This week's featured project is NoTube a 13-partner EU-funded research project about the future of Web and TV, which came to a formal end this week after three years. It involved collaborations with other broadcasters, universities, and small and large companies in Europe and Korea. 

Recently Vicky and Libby have been finalising the functionality of an application called N-Screen built within the project.

N-Screen is a second-screen web application for small groups of people, to help them choose what to watch and enable them to interact with their TV using drag and drop. Recent user testing suggested some user experience changes, and they have also been integrating some LIMO annotation-based functionality. There's a screenshot of it below, or you can try a version of it containing the wonderful TED content.

This week Vicky has been finalising some user testing plans and working on a longer blogpost for this site, and Libby has been getting the N-Screen code in good order for Open Source release.

N-Screen uses standards-based software throughout, and the result is a mixture of Javascript, HTML and XMPP front-end (using strophe.js and jQuery UI) and eJabberd group XMPP chats as the backend for the system. Dropping or clicking actions in the HTML / Javascript front end trigger XMPP messages to groups or participating individuals which then perform certain pre-defined actions. Dragging a programme onto a TV sends a message to TVs in the channel to play the video, but dragging it onto a person sends it to that person so they can see more about it. Further actions can be defined, such as a bot that can give you recommendations.

With Dan Brickley (a NoTube colleague from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Libby created a library called buttons.js which wraps some of the complexities of passing XMPP messages of particular types such as ('play this programme' or 'share this programme with Olivier') into a simple API. This week she created a very quick prototype to confirm that buttons.js is reusable: a 'shake to randomise' Phonegap-based application. She's also been working on an evenings-and-weekends project which shows that it can also be used with a much more constrained User Interface - a project sharing a number of use cases with our colleagues' work on the Universal Control API.

Libby and Vicky will continue to wrap up the project until the final formal EU evaluation in late March, and part of that will be making sure that the work is documented and reusable. NoTube continues to blog at http://notube.tv.

In other news...

A lot has been happening on the FI-Content front. Pete has been working on the wireframes for the dashboard application with which the project will be testing a number of assumptions around privacy and user data management, and Barbara has been working with the project partners on the bookplan, timescales and text for next deliverable document. Meanwhile, Joanne started the recruitment process for a user trial where participants will record what BBC TV they have watched on a certain day. The study will be based on a diary app which Duncan and Andrew built in record time.

Speaking of recruitment, Tristan, Theo and ChrisG have been drowning in interviews of applicants for our new producer.

Chris Lowis, Dan and Sean have been focusing on RadioTAG, working on some enhancements in time for the EBU Radio Week events on the 13th, including a RadioTAG-focused workshop at the RadioHack day. They have also been tidying up documentation and preparing a distribution of the RadioTAG servers for people to install themselves.

... and finally a link, courtesy of Dan: A full BASIC programming environment for the Nintendo DS. In Japanese...

I think this is roughly who’s working with who.

This week is mainly: a Uinta workshop, Little Printer progressing, Kari’s final day before maternity leave and Helen’s first full day, sales sales sales.

The new studio is bigger,

and (I noticed when I got back from travelling in the US for most of January) weirdly quiet. It’s as if people don’t know what to do in all the space. Then when one person goes into the kitchen – the kitchen is teeny weeny, the size of a broom cupboard – two or three more people pile in and there’s a kitchen party. In the last couple of weeks it’s been getting gradually noisier as we settle in. A welcome improvement.

Nick’s gone out to get a few coffees. Good-o. Caffeine please!

Travelling

Sami’s heading to Interaction12 conference in Dublin to give a compact talk called “Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces” — 10 key findings from our work on designing services for the city of Helsinki. Say hi to him if you’re going to this major event!

Elsewhere, Kate & Tia are travelling to Germany soon to work on a project. German friends, heads up!

Invisible City & WDC

There’s also a big event in Helsinki this weekend. Invisible City gathers people and companies working with open data for a long event that lasts long into the night. There’s workshops for working with data, and a seminar where many organizations like Helsinki Region Infoshare, Apps4Finland, IBM, Fjord and Kokoro & Moi talk about open data, data visualization, trends and designing for a city.

Our participation in Invisible City is two-fold. First Tia & Kate will talk about Urbanflow in the seminar, and later in the night, Matti will be one of the judges in the Cut & Paste Helsinki design competition. This could be a fun competition, so make sure to stay around for it and the party later on.

The whole event is part of a bigger World Design Capital (WDC) Helsinki Open Doors Weekend that features 180 events, in which you can “Sit down with the designer at a pie bar or tea party, participate in the design processes intended for the general public.”

Sounds fun, right? We do that every day. :)

FastCoDesign

Oh, and we also got featured as Infographic of the Day on FastCompany’s Co.Design section with Urbanflow, our cooperation project with Urbanscale. It’s a fun first for us, even though the article writer is (of course) unaware of some of our research findings which have lead to some of the design features.

• Co.Design: Urbanflow Aims To Turn Cities Into Playgrounds For Interactive Infographics

Until next time and next adventures!

Earlier in the P2P-Next project we tackled synchronisation of interactive elements with on-demand video. We developed our own framework called LIMO for creating timed events which uses a combination of HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. Our Tree of Life demo shows how the timed events can be used for subtitles, chapters and panels with additional content, and how these can be integrated with the video on a web page.

More recently we've been focusing on the problem of synchronising timed metadata with live audio or video streams. This is already possible using proprietary technologies and we wanted to explore if it could be done using open standards and technologies, in particular HTML5. The timed metadata in question could be LIMO events to recreate the demo mentioned above on a live basis and making live synchronisation work could also benefit other frameworks such as Popcorn.js.

In order to show synchronised media being streamed we created a new demonstrator interface using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3. This provides three different views on live LIMO events: full-page video, full-page interactive content and the timeline view (see screenshot). The underlying work involved refactoring our LIMO code to provide better support for live media, and modifying a browser (we started with Firefox) to implement the startOffsetTime attribute from the HTML5 specification. Sean will be posting a detailed technical description of this work in the next few days.

This week on our other projects:

Another week and the BBC R&D Internet Research and Future Services team is, as always, busy across multiple projects to the betterment of human experience. However, some of the details of our work-in-progress cannot be divulged to the public due to the confidential nature of the research. So I'm afraid this week we cannot update you on 5th-dimensional broadcasting, infrasonic data transmission networks or Web 4.0 socialisation interfaces. Because I just made them up. Here's what we can tell you:

A new release of The Programme List is nearly upon us. Andrew has been browser-testing Theo's redesigned UI and squashing bugs both small and large. Tristan has walked through the new version a couple of times, and, with Theo, planning a future-focused video explainer.

It's full-steam ahead for the FI-Content project team. Barbara and Chris Needham went to Brussels to attend their respective work package meetings with the FI-Content partners to define the content for the next deliverables. Meanwhile, Vicky, Joanne and Pete continued to refine their proposals for the user-based diary study. After group-feedback, Joanne finished off the recruitment brief, as Pete further refined the Dashboard data visualisation wireframes. Andrew and Duncan were recruited to build a TV-viewing data-capture interface.

Meanwhile, Olivier and Chris spent the week in California with the W3C Audio Group, somehow managing to shun the sun and beaches to concentrate on two intense days of meetings on the future of audio processing on the Web. So no amusing photos of them posing on Santa Monica beach with David Hasselhoff then. Pity.

Links of interest:

• Designing the future of cameras
• Predicting the future
• Channel 4's very square weather map

(Thanks to Dominic Tinley for the LIMO report and Tristan for the links)

Now that winter has set in, we are regularly experiencing temperatures in the range of -10º celsius. This makes for treacherous sidewalks but otherwise adds lots to the quality of life in the city: cross country skiing, sledding, new things on the ice, and plenty of light reflecting off the snow.

Recently Dan, our colleague Karoliina, Nina the intrepid interpreter, and myself spent a day in Hamina where it was also very frozen. Located 1.5 hours east of Helsinki, Hamina used to have two industries: a port and the paper mill but the later closed down in 2008.

 Luckily for them, the mill premises found a new tenant who values cheap energy and the location's essentially limitless supply of cool Baltic water: Google purchased the property in 2009 and set up a data centre shortly thereafter.

Although the Google story is interesting, it's not the core of why we went to Hamina. We were there to learn about the way that the city has successfully fostered green energy, both as an energy source and as an industry. Early indicators point to Hamina as a positive example of how a community de-industralizes itself with as little long-term pain as possible. They paid attention to larger structural changes in Finland's economy and reacted decisively to find a new way forward. Google's data centre was one positive outcome, and the other is WinWind who manufacture wind turbines. In parallel with these new developments in the local economy, Hamina's municipally owned energy company also courageously set up a modest wind farm.

Hamina is known for having a circular town center

We wanted to understand how this happened. How does a community make decisions about its future? Or in other terms: how do communities make shared decisions from a shared value perspective?

Shared decisions are those which are bigger than any one person. Things like building a new road or rail, cordoning off a nature reserve, or passing a law. And shared value is measured in financial as well as social and ecological capital. Although the term is borrowed most recently from Michael Porter, the basic concept is by now quite generic—you might even argue that figuring out shared value is the challenge which underlays all others.

Our trip to Hamina was the first bit of research into this. How did they get the idea to build a wind farm? And how did it get negotiated in real space, with real euros, real local politics, and real personal opinions? How did Hamina decide to open its port area to new industries? How did Hamina propose for itself a new future?

In the coming weeks and months we'll be visiting other communities that have made—or failed to make—shared decisions as we try to better understand how we might help these processes flow more easily and productively.

One of the areas of focus is a phenomena called Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) and how we might crack open more opportunity for Please In My Back Yard. In essence, we're interested in how communities balance the right to express negative opinions with the civic obligation of participation in the public realm, in local economies, in politics, in society. So how do we make it more meaningful and easier for people to engage in shared decisions? That's what we'll be focusing on in the area of work we've been calling Brickstarter internally.

A collection of NIMBY archetypes by Miquel Hudin drawn by Loren Purcell

Justin, Marco, and Johanna spent most of Friday in Lahti working with the city planning department there as part of our Design Exchange Programme. Things there are off to a good start with an ambitious timeline. We are also working on a new website for the exhange participants to share their experiences regularly.

Internally at Sitra we continue apace with work on tools, systems, working culture, and spatial resources. The first three involve lots of meetings in conference rooms, the latter involved one meeting in a design studio. It's also worth noting that there's a new Sitra.fi website!

Dan was over in London this weekend giving a presentation at The Design of Understanding. It's a safe bet that you can expect a write-up of some 10,000± words from him in the nearish future.

As always, an update on the food work. We spent a bit of time in Tukkutori with Elina and Ville, sharing notes on what we're up to and the same from them. Tukkutori is Helsinki's wholesale market and will be opening to consumers in the fall. Lots of exciting stuff planned there and we're seeing how we might be invovled, particularly with an eye towards strengthening the pathways for good ideas to grow up to be good businesses and good regulations and policy.

You never know what you're going to find in Tukkutori

And yes, some mockups for print. The food booklet we're working on may or may not come with a poster.

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.

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.

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!

Kate and Tia have been interviewing people for one very secret project recently. According to them they’ve had a good time sitting in cafés and talking to some very enthusiastic people. Sometimes design work rules, huh?

Kate says that Tia has made research interviews into an artform, and that she’s been learning a lot while working with Tia. Kate (who’s Irish) also says that “the Irish will talk to a wall if it seems to be listening”, and that actually being silent for a change and listening to these people has been eye-opening. I’m sure she’s exaggerating.

Kate is also involved in a copywriting/content case. Yep you guessed it, can’t say much about that either. This content is coming to a huge and visible website, but that’s about it.

Tia’s also organizing two days of research interviews and on-site observations outside of Helsinki. These are for that new big client of ours. This should help us get to grips with their users in their locations in different times of the day. This hints that the observations will continue late into the evening/night, which also means that it will again be another kind of a day at work for those who are going.

Tablets Tablets

A tediously negotiated iPad case is progressing finally. Hopefully the final budget can be agreed on soon, so that we can get started on this. I believe that this time we’ll actually get proper reference rights, and we’ll finally get to show you something tablet-y sometime during Spring. Wohoo! The project should be first of its kind in Finland.

There’s some other tablet pitches in the air currently. We’ve invented really good new business case for these clients already, even though the projects haven’t even started yet. That’s how excited we are already about these.

Quickies

Jukka + Sami went to Augmented Reality camp and came back with a cool, yet early, demo of an audio based AR app. A good approach to already-boring AR field, where in general everybody always wants — and has wanted to for the last several years — to build a visual layer/icons on top of a video feed. Gosh, even we’ve designed things like that years ago. The visual AR has been in the works for so long that it’s good to see at least our guys coming up with something new already.

Teppo is going to Metropolia University of Applied Sciences to review student projects from an innovation course on Thursday. There seems to be quite a variation in projects from magazines to iPhone games and social media services. Should be interesting.

We recently got the number one spot in an app store. As usual, we can’t say which app it was. Oh well.

By the way, an engineer friend recently commented our blog in a chat: “The blog is really fun. Reading about interesting things is a great break from the chores of engineering work.” Good to hear and perhaps this is so, but please try to make your work interesting too. There’s no reason engineering work should be boring by definition. The whole world was built by engineers. Go build something exciting!

Until next time.

Photo credit: Old Irish wall in Ireland

We’re almost fully settled into the new space. There’s a bit more painting to be done, some insulation to be pumped into the roof and a large delivery of teabags on order. We’ve worked out most of the major issues – like where to go for lunch, but it has to be said, certain BERGians are missing the coffee hut. I’ve yet to see anyone come back with coffee and look happy about it.

Matthew is still in the USA, where he’s been since the beginning of the year, he should be back soon. Jack is not 100% well, and so has been in and out of the office, trying not to infect us all. When he’s not in quarantine he’s working on the physical aspects of Little Printer with Andy. This involves mechanics and graphics, a mix we’re rather enjoying.

James is back in the office for the first time this year. He’s working on some behind the scenes Little Printer tech with Alice. Nick and Phil are working on a bit of refactoring too, but both of them seem rather cheerful about it. Alex and I are also working on Little Printer – a mix of things from packaging ideas, to IA. I’m also trying to keep on top of the feedback we’ve been receiving (there’s been a lot of it, and people have been lovely, thank you).

Joe and Timo have both been working on two separate projects for Uinta.. The end is in sight for the work Joe has been doing – and it’s looking beautiful. It requires some voice over work from Jones, which should be entertaining. Timo is working on editing, directing and interviewing for the film he’s making. We saw some work in progress last week and it’s everything we were hoping for – magic included.

Kari has been helping to get Helen all settled in. She’s also been battling with studio and finance admin. Simon has been here there and every where, organising the last bits of the studio, getting the timesheets in for last year (no, pressure, Nick) and sorting through job applications.

And I think that’s it.

The Programme List project is proceeding towards the final spike of the current development with Andrew and Theo giving it a visual makeover to use the BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) using the rack-less Ruby gem, which makes LESS CSS easy to integrate into a ruby application. Duncan has reworked the whole thing from a web app to a website and has been plotting graphs with the usage data to understand strengths and weaknesses.

Chris L's first draft of a paper on the technical work done for Roar to Explore has been accepted for the Audio Engineering Society conference in April while Theo, Andrew and Sean have been working on an experience prototype for touch screens with a control interface which was demo'd to the rest of the team on Thursday. We reckon this could become a medium fidelity interactive prototyping tool to be used for other projects. Following review of the current prototype next week, interaction storyboards will be drawn up to guide next phase of development.

Great progress on the ABC-IP project with around 27,000 World Service programmes processed using Roderick's API and a lot of EC2 instances. Now Chris L is looking at how to evaluate the segments extracted by the algorithm by comparing them to those added to bbc.co.uk/programmes manually. Yves has been also working with Metabroadcast to push the resulting data across our respective infrastructures.

Libby and Vicky B have been looking at the best way to encapsulate all that has been achieved on the NoTube project in a one-minute video and also attended the last project meeting in Milan. Libby is also working at enabling the N-Screen second screen application to play back basic LIMO-annotated videos.

Even if some exciting projects are winding down, there are others on their way as we have started drafting IBC and EU proposals.

Our other EU project, FI-content, has started 2012 in 5th gear with Joanne's blog on the literature review done as part of our research on user attention data. The UX team is planning the upcoming diary study as well as working on wireframes and data visualisation solutions for the prototype we'll test with users in March. Barbara is working with the project partners on refining the use cases and preparing for the upcoming round of deliverables. Chris Needham is planning the user dashboard prototype we're going to build for the end of phase 1.

While Chris G worked on updating budget forecasts for the end of year, Tristan and Yves went to talk to PhD students at Queen Mary University. Chris N has been building developer-friendly recommender APIs and Olivier has been working with the W3C Audio group on a requirements document for their upcoming standard API.

Hi, we're back. Closing out all of the work and accounts before the end of the year became more hectic than any of us expected and that means we ended up with nothing more than crickets on this blog.

The Design Exchange Programme was announced in December and is now off to a promising start

In the interim, perhaps the biggest news is that we launched a new project called the Design Exchange Programme. At the moment it's a small and modest with just one placement. We'll have a full introduction to the chosen candidate in due time, but for now we would like to congratulate Sara Ikävalo on her successful application and thank her for taking this leap with us. We look forward to beginning in earnest in February.

Sara was the winning candidate out of a pool of nine applicates, four of which we had interviews with just before the holidays. With our Lahti placement now specified, we're beginning to look at the second partnership with another government body here in Finland. Updates when we can share them.

Otherwise: much of the same here. Dan and I are continuining to crunch on the street food booklet which we are now a bit late one. We're learning the hard way what it's like to bite off more than you can chew. Then again, the up side of never promosing a specific delivery date is that you're never late. But all jokes aside, we do hope to have a draft available for download imminently. At the moment we're doing the dilligence of clearing publication rights for archival images and other fun feats of legal maneuvering.

We have also been doing quite a lot of internal 'consulting' work on two fronts. First and foremost to work through our in-house strategy for internationalization, an update to our shared ways of working, and this inevitably means also looking at internal culture. These are mostly about behaviors and practices, but are always bound up in the artefacts and tools as well. So we find ourselves sketching out new document types, interfaces, and other bits of the internal Sitra workflow. We're interested in moving these into paper prototyping at some point, and then hopefully further into light weight software prototyping. 

Marco and Justin are busy as ever with Low2No. Marco has also been spending time lately in discussions about potential upcoming work. Since we're not a commercial firm we don't have business development, per se, but we still spend a fairly good chunk of time exploring opportunities with a variety of potential partners to make sure that the projects we take part in are ones where we feel we have something useful to contribute.

And to close I'll leave you with nearly identical snapshots from two Nordic capitals near the end of the year:

Week 344 in the BERG studio has a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Joe rejoined the studio (back from the US trip with Jones & Webb) on Tuesday. Jones stayed in the US for a couple of extra days but has just arrived back in the studio, straight from the airport. What can I say, he is hardcore. Webb was at CES in Las Vegas yesterday (we can’t wait to get his report) and continues his US mini-tour in San Francisco today. James Darling is still on a tropical beach somewhere. Other BERG folk have been out to see GPs and osteos, track down packages, run various errands, etc. At the same time, we’ve had a number of visits from clients/partners and also have several contractors spending time in the studio this week. So it’s still felt like the busy, buzzing hub that it usually is.

Let me say a quick word about two people who have been mentioned in passing in previous weeknotes without much other explanation as to who they are. Phil Wright is a contractor who has been helping us out with the development of Little Printer since April of last year. He spends most days in the studio and has his own desk and everything, so although he remains on contract status, he feels like part of the regular BERG team. Helen Rogers joined us for two afternoons a week at the beginning of December to start training to take over for me as our Studio Manager when I go on maternity leave at the beginning of February. From this week she’s up to four afternoons a week, and from the start of February, she’ll be four full days a week. It’s been a treat to work with her thus far as she is super clever and catches onto everything so quickly. It’s nice knowing that the studio will be in very competent hands when I step away in a few weeks. Watch for more info about her to show up in the Studio section of the website soon!

As for the rest of the BERGians, this week Simon is doing some rounding off of project costs for 2011 and looking at capacity planning for 2012, leading some workshops on the continued development and future of Little Printer, coordinating various bits of Uinta projects that we have on the go, and working through the final issues that still need to be resolved in the new studio. In case you missed it, he also posted adverts for two new positions that we’re looking to hire for. If you’re interested in working for BERG, please do have a look to see if either of those describes you!

Nick has been working on the technical architecture for BERG Cloud, thinking about chips and font rendering for Little Printer and doing some work on the Suwappu app.

Joe has been catching up on what he missed being out for a week and getting his feet back under him. He’s mainly working on integrating animation in a couple of Uinta projects.

Denise is still very generously handling most of the enquiries that come in about BERG Cloud and Little Printer. She’s also continuing work on the UI and IA for the internet side of Little Printer.

Alex has the fun job of developing the brief for the Little Printer packaging and unboxing experience. He’s still doing some work on Uinta this week and is also helping to make the new studio a happier, more accommodating place with a functional doorbell and signage.

Alice is also involved in the font rendering work for Little Printer and is doing some early stage investigative work into dev tools for people who want to create their own publications for Little Printer.

Timo is working on a Uinta animation brief and is also doing some shooting for a 90 second test pilot. I’m sure more will be revealed about that in good time, but it’s potentially pretty exciting.

Andy is making good use of our CitySpring courier account, sending various components hither and yon. He’s also having conversations about what should be printed on the back of Little Printer. I suppose most people don’t really think too much about the copy on the back of their electronics, but it turns out it’s pretty important.

As for me, I have been doing all the usual financial admin, trying to wrap up some last bits of business around moving studio, ordering office supplies, handling all the general (i.e. non-Little Printer or BERG Cloud) enquiries that come in to the studio, etc. Today I get to teach Helen how to run the quarterly VAT return. (Exciting stuff, eh?) And I’ve been getting kicked in the ribs (from the inside) pretty much the whole time I’ve been typing this. Maybe that second cup of tea wasn’t such a great idea after all…

Late last year that revolutionary project got that seal of approval go-ahead and Akseli & Matti have been working hard on that. They spend much of their time at the client’s place to be close to the action. This is not a common way we do design, but sometimes it is just easiest and fastest that way. Since we are very flexible in general, this is doable for us as well. Sadly there’s nothing we can say about this project, really. Except that the feedback in design reviews and otherwise have been really good.

Another project has reached a high-level review stage as well. This has included quite a lot of travel, especially for Sami. The project continues through Spring most likely. Not much we can say about this either, except, that feedback has again been super good.

Elsewhere, a WP7 application for another client was designed quickly, and is also in the review pipeline. This should be released some time quite soon.

Late last year also saw the release of the second platform of a tablet thing done by Fabian and Teppo. These both gained an apparently immediate adoption by the users of the respective service. Regarding these; a good quote for your next design-sales presentation from a user was:

“Because of this app, I will NOT end my subscription as I was planning, but stay as a user!”

A text book example of the importance and benefit of good design, huh?

So all and all, there’s been quite a lot of mobile application work recently. But we haven’t forgotten about mobile websites either. In fact, there’s several on-going discussions about high-class mobile websites for clients who absolutely need to target a larger audience, or who have tight timelines where app development is simply not feasible.

A bit of a different case is a medical web service project for professional health care. This non public service is targeted for the Nordic countries. Team here is mostly Jukka, Panu and Aki.

Remember that huge public entity we won a multi year deal with? Those projects are slowly starting to start [sic]. Possibilities here are interesting as there’s so much elements outside of screens. There’s floor plans and architecture involved, for example. Instead of starting designing straight away, we plan to see how we could help the client first sort out their internal processes for maintaining their existing services. Then progress to processes for developing new services, and only then actually to developing those services. But let’s see how this goes, we have only begun to scratch the surface of this huge entity.

By the way, if you missed Sami’s recent post 10 things for 2012, please continue to reading that, and you’ll know what you’re supposed to be doing this year. :)

Until next time.

Photo credit: Blues by Panu

So if you see this, it means we have successfully re-established this channel of communication. And it's not syndication, not an auto-feed of posts or tweets or anything else: it's me typing directly to you. I assume you are mainly my Google Reader sharebros but maybe a few of you are consuming this feed in other ways, too. Maybe you're READING IT RAW.

That's it for now. More soon.

We’ve been busy unpacking the remaining crates from the Big Office Move of December. Schulze unearthed some unfamiliar output from early studio work that predates many of us. The terseness of the summary page does not do justice to the splendour of the tools it spawned. Schulze is also deep in project work for Uinta, Chaco, and our very own Little Printer.

Denise has been doing a fantastic job fielding the enquiries about Little Printer and BERG Cloud, and is also driving a lot of design thinking around Little Printer as it comes more sharply into focus.

Andy has been unpacking and setting up the workshop area of our new space, and is also working on various aspects of the physical form of Little Printer. The rest of us have been enjoying Andy and Jack’s ongoing argument over what needs to be thrown away, and what is actually valuable enough to earn precious shelf space.

Alex is wrapping up Uinta work, working on designs for our studio stationary, and writing briefs for product packaging design. He’s also managed to set up a studio speaker system which in all likelihood will cause serious structural failure if anyone were to turn the volume up to 10.

Kari has been catching up on studio admin and finance tasks, answering studio queries, and keeping on top of Zendesk tickets. At the end of this month she’s going to head off for some much deserved maternity leave.

Alice has been taking care of address and content updates to our various websites, and is now engaged in some code sketching of Little Printer developer tools. She’s been wonderfully scathing of our local coffeeshop’s customer service.

Phil is porting some embedded code in advance of vendor meetings happening next week, in addition to helping me set up our Little Printer development bench.

Timo rejoined us on Wednesday and is working his magic on a timeline full of exciting footage that was shot last month. He’s also got his VFX Supervisor hat on, and is overseeing some effects work for his Uinta video work.

There are a few notable absentees this week. Webb, Jones and Malia are together in the US and are gradually going to be reabsorbed into the fold over the course of this month. Our last missing person is James Darling, currently in India and rejoining us later this month.

Lastly, I’ve been doing relatively mundane things like making sure our office network is working properly and remembering how to write in whole sentences. This concludes the very delayed summary of week 343!

We have moved office. Joe, Alex, James, Timo, and Nick are on holiday this week. Kari, Denise, Andy, Jones and I are taking holiday for some of the week.

Our new office is so big that all-hands now requires people to move to the same space, acting under an unspoken consensus about where that should be. In our old space I could participate in a conversation with anyone without having to move at all.

As I started taking notes for weeknotes, the tiny human that Kari is currently carrying started kicking her in the ribs. Maybe he wanted to be included in weeknotes too.

There is a list of snags for the new space on the whiteboard. It includes things like "EXTRA COAT OF PAINT ON FOOD AREA PROJECTION WALL" and "LIGHT SW. MEETING ROOM SWITCH DOWN TO TURN ON (REVERSE STATE)". Simon is managing the snags list this week, along with his usual schtick of chivvying projects and people. Andy is putting up lights and hanging shelves, as well as tidying up the old space and returning keys. He has also taken to bringing bacon sandwiches from the Shepherdess for people who want them, which we're all very pleased about.

Matt Jones is finishing some work for Uinta. Kari is showing Berg 9 to people who might want to make it their own. She is also training Helen, pushing various bits of accounting admin, and doing something that I have written down only as 'printers'. This could mean anything, really, do I mean SVK printers? Little Printers? the office printers? I should have taken better notes.

Jack is working on the industrial design for Little Printer this week. He has a seemingly bottomless collection of tops in subdued colours with zips, and today he has brought out a grey knit one that I have not seen before.

Matt Webb is fighting off a sickness that he caught from an Australian and taking Jack out for cake.

Week 341 then, Merry Christmas.

We are also really excited to have just started recruiting for two new roles; an Engineering Team Lead and a Producer/Product Manager.

On the ABC-IP project we had our quarterly planning meeting with MetaBroadcast to decide the where we are both going to focus our efforts over the coming three months. One of our main priorities will be to apply our topic extraction algorithm to the whole World Service archive. We have used Roderick's API and a set of EC2 machines to automatically tag our example dataset, and are just about to start the the process across the archive. Yves also spent a bit of time refactoring the tagging code to make it more maitainable.

The FI-Content team have been making good progress and have completed their new user journeys and have started sketching some sample wireframes to go alongside them. Meanwhile, Jo has started planning the user evaluations we plan to conduct in the new year and writing up her literature review about attitudes to private data.

And finally, a round-up of other bits and bobs across our other projects. Vicky B has been blogging about the preliminary findings of the N-Screen user testing over on the NoTube project site and has started thinking about the UX for the next iteration of N-Screen with Libby. Dan has been adding recurring notifications on the Programme List, so that you can follow a Series or a Brand and be reminded via Twitter each time a new episode comes to air. The Roar-to-Explore prototype was being demo'd to stakeholders up in Salford and George and Chris L finished up the week with an interesting visit to the National Grid.

340 is the number of words that Betsy the Border Collie from Austria can understand. James Darling has hitch-hiked along the A340 near Aldermaston in Berkshire.

At the end of this week we are migrating to our new studio space. Co-ordinating the move of thirteen people from two locations in short time has been a bit of a challenge, and has involved much hard work from people with larger muscles than I. Here’s a little teaser of how our new space looks and how it’s changed over the last two weeks.

In the midst of packing up, we are still very busy on all projects. Timo, Alex and Matt Jones have been moving around Shoreditch by night filming for Uinta, stopping occasionally to watch footage and talk excitedly about what to shoot next over pizza and cola.

Work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud continues on many fronts. James D, Andy, Denise, Alice and Nick are variously looking at IA, infrastructure, manufacture plans, communications, whilst keeping up with the queries and comments we’ve been receiving via bergcloud.com, which have been super. They’ve have been keeping me, Matt W, increasingly-pregnant Kari and Denise busy in particular. If we haven’t quite got to your email yet we apologise, we’re doing our very best!

In January, Matt W (who you can hear on yesterday’s Radio Roundabout) will be clocking up at least 13,090 miles in the air en-route to a Uinta workshop, before dropping in on CES and meeting people to talk about Little Printer across the US. His itinerary is here if you’d like to catch him. Matt J and Joe will be attending at least the first part of this adventure.

This is a mere fly-by of what we’re up to, as usual, but I must now disappear to pack more things into crates.

Tonight, we are having a traditional Christmas dinner and a thimble of sherry to celebrate a year of good work (which I’ve been lucky enough to be part of for the past 7 months or so). I’ve been informed Matt Jones is bringing party games and Joe Malia may do a dance. I’m bracing myself.

Barbara had an interesting brainstorming session with Ralf from IRT looking at ways to integrate all content areas from the other FI-Content partners into a coherent story and they made good progress given it’s not an easy task. As part of Ralf's last week with us he did a presentation on IRT's work and a demo of HbbTV. 

Chris G. Olivier, Yves and Tristan made some progress on the workplan. They've been sorting, grouping and filtering the interview data captured from across FM&T (and beyond). They now have some sensible groupings of work which align to our previously identified research themes. 

Libby did some preliminary CSS for Beancounter, some two-screen 'TEAPlayer' integration for 'watch 'n' buy'  and worked on creating a Universal Control version of N-Screen, taking into account the results of the N-Screen user testing last week, and a basic UC server implementation to go with it. Vicky B has been writing up the transcripts from the user testing sessions and doing some initial analysis of our findings. 

Sean, Matt, Dan and Yves went on the New Broadcast Technologies training course at Wood Norton this week. Sean was particularly interested in the BNCS (Broadcast Network Control System) which provides realtime control of studio equipment and Jupiter, the News AV ingest system.

Michael mainly wrote up the Masterchef-based interactive push prototype he's been working on. He also attended a brainstorm with BBC Drama about a possible perceptive media project. And since the last weeknotes, he's put up christmas decorations to decorate the North Lab and brightens things up nicely.

Olivier's focus this week has been the W3C Audio Working Group - the web standards group in charge of defining APIs to process and synthesis audio on the Web. There are a lot of things this work will make possible, from music to games and voice communication - all with open standards. One exciting piece of news is that on Wednesday he was appointed co-chair of the group by the W3C director and management. In this new role he's working on things the group will need moving forward: making sure the decisions of the group are well recorded, cleaning up the web work space, coordinating with other groups on requirements, and working with his co-chair to set the agenda of the upcoming group meetings.

Becky has relaunched her field trial to test out a set of recommendation algorithms. Early results are very encouraging and show a marked improvement on the first run. Meanwhile she has also been analysing data from a different trial concerning user interfaces for recommenders, which has also produced some very interesting feedback to mull over.

Theo, Olivier and Tristan reviewed our News Follow work, looking at how it fits with our other projects and finding interesting ways to take it forward. Tristan went to an event on Anonymity, Privacy and Open Data where he learnt about Jigsaw identification and how there are many ways to "de-anonymise" data once you've got large amounts of it. 

We pushed two new features live on The Programme List  - broadcast reminders and RSS feeds. You can now set reminders on individual broadcasts from your list and you will be reminded 15 minutes before the programme starts as an @reply from @ProgListRemind on Twitter. The RSS feed gives you a daily digest of all your programmes that are or were on yesterday, today and tomorrow. The team also discussed the next piece of work on this - how we set up following of brands and series and how we streamline and improve the client-side. Duncan worked on upgrading the programmes index used for this and other projects and did some other tweaks and amendments. He liked http://vimgolf.com/

Yves started to work on applying our topic extraction algorithm to raw text - for use on synopses and subtitles. Roderick got some promising results after he deployed a trial computer instance to the cloud, and tested the speech-to-text part of the system with a few test files. He’s preparing for having many more instances running concurrently next week. Matt finally came to a manageable solution to get the R&D network into our office. Chris N has been working on our P2P-Next LIMO deliverables - a report and demo code.

Vicky S pilot tested a different method of prototyping and evaluation using a 'wizard behind the curtain' approach. It's quick to do, in theory, but has to be sophisticated enough to convince the user that it's real. She wrapped up some investigative project work, writing a presentation and setting up meetings with production teams.

Marc has been banging his head against the proverbial brick wall trying to organise an interactive storytelling show and tell workshop for February while continuing to work on his Learning Languages speech processing app.

I hosted Rachel from Manchester University on Monday, who came in to show recent work on her attempt to data-mine Twitter. Dom and I went to Metabroadcast for the quarterly review of ABC-IP. There was cake again! Chris L and I showed our research at a BBC rights event - I then showed Chris round the wonder that is Bush Hose. I had an all day R&D Leadership awayday. And then it was the weekend.

Back in the studio, the Little Printer announcement triggered a wave of public attention that quickly grew to a towering tsunami of electronic enquiries. Zendesk is fast becoming Application Of The Week and customer service is faster becoming a widely held expertise.

Simon has continued to display superhuman project management prowess until today when he conceded the fragility of a mortal shell and bowed out early with an unpleasant sounding cold. He has been involved heavily in pretty much all studio work and continues to be an organisational epicentre from home.

Kari spent the afternoon concurrently introducing Helen to the studio systems and pushing LP emails under the appropriate eyeballs.

Matt Jones is working hard to steer multiple projects for Uinta with one hand while orchestrating proposals and ‘sales’ with the other. It’s like watching Fantasia but with robots and rockets where enchanted brooms once stood.

Alex shifted his attention from creating nicely thought through visual design for Little Printer to nicely thought through visual design for Uinta. He continues to stick rigidly to ‘New Health Century’ when most have failed. Namely, myself.

Denise lends an assured lilt to customer service and continues to carefully broaden Little Printer’s personality.

When not wrapped up in paper suppliers, Andy is working closely with Uri on manufacture and with Durrell and Tom on “the Bridge”. He also attached some LEDs to a pair of gloves which looks well glam and most people thought was proper ace.

Timo has been joined by Alex in Berg 9 this week. It is said that is you listen carefully, at quiet moments in Shoreditch, you can hear the sound of Drum ‘n’ Bass emanating from their lofty tower. I think I saw Alex drag a sub-woofer up there the other day. I hope they’re ok. Timo is working on a proposal for Silverton while editing footage for Uinta and guiding UI thinking.

Matt W is working tirelessly to transform short emails into long phone calls and casting telescopic thoughts into the future to create the roadmap for Little Printer. He is also working on accounts.

James can be found scouting for ways to improve the LP IA. He returns with answers to questions we didn’t know we had. He briefly wore a snood like a sweatband and still looked cool.

Nick has returned from Balham and is now working closely with Tim Bacon to draw a vector between video, data and 3D software to mind bending effect. I just had a glance some work in progress. It’s difficult to comprehend what it all means but it looks incredible.

Lots will change next week. The mounting anticipation is hotter than a … you get the idea.

It could be you! If you have a combination of excellent Finnish and some experience of architecture/urban planning, participatory processes and ideas competitions that is.

Bryan built a page at where you can find out more details and how to apply.

(This is a direct test of our notion that embedding a strategic design capacity at the heart of organisations makes the difference. It's a joint project with TEM, World Design Capital Helsinki, and City of Lahti, and hopefully the first of several similar experiments.)

Secondly, the City of Helsinki's Food Culture Strategy project manager, Ville Relander, dropped me a line about the former slaughterhouse building project he's been working on (an incredible space seen here back in June).

The first spaces in these premises are now becoming available for rent and Ville, and the City, are looking for "gastropreneurs" to apply - more info here. (The site's only in Finnish at the moment, so if you're not a Finnish speaker, get into Google Translate and see what you can do. Alternatively, get in touch with Ville directly - he'd be happy to answer any questions.)

Ville's showing people around the space tomorrow (Friday) 9th December at 1300 and again on Wednesday January 11th at 0900. Again, do get in touch with him directly to find out more (contact details at the bottom of this page or try Facebook, LinkedIn etc.).

First dusting of snow this week. Exciting!

BERG Cloud & its first product, Little Printer were announced. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response – it’s been amazing.

As a result, our weeknotes are very, very late.

Schulze was on duty, and before he departed for Africa, he left me these scribblings from our weekly ‘all-hands’ meeting on Tuesday morning (2hrs before we pushed the button on BERG Cloud!):

AJ: final designs on Uinta, working on some Little Printer stuff too

DW: Little Printer! Little Printer! Little Printer!

