this in mind can look very different.

Wear is, of course, both a noun and a verb. It’s the verb that inevitably happens through use, and it’s the noun that the verb leaves behind. Patina is the history of a product written into its skin.

And, of course, it takes time for wear to occur. Objects start their lives pure, unworn, ready to be both used and shaped by that use. In Products are People Too, Matt’s 2007 talk from Reboot 9, he said:

Products exist over time. We meet them, we hang out with them, we live life together.

Patina is a sign of a life shared.

tarnished-laptop.jpg

Here’s a life I’ve shared.

This is my three-and-a-half year old laptop. It’s my second aluminium Mac, and, just as with my previous laptop, the surface has tarnished right underneath where my palms rest. It’s not a fault – that black speckling is just what happens when perispiration meets aluminum. It’s not as beautiful as the Leica, or the monastery floor – but it’s not as ugly as cracked and chipped plastic.

I think that might be one reason I’ve kept it quite so long: the material and form of the exterior have encouraged me to hold onto the laptop. Certainly much longer than if it had been poorly constructed, becoming damaged rather than worn.

In his talk at Frontiers of Interaction in 2009, Matt J showed this photograph of Howies’ “Hand-Me-Down jacket”.

It’s a jacket that’s designed to last. Howies ensure they have the materials to repair it, encouraging the owner to mend the jacket rather than throw it out. Inside the jacket is the label above: name tags to last several generations, indicating periods of ownership.

The label is surprising because it serves as a reminder that the product will last. The encouragement to pass something on, and to measure ownership in years, acts as a reminder that there’s no reason to throw the jacket out.

It seems absurd to have to be reminded of that.

But: how many essentially functional pieces of clothing have you or I thrown out? How many items that could be repaired have ended up in the bin? How many objects have never had the time to acquire a patina – thrown out before their time was truly up?

It’s sad that we have to be reminded that objects can last. I cannot deny that there’s a role for inexpensive, cheaply-manufactured, and somewhat disposable products – but they shouldn’t condition us into thinking that’s how all products are.

Designing things that want to be kept

I read an article – which, alas, I can’t find a link to at the moment – about the disposal and lifespan of mobile phones in the USA. The most shocking item in it was that, when questioned as to the lifespan of a mobile phone, most Americans responded with “about 24 months”. A mobile phone may not last like a Leica or a Stradivarius… but it’ll last a good bit longer than two years before it’s beyond use.

24 months was, of course, the length of common cellphone contracts. And so, as contracts expired, and network providers told their customers they were eligible for a new phone, they began to assume there had to be something wrong with the old phone. And it would go in the bin.

When the patina an object gains is attractive, it acts as an encouragement to keep it. Good jeans really come into their own as they wear down and develop creases, rips, rough patches. It’s why my favourite pair say something along the lines of “wash me as little as possible!” inside.

It’s important to note: the wear I’m discussing isn’t related to things breaking. Things break because they’re worn out, or poorly designed, or used inappropriately. Patina is that wear which comes from entirely “correct” usage of a product. That usage might be intense – a professional guitarist’s instrument will acquire patina far faster than mine will – but it is, nontheless, the intended usage of the object.

I’m not sure patina can be designed. After all, it’s a product of the relationship between product and owner.

The form it takes can be shaped – by the materials used in a product, by the nature and frequency of operations that an owner might perform. I suppose that a product can be designed to age gracefully, to wear attractively; it’s just the exact nature of that wear that’s out of a designer’s hands.

In considering the patina a product might develop, you of course have to ask a series of interesting questions: about longevity, about sustainability, about materials, about manufacturing. Going beyond “peak X” and towards “resilient X”, as Matt J said. But I think the most interesting questions – at the very heart of that consideration – are emotional ones. “What if someone adores your product? What if someone really does want to make a product a part of their life? What will your product look like when it’s been worn into the ground by virtue of its own success?

I don’t think there are single answers to those questions, but they’re great questions to have to consider.

(One answer, which leaps to mind for me, can be found in The Velveteen Rabbit – one of those children’s books that manages to be, of course, both profoundly sad and yet uplifting with it. The toy rabbit in question discovers that if his owner loves him enough, he becomes real. Products are people, too, right there in 1920s children’s books).

jim-marshall-m4.jpg

Another Leica M4 to end with: this one belonging to the photographer Jim Marshall, noted for his music photography since the 60s. (If you don’t know the name, you’ll almost certainly know his work).

Marshall made so many striking images with this camera and others like it, and, in that making, gave it its unique patina. It’s a camera as rock’n’roll as the subjects it shot. Somewhere in that wear – buried in the scuff-marks, the scratches, the flaked paint – are Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: the “life lived together” of Marshall and his camera.

Are you an iOS developer in London?

There’s no particular project quite yet, but we’re talking with a number of people about iPhone and iPad work. More than we can handle with our usual crew if it all comes in.

So I want to expand our iOS developers network!

If you develop for iPhone or iPad, and would be interested in working with BERG on short or longer contracts, please do get in touch to introduce yourself, and we’ll keep your details on file. London-or-nearby folks only… we’re a tight-knit studio, and we really like it when people working together are sitting in the same room.

Email Nick at nl at berglondon dot com and please include your CV, a list of apps in the App Store and what you did on them (bonus points if you were the sole developer), and the name of the coolest app installed on your iPhone. (My current favourites are calvetica and Little Uzu.)

And we’ll keep you in mind whenever something comes up!

Recruiters: we’re happy to hear from you, but please ensure your candidates would be cool with contract work, and that you include their answers to the extra questions above. Thanks.

Week 272

Studio leylines

One of the things that was easier, writing these notes about the studio back in 2009, was that the room was smaller. There’s something about stewing in each other’s pheromones. You share moods. If the week was tiring, you were all tired. If you had the sherbet fizz of excitement in your belly, you knew that was the collective unconscious of the studio at large.

In August 2010, we’re too big for that. We’re not big by any means! Eight people, a network of experts, and just taken on a ninth – Alex Jarvis is joining us in October! – but big enough for different moods and senses to sit together in the same space.

When three people are buzzing, collectively discovering a new filming technique, you can see the static sparks fly between them and the energy is infectious. Conversely, a feeling of difficulty or defeat when a particular project is crunching can rise like some deep magma upswell and roll around the studio almost tidally before it’s recognised, digested and massaged out.

Mood transmission follows lines of physical proximity, conversations, and collaboration.

Part of the job of gardening a studio – a community of people – is to encourage the right transmissions and tides. By weaving together sources of energy, in reinforcing loops, a collective exuberance may take place.

Exuberance is a period in the development of the brain that lasts until 10 years of age. It is an over-production of connections between neurons, a decade-long acid trip seeing the secret alignments of the universe. During your teenage years, your brain sculpts itself into a mirror of the reality it has chosen to perceive, pruning away possible worlds.

Exuberance is a state only entered into with care. It’s frazzling. We maybe don’t have to use it right now.

We have a lot on at the moment: internal R&D, film-making, design and communications work, ops and infrastructure, the sales pipeline… projects are giant invisible bears that roam around the studio tickling ribs and cracking heads. Recently projects have been colliding, not in a way where that has been affecting the work, but in odd second-order ways: people have to task-switch too much; tasks appear suddenly when they’re urgent instead of being apprehended; the gardening of the studio becomes automatic and unthinking. That needs to be looked at.

When I write these notes, I’m aware that I’m now just one perspective. When I look around, easiness and effort sit side-by-side. This studio has many voices.

What matters now are how different characters refract light differently as illumination moves between them, and how the interference patterns of the waves and rhythms of different projects interacting can be either choppy or smooth. Complexity. I have no ways to understand this. My brain’s picture of reality isn’t yet sculpted like this.

So I’m thinking about ways to manage a small big room instead of a big small room.

All of which feels like growing up a bit.

Autopoiesis is a process whereby a system produces its own organization and maintains and constitutes itself in a space. E.g., a biological cell, a living organism and to some extend a corporation and a society as a whole.

The studio we’re creating together is not only a garden that grows culture, but at the same time garden capable of self-gardening. We sometimes overlook this capacity in humans I think, because of the organ focus we have on the body. There is an organ for thinking. There is an organ for cleaning the blood. There is an organ for digesting the world into particles. These are clearly demarcated. There is also an organ for self-growth, but it isn’t demarcated in the same way. It is distributed into the molecules of every cell in the body. It exists on the organisational plane. So the organs of regulated self-creation in our studio will be psychic and structural, but they have existence none-the-less. I want to be able to spend more time looking for and looking after this organ.

For some reason today, I’m preoccupied with the leylines and gravities and internal terrain of the studio.

12 months

I monitor three budgets: attention; cash; risk. All are flows to be directed. Attention: how many minutes do we have as a studio, any how many can be spent in experimental or undirected ways? Cash: how can cash-flow be managed to build up working capital to invest, versus spend freely to buy more attention to spend? Risk: how tolerant are the attention and cash budgets to delay or failure?

We can direct some flow into the infrastructure of the studio machine: our calcified processes, libraries and knowledge that operate automatically, and give our future attention and cash greater leverage.

In the last 12 months, we’ve consulted on design strategy with Nokia, the BBC, Sitra, Bonnier, Layar, BILD and Absolut. We’ve written articles in Icon and Edge, had press in Wired and Creative Review. We’ve made a movie about RFID, re-invented the magazine with Mag+ — and created a digital magazine publishing platform that excited Apple. We’ve released Michel Thomas, Schooloscope, and BBC Dimensions. We’ve moved premises, built a team, and have significant internal and client projects well underway.

From this, we’re building decent leverage of our activity. The conversations we have with people now are less like client/supplier interactions, and more like figuring out how to start relationships. Good.

Behind the mountains there are mountains, so enjoy the climb. It’s a good feeling to look at the mountain-tops and, even in a little way, know we have room to choose the path.

BERG

And of course, on 19 August last year, we launched as BERG.

A beautiful, difficult, inventive, frazzling, exuberant, rewarding, wonderful garden.

One year!

Introducing BBC Dimensions

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.

BBC History Workshop, July 2009

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

BBC Dimensions original sketch

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.

BBC - Dimensions
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.
BBC - Dimensions - Space

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…

BBC - Dimensions - The Apollo 11 Moonwalks

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

BBC - Dimensions - If the Apollo 11 Moonwalks happened around BERG's studio!

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.

BBC - Dimensions - Creating a walkable route of the Apollo 11 Moonwalks

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…

BBC - Dimensions - Creating a walkable route of the Apollo 11 Moonwalks

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

BBC - Dimensions - Creating a walkable route of the Apollo 11 Moonwalks

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

Friday links

More chaff and some wheat from our studio mailing list. Tom’s away on holiday in welsh Wales, so this maybe a little more haphazard than his usual excellent curation.

We found out from David Weinburger that “The ‘points’ by which we measure fonts were adopted in the 18th century. They are 144th of the length of the foot of the king of France at that time.” – which prompted the response in the studio of “Hang on, doesn’t that mean the French king had feet only 2 inches long? Maybe he was a baby.”

The awesome Stamen‘s new prettymaps.stamen.com by the awesome Aaron Straup-Cope is pretty awesome.
prettymaps, London

Nick introduced us to a couple of iPhone games which Timo immediately got addicted to.

A gallery of spacesuit-helmet reflections

Nick sent the studio this link to the plans that Audi have to turn their cars into mobile wifi hotspots. Maybe he’s dropping hints for a corporate car. Conversely, we’re wondering if we can do anything in the parking spots outside the studio for Park(ing) Day which is just 6 weeks away.

Here’s Dan Hill writing about what Arup Australia did for Park(ing) Day back in 2008.

arup park

Not sure we’ll be able to get a chicken in ours.

Talking of cities – I’ve been loving Tim Carmody of BERG-favourites Snarkmarket standing in for Jason at Kottke.org. His post on “Cities as Hypertext” is worth a read.

“whenever I read anything about the web rewiring our brains, foretelling immanent disaster, I’ve always thought, geez, people — we live in cities! Our species has evolved to survive in every climate and environment on dry land. Our brains can handle it!

Yep.

Greg Allen on the design of the proposed 1964 Westinghouse World’s Fair Pavilion, the comedy-subtitling of which I have been forbidden from using on this blog by my more mature colleagues.

Scott Berkun’s lessons from Wave and Kin include these words to live by:

Google Wave was weird, but cheap. Compared to Kin, which likely involved dozens of people and man-months, Wave was likely done by a small team of people. That was their biggest cost! If you’re going to have failures, even visible ones, better cheap and small, that expensive and large.

And finally…

Robotwatch! Cam pointed us to the robot that is going to explore the interior of the Pyramids, however exploration is nowhere to be found on the robot version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs…

Hierarchy of Robot Needs

Have a lovely weekend, and be nice to robots when you meet them.

AT-AT day afternoon from Patrick Boivin on Vimeo.

BERG in Icon September issue

Icon September Issue: piece on (near-)future of digital magazines by me
Outgoing editor Justin McGuirk asked me to write a little about the near-future of digital magazines for Icon #87, in which I talk a bit about challenges of the context they now find themselves in as a media form, as well as things we think we learned during the Mag+ project.

In other prognostication news, both Tom and myself have written “five things we are thinking about”, and friend-of-BERG Dan Hon is collecting a lot more of them here.

Friday Links: rolling, mapping, driving, products.

This week’s been buzzing and busy – everybody’s back in the studio after a week of holidays, festivals, and trips to India. That means the studio mailing list has been buzzing again, and so it’s time to take the cream of the links and get them onto the blog.

Matt J found Gearbox, a company making “smart toys” to pair with your smartphone. Their first toy is a ball that rolls the direction you tilt your phone in. They explain:

We are then leveraging the connectivity and computing power of the phone to create a fully interactive experience for the user. Our first app for the ball is Sumo. I throw my ball on a table, you throws yours on the table and then we can try and sumo each others ball off the table. However, while our physical balls are moving there is also an onscreen component with online stats, profiles, damage, powerups and other aspects of gameplay that aren’t possible with a regular remote control toy. For instance, when the balls collide they can sustain “damage” and roll slower or I could get a powerup to reverse your controls for a few seconds.

Aside from the games we produce we are also opening up the APIs for the ball so any app developer with no hardware knowledge can build their own games or applications and bring them to the real world.

Smashing; it’s the open-API that really sets these toys apart from something more constrained, like Sony’s Rolly. And this is only their first product!

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Joey Roth’s ‘Charlatan / Martyr / Huslter‘ poster has been doing the rounds, recently, and with good reason – it’s lovely. But equally lovely is the attention to detail on the webpage selling it. Matt W sent it to our internal list, commenting on how the product page “communicates desire” – the closeups of the type and paper stock, the shot (reproduced above) of copies being stacked. It reinforces that it’s not just an EPS on a piece of paper; it’s a real product, and Roth’s website makes you want it.

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Damon Zucconi’s Fata Morgana is, essentially, Google Maps without the Maps: roads, land, and water are all stripped away leaving just place names and street names. Even zoomed in, as above, the effect persists. Maps made just of names and streets aren’t a new thing – but there’s a strange juxtaposition in seeing them in slippy, interactive javascript form.

Here’s a short demonstration of an official version of The Settlers of Catan for Microsoft’s Surface. It’s a little underwhelming – very literal in some of its metaphors. That said, I loved the interaction between physical tokens and the board – in particular, the way the “visor” has an X-ray effect on cards underneath it. By making it a very realistic – and carefully masked – X-ray effect, the metaphor actually holds up better. It’s very much an understanding of the Surface as a Magic Table rather than a big window.

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And finally – this is Racer. An old arcade cabinet; a remote control car on a small circuit; a remote camera, and timing circuitry. Put them together and you’ve got this charming and effective game. A tiny, remote-control version of C’était un Rendez-vous, if you like. This video of it in action is great – alas, I couldn’t embed it, so I hope the link suffices.

Wonderlab

I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in the Wonderlab a few weeks ago. The official site described it like so:

[An event that brings] together some of the smartest creatives from the digital, gaming, theatre and performance fields, to spend three days exploring where digital tools and the ethos of play will take us next.

Ever since I got back from it, though I’ve mainly been asked what the Lab actually was.

Now that I’ve decompressed from the intensity of those three days, it’s easier to both write about the event itself, and answer that question. The short video above may provide some hints, but might also just look like a bunch of grownups talking and playing games. It deserves a more detailed explanation.

The Lab was a small event, with 10 invited participants from a variety of backgrounds – performers, artists, designers, technical types. We all were, however, connected by our interest in play or games. Given the tiny size, and that it was invite-only, it doesn’t feel fair to label it as a conference. And though there was a great deal of freedom in our discussions and sessions over the three days, the Lab differed from a conference in that a definite outcome was required: as a group, we had to present “our findings” – whatever they’d turn out to be – in the format of a card game.

You could have called it a three-day game-design workshop, except it’s not entirely fair to call it a workshop, either: the format of our conclusion may have been dictated, but what conclusion we were aiming for was not clear to begin with. We had a trajectory, the event shaped by tiny, five-minute talks from each of the participants and a range of guest speakers, all talking about something that “blew their mind”, and leading into subsequent discussion. We had a few sessions where we raised topics we felt relevant to the discussion of play and games, and as the Lab went on, definite themes emerged. And then, we would have to stop talking, and make things – tiny, prototype games to prove a point; collaborative rulsets in a session of Nomic; slowly putting what we “thought” and “believed” into practice. And then, from a practical session, back to discussion and analysis.

The term “Lab” eventually proved to be the most succinct explanation of affairs. It was a space that encouraged both exploration and experimentation, not favouring one of the other, and definitely emphasising the value of thinking through making. By the end of the three days, we’d designed about two-and-a-half games each, and explored countless others. Nothing focuses the mind like having to put your discoveries and beliefs into physical, playable form.

The Lab fostered a growing literacy of games, considering “literacy” as Alan Kay did – the ability to read and write in a given medium. Early on, we played a simple parlour game called Chairs: the goal being to stop a slowly walking player from sitting down on the last available chair by moving between chairs yourselves. It’s a simple game, and yet as a group, we were terrible at it. But after the initial burst of hilarity, we took it apart: what’s going on, why are we failing, what are the simple guidelines to ensure success. We were still lousy with our newly considered perspective – and I would love to build an AI simulation just to prove how dumb you can play to win the game – but we were beginning to understand our lousiness. And thus the Lab continued: talks, discussions, or games would be presented, taken apart, put back together. I valued being asked to prove or embody a belief; the test was not to succeed, but merely to try.

What did I actually get out of it that I can explain in a concrete sense?

One overriding theme was the ethics of game-design. It’s a huge topic, especially in this post-Jesse-Schell universe, and we explored it very thoroughly in some of the sessions. By the end, we’d designed both a game you could only lose, and a game where everybody would win. We created rules that were, in the real world, entirely unethical, but within the closed system of the game we were playing not only ethical but effectively irrelevant. We considered ethics of structured, rule-based play – games themselves – versus the ongoing act of unstructured play.

For someone so interested in games as systemic media (to quote Eric Zimmerman), I was surprised by how enamoured I became in the performative aspects of games. That was no doubt in part down to the insight brought to our sessions by the numerous particiapnts with performance backgrounds. In my notes, I wrote

Games don’t have to be performance-based, but games that don’t afford performance are weaker for it

This is, I guess, what Matt J has previously described as toyetics – it’s the fun you can have with a system, the ways it affords non-structured play, the ways it encourages you to interact with other people in a social capacity. It’s the fun you can have just playing. Games aren’t just rules – they’re rules you can play with, and the best games often afford the best play.

I also finally became convinced of the value of MDA [pdf] as a framework for understanding games; previously, it had never really clicked with me. In particular, I came to appreciate the value of rules and Mechanics emerging from Dynamics – often in the form of exploration or improvisation. If the act of play isn’t fun, or challenging, or interesting, why should a game that demands non-fun actions be any good at all? Guest speaker Tassos Stevens put this much better than I currently can in his wonderful short talk, Make Believe:

Game arises from play. A ruleset crystallises a set of actions distilled from an experience of play. That crystal can be popped in your pocket to be played with again and again, any time, any place, with anyone entranced by its sparkle. It gets chipped and scratched, then rubbed and polished… the very best thing about it is that if we want to, we can smash it up and grind it into paste to make believe anew.

Make Believe, by Jimmy Stewart (by Tassos Stevens).

What we were doing at the lab was learning how to make games arise.

The game we eventually presented, to a small invited audience, was Couple Up: a site-specific parlour-game, based on getting the guests invited at the final session from one room (where they were socialising) to another (where there was booze). It used cards as a social token, but the game was played in conversations between players. From the video above, it might seem slight, and whimsical; it’s certainly a little bit broken, and needs some revisions. But at it’s core are a few things we wanted to explore: designing ethical games; designing games that forced you to learn to “read” them; games that afford performance; games that exploit hidden knowledge (both on the part of the players and game-makers. That explorations happened not only in the making, but also in watching our guests play the game, and subsequently discuss it with us afterwards.

The standard of discussion and quality of the participants and speakers throughout the lab was fantastic. The fact we were reigned-in, asked to stop taking and start explaining ourselves through making, was an important challenge, and a visible reminder of the value of thinking through making. And, of course, though our subject matter was play through the lens of games of all forms, I can already see the ways many of the lessons I learned apply to my work in design.

Some of the output of the Lab was very immediate – new colleagues, new ideas to take away. Some of it is lodged into my brain, not taking form right now, but burning away, and will no doubt nag me for the rest of the year. It acted like so many of my favourite conferences – not a reminder of things that I’ve failed to do in my work, or things that have to change immediately, but things to be thinking about in the long term, and to be incorporated into future output. Not One Big Idea, but a hundred ideas, percolating away, growing and mutating until they’re ready to use. I’ll be making use of what I learned in so many projects, and so much work, from here on out.

As such: it was a privilege to take part; thanks to Margaret, Miranda, Alex, and everyone at Hide & Seek who organised the event, not to mention LIFT and the Jerwood Foundation for their support – and, most of all, to the other participants, who all brought something wonderful to the mix.

(You can see all the participants’ short talks, and a succession of more general videos, at the Wonderlab 2010 Youtube channel. My own five-minute talk, on the German boardgame Waldschattenspiel, is here)

Friday Links: nostalgic cameras, pixels, materials, and impulscriptions

holga-d.jpg

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.”

Clearing out the link-bucket: generative text, magic tables, Moscow subway map

Nick found this lovely work from Karsten “Toxi” Schmidt: a cover for Print magazine. The final piece of work – a 3D print-out of generated text – is lovely; just as beautiful, however, are all the steps in the process, “growing” type through reaction diffusion. The video above is one such illustration, but the whole write-up is fascinating, and definitely worth your time.

Matt J’s post a few days ago about ‘magic tables reminded me of a recent post by Jason McIntosh over at The Gameshelf, comparing the iPad to cocktail arcade cabinets. You know: those cabinets with the screen in the table, designed to be sat around, a part of a conversation rather than a focused activity. Like the in picture above. McIntosh makes some strong points, most notably:

Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture.

Presence as part of a medium – fantastic.

I enjoyed this gigantic, Lego-Mindstorms-powered chess set. Not as much for the technological “wow” factor as the little details: the Knights’ legs pawing at the air as they move, and, best of all, the way the pieces politely get out of each others’ way as they move about. Machines embody politeness in a most curious way.

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Art Lebedev have redesigned the Moscow Metro map. Never an easy task, subway mapping, but the result is striking. I’m not sure how much better or worse it is than the previous map: I’m not a Moscow local. But it’s clear from the fascinating “process” page just how much care and attention went into the design. The inner ring is clearly iconic, but their more eccentric representations are perhaps the most interesting – the topographic versions in particular.

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And, finally, how’s this for proper augmented-reality: NYC The Blog report that stencilled compass roses are appearing spray-painted outside subway exists, to help travellers’ get their bearings. Brilliant, and not a screen held at head-height in sight.

Magic tables, not magic windows

A while back, in 2007, I wrote about ‘a lost future’ of touch technology, and the rise of a world full of mobile glowing attention-wells.

“…it’s likely that we’re locked into pursuing very conscious, very gorgeous, deliberate touch interfaces – touch-as-manipulate-objects-on-screen rather than touch-as-manipulate-objects-in-the-world for now.”

It does look very much like we’re living in that world now – where our focus is elsewhere than our immediate surroundings – mainly residing through our fingers, in our tiny, beautiful screens.

Andrew Blum writes about this, amongst other things, in his excellent piece “Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change”:

Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global.

Recently, of course, our glowing attention wells have become larger.

We’ve been designing, developing, using and living with iPads in the studio for a while now, and undoubtedly they are fine products despite their drawbacks – but it wasn’t until our friend Tom Coates introduced me to a game called Marble Mixer that I thought they were anything other than the inevitable scaling of an internet-connected screen, and the much-mooted emergence of a tablet form-factor.

It led me to think they might be much more disruptive as magic tables than magic windows.

Marble Mixer is a simple game, well-executed. Where it sings is when you invite friends to play with you.

Each of you occupy a corner of the device, and attempts to flick marbles into the goal-mouth against the clock – dislodging the other’s marbles.

Beautiful. Simple. But also – amazing and transformative!

We’re all playing with a magic surface!

When we’re not concentrating on our marbles, we’re looking each other in the eye – chuckling, tutting and cursing our aim – and each other.

There’s no screen between us, there’s a magic table making us laugh. It’s probably my favourite app to show off the iPad – including the ones we’ve designed!

It shows that the iPad can be a media surface to share, rather than a proscenium to consume through alone.

Russell Davies pointed this out back in February (before we’d even touched one) saying:

[GoGos]’d be the perfect counters for a board game that uses the iPad as the board. They’d look gorgeous sitting on there. We’d need to work out how to make the iPad think they were fingers – maybe some sort of electrostatic sausage skin – and to remember which was which.

gogos on an iphone

Inspired by Marble Mixer, and Russell’s writings – I decided to do a spot of rapid prototyping of a ‘peripheral’ for magic table games that calls out the shared-surface…

Magic table games

It’s a screen – but not a glowing one! Just a simple bit of foamboard cut so it obscures your fellow player’s share of the game board, for games like Battleships, or in this case – a mocked-up guessing-game based on your flickr contacts…

Magic table games

You’d have a few guesses to narrow it down… Are they male, do they have a beard etc…

Magic table games

Fun for all the family!

Anyway – as you can see – this is not so serious a prototype, but I can imagine some form of capactive treatment to the bottom edge of the screen, perhaps varying the amount of secret territory each player revealed to each other, or capacitive counters as Russell suggests.

Aside from games though – the pattern of a portable shared media surface is surely worth pursuing.

As Paul Dourish put it in his book “Where the action is” – the goal would be

“interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.”

Designing media and services for “little-ass” rather than “big-ass” magic tables might propel us into a future not so removed from the one I thought we might have lost…

Friday Links: Lego Printer, Phonetikana, Napkin Maps

It’s a hot afternoon in the studio, and the weekend is just around the corner; time to wrap up the week with a selection of links from around the studio.

So good it appeared on the studio mailing list twice: a printer made out of Lego and a felt pen. Jack really liked the little workmen all over it: working hard to make your document.

