Blog (page 42)

I’m writing these notes late. Really it’s week 250 already — we had our All Hands at noon. Opening it I said “it’s week 250. Halfway through!” I don’t know what made me say that. We’ll see!

I’m on the Central Line on my way to White City for a consultancy gig with the BBC. For a day a week, I’m helping write a short design roadmap.

A minute ago I was reading a book that friend-of-BERG (and friend-of-mine) Mark Hall sent me in the post, and for which I realise now I never thanked him. Thank you, Mark! It’s Beyond the hundred meridian by Wallace Stegner, and the section I’ve just finished is about John Wesley Powell’s epic journey down the Colorado River through canyon after canyon.

In the narrative I encounter names that make my heart flutter. Kanab! This is also the name of a project about which we are currently in negotiation. Escalante! This is also the name of the era of the studio before the current one, which is called Scenario 4.

You may remember that I give names to periods of time of the studio. It helps us understand what what we’re doing now fits into bigger things, and is not the same as what came before or what we will after. Also it adds Mythic Resonance.

I would say we are no longer in Scenario 4. That was the period of somewhat uncontrolled growth we’ve been in for these past two months. I think we’re through the worst of it. We’ve figured out how to ride that particular crocodile. There’s a lot broken (our contracts are a shambles; we need better ways of recording expenses; we need to figure out how to bring more discipline to our own projects). But knowing what’s broken is 50% of making fixes. So: we’re coming out the other side of Scenario 4. It didn’t kill us, at least not outright. What next?

There’s a feeling of high potential. An impatience for projects to go public and for whatever they cause to be caused. A knowledge that something will happen. Projects on the verge of coming in, and with them a new set of abilities, and room. But there’s an alienness to all of this. An unfamiliarity with scale, but an excited trepidation.

In the back of my mind I’ve been calling it Jupiter Space.

There’s a bit in the film 2001 where the ship Discovery has made its long voyage across the solar system, from Earth space across deep space and into Jupiter space, and it’s just there. The ship is the same as during the journey, maybe a bit battered. Nothing’s happened yet. But there’s Jupiter, lofty and looming, reminding you where you are. A long way from home. Who knows where you’ve got to, but you’ve gotten there. Holy shit, Jupiter.

If you were standing on Ganymede, Jupiter would hang in the sky about four palms-widths wide, holding your hands at arm’s length. The Moon, from Earth, is a thumbs-width.

So that’s what it feels like and that’s what I see, in my mind’s eye. We built a ship, we took a journey, holy shit there’s an enormous gas giant right there out the window, what now? Who knows, let’s figure it out. Jupiter Space.

(We worked on El Morro all week 249. Nick, Lei and I went to Stockholm at the weekend. Intense deadlines swoop down every three days and knock us sideways. Kendrick was stalled because testing threw up data problems, and because our client was checking legal. Ashdown has produced enough to start building out the product itself, I hope, but its progress is still making me a little nervous. Service+ is producing a little more documentation to get final sign-off. Weminuche is assembling questions to start a proof of concept stage. Kari made super tasty cupcakes today. I’m feeling a bit spaced out. We’ve all been working too hard for too many weeks. But it’s worth it.)

What the studio looks like at almost 4pm on Friday 12 March:

Campbell is in the small room at the end, working on editorial layouts and user interface assets, both part of the El Morro project.

Also in the small room is Timo. He’s working on editorial in InDesign and how to encode this in XML, in the file format we’ve created. Sitting with him is Lei, who is working on a software renderer which does layout. The pages don’t look quite right and we’re chasing towards a demo app, so Lei and Timo are working together to iron out bugs in both the renderer and the XML.

Nick is crouched by their desk. He and Lei are talking about a bug in the way XML is imported into the database that the renderer uses. This is all for El Morro.

In the larger room, Matt B has his headphones in and is working on page designs for Ashdown. Yesterday evening, he, Tom and I drew out a system for how the main Ashdown webpage should behave, in great detail. Using this detailed system, Matt is able to work on the visual and information design.

Tom would usually be working on Ashdown too, but today he’s busy with the Authoring Tool for El Morro. Eventually this tool will create the XML for El Morro automatically from InDesign, so Timo doesn’t have to do it by hand, but not yet: that’s what Tom is working on.

James has a day off. Phil and Tom T, who have worked with us for odd days recently, are away. Kari is with us Tuesdays and Thursdays so she’s not here today. The room feels a little empty. Sparse not airy.

