Search results for 'SVK'

Sad news folks, in order to preserve sanity and attention we have to shut the SVK shop. The good news is we’re running a half price sale on our remaining copies! The shop will close at midnight GMT on October 31st and SVK will be £5 plus postage and packaging. Get em while you can!

SVK is a collaboration between writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Gun Machine, RED), artist Matt Brooker (Stickleback, Lazarus Churchyard, 2000AD) and BERG. You can pick one up at the SVK shop. Thanks to all involved in getting SVK into the world, it was a massive privilege to have made a comic, especially with Warren and Matt.

And as a lovely thing to end on here is a beautiful video Timo shot when we got it printed and his write up.

SVK at the printers from BERG on Vimeo.

In July, on the day that we first published SVK, I sat down with Jack and Matt to talk through the ideas behind the project – both in terms of the storytelling and the business challenges of bringing it into the world.

This week we released the second print run of SVK, so I thought I’d share it on the blog.

Jack Schulze: I’d been reading comics a lot, they’re some of the most sophisticated graphic output I’ve been exposed to.

I was following the work of Warren [Ellis] and Grant Morrison very closely. I found something in common between them — in some of the stories they were writing they were folding the form of the comic back into the material of the story, so that the comic was sort-of self-aware.

Specifically I’m thinking of Warren’s ‘Planetary’/’Batman’ crossover, where there are different Batmen from the various eras brought into it – from Adam West’s TV Batman to tougher modern versions, perhaps drawn from Ennis or Frank Miller. The whole thing only works because there are 80 years of ‘Batman’ comics to draw on.

More recently I was impressed with the storytelling structure of Warren’s ‘Aetheric Mechanics’. Also, Grant Morrison’s ‘The Filth’, where at some points the characters interact with the gutters and borders of the comic page. And – all this against the background of my continuing obsession for Garth Ennis’ interpretation of ‘The Punisher’.

This is brave work — in terms of the broadest sense of graphic design. I started to think about how we might make a comic with those qualities. Of course, not being comics writers or artists, we came up with a loose idea about what we could do with the technologies of ink and printing to build a story which was about looking. We wanted to see how we could use the fabric of printing and fold that back into the narrative. Looking is a preoccupation of the studio going back to projects like Glancing by Matt Webb, through to the Here & There Maps of Manhattan.

Matt Jones: you wrote an outline proposal, with the project name ‘Blacklight”, in the spring of last year – 2010?

JS: Yeah. Once I realised with Matthew that it would be possible, and he could shape it into something we could formally include in the work of the company, I had to write it down and find a way to get it made!

MJ: So, in terms of that moment of thinking about it as a product, what was your thought process? As I remember, there was a distinct moment when it tipped into reality, and you said “we could do this…”

JS: Well, there are always a lot of ideas like that floating around the studio and that was one I’d been quite, sort of, bullish on and I think that it was something that we’d discussed for quite some years. At least I think you [nods at Matt Webb] had been aware of it — and when I brought it back to you, it was because I thought I’d found a way of making it. Not anything to do with money, just literally making it — getting it written and drawn… I think you saw something in it where it had the right sort of characteristics to fit a pipeline of work that we needed in order to get it somewhere…

Matt Webb: Yes. I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can make that kind of thing achievable, when it gets some kind of independence from the client work so you can do it yourself, that’s really interesting.

There was a realisation that it [SVK] could be a kind-of ‘crystal’ business in its own right. That it could be made to work through advertising, cover-price, direct sales, working with really awesome people. There’s something about the project – I mean, independent from the fact that Warren and Matt Brooker have made a really good story… that’s also … I don’t know… it sort of commoditises the tools of business in a funny sort of way — that those tools are at the service of creative works instead of the other way around.

JS: I think to expand on that, there was something that the map had taught us — that Matthew had found a way of allowing us to make anything we wanted — as long as it would pay for itself. And that’s the kind of objective, other than the cultural impact, that the project sort of builds its own infrastructure around it, and that it doesn’t cost us anything to do so, and maybe makes a small profit.

MJ: so it’s sort of a ratchet-effect thing — a system that could be used on other products?

MW: The system we have is putting physical things into people’s hands — with all that implies — warehousing, taking money, customer support…which is something that loads of other businesses have, big ones and small ones, but for us it’s completely new and it’s an investment, so this [SVK] is an excuse for us to make that investment

MJ: Jack, what’s your recollection of approaching Warren about SVK?

JS: Well, we’d written the proposal and Matthew had written a structure of how cashflows and process could be described to make it possible and satisfying to everyone taking part. And the proposal was a combination of early thoughts — some of them very detailed and some of them much larger themes. It’s located in London, the idea of ‘looking’ being an important component, but apart from that we weren’t very precious. A lot of the remainder was up for grabs. After that, I think we just took Warren to the pub and poured beer on him until he agreed. [laughs] Beer-boarding!

MJ: Ah. [laughs] I had that recollection as well – I thought you might have more details!

JS: No! I think that was it! But I think also there was something that caught his imagination — which was that you could take the tropes of AR, Augmented reality… and do them in ink. That you were, y’know, augmenting the page. That you have a scene that has a reality common to everyone, and then a special perspective unique to a particular tool. It’s obviously not the same as augmented reality but it has a sufficient number of parallels to feel part of the same aesthetic.

MJ: Yeah, it feels for instance like the things Jamais [Cascio] is talking about in his essay in the book, the subjective realities that people will start to have through technology…

JS: Yeah and I think AR is something, as Bruce Sterling and Kevin Slavin demonstrate, that people like talking about despite its limited arrival in our hands — so I think in that respect it struck a note with Warren.

MJ: What’s struck both of you most about the process?

