Blog (page 28)

It’s a short week in the UK, and so far the sun is shining on the three working days that make up week 307. We have two ill people (get well soon, James and Nick!), and everyone else is busy.

I have on my desk

• Pantone Books
• Alan Moore’s ‘Yuggoth Cultures (and other growths)’
• print proofs
• paper samples
• a mock up of SVK
• the biggest cup of tea in the office

I’ve been working on SVK and Weminuche this week, two very different projects.

SVK is a comic, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Matt Brooker. BERG are publishing it – and you’ll be able to get hold of it online really soon.

As someone with a past involving magazines, it’s been fascinating to see the way a comic gets put together. I’m used to pre-agreed flatplans, to sending off pages out of sequence to the reader but in the right section order for printing, moving pages about when ads change. A comic is completely different. There’s a script first, roughs at different stages, a story that evolves. The evolution is amazing – as is watching Matt J’s reaction to each new page of artwork. Such a look of sheer delight you’d think he didn’t know what was coming. I’m very excited to see this printed – but I think we might need medical help for Jones.

Weminuche is a lot of fun, although I’m not allowed to talk about it. Between you and I, it currently involves moustaches and the possibility of a soul patch. This is an idea I’ve thrown into the mix, we’ll see if I can make it work. It means I get to look at facial hair on the internet, which is an area of research generally neglected by the Bergians in the past.

Other project work continues. Alex and Joe have been teaming up to work for a client we’ve code-named Uinta. (Is it just me, or do we seem to choose difficult-to-spell project names?) There’s been post it notes, discussion and a lot of progress made recently. Joe (sitting next to me) is currently creating some beautiful mock-ups of a world to come.

Timo, Jack, Matt J and Andy are starting to work for Chaco (another client code name). There’s a couple of projects on the go and ideas have been shared out loud for the past few weeks. It sounds like there’s a real opportunity for delight here, and I can’t wait to see how it all pans out.

Matt W has been catching up with everyone and planning current and future projects. He’s also been thinking about ways we can squeeze more desk space out of the office. It’s not an easy task. Kari has been helping him look for new studio space and generally keeping us all in order.

There’s a partitioned room in the office, which is where Andy is currently hiding. He’s knee deep in bits of physical hardware and says little when you drop in except ‘I think it’s time for ice-cream’.

I think he could be right.

As tomorrow is a holiday, the weekly BERG links post is coming to you one day early this week!

It’s been a rather quiet week on the BERG studio list, but we (where “we” mostly = Matt Jones) did manage to dig up some interesting things from the internets.

Jason Kottke linked to Clement Valla’s collection of “melty roads” – Google Earth images where the 2D-to-3D mapping doesn’t quite work. Browsing through the images invokes an Inception-like world.

Via Khoi Vinh we discovered the brilliant “Back of a Web Page” Tumblr. Ever wonder what those Twitter birds do behind the scenes?

One afternoon we heard some odd bloopy music coming over the studio speakers, and Matt Jones confessed he’d been playing with Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata, a generative sound sequencer.

Go over and have a play yourself!

Via Mike Migurski came Xiaoji Chen’s Isochronic Singapore. It’s fascinating to see the city of Singapore expand and contract like a living, breathing thing as average travel times change from hour to hour and day to day.

Chen has been playing with other dynamic maps of Singapore as well:

Finally, via our neighbour and RIG super group member Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, a list of Robots, Cyborgs and Computers in Film and TV. It seems that list hasn’t been updated in at least five years (and therefore actually feels rather short), but for me the best thing about it is it reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: the TV show Small Wonder. Ah, mid-80s American family sitcoms. Most of them are best forgotten, actually…

Vicky the robot child!

I’m pleased to have been invited to speak at Sci-Fi London’s Comics day, on Saturday April 30th about the work of Warren Ellis – our Chairman-Emeritus and collaborator on SVK.

I’ll be alongside friend-of-BERG Matt Sheret and Ian Edginton (co-creator of such wonders as Stickleback, Leviathan and Scarlet Traces with frequent collaborator D’Israeli, co-creator of SVK).

I hope to show some sneak peaks of SVK as well as discussing the influence our dialog with Warren and comics in general have had on our studio.

Here’s the panel description from the Sci-Fi London site:

3.30pm – The work of Warren Ellis
Writer Ian Edginton (who collaborated with Ellis on X-Force), Matt Jones (principal, BERG design who commission Ellis’ new comic SVK) and Matthew Sheret (writer, whose love of comics started with Warren’s work) discuss the work of comic book / multimedia writer Warren Ellis who has penned some of the most influencial SF comics of the last twenty years.

Followed by 20 min preview screening of new documentary – “WARREN ELLIS: CAPTURED GHOSTS”

Three of the last four weeks have seen at least part of the BERG team decamping to the States – California, then Oregon, then New York – for client meetings. This week, the most exotic place anyone is traveling for BERG work is Swindon. But mostly we’re all here. Which is nice.

Work on the two newest projects – Uinta and Chaco – is revving up. Matt Jones and Joe, the newest Bergian, have been furiously sketching on Uinta in order to wrap up the ideation phase for a presentation this afternoon. Over in the other room, Timo is doing sketching for Chaco.

