Blog (page 35)

Jack Schulze and I were named in The One Thousand, the Evening Standard’s list of the 1,000 most influential Londoners!

Here we are (in the ‘new players’ list), and here (in New Media).

We went to their party last night, which had a great view over London, and was filled with interesting people and generous quantities of champagne.

It’s flattering (and super weird!) to be named, and wonderful to have recognised the beautiful, inventive and popular work the studio is putting out. You couldn’t ask for a better team.

If you’re visiting our site because of the article, please do watch our films and have a poke through our projects. You’ll find we’re a design studio and product invention company, and we like working with media and technology in really human ways.

Thank you Evening Standard!

It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m about to catch a train to Sheffield. But before I do that, it would be a shame not to round-up some links from the studio mailing list – especially given the box-fresh surroundings of the new BERG website.

Via infosthetics comes this set of photographs from Brian Steen. They depict data over time – in this case, the population of Germany from 1994 and 2009 (in red and white). The images are long exposures of data extruded through space, in a similar technique to that of Making Future Magic. It’s striking to see this technique used for visualisation of data, though – and it’ll be interesting to see where Brian goes with it.

Damjan Stanković’s Cipher Glass shows you what’s in it when it’s full of fluid – the name picked out in negative-space on the side when a particular colour fluid is in the glass.

Nick pointed out E4’s “Mess With The Misfits” promotional campaign. It’s really clever – dynamically compositing images and text from Facebook into Flash video; it’s also very tasteful, and leaves no trace on your Facebook profile unless you ask it to. A slick, inventive piece of imaging trickery; very cool.

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience is a bombastic name for an impressive piece of motion graphics. Projected onto the side of their 1 New Bond Street store, it uses carefully mapped graphics and video to transform the outside of the store. My favourite segments are the ones where they physically reconfigure the form of the building, such as the transformation at 1:40. It’s always interesting to see the way large brands are using such techniques for promotional purposes.

Russell spotted Mayo Nissen’s City Tickets. City Tickets was a final thesis project at CIID. It’s a service that proposes using existing parking machines as a platform for citizens to feedback on issues with infrastructure – giving them small, receipt-like pieces of paper to feed back about local issues on. Mayo explains:

City Tickets makes the bureaucratic and opaque workings of governance more transparent and accountable, while redefining the balance of power supporting participatory urban planning and management processes. Updating current machines to also issue city tickets in addition to existing parking tickets allows this existing infrastructure, without the inclusion of any costly additional technology, to be reconsidered as a way to make neighbourhoods more liveable and cities more responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.

It’s simple, acute, and charming: it already feels like a service I’d like to use. And, as we explored in the Media Surfaces films, it’s another exploration of print being quick.

A big part of what we do is workshops for product invention and for strategy. They’re also a tool in our work in design, communications, and R&D.

I talk with people about how these work a fair amount, so I thought I’d put my notes here.

Background

We get involved early in projects. Our clients have very broad questions. For example, how do we maintain and build the value of magazines in an age of digital tablets; what new storytelling opportunities are there with digital media in the domain of “history”; how can TV formats take advantage of two screens now everyone has laptops or phones?

These are strategy questions, and we answer them with strategic recommendations and product invention.

Why product invention? Because strategy has to take into account three big realities:

• The material. If we’re working with a magazine, what are the existing editorial processes? If we’re working with technology, what’s new and what’s possible? If we’re working with data, what can be revealed with algorithms? The material is the clay in our hands.
• Business needs. Design is at least one third organisational change. All projects beyond prototypes are collaborative — how will people in your firm organise to support and build your product? Do you have the right capabilities, or how can they be built? Some ideas are beautiful, in theory, but a distraction for your particular company… how can you tell if it’s a good idea or not?
• People and the market. Call them customers, readers, or users, they’re all people. And human psychology is bigger than your product. People now expect to be treated as peers, and involved in the product conversation. The market has its own expectations too. A good product will market itself… if it fits the market well.

By forcing our strategy recommendations to be expressed in the form of products, we ensure they’re buildable and amazing, make business sense for this particular organisation, and take advantage of the accelerant that is the market.