JS: I was amazed that from that proposal, and one meeting with Warren and Matt Brooker their communications and process was *so* well-oiled. That they basically just went and did it. In contrast to most of our projects into new territories that involve endless meetings and workshops, figuring out new processes… and although it was delayed by illnesses and various stuff… that the actual creative process — of making a narrative — was extraordinarily fluent. And I’m sure that was to do with Matt [Brooker] & Warren — I’m sure it’s not the same with every comic. And just to see in the result how much of the core important elements of the original concept have remained in, despite the fact there’s now an entire universe and story, I just found it very satisfying to work with someone with that level of trust…

MW: There was something amazing about how Warren took on the concept and almost reestablished it and made it his own. It’s an idea that could have very easily have become gimmicky, or be used just to look cool. But for it to have taken on so much of the core of the story — and it’s a cracking story — that was quite amazing. I don’t know how Warren does that.

JS: It succeeds as a comic in it’s own right — without the UV layer completing it…

MJ: you might have just answered my final question — what do you think of the finished product?

JS: I think it’s great! I’m really, really proud of it. It’s better than I could have hoped when I was imagining what it could be before it was written and drawn. And it’s just fun to see Warren’s process from the inside and have something that satisfying emerge at the end of it. I think it’s awesome.

MW: There’s something interesting about being a design studio and not being responsible for the… creative surface of what comes out…

JS: Yeah, that’s one of the core components… It’s been really interesting. It has been a true collaboration in that sense, in that the combination of figuring out the processes and the experience of the product, and having the early idea — that tangle of ideas happening with someone outside the studio. It didn’t seem like what I would understand to be a typical work-for-hire relationship. It seemed like everyone involved had their heart in it, and invested themselves in the project. I thought that was great.

SVK is available only online from http://getsvk.com

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…

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…

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.

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.

Last week we visited Pureprint who are brilliantly managing the complex and specialist task of printing SVK with invisible inks. We documented the comic going through the handsome machines of the printing world:

As well as being an investigation into printing and optical experimentation, SVK is a test of our own supply chain management and product launch processes. Today has been named “SVK Friday”, we are all working together on getting SVK a bit nearer to launch.

We have a whiteboard full of todos; press releases, web, blog, print and email copy, a photoshoot, a website, email templates, postal and shipping tests, managing warehousing and fulfillment, advertiser relations and customer support infrastructure.

Setting up direct sales like this is new for us, and there are still final tests to do and kinks to iron out to make sure that an order on a website results in an comic in your hand. More news as it progresses!

I’m at FooCamp, and I’ve brought a copy of SVK fresh off the press to show some of the folk here.

The Make space at the O’Reilly HQ has Greg Borenstein showing the possibilities of Kinect-hacking, and we were playing around with pointing the UV torch that will come with SVK at the Kinect sensor… and found it punches a hole in the point-cloud of depth-data that the infra-red structured-light of Kinect senses…

It’s quite a striking ‘sensor-vernacular’ image, and my folk-physics explanation of it (at midnight last night, after some Lagunitas IPA) was that the UV was cancelling out the IR – but it might just be that any LED torch light source might have the same effect – just blowing out the sensor – can’t find anything online as yet…

I’m away from my physics–punching colleagues who would put me right in short-order I’m sure (as probably, someone here at Foo will today) but if you have any thoughts…

Update from Greg in email:

For the record, my bet is that the torch’s universe-whole punching power came from its plastic sleeve. Things that are reflective tend to do that by bouncing the IR back directly at the Kinect and giving it a blind spot. Check out the hole where Max Ogden’s eye should be in the scan we made of him last night:

Max wears glasses and his lens’ reflection caused this.

You can actually do wickedly clever things with a mirror and the Kinect to pull different bits of space into the depth image. It’s like being able to cut-and-paste space. For example, Kyle McDonald is trying to use the trick to scan all sides of an object at once.

I like using it to make wormholes…

As we get closer to shipping SVK, there’s a bit more appearing about it.

Matt ‘D’Israeli’ Brooker, our incredible artist and co-creator is interviewed in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine this month.

Alongside insights from the man himself about working with Warren, the technology and techniques he employed to illustrate SVK – there’s a bit of a scoop…

…in that there’s a sneak peak of his awesome cover art for SVK…

SVK is tantalisingly close to being in the world.

We’ve got all the story and art, we’ve got some special guest contributors, we’ve got boxes and boxes of UV torches en-route from China… So, not much longer now.

May = getSVK.

In the mean-time, some more DVD extras… I’d like to introduce you to Thomas Woodwind‘s assistant – Bulmer…

Here’s Matt ‘D’Israeli’ Brooker’s character sketch from the beginning of the project:

From Warren’s character notes…

WOODWIND’S AIDE: pushing thirty, still living like a student, unhealthy and pallid
with a shock of black hair that looks like it was dipped in tar before being stuck
to his head.  Owns only t-shirts.  Works in t-shirts and y-front underpants at all
times.

HIS BASEMENT: he has a ground-floor flat (maybe Shoreditch?  Maybe Camden
Town or Hackney?) with use of a basement, and that’s where he’s set up.  Imagine
NASA Mission Control as furnished by Steptoe And Son.  There is an actual order
to what’s in here — tables, workstations, laptops and a couple of iPads, real
high-end stuff like fabbing machines and printers that print metals and microscopes
and Other Stuff, and also a lot of junk and shit — but probably no-one can see it
but him (and maybe you).

And, here’s Matt Brooker’s final art for Bulmer’s basement ‘batcave’…

And… just a reminder – I’ll be showing a few more sneak-peeks of SVK this Saturday at Sci-Fi London’s comics day.