Lots of people have their fingers in SVK: testing processes, wrangling adverts, solving problems, chasing quotes, and generally trying to get answers to lots and lots of questions that are still hanging in the air. Alex is doing a tremendous job of making sure we’re remembering what all those questions are that still need answering. We’re learning a whole lot about production, warehousing, promotion and sales – which was a big reason for doing this after all. And we’re kinda making up project management via trial and error as we go.

As I type, Jack, Nick, Denise and Alex have put their heads together to try to answer some more questions and make some more decisions around Weminuche. Elsewhere Andy is updating Gantt charts and chasing manufacturers to get production quotes. This is a long project with a lot of little exciting developments along the way. And as with SVK, there’s lots and lots of learning happening almost daily.

This week it’s Nick’s turn to do interviewing: we’re hoping to add another creative technologist to our midst soon. Project manager interviews are wrapping up this week. And since the addition of two more team members means we’ll be busting out of our lovely little space here on Scrutton Street, Matt Webb has just been out having a look at some potential new space. And I’ve been trawling the internet looking for more options. (My conclusion: there are waaaaay too many websites that promise to help you find office space in London, and the vast majority of them are rubbish. At least for our purposes.) As Matt said on Twitter today, “What I’d really like is someone in East London with a spare massive loft. Anyone?”

Today there were cupcakes to celebrate Matt Jones’ birthday (which is technically tomorrow). I suspect there may be more food later as RIG are hosting a Tupperware party next door. Awesome.

Outside the sky is bright blue and the sun is shining brilliantly. It’s the hottest day of the year so far. I predict, based on the weather forecast, that this week will include plenty of Silicon Carpark lunches and Magnums.

Here are a few things of note which have been posted to the BERG studio mailing list this week.

Matt Jones linked to a lovely poster from Pop Chart Lab, which organises and visualises the taxonomy of super-hero and super-villan powers. For instance, Powers of the Body/Superhuman Ability/Super Strength shows itself to be a highly populous category, but Weapons Based/Powered Prostheses/Armored Suit/Armored Suit with Telescopic Legs less so, highlighting a possible Darwin Awards subtext to it all.

Alex linked to Pica-Pic, a Flash site which lovingly recreates vintage 80’s handheld electronic games from around the world.

Matt Webb linked to a page detailing an algorithm for calculating exactly when Easter falls in the Gregorian calendar, which itself is a republishing of an anonymous correspondant in Nature, from April 1876. Hot pseudocode is hot!

And finishing on a video, Matt Jones also linked to this clever idea demonstrated on an iPad 2, marrying up a 3d engine with facial tracking from the front-facing camera. Have a great weekend, folks!

There have been several things that have come across my radar via the Twittersphere this week that I’ve found charming and delightful. I’ve not come up with a coherent narrative for them, though, so I’m just going to list them a la a links post. Bonus points if you can connect them in the comments!

Via my very handicrafty friend @thatdeangirl I discovered The High Church of Gaming. Here are some beautiful kneeling pads which incorporate imagery from Super Mario, Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog and bring together two things that almost never go together: religion and video gaming.

Another friend @dankauf tweeted a link to the gorgeous and fascinating project / live show The Ice Book. It uses light and projection to tell a story on a pop-up book:

The Ice Book (HD) from Davy and Kristin McGuire on Vimeo.

According to the McGuires, “It tells the story of a mysterious princess who lures a boy into her magical world to warm her heart of ice. It is made from sheets of paper and light, designed to give a live audience an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation.”

And finally, via @iainarcher, Nano Guitar! Created in 2003 by scientists at Cornell University, it’s 10 microns long and has six strings that are played by targeting them with miniature lasers creating one of the highest sounds every recorded. And really, why not?

After a fairly quiet start to the week on Monday, it’s suddenly feeling a lot like normal service has resumed. With Matt W, Jack, Matt J and Timo out last week, the rest of us has a quiet, industrious time here. Now we’re back to levels of energy and activity in the room which make this such a unique and brilliant place to work.

Matt Webb is spending a good deal of this week interviewing candidates for our Project Manager role, and he and I have been chatting about the upcoming interviews next week, for the Creative Technologist position. Kari is making the interview process into a wonderfully efficient machine, booking the interview times, and collating all the CVs.

Hiring is a good thing for us right now, and new people will allow us to scale our work, but it brings with it very urgent questions of how we scale physically. Once we’ve filled these two roles, our ratio of staff to desks will tip over one, and somebody will be bumped onto the sofa until we find a new office. Either that, or we go for Plan B, the BERG mezzanine floor!

Speaking of new people, our office is now home to the fantastic Joe Malia, and as I write this, he’s busy getting his neural pathways tuned to the special Schulze wavelength. Schulze and Timo are in NYC for a brief spell of work that will keep them out of the country all week. Denise and Alex are busy working on preparing the shop for SVK, and Denise is also spending time on Weminuche, absorbing all of the unspoken potential of the project, and sketching beautiful pixels to capture and express them.