Attendees

We use 2 principals (from Matt Jones, Jack Schulze and me), and run the workshop over 3 full days. We prefer to use the client’s offices, and have maximum 3-4 in the room other than ourselves. These people should represent

• deep knowledge of the material with which we’re working, and its opportunities (eg, if it’s a magazine, then knowledge of the editorial process and how editorial decisions get made). This is often a technologist
• audience/market/customer insight. This is usually an editor or product manager
• the strategic aims and business needs of this project. This is generally the project sponsor

And, somewhere in this mix, the authority to say “yes.” If we don’t have that, it’s almost impossible to discover what the project is really about.

We like working with clients. Invention happens between us. Everyone asks a lot of questions. Often the stupidest questions are the most revealing.

Format

Before the workshops start, we work with the client to figure out the brief: what the material and context is, what form the output should take (usually a presentation, if it’s a standalone workshop), and what the purpose of the overall project is. We’re keen to discover who needs to be convinced: often the ultimate aim is a public prototype… but just as often, we’re informing the strategy of the investors or management.

This brief is often revised as the workshops happen, but it’s good to have a starting point.

The format is loooose. It’s improvised jazz, with whiteboards. But there are some commonalities.

Day 1 is typically “download.” We’ll present/discuss initial thoughts, and we like everyone in the room to do some homework and present for at least 5 minutes too. Most of the day is discussion and whiteboards. If it’s ideation rather than strategy, we’ll collect as many ideas as possible. The rule is: if you say it, you have to write it on a post-it. The other rule is: you have to use fat pens. If people don’t write enough on the walls, sometimes we refuse to let them sit down.

Day 2 is about mapping the territory. If we’ve been gathering ideas, on day 2 we’ll run exercises to cluster these ideas, and sketch candidate products around them. By the end of the day, we should have a shortlist of concepts to take forward. If this is primarily a strategy workshop, we’ll be collecting principles and ways of framing the discussion as we go.

Day 3 takes each of the concepts in turn, prioritises it, and builds it into a product microbrief. We’re aiming to create 3 to 6.

Output takes the form, generally, of these microbriefs. A microbrief is how we encapsulate recommendations: it’s a sketch and short description of a new product or effort that will easily test out some hypothesis or concept arrived at in the workshop. It’s sketched enough that people outside the workshop can understand it. And it’s a hook to communicate the more abstract principles which have emerged in the days.

Outcomes

Often the microbriefs are used internally to kick off a project, or as the basis for a RFP or strategy document. Sometimes we need more time to produce standalone illustrations or documents for circulation. Often the project sponsor already has exactly what they need to go ahead and write their own project brief.

Or the microbriefs can go on to be built as prototypes. This is a great way to test a concept against the three realities of the material, the market, and the business. Sometimes BERG is involved. More regularly the client prototypes internally or with their digital agency.

And then there’s product invention itself. The third possible outcome is that we already know we’re going on to create something – like a film, an iOS app, or an ongoing research effort – and here the microbriefs are in the form of options in a proposal, or a roadmap. The workshop is the kick-off to a longer relationship.

(Product invention workshops are one of several ways we work. If you’d like to talk about whether these would suit your new project, please do drop me a note at info@berglondon.com. We’re always happy to chat.)

Josh DiMauro sent us this sketch of a “Demon-Haunted Notebook” (inspired by Matt J’s talk from last year’s Webstock conference). He explains:

The notebook would have a unique name and id, and a daemon would watch for “tribute” — online sharing of what you put in it.

The tough bit of implementation would seem to be defining a way to pay tribute, and to make it fun and easy, rather than onerous.

I liked “paying tribute” a lot. There’s more nice thinking and sketching over at Josh’s post.

Via Kitsune Noir comes this pinhole photograph by Tim Franco, taken with a camera perched on a 7″ single. The film is exposed for the duration of the record. Beautiful.

