iPhone developer. Great knowledge of iPhone APIs and developing. There’s a lot of UI and network activity with this app, so you’ll need to be rigorous to identify and catch possible failure modes to keep everything smooth. As ever, awesome user experience is what we’re after, so you’ll be working closely with experienced designers and an incredible lead architect and developer, and you’ll need to translate conversations and requirements into solid, beautiful code. You’ll need to learn fast.

Back-end developer. There are multiple servers that support this app, all interacting with one another. So you’ll need a good eye for Web services, both designing and implementing the protocols. Scaling and robustness are key, so you’ll be able to make a judgement about what we need and get the right solution. You’ll probably work with Rails, since this system is patterned on one we’ve just developed and we’d like to build on the same effort. You’ll need to go all the way from setting up staging and production servers and databases, to tools for deployment and ops, to rough and ready client-facing front-ends for managing content.

What I’ll be looking for, in both roles is…

• experience. Have you done this before? We need to get this right with the minimum of iteration. Show me what you’ve done: we love working with people better than us.
• London-based. We work better when we sit together. You’ll spend at least half your time in a small but busy design studio, with multiple big projects and certain kind of culture… you can get a picture of that from the weeknotes.
• responsibility and team-work. You’ll need to take ownership of challenges and come up with solutions before other people even notice, and communicate and listen constantly so we’re all playing well together.

It’s short notice: starting in a week or so, for a two month contract.

Know anyone like this? Please pass this on!

Is this you? Get in touch! I’d like to be speaking with candidates late on Monday 8th, so drop me a line by the end of the weekend: mw@berglondon.com.

The 1946 Macy Conference is kind an aleph moment. In attendance were people intrinsically involved in computers and prosthesis (the collaboration of man and machine), modern anthropology and modern neuroscience (what it means to be human), game theory (the Cold War and the conversion of people into cogs). We can trace direct paths through counterculture and social organisation, decentralisation and the Web, and to a socialist Chilean internet. There are connections to cults, advertising, social software and games, rocketry, suburbia, complexity theory and ecology. Historical roots lie in golems and pneumatic tubes, science fiction and weaving, pataphysics and the telegraph. The language of our information society was created, often knowingly, by these people. Cybernetics is the beautiful and ugly and ambiguous heart of our information society.

I have a dozen or so books in my collection that directly speak about these era. Two that stand out are both by Steve Joshua Heims: Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953; and John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death.

What’s wonderful about this history is that it’s a history of people. It’s all people who know people. The messy social world of this invented science that then vanishes undermines its own contention that humans can be modelled as components. It is a story that cannot be linearised, it is a hypertext history; a hyperhistory of actors and networks, only tellable through contradictory, subjective points of view. Yet there are aspects of known history that, I believe, only make sense when you see the hidden particle traces, the lives of the attendees of the Macy Conferences and who they knew.

It has been a pet project of mine, for a few years, to somehow tell this story. Many of the key participants are no longer with us. Understanding the modern world, in this time of change, is important. It should be known that common practices in our innocuous online spaces were thrashed out as military efforts. Conversely it should be known that the mindset computers were borne out of was reactionary and weird and perverse from the very outset.

Help wanted

I’d like some help assembling the research. I’m not sure precisely where it’ll go – for a while I thought I’d write a book, and now I have other ideas – but what I do know is that I’d like to work with a researcher for 3-6 months to turn books, articles and references into research notes: the foundation for future work.

I have a starting set of books, and a pretty clear idea of what I need as output (one reference point is Anne Galloway’s re/touch encyclopaedia). If you’re the researcher I’d like to work with, you’re already knowledgeable about postwar America and one or two of the topics associated with cybernetics. You’re good with book research, following leads like a hungry investigative journalist, and diligent with references. You’re probably in research academia in an allied field, and you may have your own use for this work. This is a part-time job, and it’s maybe another small piece of funding for you. You’ll be a self starter, and glory in interconnections and libraries both.

Why am I talking about this in public? Well, I don’t know the right researcher. Is this you, or is it someone you know? It’s speculative work – just following my nose – and I can put about £3,000-5,000 aside. If you’d like to have a chat, please do get in touch.

One of the things we need is a researcher to undertake a small sub-project for a few weeks, to help us understand the territory we’re designing for.

Have a read of the mini-brief below. It might be you!

Introducing Ashdown
Ashdown is an information system we are developing – that will manifest in a number of products relating to the UK’s educational system. Each will be built on a combination of publicly-available data sources and be made unique by the quality and insight of its presentation. The products have a variety of potential audiences: from journalists and commentators to policy-makers, teachers and parents. Each one will be gorgeous.

What do we need
We need to build up a profile of these different audiences, particularly teachers and parents – around the UK. We are looking for a researcher who can do some quick field research and create a bundle of assets that can inform the design of our products: interviews, personas, videos, relationship maps. We want someone who can provide some analysis, synthesis and have some opinions also – that we can use in our process as designers.

Who we’re looking for
Probably an individual, probably someone based near London so we can spend time together, probably someone who knows people in or related to education (getting out and finding the right people around the UK is a must), and who is happy running this piece of work themselves, for us.

When / How
We would like to have a final report and assets by the end of November 2009, and we have a £1,000 budget + reasonable expenses put aside for this.

If you’re interested yourself get in touch with me: mj [at] berglondon.com, or if you know someone who might fit the bill – please do let them know about this opportunity.We’re looking to get started as soon as we can!

From the silence, you might have guessed we’re busy. So in the name of making more time to look after this here blog, we’re hunting for someone to work with us for the next two months on a couple of projects–one physical product prototype for the BBC, and one that’s our own R&D.

Doing what? We need another pair of hands on the electronics. That means breadboards, soldering and understanding vague datasheets. It also means experience coding PIC microcontrollers or Arduino boards. It may well include PCBs; we’ll see.

We’re a start-up so we can’t promise swanky office or a chair that sighs when you sit in it. But we’re also small, so there’s a lot of influence and broad experience to be had.

This is a suitable summer intership for an interaction design or electronics undergraduate based in London, over July and August, possibly a bit of September. We generally prefer to work with friends of friends, but y’know, we’re open.

If you’re interested and available, drop me a line at matt at schulze and webb dot com with what you’ve been up to and what you can do, and we’ll take it from there.

On that note:

More speculatively, we’re also after a Windows software programmer who knows their way round USB (not drivers, just chatting to peripherals), GUI, plug-in architecture and installers, for a small project. Mac too actually.

I’m willing to look at contracting companies for this project (which I estimate at two months) but – again – would prefer a friend of a friend out of university, looking for a project to start on. The project’s not complex but the code should be tight, if you know what I mean.

Drop me a line at the same address as above, and we can figure something out.

Pass it on!

Thanks.