Nick and Matt B are in the other room, working together on new product development. They’re aiming to take a tech proof of concept to minimum viable product.

Two other products – one near term, the other medium – are also taking shape.

Campbell, Timo, Jack and Matt J are working on a film called Future Magic.

There’s been a lot of business development this week. Lots of exciting conversations. And accounts: it was financial year end recently, and that’s a good chance to revisit processes with Kari. I like that company administration runs so smoothly, like a machine. I’ve been making higher level metrics, attempting to attach meaningful numbers to the budgets of cash, attention and risk.

Last week I was in California with Matt J, recharging, hiking, and attending Foo Camp. There was a lot about robotics there – everything from articulation to low-cost development to fractional A.I. – and it has influenced my thinking considerably. Most of my thinking happens in conversations, or while writing, or while drawing.

The week before that we handed over Mag+, the end of a 9 month journey. It went from R&D design concept to iPad app, and from there to a constellation of systems and processes (production tools and help-desks), which were finally divided up and stitched back into a broader corporation to run as “business as usual.” That’s how R&D should happen. I’m pleased.

On our last night in San Francisco, walking back to the hotel from hosting drinks for our West coast friends, we passed the Apple Store, and just as we went past the giant iPad in the window started playing this. A great sign-off to Mag+.

It’s odd to be back in the studio, able to pay attention once again to health, growth and direction. It’s wonderful. This is a self-sustaining spaceship now. A culture garden full of my favourite people.

I can see the mountain-tops. I can see the stars. And I am impatient for them.

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.

Mag+ continues. The first iPad app on the platform, Popular Science+, got a cracking write-up on the Apple website: The magazine of tomorrow.

Nick and Lei are working on the next version of the app, and on scaling up. James is working on the authoring tools, aided by Loz and Simon who are making it easier for first-time users and laying the foundations for better InDesign integration. Campbell is our production expert, both helping James and answering queries from a few different magazine production teams. Together with Jack and Matt J, he’s also designing features for the version after next.

Schooloscope moves towards its second feature release! Tom’s working on that, while Matt B works on designs for the planned third release. Kari is replying to queries and feedback. Ben is helping us with data. (Here’s the Guardian’s write-up of Schooloscope.)

Both Mag+ and Schooloscope are now in operations. Ops is pretty new to us, and the continuous involvement it requires doesn’t play well with the clear open space you need for free inventive work. We’re using Tender for a helpdesk, and Codebase to track bugs and allocate features to releases.

The Michel Thomas iPhone app press releases will go out this week (get the behind-the-scenes tour). Matt B and Nick have done great work.

Trumbull is working towards demo: that’s Matt B, Paul and Matt J.

Jack and Matt J were in Amsterdam last week with Layar.

Andy continues working towards end-to-end demo for Weminuche. He’ll rope Tom in this week. Jack continues working with electrical engineers on Availabot. A previously unnoticed requirement about USB power draw led to a small design change, which led to a bigger opportunity to simplify the bill of materials, which had an impact on the industrial design. It’s utterly fascinating how all the different bits link together.

The last few months have been so busy. I completely underestimated the real impact of “Scenario 4.” (In short: it was that everyone’s been too busy to even think.)

But the nice situation now is that, with our capacity slowly coming back over the next month or two, we have the chance to speak with prospective new clients in a considered and practical way. So: lots of having coffee with people. Good good.

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.

We had a delayed All Hands on Thursday, because on Tuesday so many people were out: Matt J, Matt B and Tom were at a workshop for Trumbull; Jack and Campbell were shooting video with Timo.

I spent a few minutes at the end of the All Hands speaking about the shape of the studio over the summer. It’s exciting. A race! And the right team for it. But there’s a lot that’s uncertain and a lot that has to click together all at once. We’re timeline-ing, proposal-ing, and travelling (Jack, Matt and I, for a few days next week) to make that happen.

Now I’m going to find some socks so I can put on some shoes, leave the house and buy some milk, so I can make some tea, so I can settle down and write this launch post.

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.)

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.

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.

Processes are being developed. Weekly updates for individuals and projects are put on the wall where everyone can see them. Projects are better accounted. I’m seeing gaps where processes would make life easier (induction; briefing docs; rolling project reports). Standard employee and supplier contracts are being drafted.

