Blog (page 24)

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.

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.

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!

This week, the mailing list was filled with a lot of unhappy BERGians isolating their sniffles from the studio and nice comments from the world about SVK and Shuu.sh. Those were interspersed. with these links.

I love this project of BBC iPlayer for Kindle. Clever.

I had a very quick play with Kyle McDonald’s FaceOSC today, plugging it into Ableton Live.

Podalyzer has some really nice copy, my favourite of which is this facebook oAuth success message. I like how it thinks of oAuth as a friendly introduction facilitated by facebook instead of a functional transaction of personal details.

You can now get a 3D printed mini-me for only €59.90!

Art/photography critics evaluate Google Street View’s ‘photograph of the entire world’

On our regular “Parallax Watch” feature, this week’s entry was “Hobo Lobo of Hamelin”, a story illustrated in Parallax.

This image didn’t help those sniffles. (via @evenioslo)

Happy weekend all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 317 weeknotes were published a day late, due to Tuesday being dedicated to the launch of SVK, a comic book which was BERG’s first publication. Two bottles of Cava were consumed on that Tuesday evening, as the team gathered around a monitor displaying a special app written to track SVK’s consumption.

The app they were watching had been written with Alice’s new Ruby on Rails skills, gained while developing the application, previously known as Flagstaff, now named Shuush. Shuush was released to the public later that week.

As Tom Stuart, Matt Jones and Alex Jarvis listened to the mario coin noise of the app, they pondered over the last bits of feedback and tweaking of Dimensions 2 before it was used by client.

The largest project of the week for BERG was Chaco, which had absorbed Andy, Joe, Jack, Alex and Nick this week, and had shown some pretty exciting things at the previous week’s Friday demo.

Weminuche made unglamorous but functional leaps forward, which involved meetings attended by Jack, Denise, Alex, Andy, Nick and James. These meetings were chaired by Simon, who discovered a new way of using post-it notes which would stay with him for the rest of his career.

Various importing processes for Schooloscope were re-ignited for their occasional use, ready to update its opinion of the current educational landscape in Britain.

Week 317 was preceded over by Simon and processed by Matthew Webb.

We’ve been working on making a comic with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker.

Today we’re super pleased to announce it’s available, and the store is now open at http://getsvk.com.

It’s something we’ve really enjoyed bringing into the world – and we hope you enjoy it too.

“I thoroughly enjoyed SVK, which either in spite or because of its concision is somehow Dickensian, and while quite thoroughly dark, is also quite touching. Memorable. And couldn’t be done as well, or even be born, in any other medium at all” – William Gibson, author of Zero History, Spook Country, Neuromancer etc., in his foreword for SVK.

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!

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:

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.

Another batch of SVK torches have arrived in the office… Which reminded me to tell the story of the SVK logo.

Alex and, before him – Matt Brown, had been working up some fairly slick logos; which didn’t seem to quite fit with the story or the world of Thomas Woodwind.

I had a bit of a brain-fart and sent the following to Alex and Jack to see if we could spike it in a new direction.

Heimdall is the public brand – it’s the respectable, publicly-traded corporation with the big HQ – that’s got a polished logo that cost £18 million quid from Wolff-Olins or Interbrand.

SVK is a skunkworks project.

Its logo was never meant to be seen by civilians. It’s an in-joke, a source of nerd-pride. It’s been developed by sociopathic geniuses who haven’t talked to anyone normal since 1998. It’s likely got a logo that they generated in WordArt Wizard in Powerpoint.

It’s perhaps more of the world of the sorts of insignia that Trevor Paglen collects

Of course – this is a reasonable, plausible direction – but we are also making an object that we want people to respond to – so maybe it shouldn’t be completely unpolished.

Perhaps then…

The nerds in the SVK team picked the most socialised one of their number to beg the person in corporate marketing and design whose iphone they once de-bricked to give them a spare hour before the pub to tidy it up

“no, i’m afraid – it’s above your pay grade to ask what SVK means. sorry yeah, no it’s an awesome logo. thanks. it’s just a joke for the guys. yeah i was being a dick. etc.”

Hey presto. They got a logo.

Other things that got thrown in the pot…

Goat’s eyes are unnerving (to most people?) and often feature in the portrayal of the demonic…

Although this one seems quite sweet.

And… some of Gavin Rothery’s awesome art-direction evolution and process around the movie Moon, …aaaand fictional logos in James Bond Movies…

Oh, and I almost forgot – Warren pointed us at SCHWA. Remember SCHWA?

Anyway.

Here’s Alex’s evolution of the SVK logo based on those discussions and influences…

And what the final version looks like:

Standby for more SVK news…