Jack and Matt J went out a little before noon for a meeting. They’re still out.

What the studio looks like at 8.30pm, same day:

Campbell and Timo are in the smaller room. Matt J is at his desk in the main room, working on a project plan. Jack bought us all pizza and left just recently. Nick and Lei are working still. I feel guilty that we’re all still here. My responsibility to the people is that we all should have left by now; to the project, it’s that we wind up with a great looking build tonight. I’m going to stand up now, and insist that we start bringing this thing in to land.

It’s 1am.

We all left a little before midnight. My guilty feelings got washed away once I saw how pretty it’d become, what we’re making. I’m up still, at home now, chewing over the day.

I chew over a lot of things, late at night.

I read yesterday about the origin of Windows and on page 3 of the article, Tandy Trower describes the four jobs in designing Windows 3.0: hands-on interface design; establishing usability testing processes; creating guidelines; prototyping. And so I think about the systems around design that are necessary for organisational change and success, and the necessity of explaining them in break-downs like this.

And this lunchtime I read Warren Buffett’s letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. which is his thing, you know, 98% of his fortune, and it has crispy clarity and deep insight, so I think about that.

I’m thinking about some glum, or concerned, or tense faces I’ve glimpsed at any given moment in the studio over the week, what the related factors are or were, and what I can do. Happy ones too, and what’s working well. There’s a project that is proving tough despite its apparent simplicity, and I’m trying to put my finger on why. I’m thinking about how intellectual property functions, and the legal and descriptive frameworks by which it becomes a thing you can sell or license. I’m thinking pretty hard about Jack and Matt J’s responses to a couple different project proposals, because they have senses of smell I don’t have, and so I’m spending time interpreting their reactions in order to come to my own opinions. A quarter hour ago, I had a browser window open to check something to do with cash-flow that won’t matter for another two months. I’m thinking about how to increase delegation more deliberately, and how to balance that with cohesion in studio output.

Look: it’s been a great week. Exciting, actually, now I think about it, but it’s late and late makes me reflective. I have no worries about the studio. But I wanted to get at how mentally occupying this kind of enterprise is. I am certain that Jack nor Matt think any less about the studio than this. (I know it; every morning they effortlessly resolve concerns I’d only just realised I had.) Nor anyone who writes weeknotes.

Meanwhile one of the old standards has come on iTunes. Andy Williams, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. When I was a very little one, my dad used to sing this at bedtime. I wonder if my sister remembers. There’s a bird outside that thinks it’s morning and is singing.

Good night.

I’m at home with a glass of red wine at my new desk. I’m writing these notes late. It’s already week 248.

Jack and Matt J were in Berlin briefly last week, on a media design consultancy gig. I’ll quote from The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan/Quentin Fiore (1967) for a second:

The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electronic circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. … When these ratios change, men change.

Media is both our environments and that which mediates us. Our cinema and our glasses.

Cinema… books, television, radio, circus, salons, telegraph and telephone: our media used to be hard to invent. They came along once a generation. But now what we call “new media” is really ten thousand new media. The question for a newspaper moving to new media, I mean really moving to new media, is not how to build a CMS blah blah delivery platform blah blah for the whatever. It’s what you want the equaliser settings to be, for social interaction, for immersion, for gameplay, highbrow/lowbrow, predilection to truth, emotional resonance, etc. We don’t just publish, we get to invent the medium into which we publish.

Super fun.

Also this time last week I got a pretty down-to-earth reminder about product innovation. Product innovation has its own path.

We’ve been having a tough time with Ashdown. That’s not fair. It has been a perfect response to the brief (our own brief) to present and contextualise information well. But it hasn’t become a product. I felt that most keenly when I presented the current private version to a Very Important Person about three weeks ago. And in that presentation, I had to do most of the talking. If you need to narrate a thing, it’s not a product.

A product tells you what to do. It fills you with motivation — you want to use it, and you know what you’ll get. And when you don’t get exactly that, you’ll be tickled and delighted. (If it’s a good product; frustrated otherwise.) A product markets itself. It can be described so people can tell other people about it. It has a voice, and an opinion about how the world should be. You know where its value is… and what the value exchange is. Inside an organisation, teams can rally behind a product. A product has meaning, and goals. Products can succeed. Or fail. Products tell you, the designer, how they should grow.

