Blog (page 10)

“It would appear that ‘the future has taken root in the present.” (1) “The hardest thing is deciding what I should tell you and what not to.” (2)

Matthew, Jack and Matt J are out of the studio today to “take a deep breath of life and consider how it should be lived” (3) because “your focus determines your reality” (4) and these are the focus pullers of BERG.

Everyone else is seated around a long red table for our weekly catch-up, proclaiming what the week ahead will bring. “It’s funny how different things look, depending on where you sit.” (5)

Simon continues to project manage LP, Lamotte et al. with aplomb, deftly applying his “very particular set of skills; skills acquired over a very long career” (6) wherever required.

Alice harnesses “the world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud” (7) to “prepare something special” (8) for users of LP. Particularly, dev tools and the shop. “It’s a beautiful system.” (9) “Cue the cheesy inspirational music.” (10)

On Monday and Tuesday James worked hard on LP. For the remainder of the week he’ll be at a festival of music in Winchester. For those of you that don’t know, Winchester “is a major party town” (11) and home to the “best party ever!” (12) I may be exaggerating but it does sound like it will be a good one.

Alex has taken the week off work to perform live at the festival. He DJ’s with a crew known as ‘Merk Chicken’, and “when (people) hear the music, (they) just can’t make their feet behave.” (13) Their sets are garnering an ardent following. Keep an eye out for them.

Anyway “let’s forget about the music right now”. (14) Elsewhere in the studio, Nick is exploring the LP code mines to see “just how deep the rabbit-hole goes” (15)

Andy is holding a soldering iron and performing intricate open-heart surgery on LP. “It’s kind of a delicate situation,” (16) I wouldn’t disturb him if I were you.

Denise is fine-tuning the print and pixels that form the LP launch material, preparing for the day that it will be “out there properly, in the public domain.” (17)

Helen is tending to the responsibilities associated with a studio manager in the second week of the month. She also watched live Olympic hockey this week, which sounds like tremendous fun, in spite of Team GB dramatic loss. Personally, “I’m much better at video hockey” (18) but I don’t think it qualifies as an official part of the worlds biggest sports festival. Yet.

Ruth and Phillip are doing heroic things with code, character animation and late nights. It all “sounds like hard work to me.” (19) Looking forward to the end-of-phase presentation on Friday.

Fraser is new to the studio! “Welcome to ‘The Program'” (20) Fraser. He’ll be writing copy for LP and manning the customer services desk after launch.

Nationally, eyeballs are fixed on the Olympics because “if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.” (21) And everyone’s mood seems buoyant. “More please” (22)

“That’s the way it crumbles… cookie-wise.” (23)

The quotes peppering this update are taken from a totally arbitrary selection of movies. How many did you get?

1. Excalibur (1981)
2. The Terminator (1984)
3. Man of La Mancha (1972)
4. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
5. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
6. Taken (2008)
7. Hackers (1995)
8. The Illusionist (2006)
9. The Net (1995)
10. Bruce Almighty (2003)
11. Cabin Fever (2002)
12. 21 Jump Street (2012)
13. Grease (1978)
14. Kickboxer (1989)
15. The Matrix (1999)
16. Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
17. In the Loop (2009)
18. Big (1988)
19. Clue (1985)
20. The Bourne Legacy (2012)
21. Grease (1978)
22. The Simpsons Movie (2007)
23. The Apartment (1960)

Mid-week notes.

This is week 373 and the first week of the Olympics in London. The roads are a little clearer, public transport eerily quiet and everyone is cycling home like they’re Wiggo.

The studio is roughly 50/50 working on Lamotte and Little Printer. We have the enjoyable, continuing presence of folk over from the States to progress the technical aspects of Lamotte in parallel with the design being lead by Joe. Much tea is flowing.

Little Printer is an extraordinary, but non-competitive game of Downfall, with the red team working on the shop, BERG Cloud functionality and some behind the scenes delight. The green team are testing and identifying issues with hardware, tidying embedded software and cranking the supply chain handle. We have to make sure the right number of the right coloured balls fall in the right order. Right.

Jones has been out speaking this morning at Hackney House and is generally on call for Lamotte. He’s been passing large volumes of text to Jack, which Jack will be reciprocating.

After a fallow patch we’ve hit on a rich seam of birthdays featuring Jack and Denise. Helen, while juggling costs, LP budgets and general studio management has not shown any lack of determination when it comes to celebratory cup cakes. Exceptional.