On a similar note, Alex shared the above video. It’s a Red Raven Movie Record. There’s a series of images printed on the inner part of the record, and a mirror device that stands over the spindle. As the record plays, it provides its own soundtrack for the animation around the spindle.

Via Duncan Gough comes this lovely piece of paper product design: Muji’s Cardboard Binoculars.

This is Jonathan M. Guberman and Jim Munroe’s Automatypewriter. It’s a typewriter wired into a computer that you can (currently) play Zork on. The thing I like most – and what sets it apart from just being a typewriter turned into a teletype – is how the keys move when the machine is typing from itself. It turns it from being merely a printer, and into a ghostly writing-device. And, when used to play interactive fiction, makes it clear that the game being told is played out between both the player and the parser – writing the same text on the same device.

This is a part of a game of Artemis playing out. From the official website:

Artemis is a multiplayer game that lets you and your friends play as a starship bridge crew. One computer displays the main screen and runs the simulation server. The rest serve as bridge station consoles, like Helm, Comms, Weapons, Science, and Engineering.

In a nutshell: it simulates combat sequences from the Star Trek franchise. The captain doesn’t get a computer; instead, he has to tell everyone else in the room what to do. And so the captain’s role isn’t really part of the game mechanics at all; it’s a purely social role. The team are reliant on each other to display the appropriate screens on the main screen, execute decisions, and act on orders. And there’s nothing in the game stopping them from disagreeing or taking individual action.

The game is just some computation, network code, and a graphics engine; the real game plays out in the discussion between the crew and the decisions they make. Underneath the geeky exterior is a truly social game.

Following iPad light painting, we’ve made two films of alternative futures for media. These continue our collaboration with Dentsu London and Timo Arnall. We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.

“The Journey” is the second ‘video sketch’ in the pair with ‘Incidental Media’ – this time looking at the panoply of screens and media surfaces in a train station, and the opportunities that could come from looking at them slightly differently.

The Journey

The other film can be seen here.

There’s no real new technology at play in any of these ideas, just different connections and flows of information being made in the background – quietly, gradually changing how screens, bits of print ephemera such as train tickets, and objects in the world can inter-relate to make someone’s journey that bit less stressful, that bit more delightful.

There’s a lot in there – so I wanted to unpack a few of the moments in the film in this (rather long!) blog post and examine them a bit.

The film can be divided into two halves – our time in the station, and our time on the train.

The train journey itself is of course the thing at the centre of it all – and we’re examining how what we know about the journey – and the train itself, in some cases – can pervade the media surfaces involved in ways that are at once a little less ‘utilitarian’ and a little more, well, ‘useful’…

The first group of interventions could be characterised as the station wrapping around you, helping you get to your seat, on your train, for your journey, with the least stress.

Let’s start at the ticket machine.


The screen supposes two things – that it knows where it is (it doesn’t move around much) and it knows where your train (in this case, “Arthur” – trains are people too!) is leaving from, and when. So why not do a simple bit of reassurance here? It’s twenty minutes to Arthur’s departure and it’s a 3 minute walk.

You’ve got 17 minutes to play with! Get a sandwich? A coffee? Or go and find your seat…

Before we do that I just want to point our something about the ticket machine itself…


There’s the screen we’ve been interacting with to get our ticket, but there’s also a LED scroller above that.

As you can see in the concept sketch below, we’ve supposed that the scroller could give reassurance to the people in the queue behind you – maybe displaying the average turn-around-time of serving tickets to travellers, so if there is a queue, you’ll know how quickly it might move.



I think when I was drawing this I had in mind the awesome-but-as-yet-unrealised scheme by Lisa Strausfeld and Pentagram NYC for a videowall in Penn Station.



I think I first saw this presented by Lisa Strausfeld at a conference some 8 or so years ago now, but it’s still wonderful. The large video wall has loads of different layers of information kind of interpolated and displayed all at once, at different ‘resolutions’.

So that if you’re approaching the station from down the street you read some overall information about the running of the station that day, and the time, and as you get closer you see news and stock prices, then closer again and you actually see the train times when you get close enough to crane your neck up at them.



