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’sWhere 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.
The book sat on the front table in the room we were sharing for the duration of the conference; a constant reminder of cities past and present, fallen and still-standing. I spent some time skimming through it, and found its contents as marvellous as Eric intimated.
In the first section of the book, Chandler tours the world, listing individual cities and their populations over time.
Here’s some of the listing for Dieppe, in France.
As well as a running total, there’s a citation for how that figure was derived. Sometimes, it’s based on direct quotation. But sometimes, it’s based on something more like a calculation. For instance, that 1600 figure for population is based on the number of churches in the city, and the average congregation size for those churches.
Here’s some of the listing for Baghdad, around the 8th century AD. In 932 AD, he uses several sources: the number of doctors (and how many citizens they served); the number of baths in the city; and the area the city covered. His final figure – of 1.1 million – is closest to the estimation derived from area. Chandler includes other figures in his notes, even if he’s not comfortable with their accuracy; see, for instance, the “reputedly 2,000,000” in 833, derived from the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica. Chandler is clearly happier with the more conservative estimate derived from the area in the 1960 Encylopedia of Islam.
At the end of the book are tables of the world’s largest cities listed by era, with their populations. These are some of the listings for a few thousand years ago.
Finally, there’s a short textual appendix that serves as a short biography of the forty largest cities in each century, from 100-1970. From all his numbers and tables, Chandler weaves a narrative of how the world’s powers and economies have shifted and changed. For instance:
“China dominates the first city tables. At 1400 and 1500 it has each time 11 of the 40 cities. At 1600 China still has the topmost place, and 2 of the top 10, but Spain, with only one in the top 10, barely trails China overall with 6 to China’s 7. The Spanish cities include 1 in America, 1 in Portugal, and 3 in Italy. In 1700 China is ahead again with 9. In 1800 it has 9, as to 10 in the burgeoning British Empire, albeit the latter has only 1 on Britain itself. Britain and China thus rule just under half of all the 40 cities at 1800…”
It’s a marvellous artefact that’s now sadly hard to track down. As Eric quite rightly noted, those neat tables are crying out to be digitised in some form. It was kind of Eric to share Chandler’s remarkable book with us (and to let me share it with you) – and as a starting point for two days of talking about cities, it felt most appropriate.
Tom Armitage was employee #1, making the leap to join BERG before it was named BERG. For 2 years he’s been both creative technologist and writer, leading technology on several projects, and also running the online face of the studio through his blogging and longer form pieces. When he’s coding, he has the rare gift of solid interaction design intuitions. And in the room, he seems to know of every weird design project and obscure game ever, and can hook you up with relevant links to whatever you’re researching.
And now he’s off! Tom is joining the London game design studio Hide & Seek as a Game Designer. We’ve been watching Hide & Seek for a while — they’re an exciting practice in the rapidly growing area of games and public experiences. And Tom is passionate about games and what they mean to people. Check out his recent talk, Things Rules Do.
It’s a great move for Tom, and we’re very proud of him.
Matt Brown
Matt Brown has been with us as senior designer and chief of music since mid 2009. He’s a wide-ranging and inventive talent, as deft with illustration and composing music as he is prototyping procedurally generated graphics and crafting beautiful and natural interfaces. He’s grown into running projects with us, and working directly at the weird creative coherence where multiple design strands overlap and coincide. When I talk about BERG as a studio, producing work which is inventive, beautiful and populist, it’s Matt’s work which has been right at the centre of that.
And at the end of March, he’s off too. Matt is moving from London to Cupertino, to invent the future as part of a jaw-droppingly impressive team. He’s joining the Human Interface Device Prototyping group at Apple as a designer/prototyper.
The news of his leaving is countered only by our terrific pride at seeing our boy done so good.
Culture
Our culture and way of working is what makes us BERG. And our culture is made by our people. Everyone here has a colossal impact on the life of the room. Nobody just “fits in,” we grow together — learning, teaching and developing as we go. Tom and Matt B are irreplaceable, we’ll miss them enormously!
That said, one of the things that makes me most pleased is that the studio is a place that people travel through and move on from. I’m proud of our alumni! When they achieve great things, I admit I take a good deal of satisfaction that a fellow traveller has carried a little bit of BERG into the world.