So with Ashdown we’ve had data and an area and a design direction… but no product (we’re intending to make a suite of products). And Matt Brown, who is leading the project day to day, has now found the product. It’s taken all kinds of approaches to get there. Tom Loosemore has been part of crits. Tom A has been making experiments with generative journalism. We’ve tried big wireframes and little sketches.

But on Monday last week Matt managed to crack it. We now have a single line motto for the product. We have a tone. And we have a map of the site where we can see what the user motivation is at every page. Clicking through will feel like a good joke being told. It has rhythm. And everything unfolds from there.

If you looked at the sketches, who knows whether you’d be able to tell that something’s changed. But I can tell you now that the week before I wasn’t sure what we were making, and in week 237 – with Matt’s page of post-it notes and pen drawings – I feel totally confident that it’s cracked. It’s a product now, it’ll tell us what it wants to be.

But it’s humbling, to get there only now, and to be honest none of this “product innovation” chatter counts until we also execute and get to market. So let’s see what happens this week, and I want for us to work much better at cracking the product thing (and continuing to crack it — product focus in a project has to be maintained every week, every week) in future work.

Oh there’s a bunch more to say.

Kendrick is making its way to launch. I wrote a short teaser blog post about it a few days ago, based on one of Matt B’s icons.

El Morro is halfway through. It’s the biggest project we’ve done, and it lasts only a little under two months. I can sketch out seven distinct parts. They meet like dominos. It’s like building a bridge from the middle. Last week and this week the various components started linking up.

Most of what I do now is have 20 minute chats with people designing and building various parts of El Morro. The chats are easy because the team is incredible. People want to know how to build their particular bit, so they grab the relevant other people and make decisions. If there’s a need for clarification or knowledge of the ultimate client ambitions, that’s when I get pulled in for one of those 20 minute chats.

What else.

Kari is producing, weekly, summaries of what everyone is up to this week and next, and a per-project status, in a sentence or three. These are invaluable. Also she’s moving to two days a week, and spending the extra day project managing some new product development. We’re terrible at letting NPD slip, and my hope is that it’ll really happen with some of our established client process applied to it.

I’m learning a lot about my own process, talking Kari through what I believe is needed. Project initiation docs, briefing packs, milestones… all of this sounded like so much hot air until I saw I bumped up against what it was all helping with. I mean, when you know what you have to write down at the beginning of a project to help a team work together and keep on time and on budget and to allow room for the design to blossom and find the way, what else do you call it but a project initiation document?

I’m talking about process, which is a sure sign that I should wrap up and head to bed.

What I noted down to talk about in week 247 were a few old lessons I’d been relearning. What products are, how I use project management. I wanted also to say a few words about tuning and about documentation. I haven’t got t those.

But really when I think back over last week I think about how strange everything feels. I’m not used to the scale. I’m not used to the systems in these sketches. I mean roughly, but not fully. I’m watching a team of 8 bring a thing to life and I’ve no idea how it works, the path from individual action, I mean the tap of the finger that types the curly bracket, that somehow manifests and becomes the breathtaking beauty and correctness that I want to see, I mean how does that even occur; do you need to be dreaming of heaven while you type a subroutine because I doubt it, yet if not that, if that’s not the way beauty happens in software, then what? We plan projects we have full confidence in but there’s a moment because we’ve never done this project before at 3am where you wake up and go, Hang on, really? (And if we all didn’t do that, I’d be worried, so ok.)

So there’s an opposite of deja vu which is in action all the time, a feeling that, whatever it is, it should be familiar, but it’s not at all, and for me this strangeness creates both a risk aversion and then an overcompensating overconfidence, and I alternate between then, ultimately averaging out but only after talking and sketching a lot with Jack and Matt, and what’s left is a residual strangeness to the whole world. Gosh the walls are white. Gosh the sky is blue. Gosh it’s 2010 and here we are, this is the studio we create and this is the work we do, and aren’t we lucky, we work hard and the work is good, and maybe those adjectives are a good a way as any to sum up week 247: Strange. Lucky. Hard. Good.

I wanted to show you one of Matt Brown’s super pretty icons for the project codenamed Kendrick, which he and Nick Ludlam have been magicking up. Kendrick is for learning German.

(Or Spanish, or Italian, or French…)

It’s almost cooked!

