Blog (page 49)

Ojito is the name of a new 3d viewing toy we’re making. We took the first prototypes to FooCamp recently, and it got a great reception – but more importantly we got great feedback. Thanks to all!

We’ll be talking more about Ojito in the extremely-near-future, but for now here’s the logo and our mascot for the project. As Matt Webb found out on our trip, “Ojito” means “Little Eye” in Portuguese, which inspired me to create this little fella.

Hello, Ojito!

Our friends at GameLayers recently took the hard decision to retire their launch product, PMOG, and dedicate their efforts to a new game, Dictator Wars (on Facebook), where they can spend more time on game design and less on the supporting infrastructure. They have many enthusiastic players already. Good on them!

I’m always impressed with good, hard decisions. If you’ve ever had a sleepless night over a project, you can imagine how tough it must be to, a year or even more later, walk away from it. Projects are tangled thickets of history and emotion. Corner turns are hard, and killing your babies doubly so. GameLayers have displayed good strategy.

Justin’s post on their learnings is insightful and leaves me yet more impressed. He shares three thoughts as to what makes a good product in interactive media. It’s much more widely applicable. I’ve picked a sentence from each:

• Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered.
• Serious Business. … if you want to actually hire people to work with you, pay kickass artists to make content for your game, and afford to buy new shoes, figure out what people would want to pay for if they were using your software.
• First Five Minutes. If someone can’t figure out what to do in the first five minutes of your interactive experience, you are hosed.

All so true! There’s more. Go read it.

Let’s keep it short and sweet. Schulze is working on video all week with Timo for the RFID design research and communication project. Tom is breaking ground on our new fulfilment system, named Springdale, which will be used in consumer sales in the future. He’s also writing, and in this morning’s crit showed a component of last week’s toy experimentation he built. It manipulates video and looks like it has lots of other uses. Neat.

Matt J is doing design work on Ojito and research on upcoming projects. Ashdown is close to kicking off and he’s leading that — the subsidiary holding company is formed and there are just a few more logistical hoops to jump through.

My priorities this week are coding for the racing car, and admin: anything in the pipeline needs to be progressed, and there is a list of tasks for the year end accounts which really must be done this week. (The pipeline is the list of projects pre-contract, everything from prospect through proposal to purchase order. It’s healthy to keep the pipeline full at every stage, and everything moving.)

Schulze has just walked in the door with Timo, so I’m off to lunch with them now. Enjoy your week!

From The Golden Institute project by Sascha Pohflepp

A favourite device of ours in ‘walking the landscape of possible futures’ is to imagine a counterfactual – a ‘what if’ version of history where changing one or two factors results in a recognisable but very different present or future.

A favourite example of ours is Sascha Pohflepp’s “Golden Institute” project, which I mentioned in a recent piece posted on my personal blog – about the power of using counterfactuals to imagine ways out of our current energy and climate woes:

“…thinking through these kind of ‘counterfactual’ scenarios can throw up interesting possibilities. When we’re ready to think about throwing away the things that we hold most precious, we can see new ways to hold on to them.”

» Magicalnihilism.com: The Positive Energy of Counterfactuals

Skimming through my notebook on returning from dConstruct, it seemed worth expanding a few scrawled notes into hyperlinks.

• Adam Greenfield brought up Schelling Points – “[solutions] that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them” – as a way of describing natural meeting points in cities. Interesting that a descriptor from game theory works equally well for Eros or the Grand Central Clock. The Wikipedia page on the topic explains more.
• Robin Hunicke used the word (or, rather, acronym) QWAN a few times – the Quality Without A Name, as described by the architect and academic Christopher Alexander in his book The Timeless Way Of Building:
  

  “This oneness, or the lack of it, is the fundamental quality for anything. Whether it is in a poem, or a man, or a building full of people, or in a forest, or a city, everything that matters stems from it. It embodies everything.

  Yet still this quality cannot be named.”

  I think, though, that when Robin used the term, it was very much lowercase: qwan, a straightforward piece of vocabulary.

• Jones and I had chatted about Eng-Fi – engineering fiction – as part of British childhood in the audience at dConstruct; I returned home to find Warren Ellis had pursued a similar path in his latest Wired UK column, on why, for educational purposes at the least, the BBC should repeat Thunderbirds:
  

  Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing – it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves.

