Blog (page 15)

Soon, we’ll get back to managing to publishing Friday links on Friday – but for now it’s Sunday night and I’ve got time to round up interesting things that flew around our studio mailing list this week.

First of all a bit of a meta-point… Often things will be sent to the list with the prefix ‘X-Watch’ where X is a preoccupation of the studio. James decided to run a script across his mail to see what the most popular ‘watches’ were…

• 12 Parallax
• 4 Product page
• 2 Music Video
• 2 Printer
• 1 Injection Moulding
• 1 Baby
• 1 Bridge
• 1 Things on dogs
• 1 Kickstarter
• 1 weird skeumorphotablet
• 1 Car software
• 1 incidental media

What that tells you about us I don’t know…

Anyway. Onwards.

Our friends at RIG have been working on making jeans a bit more spime-y with Hiut Denim.

Joe found these lovely animations forming a children’s guide to critical thinking.

We discovered this amazing photograph from the ISS via Gavin Starks on Twitter

Nick and Matt Webb both pointed out this kinect-hacked shopping trolley companion species. Nick suggested that we should forget our ongoing search for a studio dog, and get this as a pet.

I think I’ll keep looking for a suitable pooch for us…

CoffeePhysics from Andy, and a car interiors tumblr from Alex, via ex-BERGler Tom Armitage.

The recent rash of babies from BERG might explain why this made the list… “…the first ever wireless, biosensor baby pajama.” [sic] Don’t worry. We restrained ourselves from wiring up Kari’s newly-arrived little boy with some arduinos when he made his inaugural visit to the studio this week.

MW liked this illustration of a speech-jamming gun a lot:

The new Nike store thats opening in a shipping container near us looks like it has a lot of interactive elements, some of which will hopefully be the human staff, but y’know.

Alex found this collection of googly-eye-enhanced bits of the planet, but he also found what I think was my favourite thing I saw on the list this week – an absolutely wonderful bit of manga illustration by Yusuke Murata, that uses the physicality of paper and folding to amazing optical effect.

Lovely.

I mentioned in weeknotes that Denise was doing some quick character sketches for some film work we’re planning, and she kindly let me take a shot of her pencil sketches before she took them into Illustrator.

I love the grumpy, determined intensity of the bear…

351 is a Harshad number, sum of five consecutive primes and also the designation of an extremely-loud V8 engine by Ford from the 1960s.

Here’s what’s revving at BERG this week, as recounted around our big red table on Tuesday morning…

Simon as per usual is running all our projects in the studio and also making sure Little Printer and BERG Cloud gets delivered on time. This week we’re finishing up a few client projects, so he’s helping wrap them up and deliver them to their respective homes. He’s also working on documentation for Little Printer, and helping with our ongoing sales process.

Timo’s working with Oran O’Reilly on editing some films for Chaco, and planning some Uinta filming with me. He’s also been doing some design research with Nick that hopefully we can show very soon. He’s the lead on one of the new client projects coming into the studio, codenamed ‘Silverton’, so he’s starting some research on that.

Andy’s working hard on Little Printer – paying particularly attention to assembly, diagnostics, testing samples, and certification. He’s also been investigating manufacturing options for Ojito – an invention of ours that we may revisit shortly.

Alice’s week is full of Little Printer dev work and Guardian Cryptic Crossword wrangling at lunchtime around our big red table, with our visiting cryptic expert, Phil Wright.

Nick’s working on Little Printer hardware and software with Phil and James Darling – and as I mentioned doing a spot of design research and filming with Timo.

James is helping NL with all of the LP work to get us to the next milestone, which is a list on a whiteboard with words on it I am not clever enough to understand. Luckily for me, James, Nick, Phil and Alice are more than clever enough.

Joe’s working pretty much full-time on the final presentation for Uinta’s Kletting project, making storyboards and images with Alex to communicate new service concepts.

The graphic style of the deliverable that they’ve come up with is lovely – halfway between storyboards, comic books, system diagrams and arresting montages of images that communicate some quite complex things really clearly.

Alex has been heads down on Kletting final deliverable work with Joe, teaching at the LCC for a day today, finalising our online shop designs for BERG Cloud, packaging design for Little Printer and starting to do some really brilliant product graphic experiments for the BERG Cloud ‘Bridge’ unit.

Denise has been supporting Joe and Alex as the creative director on the Kletting work, applying her service-design expertise to Little Printer stuff. In her non-copious spare time thinking about some iPad experiments with typography and doing a little bit of character design for an animated sequence Timo and myself are planning for a Uinta film.

MW’s been really pushing on our sales process to make sure it’s bringing in the right sort of work for the studio and in tandem with that thinking about project planning for the different shapes of new projects that are coming in, which will stretch us in new and interesting ways we hope. He’s also dealing with our finances along with Helen, and getting used to using a Windows Mobile phone after years of iOS…

Helen’s deep into spreadsheets, running the studio, replying to people getting in touch with us with various requests and helping MW with the finances.

I’ve been helping with the finishing stages of our current projects for Uinta, all of which I’m pleased as punch with – and concentrating on sales with MW to line up what we’re doing for clients through the spring and into summer.

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AOB: I’m pleased to report the lights in the loo work, there’s a good deal on Innocent veg pots at the local supermarket which have pretty much dominated lunch for 50% of the studio, and we had a cracking return for BERG Drinks last night at The Reliance, where much amber fluid was drunk and Yahtzee was played by our friends from MakieLab.

We had a visit from our friend Einar of Voy, and we’re expecting some students from his university AHO in Oslo later this afternoon.