Headliner is an experiment in online reading that BERG conducted in a short project with The Guardian. It uses face detection and term extraction to create “a newspaper that looks back at you”

It’s part of a series of experiments and prototypes that they are initiating with internal and external teams. You can try it for yourself here: http://headliner.guardian.co.uk

Jack led the project and we got a dream-team of past collaborators to work with on it: Phil Gyford, who had already done loads of thoughtful designing of new reading experiences for the Guardian with his ‘Today’s Guardian‘ project, and brilliant designer James King who we had worked with previously on the Here & There Maps.

I asked Jack, Phil and James to share their thoughts about the process and the prototype:

Jack Schulze:

Faces come up in News articles a lot, editors exercise artistry in picking photos of politicians or public figures at their most desperate. Subjects caught glancing in the wrong direction or grimacing are used to great effect and drama alongside headlines.

Headliner makes use of face detection to highlight the eyes in news photographs. It adds a second lens to the existing photo, dramatising and exaggerating the subject. It allows audiences to read more meaning into the headline and context.

Graphically Headliner departs from the graphic rules and constraints news has inherited from print. It references the domain’s aesthetic through typography but adopts a set of behaviours and structures only available in browsers and on the web.

Phil Gyford:

We wanted to retain much of what makes Today’s Guardian a good reading experience but find more in the text and images that we could use to make it less dry. We decided to rely solely on the material we can get from the Guardian’s API, alongside other free services and software.

We looked at various ways of extracting useful data from the text of articles. It had been some years since I’d last dabbled with term extraction and I was surprised that it didn’t seem wildly better than I remembered. We settled on using the free Calais API to pull useful terms out of articles, but it’s quite hit and miss — some places and peoples’ names that seem obvious to us are missed, and other words are erroneously identified as significant. But it gave us a little something extra which we could use to treat text, and also to guess at what an article was about: we could guess whether an article was focused on a person or a place, for example.

We wanted to do more with the articles’ images and focusing on faces seemed most interesting. We initially used the Face.com API to identify faces in the images and, in particular, the eyes. This worked really well, and with a bit of rotating and cropping using PIL we could easily make inevitably small pictures of eyes. (All the article text and images are pre-processed periodically on the back-end using Python, to create a largely static and fast front-end that just uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript.)

Unfortunately for us Face.com were bought by Facebook and promptly announced the imminent closure of their API. We replaced it with OpenCV using Python, which is trickier, and we don’t yet have it working quite as well as Face.com’s detection did, but it’s a good, free, alternative under our control.

Enlarging the cropped eye images looked great: eyes that seemed guilty or angry or surprised, emphasising the choices of picture editors, stared out at you below a headline. We tried giving these images a halftone effect, to emphasise the newspaper printing context of the stories, but unfortunately it didn’t work well with such tiny source images. (Here’s the code for the half toning effect though.)

Browsers treated the drastically zoomed images differently. Chrome and Safari tried to smooth the grossly enlarged images out, which sometimes worked well, but we liked the effect in Firefox, which we could force to show the now-huge pixels using `image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;`. The chunky pixels made a feature of the cropped portions of images being so small, and we wanted to show this very raw material on all browsers. This was easily done on the front-end using the excellent Close Pixelate JavaScript.

If we didn’t have any detected eyes to use, we didn’t only want to enlarge the supplied photo — we wanted some variety and to use more of the data we’d extracted from the text. So, if we’d determined that the article was probably focused on a place, we used Google’s Static Maps API to display a satellite image centred on the location Calais had identified.

We put all that together with a front-end based, for speed, on the original Today’s Guardian code, but heavily tweaked. We make images as big as we possibly can — take advantage of that huge monitor! — and enlarge the headlines (with the help of FitText) to make the whole thing more colourful and lively, and an interesting browsing experience.

James King:

To start with, we were most interested in how we might integrate advertisements more closely into the fabric of the news itself. Directing the readers attention towards advertising is a tricky problem to deal with.

One of the more fanciful ideas we came up with was to integrate eye-tracking into the newspaper (with support for webcams) so that it would respond to your gaze and serve up contextually relevant ads based on what you were reading at any particular moment.

This idea didn’t get much further than a brief feasibility discussion with Phil who determined that, given the tight deadline, building this would be unlikely! What did survive however, was the idea that the newspaper looks back at you.