  Rescue fiction, engineering fiction; whatever you call it, invention truly is a glorious and dazzling thing.

• And, as a bonus link, from the chat in the studio this afternoon: Dick Van Dyke is a computer animation enthusiast. Yes, that Dick Van Dyke.

Matt Jones and I have been in San Francisco this week, for meetings and a conference (an event called Foo Camp). We’ve been demoing Ojito, a cheap 3D device for the iPhone we’ve developed. Although it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, we’ve pitched it maybe two dozen times, sometimes in less than a minute in a corridor, and it’s fascinating how that process helps distill a product concept and clarify its route to market.

I met one guy and he was like, “oh, great name, how did you come up with it,” so I told the story: we give all our projects codenames after places on the Colorado Plateau. We need essentially meaningless names for the dark projects, and it’s one of my favourite regions in the world. Ojito is a place there. And he replied, “no, no, you don’t understand. I speak Portuguese. Ojito, it means LITTLE EYE.” Auspicious.

My plan for the remainder of this week is to write Ojito up as a plan and cost it, and catch up on the admin that’s difficult to do away — invoicing, payroll and so on: there’s an approved suppliers list the company needs to get on otherwise we’ll lose our chance at a project, and the other big task is setting up a subsidiary company to run Ashdown so that project can start. The wheels are in motion but I need to speak with the bank.

Jack and Tom are in London, working together on a toy I’m really looking forward to seeing. It needs a codename. I understand there are stickers involved. That’ll continue next week.

Tom has been spit-and-polishing the website. Jack has been finishing the stationery templates for invoices and so on. Next week he’s doing some video work with Timo on our RFID research project.

Energy is important to new product development, and to creating new work, as is perspective. It’s easy to get mired in even the most exhilarating work and lose sight of what’s important in a product, and work is always better – and easier – when it’s approached with bright eyes and an open, confident nature. For projects that last longer out of the public eye, you need willpower too.

Conversations and conferences help (Matt J and Tom are both at dconstruct this Friday). What erodes these feelings is a lack of stability. In that spirit, the big news this week is mundane: we’ve been waiting for invoices to two clients to be paid… and in the last couple days, the money landed in the bank. Frankly it’s a relief. Large company bureaucracy can make the payment process time-consuming to navigate, and now especially – what with expanding and investing in new product ideas – Berg’s two major resource constraints are attention and cash flow. Having these invoices paid makes me realise quite how tense I’ve been about the latter for the last month (I don’t mind saying that most of my waking cycles go to thinking about the company), and it’ll be good to return to the normal situation of just having too many exciting projects to work on. That’s life in the Escalante.

Our first week being BERG, and everything is sweet. Welcome to the new website! I should ask Matt J and Tom to say a few words here about the design ideas behind it, how it was put together, and where it’ll go next.

Tom is migrating the last parts of the old website now, and he and Jack are working together on an internal interaction design project for the rest of the week. That sounds fancy: it’s a toy and it’s funny and clever. I look forward to seeing it.

Matt J and I are both in California for conferences and meetings later this week and most of next. Jack has been making demos for Ojito with Campbell (the 3D designer who worked on the Manhattan maps), so we’ll show that around while we’re out there. It’s a simple toy and tool, and our best guess is that – as a standalone thing – it’s legally unprotectable. That means we need to be able to move fast, fit with other people’s products and context, innovate with the service design, and be flexible with route to market. It might still end up as an experiment but that’s fine. We’ll show it more publicly once it’s gone through another round of refinements.

Matt is also wrapping up final deliverables for the two design strategy projects. At that point both become a kind of gentle chase through the accounts payable sides of the relevant companies, which is simply a part of doing business with organisations of a certain size.

This is a quick note because I’m travelling a day early, today, for client workshops in New York (part of one of the two design strategy projects). On the plane I’m hoping to prep for that, and also collate our comments on the Ashdown contract — our solicitor had some interesting points I need check into.

Disappointingly I’m not going to get to work more on the racing car, which needs about another day’s work. Andy and I spent last Friday on it, and lost a good half an hour chasing it round the studio kitchen and having it respond to different instructions. It’s fun to play with in ways I hadn’t expected: interactively and together. More laughter than I’d thought. A good toy.

