Blog (page 19)

Hello! It’s Friday, we’ve just done our usual Friday demos. I’m sitting at my desk with a can of polish lager and Matt Jones is playing Huey Lewis and the News. It’s probably time for a roundup of the things floating around the studio mailing list on week 334.

Nick sent around this link of an old experiment looking into male / female walking patterns.

We liked this site advertising a workspace in NYC. Simple but very nice.

Nick also sent around this research project from Microsoft, working on scaling up 8-bit pixel art for modern displays. I don’t think Denise agreed with it.

Denise sent around lumibots – “small, autonomous robots that react to light”.

Jones sent around a nice post on Chevrolet speedometer design over the ages (I’m a sucker for anything design – car related):

And then Andy sent around this picture of the dashboard of a Citroen CX dashboard, with cylinders that rotate to display dashboard info. I’m a massive fan of Citroen’s design from this era. Brilliant. Look at the steering wheel!

Finally, Matt Webb sent around some an email entitled ‘First words’, so I’ll end with the first words spoken on the telephone, from Bell to Watson in 1876:

“Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.”

I’ll leave you with a studio staple track as it’s been a slightly music themed weeknotes. I think we have BERG alumni Matt Brown to thank originally for introducing us to this. Have a good weekend.

Usual weeknotes with a little surprise at the end – I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the kind of music we listen to in a normal week in the office. Enjoy.

Matt Webb is deep in business development – working on a new office space, lots of presentations for the end of the week, and lots of future work possibilities. Always exciting to hear what’s coming up.

Matt Jones is on sales this week, as well as preparing a few workshops, and working on various aspects of Uinta.

Jack and Timo are preparing for some upcoming film work, as well as working with Joe and Durrell on some Chaco related business which is looking lovely. They’re lodged over in our new (temporary) overflow space.

Kari’s doing her usual sterling job of keeping the office (and us) in check.

Myself, Denise, James, Alice, Nick and Andy are all deep in various aspects of Weminuche – design, manufacturing, code, you name it. The progress in the last few weeks has been phenomenal, I wish I could say more about it. Soon!

Joseph Malia is doing baffling things Uinta related, on top of some Chaco work for Jack.

Alice is working on the final bits of Dimensions on top of Weminuche.

Simon is producing what I’m expecting to be the world’s largest gantt chart, and generally keeping his very capable eyes on most of our work to make sure it runs swimmingly.

Finally, here’s a few samples of what we’ve been listening to in the office this week:

• T Williams’ mix for FACT Magazine
• Warp Records’ 2010 sampler
• 14 Tracks from Planet Mu
• Four Tet’s Fabriclive 59 mix
• Rustie’s ‘Glass Swords’ (Spotify)
• My Spotify playlist of the Sounds of the Universe Mailer, from 27/10/2011
• Simon’s Spotify playlist of the samples from the Avalanches ‘Since I left you’ – and the original is here
• AWOBMOLG on Spotify
• Adam Buxton’s Kind of Big Playlist on Spotify
• Leaf office playlist on Spotify
• And finally the soundtrack to Drive, which unfortunately isn’t on Spotify but is completely fantastic, as is the film itself.

This week’s Friday Links brought to you by Lech™ Premium Beer.

Here is a video of a robot riding a bicyle!

Next up, this work from the graduate lab at Mint Digital. Having been involved in a lot of short term student projects (Holla at me Extreme Blue!) what really strikes me about this project, pulled together by three graduates under the mentorship of Mint Digital, is how polished it is, how complete and real it feels. In three months they made an actual product, complete with a nice looking website, and to top it all, found it a cute name.
http://ollyfactory.com/

Matt Jones sent round this video of people falling in interesting ways:

I feel a bit dizzy.

And finally, because it’s getting a bit dark and wintery, and as far as I’m concerned this blog doesn’t have enough terrible cuteness, here is a picture of someone tickling an otter.

Happy Friday!

It’s a drizzly day in London and I have cold forearms.
Alex, Jones and Jack are in Uinta workshops this week, so the office feels a bit empty and Jones’ iconic eyebrows are missing from my view across the desk.

This week Simon is shepherding, doing a bit of re-planning, pinging off emails and ushering the rest of us into the right places at the right time with his characteristic patience and charm.

Kari is still doing ‘the usual’, a lot of putting things into spreadsheets. This week she is also writing documentation for new financial admin procedures, which I can only hope is more exciting than it sounds.

Nick has his fingers and also some toes in many pies (dexterous feet) this week. He’s working with Joe on Uinta, with James, Phil, Andy and I on Weminuche, applying some polish to Suwappu, moving more google accounts from one place to another, and doing a bit of Schooloscope migration.

Denise is making some very beautiful things for Barry, which I can’t wait to see in the world.

Joe is working on Uinta, making some truly gorgeous looking animations, and swinging his arms around a lot.

James is working on Weminuche with Alex. Right now he is looking at something complicated in Omingraffle and tapping his face thoughtfully.

I am also working with Denise on Barry. Taking pictures from dropbox and making them into real things.