Eyes are always interesting. Early on, we experimented with cropping a news photo closely around the eyes and presenting it alongside a headline. This had quite a dramatic effect.

In the same way that a news headline can often grab the attention but remain ambiguous, these “eye crops” of news photos could convey emotion but not the whole story. Who the eyes belong to, where the photo is taken and other details remain hidden.

In the same way that we were summarising the image, we thought about summarising the story, to see if we could boil a long story down to a digestible 500 words. So we investigated some auto-summarising tools only to find that they didn’t do such a good job of selecting the essence of a story.

Perhaps they take a lot of customisation, or need to be trained with the the right vocabulary, but often the output would be comical or nonsensical. We did discover that Open Calais did a reasonably reliable job of selecting phrases within text and guessing whether it referred to a person, a place, an organisation etc. While we felt that Open Calais wasn’t good enough to draw inferences from the article, we felt we could use it to emphasising important phrases in the headlines and standfirsts.

Typographically, it made sense to use Guardian Egyptian for the headlines, although we did explore some other alternatives such as Carter One – a lovely script face available as a free Google font.

Headliner was a two-week experiment to explore the graphic possibilities of machine-learning and computer vision applied to content.

Not everything works all the time, it’s a prototype after all – but it hints at some interesting directions for new types of visual presentation where designers, photo editors and writers work with algorithms as part of their creative toolbox.

– “We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish”

– Cat Tunnel Sofa

– Lightning at 7,207 FPS

– Sprouts

– 5,500 pixels illuminated by digital light

– The first CGI? From 1963

– “Knightmare: Television for the videogame generation”

– And finally, retro-interactive-olympics themed niceness from the guardian.

Without sounding a bit cheesy, I think we all missed the studio a lot when we were temporarily dislodged last week. It’s nice to be back.

So, week 372. Matt Jones seems to think I’ll work out a way of linking this to a car, but instead I’m going to link to a boat. The USS Williams (DE-372) was a destroyer escort acquired by the US during World War II – tasked to escort and protect ships in convoy.

We passed a massive Little Printer milestone early this week which had been at the forefront of Nick, Andy & Phil’s attention for a while. Work continues on everything else LP related though, mainly:

• Denise managing the publications and making sure everything looks beautiful
• Alice working wonders on the shop (and being very patient with me), so that we can sell them to people
• Andy, Nick & Phil working on various LP Bridge bits, and Andy trying to navigate a bag of colour pellets which are somewhere in the world
• I’m finishing a few print projects related to LP, and starting to work on the latest version of the mobile UI
• Simon ran his super efficient planning meeting yesterday which was both terrifying and exciting, somehow
• And Matt Webb is doing a bit of LP reach out.

James Darling was at a festival all weekend so I’m not sure what he’s doing. I hear rumours of there being quite a good Friday demo of it though.

A lot of other stuff is going on too. Joe is working with contractors (Eddie and Ruth) and clients making sure Lamotte is progressing smoothly, as well as revving up for the beginnings of Sinawava phase 2 later on in the week. Helen’s taken up key cutting as a hobby and is making sure we can both unlock and lock the doors on a daily basis, as well as planning studio space for the next few months with Simon. Matt Jones just had his hair cut, and is writing up a few things as well as planning for projects coming up. Jack wasn’t here for all hands on Tuesday but from what I know, he’s working on Vallecito and a few other bits.

Week 372, powered primarily by coke floats and desk fans.

Back in 2009, we started the work that would become http://howbigreally.com and http://howmanyreally.com with the BBC, releasing those two prototypes over the last two years under the banner of “BBC Dimensions“.

Our intention from the beginning was to design the service as a module that could be integrated into bbc.co.uk at a later date if they proved successful with audiences.

Earlier this year, Alice worked with the engineers at BBC News to do just that, and now the first BBC News stories featuring the “How Big Really” module are starting to appear.

Here are a couple of examples – a story on the vast amount of space given over to car parking in the world, illustrated with the module juxtaposing the total space used by parked cars over the island of Jamaica!

…and a more recent example showing the size of a vast iceberg that has just broken free of a glacier on Greenland.

Of course, as with the original http://howbigreally.com prototype, you can customise the juxtaposition with the post-code of somewhere you’re familiar with – like your home, school or office.

