Blog (page 25)

Here’s a video called Mark Wahlberg talks to animals:

(Thanks Jack.)

About half-way through the video, Wahlberg speaks to a chicken. This reminds me: you know how many birds there are in the world, actual individual birds? One hundred billion.

You know what birds there are most of? Domesticated chickens. There are 24 billion domesticated chickens alive right now. That means that if you are talking to a bird, there is a one in four chance it is a domesticated chicken.

Origin of birds: birds are tiny dinosaurs.

An iPhone docks that expresses alarmclockness:

Alarm Dock, by Areaware.

From via frog’s product design team, who say:

Alarm clocks, calculators, and cameras are some of these disappearing products. The smart devices themselves are shrinking so much that they don’t offer a lot of opportunity for formal expression either – especially since most of their physicality happens to be a screen. … [but this is also an opportunity.] These iPhones serving as alarm clocks now could use a dock that expresses “alarm clock” as well as those flip clocks did years ago. Like the feeling of a phantom limb, there is a form that feels right and like it has always been there. Augmented by a flip clock app, this dock made by Areaware returns meaningful form to the sliver of a device that will wake you up.

From Denise, a little pointer to Emily Post’s 1922 guide to etiquette, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. The chapter on Conversation contains some advice which might be well-taken for users of social media:

A FEW MAXIMS FOR THOSE WHO TALK TOO MUCH—AND EASILY!

The faults of commission are far more serious than those of omission; regrets are seldom for what you left unsaid.

The chatterer reveals every corner of his shallow mind; one who keeps silent can not have his depth plumbed.

Don’t pretend to know more than you do. To say you have read a book and then seemingly to understand nothing of what you have read, proves you a half-wit. Only the very small mind hesitates to say “I don’t know.”

Above all, stop and think what you are saying! This is really the first, last and only rule. If you “stop” you can’t chatter or expound or flounder ceaselessly, and if you think, you will find a topic and a manner of presenting your topic so that your neighbor will be interested rather than long-suffering.

Remember also that the sympathetic (not apathetic) listener is the delight of delights. The person who looks glad to see you, who is seemingly eager for your news, or enthralled with your conversation; who looks at you with a kindling of the face, and gives you spontaneous and undivided attention, is the one to whom the palm for the art of conversation would undoubtedly be awarded.

Here is the Hindenburg flying over Manhattan in 1936/1937:

Not Just a Perch for King Kong, via david galbraith on the twitters.

Alice recommends Beyonce’s performance of “Run the World” at the Billboard Awards 2011:

Too right! The play between illumination, Beyonce, real/projected, and huge screens is electric. It’s like you can see her aura, and her aura is performance. Powerful!

Hey, humans could have geomagnetic sight (via @bruces):

The ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, thought to be restricted to sea turtles and swallows and other long-distance animal navigators, may also reside in human eyes.

Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Two immediate associations:

ONE – this is the North Paw anklet from Sensebridge.

A North Paw is an anklet that tells the wearer which way is North. The anklet holds eight cellphone vibrator motors around your ankle. A control unit senses magnetic north and turns on and off the motors. At any given time only one motor is on and this motor is the closest to North. The skin senses the vibration, and the wearer’s brain learns to associate the vibration with direction, giving the wearer an intuitive sense of which way is North.

TWO – you know that light is polarised? That is, it wiggles in a direction, like up/down or side-to-side. In 3d theatres, the lenses in the glasses are polarised in two different ways to pick up two different pictures.

Yet human beings are already able to perceive the polarisation of light. The sense of it is called Haidinger’s brush. It is very faint, and visible because the blue cones on the retina lay circularly around the centre of the retina. Each cone molecule is longer than it is fat, and responds better to light which is wiggling in the same direction it lies. Sweet.

I would like to see the magnetic field-lines of pop.

From Simon, here is a cat caught barking like a dog by a human, which then resumes meowing:

Cats are parasites on the flows of social interaction between living things.

Between all particles in the universe, there is a constant interchange of exchange particles carrying force, virtual particles popping in and out of existence, negotiating interaction.

Between all people, there is a constant flow of favours, emotion, status, power, love, hate, redirected attention. Cats feed on these, like whales filtering plankton from the sea.

Whale baleen.

Humans never worked to domesticate animals. They flocked to us to feed on us, thriving on us like the weird pockets of life around deep ocean volcanic vents.