I’m pleased to have been invited to speak at Sci-Fi London’s Comics day, on Saturday April 30th about the work of Warren Ellis – our Chairman-Emeritus and collaborator on SVK.

I’ll be alongside friend-of-BERG Matt Sheret and Ian Edginton (co-creator of such wonders as Stickleback, Leviathan and Scarlet Traces with frequent collaborator D’Israeli, co-creator of SVK).

I hope to show some sneak peaks of SVK as well as discussing the influence our dialog with Warren and comics in general have had on our studio.

Here’s the panel description from the Sci-Fi London site:

3.30pm – The work of Warren Ellis
Writer Ian Edginton (who collaborated with Ellis on X-Force), Matt Jones (principal, BERG design who commission Ellis’ new comic SVK) and Matthew Sheret (writer, whose love of comics started with Warren’s work) discuss the work of comic book / multimedia writer Warren Ellis who has penned some of the most influencial SF comics of the last twenty years.

Followed by 20 min preview screening of new documentary – “WARREN ELLIS: CAPTURED GHOSTS”

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.

Woodwind is the protagonist in SVK, the comic we’re publishing by Warren Ellis and Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker in April 2011.

This is one of Matt’s early character sketches for Thomas Woodwind, who is quite the piece of work…

Here’s Warren’s character notes from an early treatment:

THOMAS WOODWIND:  I’m seeing a man of six feet or so, quite lean, with a good Patrick Stewart-ish skull fuzzed with very short pale hair. Paranoid eyes. Tending to very long black coats, probably with poacher’s pockets sewn on the inside.  A bluetooth earpiece cupping each ear, with front facing limbs (where the IR LEDS are). Also wears black gloves, I think – no fingerprints, reduction of epithelials.

Like I say – a piece of work all in all. He’s a classic Ellis character, with a mind like a steel-trap and a sharp tongue to match. He also makes Jason Bourne look like he’s trying too hard…

We’ll have some more news about the project likely next week, but I also want to point you at the site we’ve built where SVK will live. There’s not a lot there yet… but for now you can sign up for news about SVK’s release at getsvk.com

We love comics.

Comics break the rules of storytelling, invent new ones, and break them again – more often than almost any other media.

We are also fortunate to know – and occasionally enjoy the twisted guidance of – one of the best writers in comics and speculative fiction: Mr Warren Ellis.

Warren is actually to blame for coming up with the name BERG for us back in the summer of 2009, based on our shared love of Nigel Kneale.

So, we were thrilled when he said yes earlier this year to Jack’s proposal of working together on a storytelling project.

The result, coming in early 2011, is SVK.

What is SVK?
It’s going to be a very beautifully-printed object – a graphic novella, drawn by one of our very favourite artists – Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker – who Warren collaborated with on “Lazarus Churchyard” back in 1991. I think I’m right in saying it’s their first major collaboration since then…

We can’t tell you too much more just yet, as they are both currently hard at work on it, but Warren describes SVK as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”.

Brilliant.

It’s also a story about looking, and it’s an investigation into perception, storytelling and optical experimentation that inherits some of the curiosities behind previous work of the studio such as our Here & There maps of Manhattan.

For us – it’s also an investigation into new ways to get things out in the world, and as a result we’re talking about SVK now because we’re looking for people, brands and companies who would like to be in the SVK project…

Looking for advertisers
There are going to be a small number of opportunities to feature advertising – which will be as inventive as the story itself. We’re talking to people now, so that we can go to print with them in February 2011.

If you’re in advertising or marketing, and you’d like to talk more about it, email info@berglondon.com with “SVK” in the subject.

There’s been lots of exciting things circulating the studio this week; bacon butties, choccies, beer, the usual, but with the most notable of all being the simply delectable mango, courtesy of our Simon (and I think Sainsburys – good work guys). All the edible things aside, here’s some bits for you to enjoy.

A solar powered calculator preparing to take on the world.

What life was like in the swinging sixties.

The robot company bought by Amazon… Simply astounding.

An article about why you can’t stop throwing those birds.

The future of comics?

And finally… the biggest Creme Egg you’ve ever seen. (Bigger than a kettle):

Happy Easter all.

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.

Fact of the week: 330 is the number of dimples in a British golf ball according to Wikipedia.

So having been on holiday all of last week, I’m only just catching up with what’s been going on in the studio and am still not quite sure I’ve sussed it all out. Since I’m the one that actually makes up the blog rota, though, I have only myself to blame for assigning myself to write weeknotes the week after I’ve been on holiday. Trust me, I won’t do that again.

When I asked Matt Webb what last week was like, his summary was, “There was drama.” Unsurprisingly, when much of your work is dependent on the whims and wishes and ever-changing timelines of clients, things can go a bit pear-shaped. As regular readers of this blog will know, however, BERG is not a company that has all its eggs in one basket, so one client throwing us for a loop doesn’t completely knock us off balance. Nevertheless, there has been drama and so we’re having to deal with that.

In terms of what various folks are up to this week…

Matt Jones, Jack and Alex (who celebrated his one-year anniversary at BERG today!) are doing work on Uinta in preparation for a presentation on Thursday. Matt & Jack are also spending lots of time doing general company planning and re-planning and thinking about sales. Alongside all that, Jack has his fingers in Barry design. He’s also looking at lots of documents.

Barry is also occupying Alex, Denise, Alice, James, Nick, Matt Webb and Andy. Besides following up with various partners & suppliers and chasing China for quotes, Andy is specifically doing some reflecting on the last year of Barry development. (Side note: Because of my role and the fact that I don’t work on Fridays – thus missing weekly studio demos – I only get to see very small slivers of the progress that’s been made on Barry. I do catch a whiff of the excitement and anticipation around it every now and then, though. And I can say with some confidence: it’s going to be pretty spectacular, people.)