Really clever, and a huge influence on us. The notion of several ‘reads’ of the information being presented on the same surface – if handled well, as in the Pentagram proposal – can be very powerful.

We’ve taken a much less high-tech approach, using the multitude of existing screens in the station, but staging the information they present intelligently in a similar way as you approach the platform and your train itself.

For instance, little messages on concourse screens about how busy the station is overall that morning…



As we get to our platform we get the message that the train is going to pretty full but the station systems know where the bulk of reserved seats are, and can give us a little timely advice about where to hunt for a free place to sit…


We’ve hinted in this image at a little bit of nice speculative quiet new technology that could be placed by the station workers: magnetically-backed e-ink signs – again displaying reassuring information about where the busy portions of the train will be.


These little inventions have hopefully got you to your train (Arthur, remember?) on time, and in a more of a relaxed state of mind. So, as we board the train we might have time to note that this is Arthur’s favourite route…


If not, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a functional improvement to your journey but these touches lead to an appreciation of the service’s scale or reach and, if you are a regular traveller, inject a bit of recognition and delight into the otherwise routine.

Once onboard, we continue to explore opportunities for these incidental, different reads of information to both inform and delight.

In the first film ‘Incidental Media’, we introduce the concept of “Print can be quick” – looking at all the printed ephemera around us and how it can be treated as a media surface for more personalised, contextualised or rapidly-updated information.

After all, most of the printed matter associated with a train journey is truly print-on-demand: your tickets, your receipts and, as in this example, the printed reservation stub placed on the seat by the train attendants.


Here we wanted to look to the reassurances and reads that one takes of the reservation stubs as you move down the carriage – either with a reserved seat to find, or perhaps without a reservation on a busy train, opportunistically looking for an unoccupied seat that might be reserved for a latter portion of the train’s total journey.

In one of our concept sketches below we’re exploring that first case – could your ticket be the missing jigsaw piece to the reservation stub?

A bit Willy Wonka magic ticket!


Privacy would be preserved by just using your first initial – printed large with salutations, attracting your eye easily to zero in on your seat as perhaps you struggle down the aisle with your baggage.

The final version used in the film takes this on board, but balances it a little more with the second use-case, that of the opportunistic search for a free seat by someone without a reservation. To answer that case, the portion of the journey that the seat is occupied for is clearly legible, whereas the initials of the traveller are only visible on scrutiny.



If it is indeed your reserved seat, on closer scrutiny you’ll also notice the weather forecast for your destination…

Again – worth noting brilliant past work in this area that’s an influence on this idea. Our friend Brian Suda’s redesign of an airline boarding pass that uses typographical hierarchy of the printed object to reassure and delight.



Here you can see that the time of your flight is clearly visible even if your boarding pass is on the floor.

Lovely stuff.

Finally, some pure whimsy!

We wanted again to examine the idea that print can be nimble and quick and delightful – creating new forms of post-digital ephemera for collecting or talking about.

First of all, using the ticket to introduce you again to Arthur, your train, and perhaps extending that to recognising the last time you travelled together.



But let’s go further.

We know that we’re going to be passing certain places at certain times, to some accuracy, during our journey.

The burgeoning amount of geo-located data about our environment means we could look to provide snippets from Wikipedia perhaps, with timings based on how they intersect with your predicted journey time – alerting you to interesting sights just as they pass by your window.



These tiny, personalised, collectable paper-spimes provide a kind of papernet augmented-reality – giving a routine journey an extra layer of wonder and interest.



As with “Incidental Media”, we’ve tried in “The Journey” to illustrate ‘polite media’ tightly bound to and complimenting one’s context. Media that lives and thrives usefully in the interstices and intervals of everyday routine and technology – indeed ‘making future magic’ instead of the attention arms race that the near-future of urban screens and media could potentially devolve into.

The Journey is brought to you by Dentsu London and BERG. Beeker has written about the films here.

Thank you to Beeker Northam (Dentsu London), and Timo Arnall, Campbell Orme, Matt Brown, and Jack Schulze!