Matt Webb is thinking about January, doing his regular catch ups with the team, financial stuff and meetings.

Andy is thinking about process and working on Barry. Something must be afoot because every time the doorbell goes he jumps out from Statham and runs to the door to collect whatever the postman has brought. What’s he building back there?

Timo is working with Jack on Chaco stuff. He is also pulling together a script for Uinta work and writing a proposal.

The rain has stopped, and Alex and Jones have just arrived back, laden with coffee and fun things for us all to look at.

Onwards.

As the world starts testing Siri, with all the usuals, Alex found an interesting link discussing Siri’s personality. It’s fascinating times for copywriting in its many forms. As we get frustrated with product copy becoming over friendly, it’s tricky line to tread for the writers of AI. Siri seems to have it nailed, but it’ll be fun looking for the inevitable imitations over the next few years. (How many witty answers can you give to ‘What’s the meaning of life?’)

While we’re talking about Apple, Matthew sent around this link pointing to the origins of the iCloud logo. The golden ratio! So perfect. Only Apple could create such visual magic. Oh.

Matthew also sent around a link to this Monocle radio (above), which he spotted via @antimega. Described as ‘An update of the Heritage model’ it now has an iPod/iPhone remote control application and full coverage of DAB. Perhaps this heritage design (or the price tag) will ‘nurture the desire to keep':

“If you build in emotional value, people will keep products longer and take more care of it; this of course saves energy and materials. It is the difference between selling an ordinary hi-fi and selling amazing sound.”

Which is discussed further in this article, relating to products in general — found by Alex, on Core77.

Like everyone else we’ve been looking at the Lytro camera (above) – with its ‘shoot now focus later’ technology. Timo, sent around the first link to a written review, and Alex followed up with this additional review with videos.

We all loved this video of ‘quantum levitation’, too, first spotted by Alex.

Matthew pointed us at this waste reclamation power plant in the heart of Copenhagen:
“It’s a massive incinerator that burns household rubbish to make electricity.
Two things:
1. they’ve shaped it like a mountain, and in the winter it’ll have snow and 3 ski runs down from the top

2. it emits smoke—well, CO2. But instead of a plume, the smoke stack stores up the CO2 until it reaches 1 ton, and then puffs out a smoke ring.”

Wonderful!

The cold but sunny London mornings see us in the middle of week 332. We’re all much healthier this week, with last weeks human bugs all ticketed, fixed and filed.

Jack and Matt Jones are in New York as I type. They’ve gone for a mix of reasons; secret client meetings and non-secret public speaking.

As nice as NY is, it’s an exciting time to be in the studio. It feels like everything has come on leaps an bounds in the past few weeks. Projects are getting more visual—more tangible—by the day. Andy has just unwrapped a package which saw us all trailing in his wake on the path to Statham (the tiny back room in Berg). This is another part of Weminuche falling in to place—and it’s so easy to see how everyone’s different type of work will manifest itself now.

Alex and I have been creating the visual side of Weminuche, working closely with James and Alice. There’s a general feeling of delight as wireframes become working prototypes. (As a visual designer working on digital design, I still get so excited as things start working that I wish I could pick stuff up and squish it).

My part of the design is also uncovering bugs for Nick to wrangle. He’s extremely gracious every time ‘Oh, that’s good… It’s good to know that might happen, I’ll look into it now’. And he does. I keep waiting for the ‘ARGH! Enough! Can’t you just leave it for 5 minutes?!’ but it’s not happened as yet. Nick is working closely with Andy too, who is often buried headfirst in spreadsheets, and schematics.

Nick is also working with Joe and Simon, on the Uinta project. Again, it’s such a delight to see this developing, Joe’s design is beautiful, despite the fact that every time you talk to him he’s had some new kind of technological disaster. (Latest: laptop monitor has stopped working).

Timo is planning and editing new films. Due to our office space issues, he’s hidden away in our temporary other office (known as BERG 9), but does appear now and again for cups of tea and the odd meeting. I’m looking forward to seeing the plans for the next film, which will support some of the work Matthew is doing.

Kari and Simon are, as ever, the people that keep us going. Kari by booking flights for new workshops and continuing the ever frustrating search for new office space. It sounds like we’re getting there, but it’s certainly not been easy. Simon has been keeping control of client and internal projects, and doing a good job of keeping us in touch with some of the people outside the office we’re also working with.

All in all, interesting times.

The BERG studio list has been a bit quiet this week. I don’t know if it’s that everyone has been so buried in their work that they haven’t had much time to follow interesting links, or if it’s just been a quiet week out on the internets in general. A few noteworthy things have come floating past, though.

Via Matt Jones we discovered a simple but ingenious tool for any amateur tree climber: First Branch, “for when you want to climb a tree, but the first branch is just out of reach.”

Alex alerted us to Fast Company’s article about the NewProductWorks Collection where you can find “every product in food, beverage, household, health & beauty care, baby care, pet products, etc” going back as far as the 1960s. Of course “you” would need to be in a particularly qualified position because it is not, unfortunately, open to the public. I wonder if working for BERG would get me in. I would so love to see that.

