The studio is nice and full and humming and buzzing and it’s a great place to be, but gosh, we’ve been busy. And being busy working on projects – like Schooloscope, launched in beta this week – means there hasn’t been as much time for writing as normal.
Even if posts don’t make it to the blog, though, there’s a steady hum on the internal studio mailing lists – bursts of banter, links to curios dredged up from around the internet – and all good fodder for a post full of videos after a quiet period. Time to start clearing that backlog.
Campbell found this delight – the winner of the “Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest” 2010. It’s brilliant, and the reveal is obvious and uncanny all at once:
Each week, we like to begin and end our Tuesday morning all-hands meeting with a piece of theme music. Matt B and Matt J tend to take the lead there, and this week, Matt J picked “La Serenissima” by Rondo Veneziano – which can’t really be experienced without its surreal animated video:
The lovely stop-motion video for Cornelius’ “Fit Song” came up in conversation one afternoon:
Last week, Matt W tried to explain the magic of the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, and eventually found us a video of it:
It’s now quite a while since the skies went quiet under the threat of volcanic ash. I loved this animation, based on data from flightradar24.com, showing just how quiet European airspace went for a week.
And that’s a full slate, I think. Have a lovely weekend.
Schooloscope is a new project from BERG, and I want to show it to you.
What if a school could speak to you, and tell you how it’s doing? “I have happy kids,” it might say. “Their exams results are great.”
Schools in England are inspected by a body called Ofsted. Their reports are detailed and fair — Ofsted is not run by the government of the day, but directly by Parliament. And kids in schools are tracked by the government department DCSF. They publish everything from exam results to statistical measurements of improvement over the school careers of the pupils.
Cooooomplicated.
What Schooloscope does is tell you how your school’s doing at a glance.
There are pictures of smiling schools. Or unhappy ones, if the kids there aren’t happy.
Each school summarises the statistics in straightforward, natural English. There are well over 20,000 state schools in England that we do this for. We got a computer to do the work. A journalism robot.
You can click through and read the actual stats afterwards, if you want.
Why?
A little of my personal politics. Education is important. And every school is a community of teachers, kids, parents, governors and government. The most important thing in a community is to take part on an equal footing and with positive feeling. Parents have to feel engaged with the education of their children.
As great as the government data is, it can be arcane. It looks like homework. It’s full of jargon… and worse, words that look like English but that are also jargon.
Schooloscope attempts to bring simplicity, familiarity, and meaning to government education data, for every parent in England.
A tall order!
This is a work in progress. There are lots of obvious missing features. Like: finding schools should be easier! There are bugs. There’s a whole bunch we want to do with the site, some serious and some silly. And full disclosure here: over the next 6 months we’re working on developing and commercialising this. Schooloscope is a BERG project funded by 4iP, the Channel 4 innovation fund. Is it possible to make money by being happily hopeful about very serious things and visualising information with smiling faces? I reckon so.
Anyway. The way we learn more is by taking Schooloscope public, seeing what happens, and making stuff.
The team! Tom Armitage and Matt Brown have worked super hard and made a beautiful thing which is only at the start of its journey. They, Matt Jones and Kari Stewart are taking it into the future. Also Giles Turnbull, Georgina Voss, and Ben Griffiths have their fingerprints all over this. Tom Loosemore and Dan Heaf at 4iP, thanks! And everyone else who has given feedback along the way.
Right, that’s launch out of the way! Let’s get on with the job of making better schools and a better Schooloscope.
Deadlines, exhaustion, seismic events both real and psychic have conspired against us, but still – very remiss of us. We’ll try and resume normal service as soon as possible.
Busy times, a full studio, a lot on deck. Week 255. Off we go.
The week started with some nice recognition of Mag+ from Apple: there’s an in-depth look at the project we called El Morro in the iPad section of their website.
El Morro continues – the team are working on improving the reading experience, adding some extra capabilities to the platform, and most importantly perhaps – ensuring that the toolkit and knowledge necessary to create Mag+ is transferred to where it belongs in the editorial teams.
As the ashcloud subsided, face-to-face around a whiteboard replaced skype calls as few of our friends from Bonnier came over from Stockholm for a really useful day of workshops to that end, and as I type Mark P. from their US team is sat with the guys working away.
Jack and myself had an interesting chat with magazine art-director-and-enthusiast extraordinaire Jeremy Leslie over breakfast on Wednesday – hearing his feedback on the challenges and opportunities of Mag+ and digital magazines in general was awesome.