We keep it quiet, but the secret history of our name is that is stands for the British Experimental Rocket Group. Our experimental rockets are our people.
So what next?
The studio will grow and change. We’re established enough that we can treat these moments as opportunities. It was surprising and gratifying to have Fast Company place us #4 in their list of most innovative design firms, in such illustrious company as Stamen, IDEO and Pentagram!
And so I have more changes to announce — soon, when the ink is dry. I can’t wait to tell you.
In the meantime, please lift a glass to Tom and Matt! Congratulations fellas, well done both of you, and thank you for being part of the journey.
At the beginning of the week, Matt Brown linked to a website featuring the work of Gerd Arntz and pointed out that many of the iconic shapes you see there were drawn around 85 years ago. Coincidentally, there is a small Isotype exhibition running at the V&A in London, until the 13th of March.
Alex found a video which explains the thinking behind the face of Watson, the Jeopardy-winning IBM supercomputer. The concept of a spacial arrangement of colours to convey emotions is reminiscent of the Drones in Ian M. Banks’ Culture novels.
Lastly, a bit of nostalgia. One of my most vivid memories of the Amiga era was formed by a game called Drive IFF, which arrived on the front of Amiga Format magazine in June 1991. Ostensibly a racing game, it owed more to the concept of the game grid from the original Tron movie than it did to games like Outrun.
To race, you need a track, and the developer’s brilliant idea was to dramatically simplify the entire design and rendering process. The racetrack is designed in plan view, and the resulting image is mapped onto the floor of a vast plain. The SNES featured a similar technique in Super Mario Kart, a year or so later.
The game didn’t enforce any boundaries, so when you reached the edge of the racetrack image loaded into a specific area of your computer’s memory, you simply carried on into the unknown. I was less interested in the gameplay, but was fascinated by the concept of this game as a window into the computer’s unconcious. In fact, the game was so unbounded it was possible to drive far enough into the unconscious space to crash the entire computer. We grabbed a short video of it in action, running in an emulator.
It was a thought-provoking talk, and as a result my notebook pages are filled with reactions and thoughts to follow-up rather than a recording of what she said.
LIREC‘s work is centred around a academic deconstruction of human emotional relations to each other, pets and objects – considering them as companions.
With B.A.S.A.A.P. in mind, I was particularly struck by the animal behaviour studies that LIREC members are carrying out, looking into how dogs learn and adapt as companions with their human owners, and learn how to negotiate different contexts in a almost symbiotic relationship with their humans.
Alex pointed out that the dogs sometimes test their owners – taking their behaviour to the edge of transgression in order to build a model of how to behave.
Which led me to my question to Alex at the end of her talk – which I formulated badly I think, and might stumble again here to write down clearly.
In essence – dogs and domesticated animals model our emotional states, and we model theirs – to come to an understanding. There’s no direct understanding there – just simulations running in both our minds of each other, which leads to a working relationship usually.
My question was whether LIREC’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction of emotions would be less successful than the ‘brute-force’ approach of simulating the 17,000 years or so domestication of wild animals in companion robots.
Imagine genetic algorithms creating ‘hopeful monsters‘ that could be judged as more or less loveable and iterated upon…
Another friend, Kevin Slavin recently gave a great talk at LIFT11, about the algorithms that surround and control our lives – that ‘we can write but can’t read’ the complex behaviours they generate.
He gave the example of http://www.boxcar2d.com/ – that generates ‘hopeful monster’ wheeled devices that have to cross a landscape.
As Kevin says – it’s “Sometimes heartbreaking”.
Some succeed, some fail – we map personality and empathise with them when they get stuck.
I was also reminded of another favourite design-fiction of the studio – Bruce Sterling’s ‘Taklamakan‘
Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin.
“Why do they look so crazy?”
“‘Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them.”
Katrinko glanced up.
Another question from the audience featured a wonderful term that I at least I had never heard used before – “Artificial Empathy”.
Artificial Empathy, in place of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Empathy is at the core of B.A.S.A.A.P. – it’s what powers Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots, and it’s what Byron and Nass were describing in The Media Equation to some extent, which of course brings us back to Clippy.
