Blog posts from 2011

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.

Due to a lack of time and a lack of inspiration, I asked my Berg colleagues to help write my blog entry this week. Inspired by a recent NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, I asked them what they would consider their pop culture “comfort foods”: music, movies, books, TV shows, games, etc that they return to time and again because they are comfortable and familiar, bring you back to a happy place, create a certain feeling in you, etc. NPR’s Linda Holmes described it as things that “we turn to when we get into a cultural rut and want to reawaken our love of the things we love, as it were.”

I can think of so many things that fit in this category for me. Here’s a few:

• The Sound of Music (both the film and the soundtrack)
• Pride and Prejudice – both the book and the films (both the Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle version and the Keira Knightley & Matthew Mcfadyen version)
• The West Wing
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• U2 – Achtung Baby (brings me right back to my first year at university)
• Hem – Eveningland
• A House Like a Lotus and A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

I’m happy to say that everyone in the studio humoured my request. Here’s what they had to say:

Jack Schulze:

• Point Break
• Winnie the Pooh

Timo Arnall:

• Midnight Run, must have watched it 50 times. The most re-watchable film of all time.
• Also Rhubarb and Custard (As a kid I slept under the animation table at Bob Godfrey Studios on Neal St, still remember Bob doing the voices).
• I still return to many of Kieslowski’s films, they were formative in my understanding of film.

Matt Jones:

• Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
• The Invisibles
• “Can’t buy a thrill” by Steely Dan

Andy Huntington:

• Princess Mononoke
• Yo La Tengo – Little Honda just for the distortion sound if nothing else
• Any video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe I can find
• The drum battle where Steve Gadd (he starts at 2.45 in the clip below) launches a stomp attack on Vinnie Colaiuta and Dave Weckl and their supple wrists.

Joe Malia:

• Spirited Away
• Mario
• Robocop

Nick Ludlam:

• Asimov’s “Robots of Dawn”
• Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes
• Underworld’s “Second Toughest In The Infants”

Matt Webb:

• Once Upon a Time in the West, which has the single best concentrated set piece scene of any film at any period in history. It is beautiful, epic, speaks truth to humans, society, and history, and I can watch it infinitely.
• Starship Troopers, the book, and actually any sci-fi stories from the 1940s to the 1970s I can find in second hand shops or Project Gutenberg
• 30 Rock

Alex Jarvis:

• ‘F-Zero’ / ‘Unirally’ for games
• Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder for music
• ‘C’était un Rendezvous’ for moving image

Denise Wilton:

• Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
• And the films: My neighbour Totoro (for the scene at the bus stop)
• Bourne Ultimatum (for the scene at Waterloo station)
• This nutrigrain ad from a billion years ago, which I don’t think ever got aired but gets better every time you watch it:

So how about you? What are your culture “comfort foods”?

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.

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’ve been thinking about new employee orientation lately. We’ve had four new people join BERG since the start of 2011 and we’re about to add two more, so there’s been a lot of orientating going on here.

When I worked at a company with more than 600 employees and was directly responsible for hiring and training a team of 10 employees, we had a very in-depth orientation programme that lasted for weeks and had been continually refined over a couple of decades.

New employee orientation for a small, relatively new company like BERG is obviously a very different thing. For one thing, since we’re so much smaller, it takes a lot less time to learn about the organisation and the people in it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s any less important to have some sort of induction process.

Early in 2010, shortly after I started working at BERG, Matt Webb – being the wise and good company manager that he is – had me start compiling a checklist of all the things we needed to make sure happened when a new person joined us. At the time it was mostly geared toward short-term contractors since that’s mostly who were joining us in the spring and summer of 2010. Since then the list has grown and evolved and its focus has turned toward full contract employees. It seems like every time a new person comes on we think of two or three more things that need to be added to the list. The checklist is divided into four categories:

1. Things the new employee needs to be provided with (keys, an email address, computer kit, access to the network server)
2. Things the new employee needs to provide us with (biog and headshot for the website, details to get on payroll)
3. Things the new employee needs to know (who everyone else is and what they do, general company policies, how to request holiday, location of the first aid kit)
4. Admin that needs to happen (add their details to various spreadsheets, get them on payroll, add them to the blog rota)

I’ve been wondering if there’s anything else that we’re missing – other things we should be doing to ease new people into the BERG culture besides having a checklist. I had a quick browse around the internet which wasn’t particularly helpful – most of what I found was either blindingly obvious or not especially relevant for very small companies like BERG. I did stumble across a couple of things, though, that seemed relevant for companies of any size and worth sharing.