JM: Uinta, working with Tim Bacon on 3D and also a little on other Uinta brief w Alex and timo. Very husky. Design wookie.

MJ: Working on Uinta projects, teaching at the RCA.

NL: working on Berg Cloud – on radio telemetry and reception testing.

JD: Berg Cloud timezones and being a fashion maverick

AB: finishing the Berg Cloud website, also dev on some final-stage BBC Dimensions work

TA: Finishing the Little Printer film. Uinta material exploration and video prototyping.

MW: Internet provocateur Anne Galloway is sleeping on his couch. He is in Athens for TEDxAthens and working with Schulze to tie down the wild stallion that is Little Printer.

Simon is busy, coordinating all our projects, the BERG Cloud launch, and our impending studio move. Kari is off on holiday and Schulze is on wings to Africa. Before he flies he is stretching versions of the world in his mind to line up a working process that causes molecules and radiation to synchronise into thousands of little printers.

Normal (whatever that is) service maybe resumed in week 339…

Above: a beautiful and violent sunrise at 8:15 am (the picture was taken from my bed!). No snow yet, which is rare, but the light is really something—that is, until the sun sets at 2:30 in the afternoon.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been a visiting researcher at the HUMLab digital humanities lab at Umeå University in Sweden. The community here is wonderful: a great group of postdocs, researchers and happy geeks of different stripes, all exploring technology and digital strategies in their work. How does an anthropologist model a site and its spatial relations? How do we create ideas of futures in literature, text and image? How does religious practice play out in the digital world? It’s been a fascinating set of discussions and scholars to meet and I’ve liked how it’s stretching my brain. I’ve given three lectures since I arrived: in the QUMU lecture series on qualitative methods, in a cognitive psychology class, and my first weekend, as a part of the Umeå Institute of Design Fall Summit (which I wrote about earlier). It’s been great to connect with students at the design school, too: I’ve spent a lot of time with Adam Henriksson, Lorenzo Davoli and look forward to our future exchanges. I feel sad to be leaving so soon.

Um, and I turned 40. 40, it turns out, is awesome. They don’t tell you this when you’re 30 and I think it’s because if we all knew that it was awesome, we’d adjust our ages upward.

My final week here will be even busier, as we host the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. I’m giving a short talk on pneumatic tubes, moderating a virtual and live discussion with Anthony Townsend, Haiyan Zhang and Liz Goodman participating from afar, and hosting a workshop called Future Things with HUMLab postdoc Mike Frangos. I’m really looking forward to seeing friends like Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesonovic, Anne Galloway (double yay: I miss Anne a lot) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and seeing their reaction to Umeå in the winter.  In addition, I’m doing lots of writing writing writing, wrapping up two chapters of the dissertation and finessing another, preparing for job talks in the US, and putting together ideas for classes I’d like to teach.

Hard to imagine that in one week, I’ll return to the States, soak in LA’s sunlight as we hit end-of-term reviews at Art Center for our Graduate Media Design students, a visit to San Francisco, and visits to Madison and then Minneapolis for the family. In 2012? I think I’m staying put.

I demonstrated a web-based interface that Dan N and I had put together around the Roar to Explore classification system. Dan used the wami-recorder flash widget to allow audio to be recorded from a microphone (HTML5 device support for audio recording isn't there yet). We pass the audio to a local server which runs it through the classification system and displays the results in the browser. 90% of the time it thought I was making a pig noise, so there's some work to do to understand how to cope with "real world" data. This week Theo also built a lo-fi digital interactive prototype of the Roar to Explore concept for Vicky to test with children next week on a school visit.

Duncan showed us the work he's been doing on the Whitespace spectrum browser. It's looking great, even if the data is pretty impenetrable to most of the team. Between documenting and load testing he also managed to add centralised logging to our applications using a ruby syslog gem.

Dan N. has been adding features to the Programme List prototype. Notably this week the ability to subscribe to your list of programmes you want to watch using your favourite RSS reader. Tristan's conducted some workshops and planning sessions for the project and had a look at future features and the distinctiveness of the app.

George and I met with Jigna from R&D's green technology area, discussing options for a new service we are scoping, which could help electricity forecasting with input from broadcasters. George also had a long teleconference about a possible new EU project and introduced Ralf N. to Simon and Rupert from the Audio and Music technology team. He attended the R&D Steering Group in Salford and booked up his EU meetings for the new year.

Vicky and Libby spent two days user testing the N-Screen project and learnt a lot in the process. Meanwhile Olivier has had a busy week of W3C related work. He joined the Audio Working group to hopefully help out with the process of our effort to standardise APIs for processing audio in the browser. In the other groups with which he is involved a stand-out discussion centred around rolling captions.

Olivier, Theo, Chris G., Tristan and others have been involved with work-plan, erm, planning sessions this week as well as meeting with various people around the BBC (including Archive Development, Radio & Music, Knowledge & Learning and Strategy) to identify areas of common interest and potential collaboration. Tristan, Chris and Olivier have been collating notes from all of these discussions and have started to filter and make sense of them.

Yves has been working on various datasets of transcribed audio available within the BBC, and trying to convert them into a shape which could be used by SphinxTrain, a tool that can be used to generate acoustic models for speech recognition. He also worked on a patch for Sphinx4 for multiple keyword spotting.

On Friday we welcomed Tony Churnside to the office and had a good chat about what the Audio team in Salford are working on and where we might be able to collaborate. In food news, we took Tony to the legendary HT Harris sandwich shop for lunch and with Christmas on the way George has been busy feeding brandy to his Christmas cake.

Links

• George likes this anti-telemarketing counter script, and this source list generator for Debian. Quite what these two sites reveal about his taste in website design is left as an exercise for the reader.
• Duncan and I get our weekly fix of Ruby news from Peter Cooper's excellent Ruby Weekly newsletter.
• Andrew pointed out this interactive Windows mobile demo. It uses CSS3 to recreate the interface of the phone, and is best viewed, appropriately enough, on a phone's browser.
• And Duncan's been learning about thread based programming using this modern guide to threads.

I can’t believe how fast weeks fly you’re deep in projects. It seems it’s time for another two-week weeknote and a lot has happened again.

Apps4Finland

Few of us visited the Apps4Finland open data & data visualization competition gala at Vanha. We didn’t participate, but one entry had been inspired quite a lot by our work. You can try to find which one from The list of winners of Apps4Finland 2011 competition. All the best to them and to all of the winners! :)

The level of entries was pretty good in the top end. Some of our favorites were:

• ParkkiNappi by Neligrate Oy — which removed coins from the car parking equation by using a mobile app.
• Helsinki Public Transport Visualized was a clear world class winner in the visualization category.
• Miten menee, kunta? — or how are the Finnish municipalities doing? — was a clear enough Google Maps presentation about the major issues in the Finnish country side.
• Tilannekuva.fi was an interesting in-your-face unsolicited redesign work for anational crisis information web service — a one that was decided to build in 2005 after the Asian Tsunami, yet is still not implemented in 2011(!).
• soRvi — a toolkit for simplifying JSON, XML and PC-axis data input to the R programming language. This should make further processing easier.

Sadly all entries are described only in Finnish.

The gala had many moments of people patting each other in the back for doing good work in advancing open data in Finland. And it seems that celebration was in order as the competition had drawn in more participants than any other national open data competition so far. That’s a good result in as small country as Finland. In the words of Petri Kola: “This has been the breakthrough year for open data in Finland”.

We really want to find some time to do some open data visualizations at some point too, but in the meantime we’ll do them for our clients.

Lots of mobile stuff shipped and in-progress

We’ve been really busy in the mobile space again.

For example, a recent multi-platform mobile application designed by Kate, Sauli, Fabian, Aki was released some time ago and was the most downloaded free app in the Apple AppStore for some time. It seemed to have filled a large user need within that crowd.

A long tablet project that Fabian and Teppo have been doing was also finally launched in one app store. Coming out also on another platform soon. Designing for two different platforms at the same time is challenging, very interesting and educational, but requires quite a lot more work than one could perhaps think. It’s interesting to see how tablet UI concepts from one platform are copied & improved in another platform, before they are again copied & improved and ported back to the original platform. And your design lives somewhere in between of these.

We’re also heavily involved in Windows Phone design again. Jukka and Sami are doing a quite cool project which is just a start for a new product line expansion for this client. This has solid base in research and strategical thinking.

Fabian and Teppo are doing another WP7 thing, which needs to be done according to the strictest rules possible this time. This also makes the project quite challenging, as Microsoft’s own specifications for the platform still have some inconsistencies, although the situation has improved a lot from 7.0 to 7.5 Mango.

Anyhow, if you are in need of some mobile design, contact us, we are on a roll currently!

Competitions

It seems that Urbanflow has found its way into a Postscapes — Internet of Things Design Fiction video competition. At the moment some story telling chair is leading the voting, though. Check it out, the competition has some interesting videos in it, although you might have seen many of them already.

Elsewhere, Sami participated to Peloton Innovation Camp, which is a series of events aiming to find practical solutions for the climate change and the energy crisis. It’s organized by the think tank Demos Helsinki and Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, and supported by many organizations.

In the Helsinki event Sami was in a team that won the shared second price for their project Voimala, a mobile energy app (b2c) and a virtual power plant(b2b). The winner was an innovative ad-hoc car sharing pool Weego, aimed at ulitilizing dormant vehicles by larger group of people. This was “kind of airbnb but for cars”. Good job, hopefully it will be created for real.

That’s it for now, see you next time.

Let's start in New York. Justin, Marco and I were pleased to host a launch party for In Studio with Amb. Ritva Jolkkonen, currently the Consul General of Finland in New York. She very kindly welcomed a group of designers, NGOs, and public sector people for a gathering at her residence which features a rather stunning view over central park. Naturally, this is the one time (seemingly) when I did not have a camera on me. You will have to imagine the view.

On Tuesday Marco spent the morning presenting at and moderating a discussion for an event hosted by MIT's Collaborative Initiatives. I wasn't in the room, but from what I hear he did a bang-up job keeping a group of big-wigs on track.

Just to make sure we're not being lazy, we also hosted a book launch in Cambridge, MA that evening, seeing as we were already in the neighborhood. Turnout there was good and it was nice to see some familiar faces.

Back in Helsinki, I had a brief meeting with the Helsinki Ympäristökeskus (Environment Center) relating to our ongoing street food work and Dan and I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart MacDonald. Stuart was in town from Glasgow for an event hosted by the British Council. He alerted us to some of the strategic design work that is bubbling up in the UK, particularly around community planning. We'll be digging into that more in the future as Brickstarter ramps up.

Oh right, Brickstarter is ramping up.

Speaking of the UK, Dan was in London for something less than 24 hours to participate in a meeting of the minds that attempted to merge neuroscience with... urban planning!

Amidst all of this Aalto University reversed an earlier decision about the name of the school which contains the departments of art, design, and architecture. Previously they had announced that it would be called the School of Arts and Creativity, but after significant public uproar it will now be called the School of Art, Design, and Architecture. Personally I see this as very positive. Claiming 'creativity' as a namesake was not only a little greedy, but also rather devaluing of the disciplines that the school represents.

The studio here in Leuven is getting ready to make their final presentation so I will hastily close this weeknote and leave the details of what's happening here for the next post.

Eira, Helsinki, 0830

This was the view in Helsinki (Eira, specifically) this morning as I dropped my kids off at päiväkoti (daycare). For a relatively new Helsinki resident, the sun appears to be doing some extraordinary things - hanging low in the sky for a few hours, and so bouncing off the Baltic at oblique angles and shrouding only the skyline of the city in a canopy of sunlight that just floats at the top of buildings. November, which roughly translates in Finnish to “dead month” I believe, is traditionally the grottiest month, all rain, cold and darkness before the snow comes to bounce the light around more. But so far it's relatively benign, almost mild. Almost.

Anyway, last week was spent picking up the pieces after the aforementioned Australia trip. I was able to spend a little time with Marco, who was largely knee-deep in stewarding Low2No and Exchange towards the end-of-year finishing line, trying to keep intent intact in both.

Justin and Bryan were in the USA, working on the NYC and Boston book launches for In Studio (both of which have now occurred, and went well by all accounts). Bryan and I managed to catch up about our work reshapng our office space and culture, with Tapio. We’re trying to prototype a new organisation, in line with our new strategy processes with Paula + team, through prototyping new approaches to spaces and systems.

I spent some time on this, and some time on Low2No also, eating up a forthcoming workshop with Arup, Experientia and Granlund, hoping to take the vision down a notch towards strategy; or really, a set of projects which exemplify and unpack the strategy.

Also, much writing. Not least for an upcoming shortish book on strategic design, picking up some of the leads from In Studio; it  will include a short diatribe on why I think design thinking is largely a dead-end (before you send me hate-mail, please note the active modifier “largely”.)

I was also lucky enough to receive a visit from Seoul’s Hope Institute, who are perhaps the premier social innovation outfit in South Korea. As usual with these social innovation types (see last week) lots of overlap in terms of intent and approach. Thanks to Sunkyung and Yang So for swinging by on the way home. (Finnair’s strategy of making Helsinki the best European hub for Asia can really work in favour sometimes.)

Nice also to see Patricia McCarney, from the Global City Indicators facility, a colleague from the HDL Sustainability studio team, who was also in town briefly as part of a panel for an architectural competition.

I also had a coffee with the intriguingly anonymous blogger behind Jees Helsinki Jees, one of the best Helsinki0based blogs in terms of unpicking and critiquing the way the city is working. Or not. Sharp, acerbic and informed, it's good to see this kind of contribution to the conversation in a culture which can tend to shy away from uncomfortable topics. Her posts on parking regulations are worth the (free) price of admission alone.

And last but far from least, a really good meeting with the City of Helsinki, of which more later hopefully.

Finally, a new project from one of the world’s most interesting design firms (disclaimer: also good friends) BERG London, which subtly, wittily, playfully, respectfully and just plain smartly connects digital stuff to everyday physical contexts, habits and experiences in a way that has previously been beyond, well, most. Welcome, Little Printer.

Barbara reports that she had a very good week in FI-CONTENT-land with UX proceeding to scope out work. She then dashed over to Brussels with George for a formal project review at the European Commission. Happily, they got very good marks.

Chris and Yves worked on the Roar to Explore classification prototype, which takes the sounds of approximately 1000 examples of children making animal sounds and attempts to extract "features" from the audio. Using 21 MFCC coefficients together with a single gaussian covariance matrix gave an accuracy of around 75% and led to a week of guesswork in the office between owl and elephant noises. Chris is hoping to talk to anyone who has experience of selecting audio features for this kind of task, so leave a comment or get in touch if you do!

Yves also worked on speech/music segmentation, writing a Vamp plugin for it. Vamp is an audio analysis plugin format and his work is on Github. Using the plugin, Yves was trying to derive a measure of how much music there was in an individual programme, to get a rough idea of whether we would have the rights to put them online, so it's not very accurate. It's quite fast though, as we intend to run it on a very large collection of programmes.

Recommender algorithms abound with Chris Newell completing a comparative study of recommender algorithms based on minimal user feedback. Collaborative filtering appeared to give the best overall results.

Meanwhile, Becky launched the first part of her internal Online Recommender Field Trial, which is to gather user feedback to help evaluate the performance of a number of recommendation algorithms. So far the trial is running fairly smoothly, and she is just starting to do some preliminary calculations with the data, which are showing some interesting results!

Theo presented the "News Follow" project findings to the News User Experience and Design team, which was well received. He's also been working on LIMO, writing up UX for the documentation and preparing a proposal for where to take the project next. I've been taking Theo's designs for the LIMO demonstrator and implementing them using a heavy dollop of CSS3. Chris Needham has been working with Sean on the GStreamer live stream system that will be hooked up to the demonstrator interface. Chris made a breakthrough late on Friday afternoon, leading to much wooping in our IRC channel.

Vicky B. has been in a cycle of planning/refining/practising for user testing of NoTube's N-Screen prototype. Vicky and Libby will be testing this second screen application for choosing what to watch with 10 participants in the Centre House user testing lab next week. They hope to find out how people respond to the different types of programme suggestions in N-Screen, and to learn more about how sharing suggestions with other people in a small group using N-Screen can help the group decide what to watch on TV together.

After kicking off the week with a visit to BBC Monitoring, Tristan chatted with the Future Media Radio & Music team about their plans and priorities and is going through some final checks before we can make the Programme List alerts live, which is the most-requested feature. He's also been wondering if there's a better alternative to the 5-star rating system?

Left, age 29. Right, age 39.

Today, I am 39. Tomorrow, I will be 40. 

A decade ago, I was miserable. I had just met people who would become dear friends (Louisa, Tom) in Chicago and who I still adore, but didn’t know them well yet. I’d been laid off twice in a year. My boyfriend and I had an acrimonious breakup. I’d just bought a condo and it was beautiful but I couldn’t unpack. By July 2002, I gave up and moved back to San Francisco. I thought I’d return to the dotcom and web world of my 20s and my old friends.

But that’s where everything began to change. Three days after arriving in SF, Judy Wert and Nathan Shedroff started recruiting me for a professorship at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, and right after I turned 31, I found out I got the job.

In my 30s, I…

spent most of my 30s in and around design and architecture schools. I was a professor at Ivrea, a master’s student at Yale and a PhD student at Princeton. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would have gone back to school, let alone at an Ivy League institution. I probably wouldn’t have imagined that I’d be a design professor. I really probably wouldn’t have imagined I’d become an architectural historian or an historian of cybernetics and artificial intelligence.

started teaching. I love teaching and even more than that, I love advising students on their projects.

lived in Chicago, Italy, San Francisco, New Haven, Princeton and Los Angeles. I have lived for a month or more in Copenhagen, Bangalore, Berlin, Montreal and now, Umeå, Sweden.

loved a lot.

met wonderful people, stayed in touch with old friends, found my way back to people who mattered dearly, and yet still miss people I’ve lost so much.

ended up in places I never would have guessed.

Tomorrow, I will be 40. I…

don’t own a home, I’m not married, I don’t have children, I don’t have a dog. Thinking that all of those things will change in the next few years.

have friends as young as 20 and as old as their 70s. I love navigating the things we have in common across our ages. I’m friends with people I loved more than I can possibly explain. I’m friends with generous people and new people and people I do projects with and people who visit and people who invite me to wonderful places and people I admire. Lots of people I admire.

will finish a dissertation and then I’ll become a professor, if things go the way I hope they will.

still love music and am better clued in thanks to my hipper friends.

don’t plan to go skydiving because I prefer the view from the plane and scuba diving to the thought of hurtling through the air.

don’t have a bucket list and don’t know that I want one. Life’s good enough, the way it’s unfolding.

I’ll report back from 40 but in the meantime: thank you, 30s, for being so weird and surprising. Nothing went the way I would have expected when I was 29, but it’s so much better than what I could have imagined. I’m thankful, I’m amused, I’m happy.

As for me and my tardiness, I can only point to the impact of a 4.5-day trip to Australia. I'm a member of the South Australian government's Integrated Design Commission Advisory Board, and we were due a meeting. As that's a long way to go for a meeting, every other minute was accounted for with some form of productive activity, save a jetlagged dawdle around Darlinghurst which I mentioned here.

Darlinghurst, Sydney

The advisory board is good: it also features John Denton of Denton Corker Marshall (non-Australian readers may know their multiple-award-winning Manchester Civil Justice Centre building or their work at Stonehenge), plus the writer/critic Elizabeth Farrelly, who I'd long wanted to meet, as well as Dr. Graham Hugo, Prof. Catherin Bull, Prof. Janice Birkeland, Assoc. Prof. Joanne Cys and Jim Hallion from SA Dept. of Premier and Cabinet. 

We have a good session in the morning discussing progress on strategic campaigns like Adelaide's 5000+ urban renewal/city redesign project, and how to link, say, a particular riverbank project to wider strategic change that might stretch right across South Australia (I'm always looking for Trojan Horses!)

Hot Adelaide

In the afternoon we visit two local productive centres—Adelaide College of the Arts and The Jam Factory. Hearing the staff talk was fairly inspirational, as was seeing the students, craftspeople and artists at work. The live glassblowing at the Jam Factory was quite a blast, though it did occur to me that the heat outside on the street was approaching that of the kiln inside. Quite different to the Helsinki I'd left a few days before (although I'd seen similar scenes in a lovely archive documentary piece about the great Finnish designer Kaj Franck at an exhibition at our Designmuseo a few months ago.)

The work that Integrated Design Commissioner Tim Horton, and State Government Architect Ben Hewett, are doing in South Australia is really interesting. They're closer to government than us i.e. actually embedded within the core of Dept. of Premier and Cabinet, but it's one of the few other projects we know of worldwide beginning to build a strategic design capacity at the core of government. Thanks to Tim, Ben, Sky, and the rest of the team for a good couple of days.

I was also hosted by the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) and much thanks to them as well, especially Sarah Stokely and Brenton Caffin. I had a good private session with them, also in Adelaide, and their projects—especially Radical Redesign and Family-by-Family—are well worth checking out. Again, fantastic work.

TACSI also co-hosted a public lecture I gave in Adelaide with the IDC, as well as a 'Social Innovation Dialogue' seminar I ran in Sydney (this was also a joint effort with Australian Social Innovation Exchange, whose Steve Lawrence came through Helsinki a few weeks ago, and was moderated by the great Martin Stewart-Weeks.) (Thanks to Alex Roberts at the Australian Government's Public Sector Innovation site for a nice write-up). 

Darlinghurst, Sydney

All that plus an interview on Radio Adelaide's show The Plan, with Angelique Edmonds (it's the South Australian version of Melbourne's essentially peerless 'The Architects', on Triple R)  and a newspaper interview too. Phew.

Back in Sydney at the end of the week, I caught up with Gerard Reinmuth, a principal at one of Australia's most interesting architects' practices, Terroir (based simultaneously in Sydney and Copenhagen, as well as on the twitters.) Gerard is also Practice Professor on the Architecture at University Technology, and so I spent a enjoyable if challenging last day in Australia as part of a panel reviewing work on the course Gerard has been teaching over the last few months (panel also included John Choi from Choi Rophia and David Neustein of various. Strategic issues were also to the fore here, as the project was a Sydney-based detention centre for immigrants (talk about a loaded topic); but also much discussion of the particular qualities of building and site. Another excellent project.

So that was week 139 that was.

Quite a few people are working on aspects of the Notifications API, which will be part of the Programmes List but will hopefully be useful for other purposes too. Duncan's been continuing work on the API itself, while Pete's delivered a nice design for basic alerts, and handed over to Theo for planning the next phase of design development.

There are also several people working on LIMO ('lightweight interactive media objects') as part of P2P Next - Theo's been working with Andrew Nicolaou on UI and use cases: Andrew's work has involved building a timeline to visualise LIMO event streams. Chris Needham and Sean are looking into GStreamer pipelines for passing external times to a streaming server for use by HTML5 video applications with associated timed data. Personally I'm interested in the potential of the LIMO file format (declarative time-based annotations for video), so I've been working on adapting one of our NoTube second screen applications to use it, and as a consequence asking Chris Needham and Sean lots of annoying questions.

Chris Lowis gave a fun talk at the team meeting about his work on the Roar-to-explore prototype - he discussed some of the problems he's been addressing in the classification of eleven animal noises made by sixty different children. This week he's been segmenting all the animal sounds into individual noises that he can use to train the classifier, and using the QM Vamp Plugins to extract MFCC coefficients from the audio.

A big piece of work at an earlier stage in the process is the FI Content project, an EU project about personal data and privacy. Joanne has finished off the literature review into user attitudes to personal data privacy and security that will feed into FI Content. She says: "Basically, the information people are comfortable disclosing, and the actual information they disclose, is completely contextual - including past experiences and perceived benefits". Meanwhile, Chris Needham and Barbara and others had a workshop to discuss what prototypes they might want to build around user data and personalisation for the project, prompting Tristan to ponder a different aspect of the problem - to research one aspect of a system then ideally we need a whole experience for users. But this means we either have to build the whole thing, build it on top of our current prototypes or build it into an existing BBC product...

George had the daunting - but invigorating - task of showing RadioDNS and Autumnwatch work to the Chair and Vice-Chair of the BBC at the R&D North open day, also having the opportunity to chat to BBC North colleagues, journalists and local businesses about the group's work.

A few other bits and pieces:

• Marc's been exploring extracting historical location-based stories from TV news items in BBC archives metadata and composing 'story arcs' from them
• Vicky Buser has been working out the details of the user testing for N-Screen planned for early December
• Olivier has been mostly doing W3C-related work, including poring through the proposed Audio API specifications
• Yves and Chris Needham have both been working on 'deliverables' - EU jargon for documents with deadlines: Yves on an architecture document for ABC-IP, and Chris on the final P2PNext deliverable on metadata and content discovery.
• Roderick has been at the Conference for Visual Media Production, discovering a great deal about computer vision and visual effects, and helping Peter Schübel show a poster for the Blue Peter Rossendale ski-jump visualisation.
• Tristan reports late-breaking news on Programme List: he got his first reminder from it on Saturday, reminding him to record The Killing.

Finally, we welcome Ralf Neudel from IRT to the lab, working with us on an exchange for a month. Welcome Ralf!

Links of the week:

• Yves has been experimenting with Echoprint, with the goal of applying it to radio streams and identify tracks in there.
• Duncan has been re-reading a post on Unicorn, and also understanding RVM wrappers.
• Tristan likes the idea of exploring some of the overlaps of desirable, profitable and possible.
• Olivier had a lot of fun looking at some of the audio API demos (Bohemian Rhapsicord and the Drum Machine amongst his favourites), and liked the thought-provoking approach of this article, arguing that videos which claim to envision the future shouldn't be set in a perfect, sanitised world.

After having a second baby in the family, I’m back from some luxurious paternity leave time that Finland has to offer. Actually, I’ve been back for some time now, but getting back to grips with weeknotes is apparently a step harder now that one’s sleep time is drastically cut, again. Nevertheless, a small baby is always a quite cute thing to have around.

Things of National Importance

Good news in the national service design front. We won a cool, multi-year deal to be the selected service designers for a big “governmental organization”, let’s say. We and them are eager to get projects rolling already, but it seems this stuff will mostly get going next year. This is quite important, since the huge money this organization moves around is actually used for the benefit of the Finnish people, especially the ones who are not so well off. It’s good to be a part of doing something good.

We also managed to get ourselves into talks with another big national player. If everything goes well we might one day be improving a service or two you hate so much today. But this might take long to materialize. But I’m actually quite surprised how easily we got into this position in the first place. I guess since the big de facto players in this field are now so tarnished because of their constant failures that people feel it’s time to try something new for a change. I support this line of thought.

On-going and Upcoming

There’s good bunch of projects for Windows Phone 7 going on at the moment for various clients. And implementation support for a tablet case. About four TV related projects too.

There’s a really nice revolutionary project in the pipeline, starting in December and last for few months. This would have not national, but really international effect. The selected team is quite excited about this already, although it still needs a final seal of approval [pictured above].

2012 Interaction Awards

In case you missed it, Nordkapp and Urbanscale are shortlisted in the 2012 Interaction Awards with the Urbanflow thing. No matter what happens in the competition, it’s awesome to see us among companies like Frog, Nokia, R/GA, HUGE, Microsoft and so on. I’d like to congratulate the Umea Institute of Design, a great IXD school from our neighboring country Sweden, for being on the list too!

Photo credit: Sealed friendship by Andrea

Between bouts of project planning and other exciting administrative duties we've been continuing to drive our research into the street food of Helsinki. Below is a snippet of that, one of four narratives that we open the booklet with. They're meant to give snapshots of different key moments in the development of Helsinki's food culture. As you might guess, we're much more interested in the stuff around the food than the victuals themselves.

Ullanlinna, 1960 

The woman shifts nervously from foot to foot outside the restaurant’s doorway. Above her, a green neon sign sputters into life, casting the restaurant’s name in flowing script across the elegant square, although the sun seems to have no intention of disappearing anytime soon. Still, it was late, and he was late.

She dares not go into the restaurant without him. This is not simply a matter of etiquette, or timidity on her part; it’s the law. In Finland, women are not allowed in restaurants unless accompanied by a man, so she waits. She finds this faintly offensive, as she’s heard that the reasoning is that women in a restaurant or bar on their own could only be there for one thing, and it wasn’t the food.

Dancing isn’t allowed either, for similar reasons; this she finds more ridiculous than offensive. There had been some progress, however: after the Helsinki Olympics, Alko, who set such rules, had deigned to allow the introduction of something equally licentious: the bar stool.

That the new owner of the restaurant is a woman, Mrs. Paukka, is an irony also not lost on her, but it makes no difference. For all her progressive attitudes, the woman had never been to a restaurant before, just as no-one in her family had. But she’d heard about Mrs. Paukka’s new menu—in particular the crispy fried Baltic herrings—and had pestered the man about going for weeks.

The sharp new kiosk across the square, owned by the restaurant and the only one in the country with an alcohol license, is full of men sitting, smoking, drinking, eating gelato, workers from banks and docks alike gathered around the small tables under the trees. She feels their eyes occasionally upon her. The woman pulls a copy of Kaunis Koti from her bag. She’d just bought the magazine from the R-Kioski on Korkeavuorenkatu, and had intended to save it for the tram ride home, but it would prove more useful as a screen to hide behind for the moment.

A skid of leather shoes on the cobbles behind her, accompanied by “Anteeksi, olen myöhässä!” …

Simultaneous to the writing, we're also doing some light data mining. I spent part of yesterday doing a bit of very light scripting to help us more easily pull data from the local restaurant website, Eat.fi. That process looks like this:

Left to right: 1) a map of open restaurants at a particular time, as provided by Eat.fi 2) the code on Eat.fi that makes this view possible 3) a small script that takes a bunch of copy/pasted HTML code and returns a count of the open restaurants 3) collecting that data by hand in Excel 4) visualizing it in Illustrator using a polar graph. Much faster than counting all of the dots on the map 24 times.

We wanted to make a simple point: at the moment when drinking activity on the typical weekend is spiking, food availability is crashing. Restaurants stop serving food and there is very little of a night time economy to speak of. So we made a diagram showing the opening hours of all 569 restaurants in central Helsinki. That's the red line of this diagram:

Red: # of open restaurants at each hour, as detailed in the records of Eat.fi (peaks at 422). Blue: anecdotal observation of public drunkeness (intensity & volume) on a typical Helsinki Friday

The blue line is interpretive, a sketch. It's not based on data at all. As we evolve this diagram we'll figure out a way to handle the discrepancy between these two (one based on data and one anecdotal observation) but for now it's shaping up as a way to illustrate the point. The fact that the red hoop and the blue hoop scarcely overlap is one (small) part of the reason why saturday morning the streets are dotted with puddled of vomit and why alcohol related injuries and assaults are high.

Of course this has a direct impact on the individuals whose health is impacted or who are the victims of violence or property damage. It also indirectly effects the efficacy of Helsinki's tourism strategy that seeks to make this a globally competitive destination. So here too the details matter.

The primary offering today in Helsinki street food. Photo: Kaarle Hurtig for Sitra

As you can see, to make at point that sits at the intersection of governance, business, and culture we're starting to pull together a range of different sources as well. Mixing ephemeral narratives with the historical development of the market and its regulation from 1900 onwards; bits of data with rich imagery; interviews with close observations. 

Mid afternoon coffee at Camionette

We've been moving between conversations and interviews with organizers and activitists like Olli Sirén, who has been the public face of Ravintolapäivä or Tio Tikka, who started Helsinki's only current food truck to The Public Works Department, who Dan and I visited this week.

Snapshot from one of the restaurants open for the first Ravintolapäivä

In our booklet we're pulling together a bit of the history, current evidence, and indications of where there is untapped potential for innovation. Ultmately we are looking into the past before speculating about the next hundred years of everyday food in Helsinki and how we can make them even better. And in that regard we're focusing on how the dark matter, all the bits that situate food within our everyday lives—or not.

And to end, an observation about the color of milk packaging in northern Europe, provided by the ever amusing and insightful The Kaspar Stromman Design Blog.

As I was slowly making my way back from the W3C Technical Plenary week in California, I missed a big meeting (and equally massive amounts of cake, I am told) between the R&D Audience Experience and Prototyping team, which are due to slowly merge into one within the next few months. The two teams were already collaborating on occasion, and this was an opportunity to explore the many overlaps in our work. On the same day, Tristan also met with Nikki, a visiting academic from the US who wants to know about innovation and journalism in the BBC.

Yves has been finishing off a paper submitted to the WWW'12 conference in Lyon, about automated DBpedia tagging of speech audio. He also had a catchup with World Service to show them where we got to, and what kind of applications we can build on the data we are deriving. He worked on trying to make broadcast-related part of schema.org a bit better than it currently is, by basing it on the Programmes Ontology created for www.bbc.co.uk/programmes four years ago.

Work on the new iteration of the Programme List is ongoing. Duncan and Dan have been working on notifications for it and now nearly got end-to-end Twitter alerts that can be set on a per broadcast basis. Oh, and they've been writing tests, tests and more tests. The team is not sure yet whether we'll release the new iteration in this state or just test it as a closed trial, we know it's got limitations. Release early, release often?

On the LIMO front, ChrisN and Sean have been digging into the internals of a number of streaming tools, including Flumotion and GStreamer. Andrew N., still on a high after the Mozilla Festival where he participated in discussions about personalisation vs privacy and 3D Robots, has been looking at ways to visualise the event timelines we're using in LIMO, especially Butter, which is used in Mozilla's Popcorn Maker. An impressive, responsive editing app built using web technologies. Speaking of popcorn, Chris N also sent me a link to Popcorn.js, which just launched its version 1.0. Popcorn and WebGL were used to build the impressive interactive documentary "One Millionth Tower".

On Thursday, while Theo and Andrew were joining Vicky in Manchester for the "Roar to Explore" workshop, we were treated with some excellent show-and-tell: Yves and Roderick showed us the latest work on the ABC-IP, including an API and interface used to queue, move and process the 50 terabytes of BBC World Service audio which the project aims to analyse and organise by topic. Andrew McP also showed us some of his team's work on captioning, including a cool Twitter bot alerting you when particular terms are mentioned on bbc programmes.

Speaking of captioning, I came back from the TPAC with some homework to do as part of our involvement in the W3C Text Tracks community group, and started a community effort to document which of the many features of the timed text standard TTML are commonly used.

And finally, our planning effort is now reaching epic proportions. Led by ChrisG and Tristan, a number of us have started booking in a load of chats with people about our future direction of work. Tristan started first, and on Thursday had a good chat with Mark and Ian from the PSP team (they do user data, social and recommendations work) about their goals, problems and ideas.

Links of the week:

• Duncan is excited by this site on UK Cycling Events
• Tristan sent a whole week-end's worth of reading, with this list of New genres of media, why The Social Graph is Neither, a column on automaticity (which is especially interesting in the context of the Programme List), and this excellent html5 smiley
• ... and my own reading list this week (plus last week) included a rant on internet blog comments, A "Brief" Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, and finally the moderately non-ranty observations by Jan Chipchase on face recognition. Oh, and this entirely-rant-free font made by averaging a lot of other fonts, too.

“People are active themselves instead of waiting for others to do things on their behalf. After all, local well-being is built on the people’s own initiative and activity,” [project manager] Mira Sillanpää points out. “You must also remember that it is not always about creating all-embracing solutions for the long term. Small changes can also have a huge impact. If the needs of the local residents change, the services provided by local authorities must change accordingly.”

In Mira's observations as quoted above, there are familiar tones of the ethos of prototyping, of beta, and of iteration. But perhaps more profound is what she gets to at the end: that times change, needs change, and that our public services should be similarly agile. In other words, being able to end programmes gracefully is as important as starting them intelligently.

And this ties to another aspect of the project which is embeded in the very name of the work: Reviving Village Within a Town. Lurking here is a recognition that scale matters too. The project is located in Hämeenlinna, a town that includes a number of smaller villages. By making room for local communities to conduct low-risk experiments in their own areas, we gain the ability to test and iterate at a more manageable scale before growing or replicating what works to other communities.

In other words, early innovations are not for everyone, and not for everywhere. Utilizing the small scale—in both time and space—allows us to be more sophisticated about our risk assessments. More of this please.

Twelve thousand kilometers away, in sunny Buenos Aires, the government there is also thinking about the power of the small scale, albeit in different ways. While in Argentina to give a talk as part of the CMD international design conference, I noticed that some of the parks have signs which implore residents to visit a Facebook page like this one. One finds a brief bit of history about the place, an invitation to share stories, participate in events, and to use the public space to organize your own functions. Smart, simple, cheap.

CMD is housed in a large building that used to be a fish market. It's vast!

But to CMD, the main point of the trip. The Centro Metropolitano de Diseño is a facility sponsored by the city government of Buenos Aires in an attempt to boost the creative industries. It's a bit similar to the the Design Forum here in Helsinki, except CMD also includes incubation space for young design-led companies. Under the ambitious leadership of Enrique Avogadro, CMD are expanding their focus to look at the potential for design-related business and programmes that are able to generate social capital in addition to financial capital. Being located next to one of Buenos Aires' villas provides extra imperative. This is the context in which I was there to share Sitra's work on strategic design, and particularly what it means to practice design in a public sector context.

Back here in Helsinki, as we continue to develop our work on the mysterious exchange project, we've been looking at things like this Bloomberg Innovation Delivery Fellowship. And then for no particular reason other than the fact that we saw it from a couple different people on twitter, also MIT's Atlas of Economic Complexity.

Dan spent a couple days in Sigtuna, Sweden where he was part of an international workshop hosted by MISTRA, The Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, who are undertaking an ongoing indea development programme to identify new areas of research. After that he and I were consolidating thoughts on some small renovations to the Sitra tower.

Marco was in Finland but in and out of the office, including giving a talk at a Fortum event as well as taking part of the ongoing World Design Capital public sector working group.

Justin took a day trip from Boston down to New York to meet with the consulate there and begin preparations for an upcoming book launch later this month. He's also taking care of logistics for a launch in Boston, so if you're interested in either of these, check back in a week or so for further details.

