Greetings from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal! I’m here on a Collections Research Grant to use the Cedric Price Archive. There are about 30 scholars in residence right now from the US, Canada, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and points beyond, some younger, some more advanced, some traditionally academic, others less traditional like Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. That doesn’t even include the curators, archivists, librarians and other people who work here — they’re lovely as well. When you walk through the Study Centre, you never know what’s going to be on the tables… Susanna, from Venice, found a drawing of Peter Eisenman’s House VIII, not published. Zubin, from Montreal, is trying to make sense of the narratives in John Hejduk’s Masque drawings. Geoff found Oilstrike, a game sponsored by BP from 1970 — the irony. Samantha Hardingham, the one person in the world who publishes extensively and intensively on Cedric Price, was here this week as a part of her long research project in which she is looking at every single project he did. In any case, it’s a wonderfully convivial experience and a total delight to be here.

While I’m here, I’m looking at several Cedric Price projects that deal with information and technology, most of which have not been published about to any great extent. These include some crazy projects: a 1966 proto cybercafe for Tottenham Court Road in the Oxford Corner House; a 1967 design charette called Atom for a new town around a nuclear reactor that would have a “town brain” and a “life conditioning” unit that would educate its citizens; the British and Midlands Headquarters that incorporated the information flows and planetariums from the Oxford Corner House project — and Cedric Price’s own plans for an information storage and retrieval system to be used in his own office. It extends the work I did on my master’s thesis, which examined Price’s Generator project– a 1976-79 plan for an intelligent set of cubes on a landscape that would get bored if not moved and recombined.

On Monday, I presented to the scholars here on the Oxford Corner House project, a talk titled “Storage of Information Becomes Activity” — a note scribbled on a drawing from a different project, but that seems to indicate so much of what Price is doing with his kit of parts buildings, the mobility and the information screens and the learning and the computers. I’m coming to the conclusion that Price really did see architecture as information architecture in a very literal sense: a structuring of information, an organizing of it into activities, and then an organizing of architectural objects and tools to accommodate the movement through these informational exchanges.

The archive is a treasure trove and it’s a delight to look at more projects than just Generator, for which I was here in 2006. Some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, like the image above of the Inter-Action Centre, one of the few things that Price built (built 1977, demolished 2001) — or the letter that not only requested information on hovercrafts, but a demonstration. Some of it is amazingly futuristic, like the information flows and technologies suggested for the Oxford Corner House. I’ll publish bits of it here as I crunch through the material.

Finally, Montreal is one of my favorite cities. I’ve been here three times, twice in 2006 in late fall (brr!) and once for Design Engaged in 2008. This time, I’ve had a chance to relax into it– though I’ve been too socially busy to relax. It’s beautiful in summer, one reason why I decided to do the fellowship in July, not October. Where I’m staying on the other side of Mount Royal, there are huge maple trees and rolling hills. It all draws to a close in just under a week, when I go to Minneapolis for my 20 year high school reunion. (Shaking head.) That’s going to be its own archive.

As the quiet month of July comes to a close, we're savoring these last moments of relative calm. This morning began with a thunderstorm in Helsinki—a sign?

We've been re-working the programme for HDL Global yet again—it's subject to constant tweaks as we fine tune the flow and punctuation. Marco has taken to keeping the programme schedule as a constantly-open document on his computer and from time to time we open that window and twiddle bits around. Should Talk A come before talk B? As we've witnessed while attending other events, getting the order of the day right makes a big difference. Get the sequence wrong and you lose momentum, but if the programme unfolds properly ideas will be humming by the end of the day. 

A salmiakki tasting at Emil+Stephanie's office as we curate a welcome pack for our international guests.

Various other bits: on the horn with Eric in San Francisco, Cecilia in Singapore, and Bill in Cambridge, MA; meeting with Emil+Stephanie to review print design work; had a prep meeting with Eetu, who will be helping with some video editing next week; and started thinking through alternative scenarios for all three days of the event. What happens if Person X misses their flight? That sort of thing.

We also began uploading transcripts from HDL Global 1968 to our Flickr account. If you're a fan of Christopher Alexander's work you may enjoy his presentation of "The Organization of Design Pattern." I thought it might be interesting to try an experiment in crowdsourced OCR. I've transcribed the first page of Alexander text, maybe you would like to contribute by OCRing another page?

