Blog posts from September 2011

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.

The afternoon Transport For London quietly launched countdown.tfl.gov.uk, a desk-beer was in my hand after our Friday Demos. Countdown tells you when busses are arriving at any of London’s 18,541 bus stops. I was due for a meeting in a pub in 20 minutes, but I thought I’d have a poke around. It quickly became clear that whilst there was not yet an official API for the data, the website itself was running from an internal API. It only took a little bit of playing before I was able to programmatically access the data and within my spare 20 minutes I had written and deployed a tiny web application redisplaying TFLs data.

I had enough to start exploring what’s possible with this data. The simplicity of the website allowed it to work on any device I tried at any size. Where could this service fit best in mine and others lives? With another 20 minutes, auto-refreshing and a bus stop search page, it was ready for the world.

I quickly got feedback from people who had made it into an OS X dashboard widget or added to their iPhone screen. Having it accessible from your pocket or work desk was unsurprisingly but pleasantly very useful.

But what about our friends’ and indeed our own work on media surfaces, secondary screens, information radiators and the like? I’ve always wanted to explore what can be done with the Kindle as a relatively cheap web enabled e-ink display, and it worked on mine straight away. So I taped it to the inside of the BERG office front door.

It sits there, quietly updating every 15 seconds. Not glowing, not demanding attention, only offering it at the quickest of glances. As comfortable as a wall clock. From my limited testing, the 6 month old Kindle can do this for about 48 hours before needing a recharge, a figure I’m sure could be increased with some effort.

The Kindle came home with me that night (soldiering on in my bag with unnoticed updates over 3G). I tried it out in various places. The living room was my first thought, but updates from the big city outside didn’t fit well in there. Maybe, like the office, on the front door might work, but by that point I have already committed to leaving the house. All that told me was how long I was going to have to wait, enforcing the world on me, not empowering me to adapt.

It found it’s eventual home next to my toaster. I’m not a morning person, and my mornings are usually reactive, not routine. I will try and grab breakfast at home, but often end up grabbing a bagel en-route to work. Now my kitchen tells me if I have enough time for toast.

A service involving 8,500 GPS enabled busses and many servers is very impressive, but it really comes into its own when it doesn’t show off.

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…

Time for some links! Denise pointed out this amazing video of the (planned) destruction of a shoe factory in Leicester played backwards, in slow-motion, which is as odd as it sounds, but strangely hypnotic when you’re also listening to the soundtrack.

Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

Matt Jones pointed out (via @danmog) this vertigo-inducing high resolution picture of engineers fixing the antenna at the top of the Empire State building.

Alex Jarvis pointed out a video of a particularly scary deforestation proto-robot, the John Deere H414.

Lastly, Matt Webb pointed out Joe Hughes’ post on UI explorations with a MetaWatch. As Joe says in his post:

MetaWatch is a line of hacker-friendly wristwatches that can be paired with smartphones to enable new kinds of lightweight interactions.

That’s it! Have a happy weekend. It’s now time to join my colleagues at the pub.

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 is week 325 at BERG. The number 325 is the same as the number in the year 325 AD, which is when Gladiatorial combat was outlawed in the Roman Empire. This week is the holiday season, so lots of people are away for all or parts of the week, Jones, Ludlam and Pearson are all taking rests.

Things continue to build across the various projects we have in hand. Everything feels larger than it did before, more potent and charged. Sometimes I wince with it like preparing to touch a metal button in a hotel lift with nylon carpets.

Andy is working on some special PCBs, we nearly have a final design for one set which means we can push ahead with prototyping in East Asia. This represents a tipping point for the project, most of the design and technical frameworks have been established in the physical. We are now at the stage of resolving problems and evolving a prototype towards production. Andy also ran a thirty meter ethernet cable from a little box along the ceiling and into another room. I’m told that this will improve things for Nick.

Alex is resolving the brand thinking for Barringer, it’s exciting to see a visual language grow around a product concept we’ve known for so long. Later in the week he will be sketching concepts for the early design thinking for Uinta which I’ll be working closely on.

Denise and James are chewing hard on the IA for Weminuche, this is a tough task with technical and behavioural overhead as well as some unresolved known unknowns. Alice is waiting for resolution on this like a coiled nuke.

Timo is directing some of the Chaco work. He and I met with Phil Baines mid week to discuss typographic grids for an article we’re writing.

Joe is back from holidays and beginning second phase video work with Timo and I for Chaco, his sketches are great. The milling machine purrs, phones buzz, Alice’s fingernails shine in an ocean of glamourless Dell monitors. Someone has stolen Nicks display port to mini display port cable. That is what’s happening.