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From the Information Aesthetics blog comes news of Bing’s Destination Maps. Automatic rendering of sketchy, vague maps – almost pirate maps – based on an address and an area to focus on. The end results are entertaiing, but also surprisingly useful: reducing the complexity of traditional digital maps down to the level most people require.

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Some lovely graphic design linked over on Monoscope: these beautiful covers of Pan Am City Guides, designed by George Tscherny in the 1970s.

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From the esoteric But Does It Float, a series of beautiful old Scientific American covers.

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Via Phil Gyford comes Johnson Banks’ Phonetikana: a typeface that adds pronunciation guidelines into the strokes of katakana, helping make the phonetic script more approachable to foreigners.

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And finally, with the World Cup soon upon us, something football related. James Governor sent us a link to these lovely shirts for the Dutch football supporters organisation. The picture explains everything; delightful.

And that’s a wrap. Matt J’s got S Express on the stereo, which it’s probably time to head out into the glorious evening outside and get the weekend started. Have a good one!

Week 260

Project update time.

Client work. Trumbull (a little project with the BBC) is heading towards prototype. The production tools on the back-end of Mag+ are about to have a significant improvement, and the app is soon to have its next feature release — after a particularly tough development cycle. Schooloscope is a week or so away from its next feature release.

Internal work. Availabot is physically and electronically coming together. My mind is turning to software and to fulfilment. Weminuche has slowed due to sourcing delays. It needs to get to end-to-end demo before we proceed.

Opportunities. We had to turn one big possibility down. But July is pretty clear for us concentrate on a particular other (I’m sketching system diagrams to prep). My mind is on what client work we have in for August — we’re at only about one half capacity for that month so far.

I’m enjoying my personal less hectic pace. On my desk at the moment I have the old El Morro project proposal, written overnight on January 28th, and I realise that basically, since that evening, I’ve barely seen friends and colleagues, barely replied to email, and not had time to sit and consider at all. Time to re-connect with the community, and to do a bit of thinking.

The Michel Thomas iPhone app: behind the scenes

Project Kendrick is in the world! As Matt Webb mentioned before, it’s a new iPhone app for language learning we produced with our friends at Hodder Education, and is the latest addition to a best-selling range of language learning products called the Michel Thomas Method.

Michel Thomas was a celebrity linguist with an amazing life story. Escaping from concentration camps during the Second World War; tortured by the Gestapo; teacher of celebrities such as Doris Day, Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand — it even says his “last known identity” was that of Michel Thomas. Awesome. What a brief to work with. I’ll come back to him in a sec. Here’s a little clip of the finished app in action:

The mighty Nick Ludlam and I brewed it up together, with direction, input and advice from the rest of the BERG crew. And I’d like to tell you a little about the behind-the-scenes stuff — the craft of making and thinking — that went into it.

Kick-off

Nick and I began the main building work late last year. As you can imagine, we had a brilliant brief to work with. Schulze, Webb and Jones presented us with a huge swathe of thinking. The big-picture strategic vision; the sites, situations and contexts these apps could find themselves in (“can we make this as useful for 30 seconds on the bus as it would be for 30 minutes of concentrated listening at home?”); even little napkin sketches of UI details. All gourmet brainfood. Now all we had to do was get it into the world.

The Learning Room: beautiful, ambient, immersive

One of the first things that struck us (and probably you, if you’ve ever tried one of the CD box sets) was Michel Thomas’ voice. It’s utterly captivating, and can feel quite hypnotic at times. Have a listen again, without the visuals:

Immediately, we all agreed that whatever user interface we came up with would have to complement — even celebrate — this listening and learning experience without getting in the way. The idea of a ‘Learning Room’ quickly emerged — somewhere ambient, immersive, and hypnotic, where you could concentrate for substantial lengths of time without getting bored or distracted. And of course it would have to be a pleasure to use. Matt Jones came up with a cracker of a challenge by asking us to “Make The Best Pause Button In The World.” Brilliant.

Here, I was doing some drawing while listening to Michel Thomas’ voice for the very first time. Looking back, this one pretty much laid the foundations for the next few months’ work.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - early sketching

Look at the notes. KITT from Knight Rider immediately came to mind. A talking play/pause button. Products as People, I guess. And it’s interesting that those little geometric doodles started to happen straight away as well. I imagine there’s a really primal link between hearing sound and seeing patterns, and this was probably something I hoped we would touch on later.

Immediately after the first drawing, I put together a little animated sketch of how the Best Pause Button In The World might work.

The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.

Then we tried this. A kind of pastoral landscape with a floating, talking pause button. And speech bubbles. Too much.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - early sketching

And then an idea about using generated bokeh effects and imperceptible zoom effect that never reaches a climax. Too strange.

Here, we were exploring how to use animation and interactivity in a small portion of the screen (to save precious processing power), and make it seem to be operating in a bigger space than it actually was.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room sketching

Originally, we wanted to use a pond-like rippling effect (that one below on the left), but it turns out drawing transparent, overlapping filled circles, as well as streaming audio and animating the pause button, took too much juice. The little blue flower at bottom right was the first step toward the final design.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room sketching

Here we developed the little blue flower, adding texture and depth to give it a bit of tactility.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room sketching

And here’s how you draw a procedural petal.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room sketching - petal math

The pause state was really important to get right too. Here you can see us getting a bit too Bang & Olufsen before dialling it back to something more approachable, shiny and Apple-y.

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room sketching

Michel Thomas iPhone app - Learning Room development

And of course this is where we ended up:

Materials and tuning

Every so often we’d catch ourselves talking solemnly and straight-faced about some detail involved in building the Learning Room. Then we’d take a step back. “Dude. It’s a talking flower. How the hell did we end up here?” Looking back, there’s no real process or rationale I could outline. It’s a product of many things — our personalities, references to things we like; doodling; tinkering; sketching; prototyping and so on. But, overall, it was born from the material itself.

How much CPU did we have left after streaming audio and making the pause button animate in response to Michel Thomas voice? Not much, it turns out. We spent a lunch hour thinking and drawing, came up with thirty-odd ideas, tried a few of them out, and the flower ended up sticking around, for a few reasons: Nick could draw it procedurally in code; animate it efficiently at a decent frame rate; the symmetrical, primal pattern looked striking; the visuals adapt to different languages; the flower scales down to icon size nicely, and most of all, using it feels completely unique, yet strangely appropriate. Our friends from Hodder were closely involved right the way through, and ultimately, it was their faith in this design-led approach that allowed us to get these ideas into the world and into your hand.

Overall, I’d say the whole UI — from the Learning Room, to the Store, to the Flashcards — went through five or six complete iterations before we settled on something that felt simple and smooth enough for a release. Then, we tuned, tuned and tuned. Matt Jones has talked about Disney’s idea of plussing before, and again I don’t think it’s possible to describe it as a discrete thing. It just seems to happen when you really get a feel for the material (or rather immaterial) you’re working with. You develop a laser-like focus on ‘rightness’, and devote yourself to getting rid of anything that doesn’t make the experience as delightful as possible.

It’s been a brilliant product to work on, and hopefully it’ll help more people discover the strange, hypnotic magic of the Michel Thomas Method. Why not give it a try? – we’d love to know what you think of it.

Say hello to Michel Thomas. Or bonjour, ciao, ¡hola…

When the Michel Thomas Method language course CDs arrived at the studio, we played them on the stereo immediately. But the post was late so it arrived only the day before we were due to speak with the publishers. We tore up all our ideas and started again.

Michel Thomas teaches with no homework and no repetition. Listening to him, it’s a little like being in a classroom with other students and a little like being hypnotised.

You don’t learn, you flow.

As a design studio, we knew we had to carry the same experience onto the phone, using just the regular audio and a decent respect for the philosophy.

We designed and produced the brand new iPhone app. Check it out in the App Store: Learn a Language with Michel Thomas.

You can learn French, Spanish, Italian and German. It’s free to get the app (you get a preview of each language), and then you buy hour-by-hour as you improve.

In the flesh, the screen on the right is animated. It draws you in as you listen to the voice.

Do a pulsating pause button and tactile flower petals have a place in an audio language course app? Yes. (You have to hear Michel to understand why. I’m not kidding.)

Because mobile phones are, well, mobile, you might want to keep that learning flow going while you’re on the bus. So there’s a flashcard game. You can play one of dozens of preset decks, or make your own from favourite phrases.

This one is from the Spanish course.

There’s also the shop. I like that the “pay as you learn” store is in the exact same place as where you thumb through the course contents. I think we went through 4 iterations until it felt this smooth.

Product invention?

Between this, Popular Science+, and Schooloscope, you can see a little of our philosophy about product invention.

Work in the popular market, and be inventive, beautiful.

Respect the materials. I believe with Michel Thomas we’ve taken what’s best about the experience and made a hybrid with what’s best about the iPhone. We’re best when we partner with people who are just working out what they want to do, and we can discover together.

But what I’m proudest about is that this is a design-led product in a commercial marketplace. This isn’t just for Michel Thomas fans (though there are many). By bringing the feeling of Michel to the iPhone, his courses can find a whole new audience, and a whole load more fans.

Michel Thomas is available for your iPhone and iPod Touch now, at the App Store: Learn a Language with Michel Thomas.

See the official site for more pics and videos.

Congratulations to the team, Matt Brown, Nick Ludlam, and Matt Jones! Thanks also to Guy Moorhouse for the microsite. And, especially, thanks to Vivian and Helen and the whole Hodder team. It has been a pleasure.

People are walking architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp

It’s taken me a while to get the notes cleaned-up and post this, a talk from January this year that I gave over in Sierre, Switzerland at their TechnoArk event. Thanks very much to Nicholas Nova and Laurent Haug of LiftLabs for their kind invitation.

I’ve been keen to post it as it’s a pile of ‘beginnings’, rather than a self-contained thought.

It’s a bunch of thinking about how designers (and BERG in particular) might start thinking through making products for ‘smart cities’ (as they’re known for good and for ill) including the qualities that these products should possess in order for them to be invited into people’s homes – something we’ve started calling ‘mujicomp’ as shorthand in the studio.

Also it talks a little bit about how the aggregation and combination of smart, connected products could build into bottom-up infrastructures rather than giant top-down municipal approaches to augmenting cities with technology.

It draws on themes from my ‘Demon-Haunted World’ talk at Webstock, from 2009, but also it entangles some thinking from the MSR Social Computing Summit I attended back in January.

Specifically, looking at doorways and thresholds as rich places to investigate with products and services – something which at the summit we called with-tongue-firmly-in-cheek ‘Porch-Computing’

People Are Walking Architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp, January 2010

Say hello to Schooloscope

Schooloscope is a new project from BERG, and I want to show it to you.

What if a school could speak to you, and tell you how it’s doing? “I have happy kids,” it might say. “Their exams results are great.”

Schools in England are inspected by a body called Ofsted. Their reports are detailed and fair — Ofsted is not run by the government of the day, but directly by Parliament. And kids in schools are tracked by the government department DCSF. They publish everything from exam results to statistical measurements of improvement over the school careers of the pupils.

Cooooomplicated.

What Schooloscope does is tell you how your school’s doing at a glance.

There are pictures of smiling schools. Or unhappy ones, if the kids there aren’t happy.

Each school summarises the statistics in straightforward, natural English. There are well over 20,000 state schools in England that we do this for. We got a computer to do the work. A journalism robot.

You can click through and read the actual stats afterwards, if you want.

Why?

A little of my personal politics. Education is important. And every school is a community of teachers, kids, parents, governors and government. The most important thing in a community is to take part on an equal footing and with positive feeling. Parents have to feel engaged with the education of their children.

As great as the government data is, it can be arcane. It looks like homework. It’s full of jargon… and worse, words that look like English but that are also jargon.

Schooloscope attempts to bring simplicity, familiarity, and meaning to government education data, for every parent in England.

A tall order!

This is a work in progress. There are lots of obvious missing features. Like: finding schools should be easier! There are bugs. There’s a whole bunch we want to do with the site, some serious and some silly. And full disclosure here: over the next 6 months we’re working on developing and commercialising this. Schooloscope is a BERG project funded by 4iP, the Channel 4 innovation fund. Is it possible to make money by being happily hopeful about very serious things and visualising information with smiling faces? I reckon so.

Anyway. The way we learn more is by taking Schooloscope public, seeing what happens, and making stuff.

The team! Tom Armitage and Matt Brown have worked super hard and made a beautiful thing which is only at the start of its journey. They, Matt Jones and Kari Stewart are taking it into the future. Also Giles Turnbull, Georgina Voss, and Ben Griffiths have their fingerprints all over this. Tom Loosemore and Dan Heaf at 4iP, thanks! And everyone else who has given feedback along the way.

Right, that’s launch out of the way! Let’s get on with the job of making better schools and a better Schooloscope.

Say hello to Schooloscope now.

Week 255

It’s been a while since we’ve done a weeknote.

Deadlines, exhaustion, seismic events both real and psychic have conspired against us, but still – very remiss of us. We’ll try and resume normal service as soon as possible.

Busy times, a full studio, a lot on deck. Week 255. Off we go.

The week started with some nice recognition of Mag+ from Apple: there’s an in-depth look at the project we called El Morro in the iPad section of their website.

El Morro continues – the team are working on improving the reading experience, adding some extra capabilities to the platform, and most importantly perhaps – ensuring that the toolkit and knowledge necessary to create Mag+ is transferred to where it belongs in the editorial teams.

As the ashcloud subsided, face-to-face around a whiteboard replaced skype calls as few of our friends from Bonnier came over from Stockholm for a really useful day of workshops to that end, and as I type Mark P. from their US team is sat with the guys working away.

Jack and myself had an interesting chat with magazine art-director-and-enthusiast extraordinaire Jeremy Leslie over breakfast on Wednesday – hearing his feedback on the challenges and opportunities of Mag+ and digital magazines in general was awesome.

Ashdown is coming on leaps and bounds since going into Alpha, with Tom and Matt B. heroically-cranking through the phase we’ve started to call ‘tuning’ in the studio.

We don’t really have a fixed process at BERG, but we have approaches that we use and evolve. We’ve talked about the phase we tend to call ‘material exploration‘ before – and in fact Tom has written in depth about that in association with Ashdown, but ‘tuning’ is where I guess the instincts you’ve acquired for the territory and the material throughout the project really serve. It’s about taking the time once the core features and functionality are working to try and make the elements sing in harmony and shine them up best as time allows.

The first product from Ashdown is being tuned now, and I think the team have made something really gorgeous. Alongside the visuals and the interactions – the voice of the product is being tuned too. We’ve been joined today by Giles Turnbull who we worked with a lot on matters of tone and writing while I was at Dopplr, and he’s helping with that. Nice to have him in the studio today.

Back to ‘tuning’ – there’s an element of Disney’s ‘plussing‘ there, and trying to inject delight where you can – but the word ‘tuning’ just seems to fit better for us. It might be about removing things as much as ‘plussing’. When you find the signal, making sure that you are removing anything that impedes it, and do everything you can to amplify it.

Other projects.

Kendrick’s time for tuning has passed, and fingers-crossed it will shortly be in the world. Nick’s been shepherding that process in part this week. Trumbull’s design is progressing nicely – but a resource hiccup has put things back a little bit. I’ve been working to resolve that with Kari and Matt W this week, and, again – fingers crossed – we have a solution.

Jack had a great production engineering meeting on Availabot (remember that?) which left him grinning, and there are a couple other of our own projects, including Weminuche, which are starting to walk rather than crawl which is really satisfying to see.

As I started to scribble down what to put in this weeknote, it was mid-afternoon on Friday. It’s a long weekend here in the UK – we have a holiday on Monday.

The studio was waving goodbye to Webb, who had to leave a little early to go and buy shoes before travelling to an event this weekend. Everyone looked a little disturbed to be left in the studio as he went – a situation we’re not used to, and is usually quite the reverse.

The last few weeks have been crazy-busy for all of us, but especially him. He’s held the BERG helicarrier together through some extreme turbulence recently and seen that it’s still delivered, and I’m very glad we’re back in a rhythm that allows him to go and buy shoes.

After all – you make the road by walking.

Happy Friday from week 255.

Popular Science+

In December, we showed Mag+, a digital magazine concept produced with our friends at Bonnier.

Late January, Apple announced the iPad.

So today Popular Science, published by Bonnier and the largest science+tech magazine in the world, is launching Popular Science+ — the first magazine on the Mag+ platform, and you can get it on the iPad tomorrow. It’s the April 2010 issue, it’s $4.99, and you buy more issues from inside the magazine itself.

See Popular Science+ in the iTunes Store now.

Here’s Jack, speaking about the app, its background, and what we learned about art direction for magazines using Mag+.

Articles are arranged side by side. You swipe left and right to go between them. For big pictures, it’s fun to hold your finger between two pages, holding and moving to pan around.

You swipe down to read. Tap left to see the pictures, tap right to read again. These two modes of the reading experience are about browsing and drinking in the magazine, versus close reading.

Pull the drawer up with two fingers to see the table of contents and your other issues. Swipe right and left with two fingers to zip across pages to the next section. Dog-ear a page by turning down the top-right corner.

There’s a store in the magazine. When a new issue comes out, you purchase it right there.

Editorial

Working with the Popular Science team and their editorial has been wonderful, and we’ve been working together to re-imagine the form of magazines. Art direction for print is so much about composition. There are a 1,000 tiny tweaks to tune a page to get it to really sing. But what does layout mean when readers can make the text disappear, when the images move across one another, and the page itself changes shape as the iPad rotates?

We discovered safe areas. We found little games to play with the reader, having them assemble infographics in the act of scrolling, and making pages that span multiple panes, only revealing themselves when the reader does a double-finger swipe to zoom across them.

It helps that Popular Science has great photography, a real variety of content, and an engaged and open team.

What amazes me is that you don’t feel like you’re using a website, or even that you’re using an e-reader on a new tablet device — which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you’re reading a magazine.

Apple made the first media device you can curl up with, and I think we’ve done it, and Popular Science, justice.

From concept to production

The story, for me, is that the design work behind the Mag+ concept video was strong enough to spin up a team to produce Popular Science+ in only two months.

Not only that, but an authoring system that understands workflow. And InDesign integration so art directors are in control, not technologists. And an e-commerce back-end capable of handling business models suitable for magazines. And a new file format, “MIB,” that strikes the balance between simple enough for anyone to implement, and expressive enough to let the typography, pictures, and layout shine. And it’s set up to do it all again in 30 days. And more.

It’s all basic, sure. But it’ll grow. We’ve built in ways for it to grow.

But we’ve always said that good design is rooted not just in doing good by the material, but by understanding the opportunities in the networks of organisations and people too.

A digital magazine is great, immersive content on the screen. But behind those pixels are creative processes and commercial systems that also have to come together.

Inventing something, be it a toy or new media, always means assembling networks such as these. And design is our approach on how to do it.

I’m pleased we were able to work with Popular Science and Bonnier, to get to a chance to do this, and to bring something new into the world.

Thanks!

Thank you to the BERG team for sterling work on El Morro these last two months, especially the core team who have sunk so much into this: Campbell Orme, James Darling, Lei Bramley, Nick Ludlam and Timo Arnall. Also Jack Schulze, Matt Jones, Phil Gyford, Tom Armitage, and Tom Taylor.

Thanks to the Popular Science team, Mike Haney and Sam Syed in particular, Mark Poulalion and his team from Bonnier, and of course Bonnier R&D and Sara Öhrvall, the grand assembler!

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with each and every one of you.

See also…

Week 249

I’m writing these notes late. Really it’s week 250 already — we had our All Hands at noon. Opening it I said “it’s week 250. Halfway through!” I don’t know what made me say that. We’ll see!

I’m on the Central Line on my way to White City for a consultancy gig with the BBC. For a day a week, I’m helping write a short design roadmap.

A minute ago I was reading a book that friend-of-BERG (and friend-of-mine) Mark Hall sent me in the post, and for which I realise now I never thanked him. Thank you, Mark! It’s Beyond the hundred meridian by Wallace Stegner, and the section I’ve just finished is about John Wesley Powell’s epic journey down the Colorado River through canyon after canyon.

In the narrative I encounter names that make my heart flutter. Kanab! This is also the name of a project about which we are currently in negotiation. Escalante! This is also the name of the era of the studio before the current one, which is called Scenario 4.

You may remember that I give names to periods of time of the studio. It helps us understand what what we’re doing now fits into bigger things, and is not the same as what came before or what we will after. Also it adds Mythic Resonance.

I would say we are no longer in Scenario 4. That was the period of somewhat uncontrolled growth we’ve been in for these past two months. I think we’re through the worst of it. We’ve figured out how to ride that particular crocodile. There’s a lot broken (our contracts are a shambles; we need better ways of recording expenses; we need to figure out how to bring more discipline to our own projects). But knowing what’s broken is 50% of making fixes. So: we’re coming out the other side of Scenario 4. It didn’t kill us, at least not outright. What next?

There’s a feeling of high potential. An impatience for projects to go public and for whatever they cause to be caused. A knowledge that something will happen. Projects on the verge of coming in, and with them a new set of abilities, and room. But there’s an alienness to all of this. An unfamiliarity with scale, but an excited trepidation.

In the back of my mind I’ve been calling it Jupiter Space.

There’s a bit in the film 2001 where the ship Discovery has made its long voyage across the solar system, from Earth space across deep space and into Jupiter space, and it’s just there. The ship is the same as during the journey, maybe a bit battered. Nothing’s happened yet. But there’s Jupiter, lofty and looming, reminding you where you are. A long way from home. Who knows where you’ve got to, but you’ve gotten there. Holy shit, Jupiter.

If you were standing on Ganymede, Jupiter would hang in the sky about four palms-widths wide, holding your hands at arm’s length. The Moon, from Earth, is a thumbs-width.

So that’s what it feels like and that’s what I see, in my mind’s eye. We built a ship, we took a journey, holy shit there’s an enormous gas giant right there out the window, what now? Who knows, let’s figure it out. Jupiter Space.

(We worked on El Morro all week 249. Nick, Lei and I went to Stockholm at the weekend. Intense deadlines swoop down every three days and knock us sideways. Kendrick was stalled because testing threw up data problems, and because our client was checking legal. Ashdown has produced enough to start building out the product itself, I hope, but its progress is still making me a little nervous. Service+ is producing a little more documentation to get final sign-off. Weminuche is assembling questions to start a proof of concept stage. Kari made super tasty cupcakes today. I’m feeling a bit spaced out. We’ve all been working too hard for too many weeks. But it’s worth it.)

Week 248

What the studio looks like at almost 4pm on Friday 12 March:

Campbell is in the small room at the end, working on editorial layouts and user interface assets, both part of the El Morro project.

Also in the small room is Timo. He’s working on editorial in InDesign and how to encode this in XML, in the file format we’ve created. Sitting with him is Lei, who is working on a software renderer which does layout. The pages don’t look quite right and we’re chasing towards a demo app, so Lei and Timo are working together to iron out bugs in both the renderer and the XML.

Nick is crouched by their desk. He and Lei are talking about a bug in the way XML is imported into the database that the renderer uses. This is all for El Morro.

In the larger room, Matt B has his headphones in and is working on page designs for Ashdown. Yesterday evening, he, Tom and I drew out a system for how the main Ashdown webpage should behave, in great detail. Using this detailed system, Matt is able to work on the visual and information design.

Tom would usually be working on Ashdown too, but today he’s busy with the Authoring Tool for El Morro. Eventually this tool will create the XML for El Morro automatically from InDesign, so Timo doesn’t have to do it by hand, but not yet: that’s what Tom is working on.

James has a day off. Phil and Tom T, who have worked with us for odd days recently, are away. Kari is with us Tuesdays and Thursdays so she’s not here today. The room feels a little empty. Sparse not airy.

Jack and Matt J went out a little before noon for a meeting. They’re still out.

What the studio looks like at 8.30pm, same day:

Campbell and Timo are in the smaller room. Matt J is at his desk in the main room, working on a project plan. Jack bought us all pizza and left just recently. Nick and Lei are working still. I feel guilty that we’re all still here. My responsibility to the people is that we all should have left by now; to the project, it’s that we wind up with a great looking build tonight. I’m going to stand up now, and insist that we start bringing this thing in to land.

It’s 1am.

We all left a little before midnight. My guilty feelings got washed away once I saw how pretty it’d become, what we’re making. I’m up still, at home now, chewing over the day.

I chew over a lot of things, late at night.

I read yesterday about the origin of Windows and on page 3 of the article, Tandy Trower describes the four jobs in designing Windows 3.0: hands-on interface design; establishing usability testing processes; creating guidelines; prototyping. And so I think about the systems around design that are necessary for organisational change and success, and the necessity of explaining them in break-downs like this.

And this lunchtime I read Warren Buffett’s letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. which is his thing, you know, 98% of his fortune, and it has crispy clarity and deep insight, so I think about that.

I’m thinking about some glum, or concerned, or tense faces I’ve glimpsed at any given moment in the studio over the week, what the related factors are or were, and what I can do. Happy ones too, and what’s working well. There’s a project that is proving tough despite its apparent simplicity, and I’m trying to put my finger on why. I’m thinking about how intellectual property functions, and the legal and descriptive frameworks by which it becomes a thing you can sell or license. I’m thinking pretty hard about Jack and Matt J’s responses to a couple different project proposals, because they have senses of smell I don’t have, and so I’m spending time interpreting their reactions in order to come to my own opinions. A quarter hour ago, I had a browser window open to check something to do with cash-flow that won’t matter for another two months. I’m thinking about how to increase delegation more deliberately, and how to balance that with cohesion in studio output.

Look: it’s been a great week. Exciting, actually, now I think about it, but it’s late and late makes me reflective. I have no worries about the studio. But I wanted to get at how mentally occupying this kind of enterprise is. I am certain that Jack nor Matt think any less about the studio than this. (I know it; every morning they effortlessly resolve concerns I’d only just realised I had.) Nor anyone who writes weeknotes.

Meanwhile one of the old standards has come on iTunes. Andy Williams, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. When I was a very little one, my dad used to sing this at bedtime. I wonder if my sister remembers. There’s a bird outside that thinks it’s morning and is singing.

Good night.

Week 247

I’m at home with a glass of red wine at my new desk. I’m writing these notes late. It’s already week 248.

Jack and Matt J were in Berlin briefly last week, on a media design consultancy gig. I’ll quote from The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan/Quentin Fiore (1967) for a second:

The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electronic circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. … When these ratios change, men change.

Media is both our environments and that which mediates us. Our cinema and our glasses.

Cinema… books, television, radio, circus, salons, telegraph and telephone: our media used to be hard to invent. They came along once a generation. But now what we call “new media” is really ten thousand new media. The question for a newspaper moving to new media, I mean really moving to new media, is not how to build a CMS blah blah delivery platform blah blah for the whatever. It’s what you want the equaliser settings to be, for social interaction, for immersion, for gameplay, highbrow/lowbrow, predilection to truth, emotional resonance, etc. We don’t just publish, we get to invent the medium into which we publish.

Super fun.

Also this time last week I got a pretty down-to-earth reminder about product innovation. Product innovation has its own path.

