Friday links for week 346, a few things that have been zipping around our mailing list for the last 5 days. I’m keeping it image heavy this week.

Jones sent around the slightly terrifying ‘math blind AI that teaches itself basic number sense’. He also pointed out this article from Don Norman on AI:

The point is that AI is now powerful enough to be commonplace. Not only does it assist in such mundane tasks as restaurant selection, but it helps out in critical safety situations such as military applications, the control of industrial equipment, and driving.

Timo found this discussion on the ethnography of robots.

After reading the Steve Jobs biography this came as no shock, but this post on Apple’s attention to detail with packaging is a good read, and something we’re going to be obsessing over as a studio in the coming months.

There was also a lot of discussion over Ubuntu’s new interface, dismissing menu bars for a launcher style UI:

In our continuing quest to invent a reason to buy a quadcopter to fly around the beams of our new office ceiling all day, Alice sent around this clip of an autonomous flying tracking robot:

We’ve had a lot of incredible pictures of the solar storm flying around. This is a good one:

This is another good one:

And on a similar note this timelapse video of the Yosemite National Park is worth a watch.

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

Via Tom Armitage we found this knitted waveform scarf of the amen break by Andrew Salomone:

Which also revealed the ‘Recursive Cosby Jumper‘:

And the ‘Bitmap balaclava‘:

That’s it for this week. Here’s a picture of a tiny smiling pig. Enjoy your weekends.

Helping Future Designers

Last week I was in the Metropolia Polytechnic to spar students of an innovation course. Another person with me from the “real life entrepeneur / business side” was Perttu Tolvanen, an independent CMS expert and consultant, and of Vierityspalkki.fi fame.

We were both amazed and surprised by the general quality of the students’ work. The best of the projects were really close to professional level in their thinking and implementation. This was probably because these were third year students, with only the last year of studies left, and many of them already worked in various companies. “Innovation” was taken as a loose term, as it should, and solutions included an actually produced full-on premium magazine, a mobile based hookup/party/friend application (think Foursquare API+X), simple & user friendly Google Calendar add-on, student information & memory sharing website, an iPhone game with 8bit Nintendo graphics, and others.

Later on we discussed with the teacher Eeva Meltio over lunch. She told us about what teaching is like nowadays. For example, there’s four (!) different teachers on this course. They all bring in their own special skills, like interaction or graphic design, and teach and spar the students in that field. They also all hangaround all day in specific student groups in Facebook and exchange information and ideas constantly with the students. Eeva told that this kind of shared teaching responsibility is still actually surprisingly harder, not easier, for the teachers, because there’s so much cooperation, shared decisions and communication to do. But apparently the students are happy and get flooded with good mix of influences from various fields at the same time. The students also do real project work for companies and public sector during the courses.

All this might require a lot from the teachers, yes, but somehow to me it sounded like we are potentially witnessing the next breakthrough in Finnish education somehow. Mixing various things in one go can potentionally give the students more realistic view of how (design) work is done in the real world. It’s never just plain graphic design you can concentrate on for example. In real world everything depends on everything else and it’s a sort of balancing act to constantly produce something really good on time and on budget. Honing good skills in your own strong field is important too, but more often than not real (design) work is about understanding other fields too and moving fluently between them when your team needs you to.

What coders and users have been up to

Sauli worked with pitches for clients in the insurance and beverage sector. He also participated in a session where it was the developers’ time to show us how well they have implemented our interaction and layout designs and what is the overall status of the web service project that is due to be launched during the spring. This project is kind of heavy on the implementation side and there is two tech houses responsible for it. Apparently things are progressing well here.

Tia, Johanna, Sauli and Panu went to another city in Finland to observe and analyze how people move and behave while spending time in our client’s premises, and how are they using the available services. Of course they couldn’t just stand there looking, instead they had a little fun for themselves too. You could also call this Mystery Shopping.

The team will soon present their findings and new concepts to the client. They’ll describe how to improve the existing space and its services so that the whole experience would be better for the users and how our client’s business would improve as a result.

We have committed to collaborate with this client for a long time and that’s a good thing because there is a lot of work to be done. If only for the fact that the client has several similar spots all around Finland. It would be good to observe all or at least several of them. Not to mention that they have a huge web service that we are just waiting to get our hands on.

Boom!

Boom boom baby boom. Production of next generation of Nordkappers is again on the way. There’s three (!) new babies expected to arrive this year. One of us will be a second-rounder and then there’s two newcomers to the parenthood business. All the best, congratulations and good luck to all of them! Let’s get back to this topic at later date.

Until next time.

A good plane based number this week. The DFS 346 was a German rocket powered swept wing aeroplane, completed and flown in the Soviet Union after World War II. The Alenia Aermacchi M-346 Master is a military transonic trainer aircraft, based on the Yak-130. I’ll pretend you all knew that anyway though.

