Blog (page 21)

In July, on the day that we first published SVK, I sat down with Jack and Matt to talk through the ideas behind the project – both in terms of the storytelling and the business challenges of bringing it into the world.

This week we released the second print run of SVK, so I thought I’d share it on the blog.

Jack Schulze: I’d been reading comics a lot, they’re some of the most sophisticated graphic output I’ve been exposed to.

I was following the work of Warren [Ellis] and Grant Morrison very closely. I found something in common between them — in some of the stories they were writing they were folding the form of the comic back into the material of the story, so that the comic was sort-of self-aware.

Specifically I’m thinking of Warren’s ‘Planetary’/’Batman’ crossover, where there are different Batmen from the various eras brought into it – from Adam West’s TV Batman to tougher modern versions, perhaps drawn from Ennis or Frank Miller. The whole thing only works because there are 80 years of ‘Batman’ comics to draw on.

More recently I was impressed with the storytelling structure of Warren’s ‘Aetheric Mechanics’. Also, Grant Morrison’s ‘The Filth’, where at some points the characters interact with the gutters and borders of the comic page. And – all this against the background of my continuing obsession for Garth Ennis’ interpretation of ‘The Punisher’.

This is brave work — in terms of the broadest sense of graphic design. I started to think about how we might make a comic with those qualities. Of course, not being comics writers or artists, we came up with a loose idea about what we could do with the technologies of ink and printing to build a story which was about looking. We wanted to see how we could use the fabric of printing and fold that back into the narrative. Looking is a preoccupation of the studio going back to projects like Glancing by Matt Webb, through to the Here & There Maps of Manhattan.

Matt Jones: you wrote an outline proposal, with the project name ‘Blacklight”, in the spring of last year – 2010?

JS: Yeah. Once I realised with Matthew that it would be possible, and he could shape it into something we could formally include in the work of the company, I had to write it down and find a way to get it made!

MJ: So, in terms of that moment of thinking about it as a product, what was your thought process? As I remember, there was a distinct moment when it tipped into reality, and you said “we could do this…”

JS: Well, there are always a lot of ideas like that floating around the studio and that was one I’d been quite, sort of, bullish on and I think that it was something that we’d discussed for quite some years. At least I think you [nods at Matt Webb] had been aware of it — and when I brought it back to you, it was because I thought I’d found a way of making it. Not anything to do with money, just literally making it — getting it written and drawn… I think you saw something in it where it had the right sort of characteristics to fit a pipeline of work that we needed in order to get it somewhere…

Matt Webb: Yes. I think the job of the studio is to bring our own ideas to life – that it’s something inventive, hopefully something that has some cultural importance – but mainly to have fun, make stuff y’know? When you can make that kind of thing achievable, when it gets some kind of independence from the client work so you can do it yourself, that’s really interesting.

There was a realisation that it [SVK] could be a kind-of ‘crystal’ business in its own right. That it could be made to work through advertising, cover-price, direct sales, working with really awesome people. There’s something about the project – I mean, independent from the fact that Warren and Matt Brooker have made a really good story… that’s also … I don’t know… it sort of commoditises the tools of business in a funny sort of way — that those tools are at the service of creative works instead of the other way around.

JS: I think to expand on that, there was something that the map had taught us — that Matthew had found a way of allowing us to make anything we wanted — as long as it would pay for itself. And that’s the kind of objective, other than the cultural impact, that the project sort of builds its own infrastructure around it, and that it doesn’t cost us anything to do so, and maybe makes a small profit.

MJ: so it’s sort of a ratchet-effect thing — a system that could be used on other products?

MW: The system we have is putting physical things into people’s hands — with all that implies — warehousing, taking money, customer support…which is something that loads of other businesses have, big ones and small ones, but for us it’s completely new and it’s an investment, so this [SVK] is an excuse for us to make that investment

MJ: Jack, what’s your recollection of approaching Warren about SVK?