We’ve been having a tough time with Ashdown. That’s not fair. It has been a perfect response to the brief (our own brief) to present and contextualise information well. But it hasn’t become a product. I felt that most keenly when I presented the current private version to a Very Important Person about three weeks ago. And in that presentation, I had to do most of the talking. If you need to narrate a thing, it’s not a product.

A product tells you what to do. It fills you with motivation — you want to use it, and you know what you’ll get. And when you don’t get exactly that, you’ll be tickled and delighted. (If it’s a good product; frustrated otherwise.) A product markets itself. It can be described so people can tell other people about it. It has a voice, and an opinion about how the world should be. You know where its value is… and what the value exchange is. Inside an organisation, teams can rally behind a product. A product has meaning, and goals. Products can succeed. Or fail. Products tell you, the designer, how they should grow.

So with Ashdown we’ve had data and an area and a design direction… but no product (we’re intending to make a suite of products). And Matt Brown, who is leading the project day to day, has now found the product. It’s taken all kinds of approaches to get there. Tom Loosemore has been part of crits. Tom A has been making experiments with generative journalism. We’ve tried big wireframes and little sketches.

But on Monday last week Matt managed to crack it. We now have a single line motto for the product. We have a tone. And we have a map of the site where we can see what the user motivation is at every page. Clicking through will feel like a good joke being told. It has rhythm. And everything unfolds from there.

If you looked at the sketches, who knows whether you’d be able to tell that something’s changed. But I can tell you now that the week before I wasn’t sure what we were making, and in week 237 – with Matt’s page of post-it notes and pen drawings – I feel totally confident that it’s cracked. It’s a product now, it’ll tell us what it wants to be.

But it’s humbling, to get there only now, and to be honest none of this “product innovation” chatter counts until we also execute and get to market. So let’s see what happens this week, and I want for us to work much better at cracking the product thing (and continuing to crack it — product focus in a project has to be maintained every week, every week) in future work.

Oh there’s a bunch more to say.

Kendrick is making its way to launch. I wrote a short teaser blog post about it a few days ago, based on one of Matt B’s icons.

El Morro is halfway through. It’s the biggest project we’ve done, and it lasts only a little under two months. I can sketch out seven distinct parts. They meet like dominos. It’s like building a bridge from the middle. Last week and this week the various components started linking up.

Most of what I do now is have 20 minute chats with people designing and building various parts of El Morro. The chats are easy because the team is incredible. People want to know how to build their particular bit, so they grab the relevant other people and make decisions. If there’s a need for clarification or knowledge of the ultimate client ambitions, that’s when I get pulled in for one of those 20 minute chats.

What else.

Kari is producing, weekly, summaries of what everyone is up to this week and next, and a per-project status, in a sentence or three. These are invaluable. Also she’s moving to two days a week, and spending the extra day project managing some new product development. We’re terrible at letting NPD slip, and my hope is that it’ll really happen with some of our established client process applied to it.

I’m learning a lot about my own process, talking Kari through what I believe is needed. Project initiation docs, briefing packs, milestones… all of this sounded like so much hot air until I saw I bumped up against what it was all helping with. I mean, when you know what you have to write down at the beginning of a project to help a team work together and keep on time and on budget and to allow room for the design to blossom and find the way, what else do you call it but a project initiation document?

I’m talking about process, which is a sure sign that I should wrap up and head to bed.

What I noted down to talk about in week 247 were a few old lessons I’d been relearning. What products are, how I use project management. I wanted also to say a few words about tuning and about documentation. I haven’t got t those.

But really when I think back over last week I think about how strange everything feels. I’m not used to the scale. I’m not used to the systems in these sketches. I mean roughly, but not fully. I’m watching a team of 8 bring a thing to life and I’ve no idea how it works, the path from individual action, I mean the tap of the finger that types the curly bracket, that somehow manifests and becomes the breathtaking beauty and correctness that I want to see, I mean how does that even occur; do you need to be dreaming of heaven while you type a subroutine because I doubt it, yet if not that, if that’s not the way beauty happens in software, then what? We plan projects we have full confidence in but there’s a moment because we’ve never done this project before at 3am where you wake up and go, Hang on, really? (And if we all didn’t do that, I’d be worried, so ok.)

So there’s an opposite of deja vu which is in action all the time, a feeling that, whatever it is, it should be familiar, but it’s not at all, and for me this strangeness creates both a risk aversion and then an overcompensating overconfidence, and I alternate between then, ultimately averaging out but only after talking and sketching a lot with Jack and Matt, and what’s left is a residual strangeness to the whole world. Gosh the walls are white. Gosh the sky is blue. Gosh it’s 2010 and here we are, this is the studio we create and this is the work we do, and aren’t we lucky, we work hard and the work is good, and maybe those adjectives are a good a way as any to sum up week 247: Strange. Lucky. Hard. Good.

Links: Fashiony and Tiny and Making Do

Over lunch on Thursday, Russell showed us his S2H Replay – a really simple “activity monitor/pedometer thing“. I really liked his post about it earlier in the week:

it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it’s cheap, fashiony and simple.

The Replay is $20. It doesn’t need any connectivity to share your fitness scores – a code appears on the Replay’s screen and you type it into the S2H website. It makes a smiley face when you’ve done enough exercise. And that rubber bracelet is clearly designed to be replaced/customised/given away as a freebie.

Russell’s post has lots more detail and insight. As well as the device, I liked Russell’s use of “fashiony” as a watchword: something that feels fun and now and a little bit pop. Or to use a metaphor: the Replay isn’t Ikea, it’s American Apparel. For something like the Replay, I think that’s a good quality to have.

Makedo looks like a fun take on construction toys: “a set of connectors for creating things from the stuff around you“. It’s a construction set made only of connectors and hinges; the raw materials are left for you to find. The video above has some good examples of its possibilities. My only doubt is if Makedo is toy-ish enough; the website makes it seem targeted more to an older, crafting audience. But there’s a charm and inventiveness in both the toy, and the play it enables, that I like, and I think that makes it worth a link. (Via Alice Taylor, who saw Makedo at the Toy Fair).

dsiware-game.jpg

I think this was my favourite thing I saw this week: a downloadable game for Nintendo’s DSi. The aim of the game is to find letters hidden in 3D scenes, styled a bit like a cardboard toy theatre, by tilting the device around. The video you need to see is the second one down on this page – I can’t embed it. It’s mindboggling: a game all about perspective and visual trickery, which looks utterly beautiful. Even more impressively: the DSi has no accelerometer, just two 640×480 cameras – so all that movement is being calculated through motion tracking.

I was mainly taken with how beautiful it was, though. The only sad thing: I don’t read Japanese, I have no idea what it’s called. I hope it comes out in the English-speaking world soon.

radiolarians.jpg

Image: taken from Amos Topping’s slide of Radiolarians

Anne Galloway linked to this great SEED slideshow of Victorian Microscope Slides.

Some beautiful images here, but also a fascinating juxtaposition of scientific marvel – “tiny objects now made visible” – with aesthetics – “tiny objects arranged beautifully“. (Anne’s original post; the collector Howard Lynk’s own website)

Finally: scratching and drumming with a set of holographic heads. (via Scott Beale). This is a live performance of Chris Cairns’ Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs inc, and elevates it from “nifty video effects” to something far more ingenious. It made me laugh, too.

Thursday Links: a bit of colour around the place

There’s lots of text on the blog at the moment. Time to add a little bit of colour with some links that have been floating around the studio.

goldenhook.jpg

Following last week’s link to Reknit, friend-of-BERG Rod McLaren gave me a link to Goldenhook. It’s a French business selling knitted goods with a twist:

Golden Hook is an innovative fashion brand which allows you to create made-to-order beanies by choosing your beanie style, material, and color. You also choose the authentic grandmother who will knit your beanie from our gallery of grandma photos.

Authenticity being sold through choice – and a personal connection to whoever’s knitting your new hat. Fun, although if Goldenhook is anything to go by, Granufacture isn’t very cheap yet.

sausagefingers.jpg Meanwhile, from Kottke – and a great many other sites – comes news of increased sales of miniature sausages in Korea:

Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

Meat styluses. I really have no sense for the Korean market: might this be a hoax? No idea; it doesn’t seem so, given the coverage. And it definitely works, as this video of someone playing Taiko Drum Master with a pair of sausages demonstrates. That’s one way to keep your fingers warm.

mujilego.jpg

Matt Jones sent this to the studio mailing list last week, and it was destined for the blog from the get-go: a beautiful collaboration between Lego and MUJI Japan. It’s so simple: a model made out of a combination of Lego pieces and what look like origami squares, with pre-punched holes for joining the paper to the bricks. And: what a cheery crocodile.

Finally, via our frequent collaborator Timo Arnall comes a striking depiction of one potential Augmented future, courtesy of Keiichi Matsuda. Matsuda writes:

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

In his video, the home becomes another space for being advertised to in – with the catch that the more advertising you choose to be subjected to, the more revenue you’ll generate. The glitches in the AR system, and the horrible Girl From Ipanema cover are the icing on an entertaining (if somewhat bleak) cake.

Friday links: drawing with light, AR in the Alps, and making music

Some links from around the studio for a Friday afternoon. Firstly, a video:

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Evan Roth’s “Graffiti Analysis 2.0″. Roth is trying to build a “digital blackbook” to capture graffiti tags in code. He’s started with an ingenious – and straightforward – setup for motion capturing tags: a torch taped to a pen, the motion of which is tracked by a webcam. The data is all recorded in an XML dialect that Roth designed – the Graffiti Markup Language – which captures not only strokes but also rates of flow, the location of the tag, and even the orientation of the drawing tool at start; clearly, it’s designed with future developments – a motion-sensing spraycan, perhaps – in mind.

But that’s all by the by: I liked the video because it was simple, ingenious, and Roth’s rendering of the motion data – mapping time to a Z-axis, dousing the act of tagging in particle effects – is really quite beautiful.

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Image: Poésie by kaalam on Flickr

I showed it to Matt W, and he showed me the light paintings of Julien Breton, aka Kaalam (whose own site is here). Breton’s work is influenced by Arabic script and designs, and the precision involved is remarkable – so often light-painting is vague or messy, but there’s a remarkable cleanliness and precision to Breton’s work. Also, as the image above demonstrates, he makes excellent use of both depth and the environment he “paints” within. If you’re interested, there’s a great interview with Breton here.

Image: Mont Blanc with “Peaks” by Nick Ludlum on Flickr

Nick’s off skiing this week, but he posted this screengrab from his iPhone to Flickr, and it’s a really effective implementation of AR. It’s an app called Peaks that simply displays labels above visible mountain-tops. It’s a great implementation because the objects being augmented are so big, and so far away, that the jittery display you so often get from little objects, nearby, just isn’t a problem. A handful of peaks, neatly labelled, and not a ropey marker in site.

And finally: Matt B’s Otamatone arrived. It’s delightful. A musical toy that sounds and works much like a Stylophone: you press a contact-sensitive strip that maps to pitch, but it’s the rubber mouth of the character – that adds filtering and volume just like opening and closing your own mouth – that brings the whole thing to life. You can’t see someone playing with it and not laugh!

It’s a product by Maywa Denki, an artist makes musical toys and sells them as products; previous musical toys include the Knockman Family, all of which are worth your time watching as much of you can on Youtube.

And if you get your own Otamatone, and practice really hard, maybe you could play with some friends:

Tuesday Links: Drawings, Diagrams, Drawing Machines

A long while without links: I blame December deadlines and moving studio. A shame, given we’d been collecting a whole series of links on the studio mailing list; time to rectify that by sharing them with you, starting with a selection of articles connected by the theme of drawing.

Hand grid with guide grid by atduskgreg on Flickr

Melt Triptych – Center Portrait from Peter Esveld on Vimeo.

Drawing Machines 2009 – the blog that kicked off the idea for this post, which we found after they linked to our little Inductive Truck prototype.

Accompanying a Fall 2009 class at ITP, the blog is full of links to all sorts of automated and programattic drawing devices, as well as examples of final work. I particularly liked Greg Borenstein’s post on drawing grids distorted by gravity, in an attempt to make visible the weight of objects, and enjoyed Peter Esveld’s Melt Triptych (also above) a lot.

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Edward Zajec ram2/9 plotter drawing 1969

A lovely selection of plotter drawings from the 1960s – a very early example of artwork created entirely digitally, with a surprising variety of styles on display.

And how about this: the Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, & Social Theory pool over on Flickr, full of diagrams of linguistic constructions, social spaces, Polynesian tattoos, and suchlike. Exciting.

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Untitled, Computer print-out with coloured pen and ink, Harold Cohen, 1969, from the V&A collection

And we – we being BERG – can’t talk about computer art without reference to Cybernetic Serendipity, the 1968 exhibition of computer art originally shown at the ICA. There’s a nice overview of it – and its importance – at the ICA website, and also in these original descriptions from its curator, Jasia Reichardt.

The Harold Cohen above is a lovely sample of it – its gridded pattern of cursive loops remind me a little of the distortion patterns Matt was playing with a while back.

Week 237

Officially we’re closed this week. But on Monday we packed up the old studio, and yesterday Tom, Matt B, Tom Taylor (from RIG) and I moved all our collective stuff 100 yards down the road and piled it up in the new place.

I ache!

But it feels great. Imagine that in a Tony the Tiger voice. Grrreat!

I’m popping down there later so the locksmith can do the windows. And once all the odds and ends are finished between Christmas and New Year, I’ll pop down again and straighten out some desks so we have a running start on the 4th.

So yes, we’re closed next week too. I won’t write anything for week 238.

I just had a look back at our work from 2009. Chronologically:

  • Shownar, a telly and radio guide based on data-mining the social Web for buzz (BBC). Shownar was a successful prototype, and its technology and ideas will be integrated into bbc.co.uk in 2010.
  • The Incidental, a map and guide to the Milan furniture fair, printed nightly and updated from the social Web (with Fromnowon, the British Council, and Åbäke). The Incidental was also published at the London Design Festival and I’m sure it’ll be back.
  • Here & There, maps of Manhattan projected in plan and from street level simultaneously, our first product and sold online. It was a great success for us.
  • Nearness and Immaterials, short film explorations of RFID and connection without touching (Touch project). These films have each had over 100,000 views.
  • Mag+ interaction design and video on the future of digital magazines. The video established the reading experience as central, has had 200,000 views in just under a week, and received fantastic write-ups from the NY Times, Guardian, Engadget, Gizmodo, All Things Digitial, Wired, Core77, Creative Review and many more.

Ashdown and Kendrick, both projects on this scale, are well underway, and there are three workshop/invention gigs over 2009 I haven’t mentioned, with another two just starting up. There are two or three self-initiated projects which haven’t yet seen the light of day.

Then there’s the rebrand from Schulze & Webb, two studio moves including this one, and general growth and everything that comes with it — the Dayeujin and the Escalante.

Also we’re having fun.

This is going to sound weird: it feels like we’d done more.

Growing takes a ton of energy. If you grow and want people to be as happy as when you were smaller, able to focus on the work yet have that work continuously improve, and have the studio benefit from that growth too… well, developing everything from cultural values to patterns for workshop proposals to financial projections takes effort to get going. Scaling is hard.

There’s a little more growth I want to do in the early part of the year, and one more ingredient to throw into the mix, then I want to turn some of that growth energy into basic work and studio energy.

But enough about that.

On the whole, a good 2009.

That feels like an awesome thing to be able to say. A good 2009!

Grrreat!

A short advertisement: if you’re looking for a New Year resolution, and you have a small company or work freelance, consider keeping weeknotes! Bryan Boyer aggregates several at weeknotes.com and it’s an awesome learning experience reading how other people work. Personally I find reflecting each week helps me and helps the studio, and clients and friends seem to like them. There’s something about the regularity that surfaces things that otherwise wouldn’t come up. The form is like a click track. Anyway. You should do it, and let me know if you do.

Advert over.

See you on the other side!

Week 236

I started writing this yesterday, waiting for an appointment at the bank. Forms to sign. The business specialist was double-booked — I had to wait and wasn’t in a good temper about it. Bad karma: I double-booked myself later, and didn’t realise I was supposed to be meeting Ben about cybernetics. When he phoned me, I was in a meeting about Kendrick with Nick and Matt Brown. We were sketching out the next rev of the UI. Actually, Nick and Matt were sketching. I was asking questions. Do you think this screen should transition into the learning room? Is that inconsistent with the quick play functionality?

I’m now writing with a mug of tea before heading to a meeting across town. I have a 10,000 lux Lumie lamp next to my kitchen table. It’s the spectrum and brightness of the noon desert sun.

We’re having an eventful last week before Christmas!

Our cooperation with Bonnier R&D is public: the Mag+ concept video shows a digital magazine that prioritises the reading experience. A video prototype like this is an establishing shot and it’s done its job. 79,000 views on Vimeo in a day (now 102k), and some astoundingly flattering write-ups. I’m proud of the team, their design, research, instincts, and aesthetics.

It’s four hours later.

Matt Jones and I had an early meeting near Waterloo – getting experienced advice about a possible major project – and then we came back to a very packed studio. Matt Brown, Tom Armitage and Nick Ludlam were all in. We’ll be sharing the Ashdown alpha with some friends and family and Tom is busy wrapping up development on that. He’s building a kind of fruit machine for data exploration. And Nick is rounding off a build of Kendrick today that we can install on our iPhones and use over the holidays. That’ll help enormously with the next round of design.

That’s three people. Our friends Andy Huntington and Tom Taylor were in too, working on their own things and hanging out. So with me and Matt back, and then Ben Griffiths popping in to deliver the gobs and gobs of data he’s been scraping (very elegantly! I’m impressed), well, it was pretty full of life. Crowded.

It’s our last day in this studio. We all got presents yesterday. On Tuesday we’re moving into the new place which we’re sharing with RIG. I can’t wait. Here’s a pic. It’s a great space, and you couldn’t want for a better firm or a better group of folks to share with. RIG are the folks behind Newspaper Club, one of our favourite things going on right now. This is going to be good. Energy feeds off energy.

I, on the other hand, feed off food. It’s lunchtime.

It’s two hours later.

Good lunch, and good meeting. Heading off a potential soft spot in the team first quarter next year.

I swung by the new studio on the way back. The builders are running a little behind schedule but we’re still on for Tuesday.

Gimme Shelter is on the stereo. I remember it from the soundtrack to Wild Palms (Oliver Stone/Bruce Wagner/1993). Wild Palms is about telly and holograms and is set in Los Angeles in 2007. In 1993 that felt impossibly future.

Other news this week: Shownar has reached the end of its life, at least in this incarnation. It’ll be rolled out across bbc.co.uk in various ways in the early part of 2010. It’s sad to see it go. This time last year we were tendering for the project. The docs were submitted just before Christmas, and we won the project just before the new year. At the time, the company was me and Schulze.

How far we’ve come!

And we’ve not reached cruising altitude yet. We’re not quite at the second act. Not quite. Give me a few more weeks.

It was a pleasure last night to see so many friends at the pub for impromptu work drinks. If you were there, thanks for coming! Standing outside in the snow with Matt Jones, drinking hot rum and looking back over the first few months of BERG, that’s what it’s all about. What a ride. What a ride.

Week 234

The building work on the new studio started Monday. There are walls going up. Earlier today Schulze chose where the new plug sockets go. I understand the internal glazing is going to look wonderful.

Things are underway.

Let me speak about that for a minute.

There’s a time, in projects, where you’re in the middle. You can see neither horizon. Last year, when I was running a lot, I used to hate running along canals. Time passed but I would have no sense of momentum. Nothing changed; bridges would take hours to arrive. Space was not being consumed.

In our Tuesday 10am round-up, I tried to put my finger on it. “There’s nothing in crunch,” I said, but that wasn’t right — Schulze is doing pretty much nothing but closing this phase of our prototyping with Bonnier, ahead of his travelling next week, and Matt Jones is spending a good deal of time with him too.

The crunch is pretty intense. We just postponed this evening’s Christmas dinner because three people need to work. Even with five remaining it would feel both lonely and, knowing other people were up against it, somewhat mean. We’ll re-arrange. I admit, it’s disappointing.

But as Kendrick finds its feet, and Ashdown uncloaks, and builders build, and pitches are pitched, one crunch is now only part of the mix.

So it’s the whole studio that is underway, and it has been for a few weeks. You don’t notice the forest till you’re in it. Our three main projects have pace. Business development has pace. Closing has pace. The general business of the studio has pace. And this is a different way of working. It’s not struggling to warm our limbs up or to build up momentum, it’s a new kind of feeling, a new kind of push. To maintain.

The hazard here is a kind of fatigue. I don’t mean tiredness. We’re alert, happy and joking, and working hard. The studio is a joy to be in. Little victories twice a day!

I mean there is a risk of a fatigue that manifests as a kind of loss of mindfulness. There are effects. When the studio rhythm is threatened, it is now harder to meet that disruption with welcoming equanimity… and we have to, because change is good. And it is harder to focus on longer-term, hard graft, self-initiated projects, because that, in a way, devalues the hard work and the great thump-thump-thump rhythm of what keeps the studio running. In a funny way it becomes as hard to see the big picture as when you’re right at the beginning of a start-up and living week by week.

This is a new kind of challenge, a different kind of mountain to the one we’ve scaled over the last quarter. I’m paying attention to it.

Maybe I’m projecting: It’s raining hard outside, I’m still behind on things and still tired from being ill last week, we’re in the run-down with Christmas with lots to do, I’m disappointed about not going out for dinner tonight with the guys, the studio has never been simultaneously so entertaining and productive, and everything is blossoming. It is tumultuous. Yet I feel impatient for the future, I want to show you things. There are things I want to add.

And, as Matt Jones has just pointed out, there is apocalyptic post rock with very long titles on the stereo, and that can’t help but contribute.

I mention all this here because this is life in week 234, and if you recognise what I’m talking about then I would welcome your comments.

Week 233

I’m currently at home with a stack of decongestants and a swimming head. Being ill at a time the studio is running at capacity is decided not what’s needed, but I’ve been out of sorts for weeks, so it’s time to fix it with Albos oil, no going out, and a stack of books. I’ve just finished reading Where wizards stay up late and next is either Founders at work or The Pixar Touch. These last two are because I’m curious about what sort of company BERG is. I mean, we have values and ambitions – some tacit, some known, and some being worked out – but what sort of beast would we like to be? What are the qualities of successful studios? Where are the well-trodden paths? I’m curious about Pixar, because their work is inventive, beautiful and popular, and because of how highly they value creative processes. Also because they were a technology company and production house for nine years, and then leapt to storytelling and Toy Story. So: reading.

Meanwhile, back in the closing weeks of 2009, we’re running three multi-month projects: Ashdown, Kendrick, and this stage of our work with Bonnier. Each will have public output over the coming two or three months. Very public in some cases. It was busy early this week and I moved from my desk to the sofa. In the room were, in clockwise order from my normal desk: Nick Ludlam (who has joined us for a couple months to work on iPhone development in Kendrick. He’s startlingly talented, and we love having him here); Tom Armitage (writing, deep deep data diving, and bringing Ashdown to life); Matt Jones (design direction, business development and a little travelling this week); Matt Brown (who has a cosy nest of monitors and graphics tablets, out of which comes beautiful, clever visuals and a startlingly broad selection of music); and Jack Schulze (who is in and out filming a lot of the time). Elsewhere: Georgina Voss continues her research around UK education, Benjamin Manktelow continues his into cybernetics, and we’re working with two other designers pretty much full time too. The studio is pretty crowded and there’s no room for meetings, so I’m pleased that the builders start work Monday on partitioning the new studio space. That should take three weeks, during which time we have some sweet pitches and maybe some workshops. And of course, this week, there’s been the usual mix of risks, exciting prospects, project flutters, and surprises.

On surprises: I tell you, there is nothing, nothing that makes me happier than when someone says “hey, look at this,” and they’ve made something incredible. It must be happening twice a day at the moment, and it makes my heart sing.

It’s good, the studio humming along like this. The work is good, the pipeline is being kept healthy and moving, and admin is under control. But as I said, we are at capacity, and that has its consequences. We aren’t able to spend enough time on our own projects and when one of us is running at a little less than 100% – like me, this week – we’ll feel it. I know I’m behind on proposals and important conversations, by several weeks in some cases, and while I should be able to catch up, it should never have happened. Even the small things: there have been some great comments on the blog recently, about business strategy even, and I wanted to address them — but ran out of time this week. We have no burst capacity… I, personally, have no burst capacity. That means strategic growth (as opposed to organic growth) is put at risk.

So I’m also giving thought to how we can be more efficient and relaxed with the same level of output. Can proposals and sales be more routinised? What else? Why do some innocuous tasks suddenly feel like a Big Deal and become hard to do? How can well-being and happiness be maintained? Maybe we should print out more pictures.

I’m too cryptic. Let’s bring this down to earth. It’s a lovely, productive studio full of lovely, productive people. I bought some new brown shoes on Tuesday. And if you’d like something to read before you wind up the week, may I direct your attention towards our first guest editorial on this blog, by our friend and inspiration Megan Prelinger, and we are extremely proud to have her contribute on design, technology, and mid-century Modern: Another Science Fiction: An Intersection of Art and Technology in the Early Space Race. Wonderful.

1 in 3 schools are what? A story of what statistics can tell us

In the UK, schools are inspected every few years to make sure they’re educating kids well and run effectively.

Ofsted, the agency that visits the schools and writes the inspection reports, yesterday released their 2008/09 Annual Report. It’s a 160 page beast of stats, strengths and weaknesses, everything schools and the government need to focus their congratulations and new efforts. There’s a short commentary at the beginning which is great, but on the whole it has quite a lot of technical language.

The Daily Mail covered the report with a shocking headline, How 1 in 3 schools fail to provide adequate teaching. Gosh.

We decided to have a basic poke at the numbers ourselves, since we’ve just started working on Ashdown and have them all handy. (Ashdown is our name for a suite of beautiful and useful products we’re making for parents and teachers around UK schools data.)

So let’s have a look.

It’s pupils that matter to parents, so let’s look at 9- and 14-year-olds.

There are some 160,000 9-year-olds at schools in England that have been inspected in the last year (between September 2008 and August 2009). And about 161,000 14-year-olds, if you care about secondary schools. Let’s see how they break down…

9+14-year-olds at recently inspected schools in England

Pupils at schools recently graded by Ofsted in England

Happy schools are better schools.

A shade off two-thirds of all 9-year-olds and all 14-year-olds go to schools that are good or outstanding. But how about that Daily Mail headline? What does “not adequate” mean?

To find out about that I should say something about how Ofsted gives grades to schools. This is the terminology bit.

Oftsed grades

Ofsted do a few types of inspection, one of which is called a “Section 5 Inspection.” At the top of a report (here’s an example, taken totally at random) there’s a line called “Overall effectiveness of the school.” Right by it is a grade… 1 and 2 are outstanding and good respectively. There are also grades 3 and 4.

Grade 3 is “satisfactory.” You can read how Ofsted inspectors evaluate schools. It’s a bit dry, but in a nutshell a grade of ‘satisfactory’ means this: there’s nothing wrong with student performance, school leadership, value for money, or possibilities for improvement. Ofsted promise to inspect the school again within 3 years, and will make an interim visit just about half the time.