New work is coming in. The options continue to get more exciting, and allow for bootstrapping new parts of the business in ways that are only just beginning to come into view.

This is what metamorphosis feels like.

But we’re all working too hard and, though exhilarating – and, for the time being, worthwhile – the tiredness is showing. For myself, I can see important questions I’m not giving enough consideration, tasks that need doing, and opportunities I’m letting slip. This weekend I’ve felt like a zombie. I haven’t managed to get the work done I need to get done. It’s only 9pm on Sunday and I’ll go to bed shortly.

Any other week, the week just gone was so incredible I’d be wide-eyed and bouncing off the walls.

To the studio as a whole, what can I say? The work we’re doing – you’re doing – is beautiful, intricate, and unique. It’s a joy to be part of, and to see this team meshing so well: I look and I listen, and I see people taking responsibility, bringing things to life, working together, and so flawlessly. And I recognise that here, in the middle of things, it’s a lot and it’s rushed and it’s tiring. I don’t know what I can say about that. Other than, I guess, it’s on my mind, it has my attention, I want to figure it out. I’m proud of you and I’m proud of the work. I’m going to speak for Jack and Matt J too here: we recognise and appreciate it.

Jack and Matt J are in San Francisco, so there have been a lot of Skype calls between us.

Timo is here too, working on El Morro. He’s sitting in the second room which is called Statham. Campbell is in Statham too. He was sitting at Jack’s desk which is next to, and at right angles to mine, but changed yesterday. Nick is sitting at Jack’s desk. At Nick’s old desk is James who started Thursday. Bringing James in at this point was perfect timing. His presence is a forcing move to the project specification being refined, clarified, and better explained.

James is sitting opposite Tom. To the right of James and to the left of Tom is a sofa from Muji. On the sofa from Muji are two desks from Unto This Last partially assembled. These desks are half as long again as the ones at which James and Tom are sitting, and will replace those desks this afternoon. One of the old shorter desks will go into Statham. The other will go into the shared meeting room.

To the right of Tom is Matt B. He hasn’t moved. Opposite Matt B is Matt J’s desk which cannot be occupied. It is piled with books and files and whatnot, all of which used to be underneath the desk. But on Tuesday the studio flooded, and so the rest of the week has been punctuated by gurglings from the plug of the sink (which is where the water came from), and negotiations between the landlord and Tom Taylor, with whom we share. There’s going to be a pump and pipe put in so the sink leads to a separate drainage point. The current drainage point also has a feed from the roof so when it rains and the drain is blocked, our sink is the water’s only means of egress.

“Egress” sounds like the name of a sea bird.

During the development of Shownar, this time last year, we found ourselves having to refer very precisely to weird abstract concepts that arose from the data. To have conversations without misunderstandings, we made up words and put a long dictionary on the wall with the title “Teach yourself Dutch.” Because for some reason the project lingo got called Dutch.

It’s not really Dutch. It’s English. But to an English speaker listening in on us talking in this lingo, it wouldn’t be comprehensible.

El Morro has its own Dutch. Dutch, the project lingo, is never just a shorthand. It expresses things that, eventually, cannot be fully expressed in regular English. It ends up having its own grammar, and members of the team end up having to become fluent speakers of it.

In El Morro, a good part of Dutch – the dictionary, if you like – is defined in a spec which is 11 pages long. Timo is learning how to speak Dutch, and practises every day. Whereas we’ve written the dictionary, he’s inventing the idioms. He might need new words, in which case we’ll revise the dictionary. It’s funny, this process of inventing Dutch, because in a few weeks we’ll have a much larger team and everyone will need to speak it. It’ll start to carry meanings of its own, and its structure will encourage particular kinds of new Dutch poetry, poetry that we never imagined.

When I speak about ecological management, this is one of the things I mean. The invention of the right kind of Dutch can steer the project creatively without explicit directing. Just as the ambient knowledge and visibility of studio activity helps people operate with autonomy and agency with respect to running and selling projects. I’m not great at ecological management yet, but it’s the star by which I measure myself.

It is after lunch.

We have now assembled the new desks and everyone and everything has moved around. There are eleven seats in the studio. We have run out of the good chairs again.