And daylight savings time happened, so it's officially dark here. This was week 137.

Tristan continued connecting with colleagues across FM to discern their priorities, problems and points of interest in order to help focus thinking on future project possibilities. Alongside this, Tristan and Theo talked to the iPlayer team about what we've learnt from The Programme List so far. Duncan, Dan and Pete continue their octopus-wrestling to integrate the much-requested alerts/reminders features in the current round of Programme List work.

Theo, Liz and Vicky S. rapidly organised a presentation of their findings from the "Following the News" study. Vicky has also been planning a workshop for collaborative prototypes of radical UIs with BBC North designers. Thanks to our colleagues in CBeebies Radio, we have the first batch of sound samples to start work on a technical feasibility study for a playful audio interface.

Joanne went to the UCL interaction centre's (UCLIC) 10th anniversary. While Joanne and Vicky are proceeding at good pace with their research on data activity control and portability, Barbara has been submitting three deliverables for the project and working on the presentation for the FI Content project review due in Brussels later this month.

In abstraction news, this week Andrew has been thinking a lot about Sea Trout -- through his re-formatting of Autumnwatch subtitles, second screen content and chapter points, which are rich in Sea Trout-y content. Roderick has been thinking a lot about clouds -- estimating the bandwidth requirements for deploying the ABC-IP system. And Vicky B has been mostly thinking about beans -- for the NoTube project. Libby and Vicky also discussed user testing objectives for N-Screen.

And finally, here is the news of activities involving the multiple peoples called Chris.

Chris Lowis has been working on a segmentation method for our audio transcripts based on an implementation of the C99 algorithm. Chris Needham has been continuing work on P2P-Next LIMO, and some FI-Content. Chris Newell and Becky Gregory-Clarke have been finalising the user interface for a recommender system. And last but not least, Chris Godbert and Akua continue their sterling work behind-the-scenes to ensure the wheels keep rolling.

Links of interest:

• Customise QR codes (via Duncan)
• Demo content across multiple screens (via Andrew)

The annual meeting of the radio industry, Radio Festival, happening right now in Salford, has an associated conference called TechCon where all sorts of interesting technical talks and demonstrations take place.

TechCon has an award for Innovation around radio and audio - the shortlisted applicatants show their research to the conference attendees before a panel of judges selects the winner.

This year the RadioTAG application group (consisting of members from BBC R&D, Global Radio and Frontier Silicon) submitted a joint entry for their work.

RadioTAG enables easy, cross-platform tagging and bookmarking of radio, using specifications developed as part of RadioDNS. 

In the BBC, we've been blogging about some of the work we've done using RadioDNS - notably RadioVIS and the work on TAG. One of the best things about RadioDNS is that it's a collaborative project - working with receiver vendors, UK commercial radio companies and worldwide broadcasters to make radio better for all. So submitting a joint submission for work done together seemed natural.

We're pleased that the judges agreed with this approach, and that the RadioTAG work won the award for technical innovation.  See above for a snap of Sean O'Halpin from my team in BBC R&D and Andy Buckingham from the Global Radio Creative Technologies team picking up the award. Not pictured, Robin Cooksey from Frontier Silicon, and many of the other people who worked on this project. Congrats and thanks to all involved. 

Photo credit: Nick Piggott http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickpiggott/6302186341/ (used with permission - CC licence, some rights reserved)

Akseli’s been working on a super secret skunk works project for a startup client of ours with Panu. That’s all I can say :)

Sauli, Teppo, Fabian and Kate have been working on a few projects for a large client of ours. The context is the same, work includes several different screens and input devices, and it’s actually quite cool.

Panu’s been working on some serious corporate stuff, more precicely processes. Due to certain client demands we at the management team have gone through a lot of hoops on figuring and building processes on how to handle a lot of things from everyday stuff like security to more serious anomalies and black swans. You might ask what place does hardcore corporate stuff like this have in a lean and mean design firm? The way we see it, the better we have figured out the dull stuff and then put out of the way *until* the imaginary poop hits the tube, the more we can concentrate on the value we generate for our clients and collaborators.

Tia, Jukka and myself have been wrapping up the consumer study we did a while ago, and are carrying on with the design part of things.

Another thing we’ve all discussed a lot around the office is our point of view(s). We have to be able to offer our clients better and more efficient processes, new concepts which offer better reach and engagement, and overall help them to digitalise their business so that the core itself won’t suffer but instead things will turn out better for all. This is our change to leave a dent into this world, and we will be more opinionated about these things in the future. These are our lead bullets.

Something we also did last week was to reinvent the way we sell our work. Quite exciting, you’ll hear about this soon in our next meeting.

In other news, we also hosted the October IxDA Helsinki at the office. Since the date coincided the first national Fail Day, we thought IxDA should support that notion as well and we themed the day #failIxDA. This worked our quite nicely, we had approximately 50-60 ppl at the office listening short talks about failure. For full disclosure, I am one of the local IxDA Leaders, and the next events will be hosted by Activeark in November, and by Sitra in December.

Right after the IxDA, we had the pleasure of also having multimedia students from the Lahti Institute of Design drop by at the office for a bit of an introduction on what we do, how we do it and then of course a few concrete case studies. Nice easy start for the morning right there.

Every now & then, our website earns its perks by being either partially or just blatantly ripped off. For a designer, someone copying your work can be a compliment. However, sometimes copying takes such amounts of douchebaggery things get ridiculous. This time, some clever fellas decided to copy our site completely and make it ugly. How did we find out? They left our Google Analytics code intact in the source. Nice work!

And last but not least, public engagements: Playful was held in London in the week before the last. I was honored to be invited there along with the likes of scifi author Al Robertson, Lousie Downe, Last.fm’s Matt Sheret, Naughty Dog‘s Richard LeMarchand (the lead designer for the Uncharted PS3 game series) and probably the best, and most provocative speaker of the day Georgina Voss. For more, see the Wired article, the Playful website and check out my slides below. Our friends Third Wave Berlin wrote a nice blog post about it, too.

Last week, I also gave a talk about Urbanflow Helsinki and urban informatics at Helsinki City Hall as a part of a workshop aiming to redesign the city portal. Check out the slides below:

That’s it for now— til the next time!

Photo credit: 2 year old has been using the iPad by Teppo

Duncan got a custom scheduler app using the momentapp API up and running on our servers and has started firing HTTP requests to this so we can send notifications.
Pete's been working with Laura to consolidate the UX thinking around the Programme List alerts and wireframe some basic preferences options.

Sean was in Prague on Monday and Tuesday this week at the GStreamer
conference. One theme that emerged was that streaming protocol authors have recognised the need to include timestamp information in-band for synchronisation. Andrew dusted off the Autumnwatch secondscreen content to see how we can repurpose it for the LIMO project.

Roderick is deploying the tagging code of ABC-IP in the cloud in order to run speech recognition over the decades of programme content we have. Chris L has been working on some serious maths for the segmentation of noisy transcripts - "The maths is making my head hurt a bit".
And Yves has mostly been working on a paper we plan to submit at the WWW conference about this automated tagging.

Barbara's been co-ordinating our partners in the FI-Content project and re-focussing our work to issues around gathering and managing user data. Joanne has been collating academic research around privacy, security, ownership and transparency and is starting to make sense of it all and Chris N has mostly been researching the technology background for it.

Libby's been finishing off documents for NoTube, updating the crid-to-pid resolver and working with Dan Brickley on a simple API to underpin the N-Screen work.

George was in Poland for EU meetings in the first half of the week and has since been thinking about how the BBC can be more open. Chris G, as usual, has been preoccupied with how we do our work. Me, I've been thinking about what we do, talking to people about user data, writing presentations and trying to take control of my inbox.

Olivier's been prepping for his trip to the W3C annual meeting this week and diving into the proposed identity management technologies of browserID and WebID.

And finally, we said goodbye to Kat. Well, we said goodbye at the pub on Wednesday night, over Akua's magnificent carrot cake on Thursday, and then finally on Friday. We wish her all the best in her new ventures!

Bryan and I caught up with Ville Relander, the City of Helsinki's PM for their Food Culture Strategy. Many, many ideas spinning out of that one, as food culture is one of the most exciting and rapidly moving development areas in Finland. Equally, food is a way in to so many everyday systems: local culture, logistics, entrepreneurship, national identity, immigration, sustainability, service culture, retail, smart systems, production, industry, popular culture, urban planning, health, education, waste, the relationship between urban and rural; it's all in there. It's a key area for us, in terms of systemic change. We look forward to working with Ville on this.

(Incidentally, we met at Kluuvi, the newly-opened complex in the city centre, which is worth a look. Not least the excellent Eat&Joy Maatilatori (farmers' market) in the basement.)

Sitra also hosted a visit from Fundación Chile, one of the few organisations with a similar remit and position to ours. As part of the visit, Bryan and I met with Francoise Tirreau Glasinovic and Alejandro Tocigl.

It happened to be a rather beautiful autumn day, so we took Francoise and Alejandro for a walk around the harbour from Ruoholahti to Moko on Perämiehenkatu. Although there are key differences, the similarities between our organisations are manyfold. We talked for a couple of hours and we were probably only just getting going. Key areas of interest included different tactics for overcoming the tendency of project teams towards silos, or conversely towards proliferation of project ideas, and how to measure multiple forms of 'capital' from investments and projects, such as those suggested by concepts such as shared value. And so in turn, how to decide what to do in the first place! Many thanks to Francoise and Alejandro for dropping by and for the great conversation—we will continue the dialogue.

The strategy and budgeting process rolls on, and fills many of the gaps left between these conversations. We're knee-deep in it, but the end of the beginning is in the sight. It was good to hear that we (Sitra) had a very well-attended external stakeholder day recently, providing strong input from outside. Bryan and I will be working with our colleague Tuula to ensure all these conversations turn into useful tools for the organisation.

In between all that, it was a week of engagement through events. Marco was in Taipei for much of the week, at the 2011 International Design Alliance Congress, presenting Low2No and taking part in a panel on urbanism. Justin was at DMI Design Management Annual 36: Design at Scale, in New York (and good to hear from Justin that old friends Jake Barton and Nicola Twilley were on top form.) Bryan took off for Buenos Aires for the Centro Metropolitano de Diseño for various events, including giving a talk at the Design Festival, and general scouting. I was holding the fort in Helsinki all week, but will report back on last week's Tallinn conference shortly, and prep for next week's trip to Sigtuna for a Mistra gathering.

I did however give a talk at Nokia on Friday, to their design team (Marko Ahtisaari invited us, after we attended Joi Ito's talk a few weeks back.) Interesting times at Nokia, given the announcement of their new phones the day before. It remains to be seen whether this is a comeback, but there are always some smart cookies there, and the Lumia/Asha/flexible concept phone combo has already changed the conversation around the company. Thanks to Matt George for hosting, and organising a good crowd.

MIT Press!

While out and about, no doubt preparing for Snowtober, Justin also snapped this pic of In Studio in situ at MIT Press, in Cambridge Mass, which means of course that you can buy it there. As reported last week, it's getting out there. Do keep your feedback coming in—it's invaluable learning for us.

At DMI NYC, Justin had given a quick welcome/overview to DMI Helsinki in 2012. On related matters, congratulations to Cape Town, winner of World Design Capital 2014.

Helsinki is next year's WDC, and as with the Finnish winter, we are beginning to sense its imminent arrival. Preparations and planning are beginning to transform into activity, and it will be fascinating to see what it feels like on the street. I remember being impressed with how Victoria's State of Design festival was so vividly present in the city of Melbourne, rather more than Sydney's Design, say (no fault of the very capable Sydney Design organisers by the way; just some key differences in levels of funding and particularities of urban fabric and culture.) It wasn't so much painting the town red as turning the city over to design for a couple of weeks. It's a challenge to sustain that for an entire year, but the programme for Helsinki WDC look to be nicely diverse at this point.

More to follow on Sitra's involvement with WDC Helsinki.

And following last week's links to reports from inside Occupy New York, this from inside Occupy London, by Madeleine Bunting in today's Guardian. From "architecture of consciousness" to "key symbolic public space".

If one visits a design book shop they are likely to walk away with an impression that these fields are becoming more and more embedded in work outside the usual cultural territory for which architects and designers are more commonly recognized. The politics of space, the economies of place, the sociology of material, and topics along these lines are increasingly the focus of publications. But is there practice to back up the rhetoric? Yes, some—but not enough of it.

As part of our ongoing work under the banner of strategic design at Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, we have been attempting to address looming issues such as demographic shifts and climate change by developing new roles for designers beyond the comfortable confines of cultural production.

There’s currently a significant gap between the activities of government and most of the design world. Our practical experience has shown that these two realms mostly exist in a current state of indifference. Governments are largely unaware of the positive implications of design as a way of working that is separate and distinct from the arts and humanities, on one hand, and science or engineering on the other. At the same time, the communities of architects and designers are largely still oblivious to the pragmatic realities of government. Publishing a book is a far cry from shaping policy.

Posters by Mark Clintberg

These parallel ambivalences combine to result in a situation where working between government and design means being outside of both. There is not much of an ‘in between’. Rather than permeable borderland, we find between design and government a “no-man’s land”.

The question of the moment is who will be the intrepid intermediaries who make it their role to bridge the gap and take the first-mover advantages of doing so? As we are in the occasional habit of recruiting these kinds of individuals, we have begun developing a way to identify the skills that it takes to be successful between government and design.

What follows is v0.3 of a skill profile of the successful interloper:

Comfort with Uncertainty & Ambiguity

London, Uk

It’s a fact of the ‘in between’ that one will often find themselves in situations that are uncertain or ambiguous. Being comfortable in such situations is perhaps the most important criteria that we look for. In practical terms this means having the confidence and humility to take part in a conversation about topics that you do not totally understand and being able to wade into situations, contexts, and cultures that you have little or no experience with.

Paul Nakazawa, Lecturer in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, uses the term “pre-factual” to describe situations where there is an incomplete or contested base of facts, thereby leaving those who operate in that territory without stable reference points or established practices. It’s an apt term for many of the pressing issues that advanced governments today are facing, such as financial difficulties, climate security, demographic shifts, and global interdependence just to name a few.

As a society we are now reaching a point of awkward maturity where we are able to understand the potential of humanity to impact large scale systems such as the Earth’s climate, yet we are still without tried and tested means to reverse those negative effects. In this pre-factual condition, those who work at the pivot between thinking and doing have to be comfortable with ambiguous and uncertain conditions if they hope to avoid paralysis by analysis. This implies a different attitude towards risk taking, one that has a sophisticated approach to understanding the probability and likely costs, so that calculated risks can be taken.

Translation

Lahti, Finland

Whether between languages, cultures, professional cultures, or mental models, the ability to translate things that happen in one situation to be useful in another situation is a core skill of the 21st century, where the pre-factual nature of many contexts makes native expertise and experience hard to come by.

Arbitrage—the use of unique position within the marketplace to buy in one place and sell in another at a better return—is ultimately a success of translation motivated by personal gains. But there’s also an arbitrage for the common good: how can models, concepts, and experiences be borrowed from one context and put to good use in another? And more importantly, who is best positioned to accomplish this?

For this reason, individuals who have experience between multiple cultures (either literally or professionally) tend to have more advanced translation abilities and therefore more to draw on in moments of true uncertainty.

Intellect & Emotions

Rovaniemi, Finland: civic structure or giant guppy?

One of the realities of working in the public sector in many contexts is that it does not pay as well as the private sector. Because of this, working for the public good tends to involve some degree of moral compunction, which is very good and important because it’s a sign of commitment—until it gets in the way of judgment.

It’s a fine line between doing good and being a ‘do-gooder.’ The latter tend to have cloudy judgment when tough decisions come their way, while the former can maintain a critical edge even when things are rosy. But going so far as to operate without an emotional ability means being devoid of the essential ability to empathize, so there’s a balance to be sought.

Opportunism & Ambition

Copenhagen, Denmark

Striking a productive balance between intellect and emotions on a personal level is closely tied to pursuing a useful equity between opportunism and ambition in one’s work. We look for individuals who are able to see the big picture and think about redrawing it, but know that huge changes start with small steps. In real terms this means being able to seize opportunities when they arise, even if those opportunities are not perfect (they never will be), because one is able to find a place for them within a more ambitious plan. This is what it means to work today with the future in mind—to straddle a border we’re always, all of us, in the process of crossing.

Get your copy here to read the other contributions by Åbäke, Martti Kalliala, Zak Kyes, Markus Miessen, Karen Mirza, Anni Puolakka, Jenna Sutela, Teemu Suviala, Finn Williams and more.

It has been already over a month since Barbara joined the team and feels ready to give it a go at writing weeknotes – with an Italian flavour ;-) This week everybody has been really busy while munching on the sweets Joanne brought back from her trip to Mexico, apparently they have free Wifi and electric socket points in outdoor spaces. At our R&D North Lab there were some interesting discussions on background research for an audio recognition interface between Vicky, Penny and Max.

Olivier has been busy at Paris Web where he gave a talk on the BBC's adoption of open linked data principles and technologies (similar to the one he has given a few times to internal BBC audiences). His favourite session of the conference was “Using neurosciences in digital design” by Marc Van Rymenant. He also found very interesting the talk by Andreas Bovens from Opera on viewports and media queries for multi-screen / responsive designs. He also mentioned a really nice slide set from Precious on patterns for multi-screen strategies: http://slidesha.re/kiip5y

Generally, Paris Web this year seemed a great conference on web tech, ux and best practices. Not as cutting edge/academic as, say, the WWW conferences, but one of the best audiences I've seen, eager to learn and share.

At our Lab, Chris L. and Yves have been continuing their work on the ABC-IP project looking at automatic segmentation of audio based on the semantic tags extracted from the speech-to-text system Yves built. Interestingly, Yves has found 'Enhanced Topic Vector Space Model', which could be used to formally describe work done on the ABC-IP. Roderick has been working on implementing a message queue system for processing all the ABC-IP data on the cloud, experimenting a bit with rabbitMQ and pika. Metabroadcast (our partner on the ABC-IP project) demonstrated on Wednesday their exciting new prototype driven by our automatically extracted tags and tags aggregated from /programmes.

The final phase of the Limo project is moving at a good pace with Andrew quietly working on his desk trying to compile firefox and ffmpeg. He also had a go at making Chris L's "wherabouts" app like a bit fancier. Chris noted that it's a bit like this situation: http://xkcd.com/303/.

Chris Needham has been juggling work on LIMO and writing initial our initial technical requirements for the FI-Content. His bedtime reading this week was a 200+ page ‘high level description’ FI-infrastructure technical document.

The FI-Content project kicked off its next phase having reflected on the first iteration of use cases testing. Vicky, Joanne, Barbara, Pete and Chris Needham had lengthy discussions on use cases research across all partners and identified key areas of research for our team to concentrate on. Barbara and Joanne have looked at relevant research done and worked on starting to consolidate our research questions into one key theme around user data ownership and control.

On Thursday Joanne went to R&D North Lab with Yves, Vicky and George to meet people from an interesting company's R&D team. George enjoyed a good curry on the journey back from Manchester. On Wednesday night, George spoke about R&D at an evening/ pub event called Hacks and Hackers. Slides are here.

His hectic week ended with telcos on Friday morning followed by a meeting with representatives of German broadcasters in the afternoon to talk about how we do R&D.

With the exception of attending a briefing on The Internet of Things, Tristan has been busy looking at the best solution to include alerts on the Programme List and working with Dan, Pete and Theo on the simplest way to send reminders a few minutes before a programme using direct message on Twitter. Pete and Laura have started working on UI wireframes for it. Please take the survey Tristan and Vicky have prepared [http://bit.ly/qXRm9A] if you have used The Programme List [http://proglist.prototyping.bbc.co.uk], it'll help us design the next stage.

Sean has also been mapping out the frames of reference for the multiplicity of timelines that need to be considered when talking about synchronization with live streaming or ondemand media. He implemented some last minute changes to the RadioTAG spec and then rushed to get an express passport just in time to go to the GStreamer conference in Prague today.

Kat wrote a RadioTAG blog post after seeing the final debrief by Sparkler about the audience research. She has been also working with Theo, Vicky and Liz on analysing the findings from user research they conducted few weeks earlier for the Following the News project. They are all working hard in preparing a final research report for the Following the News project. Theo gave a compelling presentation on Thursday to the rest of the team on the extensive work done on this project.

Ciao for now :-)

Fall in Helsinki's Kaartintori

Back at home, we enjoyed hosting Norway's Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) who came to visit on Thursday. Together with Sitra colleagues Sari, Ossi, and Marja we had a good conversation about the challenge of balancing the need to change public sector culture with the realities of having to do so in a non-disruptive way. This conversation echoed some of the things we discussed in our meeting with the UK Cabinet office mentioned here, as well as the general tone of MindLab's How Public Design? seminar in September.

Budgeting exercises continue, as does the ongoing process of shaping a portfolio of projects for 2012. More about this when we have something stable to share.

I had a fight with the label printer and it won

We're happy to announce that we've added two more bookshops to our fledgling distribution network for the book. Booklounge in Cape Town, South Africa and the SFMOMA Museum in San Francisco, USA will shortly have copies on sale.

Meanwhile, Marco has been steadfastly making his way through out mailing list, sending out copies to some of our stakeholders. His signature-singining fingers are getting a good workout.

Last week Dan entertained us with a quirky video from Finland's history, this week we go to Canada where they've created a creepy origin myth out of Marshall McLuhan's famous line "the medium is the message."

And then, perhaps, to New York, where the Occupy Wall Street protests have become a focal point for contemplating contemporary democracy. Lots of good writing on this, but I particularly enjoyed Michael Kimmelman's analysis in the New York Times:

It so happens that near the start of the protest, when the police banned megaphones at Zuccotti Park, they obliged demonstrators to come up with an alternative. “Mic checks” became the consensus method of circulating announcements, spread through the crowd by people repeating, phrase by phrase, what a speaker had said to others around them, compelling everyone, as it were, to speak in one voice. It’s like the old game of telephone, and it is painstakingly slow.

“But so is democracy,” as Jay Gaussoin, a 46-year-old unemployed actor and carpenter, put it to me. “We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.

“It requires an architecture of consciousness,” was Mr. Gaussoin’s apt phrase.

Recently I happened to spot a micro-protest in a different medium in the subway tubes of Helsinki. Someone has posted EI KIITOS ("no thanks") stickers on most of the advertisements. I like that in both examples there's a politeness to the protest, even if a bit facetious. OWS is by far the more interesting of the two because of the infrastructure that the community has had to build now.

While they are definitely saying no to something, they protestors are also obliged to prototype a constructive example of how to organize human society. And not just the mic checks described above, but an entire miniture society including its own food service, sanitation department, library, and more.

Like any society, that one that has bootstrapped itself in Zuccotti Park has its own issues. Chris Cobb describes in Domus the group's creation of special women-only sleeping areas, for instance, which seems to imply that it's no oasis.

Lately I've been reading a lot of materials from open source movements and feeling as though we're living through a moment similar to the birth of the hippies in the 1960s, and the specific of the OWS story underline this thought. It also strikes me as a particularly American form of protest: complain, sure, but mostly just build the thing you want somewhere else. When you're condemming the global financial system, however, I'm not sure there is a somewhere else. And that's the problem.

Regardless of how the occupation plays out, I hope that one of the more lasting outcomes is an enhanced recognition of the need to develop a new culture of decision making. There are issues when the decisions of 1% outweigh the other 99, as there are when one form of value, such as finacial gain, dominate all others, like environmental and social returns.

A new culture is already emerging as public outrage, social media, and generally high levels of complexity begin to intersect. The real question is whether our formal democratic forums—our parliaments—will be able to handle it in a constructive way. Or if they end up in fisticuffs.

Note: We've had a bit of a technical problem with this post so it disappeared for a better part of Sunday. Sorry about that!

He posted the expected graph of the potential tensions on this very complex and yet very short project (an approximately $100 million project, to be programmed and designed in 5 weeks). Against this, we’ve been tracking the actual developments in the studio. It is a very jagged line in both cases.

Although the project has a long history in other places, and althought the goals had been well-articulated before we entered its trajectory, we’ve found that our peripheral vision was not well developed. Our design and development activity has been affected by an almost daily interjection of unexpected issues arising from a confrontation with reality that had not been present in the previous five years of this project’s development as it made its way through vision, politics, projections and other background stuff.

Part of the complexity is that we are designing for an organization not yet developed, with representation from departmental rather than thematic avatars, without a COO who could help develop a hierarchy of values, and in a comain of funding that will engage both public (governmental) and private (yet to be identified) sponsors.

We’ve tried hard to stay on a solid path but, in addition to the external surprises, we, ourselves, bring matters into the mix that clutter our movement. Every day we uncover data, special interests, individual interpretations, operational scenarios, discipline challenges, differential development, and other (logical) vibrations that shake the confidence, spirit, or energy of the team.

It was an odd delight to have ended the week with a meeting that should have been comfortable and collegial but became competitive and challenging. A delight because its emotion placed it on the stress graph  much higher than we’d predicted for Friday but, as we look to next Monday’s predicted very high stress level (because it would set the tone for the final push week), we think the week could be much more relaxed now that we’ve surfaced a bunch of the underlying clutter.

Lipscani plays the part of a familiar European tourist district, replete with terraces sponsored by beer companies, street vendors, and the steady thump-thump of Euro beats oozing out of cafes with more neon than customers. On the surface it can be generic, but with a closer look one finds moments of genuine and endearing locality. Many of the wares on offer at the street market, for instance, appear locally produced and this includes the sweets (which are very sweet). Pockets of the 19th century, such as the popular brewery restaurant Caru' cu Bere offer a hospitable glimpse of the pre-communist city, not to mention a hearty meal to beat back the chill of an autumn Sunday.

A local wedding amidst the tourists that fill Caru' cu Bere to the rafters

According to locals, the original dream of the reinvigoration of this neighborhood was to create an artists’ quarter. Although the current iteration is more gentrified than this—and it’s no Postdamer Platz, so this gentrification is very relative—gems like the small bar Atelier Mecanic shine through. It’s a sort of high style junkyard where the local cool kids drink amidst a setting various mechanical trinkets repurposed as thoughtful decoration. The communist-era leftovers lining the walls are strong material symbols and it’s tempting to see them as trophies of the conquest, now drained of their robotic animation and relegated to watch from their perch on the walls as contemporary Bucharest thrives. It’s the kind of place where one imagines a new generation of intelligentsia congregating, like the editorial staff of Decat o Revista, an upcoming local magazine on the model of “Wired meets the New Yorker”, or the group of architecture students sketching across a narrow table while I visited.

Sunday afternoon in Atelier Mecanic

But one does not come to Romania without thinking about Dracula, and so to his castle we go. Three hours north of Bucharest is the town of Bran, the population of which has just grown by 80 for Connection, a long weekend focused on building social innovation capacity within central eastern Europe. Initiated by the enthusiastic four-person core of Ropot and executed with a network of partners, the event brings together a wide range of people from Romania and neighboring countries to bring new ideas to the conversation. Carefully crafted as a multi-day event, it’s also designed to build connections and spread knowledge laterally.

Don't let the looks fool you, although the atmosphere was decidedly relaxed, Connection was carefully orchestrated

Blindly-drawn portraits posted as a who's-who of the event

In the spirit of the many social entrepreneurs in attendance, I came to make a simple pitch: details make or break big picture ambition, and design approaches are a useful lens to pursue the details and the big picture concurrently. Under this umbrella I took the opportunity to share Sitra’s work on projects including HDL, Synergize Finland, and Low2No. The latter containing an excellent example of the big picture/small detail balance in Sitra’s efforts to remove barriers to large scale timber construction in Finland. This is driven by the big picture goal of a carbon neutral built environment but involves to specific (but unexpected) actions such as working to change fire codes so that large scale timber construction is possible, not just for us but for others as well.

But I started my talk with a simple observation from the streets of Lipscani: we live in a world of multiple overlapping systems and yet these are all too often sub-optimized in isolation of each other. In just about any European city you can observe this for yourself in very concrete terms by paying attention to the downspouts. Often you will find that downspouts and other external plumbing takes a less than direct path to the ground, and occasionally one that involves significant conflict, such as the photo above with a drain violently puncturing through the decorative plaster work of the building. This is a visible symptom of the architect and plumber not agreeing on which system will take precedence and which will gracefully defer.

The rigidity of different systems becomes extremely apparent in moments of forced intersection

It’s an example of the impossibility of agreeing to disagree when decisions are involved. We can agree to disagree on a philosophical basis because this stays in our minds, but when it comes time to do something in a world of finite space, time, and material, action requires agreement—or violence.

Function piercing decoration, or: the hard considerations of gravity, flow rates of water within a pipe, and the threat of water damage against the soft factors of the cultural value architectural form, symbolic meaning of a building, and connotations that a physical structure conveys onto the organization that sits within it

At the core of this observation, and my pitch that design is positioned as a lens to help us make sense of it as a practice, is the observation that we’re still often clumsy in bringing synthesis to hard and soft factors. In the example above, rain water, flow rates, gravity, etc. vs. architectural form, cultural meaning, social connotations.

To resolve these two into a harmonious whole, as one is able to observe in more considered acts of architecture, requires a synthetic approach that balances the demands of hard and soft factors. This is something that the best businesses do as well. Nokia had touch screen phones much before Apple, after all, but the technocratic approach they took to conceptualizing a phone as a gadget inhibited full consideration of the softer side of the cultural role of a cellular phone. (For what it’s worth, this is demonstrably different now that Nokia Design is under the leadership of Marko Ahtisaari).

And so one of the central aspects of the conversation at Connection was the difficulty of bringing hard economic costs and soft social benefits onto the same ledger so that an attractive investment case can be made to appropriate investors. As groups across Europe are currently struggling with this issue, I was not surprised to see the same here in Romania. What encouraged me, however, was the verve with which some of the attendees took up the challenge.

As groups which aspire to support and enhance local communities increasingly look to social investment rather than grants, an important bit of mindset change is occurring. The more we as a society are able to entertain social returns on investment the closer we are to obtaining one of the basic mechanisms of a healthy social society—one that neither forces each individual to be a self-sufficient island nor forces the state to make unrealistic promises.

Investments come with investors, and investors have a moral obligation to put their money to best use. In the past this has more often than not implied the best annual return in financial terms. Looking forward, the notion of returns will slowly become more open, perhaps also including social returns expressed in monetary equivalent in a manner similar the cap and trade of carbon emissions.

The reason why I gave up my weekend to participate in an event in the middle of Romania is because I wanted to see how this part of the world was thinking through these issues, and what I might be able to bring back with me to our work in Finland. There are a handful of leads I will be following up, but the thing that came through most clearly was the drive and commitment of the participants to devise new ways of addressing the issues they’re concerned about—be it corruption, poverty, social exclusion—with a constructive eye towards the future. Connection itself is a testament to that by virtue of the fact that it eschews the typical conference format of individual grandstanding and hands-off consumption of presentations and instead delivers a weekend of capacity building.

Romania's native carmaker, Dacia

We took turns sharing experiences in finding the right product, developing a business case, and what to look for in policy EU developments that will affect social innovation. But also about very pragmatic skills and tools such as learning how to hone a pitch and how to skillfully use media—both traditional and non. These how-tos were anchored by a mix of stories on the ground from individuals such as Chris Worman who is developing an innovative community ‘loyalty card’ scheme in central Romania and Dr. Anna Burtea who is exploring new commercial opportunities to enhance her foundation’s reach and impact. As examples of social innovation in development they were not all easy-breezy success, and that’s what I appreciated most. The Connection team managed to create an environment where frustration and failures were just as much a part of the conversation as success and scale.

Ropot and their co-organizers take a moment to regroup and adjust plans for the next session

So when I write that I left the event feeling optimistic it’s for the same reasons that I enjoyed my brief time traveling the landscape of Romania: it’s a place that is still in the habit of making things, but equally one that can remake and repair when needed. Perhaps because of the relatively high levels of contrast visible even on the street—I did, I must confess, nearly escape a pack of angry wild dogs—I detected in my fellow attendees both a shared sense of responsibility for the future as well as an imperative to find one’s own specific contribution.

Back in Bucharest, as I type this blog post I am using a wifi network with the password “2030wifi”. An eye on the future, indeed.

Although it's just been found to be in fine fettle in terms of its core missions (link; Finnish) Sitra is looking at its new strategy for the next few years. We're all getting heavily involved in that process—as the Strategic Design Unit, we sit in Sitra's internal strategy function, headed by Paula Laine.

We're also heavily involved in reviewing the design documentation for one of our core projects, Low2No. Justin is stewarding that complex process through, which is not easy given the complexity of the project and the number of stakeholders involved. Note also Justin's writing about some early indications of potential systemic change emanating from Low2No, in terms of other timber construction projects beginning to spring up in Finland.

Bryan was in Romania for a seminar and workshop - he'll post separately about that in a day or so. Marco has been buzzing around the city, meeting potential partners across various projects. Some exciting developments there, potentially around the aforementioned and still mysterious Exchange project.

I've been working more on the Street Food briefing—including spending an early Saturday morning tramping around Helsinki's streets filming somewhat disgusting discarded detritus from Friday's night's various grilli nightclub collisions. More to follow on that. The footage should balance my recent ode to Helsinki, that's for sure.

Earlier in the week, Bryan and I had a great meeting with Steve Lawrence, Executive Officer of the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) who was passing through town. Despite our different backgrounds, we had lots of shared vocabulary, interests and approaches, which was very heartening. Steve had also carefully read In Studio, and had a series of dauntingly perceptive questions for is. It made for a rewarding lunch; thanks to Steve for popping by. Which reminds me, if you're ever in our neck of the woods, do get in touch - we're always interested in people doing similar work.

Finnish education made headlines in the US last week, some of it here in the Washington Post  and some of it here on CNN.

It's a real success story for the country (not least for this dad with two children in the Finnish system!) but one which was also the focus of one our studios last year. Bryan and I in particular are spending a fair amount of time discussing the so-called 'Nordic Model' (see Mary Hilson's book, which I'm reading) and how these broad 'spirit level' systems (see also healthcare, and many other aspects of Finnish daily life) can continue to develop and progress, drawing in external sparks of innovation and accessing new funding models without losing their incredible ability to provide high quality service provision right across the population.

On a personal note, my wife and I had a parent-teacher meeting at our kids' päiväkoti (daycare) recently, which was a) as close to group therapy as I'm ever likely to get (in a good way), and b) utterly instructive and encouraging about the teachers' careful, considered but ultimately warmly human-centred interest in kids exploring their emotional range, their natural environment, their physicality, their social ecosystems, and so on, with barely a direct mention of literacy and numeracy. That comes later, as the PISA results indicate.

Switching gears, it's been extraordinarily thought-provoking to see the Occupy protests spread around the world this week. One of our core concerns is the apparently increasing lack of faith in governments' ability to deliver solutions to today's complex problems (and this despite Silvio gettting a vote of confidence).

That's partly what seems to be playing out here in the Occupy movement, but was also present in the riots in the UK earlier this year, in various aspects of the Arab Spring, and in protests on the streets of Athens, as ell as in numerous other less visible arena. We're interested in understanding the various cultures of decision-making at play at the moment, and in recent history, and in deploying projects which begin to explore various alternative trajectories for governance, at all levels. Anyone interested in this work, or with something to say, please drop us a line.

In terms of toolkits rather than attitudes, visualisation is another of our core interests, so it was also interesting to read another article in The Guardian (NB: other news sources are available), concerning the quality and range of data visualisation on offer, in the light of recent critiques. Personally, I'd agree that many examples of information and/or data visualisation are indeed the mullets of the internet. Yet a good visualisation can engage, focus and stimulate dialogue like few other media. Embedded in that Guardian article, check the (WWF-style-not-really) face-off between David McCandless and the legendary Neville Brody.

As Bryan mentioned last week, our work featured in The Guardian. It's been interesting to observe the reaction to that—largely positive, for which thanks—and how it grew and diversified over the week. One aspect of that discussion within the design discipline concerned picking apart the difference between strategic design, design thinking and service design. To me, these are all quite clearly different aspects of design, albeit with occasional overlaps. To other people? Not so much!

As it happens, I'm writing something that will try to pick that apart a little, at least at an initial level. I'm pottering away at this in the mornings before work (whatever "before work" means), usually at the excellent Gran Delicato café. The text should be out later in the year, all being well. Will keep you posted.

In terms of other ripples from the article, see also this Spanish translation of the piece. We're thinking of making 'La crisis es el momento de que entre en juego el diseño' t-shirts accordingly.

And finally, some links.

A favourite landmark here in Helsinki is the Hotel Torni, a sort of mini-me Empire State from 1928, which is crowned by a fabulous viewing deck. Legend has it that this was designed for mooring airships to, such that airborne visitors from Paris or Berlin, say, could elegantly descend from the airship (somehow?) directly to the bar for a civilised long drink during the white nights. This image is rarely from our minds, for I hope obvious reasons, along with the notion that surely it's time for the return of dirigibles to our skies as passenger aircraft. As a result we found ourself gazing longingly at these wonderful vintage images of the USS Akron and Macon. Unlike the airships intended for Hotel Torni's mast, Akron and Macon were airborne aircraft carriers, from which aeroplanes would enter and exit through a 'plane-shaped opening in the ship's skin (reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote-shaped holes in various other objects). This, they would do via a trapeze. Yes really.

USS Akron

Training plane on USS Akron trapeze

Construction of USS Makon

Main ring design: Hindenburg vs. USS Akron

And I cannot get this data-point out of my head: apparently, during the recent Blackberry outage, traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi dropped by 40%. Oh humanity! A distressing, almost visceral illustration of the interconnectedness of systems across boundaries.

Humanity is partially redeemed by this exploration of abstraction by Bret Victor, however, which has beguiled a few of us all week.

Finally, if you've ever wondered how we open doors here in Finland, it's like this. Or at least it was in 1979. (Press the CC button at the bottom of the video for subtitles, if your Finnish isn't up to scratch.) Do not be a bad door opener.