“Inadequate,” grade 4, means something is wrong with either how the kids are being educated, or the ability of the teachers to lead and improve the school. It’s pretty harsh.

1 in 3 schools are what?

Looking at our numbers, one in three pupils go to schools that are satisfactory or inadequate. Hang on, the headline said “fail to provide adequate teaching.” But only one in twenty pupils go to “inadequate” schools. Nineteen out of twenty go to schools that are satisfactory or better.

My confusion, I guess, arises because the headline uses a word which is very close to Ofcom’s own terminology – “inadequate” (grade 4) and “adequate” (in the headline, unused by Ofsted) – and so becomes ambiguous. That’s a shame. Is satisfactory adequate or not? I have no idea. How much do we care? The ambiguity obscures these discussions, but it’s great that journalism is provoking them. It’s huge, the difference in the numbers, between “satisfactory” being a grade we celebrate or one we don’t tolerate.

It’s also worth thinking about the purpose of these kind of statistics. What are stats for?

Let’s revisit Ofsted inspections. If you look again at a report (here’s another random example) and scroll riiight to the bottom, you’ll get a letter from the inspectors themselves written to the pupils of the school. In it the inspectors outline the strengths and weaknesses of the school, and what the school (and the pupils) need to do to improve. And that’s the whole point. It reinforces what’s good, and points out where effort is needed.

The Annual Report does a similar job. It’s a summary view to help focus the congratulations and efforts of parents, teachers and government bodies. Is it great or a concern that 19 out of 20 pupils go to schools that are satisfactory or better? Should we say only 19 out of 20?

In short: is “satisfactory” good enough? These numbers don’t tell us. That’s a matter for public debate.

A new kind of journalism

Holding that the job of statistics is to help target effort, we can go a little further.

We made another chart, for pupils at the “most deprived” schools, and how those schools are doing. Ofsted define the “most deprived” schools as the 20% of schools with the highest proportion of free school meals, so we did the same. (That means we’re looking at inspected schools in England that offer free school meals to 26% of their pupils or more.)

9+14-year-olds-02a

Pupils at “most deprived” schools recently graded by Ofsted in England

A couple of things to note here… the first is that we’re dealing with 37,000 9-year-olds and 23,000 14-year-olds. That’s a lot of kids. The second is that the general shape of the graph has changed. There are, proportionately, more inadequate schools.

And that’s an interesting story: if you’re a pupil aged 9 or 14, anywhere in England, we’ve seen you have about 1 in 20 chance of being at inadequate school. But if you go to one of the most deprived schools, that’s more like 1 in 13.

Now that sucks. Should we really allow there to be more inadequate schools in the most deprived areas? Shouldn’t those schools, in fact, be so well funded that they’re better than schools in general? Well, that priorities decision is a matter for our democratic system, and these are the kind of numbers journalism can provide to inform that debate.

Reports and reporting

What Ofsted’s Annual Report shows is that most pupils – a very large majority – go to schools that are satisfactory, good, or outstanding. But that pupils who go to the most deprived schools aren’t quite as lucky. I still don’t know what the difference is really like, on the ground, between a “satisfactory” and a “good” school, but I’ll reveal my personal politics: I’m glad I now have an opinion where the government should be targeting my tax money, and, from the inspection evaluation notes, I think that the report shows that generally schools are doing a great job.

There are a hundred stories like this in the data. It’ll take a bunch of hard graft and some clever maths to find the really surprising stories (that’s part of what we’re up to). But it’s all there. Actually it’s mostly all there in Ofsted Annual Report too, but percentages are hard to read and so another big part of Ashdown’s job is to add friendly meaning and understanding. That is, to point out which of these hundreds of numbers are important, from the perspective of pupils, parents and teachers.

Thanks Tom for a whole load of number crunching very early in the project, and thanks Matt Brown for whipping up these graphs!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Humanising data: introducing “Chernoff Schools” for Ashdown

“Hello Little Fella” is a group I started on Flickr a few years ago, spotting faces.

For a little while I had been taking pictures of objects, furniture, buildings and other things in my environment where I recognised, however abstract, a face.

I tagged them with what I thought the appropriate greeting – “hello little fella!”  – and soon it caught on with a few friends too.

Currently there are over 500 pictures from 129 people in there.

This is not an original thought – there are many other groups such as the far-more-successful “Faces In Places” – which has over 14000 pictures and almost 4000 members.

Why is it so popular?

Why do we love recognising faces everywhere?

In part, it’s due to a phenomenon called “Pareidolia”

“[a] psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.”

Researchers, using techniques such as magnetoencephalography (!) have discovered that a part of our brains – the Fusiform Face Area – makes sure anything that resembles a face hits us before anything else…

Here comes the science bit – from Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects. by Hadjikhani, Kveraga, Naik, and Ahlfors:

“The tendency to perceive faces in random patterns exhibiting configural properties of faces is an example of pareidolia. Perception of ‘real’ faces has been associated with a cortical response signal arising at approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset, but what happens when nonface objects are perceived as faces? Using magnetoencephalography, we found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoked an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas common objects did not evoke such activation. An earlier peak at 130 ms was also seen for images of real faces only. Our findings suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late reinterpretation cognitive phenomenon.”

So, all-in-all humans are very adept at seeing other human faces then – even if they are described in abstract, or not even human.

How might we harness this ability to help humanise the complex streams of data we encounter every day?

One visualisation technique that attempts to do just that is the “Chernoff Face”

Hermann Chernoff first published this technique in 1972 (the year I was born).

Matt’s Webb’s mentioned these before in his talk, ‘Scope’, and I think I first became aware of the technique when I was at Sapient around ten years ago. Poking into it at that time I found the investigations of Steve Champeon from 1995 or so into using a Java applet to create Chernoff faces.

There’s interesting criticism of the technique, but I’ve been waiting for the right project to try it on for about a decade now – and it looks like Ashdown just might be the one.

Ashdown is our codename for a suite of products and services around UK schools data. We’re trying to make them as beautiful and useful as possible for parents, teachers and anyone else who’s interested. There’s more on Ashdown here.

Over the last couple of weeks, the service design of the ‘alpha’ has started to take shape – and we’ve been joined by Matthew Irvine Brown who is art-directing and designing it.

In one of our brainstorms, where we were discussing ways to visualise a school’s performance – Webb blurted “Chernoff Schools!!!” – and we all looked at each other with a grin.

Chernoff Schools!!! Awesome.

Matt Brown immediately started producing some really lovely sketches based on the rough concept…

drawing_2009-11-16 0.jpeg

And imagining how an array of schools with different performance attributes might look like…

drawing_2009-11-16 1.jpeg

Whether they could appear in isometric 3D on maps or other contexts…

drawing_2009-11-20

And how they might be practically used in some kind of comparison table…

chernoff-schools-nearby_500w

Since then Tom and Matt Brown have been playing with the data set and some elementary processing code – to give the us the first interactive, data-driven sketches of Chernoff Schools.

It’s still early days – but I think that the Chernoff Schools are an important step in Ashdown finding its character and positioning – in the same way as the city-colours and ‘sparklogos’ we came up with early on in Dopplr’s life were.

It’s as much a logo, a mascot and an endearing, ownable emblem as it is a useful visualisation.

I can’t wait to see how the team develops it over the coming months.

Week 231

We are joined this week by Matthew Irvine Brown! Check out his portfolio. He’s primarily working on design for Ashdown, and possibly on Kendrick. That makes five of us in the room now, and our first meeting with the Ashdown team all together was fantastic: great energy. I’m beginning to see the path from design aspirations to product.

Tom Armitage is occupied with Ashdown this week, deep into scraping data. He’s editing a short article the blog this week too, by Georgina Voss, updating us about her ethnography on Silicon Roundabout. Matt Jones is on Ashdown, helping with the Bonnier project, following up a little biz dev, and is today at the RCA as part of his ongoing involvement in the Design Interactions brief on the future of manners.

Schulze is working with a little team on interaction design and video evidencing for Bonnier. Then he’s off to New York for a meeting or two and to speak at the Idea Conference. Schulze is away in Stockholm and maybe Oslo next week too, and it’s always tricky to have one of us away: it’s quite a delicate design sense we’re developing between us all here, and it’s one that’s fostered by working together, co-located, constantly pitching in, debating, sketching and sharing. That’s what makes it a studio I suppose. And it’s something I’d like to protect, especially in these early days, but there’s a balance to be struck. Travelling also means fresh eyes and new perspectives.

I’m liaising with builders to get quotes for the conversion of the new studio space, with accountants to answer queries on the year end and move to better book-keeping software, and researchers for: Ashdown; Silicon Roundabout; cybernetics. There are two contracts to chase and two proposals to complete. I know I say this every three months or so, but I’m busier and more productive than I’ve ever been. Last week we hosted drinks for our friends, in honour of Laika, and I got to say a few words about beginnings in general (and science fiction, of course). It’s exciting.

Oh, and there’s some new basic stuff on this site: new projects and a new talk.

I want to say something about these weekly updates, which I have now tagged ‘weeknotes’ at the inspiration of Bryan Boyer who also writes weekly updates. Kicker Studio summarise their weekly activity; Six to Start are occasional diarists; and our friends at Stamen this week posted about their first week at their new HQ. I love these.

An active blog is like a green activity light in instant messaging. For those of us who aren’t habitual bloggers, week notes help the process become regular. But more than that, companies are so often opaque. I write here whatever’s going on and whatever’s on my mind, and make connections I didn’t expect with readers I didn’t know I had. Little doors open to empathy. Running a small company is both hard and the best thing in the world. These week notes act as a kind of diary of reflections for me – I find writing them personally helpful – but they also trigger conversations with friends in similar situations about what they’ve seen before and what they’ve learned. I’d love for more companies and studios like us to keep week notes. I learn a lot, both writing and reading them, and it satisfies my nosiness as to what’s actually going on.

Links for a Monday Morning

  • wikireader.jpg
    How come I’d never heard of WikiReader before? It’s a $99 device for reading Wikipedia from a memory card. There’s no network connection of any form, just a micro-SD slot, meaning it’ll last for a year on three AA batteries. You can update it at any point by downloading a new dump; if that’s not possible, you can get a new dump sent to you on a memory card for a small fee. It’s got a touch-screen, so the UI doesn’t have to be localised – foreign keyboards can be implemented in software. And, best of all, it has a hardware button marked “Random” – capturing one of the hidden joys of Wikipedia.

    It feels like a nice companion to an e-reader: book in one hand, universal lookup device in the other, and not a network connection in site. The chunky form-factor also makes it really robust and immediate; something I’d consider slinging in a bag, especially for trips abroad. It’s designed by Openmoko, and available now.

  • oomouse81.pngAnother open-source product making its debut in hardware is the OpenOffice.org Mouse (pictured left). Eighteen buttons, an analogue joystick… I admit to sucking my teeth in disbelief when I first saw it; the comparisons that have been made to the Homer seem justified.

    But take a step back, and consider it more slowly, and perhaps it’s not the car-crash it seems; instead, its problems are more subtle. Chris Messina has a sharp takes on this:

    What I worry about, however, is that pockets of the open source community continue to largely be defined and driven by complexity, exclusivity, technocracy, and machismo… so far I’ve see little indication that open source developers take seriously the need for simpler, easier, and more intuitive future-forward interfaces. Perhaps I’m wrong or just uninformed, but so long as products like the OpenOfficeMouse continue to characterize the norm in open source design, I’m not likely going to be able to soon recommend open source solutions to anyone but the most advanced and privileged users.

    Friend of BERG Phil Gyford picks up a similar point:

    The problem isn’t that it has appalling design — it’s poor and uninspired, but it’s not the worst thing ever.

    The fundamental problem is that the product is aiming for two very specific, probably unreconcilable, niche audiences (hard-core gamers and hard-core office workers) while associating itself with a brand (OpenOffice) that wants to be completely mainstream.

    I think Phil’s right. If this was pitched as, say, an EVE Online mouse, I’d probably go “oh, that makes sense for a game and UI that complex”. But for a brand trying to be taken seriously as a mainstream alternative to expensive office suites, this seems misguided, and only perpetuates preconceived notions of Open Source’s attitude towards design.

  • Schulze has bought a new car, and trust him to buy the only car I’ve seen with its own font. That is: not a font designed for the car, but a font made by the car.

    Toyota motion-captured an iQ from overhead using software written in openFrameworks, and used it to generate a handwriting font built out of careful cornering and handbrake turns. It feels like the opposite of DHL’s fake GPS art: Toyota are keen to show the software and prove it actually works. Best of all, they’ll even let you download – and use – the font itself.

  • I couldn’t let a round-up of links go with a mention to James Bridle’s recreation of MENACE, Donald Michie‘s learning machine to play noughts-and-crosses built only out of matchboxes and beads, which he first demonstrated at Playful two weeks ago.

    James was kind enough to bring his MENACE to a recent BERG drinks evening, and it drew the gasps it thoroughly deserves; 301 matchboxes is an imposing piece of computing.

  • And, finally, a nice little piece of what you might call design research: Giles Turnbull investigates nomenclatures for legobricks, surveying a selection of children he knows:

    This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?

    Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store.

    Lovely. (Personally, I called a Brick 1×1 a “one-bobble” and a plate 1×1 a “flat one-bobble”).

Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like

Matt’s mentioned in the past few summaries of weeks that I’ve been working on ‘material exploration’ for a project called Ashdown. I wanted to expand a little on what material exploration looks like for code and what it feels like to me, because it feels like a strange and foreign territory at times. This is my second material exploration of data for BERG, the first being at the beginning of the Shownar project.

There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it’s about what material explorations look like when performed with data. Partly, it’s about the role of code as a tool to explore data. We don’t write about code much on the site, because we’re mainly interested in the products we produce and the invention involved in them, but it’s sometimes important to talk about processes and tools, and this, I feel, is one of those times. At the same time, as well as talking about technical matters, I wanted to talk a little about what the act of doing this work feels like.

Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that’s a shame. Material explorations are something I’ve really only done since I’ve joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar – in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that’s appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.

Material explorations

BERG has done material explorations before – they were a big part of our Nokia Personalisation project, for instance – and the value of them is fairly immediate when the materials involved are things you can touch.

But Ashdown is a software project for the web – its substrate is data. What’s the value of a material exploration with an immaterial substrate? What does it look like to perform such explorations? And isn’t a software project usually defined before you start work on it?

Not always. Invention comes from design, and until the data’s been exposed to designers in a way that they can explore it, and manipulate it, and come to an understanding of what design is made possible by the data, there essentially is no product. To invent a product, we need to design, and to design, we need to explore the material. It’s as simple as that.

There’s a lot of value in this process. We know, at a high level, what the project’s about: in the case of Ashdown, Matt’s described it as “a project to bring great user experience to UK education data“. The high level pitch for the project is clear, but we need to get our hands mucky with the data to answer some more significant questions about it: what will it do? What will it feel like to use? What are the details of that brief?

The goals of material exploration

There are several questions that the material exploration of data seeks to answer:

  • What’s available: what datasets are available? What information is inside them? How easily are they to get hold of – are they available in formatted datasets or will they need scraping? Are they freely available or will they need licensing?
  • What’s significant: it’s all very well to have a big mass of data, but what’s actually significant within it? This might require datamining, or other statistical analysis, or getting an expert eye on it.
  • What’s interesting: what are the stories that are already leaping out of the data? If you can tell stories with the data, chances are you can build compelling experiences around it.
  • What’s the scale: getting a good handle on the order of magnitude helps you begin to understand the scope of the project, and the level of details that’s worth going into. Is the vast scale of information what’s important, or is it the ability to cherry-pick deep, vertical slices from it more useful? That answer varies from project to project.
  • What’s feasible: this goes hand in hand with understanding the scale; it’s useful to know how long basic tasks like parsing or importing data take to know the pace the application can move at, or what any blockers to a realistic application are. There is lots of scope to improve performance later, but knowing the limitations of processing the dataset early on helps inform design decisions.
  • Where are the anchor points: this ties into “what’s significant”, but essentially: what are the points you keep coming back to – the core concepts within the datasets, that will become primary objects not just in the code but in the project design?
  • What does it afford?: By which I mean: what are the obvious hooks to other datasets, or applications, or processes. Having location data affords geographical visualisation – maps – and also allows you to explore proximity; having details of Local Education Authorities allows you to explore local politics. What other ideas immediately leap into mind from exploring the data?

To explore all these ideas, we need to shape the data into something malleable: we need to apply a layer of code on the top of it. And it can’t just exist as code: we also need the beginnings of a website.

This won’t be the final site – or even the final code – but it’s the beginnings of a tool that can explain the data available, and help explore them, to designers, developers, and other project stakeholders, and that’s why it’s available, as early as possible, as an actual site.

To do this, the choice of tools used is somewhat important, but perhaps more important is the approach: keeping the code malleable, ensuring no decisions are too binding, and not editorialising. “Show everything” has become a kind of motto for this kind of work: because no-one else knows the dataset yet, it’s never worth deeming things “not worth sharing” yet. Everything gets a representation on the site, and then informed design decisions can be made by the rest of the team.

What does the code for such explorations look like?

It’s a bit basic. Not simple, but we’re not going to do anything clever: architecture is not the goal here. It will likely inform the final architecture, and might even end up being re-used, but the real goal is to get answers out of the system as fast as possible, and explore the scale of the data as widely as possible.

That means doing things like building temporary tables or throwaway models where necessary: speed is more important than normalisation, and, after all, how are you going to know how to structure the data until you’ve explored it?

Also, because we’re working on very large chunks of data, it’s important that any long running processes – scrapers, parsers, processors – need to be really granular, and able to pick up where they left off; my processing tasks usually only do one thing, and require running in order, but it’s better than one long complex process that can’t be restarted – if that falls over in the middle and can’t be restarted, it’s a lot of time (a valuable resource at these early stages) wasted.

It’s also important that there’s a suitably malleable interface to the data for you, the developer. For me, that’s a REPL/console of some sort – something slightly higher level than a MySQL terminal, that lets you explore codified representations of data (models) rather than just raw information. Shownar was built in PHP, and whilst it was, for many reasons, the right choice of platform for the project, I missed having a decent shell interface onto the system. On Ashdown, I’m working in Rails, and already the interactive console has made itself indispensable. For a good illustration of the succinct power of REPLs, and why they’re a useful thing to have around for data exploration, it’s definitely worth reading Simon Willison’s recent post on why he likes Redis.

Visualisation

Visualisation is a really important part of the material exploration process. When it comes to presenting our explorations, it’s not just enough to have big lists, and vast, RESTful interfaces on top of blobs of data: that’s still not a very effective translation of the stories the data tells. Right now, we don’t need to be fussy about what we visualise: it’s worth sticking graphs everywhere and anywhere we can, just to start exploring new representations of the data. It’s also useful to start learning what sort of visual representations suit the data: some data just doesn’t make as much sense in a graph as a table, and that’s OK – but it’s good to find out now.

Because now isn’t the time to be shaving too many yaks, when it comes to visualisation libraries and tools, the ones that are fastest or that you are most familiar with are probably the best. For that reason, I like libraries that only touch the client-side such as the Google Charts API, or gRaphael (which I’ve been using to good effect recently). Interactive graphs, of the kind gRaphael makes trivial, are more than just eye candy: it’s actually really useful, with large datasets, to be able to mouse around a pie chart and find out which slice corresponds to which value.

Visualisation isn’t just a useful lens on the data for designers; it can be hugely beneficial for developers. A recent example of the usefulness of visualisation for development work in progress comes from this video behind the scenes on Naughty Dog’s PS3 game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. About twenty seconds in, you can see this image:

of a developer playing the game with a vast amount of telemetry overlaid, reacting as he plays. It’s not pretty, but it does provide an immediate explanation of how gameplay affects the processors of the console, and is clearly an invaluable debugging tool.

What data exploration feels like

It often feels somewhat pressured: time is tight and whilst an hour spend going down the wrong alley is fine, a day spent fruitlessly is somewhat less practical. At the same time, without doing this exploration, you won’t even know what is “fruitless”. It can be frightening to feel so directionless, and overcoming that fear – trusting that any new information is the goal – is tough, but important to making progress.

It can also be overwhelming. Shownar ended up with a massive dataset; Ashdown’s is huge already. That dataset – its meaning, its structure – gets stuck in your head, and it’s easy to lose yourself to it. That often makes it harder to explain to others – you start talking in a different langauge – so it becomes critical to get it out of your head and onto screens.

It also feels lonely in the data-mines at times. Not because you’re the only person working on it, but because no-one else can speak the language you do; the deeper you get into the data, the harder you have to work to communicate it, and the quicker you forget how little anyone else on the project knows.

Invention becomes difficult: being bogged down in the mechanics of Making It Work often makes it hard for me to have creative ideas about what you can do with that data, or new ways of looking at it. Questions from others help – a few simple questions about the data opens enough avenues to keep me busy all day. One thing we tried to do was ensure that I made a “new graph” every day; the graph should only take about 30 minutes to write the code and do, but it ensures that I don’t spend all my time on writing processing or scraping code.

At times, the code you’re writing can feel a bit string and glue – not the robust, Quality Code you’d like to be writing as a developer. I’d like to TATFT, but this isn’t the place for it: we’re sculpting and carving at the moment, and the time for engineering is later. For now, getting it on the screen is key, and sometimes, that means sacrifices. You learn to live with it – but just make sure you write the tests for the final product.

There are a lot of pregnant pauses. For Ashdown, I’ve had long-running processes running overnight on Amazon EC2 servers. Until I come in the next day, I have no idea if it worked, and even if it did work, whether or not it’ll be useful. As such, the work is bursty – there’s code, and a pause to gather results, and then a flurry of code, and then more gathering. All I’ve learned to date is: that’s the rhythm of exploration, and you learn to deal with it.

What emerges at the end of this work?

For starters, a better understanding of the data available: what there is, how to represent it, what the core concepts are. Sometimes, core concepts are immediately obvious – it’s likely that “schools” are going to be a key object in Ashdown. Sometimes, they’re compound; the core concept in Shownar turned out to be “shows”, but how the notion of a ‘show’ was represented in the data turned out to be somewhat complex. As part of these core concepts, the beginnings of a vocabulary for the application emerge.

Technically, you’ve got the beginnings of a codebase and a schema, but much of that might be redundant or thrown out in future; you shouldn’t bet on this, but it’s a nice side effect. You also might, as a side effect of building a site, have the beginnings of some IA, but again, don’t bet on it: that’s something for designers to work on.

You should also have a useful tool for explaining the project to colleagues, stakeholders, and anyone coming onto the project new – and that tool will allow everyone else to gain insight into just what’s possible with the data available. Enabling creativity, providing a tool for non-developers to explore the data, is the key goal of such exploration. And that leads into a direction and brief for the final piece of software – and it’s a brief that you can be confident in, because it’s derived from exploration of the data, rather than speculation.

And then, the invention can begin.

Why social matters

A few years ago I read a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. It introduced me to the term social capital.

Social capital is an abstract measure that wraps up how many people you know, the information flow in your network, how many people owe you favours, that kind of thing.

High social capital goes hand in hand with being in groups, and with knowing your neighbours. People with high social capital have better jobs, live longer, and are healthier and happier. In areas with high social capital, there’s less litter, and car drivers behave better at road junctions. It’s big things and little things.

It’s a big deal. If you aren’t in any groups, and you joinjust one, your odds of dying next year are cut in half. If you’re a smoker and aren’t in any groups, statistically it’s about the same whether you should join a group or quit smoking. (Source.)

Many aspects of living are correlated with low social capital but a couple stand out. What damages social capital, at least that we know of, at least in the US, is two things: commuting, and watching television. Both stop you spending time with your friends and neighbours.

So as increased commuting times and TV dinners spread across the USA, social capital dropped drastically between 1975 and the end of the century. In that time, the average number of times Americans had friends over for dinner in a year dropped from 15 to half that.

I suspect, if we had ways to see it, we’d realise we just passed through a Great Depression of the social world.

Social software and Web 2.0

Social software was a buzz word a few years ago. It came from a realisation that websites, being online, could include people and groups of people in a way desktop applications couldn’t. Social software meant new design considerations and a renewed acknowledgement that different people use computers differently. Showing off, sharing, politeness and play would have to take their place next to usability.

I wrote a short summary of social software ideas back in 2004.

Web 2.0 is now another hackneyed buzzword, and it’s hard to remember what a shift it was when the modern Web started emerging. To me, Web 2.0 is social software releasing what it could be when social is baked in from the foundations, instead of being added as an extra to an old-school news site or online shopping catalogue.

Why social matters

It now feels natural to incorporate our friends into photo management, encyclopaedias and tracking our finances. I love that Web 2.0 has been so successful it barely needs to be pointed out and the ideas from social software are part of everyday Web design discourse.

But it’s important to remember that for ten years – a decade – the Web was not a naturally social space, where conversations and creativity could flourish side-by-side and hand-in-hand – and for many, now, it’s still not. That we’re prepared to give away our rights and privacy in exchange for leaving comments or joining a chat system in a game tells me that we’re still starved for social connection online.

The fact that our hobbies are social again is great. Flickr builds social capital, Twitter builds social capital. The fact that are hobbies are social again is important.

Social means showing off and sharing, and politeness and play, yes. But social also means healthier, wealthier and happier, and that’s a big, big deal. I believe that’s why social matters.

The bit of social I particularly care about is small groups, and my close friends and family, and I believe we’re still not designing well there. But that’s a story for another day.

The ghost in the field

basic field mapping animation

This image is a photographic mapping of the readable volume of a radio field from an RFID reader. The black component in the image is an RFID reader, similar to the component inside the yellow part of the oyster card reader. The camera has been fixed in its position and the reader photographed. Using a tag connected to an LED we paint in the edges of the readable volume with a long exposure and animate them to show the form.

Following Nearness, the chain reaction film, is Immaterials: The ghost in the field, our next film with Timo Arnall at the Touch project. There are 4 billion RFID tags in the world. They may soon outnumber the people. Readers and tags are increasingly embedded in the things and environments in which we live. How do readers see tags? When we imagine RFID and their invisible radio fields, what should we see? Immaterials explains the experiments we have performed to see RFID as it sees itself.

There is a power to be found in understanding everything from systems, to APIs, to components, to data, through to their enveloping materials (such as plastics and metals) as substrates to interfere with, bend and test. Through this we form complete wholes that make a common cultural sense to people, as products. The common category that contains services, APIs, plastics, componentry and their manufacturing processes is their behaviours and their consistencies, their immateriality.

We need to richly understand the behaviour and nature of the tag interaction with readers. Timo summarises:

It is incredible how often RFID is seen as a long-range ‘detector’ or how little relevant information is contained in technical data-sheets. When this information is the primary material that we are working with as designers, this is highly problematic. By doing these kind of experiments we can re-frame the technology according to our experience of it, and generate our own material knowledge.

