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.
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.
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.
It’s Friday, just after 4pm; It must be time for links!
First up –
Eindhoven’s Bart Hess, explores and applies a number of video techniques from time slicing to the utterly captivating, if not slightly nauseating, motion stabilisation.
Jerry’s Map, has been steadily gathering views on Vimeo after 2 years, brought to our attention by @infovore it sensitively tells a story of an extraordinary endeavour which sits between collage and world building.
There was a little unpacking of Laptops and Looms of which Denise and I attended all, and some respectively last week. It was a 3 day experiment/conference summed up by Paul Miller and decompressed by Rachel Coldicutt. In addition to the talks it was also an amazing chance to visit some parts of the BritishIndustrialPast while discussing it’s potential future.
The Gartner Hype Cycle 2011 came out a month or so ago. We like studying the cycle for ’emerging technologies’, even if just to gather other perspectives on the technologies we are working with. Mining the trough of disillusionment is an interesting means of interpreting the near-future of connected products.
Postscapes points out that Big data, Gamification and the Internet of things all debut on the list on their way to the peak of inflated expectations.
In the trough of disillusionment for 2011 are QR codes (antiflage!), Cloud/web platforms, E-book readers, Virtual worlds and Mesh networks. An exciting bunch of things to be building with!
The weather can’t decide if it’s on holiday or not. Some of the studio can. Nick is enjoying some very well earned time away following a stint of work on Uinta and a cracking Friday demo of the latest Weminuche manoeuvres. That leaves Alice and James valiantly coding to great effect. I may even have seen a fist bump as items literally drop off the todo wall.
Work on Barringer is gaining greater momentum as Alex’s beautiful graphic directions are being chosen, Denise’s AIs unpacked, provisional tools commissioned, part numbers accumulated, circuits checked, unboxing explored.
Jones, Kari and Simon are all out from the end of the week. This means there’s a reasonable amount of prepping for the smooth running of the studio in their absence. On the whole though, it’s nice to have a room which isn’t so crowded. It feels like there’s a bit more space for some of the smaller, quicker projects simmering away too: Timo and Jack conspiring with Jones. Timo also keeps hinting that he’s working on a blog post…
Matthew, following on from the high of the cricket result, is continuing to interrogate information architectures, talk with lawyers and accountants, in addition to the ongoing search for a larger studio space.
…at some point during the Lunar Orbiter 1’s mission, NASA contemplated pointing the spacecraft’s camera at Earth.
“That wasn’t planned originally,” said Williams. “That only came up after the mission was already in operation.”
Williams said that repositioning the satellite was a high risk maneuver. “If you turned the spacecraft maybe it wouldn’t turn back again. You don’t want to mess with a working spacecraft if you don’t have to.”
But there was a debate about whether they should even attempt this at all. In the end, Williams said that NASA decided it wanted the picture, and would not blame anyone if something went wrong during the repositioning maneuver.
So on August 23, the spacecraft successfully took a photo of an earthrise, the blue planet rising above the moon’s horizon.
Last weekend we were looking at a pioneering ’50s Synthesizer that was unearthed in a French barn. The photo above reminded us of Norman McLaren’s early experimental films where he not only scratched the animation directly onto celluloid, but created the soundtrack by scratching the optical track too.
In order to create music on the Oram, a composer painted waveforms directly onto 35mm film strips which were fed into the machine. Inside, photo-electronic cells read the light pattern and interpreted it as sound.
Lovely! It was built by Daphne Oram in 1957, a year before she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Alice Bartlett unearthed this uncanny movie of ‘Swarmanoid’ modular robots that specialise in ‘manipulating objects and climbing, some in moving on the ground and transporting objects, and some in flying and observing the environment from above‘. Amazing to watch these little beings adapt around our human environments. In similar territory, we’re monitoring the development in drone technology, including the ‘Raven‘, a military drone that is somewhat like a model airplane that fits in a backpack. “At its simplest, a Raven acts as a flying pair of binoculars that can look over the next hill”. Fast, cheap and out of control.
Many in the studio have been experimenting with (and like Chris Heathcote giving up on) Tiny Tower with its tiny, AI-driven version of Facebook. James Darling has been experimenting with other forms of software-generated social avatars with Weavrs, discovering that his mutant creation is a bit of an arse. The studio is very much enjoying the astutely-observed impersonation that is Peter Molyneux 2, especially his comments on the rumours of pico-projectors in next-gen consoles.
We’re enjoying Charlie Stross on the next 50 years of security, which is actually a brilliant bit of general near-futurism on the security implications of Shannon’s limit, energy, lifelogging, DIY genomics and democracy:
From being an afterthought or a luxury – relevant only to the tiny fraction of people with accounts on time-sharing systems in the 1970s – security is pushed down the pyramid of needs until it’s important to all of us. Because it’s no longer about our property, physical or intellectual, or about authentication: it’s about our actual identity as physical human beings.
From Matt Jones, news that IBM is creating chips based on the human brain, battling the Von Neumann Bottleneck with neurosynaptic chips, where ‘the integrated memory is represented by synapses, computation by neurons and communication by axons‘. This apparently is aimed towards our sensor heavy future:
“If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”
Matt Jones also discovered this visual essay about the design of displays in Star Wars films. Dan O’Bannon and Bob Greenberg created realistic computer simulations and displays with traditional rostrum animation methods inspired by Douglas Trumbull, and went on to collaborate with Larry Cuba on vector-based computer graphics.
The highly credible look of these displays went on to influence other simulated computer systems and displays in films like Alien and Blade Runner. These tropes are still clearly visible in cinema today, over 40 years later. An incredible legacy that Dan O’Bannon should be proud of.
We’re still not sure if we agree with the analysis, but the Meat to Math Ratio is an interesting provocation:
“In a data-driven world, the true measure of any organization, from a regional government to a global conglomerate, is its meat-to-math ratio. This sounds like a cold statement, saying machines are better than people. That’s not the point here: machines are better with people, and companies that can’t augment their employees with data and tools, that cling to antiquated ideas like broadcast, and that can’t turn their data exhaust into insight and innovation, are doomed.”
A cinema-furniture hybrid, this Inception Chair by Vivian Chiu has ‘hand-cut grooves that notch inside each other, securely connecting them together but making it easy to disassemble‘.
Alex Jarvis found this Gorgeous furniture by Rupert Blanchard (via @LukeScheybeler) who only uses “broken, discarded and odd drawers that no longer have a carcass” and sets himself a rule “to only use objects that no longer fulfil the purpose for which they were originally created.”