It's Chris L's first week on the ABC-IP project; he's been getting in to Python and looking at an idea Yves had for segmenting audio based on the clustering of dbpedia tags assigned via the automatic transcription and tagging code he's written. Meanwhile, Yves has been writing up about automated tagging of speech audio, and getting some new interesting evaluation results, giving a clearer idea of what processing step has what impact on the results. Roderick has been working on how to decouple the speech recognition and tagging processes into a network of interconnected systems so we can efficiently and reliably process all 500TB on the cloud.

The most requested feature from users of the Programme List is some sort of alert - to remind them of programmes (but also to prod them to use the site). Sean's suggestion on hearing about this is to use it to build a notifications framework that is extensible and flexible enough to be able to be used across future projects. Theo, Pete and Laura have been doing some initial thinking around the UX and putting together a UX brief whilst Duncan and Dan investigate existing scheduling solutions and assess their suitability.

The News Linking work has been wrapping up and on Tuesday the team got together to do a retrospective. It was an interesting project - a good research question as a starting point and something that was data-driven, resulting in a research report and a prototype. And with a possible spin-off research project on the side. What worked well? Having an interested stakeholder all along, good feedback loops between data-driven prototyping and design, good team comms and having a flexible tech lead role based on skills and the stage of the project. What could we have done better? Presented more information about what we tried but didn't work (as well as what worked). Earlier in the week we also had some more good feedback from the editorial side of News who particularly liked the resulting prototype.

We're entering the wrap-up phase of the News Follow work and Theo and Kat have been ploughing through the transcriptions of the user testing. They're going to be pulling it all together and summarising the project next week so we can transfer our learning into future media.

Our final phase of development on the LIMO framework as part of P2P-next got under way this week. The project team (Chris N, Dominic, Andrew, Sean, and Theo) reviewed the work done to date and then prioritised and planned what we do next relating to HTML5 video, live streams, and event synchronisation. Related to this, Sean has been looking at the thorny issues regarding synchronization between multiple timelines which has come up in both the LIMO work we're doing and George's idea for RadioSYNC. Andrew, meanwhile, is readying himself to read all 85 pages of the HTML5 Video specification.

Steve B, our boss, along with Libby, Vicky and Chris from Audience Experience joined us for our team meeting on Thursday. Libby showed us the N-screen demo from the NoTube project. Afterwards Barbara and Tristan got together with them to talk about generating portable profiles, user data, visualisation, good user recruitment agencies and EU projects.

Duncan has been working on a light weight github/gitweb sinatra app and watching proudly as interest in his BBC QR codes grows; so far they've been used on BBC London News, the Schools project and possibly on the new Radio 1 homepage. Kat has been doing lots of RadioDNS work. Sorting out slides about RadioTAG for TechCon at the end of the month, writing up a blog post about the RadioTAG trial and pulling people together to scope some possible next phases of work.

In other news, Yves and Nicholas have been hosting the second face-to-face meeting of the W3C RDF working group this week. It was a dual-site meeting with the MIT in Boston, MA. The group is working on updating and tidying the set of specifications known as RDF 2004 to reflect current usages and deployments. Olivier has been at the Paris Web conference talking about the BBC and open linked data. George and I both had a week of administrivia so the less said about that the better and Tris ends his week at a workshop about the future of "social".

Interesting links

• The gamification of software engineering: Earn qualitative achievements for the code you write, your skills, and your active community participation.
• Music resolution and Facebook: Why music ID resolution matters to every music fan on Facebook
• Up and down the ladder of abstraction: A systematic approach to interactive visualisation.
• Channel your inner designer by playing Kern Type.

A primary ingredient of the week was therefore the continual testing, calibration and adjustment necessary to assure that the design program and the design are in metrical alignment. That is, the program of space requirements (not the full and robust design brief) will be the defining tool for the evaluation and approval of the developed design in later phases of the project, and the guiding metrics must be set now.

A key struggle for us, and everyone who does these things, is the net-to-gross ratio – the relationship of the area of the building assignable to uses like labs and offices, and the areas of the building that are essential to its functioning but not occupied by the “users” like mechanical rooms, custodial spaces and the like.

The state limits this ratio. Appropriately, it attempts to assure that its money will be used for the direct purposes of, in this case, research and not for other purposes of the institution and nor for what might be considered luxuries. This is where a significant misalignment occurs.

At the forefront of the national agenda Is the reduction in the cost of healthcare and the increase in access to it. A key strategy in this quest is the reduction of time it takes to get an idea developed in the lab to actually benefit the patient. To facilitate the velocity of developments, the National Institute of Health has developed programs and incentives to promote “translational” research – to develop facilities in which research, development, and application come together. These are multidisciplinary and multi-use facilities.

Through research into the processes of innovation and observations of the earlier facilities of this type, we’ve come to understand how all innovation in social. That is, almost al new ideas in science take place outside of the lab, in conversation and collaboration between researcher colleagues and others from other disciplines who may have something to offer to invention and innovation.

These collaborations take place only after there is an atmosphere of trust. This is derived primarily from social interactions in which people get to know each other’s values, come to find mutual interests, and open up to working together. And these social interactions take place where you would expect them to take place – outside of the conventionally dedicated and focused activities of labs and offices, and in places where refreshment, casual contexts and open conversations normally take place.

And there’s the rub. The wider hallways, open atria, coffee bars, casual living rooms, and similarly effective spaces lie in the “gross” side of the net:gross ratio. However, the conventional demands of research buildings like mechanical rooms, shafts for piping and air ducts, and similar spaces are also on the “gross” side of the space ledger and, with a limitation on the net:gross ratio, these essential functions crowd out the potential for the social spaces of innovation.

The state, seeking to incentivize greater economic performance and promote research that will contribute to the health and welfare of its citizens, offers funds to catalyze development yet must use a control on the use of its funds that directly contradicts or limits the development of the types of facilities that will help it achieve its goals.

I’ve frequently said that design is subversive. I mean that so frequently we design in ways that our clients are unaware of or even intolerant of in order to actually deliver the places and spaces that will help them achieve what it is that they are trying to do. Maybe that’s next week.

Jim Meredith

The saddest bit of news from the past few weeks is definitely the death of Steve Jobs. It’s fair to say this had a huge emotional impact on lot of people at the office. It does feel odd to be impacted by someone you never even closely met, but it’s fair to say our company would be very different without his work and the industries he basically re-invented. It is in the human nature to value people who impact and inspire us, and Steve Jobs have truly done so. So long Steve, thanks for all the fish. Your legacy will keep on insipiring us on the road ahead.

On a more positive note, other things that happened after the last weeknote: Tia + myself visited Picnic 11 in Amsterdam and enjoyed it greatly. Tia even managed to get a few interviews done for a customer study we’ve since finished. I met a bunch of brilliant people, talked and pitched Urbanflow a lot and generally enjoyed the vibe Picnic had to offer. Thank you all — a recap might follow at some stage.

Regarding Urbanflow, there are themes which seem to tap into some kind of underlying nerve on a much larger scale than we imagined. As a result, things might get real interesting soon. You’ll be the first to know.

Before popping off for a parental leave, Teppo + Fabian managed to ramp up the visual and interaction design for a tablet app they’d been working on.It’s for a large, longstanding client of ours, it’s awesome and will blow the roof of both iTunes and Android Market once it’s out. The cool thing with this project was that it was a fast, ambitious exercize on building on our client’s brand and transforming the core elements into solid digital brand style spanning across platforms. The guys say it’s about 80% there now. Making all this happen was a huge effort for the whole team but based on what I’ve seen, totally worth it. And a first Honeycomb project we’ve done, too. The software is gradually getting better, and it seems Android tablets might finally earn their wings on this one.

Meanwhile, Tia, Jukka, Sauli and myself have been working on a another large, fast paced project which has required some flying as well— both as a figure of speech and in concrete world as well. Our team is spread out in several locations but things seem to be working fine nevertheless. Somehow we’ve found ourselves in the middle of a post-corporate positivity vortex where everyone’s motivated and confident on the important piece they bring to the table. Big things. This might even be team’s chance to leave a dent to the world. Not much more to be shared for this for now— but here’s to hoping that day will come in not-that-distant future.

Matti’s been having a bit of time off enjoying his honeymoon for the past weeks. Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco. Based on his Facebook, all is well.

Bubbling under at the office: data visualisation, new business models, electronics and all kinds of interesting new things. More about that later. In the more near future, we’ll host an IxDA Helsinki event at our office this Thursday, Playful 11 in London next week and lots of other things to keep us busy. ’till the next time!

In light of the above-mentioned focus soaking up a lot of our attention, a random sampling of Things We Looked At.

Still from Social Life of Small Urban Places, a film by William H. Whyte. More on this below...

Today we're flattered to see our efforts highlighted in a piece in today's edition of the UK's Guardian. The essay by Justin McGuirk does a great job of explaining how we approach situations which are often difficult to make sense of, let alone gain traction on. Justin's explanation of the way that specific, tangible entry points allows for new forms of consensus is a refreshing read. We are often struggling to put these notions into clear words, so it's nice when someone else does your job for you.

A trickle of feedback is coming in from the book. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share your thoughts with us already. We've taken to saving these emails to a folder and in some cases printing them out and dropping them in the impact box, a tattered cardboard container filled with tokens that help us trace the impact of our work.

It feels a bit funny to revert to such a low tech solution, but the palpable sense of accumulation is a nice psychological side effect. One of the things we're trying to be better about is understanding the feedback and responding to it as we shape future plans. So by all means, if you're keen to give us feedback on how you see HDL as useful to your work, or how it might be more useful, we're all ears.

Another still from Social Life of Small Urban Places, a film by William H. Whyte

Speaking of books, I will be in Romania this week delivering a keynote and a workshop at the Connection 2011 conference.  I'll have a couple copies of the book with me so if you're interested in having one, just ask.

Film break! Careful... you're in for a full hour.

How excellent is that? Dan and I have been digging through some archival materials (including the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces) as we explore the notion of "legible practice." What does it mean to carry out a body of work and to self-consciously do so in a way that makes it easier for others to follow or to join in?

In some sense this has been a discourse about what it means to be "open" but we've gravitated more towards the word "legible" because it speaks to the difference between just doing something where people can observe, and doing in a way that opens up and documents the tacit decisions for others to understand.

William Whyte's work checks the usual boxes of sitting at the intersection of design and social sciences, but what inspires us is the blunt, thorough approach to observation as an evidence base for design principles. The video is still refreshing from the vantage point of these 23 years on. It's this kind of spirit that we are subtlely trying to bring to our work (and yours?) through tools like the Design Ethnography fieldguide.

If you're into this kind of design practice, I highly recommend that you take a look at the Young Foundation's Head of Design job posting. It's a good post at a great outfit but applications close this week.

Finally, I'm happy to have the opportunity to point to work by Seungho Lee, our superstar intern from last year, who is doing great stuff through the venue of his company About:Blank which makes excellent products with local craftspeople here in Finland. This video is about one of About:Blank's chairs, a humble process that nevertheless is pursued with an excruciating level of detail and care. Congratulations to Seungho & team.

One more thing. It's fall time here and the many courtyards of Helsinki are, for these few weeks, some of the best kept secrets of Europe.

We have been taking advantage of the weather by getting in a few last exploratory walks for lunch or mid-day coffee. As winter sets in the radius of lunchtime possibility closes down and the daily rituals change. We try to take as much advantage of the warm months as possible, often working in cafes, libraries, or other nooks around the city for half the day or so. As it cools off we'll be spending more time in the mothership.

Autumn

Beyond the niceties of a good lunch, food has been a focus lately because of a bit of work we're doing. Street food, in particular, though we're taking a rather wide interpretation of the term. More on this soon, as we are preparing a slim publication on the topic. But the gist is that we're interested in how food cuts right to the nexus of so many interlocking systems. While it is deeply cultural, ephemeral, and literally a mater of taste, food is also an essential current in the hard flows of economics, health, and logistics.

As we pursue ways to positively affect the systems that shape daily life, we are searcing for entry points. The essentialness of food makes it a great candidate to act as a tangible pivot or hinge which allows us to research, observe, and design simultaneously at a very minute level where execution is direct and feedback loops are quick, as well as more abstract and systemic levels which on their own lack immediate feedback. More on this as it develops.

And it used to be a real picture of the Fiskars Slow Food festival held this weekend. That was until my camera decided to reformat its memory card.

University of Helsinki have recently published a video. It features a herring and it is a nice video.

From food to space. The other topic on high rotation within the team is community decision making. How do we make decisions together? And more specifically, how do we make decisions when it's not possible to agree to disagree, such as when there's a chunk of the city involved. A park, a disused lot, a nice corner, a store front. That kind of thing.

Borrowing from Nolli and thinking about more rigorously pursuing his technique of mapping the public realm.

Although this is a very nascent topic for us as yet, we've been doing some sketching. This one in particular is a quick study of the 'hidden' courtyards of Helsinki. Although the city is full of wonderful interior courtyards, they're mostly out of sight and really quite out of mind. How could these spaces become more of an asset to the city?

Both of these projects are orbiting around ideas that we explored with Clues to Open Hesinki, a pack of 'postcards from the future' that we created with the help of OK Do last spring. And while both the food and the courtyards have come back onto the radar through their own paths, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that they were also amongst the dominant themes of the conversations we had when developing Clues. I suppose I should say that it's gratifying, actually. The small bet we made with that project is now repaying its dividends and proving to be useful preliminary research for two projects which have their own focus at a new scale of ambition.

A small note about the book: I've updated the page to include information about where to find it in book stores. Currently there are only two, but I'm hoping to have time to work on expanding this list a bit. If you have suggestions for appropriate shops in your neck of the woods please leave a comment here.

Other projects: Justin continues to tweak the Low2No website, which is overflowing with details about the project; Marco had some promising meetings relating to the exchange, as well as work related to World Design Capital; Dan has been wrapping up some essential elements of groundwork for the smart systems aspects of Low2No as well as writing about food; I was out half the week on a mini-break and then handling the technical bits of the Low2No site; and Johanna is handling logistics and administration steady as ever.

Justin enjoyed the Herring Fair three years ago.

To close this weeknote I'll leave you with a link to MindLab's wrap up summary of their How Public Design? event that Marco and I enjoyed last month. Have a look—we'll be doing the same, perhaps after a visit to the Helsinki Baltic Herring Fair.

[ photo courtesy ]

Blimey it’s been a while since my last weeknote/monthnote – given their consistent irregularity perhaps I should adopt Matt’s approach and just call them worknotes?

It’s been a busy few months since my last note, in Week 41. It’s Week 61, which not only means I’ve been really slack at updating weeknotes, but that I’ve been running my own business for well over a year now. It’s gone by mega quickly, but it’s been absolutely brilliant and I’m a total convert to the freelance way of working.

In the last year I’ve worked with fantastic clients like Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Profero, Branded, Vodafone Ireland and We Are Friday, wearing a a variety of different planning hats and getting the chance to tackle some incredibly varied challenges. I’ve gone from dipping my toe into the world of freelancing to setting up the company and getting to grips with the joys of being a small business owner and employer. All of which has been, I have to say, awesome.

I went into this adventure with an open mind, using the analogy of dating. I’d been in two very satisfying long-term relationships (spending a few years each in permanent roles at two terrific agencies), but I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump into another long-term relationship again – I fancied playing the field, so to speak. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to date around until I found someone I wanted to settle down with again, and freelance would be a stopgap until I worked out what and where I wanted to take a permanent role. As its turned out, I’m completely loving the range of opportunities that going solo has afforded me – the chance to work with a tremendous variety of people and organisations, with a mix of consulting and freelancing in-house, on a wonderfully stimulating range of clients and challenges. So much so that for the time being, I can’t see myself wanting to settle down – I’m enjoying being a planning sponge, and the amount I’m learning and soaking up in the process, far too much to want to take on a permanent role any time soon. But, just as I went into this adventure with an open mind, so I want to keep thus on this journey – so who knows what’s round the corner?

But back to the present, since my last note, it’s been busy busy round Seemingly Unconnected towers. I finished the Vodafone Ireland consumer digital project, helping them develop an overarching digital strategy, encompassing really fascinating challenges such as how best to manage and scale customer service in social channels, and the operational changes needed to deliver on the agreed strategic direction. They were really happy with the work delivered, and I’m very happy to be working with Vodafone Ireland again, this time with the enterprise team on a similar project, which is now currently well underway.

Work with Friday on HSBC continues apace – such is the nature of global business banking clients that I can’t say much about the work itself, but I can definitely say that it’s really exciting to be concentrating on the experience planning and product strategy side.

Other bits and pieces since my last note:

• A few days strategy work with the lovely chaps at Branded

 

• A couple of days planning on a rather exciting brand for Citizen Bay

 

• A week of total digital detox, relaxation and getting rather bendier with my good friend Dr Jo Twist on a week’s yoga retreat at Yoga Rocks in Crete

 

• A phenomenal day’s brain candy in Brighton at dConstruct, followed by tinkering and being chased by Daleks at the Brighton Mini Maker Faire

 

• Meeting some incredible women working in digital and tech at the first (of hopefully many more) Women In A Room meetup

 
Onwards and forwards!

HDL In Studio books waiting to be launched.

Before the launch though, Bryan, Marco and I take part in a roundtable on 'getting systemic change done'. We'd jointly organised the event with E3G, who hosted it at their Southwark HQ. We actually started on Monday night, pulling most of the participants together for dinner. (We often like to use this tactic of the-dinner-the-night-before; it breaks the ice in a natural, convivial way rather than through some dreadful exercise in which people are forced to suggest what kind of animal they would be if indeed they were an animal. It also enables people to tentatively pitch a starting position and rehearse some of the conversation. And it means you can hit the ground running in the morning. Plus, it's dinner.)

Alejandro, Peter and Marco.

Kipper, Bryan and Dimitri.

Sam and Nick.

Me, Alejandro and Peter.

And Tuesday was excellent. Participants included Alejandro Litovsky from Earth Security Initiative, Sam Bickesteth from Climate and Development Knowledge Network, Kipper Blakely from Social Investors, 00/The Hub's Indy Johar, E3G's Nick Mabey, Malini Mehra from Centre for Social Markets, Peter Sharratt from Deloitte, and Dimitri Zhengelis from Cisco/LSE Cities. It was a long but fruitful day, with the morning spent presenting and comparing case studies, and the afternoon spent poring over the common ground.

Indy and Marco.

Malini and Alejandro.

We banned Powerpoint for this session, but made a small exception for Alejandro's diagram.

With much of the group talking about inspirational change projects around climate change, sustainability and government, often from the context of exerting change from 'outside' a system, I decided to present a contrast, talking about my work at the BBC, around the iPlayer on-demand media service. This was a form of design work conducted from deep inside an organisation; sometimes instinctive, sometimes tactical, sometimes strategic.

Notebook sketch of iPlayer 'architecture of the problem'.

Me, whiteboarding.

This preparatory sketch from my notebook, scribbled over breakfast, really represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of design of both context and product. I transferred the diagram to the whiteboard as I told the story, in order to give a sense of how messy, complex and multi-dimensional this embedded design work can be. I never thought of it as "strategic design" at the time, and indeed though it's quite different to much of the work now, there are many shared elements—not least as these services do represent a form of systemic change, albeit with different purpose.

Ultimately, this was a demonstration of understanding 'the architecture of the problem', as we would now call it, or how contemporary media works as a system (see some earlier thinking about how contemporary media works) and how that connects to organisations and culture. This was beyond editorial concerns; that the design of media systems and organisations themselves was the strategic act that would alter the greater system. 

Indeed, though it was a deliberate choice as contrast, what was interesting in the morning's discussion was seeing how much commonality there was between case studies and discussions. The others round the table presented some fascinating projects, ranging from the UK's Green Infrastructure Bank to The Hub project, via case studies from South Africa, India, Thailand, UAE, Argentina and of course Finland.

Alejandro, whiteboarding.

Nick and Bryan.

Kipper, Dimitri and Nick.

Much to chew on, and we're looking to develop that and other discussions over the next few months. As this territory is yet to be coherently mapped, we draw a lot from these conversations.

We launched the HDL In Studio book at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on Wednesday morning. We had a good gathering for coffee and korvapuusti (Finnish cinamon buns, sourced from the Nordic Bakery in Marylebone via Bryan!).

Korvapuusti.

Marco gave an introduction and hosted a discussion with Peter Sharratt, an architect and sustainable development leader now working at Deloitte, and Marianne Guldbransen, Head of Design Strategy at the UK's Design Council.

Pre-event game plan.

Marianne Guldbransen.

Peter Sharratt.

Our books disappeared faster than the korvapuusti, which is surely a good sign.

Marco introducing the book.

As a self-indulgent sidenote, it was a particular pleasure to be back at RIBA. When I was at the BBC, based at Broadcasting House down the road, we would often use the place for awaydays and meetings of all kinds; plus, it was a favourite 'hiding place' from my team when I needed to get some concentrated work done. (Sorry team.) It's a wonderful space.

RIBA.

After the launch, we hot-foot it across town to Whitehall, accompanied by NESTA's Laura Bunt, to visit the UK government, with whom we swapped notes in another fascinating, thought-provoking session. This was followed by lunch and more productive note-swapping (a theme of the week) at the Institute for Government in Carlton Gardens.

Whitehall.

The rest of the week was spent back in Helsinki, keeping various projects ticking over. I gave a talk at Fjord Helsinki on Friday morning (thanks for the invite, Fjord!) on various aspects of our work. It was good to see their team, and their space. Their regular Friday morning shared-breakfast-at-long-table-plus-talk will be something I'll take into our conversations at Sitra, concerning our future workspace.

Fjord Helsinki.

I also met a local researcher (via Demos Helsinki—ta!) who we'll ask to unpack some food supply chains for us. I've been working on a briefing document around food culture in Finland, and a diagram laying out just how, say, a hot dog emerges on a Helsinki street corner late one night will probably be particularly interesting.

Justin and Bryan have been knee-deep in re-launching the Low2No website (Low2No is one of our key 'systemic change' projects, predicated on building a new neighbourhood in Helsinki.) Do take a look and have a poke around; there's lots of new material and a sharper design to help you find it (which will be familiar to users of this site.) We're starting to carefully pick apart the difference between the block and the model (watch for some forthcoming writing on this 'hook/trojan horse' approach) as well as some curated contributions unpacking the idea of sustainable cities in general.

For instance, read the essay by Federico Parolotto and Francesca Arcuri of Mobility in Chain on sustainable mobility. I had the pleasure of working with Federico in last year's 'zero-carbon Finland' HDL studio, and it's always interesting to hear Mobility In Chain's thoughts on these issues.

Finally, Marco has been hard at work setting up our third major project area, alongside HDL and L2N. Known internally as 'Exchange' at the moment, we'll reveal more of this as it emerges, but suffice to say it should test a new and important angle for our work. Pretty exciting if it comes off. More later.

If you’ve somehow managed to miss this, you should really checkout:

• Sami’s intro to building Urbanflow
• Urbanflow Helsinki website & video itself

It’s great seeing this thing progress and evolve so fast. I can’t believe it’s only been a year and a half from my first original public Urban Screens presentation at a Forum Virium event.

Urbanflow also gained some nice attention in the very cool Picnic conference in Amsterdam. Among other things, the day/night map styles of Urbanflow were mentioned as “best practices” examples of such maps.

The future of this looks bright.

Nordkapp in Computer Arts

Everyone’s favorite designer magazine Computer Arts featured bits and pieces of Nordkapp design and design wisdom in their September 2011 episode of Computer Arts Projects.

You can get this historical (for us) magazine also digitally from the Computer Arts online shop. I’d recommend using the Zinio app on any mobile platform for purchasing and reading digital magazines, also this one.

If you’re drifty, you can have a peak at the magazine.

Getting Ready to Help Seniors

The senior people are something we designers should start thinking more about real soon. At least here in Finland the relative amount of people retired from work life will skyrocket during the next 5 years. This means many things for the economy, structuring of work and the system called Finland as a whole. Seniors need all kinds of new services and devices to support their daily lives in this near future scenario, where a huge after-the-wars-children generation retires, and there’s not enough young people to take personal care of them. Or even enough tax revenue (from that smaller active young workforce), to hire foreigners to come in and help, like the unrealistic (?) plan seems to be. Therefore we need to be clever about supporting the seniors by giving them more with less.

Perhaps interactive services and larger redesign of the whole scenario would help. To see how seniors live their daily life in a retirement home, Tia, Kate and Matti went to visit them.

They took photos of everything, strolled around and interviewed grannies and grandpas and identified things that could be tweaked. There was so much that could be improved with just simple physical things like signage. Also utilizing professional interior design would help make the quite sterile hospital like atmospheres feel much more home-like, inviting and enable better living together. In fact, that’s why our interior design sister company Lillehammer was visiting the place with our guys.

Obviously the digital domain is where we excel, and our guys found a lot of opportunities for digital based services that would have immediate effect on the life quality and wellbeing of our respected elders. This is a dream case for social design, as this is the only age group that actually doesn’t have to go to work or school — they can just be social! And within few years everybody of them will have used computers at work for decades before retiring, so there’s no technological barrier to do anything either. Everything’s possible. Hopefully we’ll publish more of this thinking at some point.

We know that governmental programs and grants for creation this kind of services exist, but if the standard success rate of these large scale projects continues as they always seem to, I’m afraid there will be too little good stuff, too late. Perhaps it would be best to just take baby steps?

Baby on the way

The production of the next generation of Nordkappers is underway again. My second baby should do a touchdown within days (or weeks). When this happens I’ll take a few weeks off. This might, or might not, lead to a small cap in the flow of weeknotes, but I’m sure you weren’t holding your breath anyway. :)

See you soon or a little bit later.

Names blurred to protect the innocent

The easiest place to begin is with the book that we mentioned last time. One week on from launch and we've had a modest bit of attention on that. So far a lot of encouraging feedback, so we are happy to hear that it is finding its way usefully into peoples' lives.

On Wednesday we held a launch event here in Helsinki to discuss some of the broader innovation challenges that the Studio Model was designed to tackle. And of course to give away copies of the book. We were humbled by the fact that About 60 people showed up on a rainy and blustery afternoon. Kiitos, kaikki!

Colors changed to hide the fact that these were low resolution pics taken on a camera phone

On that note, if you're in London we will be in town this week for some meetings and are taking advantage of the opportunity to have a book launch there as well. See the Facebook page for details and please RSVP (soon!) if you would like to come.

As I was cleaning my desk I came across some sketches done in preparation for the book trailer video. We stayed pretty true to these thumbnails. Not bad for ideas drawn on a sick bag.

Enough with this book thing. Things continue apace on other endeavors. This includes work in-house that Dan and I are doing with our colleagues Olli and Tapio to prototype some of the working environments and habits we anticipate fostering in the eventual new offices which are part of Low2No. More on this soon.

It also means Justin, and to a lesser extent myself, spending late nights working on the new Low2No website which we will be soft launching soon. It should look familiar to readers of this blog.

Because three's a charm, another piece of great news came in for Low2No this week. The project has received an Acknowledgement Prize from the Holcim Foundation. Thanks to our partners at Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton, and Experientia are due as well for this.

Thursday morning while Marco was in Estonia presenting at the Nordic Council of Minister's Modern Eco-Cities conference, the rest of the team had breakfast with Joi Ito and Markko Ahtisaari.

Joi @ Nokia Haus

Markko kindly invited us along to hear Joi give a talk at Nokia. Joi deftly connected many dots and it was a true pleasure to hear him talk about his plans for the MIT Media Lab, which he now directs. I'll keep this brief because the thoughts deserve a more careful bit of writing, but if there's one thing I took away from Joi's presentation it was this:

Because of the declining cost of doing things and increasing levels of complexity in the systems around us, it's often cheaper to prototype (and recover from potential failures) than it is to assess risk.

Update: Joi has posted about this on his website.

This dovetails nicely with some slow burn research we've been doing into what you might call 'cultures of decsion making.' Ultimately the ways in which we perceive, assess, and mitigate risk shape so much of what we allow ourselves to do. Likewise, the manner in which we anticipate, plan for, and recover from failure defines the outer limits of what we allow ourselves to reach for.

When we look at the rise of the open source software movement, agile project management, and the popularity of design these things add up to a new culture of decision making. The better we can coherently articulate the value of these approaches as ways to cope with the GFC and other black swans, the more likely we are to find a way through.

Or at least that's the hypothesis we're prototyping.

Inside were lots of these:

In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change is a book about crafting vision. It's about how to take something big, messy, and complex and very rapidly begin developing a way to respond to the problem. It gives an introduction to the what and why of strategic design, documents the studios that we hosted last year, and then offers a practical "how-to" manual for hosting your own studio. Hop over to the book page and watch the trailer video.

Marco, Justin, and I are really honored to have a Foreword from Geoff Mulgan of NESTA and an Afterword by our very own Mikko Kosonen. These contributions put the work of Sitra's strategic design unit into the wider context of Sitra's activities as a whole, as well as the social innovation more broadly.

We have some launch events coming up and are looking forward to these as opportunities to meet old friends and hopefully also some new ones. If you've been following the blog or interested in Sitra's strategic design work it would be great to meet you. Please join us for one of the events in Helsinki or London.

Putting the book together has been an excellent—if sometimes grueling—opportunity to revisit the ways that we talk about our work. But it's also amazing the number of decisions put into motion by something seemingly as simple as "let's write a book". What began with documenting our work in a format that is easy to share, grew into a mess of micro projects that looks something like this:

Sometimes a simple book is not so simple.

TwoPoints have done a stellar job with the physical object; we've tried our best to create a PDF that is as easy as possible to use (for instance, it has a hyperlinked table of contents); and Sitra Communications team have been doing bang-up job helping with the press stuff. Well done, everyone.

More pictures. Or in other words, this is where we fulfill Justin's dream of being a hand model.

There's a cloth binding hiding inside.

All three Challenge Briefings from last year's studios have been refined and included here.

The bookmark is a thinly veiled attempt to solicit feedback.

To highlight some of the ancillary things we've been lining up before the book launch, there's a new dossier on design ethnography. This includes a "fieldguide" available in English and Finnish. It comes out of the Synergize Finland studios that we hosted earlier this year. We've also been adjusting this website to link up with Facebook, for instance, and to be more suitable for reading on an iPad and other tablet devices.

Onwards, onwards. If you're here in Helsinki enjoy Design Week and perhaps we'll see you around town.

INDEX Awards party.

Catching up, catching up. As predicted, Autumn is here and the pace is picking up. Several of us are just back from Copenhagen Design Week, where we did a number of productive things, as well as just enjoying that fine city.

Me, Karsten Schmidt, and Matt Jones, photo courtesy of Matt Cottam.

I was there to speak at the Copenhagen Interaction Design Institute (CIID), with Matt Jones of BERG and Karsten Schmidt of PostSpectacular, organised by the great Matt Cottam (Tellart etc.) and Alie Rose (CIID). The talks from Matt and Karsten were both chock-full of challenging, brilliant thinking and as ever it was a privilege to share the bill with them.

CIID Open Lecture

CIID Open Lecture

I'll try to post some thoughts from my talk here (or there) later, but essentially it covered the shift from interaction design at the urban scale to strategic design at systemic scale, and the importance of designing both the matter (the objects, spaces, services) at the same time as the meta (the context, the organisation, the culture.)

Low2No is one of our primary examples. Here, what looks like a building project is actually a 'trojan horse' or 'hook' for a whole series of other systemic changes, around the forestry industry, smart cities, food culture, design methods, ownership models, carbon accounting, innovation environments and so on. So this was 'From Matter to Meta' and back again. There's a lot more to come here, but thanks to CIID for organizing and thanks to an attentive crowd, particularly taking the time out from a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Toldboden.

Toldboden.

Toldboden brunch, photo courtesy of Matt Cottam.

Bryan and I joined Team CIID + BERG for Sunday brunch at Toldboden, which we suspect may be currently the best brunch place in Europe, if not the world. We understand that this is quite a claim, but still.

The Mountain, by Bjarke Ingels Group, Ørestad.

VM Buildings, by Bjarke Ingels Group, Ørestad.

Then just time for a quick excursion to Ørestad, to see a couple of fine, and by now well-known buildings by Bjarke Ingels Group (but also the fairly bereft streetscape there. Hmm.)

Bryan and Marco were in town to participate in a conference organised by our good friends MindLab. 'How Public Design? Leading Change in Government' was an international seminar featuring government, academics, design practitioners, and others. The foundations for the conversation were laid down by rich stories and case studies about existing design work within the public sector; the conversation itself often focused on how to scale this work up, and what new cultures of public sector might result, or otherwise be enabled. Thanks also to MindLab for a great event.

INDEX Awards party.

INDEX Awards party.

As well as general INDEX Award shenanigans (and congrats to one of our collaborators, Alejandro Aravena, for his firm Elemental's award there) we were also in Copenhagen to meet a consignment of The Book (around twelve copies sent to our hotel).

The Book arrives.

We finally have it in our hands. Called 'In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change', the content unpacks the studio model and its use in terms of understanding the architecture of systemic challenges and quickly sketching out coherent, practical and imaginative visions that address such interlocking problems. Hopefully you'll find it a useful resource and a good read. Again, credit to Bryan, Justin and Marco for producing a genuinely original contribution, and particularly for Bryan for handling the production. The book looks and feels great, thanks to design by Two Points in Barcelona.There's a foreword by Geoff Mulgan of NESTA, and an afterword by our president, Mikko Kosonen. We'll post about the book separately, very shortly, including details on how to get it.

We've also been working on a dossier around design ethnography; please have a look and let us know what you think. Any comments gratefully received, particularly other references or case studies you think we should link to. 

In other work, we've been working hard on Low2No, and I've been picking up two threads in particular: the 'smart systems' work (our informatics-led angles developed by Arup and Experientia) around the building, and then how our organisation develops in the context of the new building. The relationship between building projects and the organisations that inhabit them is complex and symbiotic, and as part of the client body for the block, and ultimately an occupant, we'll be using this opportunity to continue the development of Sitra the organisation too.

In terms of 'smart systems', we're trying to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what this might mean, particularly as compared to yer usual building project. On a typical project, ‘smart systems’ can essentially be seen as shorthand for 'automating everything in sight', which we feel would remove the opportunity for engagement, agency and responsibility from the various users of the building. Which doesn’t feel particularly smart to us.

So we're trying to build up a simpler but more engaged relationship between occupant and other users, building, building technology, organisation, and city. This should take advantage of contemporary thinking around smart systems and smart cities whilst preserving, even expanding, the role of people within and around the building. This is partly to do with our strategic objectives around 'sustainable well-being', and the desire to produce replicable strategies for systemic change, but also to do with creating a simpler, more effective, more enjoyable workplace.

These words might come back to haunt us—until a building is built and occupied, one never knows—but we want the exact opposite of the all-too-familiar hotel room experience in which you're searching for the impenetrable remote control required to turn on the standard lamp. Some things are not problems that need fixing.

Some are, however, and we think we're on to something new and useful with our approaches here. We'll report back on this too, as it develops, on the soon-to-be-relaunched Low2No website. (Yes, I'm aware this is turning into a series of nested links to future posts.)

In the aforementioned CIID talk, around matter and meta, one thing I touched on was redesigning the context around products, services, relationships. Or, as I put it here, "You can't design a transformative service without redesigning the organisation."  

This follows the legendary Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen's quote: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." i.e. the context is often an organisation, and so a complex net of relationships, one way or another. As I pointed out in my talk, I think you can go the other way too i.e. design the context considering the thing it is intended to produce. Again, it's symbiotic.

With this in mind, our work in terms of organisational change at Sitra is therefore part of this building project, part of this ICT procurement, and so on. Given that Low2No represents one component in another stage of development for our organisation—a Sitra v4.0 perhaps—we have also been exploring what a Sitra v3.1 or v3.2 might be (this numbering is just an example, as organisations are actually in multiple stages of development simultaneously; it also deliberately avoids using the dread word '2.0'!).

These are small-step experiments that we can do right now, iterations along the way to the new organisation in the new building. These are never binary or direct relationships i.e. the new building does not 'effect' the new organisation into life from day one, nor does a new organisation necessitate or articulate a new spatial context. It's never that simple.

So the .1, .2, .3 series of hops in effect enables the organisation to 'try on' new working methods, relationships, identities, new layouts, patterns and habits. It 'de-risks' the change implied to some extent—it makes a new building three years away into something more tangible and at-hand—whilst enabling the kind of instructive forward momentum that prototypes bring to other fields.

Not that Sitra needs redesigning, but Bryan and I did some work at our recent summer awayday in the beautiful forest around Mikkeli, helping our teams constructively imagine some new working habits, patterns and spaces. We may even be able to prototype some of these in our existing building in Ruoholahti, which helped this become more than just a paper exercise.

Oh, and I've also been writing up our research into food culture in Finland. More on that soon too!

I guess it’s long been a desire of many of our designers to work more and more in the hardware space. What’s cool is that recently we’ve been / are designing software for at least three different kinds of hardware devices. One in health, one in sports and one in, let’s say, “construction”. All in various stages of their product cycle. One is a subculture thing currently, one is an existing mainstream product, and one currently exists only as blinking lights in a prototype box. I think it’s great that we get to work so far outside the scope of the standard screen sphere. Some of these projects are quite fancy & big, some quite surprising. Let’s see if we can tell you more about them one day.

There’s also promising chances for projects coming up in the medical and financial sphere. These are huge. Especially the medical thing is just the right thing to do, as it’s enabling so much for the normal people. Good stuff coming, just few more confirmations and they should start. Thumbs up.

We’re also quite deep in designing for various tablet platforms currently. One project is related to the projects mentioned on top, and one shall remain unmentioned. In any case, since the last weeknote, we’ve now moved into post-summer state where we all have our hands very full of projects. I heard from a client that other agencies in Helsinki claim the same. That’s great news. There’s work to be done, no matter how much the politicians and markets try to ruin things for everybody.

Windows 8′s New Explorer

A big design topic of recent has been the upcoming Windows 8 file Explorer. It seems that every blogger and designer in the internet were laughing at Microsoft’s new design on this. [pictured above, credit Techcrunch]

But what’s going on?