Clippy was referenced by Alex in her talk, and has been resurrected again as an auto-critique to current efforts to design and build agents and ‘things with behaviour’
One thing I recalled which I don’t think I’ve mentioned in previous discussions was that back in 1997, when Clippy was at the height of his powers – I did something that we’re told (quite rightly to some extent) no-one ever does – I changed the defaults.
You might not know, but there were several skins you could place on top of Clippy from his default paperclip avatar – a little cartoon Einstein, an ersatz Shakespeare… and a number of others.
I chose a dog, which promptly got named ‘Ajax’ by my friend Jane Black. I not only forgave Ajax every infraction, every interruption – but I welcomed his presence. I invited him to spend more and more time with me.
I played with him.
Sometimes we’re that easy to please.
I wonder if playing to that 17,000 years of cultural hardwiring is enough in some ways.
In the bar afterwards a few of us talked about this – and the conversation turned to ‘Big Dog’.
Big Dog doesn’t look like a dog, more like a massive crossbreed of ED-209, the bottom-half of a carousel horse and a black-and-decker workmate. However, if you’ve watched the video then you probably, like most of the people in the bar shouted at one point – “DON’T KICK BIG DOG!!!”.
Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.
It’s heart-rending.
But, I imagine (I don’t know) it’s an emergent behaviour of it’s programming and design for other goals e.g. reacting to and traversing irregular terrain.
Again like Boxcar2d, we do the work, we ascribe hurt and pain to something that absolutely cannot be proven to experience it – and we are changed.
So – we are the emotional computing power in these relationships – as LIREC and Alex are exploring – and perhaps we should design our robotic companions accordingly.
Or perhaps we let this new nature condition us – and we head into a messy few decades of accelerated domestication and renegotiation of what we love – and what we think loves us back.
P.S.: This post contains lost of images from our friend Matt Cottam’s wonderful “Dogs I Meet” set on Flickr, which makes me wonder about a future “Robots I Meet” set which might illicit such emotions…
This week I’ve been thinking about wall decorations for kids’ bedrooms. I’ve found two prints of the “Oranges and Lemons” nursery rhyme which I really like.
New North Press produced this one in collaboration with Richard Ardagh.
I happened to spot it out of the corner of my eye as I was walking past their gallery one afternoon. (It’s only a few minutes walk from the studio.) Apparently I should have walked in and purchased it on the spot because their print run of 130 is now sold out. They do still have some equally delightful prints of “One for Sorrow”, “London Bells” and Pop! Goes the Weasel” still available. Check them out.
In trying to find that one online, I also stumbled across this one by Martin Wilson:
By all means, do go to Wilson’s website and read the story of how he created that one.
Alas, my husband thinks they may be a bit too severe for a two-year-old’s bedroom wall. I guess if you will focus on the execution bit, they might be. But given our great affection for both urban ephemera and for East London, we might have to find a space for Wilson’s somewhere else in our home.
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.
Our friends at Tellart made something lovely this week.
“Bells” lets you compose a tune using tiny digital toy bells on the web, which will then through the magic of the internet, solenoids and electromagnetism play out in their studio on ‘real’ tiny toy bells.
After Jack’s wonderful entry last week, it’s now my turn in the new rota system. Stand by for action!
Dimensions phase two, last week’s unnamed mystery project, is beginning to build up momentum, with Alex, Matts J and B, and James currently sitting on the sofa, plotting and reviewing the first week’s development. Given the continuing interest in the first phase of the project, I’m really looking forward to watching this one evolve.
Matt Webb’s deep in the talk preparation trenches, ahead of his appearance at the Royal Institution on Wednesday, talking about domestic Artificial Intelligence. A number of us will be in the audience, and we hope you’ll be able to join us. It should be a great evening!
Timo is spending time with us this week, and he and Jack are flitting in and out of the office, working on Haitsu. They’ve turned our meeting room into a temporary film studio while they test out various ideas, and Timo’s lighting equipment is making the normally dark room shine out brightly across the office.
Matt Jones has been hard at work on SVK, and will be making some exciting announcements about it in a few days time, but I won’t say too much more about that here.
Tom is still in San Francisco until next week, and with his return, the studio will be at peak capacity, with all of the available desks occupied. Over the next few weeks, we’re wanting to pull yet more people into the studio to work with us, so it’s going to get very cosy in here.