Simon, Alice, James and Nick had a meeting at the pub yesterday to make some decisions around Barry and are now working to implement those. There are still a number of near-term decisions that still need to be made, though. Since Nick, James and Alice are now sitting in the main room of the studio where I am (having previously been based in Statham next door), I’m overhearing lots more about the code and technology underlying Barry. Most of the time I have no idea what it means, but it’s rather fun to eavesdrop on anyway and to see them working to solve problems together.

Joe is mostly working on Uinta this week, fleshing out the system underneath the recently approved “look and feel”. He and Simon will be spending some time out of the studio this week meeting with partners who are doing some work on that project alongside us.

Simon is, as usual, skillfully balancing multiple project and clients and partners – this week it’s mostly Chaco, Uinta, Barry and Suwappu with the occasional random bit of SVK and other stuff thrown in. It involves lots and lots of post-it notes. Which is causing me a bit of anxiety because he’s out this afternoon and the wind is blowing the post-it notes around and I have no idea what sort of system he’s organised them into and if you come back and all your carefully assemble post-it notes are out of order, Simon, I apologise. Blame our need for fresh air.

And as well as dealing with the drama stirred up last week, Matt Webb is planning, thinking about finances & sales and having lots of coffee with various people. I hope for his sake some of that is decaf.

Timo’s holiday has stretched into this week and we’re looking forward to welcoming him back tomorrow.

As for me, I’m working furiously to catch up with all the bookkeeping, replying to lots of general studio correspondence, booking travel, updating spreadsheets, doing customer service for SVK (it’s not to late to buy one!) and chasing non-responsive suppliers and overdue invoices. And eating cake. There seems to be lots of cake this week.

I hope that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, there’s cake there too. Have a good week!

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.

As the faint embrace of another apocryphal summer yields slowly to Autumnal overtures, the studio continues to crackle with activity and electricity.

Messrs Schulze and Arnall conjugate stories with technology for Chaco by focusing light onto semiconductors.

Jones cleaves a path through the reticular branches of Uinta.

Andy solicits a new computer to transmogrify pixels into atoms.

Denise continues to artfully assemble Barringer’s style and savoir-faire.

Simon returns from an American intermission to a freshly embroidered BERG working jacket.

Alice nourishes Barringer with fresh data and eases past her three-month milestone.

Alex is probably horizontal somewhere sunny.

Webb weaves with celerity between Chaco and Uinta meetings.

Kari administers company financials and gracefully handles SVK customer service.

James releases a product into the wild and continues to establish the Weminuche architecture.

Nick speaks fluent Computer to charm the online shop into submission.

And I drew a picture of a man with bendy limbs.

It’s week three hundred and twenty six! So what are we all up to?

Matt Jones and Joe Malia are spending the week on two simultaneous Uinta projects. Joe is also making some early inroads on a piece of Chaco work, and this project will grow to consume much of our time over the next month. So much so, that Matt Webb has had to organise us some overspill space in the building across the road, as we still have more employees than desks for them to sit at.

Alex Jarvis is spanning a multitude of work, including Uinta, SVK, Dimensions 2, and Weminuche. This is a heroic last push before he’s away next week on a well-deserved break.

Andy Huntington is concentrating on Weminuche, juggling circuit board testing, data sheets, and some CAD work.

Alice Bartlett is working on Weminuche, and will also be delving back in time, updating our original Dimensions 1 project, as well as starting some code-sketches on Android.

James and I are also deep in Weminuche. James is working on database changes to support the newly finished IA and I’ve been glueing together various pieces of the technical architecture with Python.

Matt Webb’s time is taken up by conversations with lawyers for a variety of reasons and he’s doing a sterling job masquerading as Simon Pearson in Simon’s absence.

Timo is working on the various threads for Chaco and is in the planning stage of some video work which kicks off shortly.

Kari is working on year-end financials and making sure our overspill office will be suitably furnished for the work happening in there. The effect a good sofa has on staff productivity should not be underestimated.

Lastly, the ebullient Tom Stuart is back with us for a final push on Dimensions 2, making design changes, and optimising the code and infrastructure to cope with the volume of traffic we’re hoping to get.

There’s an impressive roadmap of activity we’ve got mapped out for September and October, so if I were to characterise the mood in the office, we’re very much heads down.

It’s week 322 here at BERG, and I have been left in charge of weeknotes.

322 has a sort of interesting Wikipedia page, under the “Technology” header it says:

 “The first dependable representation of a horse rider with paired stirrups was found in China in a Jin Dynasty tomb.”

Looking at the page for the number 322, we find that unlike last weeks notably boring entry, 322 is actually quite good. The sort of number you would be pleased to find seated at your table at a wedding. Of course 322 would be too modest to tell you all at once, but as the Wikipedia entry points out:

 “322 is a sphenic, nontotient, untouchable, hashard number. It is also seen as a Skull and Bones reference of power”

Keeping these facts in mind, what is the everyone up to this week?

Alex and Matt Jones are planning Uinita. This involves conference calls and Alex saying “yeahhhh, brilliant” a lot. Alex is also continuing with Barry work and mending his busted shoulder. As Alex shares bits of Barry design for us all to ponder, I look around Statham, which is papered in drawings and work taking shape, and think how brilliant it is that I get to work here.

Denise is continuing with Barry, steering the project and working through the tiny details of how everything happens with James.

Along with talking through the difficult stuff with Denise,  James is also planning the next Barry sprint with Simon, and continuing to code on Barry. James also has a new pair two new pairs of trousers, which I am very pleased to see.