Ashdown is coming on leaps and bounds since going into Alpha, with Tom and Matt B. heroically-cranking through the phase we’ve started to call ‘tuning’ in the studio.
We don’t really have a fixed process at BERG, but we have approaches that we use and evolve. We’ve talked about the phase we tend to call ‘material exploration‘ before – and in fact Tom has written in depth about that in association with Ashdown, but ‘tuning’ is where I guess the instincts you’ve acquired for the territory and the material throughout the project really serve. It’s about taking the time once the core features and functionality are working to try and make the elements sing in harmony and shine them up best as time allows.
The first product from Ashdown is being tuned now, and I think the team have made something really gorgeous. Alongside the visuals and the interactions – the voice of the product is being tuned too. We’ve been joined today by Giles Turnbull who we worked with a lot on matters of tone and writing while I was at Dopplr, and he’s helping with that. Nice to have him in the studio today.
Back to ‘tuning’ – there’s an element of Disney’s ‘plussing‘ there, and trying to inject delight where you can – but the word ‘tuning’ just seems to fit better for us. It might be about removing things as much as ‘plussing’. When you find the signal, making sure that you are removing anything that impedes it, and do everything you can to amplify it.
Other projects.
Kendrick’s time for tuning has passed, and fingers-crossed it will shortly be in the world. Nick’s been shepherding that process in part this week. Trumbull’s design is progressing nicely – but a resource hiccup has put things back a little bit. I’ve been working to resolve that with Kari and Matt W this week, and, again – fingers crossed – we have a solution.
Jack had a great production engineering meeting on Availabot (remember that?) which left him grinning, and there are a couple other of our own projects, including Weminuche, which are starting to walk rather than crawl which is really satisfying to see.
As I started to scribble down what to put in this weeknote, it was mid-afternoon on Friday. It’s a long weekend here in the UK – we have a holiday on Monday.
The studio was waving goodbye to Webb, who had to leave a little early to go and buy shoes before travelling to an event this weekend. Everyone looked a little disturbed to be left in the studio as he went – a situation we’re not used to, and is usually quite the reverse.
The last few weeks have been crazy-busy for all of us, but especially him. He’s held the BERG helicarrier together through some extreme turbulence recently and seen that it’s still delivered, and I’m very glad we’re back in a rhythm that allows him to go and buy shoes.
Last night I was lucky enough to be invited by friend-of-BERG Liam Young to the launch of the Archigram Archive.
The archive is quite fantastic, with nearly all of their projects represented – and a lot of supporting material digitised too. Geoff Manaugh has an extensive appreciation of it on BLDGBLOG.
Dennis Crompton and Mike Webb joined the room from NYC, where they had been stranded by a volcanic eruption, via internet video chat.
Peter Cook (atomically co-present) then took the stage to present what he called the “Archigram Afterburn” – where he felt the sensibility of Archigram could be found these days.
He started by pointing out that the robots that mow the green roof of AHO, in Oslo have more in common with Archigram (specifically the ‘Mowbots’ of the Bottery) than the schemes being cooked up below…
He moved on to describe what was most powerful about Archigram was that they were a coalition, with a multiplicity of viewpoints, opinions and strong egos that inspired each other as much as they provoked each other (sounds familiar…)
It was brilliant to see all of them still passionate, and maybe even angry about the status-quo of the built-environment. To see the commemoration and celebration of their work as a call to arms, as re-iteration of the urgency and fun to be had figuring out better futures.
Cook left us with this thought:
It feels to me that the spirit of Archigram does live on, especially in London right now – but not necessarily in the architectural profession or academy.
It’s infused in the gaps of the pixels-to-plastic, post-digital/pre-biotic, spimey-wimey, city-scale, cell-deep discipline-that-has-no-name that we feel excited to be knee-deep in whenever we can.
In December, we showed Mag+, a digital magazine concept produced with our friends at Bonnier.
Late January, Apple announced the iPad.
So today Popular Science, published by Bonnier and the largest science+tech magazine in the world, is launching Popular Science+ — the first magazine on the Mag+ platform, and you can get it on the iPad tomorrow. It’s the April 2010 issue, it’s $4.99, and you buy more issues from inside the magazine itself.
Here’s Jack, speaking about the app, its background, and what we learned about art direction for magazines using Mag+.