^ Daff Photo by BERG Alumni Paul Mison

Other than that – Happy St. Davids Day, and happy week 351!

What have we been looking at this week?

Telecommunications services for the 1990s

Friend of BERG Tom Stuart is writing a book for O’Reilly: Understanding Computation

answering questions about computation and the fundamental mechanics of programming languages: how do they really work? what can they really do? what do the programs we write in them really mean?

Music video watch:

“lonely AI whose efforts to reach out to its creators ends in tragedy” by @johnpavlus.

Injection moulding watch:

Injection moulding of 72 screw caps in less than 3 secs

Mattel’s Apptivity iPad toys enhance ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Cut the Rope’, and ‘Angry Birds’ gameplay

Pneutu.be

Nine block pattern generator

Wrap Your Head Around These Gears

The Strongest Weapon In the World a.k.a. Weapons of Mass Happiness / 2006

Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer

Nike+ new sensor array using Bluetooth LE.

The Mu

Weekend in SF from robert mcintosh on Vimeo.

Related: CINESTAR-360 COMPLETE PACKAGE

And the quest for a studio dog continues, Maddie is our inspiration.

This week saw us filming the prototypes for one of our clients, Chaco, that meant two days with a studio full of people, cameras, lights, product models and as it turns out, a huge amount of extra radio waves.

(click for larger image)

This is a visualisation by Phil Wright who is working with us. It shows the usual BERG wifi network versus the monstrous chunk of the spectrum taken up by the ‘CHACONET’. That’s what happens when you have experience prototypes that use four wifi phones, two wireless baby monitors and eight bluetooth connections.

Week 350 from BERG on Vimeo.

Suwappu – the augmented-reality toy we invented with Dentsu London is a nominee this year in the Digital category of the Designs Of The Year show at London’s Design Museum.

It’s in great company – with other nominees in the category such as the Kinect, the Guardian’s iPad app (which we also consulted on, with Mark Porter and the brilliant internal team at the paper), High Arctic by UVA and others.

The Suwappu certainly get around a bit – here they are last year where they went to Pop!Tech with me to speak about toys, play and learning in a Robot-Readable World.

And last year they also lived for a while at MoMA, at the Talk To Me exhibit…

We worked with Dentsu London from their original idea to bring them to life through model-making and animation, and then build working prototype software on the cutting-edge of what’s possible in computer-vision on smartphones.

It’s great to have partnerships like this that can rapidly get all the way from a strategic idea ‘What if toys were a media channel’ through to working, real things that can be taken to market.

That’s our favourite thing!

Of course – it’s a lovely bonus when they get recognised in a wider cultural context such as MoMA or the Design Museum.

As well as making our own products, we spend most of our time in the studio working closely in partnership with clients to create new things for them – making strategy real through research, design, making and communication.

Do get in touch if you and your company would like to work with us this way.

Back in 2009, BERG created Here & There — a horizonless projection of Manhattan, and a new kind of city map that let you see simultaneously where you are and where you’re going. (The art prints are not currently on sale, and we’re not currently planning a reprint.)

Last year, the uptown and downtown maps were included in Talk to Me, an exhibit at MoMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York – about design, things, technology and people, alongside some incredible peers and inspirational design work. (Read about Here & There on the Talk to Me website.)

(Here & There at Talk to Me, photo by Fiona Romeo.)

Last week, our Here & There maps became the latest addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

I feel privileged and proud that our maps of Manhattan now have a permanent home in New York and at MoMA!

Many thanks to MoMA’s Acquisition Committee, and huge congratulations to the team: Jack Schulze, James King, and Campbell Orme.

If you’d like to read more, our previous blog posts about Here & There dig into the appearances and design influences of the project.

(A thought… we’ve been wondering about Here & There for other cities, perhaps as public display and taking the concept in new directions. It would have to be in partnership with a brand, so if you have any ideas then do get in touch: info@berglondon.com.)

A prime, the sum of 3 consecutive primes, and the number of seats in the Swedish Parliament it would seem.

Retrospective (and rather list-like) week notes this week, and what a week! Not least, there have been 3 babies born, safely and I’m sure soundly. Hooray!

In the studio it’s been busy as usual. Simon’s been out and about wrapping up a project for Uinta. Matthew’s been juggling a mix of sales and interviews around Little Printer.

Nick has been doing a marvellous job traversing the full height of the Little Printer/Berg Cloud stack, and moving house, to top it all.

Joe, Alex and Denise have also been working on a part of the Uinta wrap up (called LaMotte) while cracking on apace with the comms surrounding another project (called Kletting).

James and Alice have been licking the cloud-side bits of Berg Cloud into shape. Some significant heavy lifting going on.

Denise is continuing to refine information architectures and feeding into Kletting, whilst joining Alex, Simon and myself for some Little Printer packaging design. Good stuff.

Timo was away for the start of the week, but back in time to launch our next BERG event at St. Bride’s on March the 21st, and in time to see it sell out!

We’ve just had another cracking Friday demos, with a special guest appearance from Matt Biddulph, who’s here for 2 weeks. Lovely.

Things are moving apace. We’ve just had cake to celebrate Matthew’s birthday. It’s drive-time.

That was week 349.

On March 21st, St. Bride’s Type Library in London are hosting us for the rather-marvellously titled “An Evening with BERG”.

Timo is the headliner, but there’ll be a few of us from the studio, discussing our work and approach to it – and hopefully getting a good discussion going.

If you’d like to come along, the event page is here.

I’m rather hoping there will be bar stools and tumblers of scotch, a bit like Dave Allen used to have, while we tell tall-tales of injection-molding and machine intelligence…