This week Simon has his project managing fingers in many pies; Chaco, BBC Dimensions 1 and 2, Barry and continuing to roll along the SVK reprint.

Joe is on Suwappu phase 2, and working with Nick on making.

Jack is working on Suwappu and overseeing the continuing work on Barry.

Timo is writing proposals and working on Chaco sketching with Matt Jones.

Matthew Webb is touching many different projects, in the way he does. Guiding the direction of things at a very high level as well as getting down into the decisions about atoms that crop up. He is also doing ‘finances’ which I am unable to explain further, though I suspect it’s paperwork.

Kari is also on the finance admin, apparently the second week of the month is always finance admin heavy. She’s also doing the housework involved with the end of the financial year, which probably means more paperwork.

Nick is working on the technical side of Barry with James and I, as well as starting the technical tippy tappy on Suwappu 2, following Joe’s designs.

And that concludes my very first week notes. What say you, internet? week notes? or weak notes?

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.

It’s week 321.

As is the custom (at least when I can find it in time), we begin our weekly all-hands meeting with a burst of the theme to Battle Of The Planets and a fact from wikipedia about the week number.

It turns out that the entry about 321 is extremely boring, and no-one apart from me remembers Ted Rogers. So we’ll go straight into what’s happening this week.

Alex is back in the studio after an exciting incident involving his bike, his shoulder, a road and one of London’s characteristically-careful and considerate drivers. Good to have him back and on the mend. He’s working this week on Barry, and his monitor is full of incredibly-detailed, pixel-perfect illustrations and type. It’s looking lovely.

Denise is also working on Barry all week, but more on the service and product design aspects as well as the overall direction of the thing. She’s been working with the printers on the prep for the next run of SVK – so if you missed out first time round, make sure to sign up at http://getsvk.com for news about the next print run!

Joe’s working on Suwappu phase 2, concentrating on UI and visual design to collaborate with Nick on building.

Nick’s planning out some of the Suwappu tech architecture, ramping up on a Uinta project in terms of research and prep, doing more architecture work on Barry, and also descending into some embedded code darkness.

James is deep in Schooloscope tweaks and data-munging He’s also Barry spec-writing and development, integrating his work with Alice’s and working on turning the IA into code, refactoring as he goes. Busy fella.

Alice is stuck into Barry work with James and and Alex. Barry’s been cracking along as a result, with lots of progress and intermittent whoops from the team.

Schulze is mainly writing with Timo this week – on Chaco and some other projects. Timo, back from holiday, meanwhile is planning for Chaco and Uinta outputs, doing some treatments for scripts for a couple of other things that are bubbling away. He’s also switched on his scholarly mind-modules – doing research for an article he’s writing which I’m quite excited about.

Kari’s doing a bit of SVK customer service, writing some documentation and pursuing year-end company financials stuff with MW.

Simon’s negotiating a lot of complexity this week. There’s SVK reprint planning, Uinta workshop planning, Chaco planning, Schoolscope and Suwappu project management, writing user-stories for Barry, finalising phase two of Dimensions and generally keeping us all honest and pointing in the right direction. At this rate, his trip Burning Man at the end of the month is going to seem like a walk in the park to him.

Matt Webb wasn’t at all hands as he was out chasing down an exciting lead that might resurrect some old inventions… But he sent a telegram to be read out, framing the week for him as “Meetings-y”. He’s going to be on top of Schooloscope and company financials apart from that.

For me, this is a bit of a pause-for-breath week. I’m prepping for some new projects for Uinta, and ongoing work for Chaco – but also hoping to be doing a bit of thinking and writing here on the blog – while my giant metaphorical plastic sit-in log slowly ratchets up the incline, before the next steep drop of the future-flume we call BERG…

Three…

One…

Week 320, and there’s almost as many people in the studio as there was when I started here, back in week two hundred and seventy something. Most people are out of the office for some reason or another, which makes tea rounds a lot easier than usual. It’s gonna be a slightly empty office next week too, as myself, Jack, Matt Jones and Simon are off to the US for a few days of workshops. We’re currently listening to Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. I’ve been making people listen to David Rodigan’s Thursday night sets on Radio 2 as well.

I’ll start with the people not here. Jack & Matt Jones are currently in the US presenting something a great deal of the team have been working on for the last few months. I’m hoping Matt Webb is currently having a holiday and not working too much. Timo’s working out of the office this week, after going to the opening of Talk to Me at MoMA with Jack & Jones where a few of our recent projects are being exhibited, and working on Chaco related bits.

Joe is off today, but has been working on some Chaco related stuff, and is now working on a document trying to define our design process as a company – speaking to myself and Denise to try and solidify our ways of attacking design challenges going forward. It’s a hard thing to put on paper but will be fantastic to see progress, and also an essential thing to have sorted as we continue to grow as a company.

The back room (more commonly known as Statham) currently contains the mighty brains of Andy, Nick, Alice & James Darling – concentrating mostly on all things Weminuche. Andy did a bit of office tidying at the end of last week after a crazy few days. Denise is working with James on some IA and I’m working with Alice on some graphical elements. James is also doing some work on Schooloscope. I’ve been talking to Nick about cars in between his work on Weminuche & Chaco.

The mighty Simon Pearson is doing his usual brilliant job of herding our flocks of projects and making them work properly. He’s also been working with Kari running the customer service for SVK. He’s on a lot of conference calls trying to make things happen – and working with Denise on Suwappu. Kari’s only in for a few days this week, but keeping the office running like a well oiled machine as usual.

That’s it – I’m keeping weeknotes short this week. Super busy as usual but strangely quiet, at the same time.

So, it’s week 319. I’m pretty sure you know this already but just in case, 319 is a Smith Number, and perhaps more importantly, according to Wikipedia, the name of a song by Prince, that can not be found on Spotify.