Articles are arranged side by side. You swipe left and right to go between them. For big pictures, it’s fun to hold your finger between two pages, holding and moving to pan around.
You swipe down to read. Tap left to see the pictures, tap right to read again. These two modes of the reading experience are about browsing and drinking in the magazine, versus close reading.
Pull the drawer up with two fingers to see the table of contents and your other issues. Swipe right and left with two fingers to zip across pages to the next section. Dog-ear a page by turning down the top-right corner.
There’s a store in the magazine. When a new issue comes out, you purchase it right there.
Editorial
Working with the Popular Science team and their editorial has been wonderful, and we’ve been working together to re-imagine the form of magazines. Art direction for print is so much about composition. There are a 1,000 tiny tweaks to tune a page to get it to really sing. But what does layout mean when readers can make the text disappear, when the images move across one another, and the page itself changes shape as the iPad rotates?
We discovered safe areas. We found little games to play with the reader, having them assemble infographics in the act of scrolling, and making pages that span multiple panes, only revealing themselves when the reader does a double-finger swipe to zoom across them.
It helps that Popular Science has great photography, a real variety of content, and an engaged and open team.
What amazes me is that you don’t feel like you’re using a website, or even that you’re using an e-reader on a new tablet device — which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you’re reading a magazine.
Apple made the first media device you can curl up with, and I think we’ve done it, and Popular Science, justice.
From concept to production
The story, for me, is that the design work behind the Mag+ concept video was strong enough to spin up a team to produce Popular Science+ in only two months.
Not only that, but an authoring system that understands workflow. And InDesign integration so art directors are in control, not technologists. And an e-commerce back-end capable of handling business models suitable for magazines. And a new file format, “MIB,” that strikes the balance between simple enough for anyone to implement, and expressive enough to let the typography, pictures, and layout shine. And it’s set up to do it all again in 30 days. And more.
It’s all basic, sure. But it’ll grow. We’ve built in ways for it to grow.
But we’ve always said that good design is rooted not just in doing good by the material, but by understanding the opportunities in the networks of organisations and people too.
A digital magazine is great, immersive content on the screen. But behind those pixels are creative processes and commercial systems that also have to come together.
Inventing something, be it a toy or new media, always means assembling networks such as these. And design is our approach on how to do it.
I’m pleased we were able to work with Popular Science and Bonnier, to get to a chance to do this, and to bring something new into the world.
Thanks!
Thank you to the BERG team for sterling work on El Morro these last two months, especially the core team who have sunk so much into this: Campbell Orme, James Darling, Lei Bramley, Nick Ludlam and Timo Arnall. Also Jack Schulze, Matt Jones, Phil Gyford, Tom Armitage, and Tom Taylor.
Thanks to the Popular Science team, Mike Haney and Sam Syed in particular, Mark Poulalion and his team from Bonnier, and of course Bonnier R&D and Sara Öhrvall, the grand assembler!
It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with each and every one of you.
See also…
Popular Science’s announcement talks more about features and reading experience philosophy, and hosts the press release and screenshots pack.
El Morro launches in a few hours, so in a minute I’ll be writing an intro blog post to go along with the publicity. I got the pre-launch shakes last night. It’s the best feeling.
We had a delayed All Hands on Thursday, because on Tuesday so many people were out: Matt J, Matt B and Tom were at a workshop for Trumbull; Jack and Campbell were shooting video with Timo.
I spent a few minutes at the end of the All Hands speaking about the shape of the studio over the summer. It’s exciting. A race! And the right team for it. But there’s a lot that’s uncertain and a lot that has to click together all at once. We’re timeline-ing, proposal-ing, and travelling (Jack, Matt and I, for a few days next week) to make that happen.
Now I’m going to find some socks so I can put on some shoes, leave the house and buy some milk, so I can make some tea, so I can settle down and write this launch post.
It’s Easter break in the UK – a pair of public holidays on Friday and Monday that give us a long weekend – and so we’re off for a few days. To send you on your way: some pictures and films, presented with citation and links, but without comment. Have a happy Easter.
[Above: Natalie Jeremijenko’s LiveWire – one of the ur-objects of physical computing & calm technology]
If you have a daughter, or a younger sister – or a female family member at the age where they make choices about what they want to do when they grow up – then please, do us a favour – in fact – do us all a favour, and sit them down to read Natalie Jeremijenko’s resume.
Then, once they have, simply ask them – “doesn’t that sound like an insane amount of fun?”