This actually ties somewhat into an internal discussion we’ve been having in the company recently — the importance and application of user research. Every now and then there’s provocative blog posts saying that user research doesn’t help in innovation (at least), stating something like Apple and Ikea as examples of very successful companies that don’t do user research.

One could easily agree with that, or argue the complete opposite in some cases. While our multifaceted views on this topic might create a blog post of their own, let’s see what Microsoft did in this case.

According to Devin Coldeway at Techcrunch, “Microsoft found that more than 85% of users perform the most common actions (cut, paste, rename) with the context menu and keyboard shortcuts. Only around 10% used the command bar, and hardly any used the top menus.”

To you this, and further data in the article, might suggest that people are actually quite efficient in using hot keys and context menus, and simply don’t need the application’s command bar. Clearly people are more of a power users than you’d think. Perhaps you could stop there, or improve things for these power users.

Microsoft, instead, took this as a sign that there’s something wrong with the command bar, and started adding more and more stuff to it. The end result has some 21 arrows pointing into various directions, not to mention the multitude of buttons and icons. This is what the designers are laughing about / crying for. This is clearly a violation of common design wisdom:

I’m not going to duplicate the discussion on the overflowing Explorer design here, just read the Techcrunch articles to get the basics.

• Windows 8′s New Explorer: This One Goes To 11
• “Respect Explorer’s Heritage”

Now that we agree on the point that Explorer has probably too much going on for its own good, consider this on a higher level.

Our friend Duncan crystallized that higher level nicely in a random cafe meeting today:

This point is well proven in Mac OS X Lion, where Apple is already moving to this future. First they minimized everything in Finder, the Explorer counterpart in OS X, by taking out scrollbars, few arrows and even colors (yes, it’s grey). But there’s more — they are taking concepts from the iPad where you simply can’t see the file structure at all. The apps themselves control access to files that can be manipulated with them. There’s auto save and automatic file versioning and all sorts of Star Trek stuff. Perhaps the implementation is not perfect yet and the application support is not fully there, but this really is the next path to take.

What brings this all back to user research is that both of these design paths could have been justified with the same research data. Microsoft chose to add more stuff to the thing, while Apple decided to remove more stuff from the thing, and is then moving on to removing the thing altogether! It seems that it’s not the user research data as such that counts, but what decisions based on that data you make.

Here you see a common event in design: one player is just adding buttons and features to an existing design, up to a point when it becomes laughable — while the second player is taking chances, leaving stuff out, sometimes failing, but also innovating a future and claiming it first.

The first player has massively larger user base, but the second one has massively larger total profit and has recently become the biggest company in the world.

Which one you want your company to be? If the latter, you should perhaps consult a designer.

Until next week.

The catalyst for today’s note was an interview with Michael Raynor in Inc. magazine. The interview focused on Raynor’s claim that it might very well be possible to predict which innovations might be “disruptive” and thus deliciously valuable. While I am very interested in the subject of innovation, what caught my attention here was his comment on the frequently referenced adage of innovation, to “fail fast.”

Raynor retorted that it was instead much more important to learn fast, to ask the question, “what are we trying to learn here?”

This resonated with me because earlier this week I had sat with a couple of colleagues in a session updating our thinking on how to find more success in this economy which seem uniquely unfriendly to our core practice. There was the natural step of looking to the list of those with whom we’d done business in the recent past. In reviewing the list, several waves of dread washed over me. This was a list that had no relevant information as part of it, only contact names and numbers, and most of these were woefully out of date. Then, I realized that, if making tracks in new territory was of interest to us, almost nobody on this list represented people or organizations who were interested in or capable of catalyzing innovative action. That critical observation, however, brought the realization that my assumption was not valid because we had not had recent conversations with any of these entities.

The entire effort was a “fail” in the sense that we had not developed and sustained a disciplined practice of “learning.” We had not engaged our friends from the past in a continuing conversation about what concerned or interested them, and we had not taken to them the learnings and thinking we’d been doing in our own context that might have relevance to them in their own context.

I challenged my partners on the concept of the adequacy of our CRM system. What really matters, however, is the importance of respecting and appreciating every contact we’ve had, and being generous with valuable information for them that could keep the trust high and the conversation open and robust.

It is time, now with summer past, to get out and restart those conversations…to learn fast!

Justin and I have been doing a bit of work on a new website for Low2No, but it's mostly him down in the mine at the moment. I'm pitching in with advice here and there as we navigate that towards launch in early September.

Lahti city hall

Marco and Justin have been looking after the Low2No block itself, as they do in some form or another just about every single day. Justin was in Berlin meeting with our architects, Sauerbruch & Hutton, on the design of Sitra's new offices. Meanwhile Dan and I have been working in-house on the continued development at the intersection of Sitra's offices and the cultural aspects that this change will open up. In the process we've been making lots of lists, often involving spectrums or continuums, that try to articulate the qualities we're looking for in the new offices. Boxes, be gone.

We shared a brief but good discussion with the Elinvoima team trying to help them narrow in on a fertile topic for the next round of the forum. It was a discussion that spanned from the invention of democracy to the national anthem of the Czech Republic and the rhino-shaped capital of South Sudan. Marco was with them again for a longer planning session.

True fact: the team was in Lahti for half a day and the train ride back (and subsequent lunch) were some of the most productive hours of the entire week. During which time we revisited the conversations Dan mentioned last time and got one step closer to An Answer. I suspect it surprised all of us how quickly a disjointed set of possibilites seemed to lock into place just at the end of lunch. Undoubtedly this will have jostled itself loose again by next week, but as long as things come together for a moment of clarity on a regular basis we're on the right track.

Rainy day Ruoholahti

Otherwise: more book related odds and ends, a visit from Sanna and her three month old baby boy, sorting out our need for interns (get those portfolios ready), a braindump from the legal team, and some hurried videography shooting ghostly clouds dropping rain. Lots of little things.

I couldn’t be more excited about this: this is my article, “Interfaces to the Subterranean,” in the latest issue of Cabinet! I’m delighted to have finally published an article about the Poste Pneumatique — and at that, in one of my very favorite publications. Please do pick up a copy: Cabinet is wonderful. It’s the Infrastructure issue.

A week ago tomorrow, I arrived in San Francisco, where I’m spending a month. I’m catsitting and writing the first of a few dissertation chapters about Nicholas Negroponte. Tonight, libations and introductions with the Overlap conference folks: tomorrow, we are off to Santa Cruz for the conference. I’m looking forward to conversations and connections and stories with the people there. It’ll be great to attend.

Otherwise, SF is its usual blur of friends new and old. I’m appreciating the conversations and connections, the small worldedness of it all, the wall of fog about to envelope the Mission, the cats that meow at me in the mornings, the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard.

[ photo courtesy ]

Week 41 and life continues apace. It’s been a disjointed month with so many bank holidays and short weeks, but the weather’s been glorious and whilst I love my work, the chance to enjoy long weekends and London in the sunshine never goes amiss.

Vodafone is storming ahead, mainly working remotely but with a couple of trips to Dublin – I’ve been there several times for business, but only ever been to the airport, the client offices and the cab between the airport and the office. I know Dublin is meant to be awesome – I hope to find an excuse to go back and actually get to see something of the city at some point! The project is progressing nicely, and I’ve actually got a couple of proposals to write for some more potential work with them, so…so far so good.

The rest of my weeks are spent with the marvellous chaps at Friday: lots of awesome super-secret innovation work for HSBC, thinking about exciting digital futures for business banking. Plus some thinking about getting the nation gardening for the RHS. Workshopping, sketching, keynoting a-go-go.

As well as working with a truly brilliant bunch of people, I get to enjoy the fabulous Friday decor – last week the office was festooned with some awesomely hideous royal wedding tat:

[ photo courtesy Matthew ]

As well as some delightful fresh flowers:

[ photo courtesy Matthew ]

And the new agency Trophy Wall*

* these may or may have previously been the contents of a Croydon golf club’s trophy cabinet that was purchased on eBay

[ yes this photo is courtesy Matthew as well ]

In other news:

• I started my Introduction to Product Design evening course at Central St Martin’s. All super interesting and stretching a v. different part of my brain. I am still appalling at drawing, but having lots of fun.
• Did my first VAT return. Yes the life of a freelancer is truly rock ‘n’ roll. Well I say I did it, actually FreeAgent did it for me. Praise be for web apps that just work.
• Had fun beta-testing Bloom Studio’s utterly gorgeous new iPad app Planetary – which is now in the App store, free to download, and getting coverage all over the place. Highly recommended.
• Got very meta reading about the ‘inside out’ movement of weeknotes (the brainchild of my friends at BERG) in the Evening Standard: The ‘inside outers’ are a London design firm changing the world of business.
]]> fa159301d878290ff2a73161b4b7e827 Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:27:26 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/4134627774 Weeknotes 12 – A week bracketed in disappointments « MEREDITH]]> c4a12d967567df68a90750c2e05ad219 Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:41:53 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2011/03/22/week-35/

[ image courtesy ]

Week 35 – and 2011 is just flying by.

Over the last month, it’s all been go, with two juicy projects underway. Three days a week I’m working on a digital strategy project for Vodafone Ireland, mostly based at home in London with the odd visit to Dublin – it’s a cracking strategic brief, and really enjoying the opportunity to work really closely with a terrific client team across all aspects of their communication – not just brand comms but the really interesting questions around how best to deliver customer service via social channels.

The remaining two days, rather confusingly Wednesday and Thursday, are my Friday days. Friday being the marvellous We Are Friday team, a super smart and thoroughly lovely bunch of people, with whom I’m lucky enough to be working on a wonderfully meaty brief for HSBC. It’s getting me out of my comfort zone and getting me right in the thick of deep experience planning, working with a kick-ass UX planner and content strategist, involving lots of sketching, planning & prototyping which is both scary and awesome. One of the major motivations for going freelance was wanting to get stuck into really different kinds of planning – to be a planning sponge, soaking up different styles and ways of applying strategic and creative thinking to different kinds of problems (and developing different kinds of solutions). It’s absolutely wonderful to be thinking about designing experiences that will offer genuine utility and delight – giving people something they really want, instead of designing campaigns to sell them things they don’t. It’s great to have two days in the office with all the fun of office banter and the like – although as Friday towers is in the midst of deepest darkest Hoxton I’m seriously going to have to up my hipster game, though I fear the obligatory Shoreditch asymmetric hairdo & legwarmers may not be my best look….

The focus for the last 10 days has been the annual pilgrimage to SXSWi, which should probably be the subject of a separate post, but needless to say my mind has been truly boggled, my liver put through its paces and I’m still having meat sweats from an insane amount of incredible BBQ. I then had a fantastic few days holiday in San Francisco cheekily tacked on the end of my trip, with much fun and frolics with wonderful friends. And as it’s physically impossible for me to leave the US without a new pair of trainers, a rather spanking new pair of silver hi-tops as well.

In other news:

• A project I worked on last year with the lovely folks at Rattle, originally codenamed Project Southwold, has soft launched in beta – and can now be revealed as Mr Fante’s House of Judgement. I know how hard the team have been working on it, so I’m really excited to see how it unfolds.
  




• I also acquired a thoroughly delightful 11″ Macbook Air, which makes lugging a laptop round so much easier, it’s just a dream – though my 13″ Macbook Pro now seems enormous by comparison! Cloud-based services make working across two computers and keeping everything in sync totally seamless: thanks to all my documents syncing automatically via Dropbox; my contacts, calendars & local bookmarks syncing automatically across both machines & my iPhone via MobileMe, and all my email living in the cloud courtesy of Google Apps.
  




• And finally, my attempt at a contribution to the rather marvellous Playlist Club went live – A Discoaholic’s 70s Guilty Pleasures
]]> 7698bd5577f6e441afe9df0ba1dcdf0f Wed, 09 Mar 2011 01:50:09 -0800 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=311 Now, that was a week. We did it. We shipped. You don’t get to do that entire thing, from first chat to spinning up a dozen EC2 instances to cope with *blush* sudden popularity very often.

Artfinder is now live, go take a look. Go on, now – i’ll still be here in a few minutes.

There’s an official blog too at blog.artfinder.com where I will be periodically writing about design, feature and product issues. I’m going to write this one here first to try and collect my thoughts on our process and strategy.

Obviously we’re trapped in the classic startup dilemma of Time vs Resources vs Quality and I would like to talk about the choices we made and why.

Firstly there’s Time, and you may tell from the notes on this blog, and the gap between week 3 and week 19, that we didn’t move quite as fast as we originally hoped. But, at the end of last year we made a plan and we stuck to our dates* which was essential for us. First mover advantage is, in case, critical.

The second part of that equation is Resources, and it goes without saying we are streamlined to the extreme. On the design side it’s been just me so far, although we have an outstanding designer joining us soon. London has become extremely tight for exceptional design talent right now. Feels bubbly.

So with two parts of the equation fixed rigidly, we had to flex a little on Quality. We’ve made choices about features, implementations and shortcuts that have been difficult, but I completely stand by. It was only 4 weeks ago when we had a beta I could test in front of friends and family, with guidance on missing bits and known problems. Only did the iteration 2 weeks before launch did many of the elements fit together for the first time. Truly lean.

We’re very proud of what we’ve shipped, and the vast majority of positive comments has been very moving, but we’re extremely aware of many problems with it.

As designer and product manager I second this quote by Reid Hoffman, “If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” (Incidentally, Reid is an investor in Artfinder.)

How has this manifested itself?

“feature x is unpolished” – I agree, we’ve launched with the absolute minimum in place, the minimum of complex code (especially ajax and javascript visual effects) and the minimum user messaging. Are we going to add these missing layers? Of course, and as soon as possible.

“feature y is unclear” – From the feedback we sought during earlier, private, betas we agonised over some of the placement, naming and function of some features. Did we get it right? Certainly not, and we’ll continue to agonise over them until we do.

“feature z is missing” – The feature list of doom is massive, we picked out the ones we felt essential to convey what the Artfinder concept is about. The ones we did implement, we cut to the bone. For example collections – at launch *extremely* limited (you can see 8 artworks! No delete!) but have plans on how the next, next next, and later iterations expand on this.

“content x is missing or inaccurate” – We know, we’re working on it, the copyright issues we face are considerable but we think by being open, positive and doing the right thing we can include the work everyone wants to see while respecting living artists rights, as well as those deceased but still in copyright. More people seeing art they fall in love with = everyone wins, we think.

And that, is what it’s all about. My philosophy to UX, if I have one, would be best summed up as “Get the groove right, the beats will follow”

* Actually we shifted it by a day – we were one of the launch partners using the new Facebook comments system, and they rescheduled so we all went live on the 1st March together.

]]> 9b90d3f46c3e386defad7c86eff1d7d4 Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:02:52 -0800 http://www.girlwonder.com/2011/03/weeknote-21.html

It’s been very productive month in Princeton, even if I am channeling John Nash in my organizing of little slips of paper in pursuit of the big arguments for my dissertation. I’m interested in what Katherine Hayles refers to as “how information lost its body” and how it gets rematerialized, not in bodies (which is her focus) but in architectural objects and spaces. Ultimately, I’m looking to explain how these broader theories and explanations might be bounced against Christopher Alexander’s design processes, Nicholas Negroponte’s Media Room, the Architecture Machine Group’s Spatial Data Management System projects, and Cedric Price’s building-sized information systems.



Is this where I’m headed? (From A Beautiful Mind. John Nash still lives in Princeton, so it’s not that far a stretch.)

In the course of last week’s reading frenzy, I’ve blown through books by Katherine Hayles, John Johnston, Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, and Lev Manovich (and more that I can’t remember right now), as well as a bunch of shorter articles. It was an intense amount of material to not just read but parse enough to quote. I then cut up the quotes, recategorized them and put them into new piles. The piles all reside in envelopes, with titles like “embodiment/disembodiment” and “media/medium” and “processing and code” and “modes and operations.” This project isn’t dealing with my archival material or the historical material I have on cybernetics, artificial intelligence and the history of computing in architecture — that’s separate — but it should give me some perspective on the project. Finally, I’m not feeling blocked but rather driven to write, if only to not lose the train of thought I’m following that the hundreds of scraps of paper encapsulate. Unless I go crazy in the process. That’s also possible.

Also up this month: writing a lexicon entry on the computer in architecture for Joan Ockman’s book on the 300 years of architectural pedagogy and writing a piece for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians  (JSAH) on Papers 2… and that’s in addition to the adventures on which I’m embarking, the subject of my next post.

]]> c8a15b85a9b3124719b87d119757ccbd Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:54:35 -0800 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_282 There's been plenty going on since the last weeknotes, but given that was a month back I suppose it's not all that surprising...


First off there was the Kickstarting the Internet of Things event held down in London by the TSB - I've already posted my thoughts and slides.

The weekend immediately after that was spent back in Liverpool at FABcamp. Two days of exploring digital fabrication, playing with laser-cutters and 3D printing. It's a side of prototyping that we haven't had a huge amount of experience with so far, so it was useful to learn some of the skills needed to combine with our software and electronics knowledge to build full products. There's a write-up of the event over on my personal blog at McFilter: FABcamp.

Since then, work has been a mixture of proposals and developing course notes and examples. There was a TSB bid to develop a really interesting RFID project (fingers crossed there) and a number of client proposals. I'd forgotten how much of a lead time there is between initial expression of interest and getting started on something, which is a lesson I need to learn for the future (as it will seriously help smooth the cashflow for the business).

Speaking of which, we're always interested in chatting about future projects around sensors, the Internet of Things, RFID and related hybrid software/hardware products. There was a little of that last Friday, when Frankie Roberto from Rattle borrowed a desk in the office for the day and we brainstormed some ideas for future development of their Job Box.

Finally, as you can see from the photo at the top of this post, things are coming along nicely for the Arduino Ethernet and Internet of Things course I'm running on Friday.

]]> 5e6fbebb4194d1333e2ccb0b33488013 Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:38:15 -0800 http://www.girlwonder.com/2011/02/oh-the-places-youll-see.html Lots of travel. Lots of projects. Lots of papers and writing. Lots of arguing with the structure of my dissertation. Lots of airplanes. Lots of mud and melting snow in Princeton, where I sit at my desk right now. It’s the quiet before the storm — I’ll post about what’s coming up in my next post!

Since I last posted, here are some places I’ve been.

Shanghai, China, October 2010

The Bund



Me in a cab under the blue-lit megastructure urban highways



Umeå, Sweden, December 2010 (brr!)

I was a guest at the HUMLab and spoke at the Media Places conference.



Munich (and also Düsseldorf, not pictured), Germany, December 2010

Glühwein with the lovely Magdalen Powers.



Venice, CA, off and on, October 2010–February 2011

Lifeguard houses on Christmas Day



There’s also been Minneapolis (twice to see family), New York (Microsoft Social Computing Symposium), Sacramento, San Francisco and Burbank (Institute for the Future).

I have a tendency to think I’m not getting enough done — probably because the dissertation writing is the hardest part– but I’ve been up to a bunch of things:

• I was invited to bat for the home team: I gave a paper called “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture: Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine” at the Teaching Architecture Practicing Pedagogy conference at Princeton last weekend. Outstanding conference and great community of scholars and ideas on architecture practice and pedagogy. I also lectured on Negroponte as a guest speaker in a proseminar at Princeton in December.
• Working on a project I love at the Institute for the Future with two people I greatly admire, Anthony Townsend and Jake Dunagan. Lots of travel around California for fascinating conversations, workshops and interviews.
• Interviewing Nicholas Negroponte for publication in an upcoming book on the 150 year anniversary in the MIT School of Architecture. Was paid an embarrassingly high compliment from the man himself.
• Finishing a little project on communication systems for a future exhibition.
• Wrote a short piece in Rumor (Princeton School of Architecture publication) about the Shanghai workshop we conducted, Soft Energy Infrastructure
• Turned my fascination with and research on pneumatic tubes as an article for Cabinet
• Continue to advise master’s five students in the exciting Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center in Pasadena. It’s great to be a fly on the wall of their creative processes.

… and still trying to go running and do yoga here and there, to read self-help books and get decent sleep and cook good food. No wonder the blog ends up in last place!

]]> cff20b9c43fb8e4c3bdb2d28610e678e Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:47:54 -0800 http://www.katylindemann.com/2011/02/15/week-30/

[ photo courtesy ]

Following other notes-ers, I think I’m going to switch from Weeknotes to Monthnotes as it’s what I seem to be ending up with mostly anyway. That said in the interests of keeping up the same numbering, because I’m a pedant, I’ll still be tracking time in weeks, just aiming to write up every month. Nothing like a cop-out, eh?

January ended up being not quite the month it was originally shaping up to be, as the digital strategy consulting project that was due to kick off at the start of the month ended up being delayed due to the joys of admin that needs to be processed to consult for a big multinational corporation based in another EU country. Although all the work is being done in the UK so no tax liability abroad, to tick the compliance box they require all contractors to go via a 3rd party – though being big global brand they also have big global brand standard payment terms of 90 days, so whilst the 3rd party contractor solution is necessary from their end, being able to operate under standard 30 days payment terms is invaluable from the standalone consultant point of view.

As wise sage Phil Gyford pointed out in his ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Freelancing‘ blog post (from a few years back but still v. much true today and exceptionally useful for anyone starting out), as a freelancer you are your own account manager, finance department, new business department, HR department and so on – and managing your cashflow is obviously hugely important. You definitely learn a lot, fast, but as it’s all for your own benefit I actually find it all pretty satisfying. Being an anal-retentive sort who is slightly obsessed with organisation, I really don’t find the book-keeping and general paperwork side of things too much of a chore, I’m actually quite enjoying learning the ins and outs of running my own business, especially as I made things official and set myself up as a Ltd company, and very recently needed to become a VAT registered business as well. The whole process is made infinitely smoother as a result of using the terrific FreeAgent for bookkeeping – it’s absolutely fantastic for the freelancer who’s after an accounting package that just works. Xero was recommended by several people but seems to be suited more to people running small businesses, and as FreeAgent is designed specifically for freelancers, it seemed to fit the bill exactly, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. The UI is simple and elegant, it’s UK-native, it’s got really great time-tracking integration, the support (so far) has been clear and helpful – the only niggle is that unlike Xero, it doesn’t (yet) have direct bank account integration so you have to export your statements and upload them manually, but not a huge dealbreaker.

On the business side of things things are feeling even more ‘official’ with the development of a visual identity on the site, my business cards, invoices, letterhead and so on. All credit must go to the wonderfully talented David Lowbridge who developed a look and feel that I absolutely love, and which far exceeds anything I could have hoped for. My favourite part is the little logo which you can see in the footer of this page, the little ‘Seemingly Unconnected’ smiley: the name of the business (and this blog) comes from one of my favourite quotes, a William Plomer quote which I think is a lovely encapsulation of what we try to do as planners:

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected

I adore ‘Faces in Places‘ (or charmingly, ‘little fellas‘) – joining together seemingly unconnected elements to spot faces in everyday objects – and the logo is very obviously inspired by these pictures, only in this case it’s the initials of the company that when you connect them together form a little fella. This site’s undergone a little bit of a fresh paint job to reflect the new colours, logos and so on, and I’m rather enjoying feeling like a ‘proper’ company with my beautifully designed (I can say this, as I didn’t design it!) matching branded bits and bobs.

So, admin aside, on the work front, the slightly late kickoff of aforementioned big global brand project was actually a blessing in disguise, as I’d also taken on a couple of other bits and pieces and had a horrible realisation that I thought I’d made a slight cock-up by over-committing myself. One of those was the development of a one-day course on ‘Understanding Social Media’ for the IPA with my co-pilot and partner in crime Jamie Coomber. It was intended as a basic primer to help account directors respond confidently with the right questions when clients do the ‘I want a Facebook / Twitter / insert latest shiny thing’ thing. We ran it on 9th Feb and the feedback from the attendees was really positive, so looks like we’ll be running it again later in the year, Rather gratifyingly, so the IPA tell us, the following day there was a request from an HR director who’d sent one of her flock on the course, asking when it would be run again as she wanted to send more people on it as the feedback had been so good. W00t!

Other ‘other thing’ was a rather nice little project helping out the very lovely folks from Addidi – a wealth management / financial services boutique who specialise in helping women create, invest and enjoy their money – with some brand strategy work to help them refine their proposition, to help inform the overhaul of their comms and marketing materials. Short and sweet, but a lovely brand to work on, run by very smart and inspirational people. Happy days.

Also on the plate as of this coming week, in addition to aforementioned strategy project, I’m going to be doing 2 days a week with the brilliant guys at Friday, doing some experience planning work on a really juice big financial services brand. One of my aims of going freelance was to broaden my experience by getting stuck into a wider variety of projects, learning new & different skills and being a bit of a planning magpie, so I’m really excited about getting my teeth into a more service-design orientated project.

In other news:

• This Friday it’s the return of The Story (yes, another Conway Hall conference), which promises to be fantastic
• I can’t believe it but it’s now less than a month to SXSWi. Judging by how quickly accommodation got snapped up, it sounds like it’s going to be even bigger than last year, which is nuts, as it was massive last year, even overtaking the music festival in terms of attendance numbers. An awful lot to do before then, but really looking forward to the Austin pilgramage, followed by a visit to San Francisco for a few days of chilling out and seeing friends.
• Joined Playlist Club, a fab new initiative from Greg Povey and Marie Foulston – which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s open to all, so check it out and do sign up as a contributor if lovingly choosing and sharing a delightful selection of music is your bag. It’s my turn to curate a playlist in a few weeks time, and already getting playlist anxiety, especially as I’m in such esteemed company….
]]> 884adcf7e9938804cc973ea57f4892fe Sat, 12 Feb 2011 01:27:01 -0800 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=302 Last note I did a minor reveal of the logo I’d designed for #newstartup, or rather Artfinder. Since then we have quietly come out of the shadows. Well not that quietly – this namecheck in a speech by the arts minister was slightly unexpected while this piece in the Observer was. We have a page where you can drop us an email and we’ll give you first dibs at our beta, which is extremely soon now. Artfinder.com

I thought I’d take this weeknote to post some more of the sketches and development as to how we got the logo we settled with. (With a little help from Bernie Pochon, great designer trading as Qualia Lab who worked on a bunch of sketches when I got stuck. ) I’m not going to annotate these, suffice to say I got a bit stuck on using frames, quite loved the modern Q ish square one for a while and spent way too long fiddling with an ‘rt’ ligature.







]]> a444b3fb94272f90f7ef5c36c0e4f69a Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:26:30 -0800 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_278 It's a busy time here at MCQN despite, or possibly because of, not having a big project consuming all our time.

There was an end-of-field-trial meeting for the farm project, which saw us poring over results data and drawing conclusions. There were a couple of issues during the trial but overall the results are very promising. As one of my colleagues commented "if I hadn't seen the raw data, I'd have thought this had been rigged". We're now starting to plan the next steps, which will be a big chunk of work when it kicks off, but in the meantime it's a pretty quiet time for this project.

Last Wednesday I was over at the Art & Design Academy for the first Maker Night. It's a get together for anyone interested in hardware hacking, digital fabrication, electronics and related topics. As it was the first event I gave a couple of talks to introduce the topics - over on my blog I've posted the slides from the event.

The remaining time has been split between getting on with internal projects - mostly integrating the DNS and DHCP code into the official Arduino Ethernet library - and chasing new work. There's already a small job come out of the chasing, but there's still a gap in the schedule if anyone wants to talk to us about new projects - Arduino, Internet of Things, RFID, that sort of thing.

And if you're London-based and want to meet up for a chat about things, I'm going to be down there at the end of the week. Friday will be taken up with the Technology Strategy Board's Kickstarting the Internet of Thigns event, but I'm free on Thursday afternoon for meetings/coffee.

]]> 64da3c242d2f64a9fda10f4bdb489b78 Sat, 22 Jan 2011 06:08:04 -0800 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=293 I’m restarting weeknotes! I stopped because I was working on exciting new stuff for our startup, but we were having to be a tiny bit quiet about things and i was bound to say too much. I dislike the ‘stealth’ term for startups, because we are not ninjas or bombers. But sometimes you do have to be a little bit discrete about things, for a short time at least. The last posts were talking about developing our logo, but without revealing the end result it felt a bit pointless. So, a pause.

Now, we’re beginning to emerge blinking into the sunlight. Days are feeling large, the office is buzzing and filling up rapidly. We have done a ton of work in a few different directions (too many at once? Hmm – almost…) but we’re almost there with a one-point-oh. Beta. We have data, we have a website, we have a publishing platform. We have a lot to do.

So not to leave it hanging, here’s a developer  job ad, on githubjobs.

And here’s a logo or two.



Artfinder logos

Left we have a reactive logo, that uses colour frequency analysis of your recently viewed content to visualise ‘your’ logo. On the right we have the vanilla.

Enough revealed for this week. More, next.

]]> d9a9334fbf661330e3d19ba704180f15 Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:50:22 -0800 http://www.katylindemann.com/2011/01/05/2010-yearnote/

So, I got a bit behind on weeknotes. But as some of my esteemed weeknotes-ers (and non weeknotes-ers) have published yearnotes for 2010, I thought I’d wrap things up by doing the same. And in the spirit of being behind, I’m publishing this 2010 wrapup (and look forward to the year ahead) in 2011.

Blimey. 2010 was quite a year.

Last January, I wrote about a few things I wanted to try and achieve in the coming year.

I’ve not really done fantastically on the taking more pictures front. I’d need to check my Flickr stats: I reckon I’ve probably done better in 2010 than in previous years (thanks to my iPhone and the ease of uploading to Flickr) but definitely a ‘could do better’. I don’t know if I’d want to try and set myself the goal of a photo a day as I’d doubtless fail and then feel crap about it, but maybe a goal of a certain number of photos a week might be a good one to aim for. Anyway, ‘take more pictures’ still stands for 2011.

 



[ photo courtesy ]

Taking back control of my health. This was a biggy. I’d say this was probably the biggest of the year, and made for a lot of changes. The year started well, work was pretty quiet so I was going to the gym loads and not sitting too much, taking care of my back and taking less pain medication as a result. Then from about mid-Feb onwards it all got crazy busy again and the cycle started. Longer hours, more sitting on a broken bit of spine I’m not supposed to sit on for long periods of time, not going to the gym or physio or pilates or yoga or all the stuff I’m supposed to for better spinal health to help compensate for having had several vertebrae chopped out, more pain, more pain medication, generally feeling exhausted and utterly drained. By May, when I went away on a gruelling month of travelling round the world (5 countries in 4 continents in 3.5 weeks) running workshops for Coke, the pain and exhaustion came to a head and the wheels came off. Fainting due to low blood pressure because I was maxed out on pain medication was a wakeup call. I needed to make some changes. I couldn’t carry on like this. In trying to fight against the medical issues I wanted to pretend I didn’t have, I only made things worse.

So I made some changes. I’d been coming to the conclusion, somewhat independently of these goings-on, that it was time to move on from Naked – I’d had a phenomenal time there, working with some truly brilliant people, doing some fantastic work, but the time had come to move on. But whilst I’d assumed my next move would be another agency job, this wakeup call made me appraise things differently. I questioned what I wanted out of my work and my life.

I knew I wanted to be challenged and stimulated and creative and solve interesting problems and develop great strategic thinking to make awesome stuff. But I also wanted to get a better work/life balance and try to get my back condition more under control, so I was managing it, rather than it managing me.

 



[ photo courtesy ]

And lo, I went freelance. To use an analogy I’m quite fond of, instead of getting married again, I decided I wanted to date around, try out different people and places, rather than jump into another long-term relationship. To try out different stuff, broaden my experiences, learn new skills – and work more flexibly in doing so.

I can honestly say it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And huge credit must go to my incredible other half, who’s been my rock, always there, always supportive and I owe him a massive debt of gratitude for giving me the kick up the arse I absolutely needed to take the plunge and go for it. I’m so very glad I did. So thank you Simon, for helping me to open my eyes and realise what I really wanted, and for helping me to summon the courage to do it.

I’ve only been going 6 months but in that time I’ve worked with terrific agencies (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Profero) awesome studios (Rattle and Hypergame), and helped to launch a sustainability brand & service offering (Slow Home Studio). I’ve worked on a rich & rewarding variety of projects, been exposed to and worked with people with very different skillsets from whom I’ve been able to learn a tonne, and I very much hope to have started to make some good work.

When I set out on this freelance adventure, I did so with an open mind. I didn’t know if I’d try it for a few months or maybe even a few years, and ‘date around’ (to continue the very laboured analogy) until I worked out where I wanted to settle down again – or if this would be the way I worked from hereon in. I still don’t. But I do know that I’m thoroughly enjoying working freelance, and certainly I can’t see myself going permanent again any time in the foreseeable future – though who knows, that could of course change. All part of the adventure, right?

But it’s all got quite exciting. I’ve got some really awesome stuff coming together for 2011. Really diverse stuff I’d never have got the chance to do in one permanent job. Stuff where I’ll get to get excited and make things. I’ve set myself up as a company – so I now trade as Seemingly Unconnected Ltd. Which all seems terribly grown up. I’ve got branding and everything. Well, nearly. It’s just being finalised and will be getting rolled out pretty imminently, which I’m very chuffed about.

 



[ photo courtesy ]

And the rewards of going freelance haven’t just been work related. It’s had a huge impact on my health and the rest of my life. I broke my back and what’s left after surgery is buggered and the surgeons can’t fix it so the pain’s unlikely to ever go away but through better lifestyle choices I can learn to manage it better. And it really is better. Much better. I still have bad days but they’re a lot less frequent. And the bad days aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be. And I’ve able to manage my time to do all the stuff I’m supposed to do to look after my back -so my gym membership is finally getting used and my yoga’s coming on a treat.

Last year I posted this quote, from the School of Life’s How to Live Well in 2010:

Work to live, don’t live to work. Cleanthes, who was a Stoic philosopher and also known as the water-carrier, worked by night so that he could do philosophy by day. He was clear that he would work enough, and only enough, to support his real passion, the thinking and writing. His story is timely, for in a year that will be marked by more job insecurity and credit crises, it will be even easier to work so hard that you miss what you want.

I reckon that’s still pretty sage advice and something I want to work towards in 2011. Though I failed utterly miserably at this in the first half of 2010 – if anything, I went backwards – I made some really great strides forward from July onwards. Onwards and upwards for 2011, I hope.

 



[ photo courtesy ]

And the other stuff? I talked about wanting to do more of the stuff I wanted to do – whether that was fixing up our new house, going to interesting talks or visiting exhibitions. I made some progress on this in 2010, but I’m hoping to kick things up a gear in 2011 – but with the proviso that instead of trying to do everything, I try to be more selective and do the things I really want to do.

On the event front I’m really looking forward to The Story in Feb and SXSWi in Mar. And on the learning front, I’m really excited about signing up for an ‘Introduction to Product Design‘ evening course at Central St Martins – something totally new and different for me, and very much in the spirit of wanting to make more stuff. You have to bring felt tip pens and a craft knife and everything!

 



[ photo courtesy ]

Finally, for 2011, I definitely want to try and make more of an effort to listen to new music. It’s really quite shameful how little new music I listened to in 2010. I listen to the same old stuff, and I can’t even claim that I bought so few albums in 2010 because I was listening to everything on Spotify, because I wasn’t. Admittedly, I really got into podcasts (regular faves include Shift Run Stop, This American Life, TED talks, Savage Love, Guardian Tech Weekly, Desert Island Discs and In Our Time) so I’ve been listening to hardly any music full stop – but that which I did listen to was the same old stuff I’ve had for years. It’s not like I can’t find great recommendations for new music through Last.fm or Soundcloud or Spotify. I just need to actually listen to ‘em!

So, all in all, 2010 was a game of two halves. With the second half being a rather thrilling ride.

Here’s to 2011. Bring it on!

]]> 46c669bf7d92968a15447d0156d2f1b7 Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:30:06 -0800 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_275 A short and quiet week, given that it falls between Christmas and the New Year.

I took advantage of the lull to catch up on a few things - some of them boring but necessary, like the end of year accounts; and others more interesting, getting an updated version of DHCP and DNS code out for the Arduino community had been on the to-do list for too long. It's also resulted in me gaining official responsibility for the Arduino Ethernet library, and the first task from that is to migrate the DHCP and DNS code into the core.

]]> 75811cac20804db14cf36a78ed41c12f Tue, 28 Dec 2010 10:09:15 -0800 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_274 The run up to Christmas has been rather hectic. Most of the time was taken up with the chicken farm project - as mentioned in the last weeknotes, that was running to a very hard deadline. We hit the deadline okay but it meant that I got to spend a day during our first period of snow outside on a chicken farm installing sensors. It didn't get above -1.5°C all day, and we had two inches of snow. This is what the "office" looked like that day:


That project is now in more of a holding pattern as we gather data and analyse what we're seeing. Thankfully all of that can be done from the comfort of a warm office because the data-logging is done remotely.

Aside from that, we ran a weekend of hardware hacking and Arduino fun at the second Howduino Liverpool, launched the new bubblino.com website and as a result have been building another four Bubblini who will be heading off to their new owners in the new year.

]]> a8f062fe4ca9530732b058c2ee950d72 Fri, 24 Dec 2010 01:43:03 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/12/24/week-183/ And so the last workweek of the year has come to an end. I’ve just wrapped some going-away gifts for Wieger and Sylvan, who have been interns at Hubbub for the past four months. I’ve put together a little survival kit containing everything a junior agent of Hubbub needs to make it out in the big bad world.

It’s been a relatively quiet week, with some work on Maguro, which will kick off properly in the new year when all of the team is back on deck. Alper has started doing some small software prototyping of the basic gameplay. Prototypes over ideas, that’s how I prefer to do things.

I went over to the Netherlands Film Festival to look back on our collaboration as part of the PLAY Pilots project. Seems like we’re both keen to do more work together in 2011, which is nice.

I was at Mediamatic wednesday night to do an Ignite talk on the work that’s been going on at Hubbub. That went quite well (I was glad to have practiced the thing a few times, because the time pressure is killer). I’ll post slides and a transcript to the Hubbub blog soonish.

I managed to squeeze in some shenanigans in the snow too. A nice follow up to last friday’s snow fight, this time I rode a too-fast-for-my-own-good sleigh down the side of the old city fortifications towards the moat and almost collided with a dog and a little kid. I managed to stay dry though. That was fun.