The office is as busy as ever this week but, dare I say it, slightly quieter in terms of volume. Completely co-incidentally I’m sure, Matt Jones and Jack are in New York this week, taking workshops and visiting clients. They’ve sent word back home via a Google Hangout – which sounds like it was a pain to set up, but once it got going felt like “quite a nice informal way to video chat”. They’re getting a lot done over there, but we also have a sneaking suspicion they could be having too much fun.

It feels like a very collaborative week. We’ve just had an ‘all hands meeting’, and several people mentioned ‘being a sounding board for…’, which is one of the nice things about working here. It’s easy to ask opinions of others – and everyone is interested in everyone else’s ‘stuff’. There’s a lot of respect for the knowledge others have, even if the boundaries of people’s particular work disciplines are blurred.

In literal terms this week, the project code named ‘Chaco’ is taking up time from Joe, Simon, Andy and Nick. Each person is playing a very different role.

Weminuche is occupying the minds of Alex and Alice, James and myself, with a bit of extra time from Andy and Nick. Alex and Alice are working closely together on APIs and design and I’m working on IA with James, who very patiently listens to my latest master plan and either agrees or pokes my ideas with a big stick to see if and when they fall apart.

James is also working on Schooloscope, with some help from Nick. As well as Chaco, Simon is also working on some SVK customer service, and planning for new Suwappu and Dimensions stages.

Matt Webb is trying to go on holiday, but has managed to book himself into a hotel 3 blocks from the location of a client meeting with Jack and Matt J. We’ll see how well he manages to avoid them. If you’re in NY and spot him on the street, for heavens sake don’t mention work.

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.

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…

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.

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.

I first came across Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” through the Strictly Kev/Paul Morley masterpiece mix “Raiding The 20th Century”.

It’s an incredibly simple but powerful piece, that becomes hypnotic and immersing as his speech devolves into a drone through the feedback loop he sets up in the performance.

The space that he performs in becomes the instrument – the resonant frequencies of the room feeding back into the loop.

From wikipedia:

I am sitting in a room (1969) is one of composer Alvin Lucier’s best known works, featuring Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action—it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice,” and the rationale, concluding, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.

Playing around with the kinect/makerbot set-up at Foo set me thinking of Lucier’s piece, and how the sensor-vernacular interpretation could play out as a playful installation…

First, we need a Kinect chandelier.

Then, we scan the original ‘room’ with it.

Next, we print a new space using a concrete printer.

Which we then scan with the Kinect chandelier…

And so on…

One could imagine the degradation of the structure over the generations of scanning and printing might become quite beautiful or grotesque – a kind of feedback-baroque. And, as we iterate, printing spaces one after the other – generate a sensor-vernacular Park Güell…

If anyone wants to give us an airship hanger and a massive concrete printer this summer, please let us know!

It’s an extremely busy week here, so I’ll keep this weeknote short and sharp.

On Monday, Alex, Denise, Matt and Timo went to witness the first SVK comics coming of the production line at Pureprint in Sussex. They returned to the studio a bit wide-eyed and delirious, and not just because they had to get up at 7am to make the journey out of London in time; the comic looks beautiful, and we can’t wait to get it into people’s hands.

There’s now a flurry of activity from Webb, Denise, Simon, Alex and myself around how we organise the logistics of warehousing, shipping, labelling and packaging, and all of the other pieces of the “selling physical things” puzzle.

Webb is taking a well deserved break, and by now is refueling his brain in the Mediterranean sun. Just before he left, he took to the stage at the Serpentine Gallery for a discussion with Mark Leckey, and has also been strategising on longer term goals for the company.

Joe started off the week in self-imposed quarantine, but pulled through and is now back with us, thinking around and feeding ideas into our Chaco work. Conversely, Timo’s now out of the office now, but spent some time filming the initial SVK print run, and we should hopefully see that released next week.

Simon and Andy have been on other aspects of the Chaco work, working with our external suppliers, and generally project managing the heck out of things, and in a similar vein, Kari has been chasing suppliers, and tending to the many HR and finance tasks.

Jones is off to FOO camp, but not before looking at potential studio space for us to translocate into, and working on sales documents with Jack and Webb. Jack has also been swapping between our ongoing Chaco work, and with his Facilities Manager hat on, fitting one last desk into our existing space, ahead of our new arrival. More on this subject next week!

That is week 313.

SVK is at the printers…

Here’s what several thousand ultra-violet torches and comic bags look like, which will join with the printed book imminently.

If you haven’t signed-up yet, you can at http://getsvk.com.

.

Stand-by for action!

So, week 312, and we’re into the first week of June. We’ve got a very full studio this week, so a lot of weeknotes… here we go.

It’s Simon’s first week here! He’s our new Project Manager, and has been getting to grips with everything we’ve got going on in the office – having lots of meetings with everyone to work out where we are, and working some magic to get us all in order. This is a good thing.

We’ve got Tom Stuart working with us for a few months too. He’s currently working on turning Dimensions 2 into a real life thing, which is totally fantastic to watch as it grows and develops. He’ll be working on a few other bits for us in the coming months.

Matt Jones has been working with Jack & Timo on various aspects of Chaco, keeping an eye on Dimensions 2 as we make progress, and speaking to a lot of people old and new for various projects.

Denise has been working on the production and operations of SVK, which is tantalisingly close to being an actual product in the world. She’s also been working on various bits and bobs for Barringer which continues to bubble along nicely. It’s so nice seeing people smiling at the things on her screen.

Joe finished work on Uinta last week, so we went to the pub. This week he’s got his head stuck into certain aspects of Chaco – drawing a lot and looking at nice books… it’s already looking very, very interesting. That’s why I love this place.