This past week, again, was mostly about project Ebi. We kicked off the third iteration on monday with a review of the version we delivered the friday before. What followed was a heated discussion about the ruleset. I felt it needed a bit more depth so players would have more interesting choices. The trick is to not go overboard with the complexity, because we want the game to still have immediate appeal.

By the way, project Ebi has a name now and it is PLAY Pilots. The site is still cloaked but the process blog – where you can find many wonderful weeknotes by FourceLabs and Zesbaans as well as ourselves – is public. We’re also on Twitter and Facebook. Keep tabs on those channels to get early access to the BETA…

On tuesday I headed to Amsterdam for a taste of Stumptown’s coffee – something Alper had been bugging me about for ages – and a trip to Pristine for some accessories for my new bike. I spent the rest of the day at Alper’s studio reviewing one of my students graduation thesis. She’s designed a point-and-click adventure game with an intersex protagonist, an attempt to critique gender conventions through gameplay. Interesting stuff.

On wednesday I continued work on Ebi with the team. It was Bernard’s last day before his vacation so we wrapped up an important part of the copy. In the afternoon I headed to the Nederlands Film Festival’s office to kick off the second pilot that is part of Ebi, which will be created by the awesome crew at Zesbaans. They have posted their first weeknote over at the project blog.

Thursday, I met up with a few of my students. Some still require help, but a few others are at the point that they looked apologetic when I asked when they would like to meet again. They’re in the final phase of their work, and I’ve done what I can. We’ll see each other at the finals, which will be in august.

A first for Hubbub, I had a chat with an possible intern on thursday too. I’m still not sure if we’ve reached the point where we can offer a good environment for interns (I take the educational responsibility we would have quite serious) so we’ll have to see if we take one on board.

On friday, I was back at the soon-to-be new Dutch Game Garden on the Neude square – we’re moving next week – to work with the Ebi team. Alper was mostly hacking away at sign-in stuff for Twitter and also the new version of the game engine. Simon made good progress with the designs for the game interface and I was surfing for fun customizable gadget to hand out to our players during the first festival we’ll appear at; Stekker Fest 2010. Would you fancy an eighties style suncap?

Also, a few of our FourceLabs friends dropped by to discuss technical matters dealing with how we’d integrate the web game we’re building with the physical one they’re doing for Stekker Fest. They also showed some awesome mockups of the whole setup made with LEGO. They’ve also been playing around with high speed cameras, yielding awesome footage. I’m sure they’ll share more details in their next post.

Hello.

It’s year end so we’ve been paper shuffling, identifying and bug tracking the odd anomaly in the accounts. It’s the kind of activity that’s crying out to be made more playful and interesting (a web service-cum-mech-turk like Mazuma perhaps?) because it really is so deathly dull that I’ve precious little incentive to do it.

This week we:

• Released a mobile web app called Holiday Calculator which Frankie talks about elsewhere.  It was part of our regular hackdays, which we’re running once a month. I’m enjoying the exercise of rapid prototyping / building and working intensely as a team.  The act of releasing something is also really satisfying, although we’ve debated long and hard about when it’s right to release something.
• Ran a couple of workshops for clients who do event related stuff and one is hopefully leading to some really fun arduino “big button” stuff.
• Completed then postponed a TSB application with the Mudlark chaps.  We’re adapting the idea for the more appropriate metadata competition in September.
• Welcomed Doug, the new Folksy developer into the office for the first time and Rob spent a chunk of time with Doug managing and designing scaling solutions for the marketplace, which had a few splutters and fleeting moments of downtime, like when you used to have manual choke on a car and you didn’t leave the choke out for long enough.  It was that kind of feeling.
• Delivered an update to stakeholders on an industry-wide project with the BBC (project Mablethorpe).  The sketchy approach to describing experiences is something we’re using more and more and usually it works well, however on this occasion more detail and a mock up would probably have been more appropriate.
• Reviewed the 4IP contract we got through for project Southwold.
• Continued to build up our design resource stuff with some books and cards, to help us find inspiration, and provide stimulus for projects (in that “can I have one of those please?” kind of way):

I continued to annoy the office with my new found favourite band, Crystal Castles, and try to create a rave style experience in the office.  Headaches ensued, followed by Andrew’s more mellow Country playlist. The unintended consequence of this argy-bargy was that playlists look like being our next hackday project.