Blog posts from September 2009

Let’s keep it short and sweet. Schulze is working on video all week with Timo for the RFID design research and communication project. Tom is breaking ground on our new fulfilment system, named Springdale, which will be used in consumer sales in the future. He’s also writing, and in this morning’s crit showed a component of last week’s toy experimentation he built. It manipulates video and looks like it has lots of other uses. Neat.

Matt J is doing design work on Ojito and research on upcoming projects. Ashdown is close to kicking off and he’s leading that — the subsidiary holding company is formed and there are just a few more logistical hoops to jump through.

My priorities this week are coding for the racing car, and admin: anything in the pipeline needs to be progressed, and there is a list of tasks for the year end accounts which really must be done this week. (The pipeline is the list of projects pre-contract, everything from prospect through proposal to purchase order. It’s healthy to keep the pipeline full at every stage, and everything moving.)

Schulze has just walked in the door with Timo, so I’m off to lunch with them now. Enjoy your week!

From The Golden Institute project by Sascha Pohflepp

A favourite device of ours in ‘walking the landscape of possible futures’ is to imagine a counterfactual – a ‘what if’ version of history where changing one or two factors results in a recognisable but very different present or future.

A favourite example of ours is Sascha Pohflepp’s “Golden Institute” project, which I mentioned in a recent piece posted on my personal blog – about the power of using counterfactuals to imagine ways out of our current energy and climate woes:

“…thinking through these kind of ‘counterfactual’ scenarios can throw up interesting possibilities. When we’re ready to think about throwing away the things that we hold most precious, we can see new ways to hold on to them.”

» Magicalnihilism.com: The Positive Energy of Counterfactuals

Skimming through my notebook on returning from dConstruct, it seemed worth expanding a few scrawled notes into hyperlinks.

• Adam Greenfield brought up Schelling Points – “[solutions] that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them” – as a way of describing natural meeting points in cities. Interesting that a descriptor from game theory works equally well for Eros or the Grand Central Clock. The Wikipedia page on the topic explains more.
• Robin Hunicke used the word (or, rather, acronym) QWAN a few times – the Quality Without A Name, as described by the architect and academic Christopher Alexander in his book The Timeless Way Of Building:
  

  “This oneness, or the lack of it, is the fundamental quality for anything. Whether it is in a poem, or a man, or a building full of people, or in a forest, or a city, everything that matters stems from it. It embodies everything.

  Yet still this quality cannot be named.”

  I think, though, that when Robin used the term, it was very much lowercase: qwan, a straightforward piece of vocabulary.

• Jones and I had chatted about Eng-Fi – engineering fiction – as part of British childhood in the audience at dConstruct; I returned home to find Warren Ellis had pursued a similar path in his latest Wired UK column, on why, for educational purposes at the least, the BBC should repeat Thunderbirds:
  

  Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing – it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves.

  Rescue fiction, engineering fiction; whatever you call it, invention truly is a glorious and dazzling thing.

• And, as a bonus link, from the chat in the studio this afternoon: Dick Van Dyke is a computer animation enthusiast. Yes, that Dick Van Dyke.

Matt Jones and I have been in San Francisco this week, for meetings and a conference (an event called Foo Camp). We’ve been demoing Ojito, a cheap 3D device for the iPhone we’ve developed. Although it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, we’ve pitched it maybe two dozen times, sometimes in less than a minute in a corridor, and it’s fascinating how that process helps distill a product concept and clarify its route to market.

I met one guy and he was like, “oh, great name, how did you come up with it,” so I told the story: we give all our projects codenames after places on the Colorado Plateau. We need essentially meaningless names for the dark projects, and it’s one of my favourite regions in the world. Ojito is a place there. And he replied, “no, no, you don’t understand. I speak Portuguese. Ojito, it means LITTLE EYE.” Auspicious.

My plan for the remainder of this week is to write Ojito up as a plan and cost it, and catch up on the admin that’s difficult to do away — invoicing, payroll and so on: there’s an approved suppliers list the company needs to get on otherwise we’ll lose our chance at a project, and the other big task is setting up a subsidiary company to run Ashdown so that project can start. The wheels are in motion but I need to speak with the bank.

Jack and Tom are in London, working together on a toy I’m really looking forward to seeing. It needs a codename. I understand there are stickers involved. That’ll continue next week.

Tom has been spit-and-polishing the website. Jack has been finishing the stationery templates for invoices and so on. Next week he’s doing some video work with Timo on our RFID research project.

Energy is important to new product development, and to creating new work, as is perspective. It’s easy to get mired in even the most exhilarating work and lose sight of what’s important in a product, and work is always better – and easier – when it’s approached with bright eyes and an open, confident nature. For projects that last longer out of the public eye, you need willpower too.

Conversations and conferences help (Matt J and Tom are both at dconstruct this Friday). What erodes these feelings is a lack of stability. In that spirit, the big news this week is mundane: we’ve been waiting for invoices to two clients to be paid… and in the last couple days, the money landed in the bank. Frankly it’s a relief. Large company bureaucracy can make the payment process time-consuming to navigate, and now especially – what with expanding and investing in new product ideas – Berg’s two major resource constraints are attention and cash flow. Having these invoices paid makes me realise quite how tense I’ve been about the latter for the last month (I don’t mind saying that most of my waking cycles go to thinking about the company), and it’ll be good to return to the normal situation of just having too many exciting projects to work on. That’s life in the Escalante.