Kari is working on what we now know as ‘the usual’… which turns out is a massive, important, complicated list of things that keep the office and the company running, and us all sane. She also baked some cakes for Simon’s first day on Tuesday which were pretty tasty.

Matt Webb’s been chatting to Simon a lot as we start to hand over project management to his capable hands. He’s also catching up with Dimensions 2, and doing a sterling job keeping us as a company running along.

Nick’s been speaking to a lot of people about Chaco and working with Jack, Timo & Andy on the next few weeks, and working wonders with Availabot & Weminuche.

Jack’s been working on Chaco with Timo, Joe and a few others, and with Timo on a new bit of work.

Andy’s been working on Chaco as well, doing a lot of wrangling with hardware manufacturers, and prodding people about PCBs.

Timo’s also been working on Chaco… doing a lot of prototyping and design exploration which is looking incredible. He’s also been working with Jack on the upcoming bit of video work.

I’ve been working on a couple of last bits for SVK, and getting back into Dimensions 2 – working with our researcher and Tom to help pull everything together, and a bit of Chaco. I also popped out on Tuesday to the LCC for my last session on the project I set some 2nd year FdA students, which I’ll hopefully be writing about on here when it’s all handed in.

James has been working on various aspects of Weminuche in the back room with Nick, Tom and Andy – which I hope we’ll see in our Friday demos. He’s also got a snazzy new pair of trousers.

That’s week 312. A busy studio, a bit of sunshine, and a lot of work. All is well.

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.

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!!!

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.

Lots has happened since I wrote the weeknote I did before. As ever, there is far more going on than I know about.

Timo and I are working pretty solidly on project Chaco. We have lovely guests from Chaco in the studio with lots of early material exploration going on and conceptual unpacking of the things we want to make. We’re recording everything and have unearthed some fantastic early material through video sketching.

Timo and I have also been visiting lawyers to develop a stronger footing in some new areas we’re exploring. We had to go to Hammersmith for one meeting which is bloody miles away. Timo was cross because he ordered a new lens and it hasn’t arrived as expected.

Denise has been chasing down some of the remaining edges of SVK, proofing it, tweaking the last ads, specifying packaging details and such. She is also working on Weminuche. She and I have enjoyed evolving the physical details of the product form. I’m personally enjoying working with her hugely and her experience in service product domain is brilliant, essential stuff.

Joe has continued embedding himself into the studio culture. He’s been applying the fantastic wood chipper of his mind on the service design and UI elements for Uinta. Picking pixels from under his finger nails and aligning the detail in the grit and grain with the high level strategic thinking. It’s terrific.

Nick has been thinking hard on new hires and chasing some of the technical issues ahead of the SVK launch. He’s begun some research into the deep technical darkness involved in project Chaco. He and Timo have been experimenting with some fantastic stuff. Occasionally, as we discuss designs and possibilities, Nick gets a look in his eyes, like he’s going to have to punch physics in the brain. Physics looks back at him like a spoilt four year old teasing a doberman. It’s the best stand off you’ve ever seen.

Andy has been laying out circuit boards and looking to organise contractors for all sorts of hardware developments. He is also winning an enormous game of Gantt Chart Tetris, restructuring the fabric of time to make all eventual awesomeness possible. He also found a secret German supplier for some highly coveted components we need for a Chaco strand.

Alex has been designing an article for a magazine. As ever, he’s deeply involved with tweaking detail in SVK and testing parts of the payment system. He’s also been in meetings on Chaco strands and we expect him to begin designing concepts for that over the next few weeks.

Matthew and Jones have been out the studio this week working with a client in the UK out of London, I hear snippets on the Twitter vine but as far as I can tell all is going well with them both.

I’m enjoying being in the UK for more than three days at a time. Lots of potential is finding traction and leaping forward into some of the largest, most ambitious design work I’ve personally encountered.

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.

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.

After a fairly quiet start to the week on Monday, it’s suddenly feeling a lot like normal service has resumed. With Matt W, Jack, Matt J and Timo out last week, the rest of us has a quiet, industrious time here. Now we’re back to levels of energy and activity in the room which make this such a unique and brilliant place to work.

Matt Webb is spending a good deal of this week interviewing candidates for our Project Manager role, and he and I have been chatting about the upcoming interviews next week, for the Creative Technologist position. Kari is making the interview process into a wonderfully efficient machine, booking the interview times, and collating all the CVs.

Hiring is a good thing for us right now, and new people will allow us to scale our work, but it brings with it very urgent questions of how we scale physically. Once we’ve filled these two roles, our ratio of staff to desks will tip over one, and somebody will be bumped onto the sofa until we find a new office. Either that, or we go for Plan B, the BERG mezzanine floor!

Speaking of new people, our office is now home to the fantastic Joe Malia, and as I write this, he’s busy getting his neural pathways tuned to the special Schulze wavelength. Schulze and Timo are in NYC for a brief spell of work that will keep them out of the country all week. Denise and Alex are busy working on preparing the shop for SVK, and Denise is also spending time on Weminuche, absorbing all of the unspoken potential of the project, and sketching beautiful pixels to capture and express them.

Andy spent some time at the National Electronics Week in Birmingham this week, and if we had a sweepstake for “person most likely to be wielding a soldering iron”, he’d win by a very comfortable margin. Back at his desk, he’s been pouring over schematics for circuit boards and helping me wire up various development boards together, also for the Weminuche project.

Last, but by no means least, Matt Jones is kicking off the studio portion of project Uinta with Joe, and is also giving the closing keynote on the first day of UX London 2011. This is week 305!