Who’s to say that there aren’t similar pockets of life emerging on the internet, feeding off the energy expended by YouTube comment fiends, and the vast computing capacity dumped into the internet oceans by spam engines?

The Search for Internet Intelligence:

A non-human intelligence operating within and at the scale of the global communications network is possible. Such an intelligence would have a huge impact on our global civilization. We seek tools and skills for detecting such an intelligence with falsifiable and scientific evidence.

(Thanks Matt Jones.)

Alien life could already be here.

Oh, here’s a thing:

Rainmaking bacteria that live in clouds may have evolved the ability to spur showers as a way to disperse themselves worldwide, a recent study found.

There’s life in the clouds.

As I write this it’s actually Saturday, before the beginning of week 315, and I’m in the studio doing a few odds and ends, browsing the web, and listening to music.

Odds and ends include: configuring Zendesk to use as our customer support help desk once SVK goes on sale, and thinking. I’m not really working hard, just idling.

I don’t get enough time to think. There’s always something else to do. I get good thinking done when I go out for dinner on my own, as I did last week. Before my food arrived, I wrote in my sketchbook some problems with how we currently structure long-term client engagements, then I wrote some opportunities, and then I made some notes about a better engagement structure and what we need to do to bring that about. More of that later.

Dinner was at Viet Hoa where I had chicken in tamarind and egg-fried rice, and fizzy water.

I’m listening to the Amelie soundtrack and before that to Nero’s Dubstep Symphony, which was on the studio speakers a whole bunch in week 314. Good BWAAA BWAAA sounds, played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. There’s no-one else in, and outside it’s alternating between heavy showers with thunder, and bright sun.

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Idling: They say dreaming is the brain’s way of processing the day’s events and emotions. A necessary process of defragmenting, filing, and letting things come to rest and join up. Idling is a waking dream, time to be with work but not to be working, to let events and activity settle out and resolve, and let ideas and strategy take form in an unforced way. A necessary process.

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A few hours later – still Saturday – I’m reading an article called A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600-2100 section by section, and interspersing this with reading the monthly Profit and Loss and Balance Sheets of the company from the past year.

While the P&L (actual and projected) is my main tool to make financial decisions day-to-day, the Balance Sheet – the ledger of the company’s assets and liabilities – determines how well I sleep at night.

I use the at-hand assets of the company in a number of ways:

• as a “safety net” in the event that we can’t make payroll for a number of months. This is because the new work pipeline is 3 months long. If we screw up at the beginning of the pipeline (regarding positioning and new prospects), that mistake might only be visible 2-3 months later. (Aside: we visit the pipeline once a week, in a meeting led by Matt Jones, who is head of sales. The pipeline runs from prospects through meetings, proposals, contract, and finally through to Work in Progress. Like a gut, all stages should be equally full, and work prospects should move continuously and smoothly.)
• as tax savings, for annual corporation tax and quarterly VAT.
• to spend and then earn again afterwards, for example in the printing and sales of SVK. This is an investment, which has associated risk: the money might not be earned back, but there is also a possibility it will multiply. This can be directed at a number of projects simultaneously.
• as savings against future, unknown large expenditure.
• as a buffer to invest in growth. For example, taking on a new space or growing the staff are both expenses, but they should result in being able to accept more work or higher paid work. There is a time lag before the money is made back.
• as security on future new product development, to provide backbone during that time. It would put us in a weak position, for example, to only be able to afford to print the comic if we took external investment. That would result in a bad deal. Cash in the bank to afford NPD means you have a strong BATNA, and that means you can be choosier over your path. (I was able to put a name to this instinct after reading Getting to Yes, which I recommend highly.)
• to smooth the natural oscillations that emerge from variable payment terms, expenses, etc.

Each of these has an associated risk profile. For example, I might want to call on the safety net once every 24 months. Printing SVK has a risk profile that reduces the overall capacity by £x,000 for 30 days, and I’m also exposed to a certain probability that the risk capacity is reduced permanently.

The P&L represents flows that continuously replenish and discharge the risk capacity. High flow is both good and bad: a high turnover means there’s always room to do a bit of belt tightening or delay paying expenses, so that’s helpful. But a high turnover also exposes us to great potential oscillations.

You have to have turnover though. If you’re not moving, it’s hard to start. Turnover has inertia.