Projects progress. There are many people working on El Morro, which has become a number of streams; Ashdown is finding its identity as a marketable product; Kendrick is closing in on launch; Trumbull has a product description and a design/development timeline; Service+ is wrapping up; and there’s some short consultancy in Germany next week.

Processes are being developed. Weekly updates for individuals and projects are put on the wall where everyone can see them. Projects are better accounted. I’m seeing gaps where processes would make life easier (induction; briefing docs; rolling project reports). Standard employee and supplier contracts are being drafted.

New work is coming in. The options continue to get more exciting, and allow for bootstrapping new parts of the business in ways that are only just beginning to come into view.

This is what metamorphosis feels like.

But we’re all working too hard and, though exhilarating – and, for the time being, worthwhile – the tiredness is showing. For myself, I can see important questions I’m not giving enough consideration, tasks that need doing, and opportunities I’m letting slip. This weekend I’ve felt like a zombie. I haven’t managed to get the work done I need to get done. It’s only 9pm on Sunday and I’ll go to bed shortly.

Any other week, the week just gone was so incredible I’d be wide-eyed and bouncing off the walls.

To the studio as a whole, what can I say? The work we’re doing – you’re doing – is beautiful, intricate, and unique. It’s a joy to be part of, and to see this team meshing so well: I look and I listen, and I see people taking responsibility, bringing things to life, working together, and so flawlessly. And I recognise that here, in the middle of things, it’s a lot and it’s rushed and it’s tiring. I don’t know what I can say about that. Other than, I guess, it’s on my mind, it has my attention, I want to figure it out. I’m proud of you and I’m proud of the work. I’m going to speak for Jack and Matt J too here: we recognise and appreciate it.

Timo Arnall has been working with us in the studio this week.

He made this. It’s super lovely.

Bigger here. Thank you Timo!

Over lunch on Thursday, Russell showed us his S2H Replay – a really simple “activity monitor/pedometer thing“. I really liked his post about it earlier in the week:

it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it’s cheap, fashiony and simple.

The Replay is $20. It doesn’t need any connectivity to share your fitness scores – a code appears on the Replay’s screen and you type it into the S2H website. It makes a smiley face when you’ve done enough exercise. And that rubber bracelet is clearly designed to be replaced/customised/given away as a freebie.

Russell’s post has lots more detail and insight. As well as the device, I liked Russell’s use of “fashiony” as a watchword: something that feels fun and now and a little bit pop. Or to use a metaphor: the Replay isn’t Ikea, it’s American Apparel. For something like the Replay, I think that’s a good quality to have.

Makedo looks like a fun take on construction toys: “a set of connectors for creating things from the stuff around you“. It’s a construction set made only of connectors and hinges; the raw materials are left for you to find. The video above has some good examples of its possibilities. My only doubt is if Makedo is toy-ish enough; the website makes it seem targeted more to an older, crafting audience. But there’s a charm and inventiveness in both the toy, and the play it enables, that I like, and I think that makes it worth a link. (Via Alice Taylor, who saw Makedo at the Toy Fair).

I think this was my favourite thing I saw this week: a downloadable game for Nintendo’s DSi. The aim of the game is to find letters hidden in 3D scenes, styled a bit like a cardboard toy theatre, by tilting the device around. The video you need to see is the second one down on this page – I can’t embed it. It’s mindboggling: a game all about perspective and visual trickery, which looks utterly beautiful. Even more impressively: the DSi has no accelerometer, just two 640×480 cameras – so all that movement is being calculated through motion tracking.

I was mainly taken with how beautiful it was, though. The only sad thing: I don’t read Japanese, I have no idea what it’s called. I hope it comes out in the English-speaking world soon.

Image: taken from Amos Topping’s slide of Radiolarians

Anne Galloway linked to this great SEED slideshow of Victorian Microscope Slides.

Some beautiful images here, but also a fascinating juxtaposition of scientific marvel – “tiny objects now made visible” – with aesthetics – “tiny objects arranged beautifully“. (Anne’s original post; the collector Howard Lynk’s own website)

Finally: scratching and drumming with a set of holographic heads. (via Scott Beale). This is a live performance of Chris Cairns’ Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs inc, and elevates it from “nifty video effects” to something far more ingenious. It made me laugh, too.

It’s one of those weeks where I find it hard to remember what’s happened.

Jack and Matt J are in San Francisco, so there have been a lot of Skype calls between us.