JS: Well, we’d written the proposal and Matthew had written a structure of how cashflows and process could be described to make it possible and satisfying to everyone taking part. And the proposal was a combination of early thoughts — some of them very detailed and some of them much larger themes. It’s located in London, the idea of ‘looking’ being an important component, but apart from that we weren’t very precious. A lot of the remainder was up for grabs. After that, I think we just took Warren to the pub and poured beer on him until he agreed. [laughs] Beer-boarding!

MJ: Ah. [laughs] I had that recollection as well – I thought you might have more details!

JS: No! I think that was it! But I think also there was something that caught his imagination — which was that you could take the tropes of AR, Augmented reality… and do them in ink. That you were, y’know, augmenting the page. That you have a scene that has a reality common to everyone, and then a special perspective unique to a particular tool. It’s obviously not the same as augmented reality but it has a sufficient number of parallels to feel part of the same aesthetic.

MJ: Yeah, it feels for instance like the things Jamais [Cascio] is talking about in his essay in the book, the subjective realities that people will start to have through technology…

JS: Yeah and I think AR is something, as Bruce Sterling and Kevin Slavin demonstrate, that people like talking about despite its limited arrival in our hands — so I think in that respect it struck a note with Warren.

MJ: What’s struck both of you most about the process?

JS: I was amazed that from that proposal, and one meeting with Warren and Matt Brooker their communications and process was *so* well-oiled. That they basically just went and did it. In contrast to most of our projects into new territories that involve endless meetings and workshops, figuring out new processes… and although it was delayed by illnesses and various stuff… that the actual creative process — of making a narrative — was extraordinarily fluent. And I’m sure that was to do with Matt [Brooker] & Warren — I’m sure it’s not the same with every comic. And just to see in the result how much of the core important elements of the original concept have remained in, despite the fact there’s now an entire universe and story, I just found it very satisfying to work with someone with that level of trust…

MW: There was something amazing about how Warren took on the concept and almost reestablished it and made it his own. It’s an idea that could have very easily have become gimmicky, or be used just to look cool. But for it to have taken on so much of the core of the story — and it’s a cracking story — that was quite amazing. I don’t know how Warren does that.

JS: It succeeds as a comic in it’s own right — without the UV layer completing it…

MJ: you might have just answered my final question — what do you think of the finished product?

JS: I think it’s great! I’m really, really proud of it. It’s better than I could have hoped when I was imagining what it could be before it was written and drawn. And it’s just fun to see Warren’s process from the inside and have something that satisfying emerge at the end of it. I think it’s awesome.

MW: There’s something interesting about being a design studio and not being responsible for the… creative surface of what comes out…

JS: Yeah, that’s one of the core components… It’s been really interesting. It has been a true collaboration in that sense, in that the combination of figuring out the processes and the experience of the product, and having the early idea — that tangle of ideas happening with someone outside the studio. It didn’t seem like what I would understand to be a typical work-for-hire relationship. It seemed like everyone involved had their heart in it, and invested themselves in the project. I thought that was great.

SVK is available only online from http://getsvk.com

Update: We’ve had a bunch of great responses! We’re no longer looking to meet folks through this route — keep an eye on the blog for future vacancies and more formal hiring. Thanks! -Matt.

So, we’ve got a few projects coming up, and I’d like to expand our network of awesome collaborators.

We’re a little studio — there are only 13 of us permanent, plus a handful of totally excellent regulars. We’re always busy, researching and developing media and tech for a wide variety of companies. And we work on our own stuff too.

There are a handful of roles that I’d like to find folks for, probably as contractors. I’m not going to write up these as full job specs yet, because it’s still early days. This is a gentle testing of the waters, and I won’t treat it like a full skills screen/interview/etc process. If we meet and hit it off, brilliant, we’ll make some magic. Otherwise I’ll put out a more formal call in a month or so!

Given all of that… if any of these gigs sounds like you, drop a note + your CV to info@berglondon.com, and we’ll sort out a coffee if it looks like we have a match.