My sleepness nights are caused when I feel that risk is over-extended, for whatever reason: flow drops (or flow projection drops), available capacity decreases, capacity demand increases, more uses become apparent, several low-probability risk events look like they may coincide. All of these mean me having to make an intervention, which itself has to occur over time and is therefore concerted, so has a possibility of failure – and this is where I get nervous. The level of exposure at which I am prepared to hold risk, at what capacity, is my tolerance.

I attempt to run the company perpetually at medium-risk, with occasional forays into high-risk to grow – trusting ourselves to surf this tightrope – don’t laugh at the mixed metaphor, that’s what it feels like – and sometimes it takes a while to get my sea legs at a new scale, to discover what a tolerance of “medium” feels like when the numbers themselves change. Your sensitivity and tolerance improve only with practice. I wish I’d been given toy businesses to play with at school, just as playing with crayons taught my body how to let me draw.

I’ve written in these weeknotes before how I manage three budgets: cash, attention, risk. This is my attempt to explain how I feel about risk, and to trace the pathways between risk and cash. Attention, and how it connects, can wait until another day.

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Reading about the history of the corporation reminds me about my public discussion with Mark Leckey at the Serpentine, before I went on holiday. During the Q&A, I mentioned my belief that products and companies are both regarded better as entities transcendent from humans, with their own goals and motivations, rather than being reducible to human use or human intentions.

This caused some consternation in the audience.

But I think it’s true. The company’s decisions aren’t actually the shareholders’ decisions. A company has a culture which is not the simple sum of the opinions of the people in it. A CEO can never be said to perform an action in the way that a human body can be said to perform an action, like picking an apple. A company is a weird, complex thing, and rather than attempt (uselessly) to reduce it to people within it, it makes more sense – to me – to approach it as an alien being and attempt to understand its biology and momentums only with reference to itself. Having done that, we can then use metaphors to attempt to explain its behaviour: we can say that it follows profit, or it takes an innovative step, or that it is middle-aged, or that it treats the environment badly, or that it takes risks. None of these statements is literally true, but they can be useful to have in mind when attempting to negotiate with these bizarre, massive creatures.

(Also, in contradiction, companies are made out of people, at least partially, and we are responsible for their actions. It’s not simple.)

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It’s raining again outside, and it’s time for me to walk home to get ready for a night out.

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I said I wouldn’t speak about attention, but here’s a sneak peak of what I would say. Attention is the time of people in the studio, and how effectively it is applied. It is affected by the arts of project and studio management; it can be tracked by time-sheets and capacity plans; it can be leveraged with infrastructure, internal tools, and carefully grown tacit knowledge; and it magically grows when there’s time to play, when there is flow in the work, and when a team aligns into a “sophisticated work group.”

Attention is connected to cash through work.

Attention is connected to risk via feelings. A confident Room is a risk-taking, resilient company. A company over-extended in risk will sap attention. Between attention and risk, where the rubber hits the road, are confidence, the group mentality, ability to read the present and the future, desire and ambition, happiness.

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Now I really have to go.

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It’s Monday afternoon, and we’ve just had a visit from a dozen of so students from the design faculty of the University of Delaware. We talked to them about how the studio works, product invention workshops, material exploration (which I once wrote up as “thinking through making”), Tuesday All Hands and Friday Demos, and so on. We didn’t chat about balance sheets, or risk, or attention or cash.

In fact, I don’t know whether it’s necessary to think about these things to have a company. I doubt it is.

But I do enjoy it.

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Don’t think just because I’m banging on about the company that I don’t care about the work. I do, you should see it! There are projects that make me feel like I’m witnessing new stars being born. The studio is a nebula. But I can’t talk about them yet.

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Also I enjoy interrogating my own decision making, and giving names to my instincts.

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A little sketch of the studio: it’s mid afternoon. Everyone is occupied with work and there’s no chatter. Unusually there is gentle blues on the speakers, a female vocalist. It’s busy enough that every couple of minutes somebody walks in or out of the door. Click clack. I can see Nick’s screen, which is showing a lot of code, and Matt J’s, who is typing emails. Joe’s screen I can’t see, but he is moving between drawing on paper, and looking at his screen, holding the mouse in one hand and his chin in another. He’s sort of twisting his head at his monitor, like a labrador trying to figure out one of those Magic Eye pictures. It’s raining outside and the room feels only just slightly too dim for June.