There is a sequence in the video where I briefly discuss the directionality of tags. Most tags (and therefore their antenna) are flat. They have a direction. The shape of the readable volume changes according to the antennas orientation to the reader. The following image shows two volumes. The first visualised with green LEDs shows the readable volume from interactions between a reader and a tag parallel to it;  the second, visualised with red LEDs, shows the volume produced by the same tag held perpendicular. Two very distinctive and different shapes can clearly be seen.

parallel and perpendicular mapping

It is not the radio field produced by the reader itself we are looking at. That is much, much larger. The images show the volume in which the energy in the space surrounding the reader is inducing a current large enough to wake and run the RFID chip at the end of the antenna in the tag. The readable volume can be mapped around a tag or inside the field produced by a reader component, but it only exists between the two.

Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollenating with data as I travel the city.

We work with traditional materials and fabrication for our product and industrial design, but the exciting contemporary products of our age are more than the sum of their materials, those poorly bound knots of plastic and silicon in our hands and homes.

Matt Jones described what we do as ‘Post Industrial Design.’ Perfect! Where once industrial design was concerned with radii, form, and finish, we now deal in behaviours, experience, shifting context, and time.

The products we design now are made with new stuffs. Service layers, video, animation, subscription models, customisation, interface, software, behaviours, places, radio, data, APIs and connectivity are amongst the immaterials for modern products.

Immaterials are the new substrates for opportunity and risk in product design.

Next week, Immaterials: Unravelling the antennae.

Week 226

Matt Webb’s down-under preparing for his talk at Web Directions South, prior to him going on holiday for a bit, so I’m writing the weekly update! I’m drunk with the power!

So – in summary: Schulze is spending the week in zero-g combat training, Tom is playing with an orangutan genome that he got from some guy in Zurich and I’m building a laser-harp.

Not really.

Jack’s working on Ojito some more this week, and with me on new business development. He’s also working on some animations with Timo for the Touch project.

Tom is still engrossed in material exploration of the data sets for Ashdown as Webb described so nicely in Week 225.

He’s wrangling it now to the point of finding the interesting edges and qualities to output that into graphical, understandable diagnostic artefacts that will help us when the design begins in earnest. I find this really useful in particular, as more of visual thinker – helps me get my head round the territory far faster. Boundary objects.

He’s also doing a little bit of sound design on the side for our casual game proto that we’re delivering at the end of the week. Busy boy!

I’m still working with Paul Pod on that sprint. It’s been a really short intense project but I’m super-pleased with how it’s going and from what we can tell so is the client – hopefully it will lead to something bigger…

My creative direction for it so far has been “Y’know… Peggle meets that Röyksopp video!

Luckily, having worked with Paul before he’s able to understand garbling like that from me, and go far beyond what I imagine.

I’m also preparing the project plan and internal briefing documents for Ashdown. Writing a brief for a project that you’re going to design might seem a little odd, but of course it’s still valuable in order to really set some goals and scope going in.

What else? Well, I’ve already mentioned the new business development meetings with Jack, and I’m writing a final proposal for a mobile storytelling tool we hope to prototype.

Ok – with that, it’s back to the laser-harp.

My Weekend On Series 40

Taking my iPhone to a music festival didn’t really seem like the most sensible idea: a capacitive touchscreen in a potentially muddy field? A battery that only just lasts a day? It’s not exactly suited to the wilderness, not to mention a little fragile.

At the same time: it’s exactly the place that connectivity comes in handy, for finding lost friends. And so I decided to take a spare. Unfortunately, all my old phones are locked to the wrong network, so it was time to make a trip to a phone shop and buy a cheap pay-as-you-go phone.

2760-closed

I ended up with the Nokia 2760, otherwise known as the “second cheapest Nokia in the shop”, which seemed like a safe bet. The clamshell form factor was another layer of protection from the elements (when I wasn’t sure what the weather would be like), and perhaps more importantly, meant that the keypad buttons were much larger than on equivalent candybar-shaped devices. That was a distinct advantage given the potential for drunk, clumsy texting when in the vicinity of the Somerset Cider bus.

I spent a weekend away from pervasive connectivity, from GPS, from Twitteriffic, from thousands of apps, and instead just took the state-of-the-art when it comes to really cheap, no-frills phones.

And, you know, it was absolutely fine. The phone does everything you’d expect it to: it makes calls, it sends texts, it has a simple camera, and it has an alarm clock. I still have the muscle memory for Nokia’s T9 implementation. I could have installed Opera Mini on it (far better than the built-in browser) primarily for using Twitter, but really, I wouldn’t mess with it in any other way. And, of course, the hardware is great, as you’d expect from a firm with the industrial design experience of Nokia: it’s pleasant to hold in the hand, and it certainly doesn’t feel cheap. Also, it’s small; smartphones really have made me forget how tiny phones had got at one point, and the 2760 is a reminder that much smaller packages still exist.

Using the Nokia over the long weekend also reminded me that my usage of mobile phones has actually changed very little in the past decade. When it comes to the functionality of a phone, there’s almost no difference between my iPhone and the Nokia: they call, they make texts, they have a few useful features. Most of the change in my use comes down to the “smart” half of the smartphone: all the features that have converged from other devices. I no longer carry an iPod around with me; I no longer need an A to Z on me; I write my to-do lists into Things rather than my notebook; I can get on the web without complicated Bluetooth rituals.

2760-open

But none of it is necessarily unique – or vital – to my experience of the phone-as-mobile-communicator. I enjoyed the practicality and immediacy of the Nokia. I often find the wall of phones you see in shops tiring now – a series of black slabs, all identical in appearance thanks to the ubiquitous touchscreen, all to be distinguished by the software they run (which is usually never demonstrated in shops). The 2760 wears its phone-ness on its sleeve.

The magic of mobile phones is, first and foremost, that they are wireless communicators. You can talk, to other people, anywhere in the world, without wires. Everything else – all the magic in your convergence device – is something else. What phones have become, but perhaps they’ve transcended that description of phone-ness. All that is nice to have, for sure, and I’m very glad to have my iPhone back, but I was not once inconvenienced.

And here’s the big takeaway for me: it was fascinating to realise just how good the low-end products on the mass market today are. It’s easy to talk excitedly about innovation, and the new possibilities brought by every-more-advanced technology. It’s not much harder to be excited by products for emerging and developing markets, finding ingenious ways to bring costs right down and, potentially, change lives that have never experienced new kinds of technology. But it’s a lot harder to be excited the territory that lies between those two: refinement for the mass market of the developed world; products so unashamedly not new, but instead a continuation of past innovation, often doing nothing more than bringing that technology to a wider market at a lower price.

That’s as much part of design as new and shiny, and we don’t talk about it enough. The design community talks a lot about products like the iPod, but never the $20 MP3 players you find in the Sears catalogues. We talk about Chumbys and Pleos, but never the hundreds of items on shelves in Toys R Us right now, that are selling, and played with, and distill (sometimes well, sometimes terribly) so many of the ideas we, as a design community, talk about, into a $30 toy.

We shouldn’t stop talking about the iPods and the Roombas, either, but it’s worth remembering there is a world outside the five or six ubiquitous examples that do the rounds in conference season. And that’s what I learned when I bought a cheap mobile phone to take to a field.

Hello, Ojito!

Hello, Ojito!
Ojito is the name of a new 3d viewing toy we’re making. We took the first prototypes to FooCamp recently, and it got a great reception – but more importantly we got great feedback. Thanks to all!

We’ll be talking more about Ojito in the extremely-near-future, but for now here’s the logo and our mascot for the project. As Matt Webb found out on our trip, “Ojito” means “Little Eye” in Portuguese, which inspired me to create this little fella.

Hello, Ojito!

Week 221

Matt Jones and I have been in San Francisco this week, for meetings and a conference (an event called Foo Camp). We’ve been demoing Ojito, a cheap 3D device for the iPhone we’ve developed. Although it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, we’ve pitched it maybe two dozen times, sometimes in less than a minute in a corridor, and it’s fascinating how that process helps distill a product concept and clarify its route to market.

I met one guy and he was like, “oh, great name, how did you come up with it,” so I told the story: we give all our projects codenames after places on the Colorado Plateau. We need essentially meaningless names for the dark projects, and it’s one of my favourite regions in the world. Ojito is a place there. And he replied, “no, no, you don’t understand. I speak Portuguese. Ojito, it means LITTLE EYE.” Auspicious.

My plan for the remainder of this week is to write Ojito up as a plan and cost it, and catch up on the admin that’s difficult to do away — invoicing, payroll and so on: there’s an approved suppliers list the company needs to get on otherwise we’ll lose our chance at a project, and the other big task is setting up a subsidiary company to run Ashdown so that project can start. The wheels are in motion but I need to speak with the bank.

Jack and Tom are in London, working together on a toy I’m really looking forward to seeing. It needs a codename. I understand there are stickers involved. That’ll continue next week.

Tom has been spit-and-polishing the website. Jack has been finishing the stationery templates for invoices and so on. Next week he’s doing some video work with Timo on our RFID research project.

Energy is important to new product development, and to creating new work, as is perspective. It’s easy to get mired in even the most exhilarating work and lose sight of what’s important in a product, and work is always better – and easier – when it’s approached with bright eyes and an open, confident nature. For projects that last longer out of the public eye, you need willpower too.

Conversations and conferences help (Matt J and Tom are both at dconstruct this Friday). What erodes these feelings is a lack of stability. In that spirit, the big news this week is mundane: we’ve been waiting for invoices to two clients to be paid… and in the last couple days, the money landed in the bank. Frankly it’s a relief. Large company bureaucracy can make the payment process time-consuming to navigate, and now especially – what with expanding and investing in new product ideas – Berg’s two major resource constraints are attention and cash flow. Having these invoices paid makes me realise quite how tense I’ve been about the latter for the last month (I don’t mind saying that most of my waking cycles go to thinking about the company), and it’ll be good to return to the normal situation of just having too many exciting projects to work on. That’s life in the Escalante.

Week 219

It’s the last week of Schulze & Webb because we’re renaming the company on Thursday. S&W no longer says what we are: four permanents and a network of expert practitioners, working in design strategy, invention and new product development for ourselves and others. The new name is good for the next four years… and more on that in a day or two.

Tom’s working on the website. It’s super clean, and the launch scope is good and tight. It’s all built in WordPress so we can add to it continuously — a big problem with the current one is how hard it is to update, given how busy we get. Matt Jones is on that too. He’s designed it as a hypertext, all cross-linked so browsing is a flow of reading. He’s also writing, sketching and designing as the deliverables are created for the two design strategy projects. And he’ll be on business development towards the end of the week.

Jack is working on negotiations for the new studio, developing our new branding, and today is with our model maker on various projects… one is Ojito, prototypes of which Matt J and I are hoping to take to California when we visit next week.

I’m writing, one design strategy doc and a little copy for the website. And I’m still on business. The Ashdown contract needs to be run past our solicitor, which is new for us but it’s more complex than ones we’ve signed before. And I have my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to move the iPhone app job forward towards kick-off later this week too.

See you on the other side of the re-brand!

Week 218

Matt J’s two design strategy projects of last week continue. One is at illustration and document design stage, and the other is feeding into a bigger process through docs and meetings. Tom A continues work on the new website, and we’ll be having some friends of the company over for drinks on 19 August to help us launch. Jack Schulze is working on our new stationery and typography, and on moving us into a new studio with friends.

Schulze also has a new prototype in hand from the model maker we work with — the feasibility test has come back well. The project is codenamed Ojito. We name a bunch of our projects with place names from the Colorado Plateau. Jack leads new product development and prototyping internally and for clients. His main client project, a toy car for AHO, wasn’t supposed to be a priority last week, but Andy H was able to come in and work on the electrical engineering so there was more progress than we expected. We’re hoping there will be more of that this week.

My week is costings, admin and closing projects. Matt J and Schulze have each put out proposals this week, and I’ve helped with costings for both. I’m working on a financial model and some user scenarios with Jack; a visual/interaction design project in Germany and an education project in London, both at contract stage and requiring a little shepherding towards signing; and an iPhone project we need to get to a letter of intent this week to keep timings sweet. I was hoping to gather material for the preparation of our year end accounts, but it looks like that’ll have to wait until next week… because instead I’ll be putting together a contract:

Tom Armitage has been working with us four days a week for the last six months, primarily on Shownar. This week is his first week full time. He’s been doing ace work as lead developer and a kind of embedded journalist/design researcher, and I’m super pleased to make this permanent.

Stating the obvious: the book you can read with one hand.

Just a little obvious aside, this – but something that only struck me this morning as I was heading to the studio. I mentioned it to Webb, and he said “write it down” so here we are.

It’s been said that 2009 is the year that e-books go mainstream, with the industrial and service design of Amazon’s Kindle and Stanza on the iPhone doing the same for the format as the iPod and iTunes did for MP3/digital music.

Maybe – but 2009 could be said to be the year that one-handed reading became enjoyable for the first time since we invented the form-factor of the book when the codex arrived about 2000 years ago.

Since then, we’ve made all sorts of gizmos and gadgets to enable one-handed reading.

thumbthing

And machines too!

Look at this handsome fella for digitising entire volumes quickly:

1600

It features SureTurn Advanced Page Turning Technology!

I guess that’s no-handed reading, but… anyway…

We’ve invented technologies to deal with the form-factor of the book and change our bodies’ relationship to it, but now we’ve separated the wine from the bottle, we’re free to try different ways of reading.

As I say, it’s stating the bloomin’ obvious, but the freedom to read in short bursts and constrained situations that the UI of Stanza gives is transformative.

Reading on trains, tubes, buses, queues becomes not only possible, but a pleasure.

"...hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time"

That’s perhaps the thing I’m trying to get to.

We just did something it took 2000 years to figure out. Amongst all the talk of disrupting business systems, revolutionising access to knowledge etc, ergonomic innovation is being overlooked in the discussion of the e-book future.

What’s next?

Here & There influences

I’m going to tell you a little bit about the influences on Here & There, a project about representation of urban places, from when it began. It was warmly received when I first presented some corners of it back at Design Engaged in 2004, before Schulze & Webb existed. Here & There is a projection drawing from maps, comics, television, and games.

This particular version is a horizonless projection in Manhattan. The project page is here, where large prints of the uptown and downtown views can be seen and are available to buy.

I’ve been observing the look and mechanisms in maps since I began working in graphic design. For individuals, and all kinds of companies, cities are an increasing pre-occupation. Geography is the new frontier. Wherever I look in the tech industry I see material from architects and references and metaphors from the urban realm. Here & There draws from that, and also exploits and expands upon the higher levels of visual literacy born of television, games, comics and print.

The satellite is the ultimate symbol of omniscience. It’s how we wage wars, and why wars are won. That’s why Google Earth is so compelling. This is what the map taps into.

The projection works by presenting an image of the place in which the observer is standing. As the city recedes into the (geographic) distance it shifts from a natural, third person representation of the viewer’s immediate surroundings into a near plan view. The city appears folded up, as though a large crease runs through it. But it isn’t a halo or hoop though, and the city doesn’t loop over one’s head. The distance is potentially infinite, and it’s more like a giant ripple showing both the viewers surroundings and also the city in the distance.

schulze-holding-posters

Origins and sources

Some of my favourite maps are drawn by a British writer, walker and accountant named Alfred Wainwright. Phil Baines provides background:

“Wainwright was an accountant born in Lancashire who fell in love with the English Lake District and moved there to live and work. All his free time was spent walking the fells, and he began his series of seven ‘pictorial guides to the Lakeland Fells’ in 1952 as a way of repaying his gratitude to them. The work took 13 years.” (Type & Typography)

Wainwright’s walking maps are drawn to suit their context of use, the books are intended to be used while walking. As the reader begins their walk, the map represents their location in overview plan. As the walk extends through the map, the perspective slowly shifts naturally with the unfolding landscape, until the destination is represented in a pictorial perspective view, as one would see it from their standpoint.

Wainwright spread

This is a reversal of the Here & There projection. In Wainwright’s projection we stand in plan, and look into perspective. Wainwright’s view succeeds in open ground where one can see the distance… but in a city you can only see the surrounding buildings. Wainwright and Here & There both present what’s around you with the most useful perspective, and lift your gaze above and beyond to see the rest.

David Hockney presents a fantastic dissection of perspective in the film A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth. He describes a very old painting from China which depicts a journey along the grand canal. I really like how he describes the scene as ‘making sense.’

He justifies a deviation from Western perspective, that to represent things as they strike your eye is not even functionally as good as some other interpretative distortions. In this painting in which there’s a grossly distorted perspective, in which there aren’t even any rules, it still makes sense because it changes how you put yourself in the painting, and that changes where you put yourself outside it.

Augmented reality

There is a element in the map, in the uptown view, of a bus. Its destinations in both directions are shown. (I love NY bus routes, the cross town super power!) This is to explore how augmenting the map with local information might work.

bus-context

One of my intentions with the project is to make an exploration into way-finding devices. One of my favourite examples of augmented reality is from these American Road maps from 1905. The map is stored in a book, and good for only one route. In fact, it isn’t a map as we’d typically understand one.

American Road Maps 1905

Michaels, H. Sargent. Photographic Runs: Series C, Chicago to Lake Geneva to Delavan, Delavan to Beloit. Chicago: H. Sargent Michaels, 1905. Used with permission from Prof. Robert French, Osher Map library, University of Southern Maine, Owls Head Transportation Museum.

The book dates from before the national road sign infrastructure was introduced to American highways or inter-city roads. Each page is a photo of a junction, with every junction between the two cities included, and an arrow is drawn over the photo to say which direction to take. As the driver progresses along their route, they turn pages, each junction they arrive at corresponding to the one in the current photo. (Many thanks to Steve Krug for the sharing his discovery of these great pieces.)

First person to God games

I don’t like the way maps (in-game maps) work in most video games. They seem to break my flow of play, and locating one’s actor in the game isn’t satisfying. I’d love to see a first person or third person shooter where the landscape bent up to reveal a limited arc of the landscape in plan over distance. As a video game, the Here & There projection slides from Halo, through GTA into Syndicate, to end in SimCity.

game collage

Although I never played it, I’ve heard a lot about Luigi’s Mansion for the Nintendo GameCube. Luigi wonders around a haunted mansion and hoovers up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner. I heard about a mechanic in the game which involved a virtual Gameboy Advance in the game. Luigi could take it out and use it to inspect the world. The game played out in the third person with a view of Luigi in place, but I think when you look in the Advance, it gave a first person view from Luigi’s position. Well, if it didn’t, it should have done.

I know that in some special games the Gameboy Advance could be plugged into the GameCube, to be used as a special controller. It would be amazing to use the second screen in a controller for that first person perspective. Imagine if you could guide your actor around in third person and glance down at the screen in your hands for close inspection or telescopic sniping.

Powers and cities

Recently Matt Jones and Rod Mclaren discussed Jason Bourne and James Bond and how they use cities. Jones characterises Bourne in contrast to Bond:

“… in addition, Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour”

For Bourne, the city is his power, Jones continues:

“A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities.”

I like to talk about the projection as a superpower, the power to be both in the city and above it.

Last year Warren Ellis wrote an Iron Man arc called Extremis. As ever, fine stuff. And with great pictures from Adi Granov too.

Ellis, unsatisfied with controlling the Iron Man suit by normal means (sensors, or weeny joysticks in the gloves or something) as an exoskeleton (picture Ripley in the clumsy Powerloader), Stark must ingest the Extremis serum in order to match his enemy, Mallen, and prevent him from his destructive path into Washington. The serum welds Stark to his tech. It leaves him ‘containing’ the membrane-like ‘undersheath’ he uses to control the Iron Man suit. It is stored inside his bones.

Iron Man mind control

The final sequence of panels in the penultimate book has Stark wearing the Iron Man suit, setting off to confront his enemy, his recent transformation has left him with new powers…

Iron Man leaves to confront Mallen

“I can see through satellites now.”

What a thought! Within one field of view, to be both in the world and to see yourself in it. The power of looking through, and occupying, your own field of vision. Awesome.

What if the projection appeared inside location-aware binoculars? Hold them up, and live satellite images are superimposed in ‘the bend’ onto the natural view of the city as it lifts up into plan! You’d see the traffic and people that just pulled out of view into a side street from above mapped onto your natural view.

Timo Arnall posted a video showing a Google Streetview pan controlled with the digital compass inside the device:

It begins to reveal how Here & There might feel if it were moving beneath your feet.

Thanks

I would like to thank both James King (art direction) and Campbell Orme (technical direction) for their tireless efforts in bringing this work to life. Email them and make them work on your stuff. They are talented, humane and brilliant designer/thinkers.

Art prints of Here & There have been produced in a limited run and can be purchased here. Please buy one and stick it on a wall.

Fantastical Design

Sometimes, it’s worth joining the dots between a few things you find. In this case, that was this image of a breadboard that dumps its crumbs onto a birdfeeder.

(The original image isn’t available at the moment, http://curroclaret.es having been temporarily taken offline due to excess bandwidth; I’ll link to it in due course.)

It’s both a piece of design and a visual joke: it connects two ideas (birds eat crumbs; breadboards collect crumbs) in the shortest possible distance. The entire rationale, the entire concept behind the design is laid flesh. Is it a product, a thing that makes sense in the world? Not really. The realities of kitchen design start to impinge if you think about it too long. Instead, it’s perhaps best to look at it and smile; if there’s something to be learned from it, it’s perhaps that two ideas really be connected as simply as with a bent piece of tubing.

The birdfeeder made me think a little about other examples of fantastical design, both real and imaginary. I’m not sure I’m anywhere near finding a deep interconnected thread between these, but I think as a juxtaposition of images, they all tie nicely together. In the meantime, here’s where the birddfeeder lead me.

Coincidentally, it made for a nice comparison to a recent post from friend of S&W Rod Mclaren, where he posits the idea for a combined filing cabinet and stove:

It also reminded me of a presentation of Matt’s about some of his favourite science fiction and the ideas therein, and, specifically, this slide:

There’s obviously a historical precedent for this kind of fantastic design and thought – practical ideas realised in somewhat absurd means – such as Heath Robinson’s gusset tightener:

or, if you’re American, the fantastic contraptions of Rube Goldberg:

Fantastical, outlandish design somewhat comes to a head in the work of Tim Hunkin, who somehow manages to balance a delightful sense of the absurd with solid, realistic technical skill; he’s only interested in the working and the real, and yet his sense of the absurd is at least as well refined as Heath Robinson’s.

What do all these things have in common? They explore the value of the absurd, be it absurd simplicity – as in the birdfeeder – or absurd complexity – as in Heath Robinson’s complex series of magnets and pulleys. What value does this kind of sketching, or thinking-out-loud, have for the practicing designer? I’m not entirely sure – after all, I am not a “practicing designer” myself. They remind me a little of Matt Ward’s sketching technique (which Jack discussed in his talk about Olinda): starting at extremes, and slowly iterating towards realism (and complexity). The birdfeeder, the filing cabinet, the shredder, all act a little like another form of “physical Powerpoint”: they may not be realistic, but they are highly expressive. And maybe that’s the value of this kind of design. Once the aims or thinking behind an artefact have been explained clearly, and succinctly – no matter how absurd – then it’s possible to iterate towards realism, towards a more sensible and sensical design.

The Utility of the Unfinished

This video got me thinking.

It’s footage of a simple Augmented Reality experiment from a programmer at British independent games developers Introversion, imagining what one element (the world map) of their strategy game Defcon might look like if there was an AR component to it.

I’m not as interested in the technical aspect of this experiment as I am the aesthetic.

I was struck by how well-suited the blue-on-blue, information-dense and highly representational display of Defcon is as an aesthetic for augmented reality. It helps to have a clear distinction between the real and the augmented. By making the augmented several degrees lower in fidelity than the real, it enhances the utility of the augmented elements. It creates seams between the real and the unreal, and helps the user process both real-world and AR information faster.

A few other things that struck me as being similar to this:

Jack spoke at This Happened in London last year about the Olinda project, and talked a little at the end about the form factor. Specifically: why it doesn’t look “prettier”. And he explains:

Each of the elements are trying to say what they do themselves in their own language.

Matt has described this to me as “physical PowerPoint”. You instantly know from looking at this thing that it’s not necessarily finished yet; not quite complete. And rather than letting you down, that incompleteness (in this case, an aesthetic one) opens up a communication. It informs the observer that they can engage in a kind of dialogue with the radio, about what it is and what it does. Its form is not final, and that means that there is still space to explore and examine that form. A more finished project would shut out any such exploration from the user or observer, and simply impose its form on them; the only reactions left are accepting that form, denying it, or ignoring it.

monospaced type

Monospaced type that’s used for writing, not code. Most corporate communication takes on the same form: laser-printed, perhaps even letter-headed, smartly formatted documents, all of which look finished. But it’s so rare that the kind of documents we use in corporate communications are finished. More likely, they’re work in progress – either iterations of a report yet to be completed, reference materials for negotiations yet to be conducted, or as starting points for discussions that likely end on a completely different note. So why present them as concrete, unapproachable objects? By presenting the documents in barely-styled (yet thoughtfully laid out) monospace text, their role as intermediate objects becomes more obvious.

fabbed plastic
(Image from maxbraun, under a Creative Commons licence).

Rapid-prototyping plastic. The not-quite complete has not just look, but also feel, and as rapid-prototyping becomes more and more commonplace – and better understood by a wider audience – that unusual texture of fabbed plastic will quickly become another useful shorthand for “not a sketch, but not complete either”. This is a tactile shorthand that emphasises the boundaries between the world (of complete, final materials) and the work-in-progress.

Wireframe in situ

One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it.

How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact. It’s important that there is authenticity in the unfinished state. All the examples above are of things that are in a transition state between non-existant and final; they are not finished items that have then been distressed or made to appear cosmetically unfinished.

This is unlikely to be the last time I’ll write about this stuff on Pulse Laser; it feels like it has legs, and it’s something that I’m noticing more and more examples of. Given that, it only seems appropriate that this post remains

Endless Notebooks

“I’d describe myself as an inventive, but bad, prototyping engineer; I’ve got a shallow knowledge of most fabrication processes”

One of the things Jack has a shallow knowledge of is bookbinding. This morning, he’s talking to me about some interesting notebooks he’s been making, and about a product – and service – that could emerge from his explorations into this craft. Jack shows me a selection of books in various stages of completion. The process of manufacture, especially at the one-off scale he manufactures them, is relatively simple, and worth explaining, as it’s critical to his subsequent explorations into product.

You start with the paper, and the insides. Your paper stock is folded over to create several sections of the appropriate size and thickness. Once these have all been created, they’re stitched along their spine to hold the section together, and cut (usually with a guillotine) to the same thickness. This isn’t the primary way the spine holds together; it’s more of a convenience. Then, the sections are glued together, with a three thin strips of tape extending horizontally over the first and large page, and a thick scrim wrapping their outer edges. Finally, a thin piece of paper is strongly glued over the spine, and it’s this glue that holds the spine together.

Jack demonstrates the uncovered book

All that remains is to add the cover – two pieces of card for the front and back, and a third thin one for the spine, along with endpapers and a cloth covering. The book is not made to fit its cover – the cover is cut to match the paper size, however that has turned out. The end result is almost exactly like any hardback book you’d find for sale today.

Why make your own notebooks, though? What’s wrong with the ones on the shop shelves?