Following iPad light painting, we’ve made two films of alternative futures for media. These continue our collaboration with Dentsu London and Timo Arnall. We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.

Incidental Media is the first of two films.

The other film can be seen here.

Each of the ideas in the film treat the surface as a focus, rather than the channel or the content delivered. Here, media includes messages from friends and social services, like foursquare or Twitter, and also more functional messages from companies or services like banks or airlines alongside large traditional big ‘M’ Media (like broadcast or news publishing).

All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.

I recently encountered this mixing in surfaces. An airline computer spoke to me through SMS. This space is normally reserved for awkwardly typed highly personal messages from friends. Not a conversational interface with a computer. But now, those pixels no longer differentiate between friends, companies and services.

Mixing Media

How would it feel if the news ticker we see as a common theme in broadcast news programmes begun to contain news from services or social media?

I like the look of it. The dominance of linear channel based screens is distorted as it shares unpredictable pixels and a graphic language with other services and systems.

Ambient listening

This screen listens to its environment and runs an image search against some of the words it hears. I’ve long wanted to see what happens if the subtitles feed from BBC television broadcast content was tied to an image search.

It feels quite strange to have a machine ambiently listening to words uttered even if the result is private and relatively anodyne. Maybe it’s a bit creepy.

Print can be quick

This sequence shows a common receipt from a coffee shop and explores what happens when we treat print as a highly flexible, context-sensitive, connected surface, and super quick by contrast to say video in broadcast.

The receipt includes a mayorship notification from foursquare and three breaking headlines from the Guardian news feed. It turns the world of ticket machines, cash registers and chip-and-pin machines into a massive super-local, personalised system of print-on-demand machines. The receipt remains as insignificant and peripheral as it always has, unless you choose to read it.

Computer vision

The large shop front shows a pair of sprites who lurk at the edges of the window frames. As pedestrians pass by or stand close, the pair steal colours from their clothes. The sketch assumes a camera to read passers-by and feed back their colour and position to the display.

Computer vision installations present interesting opportunities. Many installations demand high levels of attention or participation. These can often be witty and poetic, as shown here by Matt Jones in a point of sale around Lego.

We’ve drawn from great work from the likes of Chris O’Shea and his Hand from Above project to sketch something peripheral and ignorable, but still at scale. The installation could be played with by those having their colours stolen, but it doesn’t demand interaction. In fact I suspect it would succeed far more effectively for those viewing from afar with no agency over the system at all.

In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.

Incidental Media is brought to you by Dentsu London and BERG. Beeker has written about the films here.

Thank you to Beeker Northam (Dentsu London), and Timo Arnall, Campbell Orme, Matt Brown, and Matt Jones!

I’m going to be speaking at Interesting North in Sheffield on Saturday 13th November. Alongside a great lineup of speakers, I’ll be giving a talk called – at the moment – Five Things Rules Do, which I’ve summarised thus:

The thing that make games Games isn’t joypads, or scores, or 3D graphics, or little bits of cardboard, or many-sided dice. It’s the rules and mechanics beating in their little clockwork hearts. That may be a somewhat dry reduction of thousands of years of fun, but my aim is to celebrate and explore the many things that games (and other systemic media) do with the rules at their foundation. And, on the way, perhaps change your mind at exactly what rules are for.

It’s already sold out, but if you’ve got a ticket – perhaps see you there!

I wanted to point out a little milestone!

You may remember we built Popular Science+ for the iPad — available on the day the iPad was launched (3 April), it was the first magazine available, and based on our Mag+ concept from December 2009 with Bonnier.

What you might not know is we spent that time building a platform. Mag+ is

• a way to read magazines on tablets, and a file format to package up editorial, assets and interactions
• InDesign integration to go from existing paper magazines to the Mag+ format, with custom tools to aide design, iPad previewing, and publishing
• e-commerce and customer relationship servers, and integration

Over the summer, we took this system from prototype to hand-over: for the past months, Bonnier have developed the platform, deepened the integration, and are now rapidly adding features and titles.

First is was Popular Science…

…now there are five magazines on the Mag+ platform! In three languages. All launched on the App Store, all published every month.