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On SVK:

Let me get off my chest what everyone in the studio is feeling about SVK right now. It is frustrating. Warren and Matt Brooker finished the comic weeks ago. And then it’s just been one thing after another. Getting the layouts correct. Proof-reading. Waiting for time at the printers. Printing (actually that was very handsome). Assembly. Delivery to the warehouse, followed by inventory of the delivery, followed by breaking up the pallets into individual items and a second inventory (this all takes a lot of time). Delivery tests, and final tests of the payment, fulfilment, and invoicing systems. That’s the critical path — other tasks slot in alongside and don’t add to the elapsed time: preparation of launch publicity materials, the customer support system, bookkeeping integration, etc. So much time, and damn, we just want to get it in your hands.

On the upside, the story is awesome, and the art is brilliant. The comic as an artefact is better than I had hoped. It’s actually an excellent yarn, well told and clever and tight and funny. There was a risk that the twist would be gimmicky, but nope. Warren is astounding.

Also, SVK is a little crystal business.

We’ve integrated systems to do warehousing, fulfilment, accounts, and customer support, with the minimum of overhead. One of the big difficulties of working with physical things is supply chain management, the work of channeling flows of raw materials into products, and directing them into the hands of customers. It’s easier when you have infrastructure, so that’s what we’ve set up.

I feel like I’ve got a new hammer, and now I’m looking around for things to warehouse and sell.

So if we can do our own sales and distribution, that actually opens up a lovely area of business. I spoke about this in an interview on GigaOM: “If you own your own distribution, you can afford to spend more on making a quality product instead, made for a smaller number of more discerning people. You avoid the trap of needing a hit that sells millions and millions of something — but spending most of that on marketing and distribution, and having a bunch of failures — which is the trap I believe a lot of big mass manufacture companies are in. ‘Product’ will be reinvented, just as music and media were reinvented by iTunes and blogs: there is a world appearing in between the big guys and the little hobbyists. The middle is getting filled in.”

The happy middle! It means we get to work with Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, that’s what it means.

I like having the knowledge in the Room of how all this stuff works. It means we’re putting where our money where our mouth is, to an extent, and can speak with a little more knowledge with clients.

But really I like it because I enjoy putting together a machine for channeling flows with minimum intervention, a toy business, a machine that hooks together with well-oiled joints, and runs with smooth and happy regularity.

Turns out I’m becoming a supply chain management fan.

To this point, the folks next door, Newspaper Club, are an inspiration. They have a website for people to design newspapers, they print newspapers with partners, they ship newspapers, they have customer support, all joined up. A well put together, well-oiled machine.

What else can you do with that?

Deleuze and Guattari called this an abstract machine, which I like because it implies that the machine is virtual – an arrangement rather than a single constructed edifice – and also that it can be copied, reused. It is independent, a bit, from that which is being produced. So when I see a particular abstract machine I wonder: what else you can do with that?

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That reminds me: a funny thing happened when Simon started as project manager. As he got up to speed, projects went much smoother, Jack and Matt J spent more time on the sales pipeline, and suddenly all the work proposals piled on top of each other like an oppressive stack. It turns out that – because they were connected by being rivals for the same people’s time – project management and sales were geared together. The machine was at equilibrium before, but we were depending on part of it sticking. Simon fixed that, and now we have a different problem: sales is running too fast. This is also, as it happens, an opportunity: we can attempt to combine these proposals into fewer, larger engagements, now we have the attention to try it.

Our pattern used to be to do workshops, and then engage in larger projects. Maybe now we’re larger, we can do projects, and then those turn into retainer relationships. Retainers would last for a year or more, and include month by month research, out of which projects would bubble. That’s what I was sketching at dinner the other night, and I wrote it up as an email and then a presentation today.

Also recently I’ve been making spreadsheets to track capacity, and Simon has been working on spreadsheets to report on project budget usage. Infrastructure! Tools!

Simon is planning to write up these systems as a kind of operations manual, a Choose Your Own Adventure for how to deal with projects. (Kari’s already done this for financial and general admin.) What else can you do with that?

We used to have ways to do these things, approximations at least, but we had 7 people on the payroll in January, and we have 13 this month (lost 2, gained 8). In a growing company all your processes are broken.

Plus we’re all learning as we go.

The room, the physical room, is full, and sometimes it feels like a pressure cooker. I can’t look into space and think without my gaze landing on a person’s face. Bubble bubble. I can’t joke about it, it’s not fun. When everyone gets drunk on Friday night and goes to the pub, they have a quiet word and complain about it to me. It’s on my radar folks.