Designing books around needs rather than form-factor

One reason to make your own book is to meet needs that existing books cannot. In Jack’s case, this is all about the paper – or, rather, how the paper reacts to different kinds of writing implement. Whilst a fairly traditional, smooth paper stock makes sense for writing notes in ballpoint, or sketching with pencil, Jack also likes to work with a thick brush pen, and a much thicker, rougher stock suits this better.

(I tend to approach purchasing notebooks by thinking about form-factor first, and considering the paper second. When you’re making your own, it’s much easier to reverse that thought-process and think about the paper first – and, based on my own experience of notebooks, that’s likely to lead to much greater satisfaction with the end product.)

Given that Jack likes to both write and draw in his sketchbooks, why not make a book that includes both paper types? He shows me a book without a cover. The uncovered book has three paper stocks in it: a regular, smooth stock at the front for writing notes; a thick, rough stock at the back for brushwork; and, in the middle, larger pieces of paper that are folded in. Some of these unfold into a roughly A3-sized piece of paper; one, in the center, unfolds into a giant panorama for illustrating skylines.

Jack demonstrates the panorama page

The three stocks are built up and then bound together into a cover. This immediately demonstrated something else that Jack learned from the uncovered book: whilst the three sections were equally sized in terms of page count, they really should have been equal in thickness: because the paper stocks are all of different thicknesses, the book ends up being slightly lopsided.

There were two other notable problems with this book: firstly, that because of the different kinds of work that occur in each section, Jack was more likely to use up one section faster than another, and secondly, that it still ends.

The next experiments were about building a book that wouldn’t end.

Making a re-usable sketchbook

The next notebook Jack shows me is made of nine sections of pages, bound into three bound clusters – like three little sketchbook inners. These are bound together into a book, but not in a traditional manner; instead, the piece of scrim at the end of the section “overlaps” and sticks up into the pages, clearly indicating the end of a section. The scrim makes the binding process obvious to the book’s owner, and it’s the binding process – and the user’s visibility of it – that allows the idea of a service to form around this product.

Jack points out the scrim in the reusable notebook

Jack explains his notion of the service: it’s a way to preserve the contents of your notebook as an archive, whilst keeping the book in use as an ongoing tool. When you get to the second fold of scrim, you should find a note telling you it’s time to send the book off to be dismantled. This needs to be a really fast process for the service to work well – overnight, ideally; whilst your notebook is away, you won’t be able to take notes, so we need to make sure it can be returned to you as fast as you can. Fortunately, rebinding the book is a very, very quick process, especially for a skilled binder. It is, after all, just glue.

The service cuts out the sections from your book, and rebinds it with new sections. It also scans all the pages that have been removed and uploads them to a Flickr-like service. This is definitely a secondary characteristic of the service, and not the primary goal; however, so many notebooks are destined to be scanned, it seems sensible to offer it, and it helps act as another kind of archival, more akin to backup. The service then returns the freshly bound book, and the archived sections, to the sender.

There’s nothing to force us stopping at just binding pages in. The service could also bind in content printed on demand – upcoming trips from Dopplr, editorial content, short fiction, favourite photographs from Flickr. The notebook becomes genuinely personalised for the owner. I note that the service paradigm makes it possible to know quite accurately how much on-demand content to provide – the more frequently a notebook owner sends their book in, the shorter the timeframe the Dopplr page should cover, for instance.

When Jack suggested the notion of editorial content he asked “what if Monocle had a sketchbook at the back?” I thought back to Rod McLaren observing that the stock Monocle is printed on is particularly apt for drawing on:

What if we reverse that idea: make the a notebook, printed on beautiful stock, with sixteen pages of Monocle at the back? Given such a service is likely to be subscription-based, what better model to use than one of publishing a magazine – except it’s a customised magazine, built especially for you, and largely blank pages?

And this, of course, matches the way we work: a small amount of work in progress, ongoing, imperfect; the rest archived off for reference and posterity. There’s still value in that remainder, but it’s not worth carrying around everywhere with you. The notebook remains of relevance in the present; the separated, archived sections become archival content. This reminds me a lot of Hedeigger: the current notebook, in your hands, is Zuhanden, “ready-to-hand”, a practical concern; the archival sections are Vorhanden, “present-at-hand”, reified information.

I’ve seen other forms of endless notebooks on shop shelves, recently. They have a fold like an envelope on the back cover, and when you reach the end of one book, you tuck the cover of the next into it and keep going. Of course, this eventually becomes unwieldy, but it’s a far simpler solution to a notebook running out.

Jack’s product, however, engages a little more with the notion of bookhood in the notebook: that the book should only be the things of immediate concern, and there needs to be an important way to transition content from the book to the archive. It also focuses on the notebook solely as a product – and the most interesting thing Jack talked to me about was not the notebook as a product, but the notebook as a service.

A service built around permanence

One other interesting aspect of such a service was the idea of a way to emphasise the permanence of the bookmaking process: specifically, by limiting the number of covers in circulation.

The content of these sketchbooks always belongs to the owner; the archived sections and the online archive likewise. But the covers are the property of the service; as more people use them, the binding process means that the back endpaper will build up with patina and wear, giving the book a character of itself. When you cancel your subscription, you turn in your notebook one last time, and receive only archival content back. A new subscriber will get their sketchbooks bound into those covers, the history of previous owners building up on the rear endpaper. I liked that as a way as emphasising the permanence not only of the binding process, but of books themselves, as Jack himself pointed out: ‘books are the longest-surviving information artefacts we have,’ made out of cloth, and glue, and paper – but mainly glue: ‘glue’s amazing‘.

The idea of a service built around these endless notebooks is a fascinating one. I commented that the big weak link in the chain is having to turn in your notebook to update it; finding ways to make this is swift and painless as possible is going to be very important.

I think that the service makes more sense the more local it becomes: rather than couriering your notebook special delivery to a centralized binding point, why not just turn it in at a local franchise? That helps to stress the value of the contents – you can hand over your notebook yourself, ensuring it doesn’t get lost in transit – and also helps cut out the slowest part of the process, the transport. Local binding services might become like 1-hour photo developing services; a drum scanner, a skilled binder, and a lot of glue are all you need. By building the service around local nodes, it also becomes likely that the service will become more personal, and that’s also critical to overcome the trust boundaries that most creatives will likely have when it comes to letting their notebook out of their site.

Finally, the local aspect of such a service can be brought out in another way: through the paper stock used. Paper is manufactured at local levels and it makes sense to build such services around products from local papermills or suppliers. As long as a representative of the overall service confirms that paper stock is fit for use, it means that regional franchises will all have appropriate regional variance in their final product; another way that history and patina is worked into the shells.

It’s likely such a service might not be cheap, but it’s easy to see how the combination of archival, digital backup, and endless pages might be attractive to a certain kind of creative, especially if the franchise outlets were near enough to their hubs. One in Soho, one in Shoreditch; one in the Mission, one in Amsterdam; as a member of a worldwide subscription service, you’d be able to drop into a franchise wherever you were to refresh your book and backup your work, knowing that you were part of an exclusive club built upon one of the strongest, most resilient forms of data storage in history.

And you’d never run out of pages in your notebook, either.

If products are people too, let them have a thousand true fans…

My first post on the Pulse Laser, in my newish role as an advisor to S&W, brings me to consider one of Jack and Matt’s mantras: that products are people too.

As Matt said in his talk at Reboot in 2007, it’s a extremely useful heuristic.

It’s useful in it’s apparent common-sense basis — after all, we personify at the drop of a hat, as Byron, Nass and others have pointed out for many years; but also in the almost absurd directions one can stretch the metaphor in order to see what drops out.

From the anthropomorphic surface-aesthetic of Alessi, to the 1st-person-puppetry of a NASA probe’s twittered stream of reports from another world – it would seem we welcome the products that, at least superficially, perform as people do.

But what other directions can we find then we squeeze the soapbar of this slippery saying a little harder?

One that’s been preoccupying me, and finding it’s way into my discussion with Jack and Matt are the ways that the economics of producing a product and producing media might start mirroring each other. Kevin Kelly posted a fascinating essay on the new economics of scale for artists and craftsmen, called “1000 true fans“.

I find myself asking:  if products are people too, then could they exist with a thousand true fans?

I hope you’ll excuse rather a long quote from Kevin Kelly’s piece as a scene-setter:

“the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

Could Kelly’s solution extend to the design, manufacture, marketing and distribution of products?

Cross-reference Kelly with Sterling’s notion of the Spime: something that is information first and last, and a physical thing merely sometimes. Cross-reference Kelly with Gershenfeld’s sub-$20k rapid fab-labs. Design, maufacturing, marketing is becoming contingent, personalised. Distribution is dematerialising, and if one were being optimistic about Sterling’s vision  – so is waste.

On demand, on-desire products.

S&W recently produced an advanced prototype piece of social hardware for the BBC Audio and Music R&D team: a radio called Olinda. When they put the pictures live, there was quite a bit of desire to own an Olinda expressed by those commenting.

I joked with Matt and Jack that they should put the price tag of producing a prototype out there, and see who wanted one – or perhaps the price of a short-run of limited edition Olinda, which would reduce it perhaps from four figures a piece to three… Or perhaps the next generation of Olinda, with their input?

Would people buy something like that?

Perhaps a true fan of an established product designer or brand. After all, in tradtional design the likes of Ross Lovegrove or Marc Newson can command premium prices for their limited edition, but still ultimately mass-produced works.

This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art.

Perhaps you’ve been part of the debate, shaping the potentialities – suggesting scenarios or sources of inspiration – or even componentry. Just like the small, passionate fanbase of a much-loved but non-mainstream performing artist there’s a relationship between you and the product, and crucially all the other fans of the product, perhaps mediated by services like GetSatisfaction. Certainly, already, some products on GetSatisfaction already have a fanbase talking to each other. Essential reading for product marketers…

It puts me to mind a little of what Matt Hanson is trying to do in film with A Swarm of Angels. Not only recruiting investment, but particpation in a cultural product they want to bring into the world.

This model would be a potential new spin on both human-centered design and product marketing. Collect the desires and needs of your customer base, but they’ve bought into the design process revealing something new about that. They are true fans of the designers, and the design process – invested in it both financially and aspirationally.

You can see some of this in communities such as Etsy, where crafters and product families definately have fanbases that are loyal to them; and they are rewarded by requests and delightful suprises both in the new products created in the dialogue and the level of attention they receive.

Is this possible in the arena of more complex products with behaviour, connectivity, and services woven into them? Is it possible where there’s not a direct relationship to the artisan or designer – that is, could it scale to work for larger companies and brands? After all, as Kelly says, this isn’t the path to megahits – it’s more about catering to many niches with equal attention, rigor and passion.

I think we’d argue that products and services for ‘generation-c’ can’t afford not to generate, nurture and learn from their ‘fanbase’, as soon the means of creating such products will lie with the fanbase themselves. It’s rich territory for designers and makers working today for sure: creating products and potentialities for products that will garner a fanbase through their lifetime has always been their goal.

In the recent past of industrial design and manufacture this was the mass-produced ‘megahit’ of the ‘design classic': the Aalto stool, the Eames chair, the Ive pods – but the breadth and depth of niches that this post-industrial scenario offers for viable, sustainable, economic exploration is something new I think, and one that post-industrial design firms such as S&W are itching to explore.

As a true fan, as well as advisor, I can’t wait to see what they make of it.

Infinite Zoom into Milk

In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames made a documentary film called Powers of Ten. The second half of the film includes a slow zoom into a man’s hand, right the way through cells and molecules all the way down to an atomic structure. It’s extraordinarily engaging, beginning at a familiar human context, and visualising something desperately distant and unknowable.

About a year ago James King brought a book to my attention from a series called Analysis of the Massproduct Design by Japanese product designer Taku Sato.

Analysis of the Massproduct Design is just like the Eames Powers of Ten video but for everyday products.

Taku Sato book covers

Each book takes a manufactured product and breaks down the content, graphics, construction and packaging page by page. The books are like infinite zooms into fabrication and history.

There are four, in turn looking at Xylitol Lime Mint chewing gum, a Fujifilm disposable camera, ‘Licca the fashion dress up doll by Takara Co.’ and a litre of milk from the Meiji Dairies Corporation. The blurb reads:

…we will take up and focus on one mass-produced product seen everywhere in our daily life without special attention paid to and from the point of view of design we try to take a closer look at and analytically examine it to find what kinds of ideas, efforts, ingenuities have been put in to it.

Each book begins with an overview and in some cases a history. This is from the book on the Fujifilm disposable camera.

Fujifilm overview

As the book progresses, spreads examine the product in greater and greater detail. Near the end of the Fujifilm book, there’s a photographic one micrometer cross section of the film stock.

fujifilm book film detail

One of my favourites spreads is from the book examining Xylitol chewing gum and is titled ‘The Feeling on the Teeth When Chewed.’ It’s about the material qualities of tablets versus sticks of gum. A quote:

The firmness of a chewing gum changes gradually with the passing of the time of its being chewed. In order to make this change of the chewing feeling close to an ideal one, the elements that should make up of the chewing gum are controlled… The figure shows the strength of the chewing exerted in the mouth measured with an analyzing device called RheoMeter. These graphs will tell you how different the chewing feelings are between ordinary sheet-type chewing gum and sugar coated chewing gum.

An ideal chewing feeling! A RheoMeter! They’ve got a machine for testing the chewiness of gum.

chewiness spread

I think Taku Sato actually designed the packaging for the milk carton he analyses. One of the spreads shows what each of the indents on the base of the cartons are for. Ambiguity in the translation adds to the mystery in some cases:

…(image a) is a little dented. This is for securing the stability of the carton when placed straight on a table… The number (image c) is the filling machine’s column index. The embossed information works for cause of the trouble to be clarified when it happens.

Taku Sato milk base

The books feel like imaginary manuals. They offer the seductive illusion that with this book the object can be completely known, all secrets unravelled. They somehow imply that if all was lost, objects like these could be reconstructed with this knowledge alone.

A while back I came across the term ‘Spime’ in Bruce Sterling‘s book Shaping Things. He uses the word to characterise smart objects which talk about their histories, how they were made, where they were sourced, where they’ve been, etc. Spimes might be a cars which announce their locations, or a packaged beef steak which shows the cow it comes from and where that cow was raised.

Sato’s books are raw Spime porn. Objects showing off their shiny interiors, construction and their ancestors. The celebrity biographies of mass produced objects.

Adaptive interfaces

A little while back, I wrote a post titled Widgets, widgets, everywhere in which I suggested all consumer electronics should be thought of as platforms that could run applications created and shared by users. In particular,

If I was a pro-am photographer on a month-long safari shoot, I could grab a custom camera interface from the Web, set up to provide easy-access presets to the light and movement conditions I’d face. I’d repurpose a couple of the external buttons to twiddle parameters in the presets, and have a perfect wildlife interface for four weeks. At home, I’d revert to the general purpose interface or get another one.

This came out of a general idea about Generation C and products and continues like this: Gen C are into co-creation, but they’re also highly capable… so if your product doesn’t allow them to get involved, they’ll do it themselves regardless.

Well, here’s exactly what I was talking about:

DSLR + Nintendo DS

Steven Chapman has created a way to control his DSLR camera with a custom interface on his Nintendo DS. It involves custom cables, custom DS software, a whole lot of smartness, and it saves him time. (Plus it’s playful: there’s a sound trigger thrown in there, just for kicks.)

This is the killer bit:

Where the Canon 5D can do a bracket of three shots, spread two stops apart, and the latest 1DS MKIII series can do a nine shot bracket, the “DS-DSLR” can do any number of shots, and if I don’t like the way it does it, I can rewrite the software to do it better.

And he’s selling the kit.

The power of adaptation. Imagine Canon had meant for this to happen. Imagine they had an App Store to allow people to share and to build businesses around this kind of activity.

Users are in a better position than designers to discover better products and experiences and, increasingly, better positioned to create them too. (Of course the best situation is that designers are also users… which is surprisingly often not the case.) Adaptive design is not just an approach but an opportunity.

Thanks Tom Armitage for the link.

OFF=ON, or, Whatever happened to Availabot?

My favourite trend spotters, trendwatching.com, just put out their monthly newsletter. (These are the folks who identified Generation C a couple years back, which let us finally express how the type of people you get on the Web are actually part of a much larger movement. Gen C comes up in the first few slides of most of our strategy work.)

This month’s trend is OFF=ON:

More and more, the offline world (a.k.a. the real world, meatspace or atom-arena) is adjusting to and mirroring the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships.

Right on.

In the briefing, one of their example products is Availabot. Yes, that old thing. (Here’s a video of Availabot in action.) This is what they said:

Availabot is a golden oldie (it’s an ancient two years old!!), offering a physical representation of presence in instant messenger applications, which means Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. Brilliant, and somehow very ON=OFF. But it apparently got stuck in concept mode. So could someone please bring this to market? (Just the waves of PR should make it worth the effort.)

It’s so true! Somebody should!

Okay, we should. And we’re going to. Oh, I’ve never said that in public before have I? There’s always a first time: yes, Availabot will make it to market.

Now seems as good a time as any to let you know what happened and what’s happening…

availabot-original-figure.jpg

Ancient history

Way back in the mists of time (that is, 2006), Jack Schulze presented Availabot at the RCA show and picked up his MA. Schulze & Webb had just started, as a design studio and consultancy, and our first project was to make 100 prototypes and see where it took us.

So we made a bunch and put them in a shop, as demonstration models:

availabot-original-shop.jpg

But developing a product is expensive, and starting a consultancy takes a lot of biz dev and effect, so when [insert name of Very Large Toy Company here] saw Availabot, got excited and offered to buy an option, we happily accepted. It was supposed to be for 12 weeks. It dragged on for over a year… and then the option didn’t go anywhere. Ah.

A lot happened in the meantime!

  • Availabot focus-grouped successfully. We know the best target market and how many they’d buy (and for how much).
  • We learned the relative importance of customisation versus basic features and price (customisation is less important than we believed, and we’ve designed a way to inexpensively hit the mark).
  • We had a patent application published: 2008/0122647.
  • We figured out the ancillary businesses.

Oh, and we built a successful design studio (with projects such as Olinda), and a consultancy with clients including Nokia, BBC, Blyk, Ofcom and more, with a great network of designers and a newly established advisory group (and more of that in another post).

But when the option expired, we’d had enough of foot-dragging by [yes, that same Very Large Toy Company again] and we didn’t renew. Time passed… during which time we found new partners, and a new angle.

Going it alone

We recognise the growing Generation C (creation, social, connected people), and believe that the key future way to sell many modern, complex products, media and services is as physical things. It’s impossible to operate like this and not have a knowledge of China. And of course, we still wanted to take Availabot to market.

So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts. (Availabot is unusual in that it requires mechanics, embedded electronics, desktop software which knits together lots of other bits of desktop software, and network features.)

And once factory ready prototypes were on the table, we would either go to market ourselves, or partner for either distribution or acquisition plus royalties. The economics of these models are sound.

Which brings us to the present day.

availabot-prototype-desk.jpg

Availabot today

Availabot is almost ready.

What you see above is a couple months old: a test model based on the original model, running on new circuitry with a novel mechanism that is as cheap as we can make it. We’ve been working hard with our electronics and manufacturing partner in Hong Kong to make this reliable, and to give it an open hardware API (over USB), which will of course be published.

The puppet in the picture is a placeholder. The new character development is almost complete. It looks pretty different, and I’m not going to show you photos of that, except to mention that although the customisation is toned down, we’ve come up with some exciting directions. Once the prototypes are finished, they’ll be attached to the newly improved motor and we’ll work on the liveliness of the movements. This is with our London partner and, though them, with visualisers and model makers working with our designs.

The team in Russia and Ukraine, working on the software, are a couple weeks away from finishing the second rev of the desktop software. Visually it’s pretty basic – the polished look comes when we go to market – but functionally it’s all there (there’s a plug-in API so third parties can hook Availabot up to all kinds of presence sources), and exactly what we need to demo the puppet round toy fairs.

And we have subsequent versions and associated businesses mapped out.

So what does factory ready mean?

Factory ready means when we decide to go to market, or we find a partner we’re happy with, there’s a direct path from here to mass production without any re-engineering. Bish bash bosh, in the shops.

availabot-prototype-figure.jpg

Too long; didn’t read

Yeah okay, that was a lengthy story.

Here’s the summary:

  • Availabot was stuck in a confidential options process with [Huge Toy Company] for ages. The work and market research was positive, but we didn’t renew. It’s a shame it didn’t work out.
  • We’re working with partners and companies in London, Hong Kong and Russia to do character development (retaining some level of customisation), the mechanism, electronics, and embedded and desktop software. Future product directions are mapped out.
  • Availabot is a very short way from being factory ready, at which point we’ll start showing the short run of prototypes to prospective partners and decide whether to go to market ourselves or let someone else take it on.
  • We’re not ready to talk to partners until we have a twitchy bit of plastic on the table you can handle. But if you’re big enough, maybe it’s a good time to speak. Big means talking about taking over distribution and marketing globally, and working with us on a standard toy inventor and royalties basis (so I guess I’m talking Spin Master and up). If you’re talking about distribution or sales and you need a boxed product, or white labelling the technology, we’re not in a position to talk to you for a little while yet, sorry.

To be continued…

After so long having to keep quiet, it’s a relief to finally speak publicly. More news soon!

And of course, if you’d like help figuring out your OFF=ON product strategy, need design investigations or prototypes to reach an increasingly social and creative Generation C in the product, Web, mobile, media or services spaces, or can see another way our approach and skills can help your company, get in touch. S&W is over here, where technology is about people first.

Snap

Recently at Web Directions North, I introduced Snap, the syndicated next action pattern. It’s a way to get all those little interactions out of websites, and all in the same place: your newsreader. You can watch and read the presentation here.

In this post, I want to expand on those slides to introduce Snap and show it working.

What kind of ‘next actions’?

There are loads of small next actions. For example:

  • Taking a new bug in a tracker, and accepting it, allocating it, completing it, or marking it as a duplicate
  • For an email or weblog comment in a moderation queue, accepting or deleting it
  • Clicking through and perhaps purchasing a recommended book

It’s tedious to move around the Web to do these actions. It would be better if they were all in the same place. We had this same problem with weblogs and other media, and RSS was invented to syndicate new entries to the desktop.

What I’ve previously suggested is that we need a kind of RSS for interactions–and you can see a mockup here. At the time, the concept got some attention.

Conceptually, each ‘object’ that requires interaction is a feed entry. The actions are shown as an HTML form, and using the form sends data to the website which updates that object. The feed is then updated, changing the original entry to show the new object state. The original object state is no longer visible. This requires the newsreader to allow HTML forms and respond sensibly when feed entries change.

I’ve been working together with Tom Armitage on a proof of concept (of which more in a minute), and the headline is this:

Feed entries can indeed represent interactions, and update to show new states. The user never needs to leave the newsreader.

This is the pattern I’m calling Snap. It works, and we have a demo.

Dentrassi new todo

Demo: Dentrassi

For the proof of concept, we created Dentrassi (Tom did the heavy lifting), a desktop todo list manager which can be run entirely through a newsreader.

Watch a screencast and transcript of Dentrassi in use.

The app demonstrates a number of ideas:

  • There is an admin feed which has persistent entries. One entry includes a form, which is used to add new tasks
  • New tasks appear in the inbox feed, until they are allocated to projects
  • New project feeds are created dynamically: users can subscribe to a project feed from another persistent entry in the admin feed
  • Every task feed entry is smart: each includes a form to show the available interactions, so tagging, task completion and editing all happen inside the newsreader
  • Tasks move from feed to feed so you can focus on different lists of next actions at different times

Tasks only appear in feeds if they require actions. This means there’s a single place you look to find what to do next.

One interesting feature, not in the demo above, is the idea of the deferred task: a task can be pushed into the future by some day – a day, a week or a month – and it then disappears from the feeds, only to reappear when it’s valid again.

Dentrassi possibilities

Imagine having your todo list manager – whether it’s iCal or TaskPaper – expose a Snap interface, so you can use it entirely from your newsreader.

Tasks could then be mixed with interactions from all your other sources – like email moderation or bug tracking – and even tasks from other people in your company. Perhaps tasks from other people would be read-only, or maybe you could collaborate.

Lessons learned for Snap

We learned a lot from Dentrassi. Some points:

  • Stale items: once you act on a feed entry, the entry is stale until the feed is refreshed. Problems are avoided, in Dentrassi, by giving each object a serial number which increments on updates, and refusing to accept updates from forms which don’t pass in the current serial. This isn’t great from a interaction design perspective. Instead each feed item should query the server when it’s viewed, showing a ‘stale’ badge if a refresh is required. If the user is offline, an ‘unknown’ badge should be shown instead.
  • Disappearing entries: an entry will often disappear from a feed once it’s actioned. It’s important that a newsreader allows the entry to vanish, and doesn’t keep its old state as a duplicate entry (GUIDs help here).
  • Keeping interaction in the newsreader: when the follow-up to submitting a form is a success or failure, Dentrassi shows a badge. It would be good to have a standard way of reporting status. But sometimes the follow-up to a form is another form, and that’s tough: the interaction has to move to a website. Using Ajax inside the feed entry will help.
  • Subscribing to feeds from within the newsreader: inside feed entries, new feeds URL should be prefixed with ‘feed:’ to make sure the newsreader handles them directly, instead of opening a Web browser.
  • Working offline: there is currently no way to work offline. It would be good to have the newsreader cache the form data to send… although this may pose a problem if Javascript is being used.

One point to look further at is how to improve newsreader support for this usage. Maybe there could be a Snap profile for Atom, in the same way podcasting is supported by enclosures? If forms were ‘enclosed’ in feed entries, they could be shown separated from the main body – more like a dialog box – and it would be clearer how to use them. This was the look that seemed to make most sense in Dentrassi. In my original mock-up, which just used the straight HTML, the forms look confusing.

Original RSS-I mockup

Other possibilities

I’ve mentioned a number of possibilities for Snap in general:

  • Mixing together multiple ‘next action’ feeds from different sources
  • Having several feeds representing different states of a process, for example different Snap feeds for the different states of a bug in a tracker
  • Desktop applications exposing a Snap interface, for local use. And using the location of the feed request to show full feeds or read-only feeds, for collaboration
  • Having multiple people work on the same applications, each using a different mix of feeds

These are rather abstract, so here are some systems that use these patterns:

  • Multi-player turn-based games, like Risk, or Scrabulous
  • An editorial work-flow for a CMS, where each article goes through a number of states, dealt with by journalists, subeditors, editors and other sign-off parties. The documents could be links to the Web, or included as enclosures. A persistent item would allow the upload of new documents
  • Similarly, an HR system. Employees would use a website or persistent feed item to submit a form, and then track its process using a single feed. The HR team would have an interactive version of the feed
  • iPhoto exposing a Snap feed of all untagged photos, to encourage me to categorise them
  • A blog feed which has all posts, and a comments feed which only shows comments from posts the reader is following. A reader follows and unfollows posts by using a persistent entry in the comments feed
  • The Facebook activity steam, except each entry carries with is contextual interactions: see more/less of this type of item; add this person as a friend; join this group; enlarge this photo; add a comment
  • Feed pipes, slim applications which take a single object through a number of steps in different applications. For example, the same feed entry could represent an untagged photo in iPhoto, then the same photo uploaded to Flickr, which then becomes an object which can be commented on
  • A feed of ‘travellers you might know’ from Dopplr, each having a form to either share trips or ignore for a month

Snap cover art

Snap as part of the Web

RSS/Atom is simple human interface to website content. A REST API is a simple machine interface to website functionality. Jabber/XMPP is gaining attention for being a machine interface to website events. Snap sits in this same constellation: Snap is a simple human interface to common actions, on a website or desktop application.