Andy spent some time at the National Electronics Week in Birmingham this week, and if we had a sweepstake for “person most likely to be wielding a soldering iron”, he’d win by a very comfortable margin. Back at his desk, he’s been pouring over schematics for circuit boards and helping me wire up various development boards together, also for the Weminuche project.

Last, but by no means least, Matt Jones is kicking off the studio portion of project Uinta with Joe, and is also giving the closing keynote on the first day of UX London 2011. This is week 305!

More welcomes this week…

I’m very happy to announce that we’ve added Joe Malia‘s biological distinctiveness to the BERG collective!

Joe is a contemporary of Schulze, Matt Brown and James King from the RCA Design Interactions course, and since then has been working as a design ronin on research and software projects for Nokia, KPMG, Sony Ericsson, Luckybite, Beta Tank, IDEO and Deutsche Bank.

Though I’m perhaps most fond of this piece of his work – a drawing of “Ever-more complicated light switches” that he did for me in the 17th hour of the “24hr Drawathon” he staged with Alice Hoult last year…

Welcome Joe!

The studio’s experiencing some turbulent times at the moment – all good – as we get busier, reach further and grow.

On that last note, I have an awesome announcement to make. Our long time friend and collaborator Timo Arnall is joining us full-time as a Creative Director here at BERG. He needs little introduction – he is a accomplished researcher, designer, photographer, film maker and conference speaker.

We’ve been working with Timo in various ways since Matthew and I formed Schulze & Webb back in 2006. Our collaborations increased in scale as we began working on the Touch project investigating Near Field Computing at AHO. For instance, we went from this RFID Hacking Workshop in 2006 through to the “Immaterials” and “Nearness” film work in 2009.

Timo’s thinking, film-making and interaction design knowledge was also a huge contributor to our work on Mag+, and subsequently, he collaborated with us on the design of Popular Science+. This is to name just a few of the projects he has contributed to.

Timo is among that rare category of people with a broad, inventive literacy across the design, technology and product spectra as well as having awesome deep trenches of skill across graphic design, product design, design research, writing, photography, video production, post-production, drawing, lighting, and architecture.

He also has a long standing dedication to Nike Footscape.

In addition to leading product and service design projects with our clients (alongside Denise) as Creative Director, his responsibilities will also include managing and directing BERG’s communications output.

Timo is a capable designer in many traditional forms – but in many ways his preferred design medium for exploring interactions is video. His responsibilities will begin on a brief for Chaco, but we also have the pleasure of including him in some client workshops on Uinta.

On a personal note, I’ve known Timo since childhood – I look forward to his continuing influence on me personally, also to watch both how he affects the room, and it affects his work.

Many cheers for the acquisition of the blonde-posthuman-photon-railgun Timo Arnall!

Happy days…

In another file on my laptop I’ve got the notes I was intending to write here. They’re all about how to structure risk in projects in order to leave the maximum room for unintended invention.

Whatever. I’m in no state to finish them. I’ve been eight timezones away for the past week with Matt J, Jack and Timo (who has joined us as a creative director!), I just flew back in, and my head feels like it’s full of bees.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played the game Canabalt. You should, it’s fun. That’s what the week has been like. Wake up early, read new resumes for the project manager position and decide whether to interview or not. Up, shower, downstairs. Drink coffee, respond to latest changes in a contract being negotiated, write a response to a media request, arrange meetings for next week, finalise another contract. Finish coffee, off to workshops, back, catch up on emails from the day, out for dinner, bed.

While we were on the road, Timo and Jack launched Suwappu with Dentsu London, our first gig as official “consultant inventors.” And toys too! Sweet.

So with so many people away it was quiet in the studio. Nick tells me it was industrious, and that’s the truth. I spent my first hour back in today being shown what’s been going on. Ads for the comic, testing the online shop and fulfilment, continuing mini breakthroughs and prototyping in our own new product development, etc. Lots!

It’s very sunny here too. A good Spring day in London.

I’ll see more at 4pm at Friday demos. Between that and Tuesday All Hands, there’s a nice rhythm to the week.

I’m not sure when we’ll all be back in the studio at the same time again. I think Jack may be off to New York next week, to kick off an engagement that will see us through the next six months or so. But we also have someone new starting on Monday, and then these two positions we’re just starting interviews for, and then, gosh, we’re out of desks. I don’t really want to move, but it does mean, on top of everything else going on, I’m now also looking around for new premises. Somewhere in Shoreditch with a bit of character, a bit of room to grow, a quiet room, a meeting room, and a space to run workshops and make films. I’m getting on the estate agent train. Do let me know if you have any ideas or serendipitous opportunities.

I’m looking forward to travel pausing for a bit, and having everyone back in the same room. There have been lots of changes recently, and the Room – which in my head I’ve started capitalising, Room not room – is nothing if not a culture – a particular stance to design and the world, and shared values – a way to work which is beautiful, popular and inventive – and a network of people in which ideas transmit, roll round and mutate, and come back in new forms and hit you in the back of the head. The Room is what it’s all about. It’s a broth that requires more investment than we’ve been giving it recently. So, yeah, that.

It’s the end of week 304 folks.