The team worked hard to integrate the prototype’s technology with BBC News’s mapping systems and the the look/feel of the site overall.

Here’s Alice on some of the challenges:

We worked with the BBC Maps team to create a tool that could be used by editors, journalists and developers to create How Big Really style maps. Chris Henden and Takako Tucker from the team supplied me with the BBC Maps Toolkit and did a great job of explaining some of its more nuanced points, particularly when I got into trouble around Mapping Projections.

The tool takes an SVG representation of an area, including a scale element, converts it to a JSON object that is then rendered onto a map using the BBC Maps Toolkit. Immediate feedback allows the map creator to check their SVG is correct, and the JSON representation of the shape can then be used to build the map in future.

It’s really satisfying for us to see something that started as a conceptual prototype back in 2009 find it’s way into a daily media production system of the scale and reach of BBC News.

Thanks to all the team there – also Chris Sizemore, Lisa Sargood and Max Gadney for shepherding the project from whiteboard sketches to become part of the BBC journalist’s digital toolkit.

It’s currently Monday of Week 372, and I’m writing this regarding last week. So I’m late with these notes and I’ll not talk about what everyone’s been up to but instead I’ll talk about what’s in my head.

For one reason and another (I’ll tell you over a coffee, remind me) we were locked out of the studio for a couple days last week and had to variously bunk at the offices of generous friends in the neighbourhood, and work at home. Disruptive.

Over the week Matt Jones pointed me at a Wikipedia article about black start. A black start is (and let me quote from the article here) “the process of restoring a power station to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network.”

Like, let’s say you have a hydroelectric plant. You need falling water to drive the turbines. But how do you open the sluices without a pre-existing supply of electricity?

Or let’s say it’s summer and the power grid has been down for a while. As soon as you boot it up, aircon will come on all over the city, a demand much greater than aircon switching on and off in the “steady state” situation, so suddenly you’re overloaded. Which means you need a rolling power-up.

“Black start” is full of considerations and strategies.

Like bootstraps: a battery starts a diesel generator, starts a hydro station, energises a subset of the grid, ignites a coal station, restarts the nuclear plant.

I was burgled recently, and between my partner and myself we had no house keys (all gone), no cash and no cards, and the knowledge somebody might come back. The boot-up was all from our phones. Use the phone to get an emergency credit card; scrabble around for pennies to get the bus to get the card; get cash, get a locksmith, get security on the house. Once stable and secure, get more cards, get replacement gear, etc.

You know, I remember reading this great book, Lion’s Commentary on UNIX, an annotated version of the source code of an early operating system. And in it you can see the very first moment of the sun, the code that runs to declare what is a “file” anyway, and what a “process” is, and then you can use those concepts to bootstrap the next level of complexity.

I find these deeply fascinating ideas!

Because we’re in our own black start right now.

Not just getting back into the studio last Friday morning, although that’s what made me draw the connection.

But we’re starting a design studio whose mission is to use the network to transform every existing product, and to invent new ones.

Little Printer is a part of that — bringing into the world something that isn’t quite a product, isn’t quite a service, and isn’t quite media. Something new. And meanwhile battling such immaterial forces as radio (don’t talk to me about radio frequency interference, although we’re past that particular corner now) and risk/finance/law (which turns out to be a hideously complex part of setting up the supply chain and sales).

Also the consultancy. We just finished our first unabashed product design work right in the middle of the “smart product” sector. Networked kitchenware with [redacted] as a client. And I’m super proud of it. It’s beautiful, inventive, and – mostly importantly for me – accessible. This product won’t be just for smart product connoisseurs, it’ll be for everyone. We’re just starting on the second phase now.

Other consultancy work touches various parts of what smart products mean, to experience, for interfaces, in terms of new norms, for companies and for humans. So one our ways of transforming products will be influencing their design by collaborating with the R&D departments of major technology firms. But this kitchenware work is the sharp end of it: thinking through making, in order to invent products that end up in people’s homes. More of that please.

And all this is tough, you know, starting up an autopoietic system from scratch, trying to get every single part to move simultaneously.

So getting a studio like this up-and-running feels like a black start.

One day we’ll be our own power station, humming along and lighting up a city of smart products, ones touched by particular BERG values — happiness and hope, whimsy, socialising, play, excitement, culture, invention.