Timo is here too, working on El Morro. He’s sitting in the second room which is called Statham. Campbell is in Statham too. He was sitting at Jack’s desk which is next to, and at right angles to mine, but changed yesterday. Nick is sitting at Jack’s desk. At Nick’s old desk is James who started Thursday. Bringing James in at this point was perfect timing. His presence is a forcing move to the project specification being refined, clarified, and better explained.

James is sitting opposite Tom. To the right of James and to the left of Tom is a sofa from Muji. On the sofa from Muji are two desks from Unto This Last partially assembled. These desks are half as long again as the ones at which James and Tom are sitting, and will replace those desks this afternoon. One of the old shorter desks will go into Statham. The other will go into the shared meeting room.

To the right of Tom is Matt B. He hasn’t moved. Opposite Matt B is Matt J’s desk which cannot be occupied. It is piled with books and files and whatnot, all of which used to be underneath the desk. But on Tuesday the studio flooded, and so the rest of the week has been punctuated by gurglings from the plug of the sink (which is where the water came from), and negotiations between the landlord and Tom Taylor, with whom we share. There’s going to be a pump and pipe put in so the sink leads to a separate drainage point. The current drainage point also has a feed from the roof so when it rains and the drain is blocked, our sink is the water’s only means of egress.

“Egress” sounds like the name of a sea bird.

During the development of Shownar, this time last year, we found ourselves having to refer very precisely to weird abstract concepts that arose from the data. To have conversations without misunderstandings, we made up words and put a long dictionary on the wall with the title “Teach yourself Dutch.” Because for some reason the project lingo got called Dutch.

It’s not really Dutch. It’s English. But to an English speaker listening in on us talking in this lingo, it wouldn’t be comprehensible.

El Morro has its own Dutch. Dutch, the project lingo, is never just a shorthand. It expresses things that, eventually, cannot be fully expressed in regular English. It ends up having its own grammar, and members of the team end up having to become fluent speakers of it.

In El Morro, a good part of Dutch – the dictionary, if you like – is defined in a spec which is 11 pages long. Timo is learning how to speak Dutch, and practises every day. Whereas we’ve written the dictionary, he’s inventing the idioms. He might need new words, in which case we’ll revise the dictionary. It’s funny, this process of inventing Dutch, because in a few weeks we’ll have a much larger team and everyone will need to speak it. It’ll start to carry meanings of its own, and its structure will encourage particular kinds of new Dutch poetry, poetry that we never imagined.

When I speak about ecological management, this is one of the things I mean. The invention of the right kind of Dutch can steer the project creatively without explicit directing. Just as the ambient knowledge and visibility of studio activity helps people operate with autonomy and agency with respect to running and selling projects. I’m not great at ecological management yet, but it’s the star by which I measure myself.

It is after lunch.

We have now assembled the new desks and everyone and everything has moved around. There are eleven seats in the studio. We have run out of the good chairs again.

It’s Saturday and I’m at my kitchen table with a cup of tea. I enjoy working Saturdays so long as they’re optional. So far I’ve sketched the latest rev of an XML specification, drawn a cartoon of a workflow and written a commentary on it, replied to a few emails (though I’m still way behind), and checked the accounts.

My attention this week has been dominated by El Morro. It’s larger than we’re used to both technically and with regard to personnel, so the usual processes need to be re-invented. For instance, we need to be more formal with documenting issues, working decisions, and goals. In terms of people: Jack and Timo are in New York, and next week Jack and Matt J will be in San Francisco. Nick is wrapping Kendrick soon to move onto El Morro, Tom’s attention is going to be divided from Ashdown, and we’re extremely pleased to have two new team members for this project. James Darling starts Thursday, and Phil Gyford is with us again for the next two weeks to help springboard. As Campbell finishes with Service+, he’ll also join the team. And we’re still looking for an iPhone developer. We’re based in London, working alongside teams in Stockholm, San Francisco, and New York.

It’s complex. But we thought carefully and planned tightly before taking it on, so it’s doable. You have to trust your boots. It’s the possibility of collateral damage that I feel the need to de-risk.

For instance: Kendrick is drawing, beautifully, to a close (over the next month), and the last week has seen a new focus and a kind of “coming into focus” for Ashdown. Matt B, Tom and Nick have their hands full with both, but with the attention of principals so divided, I’m concerned that studio attention might drift too. So that’s a way that processes break during growth: our old ways of managing projects aren’t as effective anymore, and we need to find new methods. A kind of growing up. I’ve got a few ideas, but I plan to open the discussion with the team on Monday.