The first was from William H Truesdell who, in 1998, wrote on The Management Advantage Inc’s website:

Explain your organisation’s mission and its philosophy of doing business.

• “The way we do things around here…”
• “We believe that our customers are…”
• “Nothing is more important than…”

Those would be good things for a company to think about and have an answer to even if they aren’t doing it for the sake of new employee organisation. It seems to me that last one in particular – “Nothing is more important than…” could give a lot of great insight in the space of just one sentence to a new person joining the organisation.

The second thing was from Alan Chapman on businessballs.com. Chapman has quite a lot of material there about new employee orientation and training which emphasises ‘whole-person’ development, and he suggests saying something along these lines to a new employee:

“You’ve obviously been recruited as a (job title), but we recognise right from the start that you’ll probably have lots of other talents, skills, experiences (life and work), strengths, personal aims and wishes, that your job role might not necessarily enable you to use and pursue. So please give some thought to your own special skills and unique potential that you’d like to develop (outside of your job function), and if there’s a way for us to help with this, especially if we see that there’ll be benefits for the organisation too (which there often are), then we’ll try to do so…”

A little later he says,

So much of conventional induction training necessarily involves ‘putting in’ to people (knowledge, policies, standards, skills, etc); so if the employer can spend a little time ‘drawing out’ of people (aims, wishes, unique personal potential, etc) – even if it’s just to set the scene for ‘whole person development’ in the future – this will be a big breath of fresh air for most new starters.

Based on my experience, I think he’s probably right.

That’s a little bit of BERG’s still very new and very evolving New Employee Orientation story. If your company does anything interesting or creative for new employees that you’ve found to be helpful, fun, innovative, etc, we’d love to hear about it!

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.

As tomorrow is a holiday, the weekly BERG links post is coming to you one day early this week!

It’s been a rather quiet week on the BERG studio list, but we (where “we” mostly = Matt Jones) did manage to dig up some interesting things from the internets.

Jason Kottke linked to Clement Valla’s collection of “melty roads” – Google Earth images where the 2D-to-3D mapping doesn’t quite work. Browsing through the images invokes an Inception-like world.

Via Khoi Vinh we discovered the brilliant “Back of a Web Page” Tumblr. Ever wonder what those Twitter birds do behind the scenes?

One afternoon we heard some odd bloopy music coming over the studio speakers, and Matt Jones confessed he’d been playing with Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata, a generative sound sequencer.

Go over and have a play yourself!

Via Mike Migurski came Xiaoji Chen’s Isochronic Singapore. It’s fascinating to see the city of Singapore expand and contract like a living, breathing thing as average travel times change from hour to hour and day to day.

Chen has been playing with other dynamic maps of Singapore as well:

Finally, via our neighbour and RIG super group member Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, a list of Robots, Cyborgs and Computers in Film and TV. It seems that list hasn’t been updated in at least five years (and therefore actually feels rather short), but for me the best thing about it is it reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: the TV show Small Wonder. Ah, mid-80s American family sitcoms. Most of them are best forgotten, actually…

Vicky the robot child!

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”

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.

Here are a few things of note which have been posted to the BERG studio mailing list this week.

Matt Jones linked to a lovely poster from Pop Chart Lab, which organises and visualises the taxonomy of super-hero and super-villan powers. For instance, Powers of the Body/Superhuman Ability/Super Strength shows itself to be a highly populous category, but Weapons Based/Powered Prostheses/Armored Suit/Armored Suit with Telescopic Legs less so, highlighting a possible Darwin Awards subtext to it all.

Alex linked to Pica-Pic, a Flash site which lovingly recreates vintage 80’s handheld electronic games from around the world.

Matt Webb linked to a page detailing an algorithm for calculating exactly when Easter falls in the Gregorian calendar, which itself is a republishing of an anonymous correspondant in Nature, from April 1876. Hot pseudocode is hot!

And finishing on a video, Matt Jones also linked to this clever idea demonstrated on an iPad 2, marrying up a 3d engine with facial tracking from the front-facing camera. Have a great weekend, folks!