All of these are ways for websites to get blurry edges and mingle into one another. They offer ways for website to be recombinant, so that each can build on the functionality of others. They also offer ways for websites and applications to be more humane–to let us build around the tasks and experiences of people, rather than the features list of an individual website.

Snap isn’t a technology. Snap is an interaction pattern which works right now, and I’m convinced makes the experience of using websites better. I’m hoping you’ll give it a try.

Next action!

So, what’s next?

Go read Tom’s post on Snap, about building the proof of concept and the interaction design learnings that came out of it–in particular how the big tick is useful for hitting flow states. That’s first.

Second, if you have a web app, it’d be great to see Snap happening. Feel free to drop a mail if you want to bounce ideas around (and I’m sure Tom would be happy to speak with you about it too).

Thanks

Thanks again to Tom Armitage, WDN08 for giving me the opportunity to think about this, and Ben Hammersley for hosting the session which led to this, way back in 2004. (Also…)

Beautiful Beolit

A couple of months back I visited Tom and Durrell at Luckybite to discuss some of the Olinda development. During our conversation, Durrell described one of his favourite portable radios, the Bang & Olufsen Beolit 600. I bought one.

Beolit radio

The range was produced between 1971 and 1981 and aside from its elegance and good audio quality, the detailing is very deft.

Radio details

Tuning with magnets

The chassis is constructed from aluminium strips, holding plastic shells front and back. The controls for the radio are spread out along the front and back edges of the top face. On the back edge are buttons for band selection and two sliders for volume and tone. The entire front edge is a horizontal tuning slider.

Tuning slider long
Tuning slider overview

The slider can be grabbed and pushed quickly up and down the length for coarse tuning. To tune precisely the two small kinked wheels are rolled under the thumb to give fine control. The remarkable detail is in how the selected frequency is indicated:

Tuning slider detail

Two very small steel bearings sit in covered grooves in the aluminium chassis, one for each tuning band. The tuning slider conceals a magnet, which drags the bearings along the scale inside their grooves (the aluminium is of course unaffected by the magnetism). The position of the bearings corresponds to markings on the surface of the radio which indicates the frequency the radio is tuned to.

It’s a really nice example of celebrating functionality. There is no functional need for the bearings. The additional cost to develop and manufacture can’t possibly have made financial sense. Why not use an arrow? But tuning is what radios do, and something which articulates this most familiar function so poetically just had to be done.

I love how the furthest bearing twitches along more slowly than the closer one.

Construction

Structurally the radio is a square of four lengths of extruded and cut aluminium, with the front and back plastic shells tucked in. What’s exciting is that taking the radio apart isn’t work: there are no machine screws or self-tappers.

Base fixings
Base fixings 02

The base plate of the radio can slide. Sliding it a little way first unlocks the back shell. Removing the back allows the base to slide more, which releases the more rarely removed front shell. All this is achieved with a clever system of grooves and nooks.

Beolit in bits

Coming off first, the back shell gives access to the battery. The front shell reveals something else.

The repair manual

Inside the front shell, there is a little envelope. Inside the envelope there is a piece of folded paper.

Beolit envelope

Screen printed on the paper are all the instructions for repairing the radio. There is an abstracted circuit diagram and also an image of the actual PCB. The radio contains its own data sheet, physically!

data sheet physical
data sheet abstract

I’ve cut these last two images together to show that the PCB and the print in the diagram are to scale (the screens were probably made from the same drawing).

data sheet and PCB

Drawing Olinda

Drawing hybrids and inbreds

We are around half way through the development of Olinda, the digital radio prototype we’re building for the BBC. Most of my efforts over the weeks since Matt’s post have been focused on how the object should behave and physically manifest. 

This post discusses some early drawing processes. We use drawing to surface and test many ideas easily and early. These drawing processes are also used to reach unexpected forms, and to examine why an object should look like it does.

About three weeks ago I met with Matt Ward from Goldsmiths. Ward has developed a drawing process which he works through to explore and interrogate ideas. Here we used it to develop ideas around products. His position for understanding how a product can manifest begins with a framework that includes how objects respond to anticipated contexts and tasks, in situations within a culture of consumption. He sketched this for me, and I’ve included it below. I like that it includes the designer, in a ‘context of production’. 

Ward diagram

Ward’s approach is this. Begin by taking an existing radio, and draw it at the centre of a page. From here, choose four contexts or situations for development, like ‘in the kitchen’ or ‘listening to the football’. Write these labels in the four corners of the page surrounding the original sketch of the radio. Then evolve the form in the centre towards imagined new forms in response to the four situations.

The point here is to get away from the original form as far as possible, and to make many drawings. Below there are radios that are – more and less literally – in the contexts of decorating, the bathroom, kitchens and shop shelves.

Early Olinda Sketches

Sometimes this leads to very strange things.

Hand blobs

Critically, the purpose for such an exercise is not to draw good products but to begin evolving forms outside of an expected mold. As soon as a form emerges which catches, it is redrawn on a separate page, and bred between other sketches to develop new hybrids.

Olinda radio hybrids

One is being selective in this process, but it is surprising how little control there is over what you expect to emerge, forcing issues with the sketches rarely yields anything satisfying. But this is not a storming, random process. It is very methodical, as a process of deconstruction. It is using drawing as thinking, which is its power.

What emerges is the discovery of what it is about that original radio that persists, in spite of the violent evolution. The drawings are really about ways of housing these commonalities, so you start thinking in terms of materials very quickly. The other thing that happens is you see particular twists. For example a kitchen radio should have legs, in order to sweep crumbs out from underneath it.

Making and drawing

In parallel to these processes, we have been in the workshop making objects from which to derive further drawings. This process started by thinking out a critical aspect of the form, in this case the connection between the two separate Olinda modules.

Early connector experiments

Once things start to get made, materials start to influence drawings and further made experiments. As the pieces of wood were cut, the shapes started to yield new directions and the wooden blocks emerged as a combinatorial way of interrogating traditional and less likely forms.

Early form tests

These are then fed back into the drawing and imagined interfaces are penned onto surfaces.

Early interface drawings

Some of the drawings begin to imply unlikely material qualities. The social module here looks like it’s been knitted from wool. The drawing is from a little over a week ago, and is based on a model used to investigate certain materials and assembly.

Olinda wool module

When Olinda is an object, it will be a product of unusual influences. It is unlikely that in this project such radical deviations from expected form will be appropriate. But these processes have made it possible to interrogate the assumptions embedded in the form of products. Objects like Olinda respond to forces from many territories, but the reasoning around that is a separate discussion.

Love the bomb

Here are some clips from some science fiction films I’ve been enjoying recently. There are some really potent sequences, and some nice glimpses from the past into our futures.

This first clip is from the film Ultraviolet, which isn’t very good. There is a really nice sequence around a printable phone:

The following clip is from Runaway with Tom Selleck. Imagine Magnum but in the future, with killer robots and Gene Simmons as the baddie. Awesome. I love the idea that ‘micro-electronics’ might be more dangerous than terrorists with atomic bombs.

This next two clips are my favourites. They are from John Carpenter‘s Dark Star. Long before he dreamt up Snake Plissken, he made this film about four men on a long term mission in space, to blow things up with nuclear bombs (or ‘Thermostellar Devices’).

One of the bombs has a malfunction because a laser broke. In the first clip, the main ship computer has to negotiate with the bomb to convince it not to blow up in the ‘bomb bay’. I love how they’re really polite to each other, but bristling underneath. It feels a lot like when I try to open Mac-based Illustrator DXF files in Solidworks.

This goes fairly smoothly until later, when the bomb is rearmed. One of the crew (Doolittle) has to go and negotiate with the bomb, face to face, to convince it not to explode. It’s quite strange. He talks on a radio headset, but he goes outside in his space suit to look at the bomb, eye to eye. There is a face created by the instruments on one of it’s sides. Terrific cod philosophy too, looks like it’s derived from Kubrick; the bomb turns out to be a little stupid.

It all makes me think of Tom Armitage‘s talk about politeness in software at Reboot 9.0, but in a way that directly misses the point.

Editorial approaches to mobile media

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.

Mobile Media, 2 posters

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.

Mobile Media, popcorn poster

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!

Japanese repair culture and distributed manufacture

I’ve just finished Cities by John Reader, on the history of cities, and it’s chock full of information and great stories.

Cities, John Reader

This story, on Japanese manufacture, is lengthy but so good I have to quote it in full:

Bicycles were extremely popular in Japanese cities at the end of the nineteenth century, when the import of goods that Japanese manufactures could not compete with on price — or could not make at all — was damaging the national economy. Clearly, if bicycles could be made in Japan, both the massive demand for an individual means of transport and the national economy would be server at the same time. As Jane Jacobs points out in her book The Economy of Cities, Japan could have responded to this challenge by inviting foreign manufacturers to establish plants in the country — though this would have brought little profit to the Japanese themselves. Or they could have built a factory of their own — which would have required large investments in specialised machinery and the training of a skilled labour force. The Japanese followed neither of these options. Instead they exploited an indigenous talent for ‘economic borrowing’ — or imitation, as non-specialists would call it. It worked like this:

Not long after the importation of bicycles had begun, large numbers of one- and two-man repair shops sprang up in the cities. Since imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles too valuable to cannabalise, many repair shops found it worthwhile to make replacement parts themselves — not difficult if each of the shops specialised in making only one or two specific parts, as many did. In this way, groups of bicycle repair shops were in effect manufacturing entire bicycles before long, and it required only an enterprising individual to begin buying parts on contract from the repairmen for Japan to have the beginnings of a home-grown bicycle manufacturing industry.

So, far from being costly to develop, bicycle manufacturing in Japan paid for itself at every stage of its development. And the Japanese got much more than a bicycle industry from the exercise. They had also acquired a model for many of their other industrial achievements: imitation and a system of reducing complex manufacturing work to a number of relatively simple operations which could be done in small autonomous workshops. The pattern was applied to the production of many other goods, and underwrote the soaring economic success of Japan during the twentieth century. Sony began life at the end of the Second World War as a small shop making tubes on contract for radio assemblers. The first Nikon cameras were exact copies of the Zeiss Contax; Canon copied the Leica; Toyota Landcruisers were powered by copies of the Chrysler straight-six engine.

Here are the reasons this is great:

  • It’s distributed manufacture, a network of independent units operating as a single factory, but in a more agile way.
  • It reminds us that the idea of interchangeable parts is relatively new–and was a world-changer. It parallelised and distributed manufacture. Are we at the level of interchangeable parts in software yet? Despite common protocols like HTTP, I don’t think so, not quite.
  • It points to an alternative to the mass manufacture and assembly line of Fordism. The parts can be accessed separately from the assembly, we can build our own neighbourhood factories for custom goods! Mass manufacture doesn’t imply treating workers like interchangeable parts too! What’s more, it bootstraps off mass manufacture and makes something different out of it.

The most exciting reason?

This pattern is happening, right now, in India with mobile phones. 100s of small shops repair and rebuild phones with generic components and reverse-engineered schematics, supported by a developed training and tool-production infrastructure.

How long before we’re seeing cheap-as-chips kit phones, assembled by entrepreneurs harvesting the market stands of Delhi?

Experience hooks

To recap: Generation C demand 3C products, which are the new breed of products taking the internet and their presence in the social world for granted, and treating people as involved, creative peers, not “end users.” As a design and development approach, the route of interaction design and a focus on the product life-cycle is useful. This life-cycle can be thought of as a series of experience hooks, activities around which stories gather. These hooks are opportunities for good design and I want to wrap up by looking at a few a little closer.

Commercials

I mentioned a number of ‘intrinsic activities’ associated with a product, those that aren’t specific to what the product does. They were: Design, manufacture, discovery, selection, being wished-for, purchase, being shown-off, review and resale.

The intrinsic activities are often hard to reach if the scope of design is considered to end at the physical surface of the product. Yet they still contribute, heavily, to ongoing experience of the product… and therefore to the brand (the brand is the sum over all the experiences). Since Gen C relate to their products via the activities they experience together, the design scope should include whatever is necessary to make these hard-to-reach activities good ones.

Design, here, should include advertising and marketing.

The human brain is an incredible thing. It’s a carrier bag of thoughts and emotions, stored by association and popped to the top by association too. Advertising, through whatever medium, can be used to feed in stories that’ll come to the surface when the appropriate experience hook is encountered. Or it can use the memory of a particular experience hook to show what the brand cares about.

Two examples spring to mind:

  • The Coke Happiness Machine commercial dispenses with building a glow of generic “happiness” or “family life” or “Christmas” around the logo of a soft drink. Instead it concentrates on the experience of an important intrinsic activity: Vending. This neglected moment becomes coloured with a story that makes the drink itself sparkle with fantasy and magic. This advert will improve the perceived taste of my bought drink, not just nudge me to purchase it in the first place.
  • Orange, the mobile phone operator, has in the UK a scheme called Orange Wednesdays. Orange mobile subscribers get two-for-one cinema admission once a week. I’m not sure how many people use it, but as marketing that infiltrates (and influences!) conversation, and demonstrates the company’s commitment to personal relationships and small groups, it’s spot on.

Now these are both advertising/marketing efforts that demonstrate a shift from lifestyle or aspirational branding to experience-driven brands–but they remain in traditional media.

More exciting to me are the obsession with experience shown by Amazon and Apple (see yesterday) who have a continuous approach to brand, and new media such as games (a favourite: Project Rub affects your body to communicate its story). What these have in common is interactivity and lack of explicit rules (you use play and experimentation, not instruction manuals, to find your way around Nintendo games, Amazon, and Macs).

Traditional media are good for showing. Games, shops, vending machines, interactivity: these are the media channels for experience.

Focus on individual activities

It was by considering the activities I take part in with my printer that the idea of the printer as social letterbox came about.

If this approach of looking for activities is taken to other products, more new features can be found.

Take the unboxing moment, an experience hook for stories if ever there was one (I discussed unboxing more here). Or customisation in vending machines, as explored in our metal phone project (not just a re-castable lump of metal but a performance mirroring the importance of the transformation).

Experiencing trainers

In my notebook, I have sketches of how each of these could apply to trainers.

On the left: I was trying to find a satisfying approach to customisable shoes. On the one hand, the customisation shouldn’t be superficial and lack meaning, like choosing the colours or adding stickers. On the other, it should carry the intelligence of the designers with it, so a good shoe is easy to make.

Here my sketch shows soles with slots in them, looped through with a continuous strip of velcro. The strip could be wound and re-wound, making a reconfigurable shoe. Patches or ribbons woven into the velcro could decorate it (and I’m sure we’d find a way to cover the ankles). Importantly, the more you did it the better your shoes would become, and there’s the possibility of making uncomfortable or ugly shoes (risk is vital, otherwise doing it well has no value). As well as expertise and social knowledge sharing, there’s the opportunity of more personal artistic expression. I think it would be a pretty interesting instance of co-creation.

On the right: Could unboxing be applied to trainers? Given trainers are tried on before purchases, what doesn’t vary before that great moment you wear them out of the house for the first time? Laces are often threaded in the shop, and even having to unstuff your shoes from a box full of extra-fancy paper would feel inauthentic.

How about peel-off plastic covering the leather stripes on the sides of the shoes? It’s potentially authentic, because the plastic has a protective function, and it wouldn’t be removed just for trying the shoes on. As with the peel-off protection on new mobile phone screens, it would make that experience hook – the transition between shop-owned and me-owned – special.

Technology products and websites benefit from the same approach. How about online radio you can listen to with your friends? My work at the BBC, with Tom Coates, on social software and listening tackled exactly this. (The conference session Reinventing Radio includes our Group Listening prototype towards the end–Tom is hosting the Reinventing Radio presentation [PDF].) Or how about using physical computing to address the process of discovery, besotted-ness, and eventual boredom with novel TV and radio channels. Or even an RSS reader that forgets.

While we’ve used this approach on the Web and in mobile, the physical product opportunities have the most potential. The existing areas of printers, cookers, magazine racks, underwear, wooden toys or any number of other product categories would benefit enormously, I believe, from this kind of design research and product ideation.

From pixels to plastic

Not only is there opportunity with physical things, there’s an imperative. Just as manufacturing techniques are becoming shorter-run and more accessible to individuals and small companies, the knowledge of how to use these techniques is becoming more available. People are learning how to use 3D software using free tools such as Google Sketchup, and stepping more easily to professional software, previously reserved for expert product designers. The communities gathering around actuators, electronics and microcontrollers are infected with the internet sensibility, fully aware of the social worlds their technology will inhabit. And as Instructables shows, they’re sharers through-and-through. Not only this, but the net has put logistics, vending and distribution channels at our fingertips.

We’re looking at, as Tim O’Reilly puts ita future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates “information” from “stuff”‘. Traditional manufacturing and technology companies will soon be competing with small, responsive companies who are at once just Good Enough technologically, but way more in tune with the social and creative needs of Generation C.

RFID Brief

Last Thursday I began teaching third year graphic design students at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in Holborn, Central London. I’m teaching a group of nine with an old colleague of mine James King. James and I have each written a brief, I’ll post them both here and any exciting results that emerge from the students. The brief is set against an introduction to the technology and is conjunction with Timo Arnall‘s Touch project. Click the image to download the RFID brief as a pdf and the text to follow.

If you have any ideas, solutions or comments yourself, please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments.

rfid brief

Aims

To think functionally. To develop a sense of how signs can work across different contexts with specific meaning.

Brief

Design an icon or series of icons to communicate the use of RFID technology publicly.

Details

RFID is complex because it is very new and there is no simple metaphor that it easily fits. Explore several elements and think about appropriate representation for those. Think about the following:

The act

Think about how the icon should represent the physical act of activating an RFID tag.

This technology works when the RFID tag is brought near the RFID reader. It is important to show how the RFID tag should be used. One of the ways London Transport manage this is to repeatedly broadcast “remember to always touch in… and out with your Oyster card” over their public address system, their logo also represents an image of the card moving in an arc, the logo being printed on the surface of the reader.

The verb

When you swipe the RFID a transaction will take place. This is true in nearly all situations. I want you to develop icons which represent the verb that takes place when the tag is activated.

Develop icons for the following actions:

  • Purchase. Your account will be deducted when you swipe. Imagine your switch card was a digital wallet, and you could use RFID instead of chip and PIN. How would you communicate, that when you swipe, you will be charged.
  • Identify. If you go through this gate your details will be read and known, you could think about a passport.
  • Enter, but one way. If you pass through this door you will not be permitted to leave by it. Think about security at airports.
  • Download. Imagine your phone had an RFID inside it and when you wave your phone at a reader, a file is downloaded to your phone, perhaps a local map.
  • Phone. Imagine if when you waved your phone at the reader, it phoned someone, perhaps a helpline or someone specific.
  • Destroy. If you used the RFID to store sensitive data, and you wanted to delete the data, like from a memory stick, swiping the RFID will erase the data on the stick.

There might be secondary verbs like Open, or Start. Lifts might require people to identify themselves before they gain access to certain floors. Tickets are often purchased inorder to access certain areas, like with Oyster cards. This is important too, think about how you can combine verbs in the system you develop.

Ownership

RFID cards often work in closed systems, where particular companies or institutions have ownership over the system. Starbucks have just released a ‘smart card’. Think about how this can be represented alongside the verbs too. You could think about graphic consistency or colour, or perhaps there is a feature of the icon like a character, which appears across the brand. For the branding side, don’t get distracted by a specific brand that already exists. I want you to just think about the kind of business. So think about the following:

  • an international transport company like an airline
  • a money system, like a bank
  • a supermarket

Some points to remember

The icons should be universal as possible, so English language or culturally specific meaning could make the icon obscure to some people. Think about the context of the reader, does this icon go on doors, busses, airports etc?

Deliverables

Design sketches: For Thursday 23rd at 9am bring the following: 40 sketches with assorted ideas for Act, Verb and Brand. The sketches should be good, not widdly little drawings in a sketch book, make sure the drawings can be seen clearly at a distance. Also, the design should be good, not bad. So try to make it good.

Research: Look at signage and icons in the world and think about how they communicate acts and verbs. Bring in some examples that have influenced your work.

RFID hacking workshop notes

The RFID hacking workshop last week was both thoughtful and productive. I’m going to scoot through what we made and a few of the ideas, and leave any more detailed thoughts for other posts.

Day 1 was introductions and learning the technology. I’ve had a vague idea what RFID was before, but now Matt Karau told us all about it. So what is it? A powered RFID reader reads tags. An RFID tag is one of these:

RFID tag

Actually, that’s a smartcard together with an RFID tag–it’s from the inside of an Oyster card, the thing you use to pay on the London Underground. The antenna has broken off. RFID tags come in two flavours:

  • Passive tags have an antenna and a small chip. The RFID reader sends a burst of power at the tag; the power runs through the antenna and powers the chip; the chip does something (maybe just loads an ID, or perhaps does a tiny calculation); the tag sends the data back to the reader and powers down. It might have a little memory too–perhaps 0.5-4Kb.
  • Active tags are as passive ones, but with a battery.

Tags have large antenna loops, and are generally sealed inside a disk of plastic or paper. There are complexities, of course. RFID tags can be joined to sensors, so they report environmental data, or have more complex chips capable of running a tiny OS and cryptography applications, like the Oyster cards. There are different frequencies, different ranges you can hold the reader to invoke the tag, and different standards…

…but, essentially, the basic thing we’re using is a loop of wire that somehow reports the same number each time when you ring it with an electromagnetic field generated by the reader.

(Also on day 1 we had a go at calling the tags “spychips” instead of “RFIDs” every time we referred to them. The specific privacy fear isn’t a view I subscribe to, but it’s enlightening to see your new ideas being inflected by the language you use to reach them. I think it helped us see RFID as a technology in its own right, rather than relying on a single, badly-fitting metaphor.)

Day 2

We started considering the range of RFID on the second day. These thoughts, about how to have interactions in a sphere of thin air a few inches around a hidden tag, led in part to last week’s post on RFID and forced intimacy. They also led to this:

S&W experimenting with RFID

(Thanks Timo for the photo.)

In the palm of each white glove (Jack and I both have one) is an RFID tag. Inside the white polystyrene box is an RFID reader hooked up to a microcontroller (on an Arduino board). The board is also hooked up to a vibrating motor.

When you put your hand near the block, it begins to rumble.

On my glove – I’m on the right of the photo – is a flex sensor, wired up to the controller. The more bent the sensor, the bigger the rumble of the box. So when you approach the reader with an open palm, there’s a gentle vibration. As you make a grabbing gesture, the vibration grows and the white box begins to lead about. It makes a fair racket.

Why do this?

Jack was keen on celebrating the magic of this kind of remote action. What if the vibrating motor was actually a toy car motor? You could approach a car, and push it with your glove, imbuing it with acceleration through empty air. By clenching your fist, it’d zoom faster! You’d have to chase it to keep it moving. With two gloves and two motors, you could control it too.

Are proximity and tensing the hand the correct interactions for these kind of toys? We can only think by making.

Day 3

We’d spent the second day trying to learn some of the intrinsic properties of RFID tags and readers. Some of the ones we discussed were:

  • You can’t see the tags
  • Tags are ways for machines to tell the difference between different lumps of plastic–heading towards what Matt Jones has called a robot-readable planet
  • Knowing a tag’s ID is proof that the reader was geographically there, like the patterned card punches used in orienteering
  • The functional bit is the reader, not the tag

This last point was a revelation to me. RFID interactions are not like button-pushing interactions. With buttons, the smarts are behind the buttons themselves. The buttons trip relays and activate switches. With RFIDs, the smarts are all in the thing you use to push the buttons.

Imagine a computer keyboard, but the keyboard isn’t plugged into anything. Instead, cameras in your fingertips read the letters on the keys, decipher them, and send those letters via a USB cable in your wrist to the computer. That’s more like RFIDs. With buttons, the button pusher is the fungible bit (any finger can be a poking device) and each button is special. With RFID, the button pusher needs to be clever.

Continuing this thought, imagine a keyboard which worked like this. You’d print out paper ones that were better for Quark or Photoshop or whatever. You’d draw ad hoc macro keys on the desk, in erasable pen. Taking this back to RFIDs, does their true potential only emerge when people can make and write their own copy-tags to fill their environments?

Anyway.

Since the reader is the functional bit, different tags can behave in different ways. Perhaps the reader could have a slot in the top, and that’s where you slip in a tag to state the kind of tool the reader is at the moment (a telephone, a camera, a query tool), and there are other kinds of tags that represent objects, like people, places and things. What about stacking tags, or having them interlock in different ways, or… or…

The possibilities multiplied.

On the third day, we came back to where we’d started on the first day: Trying to get a feel for the field of an RFID reader.

RFID field drawing

Above is a drawing Timo made, with the RFID reader under a desk and a pen through a hole in the middle of an RFID tag. He drew only when the reader was picking up the tag ID. It’s a beautiful image. (Thanks Timo for the photo. This was when we were seeing if a magnet would distort the field. Other drawings didn’t have that in place.)

Jack and Timo spent time in the workshop at the Architecture School making a robot pen to do the same thing.

RFID pen drawing

This pen has an embedded RFID tag (Timo’s photo again). It’s wired to the RFID reader, which controls a solenoid pushing the pen up and down. The pen is only down, and drawing, when it’s within range of the reader. You slide it around, and the automation does the rest.

RFID pen

The machine-aided drawings aren’t as beautiful as the totally hand-drawn ones, but ain’t that always the case.

Robot arms

So I’ve been thinking about hands and arms. I started by thinking of extremely small hands, on my hands. So here are some drawings from that thinking.

Physical VR

This drawing is of a toy that shrinks your hands down so you can play in a small world, with small figures. Your fingers are all connected up to a group of flex sensors, which converts the analogue movement to a cluster of servos. The servos collectively control fingers on the small hands by tightening or loosening. So the movements of your fingers become roughly and awkwardly analogous to those of the small hands in the toy. There is also a screen inside some goggles hooked up to a small camera in a glass ball between the two small arms. So when you look in to the goggles, you see what is in front of your arms. There are two wheels which you can twist to point the camera in different directions, like an eye. Kind of like an analogue version of virtual reality, only right in front of you and not virtual.

Hand Finger

I would also like to have a very small hand at the end of my finger. To pick up pens and things. You control the small hand on one finger using your other fingers, with flex sensors (same as above). You lose one of your big hands to gain a little hand on the end of one of your fingers.

I came across Chad Thornton‘s work. He is at Google now, but he made a mechanical finger as part of his work at Carnegie Mellon Interaction Design programme (nice video here).