Those gigs:

• Book-keeper: 1-2 days/week. We’re looking for an assistant to Kari, our studio manager. As part of her job, she runs payroll, does the book-keeping, receives and pays invoices, run VAT returns, and provides information to our accountants at year-end. Kari has written an operations manual on how our book-keeping works, and the position will start with shadowing her for a month or more. This will be an ongoing, part-time role, ideally kicking off before the end of the year. Experience with Xero (our accounts software) highly desirable.
• Designer-coder(s) au fait with openFrameworks (we’ll be looking at public code contributions), projection mapping, and live video manipulation, for a project or two beginning later this year. Experience in computer vision is a plus, as is the ability to blog publicly about work. The project definitions will start off pretty loose — we’re looking for collaborators to work with the software and ideas we’ll have already developed, and find and show off new possibilities. We’re looking at starting very early in 2012 for this, maybe earlier, and would like to start meeting people now.
• A developer highly skilled with 3D and manipulating 3D models, large polygon counts, and graphics. Additional skills: making beautiful visual output; tight code for future mobile output. The first iteration is a clearly defined project, for delivery before the end of the year for an internal prototype. This would be a contracting position, starting as soon is practical.
• Producer with experience working with specialists in interaction design; product design; short-run manufacture; electronics; software development. We’re increasingly getting projects that run from experimental prototyping to speculative short-run manufacture of physical products with screens and electronics. While we have project management and hardware producer/R&D skills, in the long-term I’d like to expand the team, and so this is a good opportunity to work with a new contractor producer dedicated to a single project. Great communication is a must: this is a client-facing role, and being able to define and demystify roadmaps will be a big part of it. So a background in prototyping and/or embedded software would be very useful. I reckon this a 50% role for 3-6 months, and will likely involve a little travelling. It starts as soon as we meet the right person.

All roles are based out of our East London studio — we’re not quite big enough for remote working. No guarantee that we’ll actually take anyone on at this point. It’s all contingent on finding the right brilliant person!

Anyway, drop info@ a note if any of these gigs resonate.

Thanks, and please feel free to pass this on!

Update, February 2013: Howmanyreally.com has now finished its prototype trial, and is no longer live.

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About two years ago, we started work with Max Gadney on a series of workshops looking at how digital media could be used for relating stories and facts from both history and current affairs.

One of the concepts was called ‘Dimensions’ – a set of tools that looked to juxtapose the size of things from history and the news with things you are familiar with – bringing them home to you.

About a year ago, we launched the first public prototype from that thinking, http://howbigreally.com, which overlaid the physical dimensions of news events such as the 2010 Pakistan Floods, or historic events such as the Apollo 11 moonwalks on where you lived or somewhere you were familiar with.

It was a simple idea that proved pretty effective, with over half-a-million visitors in the past year, and a place in the MoMA Talk To Me exhibition.

Today, we’re launching its sibling, howmanyreally.com

You can probably guess what it does from the URL – it compares the numbers of people who experienced an event with a number you can relate to: the size of your social network.

For example, the number of people who worked at Bletchley Park cracking codes and ushering in the computer age…

I can sign in with my Twitter account

and I’m placed at the centre…

Clicking to zoom out shows me in relation to those I follow on Twitter…

Zooming out again places that group in relation to those working at Bletchley Park in 1945.

Which, in turn, is then compared to the Normandy Landings

…and finally the 1.5m people in the Home Guard

Despite the difference between the size of the final group and your social network, it can still just be made out at the centre of the diagram, helping us imagine the size of the group involved in these efforts during World War 2.

Of course this visualisation owes much to the pioneering work of the Office of Charles & Ray Eames – particularly their “Powers of 10” exploration of relative scale, which is a shared source of inspiration in the studio.

There is another type of comparison featured in the prototype – one which during development we likened to an assembly in a school playground – where your friends are gathered into different groups.

For example, this one looks at home ownership in England and Wales:

Starting again from your twitter network…

This visualisation starts to arrange your social network in groups…

relating to the different experiences…

and you can also rollover the individual avatars in this version, to see the individual’s experience…

All the ‘dimensions’ in howmanyreally.com allow you to post what you’ve discovered to your social networks, if you want…

There are a lot of influences on howmanyreally – both from the Eames, and in the case above – the work of Isotype, which I hope we’ll go into in a further post.