And with that it is time to sign off. I started writing these weeknotes at the beginning of this year and wasn’t at all sure if I would keep it up. Turns out I did, and I have to say it’s been a pleasure to write these for the most part.

Even so, I don’t think I’ll keep writing these here in 2011. Most of my work now happens at Hubbub so I’ll be writing the occasional update over at the blog there.

When it comes to the link posts, I used to do this with Delicious, but like many I’ve made the switch to Pinboard last week. I don’t think I’ll reactivate link posts, so if you want to follow the bookmarks, follow me there.

And of course there’s my personal Twitter account, and the Hubbub one. That might be easiest in fact although maybe a bit overwhelming at times.

All that’s left to say is thank you for reading this, have a merry Christmas a happy new year, and I will catch you again sometime somewhere.

]]> 1db4cab4ef8eb7bc2c573e00e34afd8f Sat, 18 Dec 2010 06:40:34 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/12/week-1283-2 This week saw the delivery of a couple of print projects we’ve been working on, one for ourselves and one for BBC R&D.

The Rattle Review is our bi-annual review of stuff we’ve liked, from apps, projects and blog posts to our own work. It’s all wrapped up with the usual meta meta stuff as well as an article by Tom Stafford who lectures at Sheffield Uni and who writes the psychological drivers behind everyday behaviours, and a Social TV Planner, a sort of analogue version of We Watch, the Labs project we completed a few weeks ago (and which I talk about over on my blog).



We produced the review mainly as a way to introduce ourselves to people, to gain some of their precious attention in a way that an email newsletter, for example, may not. One interesting aspect of the project was the distribution. We’d already got a database of people we know, clients and potential clients but for a minority of people we only had an email address, phone number and a Twitter handle.  Getting a physical mailing address isn’t always straightforward. Start-ups often work out of borrowed office space and some companies don’t give away an address and of course freelancers, consultants and other non-aligned folk rarely give you a home address. So there was some effort involved and doubtless will be in keeping this database up to date as resolving people to physical addresses becomes more and more irrelevant in a digital communications ecosystem. But that effort means we’re gaining a bit more attention, at least we believe that’s the trade off. In all we printed 300 copies and distributed just over 200 and we’re committed to doing another next summer and hopefully more beyond that if it proves successful.  If you’d like a copy then contact us with your address and we’ll send one right along.



The other print focused project that came in this week is an extension of the Channelography work we’ve been doing for BBC R&D this year. It’s a Pocket Guide to BBC TV in 2010 which sliced up subtitle and TV schedule data in new, interesting and beautiful ways and was produced with the help of the awesome Stef. We can’t show it publicly yet so for now, here’s the cover:



We also headed to London for a meet-up with potential clients (hello Mat, Ben and Jon) and Tim completed some strategic work for a client, which has given us some ideas about where to focus some of our energy in 2011 (clue: where there’s a need for all big corporate’s to present large amounts of data in engaging ways). Tim also went to meet the Scraperwiki chaps, who are doing great work. We’re looking at getting Muddy (our term extraction and disambiguation tool) wrapped up as an open source tool to fit with their platform.

Our last hackday of the year also crash landed into this week.  This was the first time Doug, who is the lead developer on Folksy, has taken part and it was his idea we ran with. The output from this day will be seen in the New Year (as it needs some more design love), but it’s a fun thing and will hopefully sit alongside the stable of other neat things we’ve created this year. Looking back on these hackdays in 2010 we’ve realised that whilst they’ve been great fun and fulfilled many of the things we wanted them to do, they’ve not been wholly successful. We find ourselves having a tension between releasing something early and getting feedback and not communicating the concept as well as we wanted to. We’re resolving what to do in 2011 but I think we’ll probably have fewer things, with more time spent on them.

These are some of the things that distracted us this week:

• The the impending death of Delicious.  Yahoo! seem to have lost their way and the strategy of buying up interesting web services in the early part of the decade is looking like a rush Christmas shopping job.  Shame, but Delicious, like Upcoming, and to some extent Flickr have all been struggling to move with the times and with competitor products and user needs. Certainly the notion of social bookmarking  being a mainstream service (and folksonomy being useful in indexing the web) that Yahoo! perhaps thought it would be, has been rubbished.
• Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet presentation from November (thanks Aden).
• This image which states that over 20% of California’s electricity is used to power water supplies to the State.  Not sure if it’s true but it sparked a debate as to how our infrastructure has been designed, and how this doesn’t scale well (mostly being Victorian and built for far less use than it now gets).
• Designing for a mental model that doesn’t exist, from the BBC’s UX team on the BBC Music Showcase.
• And on a related topic, an older post from March from Marco Arment, who created Instapaper, on why we shouldn’t use real world metaphors when designing tools for the screen or web or internet of things.

Lastly, Torchbox’s ace use of the new canvas of choice, the iPad, to deliver a Christmas promo…

A Starry Night from Torchbox on Vimeo.

]]> 239607284d97e7a5403697614309cf39 Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:25:18 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/12/17/week-182/ First at the studio, coffee brewing, Tron Legacy soundtrack playing making this feel like an epic morning. It’s week 182 which means the penultimate workweek of this year. I’m looking forward to a much needed holiday between Christmas and the new year during which I will be completely off the grid. Being disconnected has become a luxury.

Thing are quieting down, but still there’s plenty to do, although things seem a little less fragmented. I basically focused on getting a new project codenamed Maguro off the ground. I signed the contract with the client and briefed the team. We’ll be making a pervasive game aimed at creating a change in the attitude of a large governmental service’s personnel. It’s ambitious and exciting. Good thing I have some very bright minds on the team: Alper, Simon, Karel and Niels. We’ll get started properly next year. Can’t wait.

Besides this I went over to Muiden to attend a demo and presentation of the game my students created for the island of Pampus. There was too much ice in the IJsselmeer so we couldn’t actually go to the island, so the demo was done on a dike with a view of the lake. I took some photos. It was great.

And in between I have been talking to the studios who created the PLAY Pilots live games. Evaluating the project, so that if we get to do it again in the new year (which I am very much hoping we can) we keep doing what we did well, and improve on the things we could have done better.

With that it’s time to sign off and dive into friday. Tonight’s Hubbub Christmas drinks at Kafe België. Very much looking forward to that.

]]> d7c3cdb293d113f2fa9f2c393825095e Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:35:18 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/12/13/week-181/ And then all of a sudden there’s only a few more weeks left in the year. As is usually the case at such a time I’m trying to tie up as many loose ends as I can before taking a one-week break between Christmas and the new year:

I worked with Alper, Simon and Bernard to get the last PLAY Pilots addition out the door. I did a final assessment of the work my students did for Pampus. I worked with Wieger and Sylvan to tweak the very last test they’ll be doing for the Learning Lab metagame…

And then there’s new things, such as Maguro, for which I wrote a briefing and drew up contracts. And Tweetakt 2011, for which I had another meeting to go over production details of the various works on display. I also talked with Ianus and Alexander about the next editions of This happened – Utrecht. So 2011 is a lot on my mind already.

I don’t know if I will keep on keeping these notes next year. I want to free up some time to do other writing, and I think a better place for these status updates is the Hubbub blog, since I have more or less phased out my freelance practice this year and so don’t work under the Leapfrog moniker anymore. We’ll see.

]]> 615d9242354c730fab7dc0bb2fa8ee7f Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:30:07 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/12/week-1294 We’re all feeling a bit sluggish today (and a little hungover). Yesterday was our Christmas do, held this year in conjunction with Folksy, our start-up venture which now has almost as many full time staff as Rattle itself. For the dinner, we managed to avoid the turkey and instead went Moroccan (my suggestion) at a little local restaurant called Otto’s (warning: their website design is truly awful – thankfully their food is a lot better).

The day wasn’t just about dinner and drinks though. Instead, we spent the afternoon letterpressing at Sheffield Hallam University, courtesy of Pamela Bowman, who very generously devoted several hours to showing us how it’s done. As a company who work mainly with digital technologies, using such an ancient printing process was quite a change. But, as they say, it helps to know the past when you’re designing the future… (or some such similar proverb).

The printing press itself was a thing of industrial beauty. Apparently purchased from a printing company who went out of business a few years ago.



The type is made up of individual letters (called ‘sorts’), sorted in a giant tray (or rather ‘case’). Interestingly, and somewhat frustratingly, they’re not arranged like a QWERTY keyword, but instead some other layout, in which u and j are in odd locations ‘for historical reasons’ – an excuse we decided we should use more often.



Picking out each of the letters, in the right order, along with spaces (em and en sized), punctuation characters takes a little while, and requires nimble fingers. Surprisingly relaxing though.



Having collected all the letters needed, the type then needs to be laid-out. At this point, it’s mirrored, which makes any mistakes quite hard to spot. The type is then inked (‘proofed’). We used a delicious red ink.



It’s then just a matter of inserting the paper, and rolling it out. The nice thing about letterpress is that the letters literally press into the paper, leaving a slight indentation which give the printed word a lovely tactile feel. We mainly printed some famous quotes.



We also found a bunch of wooden type blocks, in varying conditions and typefaces.



Hey presto, instant Christmas cards!



What fun!

We left the presses with a renewed respect for type and the history of printing. And a bunch of beautiful printed posters and cards – some of which will soon be adorning the studio walls.

Ironically, most of the rest of the week was also spent working on print projects. Our newspaper is currently working its way through the Newspaper Club presses, and our data visualisation pocket guide for the BBC is currently hanging up to dry, before being scored and folded early next week.

Back in the land of the digital, we’ve also been working on a new company website. More about that next week.

]]> 1558474c63ead1a3449020585c3fd4f8 Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:25:40 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/12/06/week-180/ Last week was packed again. When a few last minute meetings get squeezed in, it usually means trouble. Week number 180 was no exception, which explains the absence of a weeknote on friday. A quick rundown of stuff that went down:
• Wieger and Sylvan worked on a prototype of the Learning Lab metagame, which we presented on friday. Got heaps of feedback, now all that’s left to do is: do a last live test, document the design, write up things we learned throughout the project.
• Together with Irene I spent time detailing a storyboard for a video sketch for project Buta. We met up with Hein on friday, to see if he could be assist us, since he has mad video and motion graphics skills.
• Properly kicked off Maguro on thursday. More on that one soon.
• Did a review of the Pampus project, which is coming along nicely. This friday I’ll do the final assessment of the project, and the week after it’ll be presented to the client so the heat is on.
• We did a “pants down” release of the Bandjesland additions to the PLAY Pilots website. Shame’s a good motivator, so now we have a real incentive to tweak it so we can announce it officially this tuesday.
• I wrote some descriptions of the interactive work that’ll be on display at Tweetakt 2011.
]]> bb5b84efb8a575bcee7f86553cb3e4d6 Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:30:14 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/12/week-1293 As some people may have seen on the news, Sheffield has temporarily been turned into a winter wonderland (the view from Frankie’s window) :



We’ve been subsisting on hot chocolate and biscuits whenever we’ve managed to make it into the office.  Andrew has been given the “Sir Edmund Percival Hillary” award for making it in every day this week come rain, snow or even more snow.

The weather hasn’t stopped the week from being a fast paced one though, with a number of projects coming to a head or kicking off.  The recent piece of visualisation work we’ve been doing for the BBC is nearly ready for release, it should be winging it’s way to the printers some time in the next week hopefully.  We’ve kicked off the next phase of project Southwold too, we had Ashley Moran helping us map out the development process for the project and managed a couple of user story workshops into the bag as well.  The new and improved Rattle website is nearing completion and should hopefully include a nice home for all our hackday projects.  Lastly, our Christmas publication is awaiting final copy and should be dispatched to the printer next week, if you’re interested in finding out more then please drop us an email to get onto the mailing list.

Interesting links we passed around this week included :

• 5 of the best new user experiences in 2010
• Tube Radar
• Faceook profile picture analyzer
• Theatre DB
• BBC Music Showcase
]]> d0af67ce0cefe3aab710813dfe3351c0 Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:57:55 -0800 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/11/29/week-18/

[ photo courtesy ]

Just a short one, mainly because as is the nature of weeknotes, there’s lots of stuff going on I can’t really talk about (yet).

Work at Profero continues apace, the big pitch-esque workshop we were prepping didn’t end up happening, but as the client decided to appoint Profero to lead digital strategy, we’re able to just crack on with the work. Which is nice.

On a sadder note, however. Kahlua, Profero’s Head Reptile, who I mentioned in my last weeknote, passed on very quietly – he’ll be much missed by everyone in the office.

It’s nearly December – where the hell has 2010 gone? So, being conscious of the fact that I’m at Profero till Xmas, I’m starting to have lots of meetings & discussion with various people & organisations about work for January onwards. And because I don’t want to jinx anything, I don’t want to say anything until they’re respectively confirmed, but all super interesting stuff and pretty stoked about how 2011 is starting to shape up if they come off. Not very interesting for you, dear reader, but, er, watch this space. Exciting times!

]]> e2c6df857a342ed3fe1d24131c46d838 Fri, 26 Nov 2010 09:08:59 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/11/week-1292 The theme of this week has been crunching. Specifically, custard creams – of which more anon – and data.

Work on the BBC Annual has been ramping up before it goes to press next week. It’s been an intriguing mix of hi-tech and lo-tech to mine patterns from the subtitles from BBC broadcasts over the year – Frankie’s been hacking away at the data with an increasingly-complex range of Ruby code; while James has invested in a new set of coloured highlighters and has covered the desk with printouts. Andrew, meanwhile, has been a blur of scissors and Prit-stick as he mocks up the final paper form.

Some startling trends have emerged when you start to compare various terms. Simon Cowell beats Cheryl Cole, apparently (news which the office received with deafening indifference). Charles Darwin trounces the Archbishop of Canterbury (this sparked some debate.) Cats are mentioned more than dogs (nods all round – we’re cat people, apparently).

And it’s been an interesting year in broadcast profanity – **** has been used far more than ****.

Despite PVRs and iPlayer, we still watch broadcast TV – and thanks to Twitter backchannels around programmes like Question Time and The Apprentice, it’s becoming a shared activity. This week we launched the beta version of WeWatch, a web service that lets you share tonight’s planned TV viewing through the medium of the world’s most popular microblogging service.

WeWatch is the result of this month’s Hackday, when we down tools on project work to scratch out collective personal itches and build a prototype service in a day. It’s one of the ways we can experiment with technologies that might have application for clients in the future.

That ties in with my week – I’ve been looking at how we go about finding and bringing in new business. It’s the perennial dilemma for small businesses – how to balance finding new projects while delivering current ones. There aren’t any shortcuts, but it’s been a useful exercise to look back at the work we’ve delivered and think about the kind of work we’d like to be doing.

Earlier in the week, flags were pulled down to half-mast and a two minute silence was observed to mark the passing of Frankie’s Macbook. Once white and shiny, after two years of faithful service and becoming increasingly grubby, it has finally been > /dev/null in the sky to be replaced by a sleeker, shinier and quite amazingly thin Macbook Air. The rest of us are not at all jealous, oh no…

After the unfortunate incident of the Scrambled Eggs That Might Have Been Microwaved, our peripatetic Friday breakfast had a new venue in the suburbs, amidst the yummy mummies in the wealthiest ward outside London and the South East. (No, really.) No black pudding, unfortunately, but given that this week’s Office Biscuit of Choice was a Custard Cream this was probably for the best. Slanderous rumours would hold me single-handedly responsible for emptying the tin, but I maintain that the crumbs underneath the desk tell a different tale…

]]> e170e022cb856116607579b72f9eccaa Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:53:36 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/11/26/week-179/ Another quick weeknote, things are simply too busy. I was going to attend the STRP conference today, for example (which looks great) but have had to cancel. Too much to attend to.

So what’s up?

• We ran This happened – Utrecht #8 last Monday. For a great impression of the evening read this report by Iskander. Video’s will be up soon at the event’s page.
• Work with Alper, Simon and Bernard on the last of the additions to the PLAY Pilots website. The project is nearing its end as the last live game will launch tonight at Le Guess Who?
• A full day of meetings and a session with the Pampus student team at the HKU. I also had the chance to discuss the next steps for project Buta (you know, the thing involving pigs).
• A trip to the Graphic Design Museum to discuss the challenges of exhibiting games.
• Some work with my interns at Hubbub on the Learning Lab metagame. They’ve built a great paper prototype; we’re going to play it today.
• And some talk in between about what happens after PLAY Pilots, as well as about the interactive program for Tweetakt 2011…
]]> 4791585126f9eb880d48dd56b33d428f Tue, 23 Nov 2010 03:35:34 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/11/23/week-178/ I have developed a sort of routine when it comes to writing these notes. I usually sit down on friday morning and bang them out in around half an hour. The trick to a lot of the things I do is developing habits. Others would call it OCD.

But whenever something other than the ordinary stuff happens on friday, it’s a challenge to still post weeknotes. This was the case last week. I was at Game in the City to see Keita Takahashi speak and also participate in an invitation-only workshop with him. A great experience all around, Takahashi-san turned out to be a bit of a philosopher, an interesting combination of a super-serious and very playful personality. The signed Katamari disk I took home is a perfect souvenir.

Week number 179 has taken off already, so I’ll have to keep this short now. The most important things to report are that I worked on the Bandjesland additions to the PLAY Pilots website with Alper, Simon and Bernard. The game had a test-run last friday and we’ll be doing a test of the data import this week so we can tweak and tune before the whole thing goes live coming friday.

Furthermore, I spoke at an event for middle school teachers on wednesday, where I proposed a traveling games studio that would partner with teachers and students to make games about a variety of subjects (anything really). Got some nice responses afterwards, which was heartening. Slides and notes will probably show up once things calm down a bit on the Hubbub blog.

Aside from this I worked on Maguro, the Pampus project, Tweetakt 2011 and the Learning Lab project, and took care of the last preparations for This happened – Utrecht #8. The latter took place last night and was a lot of fun once again. Bring on the rest of number 179!

]]> 8732c83303392c66605a62f39677bd50 Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:08:12 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/11/week-1291 Hello,

This week we commissioned another of the large desks from fin. It was getting cramped in the office, especially on Mondays, when we have nine in.



We’re also cracking on with project Dungeness for the BBC which will hopefully see us working with Stephanie Posevac. For those coming to this post blind, we decided to name all our projects this year after British seaside towns. And, with the occasional blip, where we found some in the team had a fairly appalling sense of geography (so much so that the towns weren’t actually very seasidey at all) we’ve thoroughly enjoyed our virtual trips to Barry Island, Skegness, Largs, Southwold, Mablethorpe, Cromer, Seaton, Millport, Prestwick and Blackpool.  This is Dungeness by the way, courtesy of Squirmelia, and if you look hard your can see sea:


On Wednesday we had our sixth hackday, our monthly build a thing day. And this week we built something called We Watch. It hasn’t been born into the world formally yet, though this is due to happen early next week as we deal with a amends from our earlier testing. We’re pleased with it, mainly because it points to a different conceptual model of dealing with an ongoing problem, making TV social. Anyway, more early next week. We’ve also had Richard help produce a (long overdue) video for our last hackday project, Job Box, so it can introduce itself more properly to people.

The next stage of Southwold got signed off, so we’ve asked Ashley Moran to help us hone our agile skills and do some work looking at user stories and methods, which seem particularly well suited to Southwold. He’s become the agile guru in the north.

I met a few new people and some existing nice people at 4IP’s wake party on Thursday in London. Frankie went to Scotland. Tim and Andrew stayed in Sheffield and Rob went up and down the M1 quite a bit.

We also published and distributed (courtesy of Anne and the newspaper club) around 20, 000 of this years Folksy Festive Sampler.  The sampler was distributed (200+ copies at a time) to a small army of volunteers from Bournemouth to Inverness who are kindly depositing them in the hands of interested people and potential customers.



Russell, who runs the newspaper club, talked a while  ago of the problem of “the last 2 inches” in our joined up networked world; getting physical stuff through our letterbox (and the hassle  involved if it doesn’t get through) and it seems to me that our problem was probably the last 200 meters.  It’s cost effective to deliver lots of newspapers but it really doesn’t make sense to post individual ones (as newspaper publishers know) so we’ll be watching this trial with our 65+ volunteers to see how successful they are in getting Folksy out there.  It’s a huge testament not only to Folksy and the allegiance it has (all 65+ came in 48 hours and many more people wanted to be our newspaper boys and girls but we asked them to get permission to distribute at an event or place which was a good first filter) but also to the power of lo-fi and high tech working together to solve a problem.

Interesting distractions (of mine):

• Matt Edgar’s post on city as system and how bikes enable the sort of future that Paris dreamt of in Aramis and which is documented by Bruno Latour.  ”What really fascinates me about the cycle hire schemes, however, is the way they turn the bike into just a small part of a bigger system. To the hardware of gears and chains and brakes are added official and unnofficial services that multiply the bikes’ utility”. Latour is one of the most radical and brilliant thinkers of the last fifty years and yet doesn’t get much attention or attribution from the design community.  Aramis is a great place to start for any interested designer.
• Again on the subject of cities and this BLDG BLOG on Trap Rooms, the manifestation from Trap Roads, those tricks of cartography used to flush out copyright infringement (basically erroneous marks – roads – on a map which could be used to point to people copying from the original).  This sort of cartographic fiction could point to more interesting models for ARGs in the city.
]]> ece0979ee20d7e83b48faf8ad5273446 Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:21:54 -0800 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/11/week-1290 This week we present a double bill of weeknotes. Think of it as a bonus and in no way a reflection on standards of communication. First James has his say…

Hello.

Outside it was a cold, wet and miserable week. A busy five days but with little of outward significance. We delivered our games design documentation to Channel 4 with help from Kim, Russell and Katy, pushed out a pretty major Folksy feature and signed off on a bit of tangible loveliness for the BBC folks.  Tim spent time planning Interesting North, with collaborator-in-crime Greg, and Frankie and myself were using any spare moments to try and get our slide deck prepped for speaking at Interesting North.  We also tried, and largely failed, to understand the new BBC supplier process. Rob was pulling the strings from Leeds, helping us to project manage more efficiently, whilst Andrew polished his “washed up wreck of a man” routine.

Things we’ve been discussing and chewing over:

• http://www.mayonissen.com/work/citytickets/ “Pay-and-display parking ticket machines are an example of an intensely technological piece of infrastructure. This project explores how we can use these ubiquitous and expensive boxes to make cities more responsive to the needs of those who live in them, and proposes a service through which ticket machines become a communication channel between citizens and their local authorities.” Nice concept, fix my street meshed with parking meters.
• “Q: How does the Linotype fit in with new technology?”
• http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/stories-vs-statistics/?hp “In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled. A drily named distinction from formal statistics is relevant: we’re said to commit a Type I error when we observe something that is not really there and a Type II error when we fail to observe something that is there.”
• http://infovore.org/archives/2010/11/04/narrative-exoskeletons-or-why-i-like-game-dev-story/ “Every now and then, the game asks you to type something in: the name of your company, the name of a game. And that’s where the magic begins.”
• http://www.kitchensoap.com/2010/11/07/mttr-mtbf-for-most-types-of-f/ “Being able to recover from failures is more important than having failures less often” A fascinating look at how Etsy have leant from the Flickr guys about managing the development of the service.  It does require a pretty shit hot test suite and damn good comms though.
• http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6177/the_state_of_social_in_social_games.php?page=2 “Theorists have identified two kinds of social capital: of the bridging type and of the bonding type. The first refers to weak ties which privilege exchange of information or new avenues of thought. The second refers to a more tightly knit web of emotionally close relationships. Whereas a friend leaderboard in a social game would represent an example of a social object that has a bridging function, a photo gallery from a social event full of tagged individuals would count for bonding.”
• http://www.fastcompany.com/1700619/why-facebook-browsing-annihilates-web-browsing “Back in April, Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook’s “Open Graph” initiative, an Internet-wide protocol for making any webpage “equivalent to a Facebook page.” With a few bits of code, any web developer could add social networking functionality to a page, integrating tools such as Facebook’s “like” button. Six months later, it seems that the bet has paid off: Social plug-ins (ie, “like” “share” and “recommend” buttons) are now, according to Facebook, present on more than two million websites.” Much in the same way as Wikipedia, Facebook is creating a big black hole with a gravitational pull stronger than anyone expected, largely due to those people for whom the internet was, until recently, largely irrelevant.

Done. Baked. Bye.

Thank you James. And now Andrew…

The grey shroud of mist and pelting rain is not a fair companion to a week of unrelenting pace towards the twin deadlines for both Project Southwold and a much anticipated feature for Folksy shops. I took most of Friday to swap Baskerville for Garamond and justify the paragraphs on the Southwold documentation, but let’s keep that between ourselves. Details take time.

Midweek, I revisted a design that was veering towards the wrong side of pastiche, reigning in the visual excess and introducing Lydia‘s illustrations as the perfect counterpoint to my typography and palette. Which gave me an idea for something unrelated. But more about that at a later date.

Remember Christmas meals at your Grandparents with a handful of perfumed Aunts and awkward near pubescent Cousins? When the full width of the heirloom table was reached by sliding out the centre leaves, the different sheen of their patina betraying their rare use. Well, how we wish we had a similar potential to expand our three wide chunks of melded pitch pine. Once upon a Springtime we enjoyed a comfy fit but now with our loveable Job Boxes taking up some elbow room and a few more seats to fill on Mondays we are left scratching our heads trying to concoct collapsible sattelites to the main table station. File under ‘decision pending’.

Finally it’s fair to say that Doug, Folksy’s resident developer, provided the finest portfolio of tunes of the week with some inspired Balkan Gypsy Brass and exuberant Brazilian jazz. A radical change to the previous day’s hourly switch between US college radio that included forty minutes of repetative beats from UCLA. We re-assured ourselves it was an avant garde experiment in monotony before discovering it was their off-air click track.

Goodbye.

]]> cea20b8e4e96185b91f03037d2c6cdd0 Fri, 12 Nov 2010 06:05:39 -0800 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/11/12/week-177/ I was just checking out a secret development version of the Bandjesland page on PLAY Pilots. It is shaping up nicely, all the basic tech is in place, now it’s just a matter of kneading it to look nice and connecting it to the installation Monobanda are building for Le Guess Who? When all goes according to plan we’ll have a lovely online record of what went down in that very special place in Tivoli Oudegracht. Getting the scaffolding up for this took up a large chunk of the week, with Alper and Simon back in the studio for engineering and design.

Next wednesday I’ll be speaking at an event for teachers in middle education at Pakhuis de Zwijger organized by Noordhoff Publishers. I’ve been asked to share my most remarkable idea for engaging students in a novel way. I have a rough outline of the thing on paper (it popped up almost fully formed when I woke up this morning, love it when that happens). Now it’s just a matter of building the slides. Shouldn’t take too long.

Another major thing this week was coaching the development of a paper prototype of the game we’re designing for the Learning Lab. Wieger and Sylvan, my two awesome interns at Hubbub, have come up with a lovely concept for something that runs on top of the course’s internal blog system and supports students with reflecting on their self-development. We played through it this morning with the client, filled a big whiteboard with comments and are now in good shape to work towards a version that we can playtest with students. Lovely.

]]> ae2c6acec1e4260b85f9041cc21ebc65 Mon, 08 Nov 2010 06:32:26 -0800 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_267 A fortnight to catch up on since the last weeknotes, so not quite weekly, but better than the last gap!

The PCBs that arrived in Week 265 were soldered up last week. An oversight in checking the voltage rating of a capacitor used in the first test board led to the entire office getting a rather noisy and surprising lesson in what happens to electrolytic capacitors if you exceed their rated voltages, and also led to this addition to one of our whiteboards...



(It's up to 12 days now)

This week I got to spend a morning on the roof of the Innovation Park installing the PCBs, along with their accompanying Arduinos and Ethernet shields and they're monitoring things happily.

The Saturday in the middle of the fortnight Bubblino and I spent in Manchester helping people build robots at Madlab for their one-year-old celebratory Robot Hackday. It's a while since we'd visited and they're really starting to put their stamp onto the building. It was good to catch up with Dave, Hwa Young and Asa who run the Madlab - they're doing an excellent job of encouraging the Manchester tech scene.

Speaking of events, there's been some planning and prep work done for the upcoming Howduino hack-weekend and the fourth Ignite Liverpool.

The rest of the time has been taken up with work for the chicken farm project, and that will carry on into this week too. The farm runs to a very particular schedule, so that's providing some hard dates that we need to hit. It should all come together, but is calling on more of my project management skills as the deadline looms.

]]> 78c93b81f1f1207cb2d2b8b463cce0cd Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:49:14 -0700 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/11/week-1289 Hello.

The early part of my week was taken up with a Folksy team day, our first with the expanded team (Folksy is the sister company to Rattle and Rob, Andrew and myself are involved as directors). There are seven in Folksy now, mostly part-time, and getting us all together isn’t logistically easy. It was also Anne’s leaving do. She’s left to do more fabulous Newspaperclub work. Fortunately we’ve managed to persuade Sarah to take up the reigns.

You can see the various members of the Folksy team here:



Southwold, our 4IP (now presumably C4) project continues apace. Tim has again, spent the best part of his week deep inside the belly of the beast. Andrew and Greg have created a wonderful concept within which the games will live, and it’s all starting to come together nicely, which is just as well as the end of the first stage is next Friday. Then it’s production.

Other stuff that’s ebbed and flowed this week included the conclusion of a TSB application, the end of Mablethorpe which was the concept design work for online video editing, and pulling together the Channelography dashboard to mark the end of BBC Backstage (who funded the work). I also produced a proposal to create a nice artefact, actually a souvenir, from the Channelography data, again for the BBC.

Distractions included:

• The simple beauty of the BERG work on the future of ambient media for Dentsu (videos 1, 2).  They’ve become an inspiration for us to improve how we communicate our own work.

Media surfaces: The Journey from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

• Tom Scott’s Pop Quiz which uses simple game mechanics much like what we’ve been developing.
• A catalogue of Jewish surnames
• Preloaded’s post on how to launch a social game (thanks Katy)
• The Economist’s Special Report on our connected world of stuff (otherwise known as the Internet of Things)
]]> 65d220d28b9babb86f857bcc8799723b Fri, 05 Nov 2010 06:36:20 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/11/05/week-15/

[ image courtesy ]

Week 15 and playing catchup.

Work at Profero continues apace, working on a mix of stuff, including Change4Life, prepping a global strategy workshop for a big FMCG brand, and some brand planning work for a large global financial services new launch. Lots of different stuff, variety is good.

I mentioned before how much I’m enjoying working with a really mixed bunch of people with different skills, and how much I’m learning from working alongside UX designers, creatives, developers, search specialists, media planner/buyers, account managers, producers etc. And in fact the last two are particularly interesting from a very practical point of view – at both PHD and Naked although my role was as a planner/strategist, by the same token we also managed client relationships, ran our respective pieces of business, managed projects we were working on etc. I’ve not worked in teams with account managers and / or project managers & producers, and I have to say it’s a really awesome change! I’m able to spend my time planning, and whilst I work really closely with them, it’s absolutely fantastic to not have to juggle several different roles, and to focus on the bit I really enjoy (and what ultimately my job is supposed to be about). It still feels like quite a luxury to be able to be ‘just’ a planner and not have to worry about writing a scope of work or going through an hours analysis reconciliation to discuss a fee negotiation with a client. I’m really glad I’ve got some experience of partially wearing these different hats, but the one I really want to wear is the planning & strategy hat, so I feel pretty spoiled at the moment!

Another very valued member of the team at Profero is Kahlua, Head Reptile (his official agency headshot, done in the house style):



Yep, he’s the office gecko. He lives in a tank in the office and mostly spends his days sleeping, occasionally grabbing one of the locusts wandering around his tank when he decides it’s dinner time. He does come out for the occasional mooch around the desks and is very friendly. He’s shedding at the moment and got his brand new season’s outfit on:



His last creative brief was so-so, but we’ll bring it up in his next appraisal.

Profero work is Mon-Thu and Fridays are my ‘other stuff’ day, which recently has been more work with the Rattle guys on Southwold, and also a spot of comms strategy for James Wallis’ new company Hypergame, for their v exciting new game that’s in development. All good stuff. Been thinking about future stuff for Jan onwards as well, got some bits hopefully lined up and some most excellent plotting and plan-hatching with the brilliant Thayer Prime, which should all be v. interesting…

So, been busy, but a good busy – feeling stimulated and inspired by the work I’m doing, but also getting a healthy balance and enjoying a life outside work. Which was one of the aims of going freelance, to be able to strike a better balance – and so far, so good.

Since my last weeknote, I attended the really fantastic 2Screen, which explored the wonderful stuff that happens when you mash up telly and the web, featuring Matt Locke talking about Attention Shapes, Margaret Robertson talking about designing for attention, Tim Morgan & Utku Can in a face-off over Picklive & LivePitch and Kevin Slavin introducing Starling.tv. A thoroughly excellent evening, and the fact that the ticket purchases raised £2,540 for Pakistan Flood relief was icing on the cake. Last week I also went to The Future of Mobile at the RSA – usually the RSA events are really good brain-fodder, but this one was a (fortunately rare) real disappointment, being mediocre at best. Simon Kendrick’s written up his thoughts on the evening – I’d say his account was much more useful than the hour or so spent at the RSA!

In other news, it was my birthday, and Simon got me some terrific books he knew I wanted – I’ve had Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions on my ‘must-read’ list for ages. And I’m hoping that Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology will help me continue to wage the war against bad Powerpoint & Keynote.

We also saw A Town Called Panic which is the most insanely bonkers crazynuts film I’ve ever seen. I totally bloody loved it. I slightly worry that I might have hallucinated it, but even if I did, it was awesome.

Looking forwards, the fantastic chaps at Pipeline, including my old Naked mucker Dan Burgess, have organised Good for Nothing, a fantastic idea which I’d urge you to support if you can:

We wondered what if there was an event which invited people to do stuff together?

With people who really need some help with live challenges.

And don’t have money.

It’s called good for nothing.

One day.

Some awesome causes.

An open space in EC1.

And hopefully a room full of lovely people.

Doing stuff.

Together.

For nothing.

3 live briefs.

They include running, kids, urban gardening, city business, elderly people, christmas, football and more.

8 hours.

We shall be posting the briefs and more details shortly.

Right now we’re looking for people to attend.

We need strategists, developers, designers, creative sorts, hackers, photographers, writers, film makers, bloggers, getting stuff done folk and that’s just for starters – basically anyone that wants to get stuck in is welcome.

We’ll feed and water everyone.

There’ll be music

And laughter.

Maybe some dancing

You can register here

Hoping lots of you smart folks decide to join in too.

]]> 601694c5167d99b1e71a4356bf85854e Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:55:16 -0700 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/11/05/week-176/ As I was starting to write this a discussion broke out on dramaturgy and game design. So I got sidetracked debating similarities and differences between disciplines and most importantly what they have to offer to each other. The room was filled with interaction designers, game designers and folk with a theatre background.¹ So that was interesting.

More mixing of disciplines: on tuesday I spent a day working on Buta with Irene van Peer, a product designer with a tremendous amount of experience in the healthcare domain. We sat down and managed to push the work forward through lots of sketching and making. Next up is more work with pigs and farmers on site.

The rest of this week was taken up by work for PLAY Pilots (Monobanda’s Bandjesland for Le Guess Who? is turning out great), the Pampus project at the HKU, and a few meetings for new projects on the horizon.

I have been paying attention to my calory intake the past few weeks. It turned out this was far too low. Now that I am eating much more I find myself being able to cope with less sleep, more stress and just generally feeling much better. Which also makes for more pleasure taken from my work. Who’d have thought food could be such an upper?

1. Wieger and Sylvan, interns at Hubbub, study Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the HKU.
]]> 0111b437ccfeef381689da3652b7b614 Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:58:14 -0700 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-119 We got a new logo this week, by Jason Permenter. Jason also designed a suite of document templates that will make all of our paperwork shine. We are very pleased.

MediaBugs is now available nation-wide, so you can now file bugs on news reports from any publication or news source, no matter where they are located. In addition, much more information is now available about publications, including information about their correction policies. Mediabugs' launch was covered by BoingBoing!

We've been working for a few months on a big enhancement to the dooce® Community, and it is finally live: dooce Groups! Members of the community can now join together in small groups and participate in conversations outside of the main question-and-answer site. This addition to the site happened in response to how quickly the site grew, and how active the membership is. When we noticed that members were struggling to group together and organize themselves using the existing software, we knew it was time for an upgrade!

In case you missed it, we released a new version of our social SDK, PeoplePods. The new version features a redesigned and enhanced command center, as well as new plugin capabilities.  Also, PeoplePods now ships with Twitter, Facebook and OpenID compatibility!   We're putting lots of work into PeoplePods, and releases should now happen on a more regular basis.  The latest and greatest code (and info on every change as it happens) is available on the PeoplePods Project Page at Google Code.

And finally, our awesome intern Damien has been working diligently on a Chrome version of SendTab.  If all goes well, SendTab 2.0 will be released sometime this month in both Safari and Chrome versions with some much requested new functionality.  Hooray!

]]> 461de9b7720fbe231b8a4fc38e25c3c0 Sat, 30 Oct 2010 08:33:00 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/1439431457


This was a relatively quiet week for us, spent mostly in preparation and coordination for what have been lagging engagements. As with many of our opportunities these days, the state of the economy still has a direct influence on the commitments of clients. While in many cases there seems to be an urgent need for change, the ability to fund the change slows decisions and project commitments. In the meantime, we have continued to work (but are lagging ourselves) on the definition of a “call” to developers.

Although more of a position statement and point of view on the new world of work, we are nonetheless very interested in finding a way to take the initiative and lead development into a new way of thinking about workspace and the workplace. Concepts of stocks and flows are informing our thinking for a workplace that is not owned by the company but by a 3rd party.