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I guess another reason I spend a lot of time thinking about the company is because I’m pre-occupied with failure. I’m confident that the work will be beautiful, inventive and mainstream. And I’m confident that we’re aware of how important it is that the Room is a happy one. The company as a corporate entity feels like my responsibility. My job is to let the studio do what the studio wants to do, and to not crash it or stall it.

Two ways we fail:

The first is ignorance–we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude–because in these cases the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

(The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Guwande, summarising Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility, Gorovitz and MacIntyre, 1975.)

I don’t buy it, at least not in the field of invention.

Ignorance is a marker of somewhere interesting to dig. “Thinking through making” is really a dialogue between the designer and the material, one which reveals the unknown unknowns. Once you’ve become aware of your ignorance, you can do something with it, trade it in for interesting things. Also naivety gives you strength.

Ineptitude is a worry. You have to pay due diligence to your own ineptitude. But again, if you’re not getting shit wrong a good proportion of the time, you’re not learning hard enough.

Here’s another description of failure, from Ernest Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees.

So, the Colonel thought, here we come into the last round and I do not
know even the number of the round. I have loved but three women and have lost them thrice.

You lose them the same way you lose a battalion; by errors of judgment; orders that are impossible to fulfill, and through impossible conditions. Also through brutality.

So I look out for these, these are what I look out for.

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Two more moments from Monday, week 315:

First thing this morning, Joe bought Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs for everyone in the studio. They have prizes inside. Matt Jones got an aeroplane. Alex got a small car with a website written on the bottom, and if you go to that website, you can play a game of driving around a racetrack where you hold your hands as if you’re holding a steering wheel, and the game figures out what to do by looking at you with the webcam. Computer vision. I got a coquettish hedgehog.

Right now, in the evening, we’re moving places so that people who need the big desks have the big desks, and people who don’t so much have either have the two-thirds-length shared desks, or share a desk (I now share a desk with Kari). I’m writing this as everyone is moving objects around and wiping tables. It seems to involve a lot of collisions, and a little bit of dancing, and painfully hard high 5s. We’ve moved our massive plant pots outside, and replaced them with smaller ones that perch on shelves or on the corners of things.

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Time passes.

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Now we’ve just had Tuesday All Hands, it’s traditional that I give a run-down of what people are doing this week. But 13 people were speaking, so maybe I should do something more impressionistic.

More people are working on the Chaco projects this week, as the work kicked off with various external contractors comes to fruition and it’s time for the various streams to converge. It seems like, with these projects, we’re going through a tipping point from exploration to minimum viable product (MVP) and its associated communications. You go for the MVP because you need to get to an end-to-end experience as soon as possible. You can’t tell how well something will work until it’s sitting there in your sweaty palm.

That tip-over is an important part of our process, and it’s tough. It often feels like a crisis moment, when you are forced to shear off branches of the infinite exciting possibilities and come down to one.

Another important part of our process is to think about the MVP and its communications simultaneously. I’m inspired by Apple in this respect: I’ve heard that they have strong Product Marketing roles. That’s clever, to have final responsibility for the product features and for the way the product is understood in a single person, in a single brain.

People involved: JS (who is on holiday in New York, but has been having meetings), MJ, DW, JM, NL, TA, AH, SP, me (a little). External contractors involved include software engineers, model makers, and product designers.

Dimensions 2, the follow-up to How Big Really with the BBC, is going through what TS calls “productionising.” It’s working, fully, in WebKit browsers, but it needs to work with a broader set, and it’ll also need to go through tuning, and then the project launch process.

People involved: TS, DW, SP, AJ.

AB is finding her feet (only her second week!) and learning new computer languages through the project called Flagstaff. Other people involved: JM, AJ. It’s a good training project, and should have some public results.

Then there’s SVK (people: MJ, AJ, DW, NL, KS. I’m running a help desk training session shortly), and our other new product development (DW, NL, JD, AH, JS, PW, plus a number of external companies). The NPD all happens in the back room, the one we call New Statham.

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There’s a lot going on. It’s a good Room, even if it is rather full to the brim.

What else can you do with that?

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It feels like the studio has plumped out nicely the last few months. We’ve got the right group of people to do the work and projects we were attempting to do, we’ve grown into ourselves. Maybe we’ve reached a plateau of sorts, a place to concentrate on the work and on making this particular abstract machine work well — time to nurture the interconnections, feed the rhizome.