Our fearless leader Matt Webb has returned from 3 weeks in the US, with considerable jetlag, and tales from CES. He’s been taking Little Printer on a whistlestop tour all over the country, so will be unpacking meetings this week when his head is back on UK time.

Simon’s doing his usual incredible balancing act between making sure our client work is running smoothly, keeping all aspects of Little Printer and BERG Cloud on track, and managing the last few bits of new office sorting out. He’s also sorting through job applications (there’s still time to apply if you’re interested, we’re closing applications this coming Friday the 27th). It’s Kari’s last full week in the studio before she heads off on maternity leave, so she’s training Helen up on the last handful of bits. We’ll miss her!

The majority of the office are still pressing ahead with all aspects of Little Printer and BERG Cloud. Andy and Jack are working on the hardware and the industrial design. I’ve been doing a bit of design work for the shell, and working on the sales and out of box experience for when we launch. Andy’s sitting at his new soldering desk with a load of new circuit boards. Alice did tell me what she was working on, but all I wrote down next to her name was ‘moving’. Based on what she’s shown us at Friday demos for the last couple of weeks though, it’s pretty mind boggling and very exciting. James is similarly working on different but again very exciting backend stuff for Little Printer, as well as working on the IA for the mobile website with Denise, who displayed an impressively vast Illustrator document on Friday covered in wireframes. She’s also manning the BERG Cloud CS desk with Simon and Kari. Nick and Phil are as always working on the real backbone of the entire system, with a lot of brief writing and organisation of meetings.

Joe is putting the final touches to his Uinta work which is looking and sounding brilliant. Both him and Jones were in the recording studio yesterday.

Jack is mostly on the industrial design and manufacturing of Little Printer, but is also having a few catchups with Webb and Jones, and working with Timo on the final stretch of a bit of Uinta work. Timo’s doing a little bit of filming, a little bit of editing, and is also talking at the Design of Understanding this Friday. Matt Jones is on some Uinta project work, a few sales meetings, and is getting his hair cut tomorrow.

That’s pretty much it for week 346, fuelled by the 1.125kg of Haribo we’ve consumed as an office in under 2 days, and with the soundtrack of Pinch’s Fabriclive 61 mix, which I entirely recommend.

We're starting a new format for our weeknotes this week to make them a bit easier to read. We'll feature one project in detail each time and just give a quick summary of our other projects. This week the project in focus is The Programme List.

The forthcoming release of The Programme List has a simplified interface based on GEL

We're coming to the end of the current phase of development of The Programme List. This has been an exploration of how people remember programmes and tools to help them do that. We launched the first version in September as a simple way of keeping a list of programmes that you might want to watch or listen to. Since then, based on feedback from our users, we've developed the concept to focus more on delivering reminders and alerts for your programmes. The last prototype update in December added Twitter-delivered alerts - sent 15 minutes before a programme is due to start, with the restriction that these could only be set on individual broadcasts.

This week Andrew's been implementing the GEL re-style of the prototype, including a new settings page for alerts and emails. Dan's been modifying the API underneath to support these changes and finishing off what's necessary for the emails. Theo's been on hand for any UI tweaks and Duncan's been adding some custom analytics so we can better analyse the usage of it. We'll be releasing the next version shortly and it will have recurring reminders that can be set on episodes, series or brands (that's what we call our long-running programmes) and will be delivered by Twitter or by email. We're also starting to put together a video that explains more about the concepts behind this prototype and how we're imagining a common platform with which these lists and alerts might be shared amongst your TVs, radios, computers and mobiles. You can try The Programme List prototype here.

This week on our other projects:

NoTube is wrapping up after three years, Libby's tidying off loose ends and Vicky B is storyboarding a 1-minute video to summarise the whole project and created this poster of the recent user testing of a multiple second screen scenario.

ABC-IP is a little quiet this week but Chris L has been evaluating the automatic segmentation code by comparing it to manually added chapter points in the World Service programme The Strand.

In P2P Next Sean has been writing up the recent work on adding the HTML5 startOffsetTime attribute to Firefox. More about that soon.

In the programme recommendations work it's Becky's last week with us and she has been finishing off her analysis of the field trial. This has shown very good results for a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm and is able to produce instantaneous recommendations based on a small amount of information provided by the user.

In FI-Content Vicky and Joanne are planning the diary study that will be run to capture people's viewing activity. This will end with lab sessions where participants are shown their viewing history and asked about their attitudes to privacy and personal data. Pete has been wireframing the prototype dashboard for these sessions while Barbara and Chris N have been dealing with the collaborative side of the project.

And in other work, Sean has been building a a simple HTML5 RadioVIS demonstrator for use at an upcoming hack day at the EBU and Michael has been exploring using .mobi as a documentation format. And Marc has been looking at how to use web-based timelines for news stories; from Dipity to xtimeline via timetoast!