Some history

Jack Schulze and I dispute where we met, but I know when we first worked together. In 2005 he offered to have his students design icons for some experimental social software I was making. He showed me the options, and the best one had gone against specific requirements in my brief. I picked it anyway. It wasn’t from any of his students it turned out. He’d done the work himself and put it under my nose secretly.

Schulze & Webb Ltd isn’t the original name of the company. Schulze and I renamed an off-the-shelf company we bought in summer 2005 — that’s often the easiest way to start up in the UK. So for a while the company was called Z.V.B. Ltd. “What does that stand for, Zero Version Behaviour?” said Schulze’s dad. And that particular company was formed 1 June 2005. I like that it pre-dates us, if only by a few weeks.

In the summer of 2008 we began the Dayuejin. It’s important to name the eras of a company. It gives a sense of purpose, and of history. The Dayuejin is also known as the Great Leap Forward. To make the products we wanted, we needed more money petrol, which needed bigger projects, which needed more people and a bigger studio, which needed more money, which needed our own projects to build confidence. Everything had to move forward at once. It took a year, more or less, to find the right way to do it and lock it in.

The current era started last week. It’s the Escalante, the Grand Staircase. We’re in the third stage of the business plan I wrote in 2006. Tom Armitage started with us as lead developer and writer at the beginning of 2009. Matt Jones joined mid this year.

Today

This is an invention, strategy and new product development design company. Schulze looks after NPD. Matt Jones looks after design and client services. I help keep the wheels turning. In addition to Tom, there is a network of expert practitioners in electronic and mechanical engineering, industrial design, print, 3D, animation, videography, visualisation, data-mining, coding and technical development. We have growing experience in more and more of fulfilment and the supply chain, with patents in progress, and some neat products either out of the door or in development.

I look at the ideas, people, projects, ways of working, products in development, our friends and culture, and I have to say it: I’m proud. S&W laid the right foundation, and it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to this part of our lives.

We need a name for the next four years. I’ll ask Schulze to say more about the brand in the coming days. For the moment, from all of us, welcome.

A new name

This is BERG.

It’s the last week of Schulze & Webb because we’re renaming the company on Thursday. S&W no longer says what we are: four permanents and a network of expert practitioners, working in design strategy, invention and new product development for ourselves and others. The new name is good for the next four years… and more on that in a day or two.

Tom’s working on the website. It’s super clean, and the launch scope is good and tight. It’s all built in WordPress so we can add to it continuously — a big problem with the current one is how hard it is to update, given how busy we get. Matt Jones is on that too. He’s designed it as a hypertext, all cross-linked so browsing is a flow of reading. He’s also writing, sketching and designing as the deliverables are created for the two design strategy projects. And he’ll be on business development towards the end of the week.

Jack is working on negotiations for the new studio, developing our new branding, and today is with our model maker on various projects… one is Ojito, prototypes of which Matt J and I are hoping to take to California when we visit next week.

I’m writing, one design strategy doc and a little copy for the website. And I’m still on business. The Ashdown contract needs to be run past our solicitor, which is new for us but it’s more complex than ones we’ve signed before. And I have my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to move the iPhone app job forward towards kick-off later this week too.

See you on the other side of the re-brand!

I’m super pleased to have been invited to give the opening keynote at Web Directions South in Sydney at the beginning of October.

In 2008, I closed Web Directions North in Vancouver with Movement, on designing flow into the Web, and making applications in which action creates action. It was one of my favourite conferences.

This year I’m presenting Escalante:

The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

You may recognise the themes from Scope which opened reboot11 (catch the video here) in which I spoke about the personal roots of the invention of culture… and also about million mile tomatoes, JFK, and the Moon.

I’ll build on these topics at Web Directions. The leverage small groups have now to invent and participate in culture is wonderful, and the Web is at the very front of that. We’re at the beginning of a complex, remarkable world of exciting possibilities and responsibilities both. I want to look up and take in those wide blue skies.

It’s also my first trip to Australia, so recommendations of things to do and people to see are much appreciated. I think I’ll be able to extend my trip to about a week after the conference itself, but let’s see what happens. It should be ace, and I hope to see you there.