But for now let me encourage you to explore howmanyreally.com yourself. It’s little bit of a different animal from its sibling IMHO, which had such an immediate visual punch. This is a slower burn, but in my experience playing with it, I’ve found it can be just as powerful.

Both human history and current affairs unfortunately feature an high percentage of turmoil and tragedy.

While I’ve selected some rather neutral examples here, juxtaposing your friends with numbers of those injured, enslaved or killed through events in the past can really give one pause.

In its way, I’ve found howmanyreally.com a tool for reflection on history. A small piece that I can loosely join to a larger exploration of the facts. I really hope that’s your experience too.

If you don’t wish to use your social network accounts in connection with howmanyreally, you can enter a number you’re familiar with to centre the comparison on – for instance the size of a school class, or those in your office perhaps.

Or you can choose one of the comparisons we’ve prepared – for instance the number of people typically in a large cinema…

As with howbigreally.com – if the prototype is successful, these new visualisations are designed to be incorporated as an element within the bbc.co.uk history and news sites. So do give your feedback to the BBC team through the contact details on the site.

It’s just left to me to say thanks to the team at the BBC who originally commissioned these explorations into history at human scale, including Lisa Sargood, Chris Sizemore, and Max Gadney.

Howmanyreally (and Dimensions as a whole) has been a fascinating and rewarding piece to work on, and thanks many members of the studio who have made it happen: Nick Ludlam, Simon Pearson, Matt Webb, Denise Wilton – and the core team behind its genesis, design and development: Alex Jarvis, James Darling, Peter Harmer and Tom Stuart.

In this weeks links we watch the weather float by with Poietic:
http://www.poietic.co.uk/ourwork/floatingforecaster

Take a tour of the giant-abandoned-nuclear-power-plant where they filmed The Abyss.
http://io9.com/the-abyss/

Get under the skin of the ‘Hands’ scene from Labyrinth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcg9ssRwpfE

See the original sketches for the Back to the Future II MAG shoes.
http://www.nicekicks.com/2011/09/nike-air-mag-officially-unveiled/

Mull over a blog entry from Bryan Clark about the need to create systems capable of negotiating with users.
http://clarkbw.net/blog/2009/05/14/negotiate-with-your-users/

“I always advocate against simple (and especially modal) dialogs in user interfaces because they aren’t there to help the user get past the problem, more like work through the emotional issues the software is having.”

Finally, in the studio we drink a lot of tea so the subject of a tea-making-robot inevitably cropped up.

Timo compiled a list of links to get a sense of how far humankind has got in this great endeavour.

Teabot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl-WbiyJIDQ

Lego
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhQ4mv4zsHk

An industrial robot in 1988:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcttVn2y6v0

Another ABB industrial robot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CiuXy5UY1w

A speculative teapot carrier
http://vimeo.com/4587297

Have a great weekend!

As the faint embrace of another apocryphal summer yields slowly to Autumnal overtures, the studio continues to crackle with activity and electricity.

Messrs Schulze and Arnall conjugate stories with technology for Chaco by focusing light onto semiconductors.

Jones cleaves a path through the reticular branches of Uinta.

Andy solicits a new computer to transmogrify pixels into atoms.

Denise continues to artfully assemble Barringer’s style and savoir-faire.

Simon returns from an American intermission to a freshly embroidered BERG working jacket.

Alice nourishes Barringer with fresh data and eases past her three-month milestone.

Alex is probably horizontal somewhere sunny.

Webb weaves with celerity between Chaco and Uinta meetings.

Kari administers company financials and gracefully handles SVK customer service.

James releases a product into the wild and continues to establish the Weminuche architecture.

Nick speaks fluent Computer to charm the online shop into submission.

And I drew a picture of a man with bendy limbs.

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.

We’re pleased to say that SVK is back on sale.

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.

Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

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.