Hang on, let me get a glass of water.

Back.

It’s like the accounts. The shift to a new system and my financial projections worked for maybe two months, and now growth means they’re broken again. Jack asked me on Monday night last week some questions I couldn’t answer. So on Tuesday I put together new templates for analysing per-project profit and loss, and creating per-project budgets that feed into an overall studio budget. It’s finer grained than I had before, and it’ll create new jobs for Kari, but necessary and fascinating. Imagine building a boat while you’re standing on it. One minute you’re building fishing rods and oars, the next you’re creating a rota to monitor for driftwood, and the next month you’re figuring out how to feed the R&D group you’ve delegated to invent radar.

A minute only ever lasts a minute. Hard work and efficiency only gets you so far. What you put in the minute has to adapt.

Now my mind turns to what growth is for. That’s been the subject of several conversations recently because Scenario 4 is hard, and we all need to know it means something. Well we’ve always had a product business in mind: beautiful, inventive, popular products for the home, ones that make solid our design and technical beliefs, that make the everyday more joyful and humane. Products that couldn’t come from anyone but us. So there’s that. And previously I’d been focused on building the right team with the right expertise and capacities for such a moonshot. But we’re there almost there. The studio is a machine humming and waiting for just such a challenge to take on together. And so now my mind is turning to bootstrapping in a less abstract way, and using the time these current projects buy as the means to plan more direct steps.

Ha! I’m listening to iTunes on shuffle, and a track from A Momentary Lapse in Reason by Pink Floyd has come on. This was playing when I got my first modem in 1994, and went online from my own computer for the first time. That is half my life away.

Let me wrap up.

It’s a big moment for us when friends who have worked on a particular project decide to join us on an ongoing basis, whether it’s for a couple of months or for much longer. When somebody is part of the studio and contributing to any and all projects, that means they become part of the creative life of BERG. They contribute to – and have taken personal responsibility for – its culture, its creative direction, its work, and its instincts.

At the drinks we hosted on Wednesday, celebrating Deep Blue’s victory over Garry Kasparov in 1996, I didn’t do my usual “talk nonsense for 5 minutes,” but instead called out the people who make up BERG, here in Scenario 4 and week 244.

So I want to do the same right now, because it’s a huge deal that we’re all in the same room together, doing this thing together, and saying it out loud to you here is the best way I can think of to show how I feel that.

Jack Schulze! Matt Jones! Tom Armitage! Matt Brown! Nick Ludlam! Kari Stewart! Campbell Orme!

What a team!

There’s lots of text on the blog at the moment. Time to add a little bit of colour with some links that have been floating around the studio.

Following last week’s link to Reknit, friend-of-BERG Rod McLaren gave me a link to Goldenhook. It’s a French business selling knitted goods with a twist:

Golden Hook is an innovative fashion brand which allows you to create made-to-order beanies by choosing your beanie style, material, and color. You also choose the authentic grandmother who will knit your beanie from our gallery of grandma photos.

Authenticity being sold through choice – and a personal connection to whoever’s knitting your new hat. Fun, although if Goldenhook is anything to go by, Granufacture isn’t very cheap yet.

Meanwhile, from Kottke – and a great many other sites – comes news of increased sales of miniature sausages in Korea:

Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

Meat styluses. I really have no sense for the Korean market: might this be a hoax? No idea; it doesn’t seem so, given the coverage. And it definitely works, as this video of someone playing Taiko Drum Master with a pair of sausages demonstrates. That’s one way to keep your fingers warm.

Matt Jones sent this to the studio mailing list last week, and it was destined for the blog from the get-go: a beautiful collaboration between Lego and MUJI Japan. It’s so simple: a model made out of a combination of Lego pieces and what look like origami squares, with pre-punched holes for joining the paper to the bricks. And: what a cheery crocodile.

Finally, via our frequent collaborator Timo Arnall comes a striking depiction of one potential Augmented future, courtesy of Keiichi Matsuda. Matsuda writes:

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

In his video, the home becomes another space for being advertised to in – with the catch that the more advertising you choose to be subjected to, the more revenue you’ll generate. The glitches in the AR system, and the horrible Girl From Ipanema cover are the icing on an entertaining (if somewhat bleak) cake.