^ roland.TB-303.schem-3 by rafael_mizrahi

My first time doing weeknotes, I’m terrified. Here we go.

It’s Matthew Irvine Brown’s last week at BERG. We’re going to give him a proper send off at the end of the week, but before that he’s working on getting Denise up to speed with what’s been going on, and making sure all of the bolts are tight on the things he’s been leading. We’ll miss him a lot.

Which leads us into Denise‘s first inclusion in weeknotes. She’s been spending a lot of time learning about Weminuche with Matt Brown and Nick, and has also been getting stuck into some awesome things SVK related and getting up to speed of where we are. She’s also been out of the office with Jack looking at good things that we can’t talk about (yet).

Matt Jones has been working with Jack on new project Uinta, doing a bit of behind the scenes planning for SVK, and helping me out with Dimensions 2. He’s off to far away lands next week with Jack. It’s very quiet when he’s not in the office.

Jack is working with Timo on a couple of projects, speaking to lawyers and is away doing workshops with Matt Jones next week.

Timo is working on Haitsu. We’ve had a few sneak peeks and it’s fantastic. He’s also been sketching some things for Chaco.

Darling, Nick and Andy have been locked in Statham for most of the week, cranking hard on Weminuche and showing us incredible things for Friday demos that make us smile a lot. Nick’s also been working with Timo on Haitsu. We’ve been communicating with them by sticking post it notes on the windows.

I’m continuing work on Dimensions 2, getting a bundle of things together for Friday. I’m also keeping an eye on SVK things with Denise and Matt Jones as they start to come together.

Kari is working her usual magic, keeping the office ticking and making the stuff behind the scenes work. She’s also been working on the logistics of SVK for when that launches.

Finally, Matt Webb is out and about for a lot of the week talking to people and making things happen, and hiring people! (We’re looking for people to join us, if you hadn’t seen it before).

That’s week 303. A lot of exciting things going on, and a lot of change.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Week 298 and I think we’re all experiencing a bit of emotional fatigue. In just the last five days we’ve been tossed between sadness at the news of colleagues leaving us and exhilaration from incredibly exciting, almost-too-good-to-be-true news and opportunities. It’s all a bit much, really. But we’re pushing on. It’s Tuesday and everything is ticking over. However, as Matt Webb pointed out on Twitter last week, there’s a decent chance that by Friday everything will have gone completely mental again.

With Tom back from his California escapade, we are once again completely full up in the studio. So full, in fact, that Matt Webb has had to sacrifice his desk – bless him – and is working from the sofa as we await the delivery of a couple of new desks.

Matt working on the sofa; beneath him is the fabulous map blanket by our friends at Pistil SF

In project news, SVK is getting tantalisingly close to it’s formal introduction into the world. Matt Jones, Matt Brown, Alex and Tom are all hard at work on the various finishing touches and bits that need to be in place on our end. Of course Warren Ellis and Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker are doing the heavy creative lifting on that one, but since they are toiling away in their own locales, we unfortunately don’t get to see the day-to-day progress of their work.

Jack and Timo’s work on Haitsu was nearly derailed by a combination of missing HMRC paperwork and an incompetent UPS delivery person, but they persevered and are making progress on that. Moments ago I witnessed them totally geeking out over photographic equipment.

Matt Jones, Alex and James are doing more sketching and scheming around Dimensions II in preparation for a presentation later this week.

Weminuche is a many-tentacled hydra that continues to take up a lot of the studio’s time and attention, and some of our incredibly talented partners on that project have been spending time in the studio lately to feed into various bits, push us out of groupthink mode and help solve problems in ways that only they are able to. We are very grateful for their input.

(Sidenote: I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, and it’s been really fascinating to see a lot of the things he talks about playing out in real time in the studio. If you are in any sort of creative, innovative field and haven’t read it yet, by all means add it to your reading list!)

Elsewhere in the studio brainspace pitches & bids are being assembled, legal matters are being worked out, teaching content is being prepared. And underlining all of it is good music, plenty of laughter, and genuine affection for each other. There are going to be massive changes coming to the studio soon. As I type this, though, everyone is simply focussed on the task at hand, keeping all of it ticking along. If everything is mental again come Friday, we’ll deal with it. Because that’s what we do.

It’s Warren Ellis‘s birthday.

Warren and BERG are intertwingled. We’re working with him on SVK, and he’s a massive influence on our thinking. One of our patron-saints in the realm of sufficiently-advanced literature – alongside Gibson, Sterling, LeGuin, Ballard, Morrison, Moorcock and many others. He’s also been a great friend and supporter of our work.

You might not know however, as he points out in this interview at Den Of Geek, just what a pivotal role he played in the formation of BERG…

One of the organisations that I’ve discovered through your blog is BERG, the design consultancy firm. And you’re collaborating with them on a comic called SVK. I was wondering if there was anything else you could tell us about that.

I really can’t. You see, I didn’t know this whole thing was going to happen, because, if I did, I would have tried to move it, because I’m under NDA or instructions not to talk about pretty much everything I’m working on right now.

It is the worst possible time to be doing two or three hours of phoners. What’s there to say about SVK – Yeah, it’s a thriller comic I’m doing with my old mate, Matt Brooker (D’Israeli), who I did Lazarus Churchyard with back in the day. And BERG will be publishing it. And there is a weird visual aspect to it that I can’t talk about yet, but if it works it’s going to be really kind of unique.

Some of BERG’s projects have been quite fascinating, so it will be interesting to see what they do with the medium of comics.

Yeah, I’ve known them for years. I knew them when they were still Schulze and Webb. In fact, it was me who named the company BERG. That was my fault! [laughs]

Happy Birthday Chief, from all of us in the studio.

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.