Stay tuned for developments, which we’ll post at MEREDITH Strategy & Design in the next week.

image by noneck at flickr.com

]]> 2a34a1f034b16f28cd0909392effad78 Sat, 30 Oct 2010 04:05:15 -0700 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/10/30/week-175/ This week, a large chunk of my time was taken up by the return of project Maguro. A few weeks ago, I think it was number 171, we (a team of freelance consultants put together by Demovides) presented our concept. It turns out the client liked this concept so much, they actually want it produced, pronto. Demovides has asked Hubbub to take care of all creative work, which is great. I’ve been planning the project, together with the other folks driving it, and figuring out budgets and deadlines and deliverables and so on. We should be able to send the client a proposal before the end of next week.

Another big session was devoted to a review of the work Hubbub has been doing for the Learning Lab. We have three games under our belt so we talked about what worked and what didn’t. And we looked ahead and came up with a plan for the next phase. In general, we’ll be moving away from proper games and exploring more subtle ways of introducing rulesets into existing processes. It’s going to be more about making game-like learning tools and less about proper games that have second-order teaching effects.

On monday we announced This happened – Utrecht #8. Rainer Kohlberger, Helma van Rijn, Lotte Meijer and my friends at FourceLabs… it’s going to be awesome, I am sure. Three more weeks to go. Apart from the usual arrangements, not much needs to be done for this, luckily.

Those were the highlights of this week I guess. I did work on the Pampus project and on PLAY Pilots (have you seen the roundup in English for that one, by the way?) but that’s about it.

]]> f8c643cfea4aeae3c2b40b94b70e509e Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:59:08 -0700 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/10/week-1288 This weeknote is brought to you by a certain air of melancholy. Not because of any upset or tragedy in the world of Rattle – in fact, project progress has been good, half-term has been enjoyed and birthdays celebrated – but this is the final weeknote of the summer. On Saturday night the clocks go back, so whereas previous Friday evenings may have involved glasses of Pimms in the summer sunshine, for the next six months we will instead have to console ourselves with hot toddys and thermal underwear.

One of the themes this week has been Numbers. Although a qualified engineer, Rob has spent the last few days masquerading as an accountant and project manager. He’s been diligently colouring in Gantt charts, appraising people, and explaining the difference between some numbers and some other numbers as part of process of what he calls “management accounts”. He claims that this proves he gets all the boring jobs.

While Rob has been all about rigorous balancing of the books, Andrew and James have been variously been meandering through theatrical memorabilia to research Victorian playbills for project Southwold; and delving into questions of the whys and wherefores of social gaming. Despite appearances, there’s a link – hyperbole is a common theme. On the one hand, exaggerated claims of bearded ladies and lion taming; on the other equally staggering numbers of players and time spent tending virtual farms. The musical theme of the week has been Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, and the visual theme that of the human impact on the landscape at a macro scale.

For my part, it’s been another week of Facebook wrangling, punctuated by a mid-week trip to Leeds for a ScraperWiki hackday. Hacks (those with the gift of incisive prose) and hackers (those with the gift of incisive code) gathered to see what could be done with open public data and the latest generation of scraping and crunching tools. It is for you, dear reader, to decide for yourselves into which of the categories of participant your correspondent fell.

Frankie’s transplantation to the correct side of the Pennines was completed over the weekend, so he’s been experiencing the joys of Sheffield buses instead of the horrors of Transpennine trains. While this hasn’t resulted in earlier arrivals into the office, it does appear to have transformed his domestic catering capabilities. His lunches have come to involve homemade boxes of nutritionally balanced masterpieces, to the detriment of PJ Taste’s cashflow.

How long does a culinary tradition take to form? Our regular Friday breakfast gathering at the Urban Deli have only been the highlight of our weeks for a short period of time, but already a Friday without the benefit of free-range eggs and quite frankly awesome black pudding seems unthinkable. Truth be told, the saturated fat overload doesn’t make for the speediest of starts to the day as we waddle back to the office mid-morning, but what we may miss in productivity we more than make up for in stimulating conversation and witty badinage over the beans and the bacon.

]]> cb5e6c1a6ce34e73bc8186240648ef6e Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:03:45 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/10/week-46/ A real tunnel of a week development wise, it being spent almost entirely implementing the new user interface. All the assets are being uploaded, assembled, and tied onto their respective data sets. It’s sort of like setting up puppet strings for hundreds of figurines all controlled by one wooden cross. Get one in the wrong place, and the whole thing gets tangled and falls over. So there won’t be very many new features for a little while, but what is already there will look really really nice.

Sitting behind the new UI is the 3D animated visualisation. That’s really coming along, and after a quick session of bug spotting yesterday we planned the next stages of development. There’ll be some new spikes in viz development relating to teams and station captures.

Finally, we’ve started making lemon difficult decisions about what features will be visible to the world when we go into public beta sometime soon. We keep telling ourselves, we’re not NOT going to do that, we’re just not going to do it right now.

]]> d5a87a2b3f8194b9e038ed32ea964788 Sun, 24 Oct 2010 07:01:45 -0700 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_265 Seems that I either spend my time writing weeknotes in which I complain that not much happened, or I'm too busy to write any weeknotes. Let's see if I can get back in the habit.

There's been plenty going on since the last weeknotes.

MCQN has moved into a new office, in the centre of Liverpool. We're sharing a space with a couple of other interesting local tech companies, and seem to be suitably infecting them with hardware hacking and tinkering. So much so that the office has been nicknamed the Room of Things 29 (International). Bubblino has been suitably updated, and when he's not off attending an event is alerting the office to anyone mentioning "#RoT29" on Twitter.

Speaking of events, we've been to quite a few: Hacks Meet Hackers Liverpool, Arduino DevCamp, this year's Be2Camp Brum, Over the Air, and DIY Music Day at World Museum Liverpool. I also gave a talk down in London at the Minibar Internet of Things and helped organise the third Ignite Liverpool, How? Why? DIY! and Howduino NCL

Project-wise, it's been all about sensing and monitoring. The workshops and development of some environmental monitoring at FACT has been completed, and there's ongoing work to monitor some air-conditioning units at a data-centre, and to investigate silos on farms.

Which brings us up-to-date. The start of the week saw our first ever batch of printed circuit boards arrive, which turned out to be a simpler process than I'd feared. They haven't been soldered up yet, as other work has taken precedence, but the holes seem to line up, which is a good start. Most of the rest of the week was taken up with testing and getting a feel for zigbee data transmission, and I rounded off the week in deepest Lancashire with a site visit to a chicken farm.

Not quite what I'd imagined when doing my degree...

]]> 513cdada62fed71b22cbfb068255360a Sat, 23 Oct 2010 02:00:12 -0700 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/10/week-1287 We’ve all been in and out the office a bit this week, with Frankie and James on a course, Tim down in London and myself hopping between Otley and the office.

Frankie and James learnt  (more) about NLP and non-violent communication on their facilitation course on Monday and Tuesday.  I’m hopeful this should reduce the number of fist fights that break out over the colour choices for the projects on the jobbox.  Tim went to the Facebook Developer Garage Meetup London event, whose theme this month was “Government and Society”,  a handy tie in to the “Big Society” and how social networks might fit into the Government’s new idea.

Folksy has been taking up quite a bit of time at the moment and we’ve been making some changes to support the scaling of the site, especially in the run up to Christmas.  We pushed out some caching enhancements on Monday, which have done a good job of removing some of the heavy lifting from the db server, to support the tag search functionality.  We’ve also got some other exciting Folksy news this week, which we hope to be able to share soon.

The main push for the week has been progressing the project Southwold designs, we’ve start work on a couple of alternative visual routes for the game and we’ve completed seven or so playable trial games to see what works and what doesn’t.  Hopefully, we’re nearing having a good understanding of the mechanics behind the project and how the different pieces all fit together.



The jobbox has become habit now for most of the team, mainly due to the electric shock treatment they receive if they don’t update it every hour, this was an unintended side effect of wiring up each spot at the desk but it appears to have been quite effective.  The only person not clocking in on a regular basis is myself, mainly due to the fact that I don’t have my own jobbox and the equivalent  web interface for doing so is spartan to say the least.  Again, I suspect when Otley receives mains electricity I’ll be wired up for updates, in more ways than one.

We’ve also prepped the final elements to release project Largs, with the expectation that we’ll be talking about it publically over the course of the next few weeks.

At Frankie’s request (who is off today, moving house to Sheffield – good luck Frankie) we’ve created a new internal mailing list to share interesting stuff we’ve seen.  There’s not been too much on it this week  as we’ve all been out and about, but of interest were :

• Side projects are like children
• Adrian Hon on Gamification
• BBC Backstage to close
]]> 593ccdd2429b6a7001d52df7110daf46 Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:19:59 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/10/week-45/ Matt presented Chromaroma at the Geomob event in London this week, and good a good old reception. Made a few new friends, maybe even future cohorts. Geomob is an event all about Geo-location and what people are doing with it. For us, GPS hasn’t been a factor really, as wel use the Oyster Card. But in developing the 3D visualisation it’s been very important in mapping stations, bus routes, and bike docs in both topographical and experimental formats.

This week has been all about using existing game logic and tweaking it to do something different. So, for example, you can now Get Off One Stop Earlier (GOOSE) on the way to work, not just the way home. Outward and Return. The next bit will be to Get ON One Stop Earlier. Although that’s GOOSE as well, so that could get confusing. We’ll have to go over to the blackboard for that one.

We’ve also talked a lot about in-game items. We’ve been through the game design documents and picked out new user stories that pertain to the use and effect of items in the game. Owning them, sharing them, deploying them. Even buying them.

Our alpha players are going at the new missions now as well, unlocking new ones as they go. This is the part where we’ll see the effects of our narrative approach on the game, something that we’ll be adding to as the weeks go by and we think of more and more stories that would be ace to play out across the city.

]]> 2f478babadf629ef0093f201b473c305 Fri, 22 Oct 2010 01:29:44 -0700 http://leapfrog.nl/blog/archives/2010/10/22/week-174/

This week on Wednesday I found myself in the lovely KNAW building to talk about the far future of applied game design. I was invited to do so by STT, together with David Shaffer, Jeroen van Mastrigt and Jeroen Elfferich. I talked about the incapacity of design as well as science fiction to effectively imagine a future, how to deal with that as a designer, and two areas that I see as truly virgin territory for applied game design: the new type of city we’ve seen emerge in the East, and synthetic biology. I got some nice responses and some challenging questions from the crowd, so I guess things went OK. The annotated slides will find their way to the Hubbub blog soon.

Aside from this, I spent the week working on PLAY Pilots – continuing work on the next pilot for Le Guess Who? together with Monobanda. And at the HKU, working with my students on the Pampus project. Finally, my interns have kicked off their third game at the Learning Lab, this one running on their internal blog platform. It involves monkeys and a blind dragon. Looking forward to the writeup for that one.

Quite a few bits of content found their way online too, by the way. In case you missed them the first time around, here they are:

• Cheating by the rules in Pirateball and Illuminati
• Assumption is the mother of all…
• Dwalen door de stad met een paar Jeu de Boules-ballen

Plus a video of the Bocce Drift session Hubbub ran a while back:

]]> edd179d671723b8564f7b60d39ce7ad7 Thu, 21 Oct 2010 01:49:22 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=289 I left the cliffhanger in Week 1 struggling with the logo. After much revision, including the standard false “ah, this is it” moments at least twice, we got there. (Sorry it took so long team!) I will unveil as soon as I am able (couple of weeks probably) but I think we struck a balance between obviousness and subtlety.

Nicely it lets us do some interesting customisation based on user activity, clearly inspired by the ace Dopplr http://blog.dopplr.com/2007/10/23/in-rainbows/ ‘sparklogo’ that changes with cities visited and building on work from /dev/fort4 performing colour frequency analysis on content the user sees. Look at pictures of blue skies and the logo will start reflecting that, dive into something else and primary colours might become prominent.

Ah, you’ll get it when you see it.

]]> 13ac2a160b84a9b27f11250322d56c6a Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:28:44 -0700 http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/10/weeknote-20.html

Beatriz Colomina, me, Janet Vertesi at the Princeton School of Architecture.

It’s been a wonderful month in Princeton and it’s about to heat up into a whole bunch of travel. I write this from Newark Airport, where I’m in the President’s Club on a friend’s membership, feeling sad to leave autumn on the East Coast and excited for Los Angeles and Shanghai.

On Thursday, Janet Vertesi and I presented to the Media+Modernity lecture series at Princeton. Media+Modernity spans several departments, including architecture, art history, history, German, English and comparative literature. (The program also offers a graduate-level certificate.) The lectures typically pair two people, often within Princeton but sometimes from outside. In this case, Janet meant an inclusion of sociology and history of science in our number.

It was great — good energy and a lively audience. Janet presented “Seeing Like a Rover” about her Mars Rover mission research, the ways that the researchers embody aspects of the Rover and the use of images. I presented my ongoing research about Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House (1965–66) as well as the Birmingham & Midlands Institute Headquarters (1967–70). The two projects incorporate similar themes — BMI/HQ is a continuation of sorts from OCH — but neither have been written about or discussed with much frequency.



A panel titled “Responsive Architecture” for the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) accepted my paper on the Oxford Corner House to their annual convention in Montreal (!!!) from March 3–6. You already know how much I love Montreal. I’m delighted to return and at that, to present the research I conducted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Last night, we hosted a Hannah Arendt nightcap hour at my place in Princeton. It made sense: a few people are in a seminar devoted to her work; most of the rest of us have read her, she was the first woman to be a full professor at Princeton (a decade before women undergraduates could attend the university). Daniela and I made glühwein, Daria made bread, Anna-Maria made popcorn. Not sure who the next political scientist or philosopher will be who we fête, but I’m certain it will involve fondue and raclette.

Now, I’m waiting for a plane back to LA, where I’ll meet with my writing advisees and attend their Work in Progress presentations at Art Center and spend some time at home with my boyfriend. Next Tuesday, I go to Shanghai to help organize the Soft Energy Infrastructure workshop with Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism & Infrastructure. It’s my second trip to Shanghai–I was there in 2007 for a project–and my fourth to China since 1997. There’s so much more to say about it but rest assured, you’ll hear about it before I board a flight next week for points further west. I’m then back to LA just five days later at the beginning of November for crits at Art Center. Work continues on dissertation chapters, job applications, an article I’ll submit to Cabinet and um, I guess a bunch of other things. I’m excited for the travel but will miss my friends and my framework in Princeton and the gorgeous fall leaves.

]]> 9d8095dffe6c7c59b5a629c40847caf0 Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:12:50 -0700 http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2010/10/week-1286 Hello. This is a short weeknotes because, well, it’s a bit late. I meant to write it over the weekend, but got distracted by my impending move to Sheffield. Now that I’m 90% packed-up (and surrounded by crudely labelled cardboard boxes), I can reflect a little on last week.

We moved several steps forward on Project Southwold. Whilst we’re still in the design phase, we spent the first half of the week actually prototyping some ideas in HTML form. They’re pretty rough and deliberately unpolished, but give enough of a sense of the gameplay to give us some idea of what works and what doesn’t. It’s always nice to be reminded of the power of prototypes, and in this case, they’re proving helpful already.

In the latter half of the week we did some user research, talking to local students about the project concept, and testing some of the prototypes on them. This again was valuable, and reminded us that research and user testing doesn’t have to be long and complicated to be useful.

As a break, in the middle of the week, we spent a day on another Hack Day, this time with a focus on revisiting and finishing off some of our previous hacks. In particular, we completed work on our hardware hack, the Job Box, which involved a bunch of soldering, wiring, drilling and debugging. Tinkering with physical projects like this is a bit slower than software or web work (with problems much harder to diagnose), but has a nice payoff of being able to see and touch the finished product. We’ll write more about the project soon, but for now, you see a glimpse of our handiwork in our Job Box Flickr photo set.

The week also saw the continuation of two emerging Rattle traditions: on Fridays we start the day with breakfast at the Urban Deli, and finish off at Bath Hotel. With our recently-expanded team, it’s nice to be able to do things like this.

]]> 8cb3d91d346b2fce269f9a9a114c1dc5 Fri, 15 Oct 2010 03:07:54 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/10/week-44/ Lots of smaller features this week. Sort of tidying up after last week’s blitz. After making all the bigger back end stuff, we spent the early part of the week making these bigger bits easier to get to for the player. This could mean anything from the visibility of a list to the placement of a button. Small, but important stuff. And since we started Seasons, it’s always been a testing time when a new one starts. Making sure that the player and team points are calculated correctly, awards given correctly and notified successfully, the leaderboard archived and then reset.

Now that the ‘Career Mode’ functionality has been built we’ve been adapting our narrative ideas and finally getting them into the game. This has opened up a whole exciting new development area that will become my main focus over the next month or so. After making the engine, we now have to write the stories. And not only the stories for the player to play, but the story of the Chromaroma platform as a whole. This week we put a flag in the ground for an important announcement, and have since been thinking differently about how we talk about what we’ve made. In turn, this has made us look at things in a different way which, after being under the hood for so long, feels really refreshing.

]]> 6de04880d0f0ed0982c88ae3ec18bcb7 Thu, 14 Oct 2010 06:47:38 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/10/14/week-12/

[ image courtesy ]

Week 12 and the time is flying by. But in a good way. I’m into my third week at Profero, and really enjoying the variety of different briefs and particularly getting the chance to work with great people who I’m learning loads from. It’s really different to be applying strategic insights much closer to the executional process rather than the very high level, more conceptual work I was doing at Naked. Not that one is better than the other mind, just different. And different is good. The ASOS iPhone/iPad brief has been really challenging as we’ve been wrangling between the vision for the kind of interactions and experience we want to develop – and we know the user (and client) would want – and the realities of what’s going to be technically possible in the shorter term, and building upon existing legacy systems. But that’s all part of the process, and just means we have to think about how we phase these ideas, balancing pragmatism with more visionary concepts. I’ve been learning tonnes from brilliant UX designers and an incredible content strategist who’s got a fantastic background in both print and digital publishing and experience design, so it’s all very rewarding.

Andy Whitlock very kindly asked me if I’d be up for speaking at an event he’s curating for Poke as part of Internet Week Europe. It’s called Metaphwoarh! – because metaphors – and changing perspectives through metaphors – are sexy. Really looking forward to seeing the other speakers do their thing, although this does mean I actually have to prep my bit. It’s going to be held on 7th November, and it’s free, so if you fancy some beers and some food for thought from some cracking speakers (and me), it’d be lovely to see you (RSVP details on the site).

Last week also saw a lovely catchup with Toby about Chromaroma and other bits ‘n’ bobs, and a cracking afternoon of brain fodder at CityCamp. Project Southwold with Rattle is forging on, and really looking forward to seeing the results of this week’s game testing.



[ image courtesy ]

 

In summary – getting excited and (being part of a team that) makes things – not quite as snappy as Mr Jones’ lovely design & slogan, but it’s where I’m at. Good times.

]]> 10dc82b11d82e22c8976ed7578e7e3bf Mon, 11 Oct 2010 06:00:20 -0700 http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/10/weeknote-19.html

What comes next? It’s been a big question for me lately. I’m in the fourth year of five funded years of my PhD and in my sixth year of graduate school. Do I want to stay in academia? Do I want to do corporate R&D? Consulting? Thinktank? Start a company? My background is different than that of the other people in my architecture program (and with very few exceptions, with architecture in general), so it’s unlikely I’d pursue a traditional architectural history position. But this week, I found out that an academic position is open that speaks directly to my multifaceted background. I’m going to apply. There’s no downside to it. At the very least, it’s a good opportunity for me to try to put myself on the academic market and to go through the focusing process. And if I land it, it would be tremendously exciting.

I’ve refocused my dissertation proposal to hone in on the architecture and information/artificial intelligence aspect, moving away from characterizing it as generative computing. It makes me see that I’ll be able to incorporate a lot of the writing I’ve already done  in various papers so far. I’m very lucky to have such a supportive committee. It makes me see this dissertation as a real thing that will not only come together, but that I will complete. A year ago, that seemed so far away. It even seemed far away when I was writing the original dissertation proposal. But now, it’s organizing itself. It’s coming together.

I’ve been reading media theory this week in order to try to situate the projects and practices I’m writing about. At bat: Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Friedrich Kittler. I still kick myself for not taking the media theory class two years ago — it would have come in handy — though I loved the All-Marx-All-The-Time class I took in its place.

We’re getting things set for the Princeton Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure (CAUI) workshop in Shanghai — my flights are booked and I’ll be there the last week of the month. We’ve also begun to put in place the content strategy (including the social media strategy). I’m enjoying the collaboration. We span more than 50 years and every level of higher education from Mario Gandelsonas, the director, through PhD, master’s in architecture, and undergraduate students. Two of the M.Archs  were in the writing group I ran two years ago: now we’re peers in this effort. I like how things flatten.

Finally, this week I’ll be speaking at the Media + Modernity lecture series at Princeton on Thursday (announced in my previous post). It’s exciting to have the opportunity to present my research to my colleagues across the school.

And then the travel picks up: New Haven, Boston, LA, Shanghai, all between now and October 27. The quiet in Princeton is a kind respite.

]]> 6bae3c220fc484c94a2698a2342e9fb4 Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:55:58 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/10/week-43/ Missions missions missions. That’s pretty much what this week has been about. By the end of the day the functionality for Career Mode will be in place. This is the first time I’ve developed in Agile, and this week felt like one of the more Agile ones so far as we discovered that once a new piece of mission functionality was deployed, there were other things to do around it to make it sit right with everything else.

An example – A player should be able to play a mission that requires them to visit a station at a certain time of day. We’ve written a Mission about ghost hunting which makes sense taking place late at night – between 23:30 and 00:30 for example. But the game treats each day separately so we can’t program that in. Within a day we’d developed and deployed the workaround of creating two requirements for the completion of the mission, but specifying that either of them equate to success, not both. Then at the front end, a mission that has this either setting is presented as if there were only one requirement. I’m not sure if that makes sense when written like this, but anyway, it was fun and intense and it works. Three of my favourite aspects of Chromaroma development…

We ticked over another Milestone at the start of this week. All social stuff done for now. Missions this week, new Season next week (with some very important technical things happening in the Interlude relating to Kings Cross St. Pancras), and then onto the new UI. Speaking of which, next week we’re making the mock-ups of the User Interface into XHTML and CSS, which will be ready for implementation the week after. Exciting times.

On the visualisation front Matt showed us a new single player view that is getting really close to what we had in our heads a few months ago. As your little dot moves around the map tracing your journeys, your achievements and missions now flash up and points rack up and your mode of transport is shown. That’ll probably be unveiled with the new UI as well.

James has been working on iconography – never an easy task. We’ll probably confer over those early next week.

Phew.

]]> 49804efe5c13f3029f6a151cc98e0aae Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:42:00 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/1244250970 Last week we had the pleasure of a request from a leading global real estate organization to participate with them in the development of a workplace trends report, looking both 20 years back to assess where design has gone, and 20 years forward, to assess how design of the workplace should respond to other changes we might anticipate in society, technology, culture and the workplace.

These are always great assignments to have. They act as inflections in the normal course of business. They allow a short bit of time to stop and reflect and, in the reflection, to recalibrate.

One of the simple insights that came to us came to us as a result of the final question in all of these exercises, which is something on the order of, “Okay…and what should we do now?” This brought us back to an assessment of what we’ve been doing, and what we’ve been doing right over the past several years.

What I found uniquely fresh in this review was our belief that we are on the front edge of a future that will should radically reformulate what the/a “workplace” is. What I found uniquely surprising in this context is that the processes we’ve been developing over the past couple of years to define the context for design of the workplace provide a robust framework for meeting the challenges that have been emerging and that are becoming more visible now. We are preparing future posts for our work in other places discussing the subject of trends and the best-practice processes that can be used to day to prepare for any future.
]]> a881bf138d5b80ab949a203f59038866 Sun, 03 Oct 2010 09:11:55 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=286 What?

I’m hitting the reset button the weeknote counter because technically my extended run of designer-at-large amongst you has come to an end. I’ve signed an employment contract, have a desk in an actual office and a list of tasks all for one company. Shit got real, as I imagine the kids say.

We’re going to be a wee bit hush for a few weeks yet, but only a few as I think we’re looking at three or four products out and proud by end of the year at a minimum. Fast, good, cheap – we picked the first two.

So I talked about doing some wireframes and mockups for iPad apps before, these are ongoing. In the gaps I’ve been doing logo designs for company. Man, I forget how hard this stuff is. Doing a tweak or refresh of something existing I’ve done a few of, but from scratch only two or three. You try to conjour up all your hopes, ideas, messages into as few strokes as possible. Oof, proper Hard.

It continues.

App of the week: updated Remote, now for iPad. Pretty nice, playing this tune from here on that thru the big speakers using this. Sweet.

]]> 52d6af1414057f113147a03c0fad5132 Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:53:38 -0700 http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/10/weeknote-18.html

I’ve been back in Princeton for just over a week and the heavy air of late hurricane season finally gave way to crisp autumn evenings. It’s my favorite season and it smells wonderful outside — a mix of Lake Carnegie and trees, a chorus of lazy crickets as the soundtrack.

Coming back gave me an opportunity to meet up with Christine Boyer (my advisor) and Ed Eigen (my first reader) about the research I did at the Cedric Price Archive and in Nicholas Negroponte’s personal archive. They’re not surprised to hear that I’ve discovered my original dissertation proposal contains about 5 dissertations, and they’re happy to hear the direction I’m going. Christine told me to retheorize, so I’ve been reading Paul Edwards’ The Closed World as a model of writing about imbricated information-technology-society hybrids. I will start writing an introduction of sorts this coming week, using it as a fulcrum to get into the architects I’m writing about. Having Janet Vertesi in town is quintuply amazing in this regard. She’s in Princeton’s Society of Fellows for a three-year fellowship and is just the right person for me to talk to about the history of technology aspects of my project. She’s also become a very close friend and on top of that, she and her boyfriend Craig live blocks away — a great mix of work and pleasure.

I also started digging into Richard Saul Wurman’s work in the 1970s. My last blog post mentioned some of what I’m curious about: the 1972 The Invisible City theme at the Aspen Design Conference and the 1976 AIA Convention, “The Architecture of Information.” It would be great to interview him as I did Nicholas Negroponte a few months ago and even better if he has archival material: the AIA has been of little help and I’ll need a trip to Chicago to get the rest of the material on the Invisible City conference.

Other things this week:

A lovely trip to New York with numerous meetings with friends. Richard Nash and I finally met face-to-face for breakneck-speed breakfast after numerous near misses. Alex Deschamps-Sonsino was in town with her good friend Karola and we wiled away a lazy afternoon in Brooklyn. Jennifer Brook and I saw the most excellent Sarah Sze show at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, made a trip to Printed Matter and connected with Christian Svanes Kolding for a quick bit at the Standard. Alex Wright and I met up for the first time in a few years to catch up about the history of technology, babies, marriages, and relationships and meditation.

Mark Wigley came to the Radical Architecture Education seminar — the PhD colloquium — to talk about Buckminster Fuller, John McHale and the design department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It was great. Bucky was loved and hated: the students all had to be reprogrammed after his stays on campus. He has a history with Princeton, with 9 visits in the 50s and 60s (and one in 1929). They built tensegrity domes here on campus near the architecture lab. McHale is an interesting figure to me, especially with his work in futures studies.

Coming up this week: I’m extending my stay in Princeton and am looking forward to getting a lot of writing done. Jorge Pardo, who just won a MacArthur “genius grant” is speaking at the architecture school. On Saturday, Axel Kilian is organizing a robotics seminar and I’ll be a critic. There are birthday parties and good dinners and a lot of things to do.

]]> a56bc7e30d4fc45666a70cf84799bb50 Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:05:55 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/10/01/jisc-weeknote-3333/ 33 weeks of constant blogging has been achieved – the best unbroken run of my blogging career and it worked even better than I hoped as a way of getting me thinking and identifying other things to blog about. It is also an interesting record of my year in the JISC Innovation team to look back on in the future.

As it happens my maths were a little out and I have 10 more days at JISC – so it should have been /35. That said I am going to draw the weeknotes to a close now. I haven’t decided whether I will start up again at the MRC – I don’t know their feelings on this sort of thing yet and I’ll need to get a feel for things first. Also it is becoming clear that I have more to say often about my side projects so maybe the focus needs to shift there.

I have written a post that is sort of a ‘leaving interview’ – well if I interviewed myself – that I will publish on the 15th October. It looks back at the last 12 months and is pretty honest I think.

This week the focus has been getting the Briefing Day sorted – and I think that is looking good. I visited the venue today – it is a bit Hogwarts in places but I reckon it is going to work well. Also I continue to have a series of ‘handover’ meetings as I try and justify and explain what I’ve been doing this last year so someone can pick up the few things left.

The team is releasing a pretty sizeable call for funding document on Monday which includes an explanatory briefing paper which I had the pleasure(?) of reading through and giving some feedback on. One section on Identifiers for web pages was actually pretty interesting to me as I retain a bit of fetish for well formed URLs – the whole human readable and hackable aspect of them anyway (I am less interested actually in the Persistent Identifier for everything aspect that is so important to Linked Data which I guess is a surprise to noone given my history of being unconvinced by LD..)

Had a couple more signups to Bettr and next week will give it a big push – starting with the launch of the new, Evenstreams powered, website and news of the Learning Without Frontiers discount offer. I’m going to ask some of the speakers to push things out via their channels as well.

Eventstreams is looking amazing – the feedback we have had so far has really helped simplify things and Stefs work has been amazing. I’m going to have to slow down my involvement for a couple of weeks once I start at the MRC just to free up some headspace but I am very proud of what Stef has built already and it is only going to get better.

I was also very pleased to get my first blogpost done for the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival – I’m hoping to get at least four more done before the Festival starts and then a couple during and after.

Today I am in London just sorting out a last few things – it will be my last visit to the London office which does feel a little weird. I’ll be heading off for a couple of beers at the tiny Savoy Tup in a bit and it will be weird coming to London and not heading for the Strand (or Centre Point) in the future.


]]> bde301f590267e9f6f7ca70cbaaf6806 Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:58:47 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/10/week-42/ This is a double weeknote, a fortnighter. We put on Playful last week, so while I usually would have been writing this, instead I was listening to Sebastian Deterding and thinking about Gameification.

Development has been swift as anything the last two weeks. Anup and Jakub, our full-time developers from Dynamic50, have been really on it. The milestone priorities for the end of this week relate to social features and general site and data query speed. The social stuff was all deployed to production this morning and is ready to go. A newsletter will go out to all our players before the day is done to inform them of all this.

We’ve added Gravatars and pulled in Twitter bios to give the profile pages a more personal feel. This is all laying foundations for when the new user interface goes in next month though, so it takes a bit of imagination and looking past the clunk.

We’re still battling with query speed, both on the data visualisation side of things, and on the site itself. We’re pulling so much fresh data into each profile page that it can take a while. I workaround for the time being is to cache these pages on the server once they’ve been viewed once by the player. Again, the new UI will change the way we consider this as we’ll be pulling in ‘headlines’ as opposed to ‘everything you’ve been doing’. Still, we’ve got plans for complete profile auto-cache-while-everyone-is-asleep type stuff which will make everything lovely and quick for the player.

Tom Scutt and I also got together to wrangle through some game design ideas, and convert them into user stories, add them to the project, and prioritise them. There are some amazing ideas. The first one to get implemented will probably be a point declination algorithm – meaning that if you capture a station, you’ll lose power over it over time if you don’t go there again. After that, it’s all multiplayer and item based action. Fun times.

]]> 0ee941aa6739def8df490c78288e65ad Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:40:20 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/10/01/week-10/

[ photo courtesy ]

Bloody hell, how did it get to week 10? I’ve clearly not been keeping them weekly, but as that’s because I’ve been busy with good stuff to feed my brain, hopefully that’s no bad thing. The thing you’re most afraid of when you leave the comfort of a monthly salary for the brave new world of freelance is of course will I get enough work? And also if part of the reason for leaving the safety of permanent employment is to get variety and explore different opportunities, there’s aso the question of will I get the right work – stuff that interests me, the stuff I want to be doing? And so being behind on weeknotes because the answer to those questions is yes and yes, then that can’t be too bad.

Project Alberta has pretty much been wrapped up – thanks to some sterling team work and particularly excellent work by my partner in crime John Connell, the work’s been delivered to the client, who’s really happy – we just have our closing review call to answer any final questions. Because the client’s in Canada, all of our meetings have been via their very whizzy web-based video conference software Elluminate, which has been a huge help in the absence of face to face meetings.

One of the other questions you have as a freelancer is will I get paid? Happily, I’ve so far had the satisfaction of all invoices issued being paid on time, which I’m making sure I don’t come to expect, but it’s been very gratifying to kick things off on a positive note.

I’d not been working in an office since leaving Naked at the end of June, but this week I started a 3-month contract at Profero, where I’ll be spending 4 days a week until Christmas. One of the aims of being freelance was to get explosure to different agencies and organisations, different ways of working, and to soak up as much as possible from these opportunities. Profero have a lovely agency proposition: ideas that people can belong to – which is most definitely a point of view that strongly resonates with me. And the chance to work in a full service digital agency is already offering me new opportunities I’ve never had before. For a start, we’re making stuff. I’m working with creatives, UX specialists, developers, designers, project managers….all very different from my experience at both PHD and Naked, and it’s awesome to be able to soak up so many different points of view and areas of expertise.

I’m working on a cracking brief for ASOS, which is a brand I both adore personally and hugely admire professionally, and it’s a totally different experience to be applying strategic insights directly to a development process to stuff that’s actually being made, rather than at the high level, more conceptual strategic level I’d been working at whilst at Naked. It’s brilliant to be able to sit in a working session and absorb so much new stuff, process, thoughts, ways of working – this whole journey was about learning and exploration, and so far it’s shaping up very nicely. As well as ASOS, I’m working on a mobile brief for J&J Skincare and will be prepping an innovation session to inspire the M&S client team about digital innovation in retail. So far, so good.

Friday is my non-Profero, other stuff day, so today I’m cracking on in earnest on the bits I’m doing to help input to Project Southwold with Rattle. Also hopefully going to be doing a bit of thinking for Rebel Alliance, which is all very interesting.

In other news, last week I joined Jamie Coomber, Le’nise Brothers & Graeme Wood on a panel representing the IPA to discuss different ways that brands can take advantage of social media at a conference put on by an organisation called the Social Media Academy on Thursday 23rd, then spent the following day at Conway Hall for the utterly delightful Playful 2010. Playful was a cracking day, too much to write up here, especially when others have done so already so eloquently, but one of my highlights was Sebastian Deterding’s self-described “grumpy talk on ‘badge measles’ and the confusions, side effects and missing parts of gamification”: Pawned: Gamification and its discontents. I also had a couple of moments on the stage as part of the What the Foursquare? panel, which was marvellous fun, and which I’ve written up in greater detail in the previous post. A good time was had by all (and we inadvertently started the rumour that Dominik Diamond had died, sparked by his sudden appearance amongst trending topics, all the result of his appearance on a live recording of Shift Run Stop. Oops.)

And obviously, I still haven’t seen Inception.

]]> 808d8a389568b460ebee8fd432a15995 Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:41:11 -0700 http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/09/weeknote-17.html It’s hard to top a week like the one I described in weeknote 16. The last week was about starting the school year at Art Center, on one hand, and tying up loose ends in LA to start the school year in Princeton. The highlight of the week: hearing Tom McCarthy read from his novel C, then having brunch with him and a few friends the next day. READ. C. It’s stellar.

At Art Center, there’s a great crew of thesis students in the graduate Media Design Program. I heard the first of what they’re working on. My very favorite part of being a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea was being a thesis advisor: nothing like watching someone’s own project grow and develop and being there as a guide. I’m also really enjoying being a part of so multifaceted a faculty. It feels familiar and new at the same time. Funny (in a very nice way) to see themes repeating in my work and in theirs as they explore their thesis directions — it’s a great place to be.

So then, I packed up a couple boxes of books (they made it, though the box is torn), went to yoga and to my writers co-op, then flew back to Princeton last Thursday. I discovered I’d done a thorough job of setting things up for my return. Can’t say I’ve ever been all that neat a person but everything was tidy in the student apartment I’d moved into in June. When you split time in two places, finding things again is the best you can hope for, but things felt smooth and familiar. I reconnected friends from school, several of whom I’ve studied with for five years, caught up about our summer research and discussed the bigger questions of what comes next — we’re in year four or five of our PhDs, we’ve known each other since our master’s program — what’s the next step? Two friends will enter the academic job market. I’m trying to determine which way I’ll go. Writing the dissertation means that there’s an end in sight, unlike the interminable coursework I did (two years of a master’s, two years of a PhD: nearly 20 courses in four years).

My research on Cedric Price and Nicholas Negroponte this summer is going to help to boil down the dissertation. I’m surprised that I’ll be dealing in some way with Richard Saul Wurman and information architecture, as he defined it in 1976 (it never was my intention). Today, I met with Christine and Ed (advisor & 1st reader) and they’re excited about the direction I’m going to take it. Now to theorize information and architecture. Re-reading this week: Geof Bowker and Michel Foucault.

All of this in preparation for an unhinged October. October is going to be crazy. I’m flying at least 25,000 miles: Princeton, LA, Boston (IBM Research), New Haven, LA, Shanghai (Princeton Center for Architecture, Urbanism & Infrastructure), LA. I’ll probably be in San Francisco in there, too for Institute for the Future. I’m working on being as grounded as I can.

]]> c18afa1c8fa5fe4b91627cfaaf99544f Sat, 25 Sep 2010 05:12:39 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/09/25/jisc-weeknote-3233/ The first half of this week was mainly defined by some weird bug that basically meant I spent alot of time throwing up without actually feeling particularly unwell. Didn’t make for a particularly productive start to the week though. I did manage to get a bit further along on organising the teams Briefing Day and also push out a survey covering the impact of JISCs work on ‘skills’ to a few people to see if my planned process has any chance of succeeding (my initial thinking by the way is nope – not in the timescales.. )

In a typical bit of timing as well I started this week to really start to get a feel for working remotely with the rest of the team – bit late in the day it has to be said and it is likely fueled by a certain amount of freedom knowing the end is nigh but nonetheless it was good stuff. I think the current restrictions and challenges that JISC is facing is going to force some innovative thinking around some activities that will be interesting to watch (from a safe distance!)