Maybe I’m carrying some latent affection for the Radio Shack Armatron here, I don’t know. These themes are common in films. This must be informed by Ripley’s Power Loader from Aliens:

The belt buckle, and rubberised keyboard make her rig seem really convincing, her trainers too, and how she locks into the unit. The cyborg fingers for typing in Ghost in the Shell are nice too.

No doubt there are more. It makes me think of Robocop‘s gun hip too although slightly off topic.

I like them, robot arms. I see them as a celebration of industrial process. I predict they will become a more widespread part of our lives. They are cheaper now (it appears that non-load bearing ones don’t require three phase power either) and since they are multi modal they can perform many tasks, in strange contexts. No doubt FDM or other fittings are/will be available, implications of that could be very large. Imagine a robot arm in your drive thr(o)u(gh), changing a tyre, and then printing out your happy meal. Our lives could become peppered with arrays of multi-buildy-arms.

Robotlab (via Roger Ibars) are a German partnership who have used industrial robot arms to perform a DJ set. Witnessing the arms is as important as their role. I find them disconcertingly accurate, mechanised confidence in something typically so analogue and expert and careful. There is also something about their inflexibility, their inability to reach inside certain arcs, too close to themselves. I like the way they occasionally find a sync with each other, and at other times drift out. I think these guys have a business model set up around this, so I’m very interested to see how that develops.

I want one.

RFID and forced intimacy

S&W is here in Oslo with Timo Arnall’s Touch project for an RFID hacking workshop (check out that hand-drawn antenna field map). Yesterday was introductions, learning about RFID as a technology, and some preliminary explorations.

The work group met for breakfast today, and we discussed promising interactions and potential projects. One of the topics that came up was RFID tag visibility.

I know it’s obvious to state it, but RFID tags are generally hidden. To read a tag, first you have to find it with your reader. Design can make the location of the tag obvious… but wouldn’t it be interesting to embrace the invisibility constraint? Could we take advantage of the seeking behaviour that has to occur?

Consider a car showroom. Imagine no salespeople there, and no prices on the cars. When you entered the showroom, you would be given a RFID reader. There would be an RFID tag, holding the price, hidden somewhere on each car. You’d have to find the rough location of the tag to read the price.

Okay, this would be enormously annoying. But it would force you to step closer to the car, to examine the wing mirror to see if a tag was there, get up close to the paint-work on the door. What would happen?

When you get bright lights and noises in films, you feel excited whether the narrative of the film is exciting or not. Playing Project Rub on the Nintendo DS, the blowing interaction forces you to get adrenalised. Your body is tricked. Maybe getting really close to the car would be a kind of forced intimacy. You would feel better disposed to the car whether you liked it or not, simply by virtue of almost hugging it.

Okay, that’s car showrooms. What about parties for teenagers? We made up a Spin the Bottle type game. Oh, and gave it a pirate theme.

The scenario is this: Everyone who comes to your house party gets a token that looks like a gold coin with an RFID tag in it (holding a unique ID). People at the party take turn with the RFID reader. They have to wear a pirate hat, and the reader looks like a buccaneer’s sword. Let’s say you have the sword. You press a button on the handle, and it chooses a random RFID tag. This is the tag you have to find, by going round to everyone at the party and sweeping them with the sword.

Now let’s say you’re a person with a coin. If you’re not too keen on the person wearing the pirate hat, you’d put the coin in your pocket, or under your collar, so it could be found quickly. But maybe if you fancy the person with the hat, you’d conceal the coin a little, to make it harder to find. Gosh. I think it could get a little bit sexy.

I like this game because it celebrates the invisibility of the RFID tags, the fact they have a short detection range, and that the range can be shortened with material. It’s a treasure hunt game, but it doesn’t matter whether you have the chosen coin or not–it can be flirty in any case. It supports social interactions (ahem) rather than displacing them.

We had other ludicrous game ideas: Croquet where the hoops had tags and the balls had readers, where the balls would speak what you had to do next. “You have taken 4 hits. Now get through hoop 2,” your ball would say. You wouldn’t need the rule book. We also considered playing penny football with RFID tags, the readers snapping onto the edges of the tables and recording the number of goals. They could show the score on LCD screens, and play cheering sounds whenever a goal was scored.

Both of these games feel as silly to me as Slapz, the electronic game that replaces the children’s game Red Hands (or “slaps”).

The forced intimacy treasure game feels just as silly, but much more fun.

Two recent work talks

First talk!

I visited the London office of Agency.com a week last Friday and reprised Engaging Technology. The gags went down okay – something I’m always nervous about, especially with an end-of-the-working-week audience – and I made a few small changes, mainly to focus the Acts Not Facts slide on interactive agency work. I said:

When I buy a holiday, Expedia makes it feel like I’m engaging with tedious bureaucracy. My ringing phone embarrasses me when it rings on a train or in the cinema. But when I purchase something, that’s not just a cold fact… it’s the first time a product and I engage, and if the purchasing experience is lousy then the brand is damaged. […] And when I’ve talked to advertising planners and folks working in brand communication in the last few months, they’ve all told me that the days you want a product in your life because that product is “cool” or “reassuring” or has a particular lifestyle, whatever the fact… those days are gone. It’s all about the acts instead. What’s it like to purchase? To show off to friends? To sell? To clean? To run in? What are the stories? How do I engage with it, and how does it engage with me?

I keep meaning to post more about how to design for intrinsic activities. Remind me.

Second talk!

This Saturday, I spoke at an away-day for the folks behind BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight (my slides aren’t online). It was rather disconcerting to see the faces of voices with which I’m extremely familiar–I catch the programme almost every weeknight. I was speaking about the leading edge of media consumption, especially new media, covering old and new media channels (giving some demos–I think hands-on is important in understanding threats and opportunities), social media, citizen journalism, and a little trend speculation on where people will be spending their time in coming years:

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and the creative renaissance evident in Make magazine and more (the example I gave was Instructibles, where the empowerment of creation from the internet has come together with the loosely-coupled collaborative ethos)… both of these feel as energetic and full of potential as blogging did in 1999.

Thanks, too, to Dan Hill and Suw Charman, who were both generous with their help when I was putting together the talk.

I wanted to mention, here, how I concluded the presentation. I’d begun by stating that while technology changes, people mostly don’t. At the end I highlighted one social change that, from my perspective, looks as if it might be taking place:

Far from being an antisocial medium, the internet is enormously social. We in this room are media literate, from being surrounded by tv, cinema, radio, magazines, adverts… People growing up online are surrounded by people, and are socially literate. They’re fully in-tune with small-p politics. Interpersonal politics. Social politics. Sometimes it shows as a lack of respect, because they know how people work and aren’t willing to think that some people are special, just because they have authority. They understand that people are just people. […] There is a small-p political literacy that comes from continually socialising. It manifests both as people forming communities online, and as a lack of respect for big media that means media needs to personalise, and meet people in their communities as peers.

Highly speculative, of course! I also touched, briefly, on social capital.

It’s been a while since I felt like I was banging the drum for the internet. But being online is a large component of most of my friendships, and a lot of those friends I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the net. Often people who have purely utilitarian use of the internet don’t see that.

I find it enormously heartening that there’s a general intelligence, online, about how people work in groups, gleaned from folks living on mailing lists, making stuff together, and chatting. I wanted to get that across.

Participation inequality

Jacob Neilsen’s latest Alertbox Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute highlights the lurkers/participants ratio in social software:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action

Neilsen points to less equitable distributions, and gives suggestions on how to increase the number of participants. Previously the Guardian have discussed this as the 1% rule.

It throws up a ton of questions. Is the growth of a social software system led by the number of participants, or the number of lurkers you can gather who somehow turn into participants? What are the distributions for different sites, and with what are these correlated? Are people who participate in one community more like to participate in another? Does having a consistent identity across services promote or damp general participation? With which distributions are the people lurking and participating most satisfied? How does this compare to television, newspapers, the postal service, the music industry and so on?

I don’t like the word “inequality” because it’s so loaded – the whole phrase seems to promote deliberate and vocal participation as a good thing – but I’d love to know more about distributions of different modes of engagement with communities, completely online and otherwise. Any suggestions for reading material?

Editing documents as playing music

I’m currently reading Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction. Well written, well structured; a good introduction to interaction design that’s centred on the web as far as I’ve read, and looks as though it’ll take a broader approach in the second half of the book. This passage, on icons, grabbed me:

A confusing image can obscure much more than it can illuminate. For example, the disk icon has come to mean “save,” even though, increasingly, many young people have never seen a floppy disk (except perhaps this icon!). Then again, it is difficult to imagine what image could replace it.

Well that’s a challenge if ever there was one.

Save metaphor, disk icon

People don’t use paper files like they use to, and besides, computers aren’t office focused but for the home now. And at home, it’s all about the media.

Could play, pause and the rest replace save and open?

We might have to twist the metaphors a little, but consider the regular set of icons (and I’m sure I’m only thinking of this because I’ve been reading about early play and record icons; more).

Media icons

How about this: On file open dialogs, the play icon would replace the open button. On toolbars, the play icon would be used to trigger the dialog. To close a document, saving automatically, the pause icon would be shown.

The metaphor here is that a document is a continually evolving piece of media. There’s no concept of “save,” what you see on the screen is what’s on the disk. You can never lose work. Play and pause simply mean start and suspend editing.

Ah, but what if you wanted a safe and stable version of your document to always come back to? That’s what the record icon would be for. It’d be analogous to “save as,” kinda, but a better description would be that record means “tag this as stable” in version control. You’d still have your continually evolving document, only the recorded one would be tagged as a version to rely on–an inflection point. This would tie nicely into Apple’s Time Machine, which will let you leaf through previous versions of your files–maybe rewind and fast-forward could be used to step between stable versions.

When I had a dual cassette player, years ago, the second tape deck had a record button for deck to deck dubbing. It only worked if the first was playing. The record button, in our new system, could also be attached as a label any place the currently playing document could be channelled. So record would also show up next to the printer, to dub the open document to paper, and it’d be on the email application, and next to IM buddy names too… it’s a bit of a stretch, this one, but I’d like to try it.

Naturally stop would send your document to the trash.

This change in metaphor, from document as a discrete thing to something which is continuously changing, would affect much of the desktop GUI. Rather than an application which has the command “send to printer,” it has to be a representation of your printer which has the record button on it.

And what does “now playing” mean, given our computers multitask? Perhaps it’s a good thing for us to think of them playing documents over one-another, in a cacophony. It means we’d start thinking about which we focus on, and how to quieten the others–would we have a “stifle” button, to suppress alerts from playing documents that aren’t at the pinnacle of our focus?

Documents as music. What else could replace the disk picture on the open button?

S&W in San Francisco (update: but not yet)

Update, 11 October: Oh, the joys of attempting a trip of multiple purposes! We were almost sorted on one of the meetings that we wanted to come off, so I jumped the gun and posted this to get the rest of the week arranged… and it turned out the timings just wouldn’t come together. The trip only half makes sense without it, and we’ve just got swamped with work, so we’re pushing the S&W California tour into next year. It’s a little disappointing but I’m still considering a San Francisco holiday in December, so we’ll see what happens!

The following is the old post, maintained for posterity:

Very exciting news: S&W (that’s us) has been invited to speak at Yahoo! as part of the TechDev Speaker Series (weekly talks for the Technology Development Group). Our slot is 1 December. Not only do we get to speak with a room full of super smart people, we also get a rare visit to California.

That means we’ll be in San Francisco during the last week of November (and, personally, I might be staying on for a week and taking a holiday).

Fancy meeting up?

I’m happy to do re-runs of previous presentations, or discuss previous work (read our work page for both), and Jack has a good line in maps and graphics that isn’t online yet. We’re especially curious to speak with folks in product and interaction design, toy companies, physical computing, and R&D in consumer technology hardware and software. Oh, internet/mobile companies too who have interesting social, interaction or interface challenges–but you knew we’d be up for that (read more about our specialities).

While we’re not quite bespoke Savile Row tailors visiting to take measurements and send perfect suits back on the next plane, it’ll be grand to meet a whole bunch of new and old friends face-to-face. Please do get in touch if you’d like to do something, or have a suggestion for someone we should see!

Drawing phones

Hello.

I think I’m mostly going to post drawings from my sketchbooks, and talk around those for a while. Since a lot of my thinking starts like this. My sketchbooks are also places where I put ideas that would be too difficult to make, so they just get drawn instead.

I think phones mostly used to look like this:

Old phone drawing

Now they don’t. During our work for Nokia and my time at the RCA, I developed groups of ideas around phones and how their functionality influences their form. The ideas follow a continuing enthusiasm for celebration of function, something that continues to influence the work Matt and I do.

Drawing of phone 01

The first is a sketch of a phone dock that distributes all the things I use in the phone into discrete physical instances locally. Pretty self descriptive really, a receipt printer pushes out text messages as they arrive. To make a call, stamp out the number, or add a name card from the Rolodex, then pull down on the indicator lever, the end blinks while it rings and snaps back when the phone returns to idle or someone answers.

Mechanical phone

This phone explores the keypad unlock function. As it opens from its locked down position, the screen opens like a flower and all the buttons turn over like little Porsche* headlamps. Locked down, it is completely flush and faceless, no risk of pocket dialling, but fragile, mechanical and slim when open.

*(is it Porsche or am I revising history?)

Extra hand set

Hands free sets feel quite unsatisfying. Wouldn’t it be better if your phone came with an extra hand? This phone comes with a small robot arm (plugged into your data port), to hold your tea, or mangle paper clips while you are listening to your voice mail. Definitely needs to be more exploration of robot arms in the future.

From pagerank to pagefeel?

Back in June, at reboot8, I presented a series of web browser enhancement ideas based on an investigation of the human senses. (The slides and my notes are online: Making Senses.)

The concept of taste led me to imagine what it would be like to take a hyperlink on a webpage, and pop it in your mouth (taste starts on slide 7). Just like our tongue picks up a 4 or 5 flavours, but sometimes we really enjoy a salty or bitter taste and sometimes we don’t, what are the 4 or 5 tastes of a webpage that we like depending on our mood and nutritional requirements of the day?

Web page taste

In my sketch, tasting a link involves hovering over it and having a flavour summary pop up. This includes a thumbnail of the page at the end of the hyperlink, it’s extracted terms (corresponding to the smell), and a bar chart of the 4 page tastes (flavour is a combination of all of these). The 4 I chose, with only a little thought, were:

  • Is it an outward-linking page, like a contents page, or an inwardly focused page like an essay?
  • Is it frequently updated?
  • Is the text more in the 3rd person, like a corporate or academic page, or more about the 1st person–subjective, like a blog or journal?
  • Do many people link to this page, ie what is its pagerank?

They’re okay, as tastes, I think, but really could be better.

Fast forward a few months…

At eurofoo06, Ben Gimpert presented on the “Theomatics of Food” (he has a culinary background). He spoke about mouthfeel, that sensory experience of taste, materiality, stickiness… it’s a grand word.

Where I really pricked my ears up was when Ben joined taste to mouthfeel. What is the feel, he asked, of the main tastes? He speculated:

  • “Sour” mouthfeel: pucker-y
  • “Salty” mouthfeel: chewy
  • “Bitter” mouthfeel: coating-y
  • “Sweet” mouthfeel: crunchy

(I don’t recall whether he mentioned umami/pungent or spicy in this section too.)

Now this I like. Given those 4 tastes, and their corresponding feelings, are what we need to make a first-pass judgement on whether we need the buckets of chemicals available in any given food… could I use these real tastes to make the equivalent 4 for webpages?

What does my browser-mouth taste when I click a link? What are the basic flavours of HTML? What is the pagefeel?

So I think I’ll revise my original 4 web tastes. They’ll still take a lot of datamining to calculate, but that’s fine. Perhaps crunchy pages are like popcorn, ones people stay on for not much time, but when they click away it tends to be on another, almost identical page. Coating-y pages are ones that linger… could these be social sites, where you get embroiled in the community, sticky sites?

Chewy sites are long and worthwhile: academic papers, pages that are knowledge hubs, using keywords from a lot of separate parts of the web. And I’m not sure what pucker-y/sour is. Sour makes me think of lemons, which makes me think of citric acid at the centre of the metabolic cycle, which tastes nasty but is at the middle of all life. Perhaps the equivalent for the web is hyperlinks. Pages with a lot of hyperlinks on them are the concentrated stuff of life on the web, and so they taste very, very sour.

Okay, enough of that silliness.

I still think it’s worth taking huge quantities of every metric we can gather about the web and web browsing behaviour – page linger time, click-away time, search terms, text reading age, word tense, link network position, everything – and datamining it as much as we can. Maybe out of all of that we’ll find some stable metrics for describing pages, possibly even those pagefeels, and those will be great additions to search engines and web browsers.

Alternative taste suggestions welcome!

Form and woodturning

Following up on the rubber forms and mechanical wood material explorations, we look here at turned wood, how it reacts with the expectation of the mobile phone, and what questions it provokes.

These wooden pills, made for us by Duncan Kramer, run completely counter to the painful, awkward silicone rubber shapes.

Making by Duncan Kramer

We just wanted these objects in our hands. They look a little like make-up compacts, or something else very definitely non-technological. The wooden surface is organic and permeable; it will absorb things. It smells of wood. When you hold one of these pebbles in your hand, it just begs the question: What if this lit up with phone-ness, how would it look?

In the movie The Final Cut, Robin Williams plays an editor who assembles memorial biopics of regular individuals after they die. His video editing workstation—keyboard, screen housing and all—is wooden. It seems apt.

Robin Williams in The Final Cut.

Wood is organic. Wood weathers. There’s something about turning one of the pills in your hand, and taking two and rubbing and clacking them together. The turned wood pills feel like they should be taking part in rock stacking, or one of Andy Goldsworthy’s natural, ephemeral sculptures.

Stacking.

We go through these explorations because we want to discover the natural movements of the material—what you want to do with them. What are my natural moves with my current mobile phone? I tap it on the table mainly, I guess, and that has no function. But with a wooden phone, like one of these, I want to spin it, and turn it over and over in my palm. These are intuitive actions every bit as valid as our “intuitive” want to poke at a keypad button or flip a toggle switch. I believe that when we use these new materials to make a phone, we should look at how these movements can be used in our everyday interactions.

Other material explorations

Other material explorations are linked from the Materials explored page.

Form and silicone rubber

These silicone rubber and latex objects are the least technological of our material explorations. Simply by producing the familiar shape of the mobile phone in unfamiliar materials, we can investigate our expectations of the texture and comfort of the purely physical form.

What you can see in this picture is a collection of rubber-covered wooden blocks (the connected one is latex), produced for us by Duncan Kramer (see also his biography). There are a couple of turned wood shapes, which I’ll discuss separately.

Making by Duncan Kramer

I’m only going to show the photos of the models and immediate impressions in this post, to avoid spinning off into speculation (as I did in a couple of draft posts already).

Defiant

What does it means when a phone is defiant about being put in your pocket?

High friction surface

This light green surface has very high friction. With its bubbles and tiny holes it looks a little like a coral. To the touch, the only way to describe it is dry. It’s not sticky, but it defies slipping easily into your pocket. Yet the surface, when you push it, gives slightly. If you mark it with your thumbnail, it remembers a little. All surfaces have this kind of memory eventually, as they accumulate cracks and scratches, but this one acknowledges it too.

Awkward

Where do you put your phone when you’re not using it, and when you are using it?

Floor surfacing.

These wooden blocks are painted with factory floor surfacing. The black dotting you see on the surface is extremely hard carbon grit: The paint doesn’t chip, and you can’t pick the grit off. It’s beautiful, sharp and painful. You wouldn’t want to hold one of these against your cheek, and it’d shred the inside of your pocket if you kept it in there for any length of time.

Yet, despite the abrasive surface, the shape of the object compels me to touch it. Maybe it’s because I so strongly associate shapes that would fit in my hand with items I should pick up (I’ve written more about this in Expectations). I think I also recognise this kind of tentative touching and, paradoxically, it’s from expensive or fragile materials: I hold this scratchy block carefully… in the same way as I’d hold a delicate, inflated origami box. It’s curious that the same kind of interaction is triggered by a possibility of damage to either the handler or the handled.

Broken

When we look at a crumpled object, how do we expect it to feel or function?

Rubber rock.

Like the other rubbers, this blue, crumpled object feels warmer to the touch than plastic. It gives a little when you push it, but not too much. It’s more comfortable to hold in some ways than in others. Looking at it, you expect it to be broken, but it will keep this shape. It’s an aesthetic I like, personally. It’s punk.

Linked

If you were making a clamshell phone, covered completely in rubber, I think you’d have to join the two portions something like this. The latex coating on these blocks turns into a connecting cord.

Connected latex-covered blocks.

I’m not sure of the origins of this piece—whether Duncan made connected blocks accidentally or deliberately—but I like the way there’s no plug or socket for the join: The same material wraps everything.

Other material explorations

Other material explorations are linked from the Materials explored page.

Fabric handicraft

This material exploration took us in the direction of fabric and, in particular, what non-specialists would do at home if the phone encouraged them to make use of handicrafts and fabric.

Now, personally I’m not handy with a needle and thread. I can sew a button on, even using the matchstick trick as explained by a Genuine Tailor™, but I don’t have a sewing machine or the kind of knowledge that tells me what angle to cut at, what stitch to use… you get the picture. We were looking for someone who has this kind of knowledge, but wasn’t an expert. Full disclosure: I asked my sister, Kat Webb, to help out.

She’s ideal for this exploration. She has what I’d call “fabric literacy”: She knows her way around the tools, and is adept enough to make simple clothes for parties, or use fabric, beads and stitching for cards and decoration. But she’s not what we’d call a practitioner—it’s an occasional evening pastime only.

(If I can explain a little why this target audience is good: Think about email. Email has to be good for people whose primary job skills aren’t in computers. To design a good email (or IM) application, you can assume basic computer and written literacy, and that’s it. With that starting point, you can see what qualities your email system needs to exhibit. For example, memorable, short email addresses mean people don’t have to learn another interface to record them—they can just write them down with pen and paper. This kind of focus is important.)

Phone templates, made from MDF with a laser cutter

Kat spent an hour or so on each of five pretend phone covers. We gave her some template phone shapes to use as a prop. I’ll show you what she came up with, and talk a little about the ideas they inspire.

Fluffy cover. Making by Kat Webb

Texture

Something this fluffy tells stories by virtue of its difference from regular mobiles. I’ve got my mobile in my hand so much of the time, when I’m expecting a call, mooching on the Underground, or sitting with friends in a bar. Often I’m not even looking at it, I’m just playing. Why shouldn’t it be something that feels pleasant? There’s the problem about it getting dirty, of course, and that fabric wears… but people have pretty and delicate purses which are handled just as often, and those aren’t a problem. So what’s the difference? Maybe it’s something to do with the fact phones don’t invite these kind of covers, and I’ll come back to it later. In the meantime, just think about a mobile you want to stroke.

Money pouch

Taxi

It’s a simple gag, this one: You need somewhere else to keep a spare tenner for the taxi home because if it’s in your wallet on a big night out, it’s going to get spent. And what else do you always have with you? Your phone.

To draw a moral out (admit it, you knew I’d work one in), think about why there aren’t covers like this already: Here’s one reason: It’s hard to make well-fitting covers, because the people who can make creative and good-looking covers generally aren’t engineers. Here’s another: Uses like the “taxi” pocket cover are highly situated in certain social groups and geographical areas. With a culture of mass manufacture, the designers who might make these covers are too far from the people who might buy them, and so the ideas don’t come to fruition.

Instead of this manufacture culture, how about one where phone covers (even the phones themselves) are designed and made locally, in runs of only a few hundred, if that? How could we make it possible for non-experts to co-design the phone for their friends, neighbours, and people in their town? I’m talking about a culture of casual manufacture (that is, amateur and part-time), or folk factories (bottom-up and commonsense).

Beads, felt and flower

Gauze and velcro

Repositioning

Something that doesn’t really come across in these photos is the material itself. The brown background is hard felt, which is tough but can eventually be torn. The red and purple flower petals are made from transparent gauze, which shimmers and can—just—be seen through. The beads are tightly threaded and joined together, and they make a surface that’s fun to run your nail along.

All the elements have velcro on the back, and can be repositioned to sit anywhere on the silk. It’s enjoyable, moving the pieces around to make different patterns. In the spirit of material exploration, these objects make me think in two, quite new directions:

Layering is true to the way paper (in the form of magazines) and fabric (as gauze and crochet) work. It also, as the layers disappear, demonstrates the impermanence of the material. Yet, although removing layers is generally destructive, it’s so compelling: We pick, we peel, we unwrap. How about a cover where the layers are different colours, and can be torn off to reveal the layer underneath, like a gobstopper? You’d spend your idle time making swirl and stripe patterns, or peeling all the way back to a solid colour, or using the torn-off scraps for notes and phone numbers. It would be a cover that invited you to participate with it.

And speaking of participation, I also think of patchwork. If the cover is composed of many similar parts, these flowers, or squares of fabric could be individually decorated and swapped. I’m thinking especially of the pattern of activity in schools around friendship bracelets here (example; more to see; detailed site). Kids invest time in knotting these bands, and give them as a demonstration of friendship and caring. Could individual patches have a similar use, if they were made to be carefully decorated and given to others? I’m wary of appearing to see a cultural practice and advocating leaping in to take advantage of it commercially… Instead I’m just thinking, why doesn’t the physical form of my phone lend itself more to object-centered sociality (ably described by Jyri Engeström)?

These are both ideas I’d like to explore further.

Face

Doll

I’ve left my favourite till last. Kat made me laugh with this—it’s a mobile phone with hair. If you don’t keep its hair up in bunches, you can’t see the screen. To be honest, it feels like I have to give my phone that much grooming, maintenance and attention already, so we might as well make it explicit.

Again, just holding this in my hand sparks ideas: Is playing with a doll a physical casual game for young children? Could we have equivalents now? What other interruptible attractions could the surface of my mobile have—a Zen garden, rosaries?

Reflections

One of the reasons people don’t make covers like this now may be because it’s too difficult. Once you take the plastic cover off a phone, you also lose the keys, the power switch, the splash-proofing, and the battery cover. The outer surface is too solid, and the inner surface is too weak. How good it would be to have an in-between surface which still had keys and splash-proofing, but wasn’t robust enough to go in your pocket with your keys.

Perhaps that surface could also have fabric fasteners on it (as in the third photo, above), to encourage people to make other covers.

I’m reminded of John Maeda talking about nude electronics and fabrics. He said: Have technology toys always been… naked… until recently? […] The object inside can be pure, simple, and cool; while its clothing can be warm, vivacious, and simply outrageous.

Practically, a fabric cover, especially a layered one, means that my phone in my pocket won’t have a tough exterior to smash up my camera or rub away at my jeans. But for people to use fabrics, the covers have to be “vivacious” and “outrageous”, which are judged subjectively, and so we also need a culture of local manufacture. What we’re finding in this exploration is that there are changes the phone manufacturer can do to encourage that, and illustrations we can make to provoke designers into thinking that way.

Other material explorations

Other material explorations are linked from the Materials explored post.