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 [...]

May 12th, 2010 by Matt Webb · 5 Comments

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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 [...]

April 2nd, 2010 by Matt Webb · 31 Comments

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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 [...]

November 10th, 2009 by Matt Webb · 1 Comment

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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 [...]

November 3rd, 2009 by Matt Webb · No Comments

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Last week’s financial modelling resulted in a graph of the company’s invoices and cash receipts back to July 2007. I can read my feelings off it month by month: there’s an early year of maintaining one big consultancy gig per quarter coupled with a single long running project. Good. I can read a year ago, [...]

October 29th, 2009 by Matt Webb · No Comments

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Tom is on holiday. Matt Jones was with the RCA Design Interactions programme on Monday launching a brief on the Future of Etiquette, in collaboration with T-Mobile. He’s currently in Berlin with that. Aside from that: Ashdown; helping Schulze with Bonnier; gentle biz dev. Schulze is gently biz deving too, on top of developing last [...]

October 22nd, 2009 by Matt Webb · 9 Comments

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I’m into cybernetics. Or rather: I think that the cybernetics movement of mid last century is the hidden nexus of interconnected postwar history. 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 [...]

October 21st, 2009 by Matt Jones · 3 Comments

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As Webb has mentioned in this week’s update, I’m leading a project in the studio called Ashdown, which is in it’s very early stages. 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 [...]

October 20th, 2009 by Matt Webb · No Comments

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I’m back. Holidays are good, I can thoroughly recommend them. And if you’re interested in the talk, Escalante, I gave while I was away, you can listen to the MP3 recording and see the bibliography. Thanks Matt Jones for giving the week 226 and week 227 updates while I was away! He’s funnier but I [...]

October 13th, 2009 by Matt Jones · No Comments

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Webb’s on holiday after delivering his keynote at Web Directions South. He’ll post the slides/notes when he returns from his spirit journey but in the mean-time here’s the bibliography. Tom is still doing his data-botany for Ashdown, running around in servers with his butterfly net made of finest regexp to see what he can find, [...]