And so we’re ready to do what’s becoming the goal and approach for BERG: build an awesome Room, then – by design and hard work – ignite some beautiful, inventive singularity right in the middle of it, one that changes how people think and produces massive and unpredictable new opportunities. My aspiration: to be the best at knowing how to improvise through these provoked singularities and, in the hot heart of them, to forge new culture.

After an epic weeknote I’m going to keep this one brief.

This week Durrell Bishop of Luckybite contributed an excellent article to Imperica on the subject of ‘augmented print’. It’s well worth spending a bit of time with.

Timo has picked out a few choice quotes.

“What if there was a generic tool to link the digital and the physical worlds? A way to touch an object, to select and see its digital augmentation? It would just send a message via your chosen device: laptop, mobile, home wifi et al. The equivalent of a digital finger. Passive objects would act as physical buttons to the digital world. All that these objects would require is that we perceive their purpose, and see how to act on them. We would need to have an accessible tool to make our selection, and carry out the link between the two worlds.”

“I still believe that, at some point, we may live in a society where most objects are visibly augmented with digital information; where objects are direct access to sites, services, sounds, applications and actions.”

“Eventually the physical object becomes what it does and in our minds you no longer see it as a set of mechanisms. It simply becomes its purpose.”

Durrell calls product design:

“a profession which I learned all-too-often to mean the design of consumer experiences: a type of technical, stylised, packaging and marketing.”

Link http://www.imperica.com/viewsreviews/connecting-the-digital-world-with-print

Last week we visited Pureprint who are brilliantly managing the complex and specialist task of printing SVK with invisible inks. We documented the comic going through the handsome machines of the printing world:

As well as being an investigation into printing and optical experimentation, SVK is a test of our own supply chain management and product launch processes. Today has been named “SVK Friday”, we are all working together on getting SVK a bit nearer to launch.

We have a whiteboard full of todos; press releases, web, blog, print and email copy, a photoshoot, a website, email templates, postal and shipping tests, managing warehousing and fulfillment, advertiser relations and customer support infrastructure.

Setting up direct sales like this is new for us, and there are still final tests to do and kinks to iron out to make sure that an order on a website results in an comic in your hand. More news as it progresses!

Glancing over my shoulder I catch sight of Nick enter purposefully from the adjacent room. He’s clutching an electronic rig and wearing an expression that tells me ‘something has worked’. He sets the contraption down on a table and takes a step back. Jack leans in to probe the item and seems pleased if a little taken aback. A flurry of exchanges spin up and ebb into conversation of possibilities and more experiments. I get the feeling that something new is being invented. A feeling that is becoming increasingly familiar as I settle into life at BERG.

The group has expanded quite a bit recently and that pattern continues this week as we welcome Alice Bartlett to the fold.  She has taken the helm of a new project we’re calling Flagstaff and I overheard her describe it as ‘worryingly easy’ yesterday. It’s nice to see her adapt effortlessly to the studio milieu and I’m looking forward to working with her in the near future.

It would seem that Britain is the only place where the weather has a sense of irony. It’s June yet the skies appear to have been drawn from the pen of Cormac McCarthy. Bleak.

With some kind of oracular insight, Matt Webb has dodged much of the gloominess by spending the past week in Cyprus. He’s back in the studio now and described his return to work as. “that bit in Finding Nemo where the fish stick fins into the turtle current and get whipped across the world at a thousand mph.” If email piled up on the floor like post when you return from your holiday I imagine he’d be really struggling to get through his front door right now. He’s also spent time meeting with Uinta, reviewing aspects of Chaco and overseeing project running. Cyprus probably feels very far away.

Matt Jones has also carefully outmanoeuvred the dour weather by compassing half the globe to Foo Camp in California. In spite of his absence from the studio his echoes still ripple though the BERG blog. I understand he’ll be back with us tomorrow; likely tanned and equipped with many tales of far off lands. While in sunnier climes he’s also been meeting with Uinta people, reviewing Dimensions 2 copy and preparing for, what has been dubbed, SVK Friday. No doubt there will be much more about this to follow shortly, so definitely keep a UV sensitive eye out.