In the meantime: we do what has to be done. Fire up the diesel generators! Jump start the heavy turbines by flashing the electricity grid with a solar flare to create a potential difference across 2,000 miles! (Can we arrange that? I suppose not, but it’s worth a go.)

You take on work to build capabilities to generate experience and expertise. You punt the ball as high as possible into the air, judging that you can get a team beneath it before it comes down. You jumpstart. You do things during the process that you wouldn’t do in operation. But during the start, there’s no point waiting. It’s the order that matters. Order and speed.

And I look at the things that I’m doing, and when my intuition tells me that something isn’t right – because that’s not what a fully operating machine would do – or when my intuition tells me something is necessary but my logic queries it — I try to remember that this is just where we are in the process, and double-check my assumptions. Remember this: These are the revolutionaries going town to town in Cuba, doing what needs to be done to close in on Havana. One day someone will have to figure out the national endowment for the arts. But not today. This is the bootstrap, where you cut through and do what has to be done because this is what you’ve got, and you gotta get to the point where the run loop runs. This is the colonisation of Ka, of Thalassa, of Reiradi, of Sindychew. It’s the runway, it’s why people take funding (we didn’t, we’ve been going 7 years and every 24 months it’s a bigger bootstrap), it’s what you do to make the reaction self-sustaining so you can light up the city. It’s the black start.

So yeah, that’s what was on my mind last week, in week 371. And then over the weekend I relaxed by spending a couple of days in the sun watching the cricket. South Africa methodically trounced England, if you really want to know.

The black start.

Our friend Will Wiles, erstwhile deputy editor of Icon and author of “Care of wooden floors” unearthed this brilliant vintage visualisation: the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge overlaid on central London.

It really is HowBigReally.com 70 years earlier!

Perhaps we should have called it “EMPHATIC COMPARISON”…

It’s week 370. The eye of the storm. We have a week with fewer deadlines than we’ve become used to, but we can see more on the horizon. An opportunity to perhaps prepare and regroup, but also to attack the things that are important, have been at the back of our minds, but aren’t directly deadline driven. This is good. Structural plussing.

Most of our client work seems to be in this middle stage, phases have ended, time to think about the next phase for each. Thoughts, proposals, flights, meetings and workshops.

This is also where Little Printer is. In this post-hackday world we are now in, we are buoyed by the relief that the fundamentals have worked, and the beauty of the things made. Our foundations have been proved, and we can continue building upwards. Phew and wahoo!

In celebration, we have been getting deep into re-working a lot of BERG Cloud’s internals, rethinking how every component works, and how they work together with the new knowledge we have from the last year of work.

There is also the online shop being built, hardware moving around the world, being tested and debugged, printers primed, plastics perfected and finances prepared.

Regroup, prepare and onwards.

3, 6, 9
The goose drank wine
The monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat

—-

Aside from all that, week 369 is shaping up nicely. We’ve almost got a full house and we’ve just about recovered from a very productive Hack Day at the weekend.

Like everyone this week, I’m pretty busy, so here’s a lightning fast tour round the studio in the time it takes a kettle to boil:

Helen is knee deep in VAT returns, travel planning and finance.

Joe is working with Eddie on Lamotte, video prototyping, gesticulating wildly, and looking forward to presenting a finished piece of work on Friday.

Alex is dealing with print. He’s getting samples and talking to suppliers about things for Little Printer, while also working with Timo, who’s in the UK for a few days. Together they’re working on the photography for the updated BERG Cloud site, and it’s going to look rather nice. Timo is also working on a proposal document, and generally catching up with what’s been going on in his absence.

James is refactoring. Anything, everything. If you put it down for long enough, he’ll refactor it. This is a good thing.

Nick is looking at database models, and processing some of the excellent feedback from Hack Day. (And Alice, is taking a few days off after doing brilliant job of organising it.)

Andy is working on more CAD models and taking care of the larger Little Printer supply chain. He’s juggling about 10 things at once, but still managing to do it with a smile. This could be due to the fact there are biscuits left over from Hack Day.

Vanessa is busy writing documentation, and Simon is keeping everyone under control, juggling projects both present and future.

Matt W is working with Helen on some of the financial aspects of the business, dealing with client contracts and looking at some of the internal BERG processes, with Matt Jones and Jack

Matt Jones is working with Jack and I on Ouray, and like Joe and Eddie, we’re also aiming for a finished piece of work for Friday.

Which means I’d better get on with it.