Matt Jones sent this video of the Recon Scout Throwbot, a throwable robotic reconnaissance agent for use by the military, which doesn’t just seem like something out of science fiction, it actually is. (Sort of. Minus the intelligence anyway. So far…)

Also via Jones came news of a new ultrasound accessory for your smartphone. I’m sure there are plenty of celebrities who will be relieved to know that they only need to shell out $8,000 for their own private, in-home ultrasound equipment rather than $100,000. More seriously, this could be a great advance for global healthcare.

And finally, Joe delighted us with a magnetic liquid hedgehog from Russia:

Which then sent me into a rabbit hole of Ferrofluid videos on YouTube. There’s some pretty awesome stuff out there.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

331 – the week that shall henceforth only be known as Plague Week. Leaves are falling, temperatures are dropping, and the dreaded rhinovirus has claimed no fewer than five victims of our small cohort of thirteen this week. We have a policy in the studio that as soon as someone begins to look a little green, sniffly or generally grotty they are immediately banished, not to return until risk of contagion subsides. Unfortunately it seems our policy hasn’t worked too well this week. Biohazard suits are next.

Last Friday, our weekly demos were stunning. Ninety minutes of brilliant work on all projects. It’ll be hard to follow that this week, especially with so many people out of the studio.

If Barry were a rollercoaster, we’ve just gone over the top of a reasonably lengthy climb and are enjoying the thrill of sudden progress, speed and excitement, though there is still much to come. After various re-planning sessions last week, and a couple of eureka moments this week, things are really happening. Both Matthews, Jack, Denise, Alex, James, Alice, Andy, Nick and Phil have all been working tremendously towards our various short-term goals for this. You know things are going well when Andy becomes an excited one-man percussion extravaganza in the back room.

Last week we started working with partners Future Platforms on some elements of the Uinta and Chaco projects. Progress so far is good, and as they run their projects in fortnightly iterations, as well as our day-to-day communications Joe and I will be spending every other Wednesday with the FP team in Brighton to review what’s been done and plan the next iteration of work. It’s a similar process to that which we’re using for Barry internally.

We’re at the stage where we’re gearing up some communications work around Chaco, Uinta and Barry. Jack and Timo have been sketching and I’ve spent time with them to sketch out timings and logistics. It’s going to be a busy few months for those guys.

Between her numerous other responsibilities, Kari’s been pounding the streets scouting out slightly larger spaces for us to move to locally. Matt Jones and Matt Webb have been looking at our pipeline of work into 2012 and I’ve been supporting by looking at our likely capacity into the new year. They’ve also been out at Wired 2011, returning to the studio rather excited about brainwave-controlled cat ears. And why not.

Congratulations to all the team at The Guardian for launching their iPad app this week.

BERG played a small role at the very beginning of the process with initial product workshops, Nick contributing his experience on iOS prototyping and Jack consulting on the interaction design with Mark Porter and the team.

Andy Brockie who led the internal design team there has put together a great ‘behind-the-scenes’ gallery of the process, and newspaper design guru Mark Porter has an in-depth blog post about his involvement here.

From that post, a snippet about some of the ‘algorithmic-art-director‘ workflow the team invented:

Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

It’s not quite the “Robot Mark Porter” that Schulze and Jones imagined in the workshops, but it’s as close as we’re likely to see in my lifetime. Of course robots do not make good subs or designers, so at this stage some humans intervene to refine, improve and add character, particularly to the article pages. Then the InDesign data goes into a digital sausage machine to emerge at the other end as HTML.

Fascinating stuff, and perhaps a hint of the near-future of graphic design…

It was a pleasure working with the team there, and Mark especially. The final result looks fantastic, and more importantly perhaps reads beautifully and downloads extremely quickly. Well done to all involved!

And now, we can now finally exclusively reveal our prototype sketch for Robot Mark Porter…

It’s Friday the 7th of October, and this is Berg Friday Links.

The recommended soundtrack for this edition of Friday Links is Keygen Jukebox, provided by Andy, and my favourite link of the week.

Alex provided us with this link to a 1971 Nintendo product.

We got excited enough about this new Roland 3D hobby mill that we started talking about the games consoles we used when we were kids.

There’s been a bit of interest in Point Of View videos on the list, bringing up these examples: The Stampede by Biting Elbows, Cinnamon Chasers – Luv Deluxe, Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW) and the game Mirror’s Edge.

We also had a mini discussion on the greater debate around what now seems to have been coined wackaging. Denise, the person I would most trust on this issue, gave us this:

Main thing is that writing in that style and doing it well isn’t easy. And it’s not quick. It doesn’t just trip off the tongue, its not like writing an email to your mates. Get it right, and people like it. Get it wrong and it’s really offensive. It’s also very difficult to tell people how to get it right. Christopher Hitchens explains it better:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

Alex provided us with this animated gif:

And finally, from Denise via She Went of Her Own Accord, is New Old Jokes Home:

My robot wife has gone to the Carribbean.
Jamaica?
No, she came ready-manufactured.

Have a good weekend.