Schulze has now left the studio, bound for the States on a short break (and a few meetings). I spent the early part of the week working with him on Chaco and intermittently throughout the week on Chaco alongside the excellent Tim Bacon. Jack is dividing his time between every aspect of Chaco while planning the layout out a new potential studio space. We had a brief stroll to peer through the window on Monday; it looks big. In addition to all this, he’s also hoovering up a lot of admin which leaves very little time to for him to enjoy his Grazia.

Nick has Physics tied up in the room known as Statham. It’s cooperating now

With so many people out of the office early week the development team emerged from Statham and took up residence in the main studio. Nick is now tapping away a few desks across from me focussing the online SVK lasers on tomorrow. He’s managing development on all things Chaco while ensuring that Alice grows with the grain of the studio without hitting any knots. He’s also keeping track of developments from Elliot in South Korea.

Andy has has introduced an eclectic melange of deep funk to the speaker system which has lead to much imitation slap bass around the studio. When not setting the Scrutton St alight with his musical oeuvre, Andy is spending much of his time planning and reviewing work on Chaco. He’s also lending his skilful touch to Barringer, sourcing components and pestering PCB manufacturers.

James’ time is largely being devoured by the implementation of Weminuche, the rest is given to helping out Alice on Flagstaff. A powerful team by my reckoning. James and I have hatched a plan to go to yoga one day. We’re going to keep it that vague for now.

Tom is predominantly polishing off Dimensions 2 now. So close now. He and Alex have conversations about whether a panel should be moved one, or two, pixels to the left. Tom demonstrated the project to the studio last week at Friday demos to a warm reception. I’m looking forward to see it live in the world now

Kari has pulled out the induction sheet once again for Alice. Keys have been dispatched, general directions provided and contracts issued. She is also juggling emails about Schooloscope and lending a deft touch to the preparations for SVK Friday.

I can see a slither of Alex’s face between two large monitors, he looks like Goliath bearing down on Stonehenge in an, as of yet, unwritten fantasy novella. He’s putting together the final pieces of SVK and generating assets for Dimensions 2 with Tom and Simon. He also maintains close radio contact with Peter Harmer who continues to unearth invaluable stories for the project from afar.

Timo is firing photons across the entire Chaco spectrum. I’ve caught glimpse of the video of some experiments he’s currently editing together and it’s pretty special. The work is leading the project into fresh domain where rules have to be invented to help navigate new paths of enquiry. All part of a days work. He was also clever and has been abroad for much of the week.

It’s Simon’s third week now and I’ve noticed his masterful technique of organising people without making them feel like they’re being organised. Consequently all the projects appear to be running like clockwork now. It’s great to have him around.

When I look at Denise’s screen I see a flood of charming sketches for Chaco. It seems that there is a lot of work to do in a short space of time but the foundations are being set with rigorous thinking and sketching. She’s currently chatting to Simon about copy for Dimensions 2.

Phew! That’s everyone.

It’s sunny now.

We’re a design studio, so we like going to the degree shows that pop up around London this time of year — London has a number of extremely strong design courses, and seeing what the students are up to is always an inspiration. A couple of weeks ago it was the Goldsmiths Design 2011 Show, and my personal favourite there was Ditto by Matt House. This is what he says:

Copying is fundamental to development and social interaction, yet it is viewed negatively in education and creative fields. With new media, reproduction is engrained in culture allowing us to embrace this phenomenon. How do individuals respond when you reiterate, reprocess and reclaim their property? We are the generation that remix, parody and re-enact. Go henceforth and copy.

(He says it twice, naturally.)

So what did he do? At the core of his show piece was a performance: he sat opposite you wearing a bowler hat (like a Magritte), and copied exactly everything you did, while you were doing it. What you spoke, how you moved, what you drew, your expressions.

I have never felt anything so uncanny. You lose yourself in the mirror-feeling, and it gets confused in your head where free will comes from.

His work speaks directly to the nature of novelty and invention, culture and the individual, and to the creative act — particularly now, in the 21st century, where everything is copy-and-pastable, the whole world is a palette to be dabbed and painted using our new brushes. It’s a wonderful feeling, to be forced to encounter this insight so abruptly!

Anyway, Matt House recently put a new video online, where he literally puts my words and the words of Matt Jones in his own mouth.

He’s taken bits of our public talks and patched them into his own movements. It makes me think: where does character come from? Ideas? He is deliberately being a blank slate, and this accentuates the individuality of Jones, me, and him.