Read more about the platform and see the magazines at magplus.com.

And have a look at PopSci’s write-up of the four new mags. They’re really worth a look.

The various art directors are really beginning to understand the visual design possibilities of Mag+, the layouts are moving way beyond the simple right-column, left-photo place we started. It’s exciting to see, and exciting to imagine what comes next.

I’m really pleased to see Bonnier developing the platform so well, and to see the seeds we planted together blossom so beautifully.

(Read more about the Mag+ project here.)

The milling machine is buzzing away next door. It’s been dormant a long while: mainly because we needed a new bit for it. A few weeks ago we acquired said bit, and now it’s being put to use. I’ve never heard it in action since I joined Berg.

The studio sounds different this week.

There’s a different mixture of voices, for starters. Jack’s out at meetings with clients a lot right now, so his desk is quiet. Matt W’s on a well-deserved holiday until next week. Matt J is off to Barcelona tomorrow to talk at the Mobile Design Conference, as part of Barcelona Design Week. Daniel Tull started on Monday and is working with us – mainly Nick – for a few weeks on some iOS work.

New sounds on the stereo. The speakers have moved to the middle table where, at the moment, Matt B, Alex, Daniel and I sit, which means we’re often in charge of the studio’s soundtrack. Alex put on a lot of New Jack Swing this morning; a lively start to the day. (Well, I liked it).

There are new project names on everyone’s tongues: Wupatki; Havasu; Gallup. New projects bring new Dutch to the conversations about them – “Dutch” being what we call the domain-specific vernacular that projects evolve, which Matt has talked about before.

Who’s doing what right now: Alex is working on Gallup, which is looking great; I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it in the not-too-distant-future. Right now, though, I’m hacking away at a small internal brief we’re calling Havasu, which is a material exploration into a territory we’re interested in.

(I’m also writing a weeknote for the first time. I’m not quite sure if I’m doing it right).

Nick, Daniel, and Campbell are working on Wupatki; Matt J’s been dropping in and chatting with them, giving a little bit of a steer now and then; he’s just left the studio for a meeting. Kari’s been digging out some assets for Gallup, and is catching up with everyone about progress. Matt B and Andy are working on Barringer today, and are responsible for the buzz of the milling machine.

Or, rather, they were responsible for it. The milling machine has stopped.

What the studio sounds like now: Lamb on the stereo, heavy rain outside, typing conversation. Time for me to get back to my state machines.

Alex Jarvis has joined our design team! Nick Ludlam has gone from a contractor to become our full-time CTO! Matt Jones is now a partner!

Kari has taken on project management of internal projects. I’ve given her two goals:

1. Velocity
2. No surprises

She pulls projects through the studio while project leads push. It’s working well. I’ll leave tomorrow for a week’s holiday a confident man.

These things I’ve been working on are a combination of things: processes, tacit knowledge, published goals, regular meetings of particular sorts. In short, part of my job now is creating the software of the studio, in this sense: software’s strange duality as both information and machine.

At the end of the last week, I looked at the shape and flows – the software – of the studio and saw it had become ship-shape.

And so this week – after three months consolidating, learning to read and garden this synthetic ecology – I took the studio out of its holding orbit and – well, you’ll see.

There’s a bit in Ken Macleod’s sci-fi quartet, the Fall Revolution series, where Dave Reid’s company “Mutual Protection” are in orbit around Jupiter, building a massive, complex structure to instantiate a wormhole to the edge of the universe. It takes several years. To build it they have whole populations of uploaded human consciousnesses that occupy and run construction robots (uploaded minds are easier than writing artificial intelligences). They call these robot clusters macros.

Macros.

There’s something about this combination of sustained effort, and the use of leveraged software and effort, that makes me think of what’s just beginning, right now. So that’s what we’re doing, making and running macros to build a wormhole. Continuous effort, hard scaling, big goal. I don’t know what to call it, but this voyage has a particular character.

Ken Macleod, the author, has this perfect quotation on his blog. Get this:

Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.

Yes!