This is weirder for me than for you, I’m sure, but I love it, and here it is:

berg copy from Matt House on Vimeo.

…Putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers. Because one book leads to the next book and the next book and the next book and that is how a world-view grows. That is how you nourish thought.

Cecil Castellucci, “Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the Darkness” on the LA Review of Books blog

I first came across Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” through the Strictly Kev/Paul Morley masterpiece mix “Raiding The 20th Century”.

It’s an incredibly simple but powerful piece, that becomes hypnotic and immersing as his speech devolves into a drone through the feedback loop he sets up in the performance.

The space that he performs in becomes the instrument – the resonant frequencies of the room feeding back into the loop.

From wikipedia:

I am sitting in a room (1969) is one of composer Alvin Lucier’s best known works, featuring Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action—it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice,” and the rationale, concluding, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.

Playing around with the kinect/makerbot set-up at Foo set me thinking of Lucier’s piece, and how the sensor-vernacular interpretation could play out as a playful installation…

First, we need a Kinect chandelier.

Then, we scan the original ‘room’ with it.

Next, we print a new space using a concrete printer.

Which we then scan with the Kinect chandelier…

And so on…

One could imagine the degradation of the structure over the generations of scanning and printing might become quite beautiful or grotesque – a kind of feedback-baroque. And, as we iterate, printing spaces one after the other – generate a sensor-vernacular Park Güell…

If anyone wants to give us an airship hanger and a massive concrete printer this summer, please let us know!

I’m at FooCamp, and I’ve brought a copy of SVK fresh off the press to show some of the folk here.

The Make space at the O’Reilly HQ has Greg Borenstein showing the possibilities of Kinect-hacking, and we were playing around with pointing the UV torch that will come with SVK at the Kinect sensor… and found it punches a hole in the point-cloud of depth-data that the infra-red structured-light of Kinect senses…

It’s quite a striking ‘sensor-vernacular’ image, and my folk-physics explanation of it (at midnight last night, after some Lagunitas IPA) was that the UV was cancelling out the IR – but it might just be that any LED torch light source might have the same effect – just blowing out the sensor – can’t find anything online as yet…

I’m away from my physics–punching colleagues who would put me right in short-order I’m sure (as probably, someone here at Foo will today) but if you have any thoughts…

Update from Greg in email:

For the record, my bet is that the torch’s universe-whole punching power came from its plastic sleeve. Things that are reflective tend to do that by bouncing the IR back directly at the Kinect and giving it a blind spot. Check out the hole where Max Ogden’s eye should be in the scan we made of him last night:

Max wears glasses and his lens’ reflection caused this.

You can actually do wickedly clever things with a mirror and the Kinect to pull different bits of space into the depth image. It’s like being able to cut-and-paste space. For example, Kyle McDonald is trying to use the trick to scan all sides of an object at once.

I like using it to make wormholes…

It’s an extremely busy week here, so I’ll keep this weeknote short and sharp.

On Monday, Alex, Denise, Matt and Timo went to witness the first SVK comics coming of the production line at Pureprint in Sussex. They returned to the studio a bit wide-eyed and delirious, and not just because they had to get up at 7am to make the journey out of London in time; the comic looks beautiful, and we can’t wait to get it into people’s hands.

There’s now a flurry of activity from Webb, Denise, Simon, Alex and myself around how we organise the logistics of warehousing, shipping, labelling and packaging, and all of the other pieces of the “selling physical things” puzzle.

Webb is taking a well deserved break, and by now is refueling his brain in the Mediterranean sun. Just before he left, he took to the stage at the Serpentine Gallery for a discussion with Mark Leckey, and has also been strategising on longer term goals for the company.

Joe started off the week in self-imposed quarantine, but pulled through and is now back with us, thinking around and feeding ideas into our Chaco work. Conversely, Timo’s now out of the office now, but spent some time filming the initial SVK print run, and we should hopefully see that released next week.

Simon and Andy have been on other aspects of the Chaco work, working with our external suppliers, and generally project managing the heck out of things, and in a similar vein, Kari has been chasing suppliers, and tending to the many HR and finance tasks.

Jones is off to FOO camp, but not before looking at potential studio space for us to translocate into, and working on sales documents with Jack and Webb. Jack has also been swapping between our ongoing Chaco work, and with his Facilities Manager hat on, fitting one last desk into our existing space, ahead of our new arrival. More on this subject next week!

That is week 313.