As far as the side projects are concerned I upgraded the hosting for Evenstreams this week which has made a real difference and the feedback we have received has all been very helpful and it is developing into a very slick app. In the next week or two we will start using it to manage the Bettr site as if anyone should be a true guinea pig I’m the most obvious option.

Speaking of Bettr I’ve been amazed at the support I’ve been getting from the organisers at Learning without Frontiers – they continue to astound me with their generosity.

I attended Playful on Friday for two reasons really – the first was to get a feel for the Conway Hall and what I’d need to keep in mind for running Bettr there and the second was to spark some inspiration on new thinking around doing interesting things with ‘digital’ to communicate with audiences. Unfortunately I had major transport issues which meant getting there late and, if I’m honest, in a poor mood. This might have effected my take on the 2 hours of talks I did stay for but while I thought they were fun (especially the talk about being contrary) it was even more frivolous than I expected and as such I left after lunch (though it was good to see Frankie, Ben and finally meet Mia). It was a success though as far as ideas for Bettr is concerned – got a clear picture of the day in my head now (and am more certain than ever of the need for a good ‘host’ for the event!).

I contact multiple people this week to get started with my blogging for Drumbeat as well. I am determined to have posts with all the people who were both at FUKOER and will be at Drumbeat. It will be challenging but doable I think.

I’m having a few beers in London on Friday as phase one of my leaving schedule and I also have the pleasure of tidying p and explaining the budgets I’ve been responsible this last year on Wednesday so that’ll be fun.


]]> 62bacbb3b0a5318cdac5ac9f012ab401 Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:08:27 -0700 http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/09/weeknote-16.html

What. A. Week.

I’ve packed five weeks into the last five days. My head is reeling and I’m exhausted, but what an amazing week.

This week has involved LA, San Francisco and Scottsdale, the pneumatic tubes Ignite talk, a 30 person meeting with an organization I’m working with through Institute for the Future, and the opportunity to give a talk about Cedric Price. I’ve submitted a paper to a conference and turned out an article draft for Design Observer’s Places Journal.

Some highlights:

I got lost in some bushes trying to find the grand dinner at Google Zeitgeist at a resort in Scottsdale and accosted someone for directions. When he responded, I had a moment of oh-my-God-I-know-that-voice: it turned out to be Tom Brokaw. I had lunch with the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, discussed conduits and pneumatic tubes with Larry Page, went swimming at 3 a.m., and gave the pneumatic tubes talk to the greatest concentration of fame and leadership that I’ll probably ever meet.

Talking to 30 or 40 people at Adaptive Path about my research was awesome– I’m so grateful to Kate Rutter and Laura Kirkwood-Datta for organizing it and to everyone for turning up! I’ve wanted to share the research I’m doing about Cedric Price with information architects and interaction designers because it seems so similar. I talked about one of the projects I researched this summer: the Oxford Corner House Feasibility Study (1966), an urban information hub for central London built into a massive former restaurant. Price used information as his central material for the building — a very contemporary idea (consider Mike Kuniavsky’s recent talk at Device Design Day, “Information is a Material.”) I never set out to work on a history of information architecture — a term that Richard Saul Wurman coined in 1976 at the AIA Conference –but Price’s work really is an architecture of information. In any case, there will be articles and papers to publish soon. We videotaped the talk and will make it available as well.

We did a great kickoff meeting with Anthony Townsend, Jake Dunagan and Jim Dator for a project at Institute for the Future. I’ve long admired Anthony’s work (I sent him fanmail on his dissertation) and have wanted to work with IFTF for some time. It’s a promising project and great team. Jim founded the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies — and also wrote for one of the issues of Archigram back when. He’s a central figure in the field of futures studies. (Futures Studies even ties into Price’s work: he considered himself a futurist and was listed in the Futures Directory in 1975.)

Tonight, I’ll see most of the people I’m close to in San Francisco. Tomorrow, I hurtle back to LA, starting my position as a writing advisor at Art Center in the graduate Media Design Program. Then finally, finally back to Princeton on Thursday to start off the school year, to focus and formalize the research into a dissertation chapter and get my apartment set up. I’m only midway through September and already, October is brimming over. I’ll return to the West Coast in October for IFTF and Art Center, attend a symposium on place at IBM’s Center for Social Software in Boston, and put on a seminar in Shanghai with Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure.

And sleep. Maybe somewhere in there I’ll get some sleep.

]]> 39e8f3bfdb0fb576bab47f0b805323ce Fri, 17 Sep 2010 05:13:28 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/09/week-40/ With our new development team now flying solo and burning through bugs and user stories, Toby, James, Matt and I went to Birmingham this week to go through the new User Interface designs. Basically, for the last month James has been making the visuals of each aspect of the site focused on different user journeys that we’d predefined. Once we were happy with these (about a fortnight ago now) Matt took them and started making them move around, making them interactive.

So we had a play, and made some notes, and there are changes to be made for sure, but we’re getting there well on target for our October design overhaul.

On the dev side of things we’ve got some new features, and have solved some important bugs, as well as giving the admins (me and Toby for the moment) the power to fix any broken imports. We scrape the data from TFL every night, and import it into the game where the journeys are turned into game events and given points, missions accomplished, collections achieved. Sometimes this breaks. Because we’re scraping, it’s often a mismatched word that breaks it. I just typed another two hundred words about why that is, but when I read it back it sounded so unbelievably dull that it just had to go.

We’re making the game more social, and this week added Gravatars to the mix. We tried Twitter avatars but that only worked with images half the size that we want. Nevermind.

We also solved the problem of Kings Cross St. Pancras versus Kings Cross versus St. Pancras International versus I-don’t-know-how-many-different-versions-of-the-same-station. Basically, when Kings Cross St. Pancras featured in a collection, you’d have to swipe at the ‘Kings Cross St. Pancras’ swipe point. Not even I know where that is compared to the others. So we’ve made the game consider it as one station. From a data perspective, that’s wrong, but from a player perspective it just had to be done.

Unfortunately, the game will have to recalculate everyone’s completed missions and collections, achievements, and records when we tell it these facts…and that will take 2 days. So we’re going to do it in The Interlude between Season’s 3 & 4 at the start of October.

]]> 7ee864d132605f452fe15e284f734e5d Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:54:27 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/09/17/jisc-weeknote-3133/ This has been a good week

I got the call Monday confirming that I will neither be joining the growing ranks of the unemployed nor the (seemingly equally growing) hordes of freelancing digital types. I’ve already written about my soon to be new gig so I won’t revisit that here other than to say..YAY!

I’ve also written about the fact we have opened Eventstreams up to alpha testing – this seems to be going well and we have had some useful feedback already. We are going to need to upgrade the hosting rapido and that is on me to sort this weekend but otherwise we seem to be onto something.

Bettr got both some much appreciated support this week and also a small bit of (fair) criticism. Graham Brown-Martin who runs the major Learning Without Frontiers conference got in touch with some kind words and offer of publicity which I gladly accepted. They have a pretty amazing line-up already for their event earlier that week and I think I’ll be making my best effort to attend. On the critical side it was pointed out that the speaker list was light on women. I’ve mentioned this myself and my initial invite list was much more balanced. I am still hoping the final day will be more reflective of the education space on this issue.

Back to the day job and to be honest that went pretty well. I think the fact that I am no longer fretting about what happens next means I can get my head back into a useful space again plus the fact I only have 20 days left means I can focus on just a couple of things and make sure I see them through. I’m going to lead on the logistics of the IE Briefing Day that Andy announced and also coordinate a couple of (non) communications projects through to completion before I leave. Hell, I even enjoyed yesterdays team meeting!

Oh and I also started organising my leaving do which is probably the most important thing!


]]> 3b7b48600d2f78e828ee1bb913b1b0eb Tue, 14 Sep 2010 05:49:46 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=283

Avoiding the effects of the darkness of winter at the moment, while chugging through a second round of wireframes and designs for new project, after excellent spiralling design/feature/detail chat with Norm & James. That’ll get a bit easier soon I think with a permanent space.

Last week was quite large, or felt that way, beginning with a chunky bit of mockup design completed to show off an iPad concept – fairly straightforward actually, don’t want to scare the horses just yet. Following that with a busy presentation day and arrival of inlaws to stay for a few days.

This week, we have our first all-hands in an actual office space too – fast moving (although we’re warned to bring our own deckchair…!). Love it.

]]> cd78aec1359a936782269b42fe709898 Tue, 14 Sep 2010 04:02:56 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/09/14/week-7/

[ photo courtesy ]

So, obviously I’ve been a bit, er, lax, about the weekly part of weeknotes. So playing catchup.

The Goodby project is now all wrapped up, client and agency both really happy with what was delivered, which was a lovely confidence boost as that was my first freelance gig. It was very much an early-stage strategic direction brief, so the work that this strategic thinking will inform is a way away, but that’s now with Goodby and looking forward to seeing what they come up with. They were awesome to work with – though as they’re in San Francisco, we haven’t actually met face to face! Going to be making the annual pilgrimage to visit friends in SF after SXSW next year, so we’re looking forward to some very belated beers then.

Currently on the plate is Project Alberta, a nice gig for a small but lovely client who have a wonderful brand, a great purpose idea & all-round delightful offering – they just need some help bringing it to a wider audience. I’ve brought my brilliant mate (and former colleague at Naked) John Connell on board to work on this, as I didn’t have the capacity to give this the attention it needed within the timeframe needed, and didn’t want to turn them away – and luckily he’s got a perfectly-timed window of freelancing before going off travelling in India & Nepal. Furthermore as this client’s business is all about sustainable design and John helped to develop the Naked Planet sustainability offering, he was the perfect person to bring onto the project. All going swimmingly so far, and John’s just as great a partner in crime now we’re both freelance as he was when we were working together at Naked. Good times.

Also been speaking with the IPA Social team, as we’re supposed to be on a panel at the Advertising in a Social Media World conference in a couple of weeks, and we’d like to try and stir things up a bit, and raise a few provocative points of view, get some debate going, as panels where everyone agrees with each other tend to be dull as ditchwater. Some of the broader areas we’re thinking about are etiquette, what you should do vs what you can do, and the ever-present issues around privacy.

Looking forwards, I’m very excited about the conversations with the fine folks at Rattle about coming on board to work on Project Southwold – it’s a fantastic project, with some exceptionally talented people lined up to work on it, so really chuffed about this one.

It’s been really inspiring to come across so many people who aren’t content with just doing things the way it’s always been done, who are experimenting, trying new things and forging new ground. Chatting with the lovely fellas at BERG and Rebel Alliance, amongst others, got my brain buzzing, and that’s a Very Good Thing.

 

In other news, I:

…went on a hen weekend and took part in my first life drawing class. I cannot draw for toffee. I apologise now to Andy the model for my depiction of him. It wasn’t very flattering.

…went to dConstruct & OpenTech, as written up in my previous post.

…have been playing with Mappiness, the delightful app which maps happiness across space in the UK, as part of a research project for the LSE (thanks to Charlie for the heads-up).

…have been loving If You Only, the wonderful creation of my friend and writer Bobbie Johnson as a means of surfacing brilliant long-form content (the full name of the project being ‘If you only read one thing today, make it this’). It’s perfect Instapaper fodder for the iPhone / iPad and makes you want journeys to last longer just so you can read some more wonderful writing – and it got a lovely write-up in the Observer to boot.

..have been enjoying my former creative director Jim’s latest creative tinkerings, with his pal Mark (of Fast Show and Harry Potter fame) – a mini sketch show featuring Mark in the character of The Bishop of Chiltington recording his thoughts & observations as he explores Other Villages. Lovely little microcontent using Audioboo, it’s really charming.

… still haven’t seen Inception – though I did see Scott Pilgrim vs the World which kicked ass.

]]> fc4f93be2d0cb7bc059c981fc108253f Sat, 11 Sep 2010 03:17:22 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/09/11/jisc-weeknote-3033/ Another week off so another short update.

Be Bettr has really come together now – I’ve already got a great bunch of speakers and am actually going to confirm two more next week. It will be a packed day and it is nicely balanced in theory as well. The chance of sponsorship has increased as well which is nice. I have opened registration but haven’t done much of a publicity blitz yet – that is on the cards though.

It was another big week for Eventstreams as well – ending with our latest planning meeting last night in our HQ (the Canteen!) – tomorrow I’ll be inviting the first alpha testers to check out the app – hopefully they’ll be kind! I also quickly built a demo site just to show the sort of basic site the app creates at the moment – a ‘no-prize’ to anyone who knows the author of the comic strip I have used for the conference content

Yesterday I attended some of the #bccweb meeting to discuss their new web platform. I didn’t stay long as it wasn’t really what I was expecting but I do very much admire the level of transparency they are demonstrating. There was a really interesting idea amongst it all that they seem to only really be skirting around the edges of and that is the concept of breaking the full functionality of the platform into smaller projects and commission them separately for a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ approach. This is no easy undertaking and some of the support for the idea is a little naive but I do think it is the future of these sorts of projects and we need to work out best practice for achieving it.

I also had an interview this week. I thought it went well and seems like a really interesting job in a nice department with the opportunity to build my own team again but I’m not getting my hopes up – recent history has taught me better.

Back to work next week – few bits and pieces to finish off and one project to concentrate on and that’ll be that. I’m sure the last couple of weeks will fly by.


]]> aaec49fb0cf76e046128cf1bfcf137ea Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:34:09 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/09/week-39/ Dubbed ‘Handover Week’ because most of the work has been around ensuring Dynamic 50 (namely our new developers Anup and Jakub) get to grips with the system while we still have Dr. James Adam at hand from Go Free Range. It’s weird getting used to a new developer’s working style, but Jakub and Anup have been plowing through and have cleared some major bug fixes, new features, and all the handover technicalities to boot.

Matt has been away from the visualisations this week, and has been creating interactive versions of James R’s highly detailed interface designs. Over the past months we’ve been describing each part of the site with a ‘whoosh’ sound, or Tron analogies, and so to actually see it working before your very eyes is a treat. Naturally, there’s a lot of ‘I never thought of that’ moments – both good and bad. Good in the sense that you’re surprised, bad in a sense that you didn’t-think-of-the-main-point-of-the-page-when-coming-up-with-it. But the latter is good also, because give it another iteration and it’ll be perfect (at at least closer to being).

Tom dropped his game design document on us last week, and I got to reading it this week. There’s lots of great game mechanics in there, and ideas of how we can twist and turn the system to be played in different ways. Agile Dev Stories have started popping into my head about each one, so we’ll get all those down next week and start prioritising them.

That is all.

]]> 44d74df1ba94573adde62b11d34dc373 Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:17:12 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=277 The long weekend was a joy, and although this isn’t ‘work’, we did get round to scooping out about 9 frames of honey we’d taken from our bees earlier in the summer. The messy results of that sticky process are now sitting in a slowly filtering honey-bucket awaiting bottling in a few days.

After that, it was a new month, a new term and it feels like a new start. Having had hardly any EMI work to do this week I’ve been able to focus on the new startup. Now everyon is off holidays, we had a great catchup meeting on Thursday, with the whole team together. Awesome stuff, a few shifts in the various strands but overall momentum, which is invigorating.

Immediate tasks bubbled up with a pitch next week so Friday was spent putting some very quick screens for an iPhone app together and sketching out an iPad app. This weekend I’ll flesh those out and should have nice work ready for midweek.

In addition, I’ve been helping out with a little site for the New Forest Festival, learning a bit more than I’d like to know about WordPress. Really, I’m shocked by how popular WP is – it’s a right messy old nightmare doing things in it. Back to MoveableType for me next time!

Busy busy busy!

]]> 65f6d83530eb7ee02bcc5e2eaf80909f Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:58:38 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/09/03/jisc-weeknote-2933/ I am on leave this week and next and for the first time in a long time have completely switched off my work email and am taking a proper break from the day job – before the day job takes a permanent break from me

It hasn’t all been getting Mayorships of local pubs or going to the cinema though.

I’ve been pushing along with Bettr and am very pleased with how it is going. I have a pretty decent line-up of speakers already (with more to come) and have already sold one ticket despite not planning on announcing registration was open til Monday! There has even been a nibble around sponsorship despite me making no efforts in that direction up til now so that needs careful handling.

Evenstreams is very, very close to being opened up to a few friends to kick the tires a bit and see what they can break. Stef really has performed miracles with this app already and we are coming up with new features everyday – though being careful to stick to the mission that it should be as simple as possible and feel more like data entry than web design at the backend.

I’ve agreed to take on a weeks work for Jiva around the launch of Tutorhub as well which is nice as it means I was there at day one of initiating the project and then will be involved with the launch.

Well that is about it for this week – next week will be equally short and sweet before we start the final run-in..


]]> 971d746cbef063f6a20c5fdc8a6bd9ea Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:31:19 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/09/week-38/ A relatively quiet week this week, what with our development team being away. It’s handover week next week though, where Go Free Range pass the baton on to Dynamic 50 (our new team).

Earlier on in the week we sorted out the beginnings of a new workflow dynamic for the next Data Visualisation milestones. We’ll need to refine it according to Dynamic 50’s particular workflow methods, but we’re hoping to be able to secure a few hours each week for JSON edits. Matt and Robin (our data viz lords) require a really refined database so that the flash loads faster, so to prevent a viz development bottle neck, we’re hoping to review this weekly.

Other than that, we’re coming up to the end of Season Two. Seasons will eventually be three months long, but we’ve a lot to test in the transition period – The Interlude. Awards, point tallies, leaderboard reset, profile details. All the things that are affected by Season switches need keeping a close eye on, as they were only implemented last month. I suppose we could do a series of very very short seasons, but we’re really trying to keep the game as fun as possible for our alpha users.

Speaking of our alpha users, the way they’ve been playing the game has been really inspiring us. From where we’re standing, you can clearly see companionship between players. There’s also noticeable tactical behavior – from people who crave the Get Off One Stop Early (GOOSE) missions, to those hankering for more bike play, and even a few players going really out of their way to capture stations and complete collections. At this stage in the development and with some a small user base, it gives us a warm feeling to see people playing life in ways we hadn’t imagined.

]]> 252b8773280405b2e53b290b67ac1b01 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:34:28 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/1021834209 Will Fall and renewed activity drive us back to the opportunities for reflection that weeknotes provide?

It has been a long, hot, slow summer so far. Now, however, maybe with that back-to-school anticipation and optimism that seems to be built into our genes and into our annual cadence, I expect that the discipline of these notes will return.

We are in a flurry of activity with new opportunities developing in a number of places. we are getting excited about the Fall with international work emerging, with the regeneration of some our research and development projects, with the restoration of collaborative relationships, and with new opportunities in the domain of technology startups.

So this week has been proposal week and we haven’t felt better for a while.

]]> f677b864cacad14a0fe65875be823f8e Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:58:52 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/08/27/jisc-weeknote-2833/ Another week flies by. The closer it gets to the end of my time at JISC the faster things seem to be moving.

The week was pretty good though – I spent alot of time in Balsamiq trying to find a way to make our team area on the JISC website a bit more useful & less muddled. This is a weird challenge really as alot of things I would do usually ‘break’ the automated aspects of the CMS as regards pulling content in from other areas and also there is little controls over the URL structure so me messing with things leads to broken links and random redirects.

I also got my hands dirty and actually dusted off my CMS skills in the Dev environment to see what I could and couldn’t get away with – despite the problems with the CMS (and there are a multitude) it isn’t quite as evil as it is sometimes portrayed and I enjoyed poking around in it again. I also find that my preference for writing all my WP posts in the code view means I have rediscovered my long lost HTML understanding – which helps.

I also wrote what can best be considered an ‘opinion piece’ that was strictly for internal circulation that was the sort of thing you can really only produce with one foot out of the door. I stand by what I wrote and it wasn’t a personal jibe at anyone but it certainly lacked subtlety.

Also had some fun building some basic forms using Google Forms – which is probably my favourite aspect of Google Docs these days. I just remember when even the most basic form was a royal pain to produce and form builders were expensive extras bolted on to your CMS – now you can knock something up in minutes and embed it anywhere..for free!

Something that has been happening alot lately is that I have been invited in to bits of meetings or for 1 on 1 chats just to give my unvarnished opinion on certain subjects. It is like being an internal consultant and I do enjoy it. This week I was harping on about the way the Bristol City Council is approaching the procurement of its new website as I think it is an impressively innovative idea.

Eventstreams is rocketing along – we are only 2 weeks or so from inviting ‘alpha’ testers. This is about a month further along than I was expecting and we’ll be offering more functionality as well. Stef really has outdone himself. I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks working up the business side in more detail.

Been a slow week for Bettr as I was pretty busy with the day job but I’ll give that a boost next week as well – it is further along than I expected but I do need to lock down some extra startup speakers quick smart.

I have now got one interview which has pleased me no end but I also was knocked back for two jobs I applied for without even getting an interview – one of which was no surprise but the other was a bit of a shock. Freelance life is looking more and more likely.


]]> 9cfec0e0458620ce3bf6689f583c8be8 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:19:38 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/08/week-37/ With only a few weeks left before we swap development teams, this week was really the last one where any major new development of the site could take place. What with holidays and hand-over time, the next two weeks are already full. Somehow though, we’ve managed to nail quite a slab of stuff…

You can now score points for riding a bike. Hurrah! It’s all a bit basic still, but it works. Everytime you pick up a TFL bike using your keycard, Chromaroma will give you points. I can’t wait to see the visualisation of the rides. Testing of that begins next week with Robin and Matt developing and sketching respectively.

Last week was spent mostly doing the really boring work of making the system more robust (some changes and downtime on the TFL site meant we lost almost a week’s worth of points for a while), so on Friday afternoon, as I was typing up last week’s weeknotes, Dr. James Adam went on a little development spike to explore Groups.

We hadn’t even spoken much about Groups. It was always a few stops down the line. Yet, when James sent the screengrabs it all made sense. Even before we’ve built up the social side of the game, in one foul swoop Groups harnesses friend power and makes mini-communities and teams. Think of them as more like Guilds. Or clubs even.

I’ve been in Nottingham today with Matt laying out the next couple of months of data visualisation development. We spent the whole morning on the single player view aspects, and if we can get everything in that we want, it’s going to feel really game-like. It’s strange, because you can’t play it on screen (you play Chromaroma by travelling), so in effect we’re making an interactive film of you travelling around London. But, as usual, there’s more to it than that.

Toby’s been in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Wales all week. And I’m about to go and live in a cottage near Bakewell to look after some animals including a fish called Agamemnon. For a week.

]]> 4dda475c6a4ab46e95f5843d3e6a7758 Sat, 21 Aug 2010 11:18:37 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=275 Back on the weeknotes horse after summer off, apologies for the absence. It was a self imposed quiet from not wanting to crap on and moan about work not going in my preferred best direction. Also, I didn’t want to undermine myself by talking about future plans prematurely.

I’m currently splitting my time between winding down my participation with new digital product development with the record label and early design work for a new startup I’m involved with. The contrast between the two especially strong right now, where the project I had originally begun in November is culminating in multiple releases in early October. Meanwhile the startup has assembled a killer team, has multiple streams spinning up and should have a couple of early products out in October with more following.

This brush with corporate culture has been quite interesting but eventually the frustrating inertia inherent becomes frustrating and the opportunity to get out and at least fail fast again is irresistible.

]]> 2d22eb4a3a25a80cbd83905f5706bada Sat, 21 Aug 2010 03:04:46 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/08/21/jisc-weeknote-2733/ This week was mainly defined by meetings.

I met up with Dan Sutch, who is Head of Development at Futurelab to talk about various things but EventEye in particular. I’ve always been a little envious of Futurelab as they seemed to run so many cool projects and EventEye is destined to be another example of that. It was interesting to hear Dans’ plans for the product and my brain was whirling away during and after with ideas about taking a tool like that to market (especially with events tools being my main preoccupation already!). Futurelab have the benefit of a great innovative product, a strong reputation and access to some big names in media, industry and education so I have no doubt it will be a success.

Dan also very kindly agreed to speak at Bettr – which is shaping up rather brilliantly at the moment – I now have nine confirmed speakers all of whom will have interesting stories to tell. I am going to spend the first two weeks of September pretty much work on Bettr fulltime so I’ll be launching it properly around that time.

Thursday I had back-to-back meetings in London – kicking off with some light handover stuff with Ben who will be taking over the last remnants of my project activity – we talked at some length about the place for usability in the e-infrastructure work JISC is funded and I think/hope it was a useful discussion.

Then we had a team meeting that was a little strange for me as it was very much focused on various activities I won’t be involved in at all. In particular the large funding call that is going to be released in six weeks or so. It does look as if there is going to be some meeting organisation and some social web publicity work that I’ll get to do but the timing of my leave isn’t perfect for that so we’ll have to see what I can do next week.

I was then lucky enough to meet up with Alan Levine, CTO of the New Media Consortium and author of the CogDogBlog as he is briefly in the UK (though I did manage to miss him when he was actually in Bristol!). The NMC has been an organisation I have followed for many years and their Horizon Reports have been regularly on my reading list since they first started. In fact Alans blog was one of the first I subscribed to. It was really interesting to have a chat over a couple of pints of Bombardeir – especially hearing about some of his epub stuff first hand and also the distributed way in which the small NMC team are able to work (and their lack of formal meetings!)

Eventstreams has been going full steam ahead with Stef releasing new functions on a daily basis – I have written the blog post about it which I will publish this weekend sometime. I am also, along with Grace, going to push ahead with another event idea we have been discussing assuming we can get a financial backer for it.

I got a couple of knock-backs for jobs this week – one of which I really did expect to get an interview for so it does look more and more like I’m going to need to strike out on my own. I have had a very kind offer of free desk space back at Jiva if I do go in that direction which will make life much easier (despite the distraction of the effing table football!)


]]> d89848323ef12118159989e291c45bbf Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:15:04 -0700 http://www.chromaroma.com/blog/2010/08/week-36/ The most exciting thing this week (apart from coming back to work after a week by the sea, of course) was by far me and Toby trying out the Boris Bikes. After a donut laced meeting at Channel 4, we tazzed it around Westminster, crossed the Thames, and dropped the bikes off at the South Bank. Then back on another pair, and North to Brick Lane for a perusal round Rough Trade/meeting/afternoon working on café Wifi. Amazing.

They’re really good bikes as well. They weigh a lot, and only have three gears, but the gears are set in such a way that the bike feels lighter to ride than you’d think. The roads feel safer than I thought they would as well and, since they’re still a novelty, the tourists filing down to see the Houses of Parliament all look at you going “ooooh”.

So yeah, now we’re DEFINITELY plugging the bikes into Chromaroma. How could we not? We’ve already come up with a really non-obstructive and compelling way to add them to our data visualisations as well. More to come on that.

Toby’s away on holiday, so I’m in charge now. Evil laugh etc. But no, I’ll be working heavily on the prioritisation of visualisation features, and speaking to our new developers.

We’re really sad to be losing Go Free Range – their attitude towards development and business is really inspiringly fresh, independent, and honest. They’ve been offered a huge chunk of work from another client that will be taking up too much of their time to continue with Chromaroma. But, they’ve been amazingly helpful in helping us find a new development team. Really, they couldn’t have been more helpful or brilliant. If one day you need some developers to make you something that hasn’t been done before, go to Go Free Range.

Yesterday we also went to the Channel 4/4IP picnic, that wasn’t a picnic (foreboding clouds) but an afternoon in the pub. Met some really nice other 4ip folk, and folk from other 4ip funded projects. Everyone doing great things. Most of them still secret (ish).

]]> 9671d222c2c9660c4e041d0adf014562 Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:23:25 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/08/13/jisc-weeknote-2633/ The week isn’t quite over but I’ve got a busy weekend ahead so I have jumped the gun a bit.

If last week felt quiet then I don’t really know how to describe this one – it has been like the Marie Celeste.

I seem to have spent most of the week doing the kind of admin tasks that you should really try and keep on top of as you go along but which I always allow to build up. It is dull work but it does give a nice feeling of accomplishing something when it is done.

I also made some progress with the Comms project I’m working on – a meeting with Rachel yesterday clarified a few things for me and now I have a plan of action I can get behind – need to get my survey head on and also start thinking about manipulating JISC Involve to my will

I’m also going to be doing a little thinking about how to represent the new areas of work starting in a month or so on the JISC website which will mean thinking about so IA issues and also about what information people actually expect to find on our various platforms.

Oh and I’ve got a load of links to various Gov policies and initiatives that may be JISC related to see where I can map our work across – that is going to make for some fun reading.

As far as the side projects go it is all systems go – Stef is steaming along on Eventstreams and I’ll be blogging about that this weekend. Also the new Bettr site has launched and is looking lovely so I will be pushing ahead to invite speakers and do publicity on that starting next week.

I am also thinking very hard about taking on another conference and will start polling people in private about interest over the next couple of weeks – I think it is a decent idea but need to run it by a few more people and also see if anyone is interested in bankrolling it.

On the job hunt side – I did have some positive news about a job that was previously withdrawn due to Gov cuts coming back into play so I should be interviewing for that one but everything else is still very quiet.


]]> 189b43efc00c5aa7d59c037e16da4d6a Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:58:19 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/08/12/week-2/

[ photo courtesy ]


So in the grand tradition of weeknotes, I’m posting this one a bit late. I’m also not going to flog a dead horse – if I’m simply too busy doing then I’m not going to sweat missing the odd week too much, equally if I’m struggling for stuff to write about then I shan’t inflict my waffle on you, dear reader. But I’d like to try and see if I can use these as a way to look back on the overall process & journey of going freelance, as well as to reflect on some of the things I’ve been thinking about during a given week.

So, week 2. My time’s principally been spent working on the Goodby project, which has been really interesting and a terrific learning curve. Interesting firstly because it’s a knotty problem (and as a planner, they’re the very best kind) with an open-minded client, and a super-smart team of folks back at the ranch in San Francisco. But also interesting from a practical point of view, being that I’m working mainly at home, and triangulating between an agency team on the West Coast, and a client team split between London and Geneva.

Working at home definitely has its benefits – no commute (although the down side of this is limited opportunity to get Chromaroma points!), and the novelty of being able to work in your pyjamas has its own appeal! Avoiding distractions is pretty much the same as it would be in an office, insofar as the main culprits are net-related (email, twitter, IM, google reader, facebook, general noodling around), so the discipline required to remain focused isn’t much different. I’m finding the main difference is that working at home means you don’t have the banter and human contact that you get in the office, so the temptation to get distracted by email, IM, twitter etc is perhaps greater, as it’s the main outlet for talking to other people…..and being somewhat, er, chatty (read: gobshite) it’s definitely something I crave!

It’s looking like my next major project will be for a brilliant agency: until it’s totally confirmed I don’t want to count my chickens, but having met with some awesome people there and had some firm discussions about coming in to spend some time with them, I’m excited about the coming months. So if all goes according to plan, I’ll be based in their lovely offices for 4 days of the week, and working from home on other stuff on the 5th. Also got some shorter consulting gigs lined up before then (more to follow on those) so things are filling up.

I think that if I were going to be working from home for any considerable length of time, I’d probably want to look into a co-working space, both because my other half works from home (and as a record producer with a full studio setup in the second bedroom, it’s not necessarily the quietest place to work, plus I can more easily relocate to another desk, whereas he can’t so easily move a studio!), and because I think I’d go a bit stir crazy spending all my time at home. That and I do quite like making a separation between work and home – at uni I always liked to work in the library rather than in my room, so that I could mentally separate work from non-work, and I’d like to think of our living / dining room first and foremost as somewhere for relaxing rather than my office.

There are several brilliant options near me – including the Islington Hub, the King’s Cross Hub, the newly-launched TechHub in Shoreditch, and the Hub Culture Pavilion a little further afield in Soho. My discerning friend (and producer extraordinaire) Antonio Gould has spoken very highly about the King’s Cross Hub, but would love to hear from anyone else if you’ve spent any time in any of these space (or indeed have any other suggestions that you’d recommend). I don’t have any immediate need but would be good to think about options as and when – the attraction of these spaces being the opportunity to sit amongst likeminded people, and crucially, reasonable rates with the flexibility to spend more or less time there as needed.

In other news, I had a great catch up with the always-incredibly smart Chris Thorpe about his hot-off-the press FirstPlaces to support Race Online 2012, which gave me tonnes of food for thought. I was gutted not to be able to come along to Young Rewired State on Friday (thanks to the wonderful Tiffany St James for the invite) but am really excited by all the fantastic innovation which came out of the day, and never ceased to be impressed at what great stuff happens when geeks meet government.

On a more personal note, one of the factors behind going freelance was the need to try and manage my work / life balance better to get better control of my health – having spinal problems resulting from a broken back many years ago means dealing with chronic pain for the long-term, and what I’ve learned over the last few years is that the biggest barrier isn’t actually my condition, it’s me. I’ve treated my pain like an enemy needing to be vanquished, and my way of dealing with it has tended to be a case of charging on regardless and considering making any concessions to my condition as ‘giving in’ and ‘letting it win’. Which is of course bollocks. So a big focus for me personally is trying to get better control of my health and wellbeing by learning to respect my health issues and not trying to pretend they don’t exist, and thus to adapt my lifestyle accordingly.

I’m lucky enough to have a brilliant pain specialist who’s fantastically supportive, and a visit to the pain clinic last week to review medications and general pain management techniques was really helpful. There’s still lots of work to be done on the more practical things like getting back into a strength training / yoga / pilates regime, and actually doing the exercises given to me by my physio – but a huge part is the mental side of things. It’s something I’m going to have to live with, so acceptance is the first real step. I used to think I had accepted it, but the fact I’ve been trying to crack on without really acknowledging the need to respect my condition suggests that I really hadn’t. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s defined by a health issue – it’s not who I am, I’m many things, but I also have to recognise that it is a part of me that’s not going away any time soon. I’ve steered clear of personal stuff on the blog for the last few years, but writing this down feels like a positive step to me starting to actually deal with pain management, rather than just paying it lip service. So onwards, and hopefully, forwards.

]]> d52cbc4aeafe96f9b1f5a82324064d3f Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:29:29 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/08/06/jisc-weeknote-2533/ Been a pretty quiet week. After the last couple of event filled weeks August tends to signal a bit of a slow down at JISC mainly because so many people take massive chunks of it off as leave! That isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to do still but the buzz around the place certainly quiets down.

I’ve mainly been trying to get some stuff sorted around this Communications research project that I am supporting – I had a good meeting with Andy discussing some stuff around repositories where I basically played bad cop to all his ideas but I think there is a decent plan coming together there and I’ll get to do some copy-writing on that task rather than just being glorified admin like I am in the other areas (not that I mind – there wasn’t really any other way to approach the work).

I had some interesting conversations with Grace about doing something interesting with mobile sites for supporting events – I think the whole apps vs. mobile web stuff is interesting particularly for conferences and the like and I do heavily lean towards optimised web pages it has to be said. In fact events have been very much on my mind this week but more of that later.

The JISC website has had a rough ride this week with many hours of downtime and even when it is up it has been crawling. This is a nightmare for any web team especially when the management of the hosting and CMS is outsourced. I offered my self as a sympathetic ear to Ben and if asked will throw my support behind any decision he makes about contractual issues with our suppliers in this area. I think drastic action is required after such a major error but it is not my decision these days – I’ll be watching with interest to see how it shakes out though.

On the non-JISC front planning for Bettr is moving along nicely – hopefully next week I’ll be able to announce the venue is secured and the first 2 or 3 speakers plus soon after that we’ll be launching a new version of the Bettr website.

Stef and I have also decided to push ahead with an out-of-hours project to launch a web app aimed at conference and event organisers. This is based on some of the ideas I’ve been blogging and speaking about for a couple of years that have become a bit more focused based on some of the functionality Stef thought up for a couple of recent sites we have worked on together. I’ll blog about that specifically soon – I think it is pretty exciting stuff.

I also had an informal meeting that might well lead to some freelance work still very much within the JISC community doing some work around blogging, advocacy and event support. I do still have my fingers crossed that I will get a permanent job (or at least a one year contract) but am starting to think there might be some hope on the freelance side.


]]> c6b98a82be3633d73d57599eaadf23f6 Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:00:59 -0700 http://www.katylindemann.com/2010/08/01/week-1/

[ photo courtesy ]


Well there have been a few changes round these here parts. After a brilliant 2.5 years with the lovely folks at Naked Communications, having learned a hell of a lot and been privileged to work with some of the best & brightest minds in the business, I’ve made the scary but exciting decision to go freelance. I’m both shitting it and totally stoked about the opportunity to spread my wings, and get stuck into a whole range of different things with different people. But you don’t know unless you try, right? We’re always telling our clients to learn by do-ing and to fail faster, so I figured it was time I took some of my own advice.

And so following in some very fine footsteps indeed, and first initiated by my friends at the-then Schulze & Webb (now BERG) this also gives me the opportunity to have a crack at writing regular Weeknotes.

I think, and hope, it’ll be a useful discipline – it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of whatever you’re working on at that particular moment in time, but just as I’ve always advised my clients of the importance of taking a step back and looking back at the bigger, aggregate picture, so too should I take some of my own medicine.

So here we are. Week 1 – my first official week working freelance.

People are wonderfully supportive. Over the last few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to have several chats over coffee with awesome folks who gave me some really helpful pointers, tips and general ‘things they wished they’d known about / done at the outset’ when they first started freelancing. Others have provided much-appreciated support when I’d have a bit of a freak-out about the fact I’d resigned my job without a job to go to, and what the hell was I doing? (Stumbling across David Hieatt’s recent observation that the three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary was also pretty timely).

T’interweb is, unsurprisingly, invaluable. There are some brilliantly useful resources online for the new and wet-behind-the-ears freelancer who’s just starting out, from the more obvious Business Link type stuff to Phil Gyford’s utterly fantastic A Beginner’s Guide to Freelancing (few years old but still pretty much essential reading).

I’ve still got a lot of admin to get in order. The CV & site need updating, and the portfolio I said I’d develop needs doing. But being obsessively anally retentive about organisational matters means I’ve rather enjoyed getting my paperwork and whatnot in order, and I actually love a good spreadsheet. Especially one with conditional formatting. (Yes, I am that tragic. Really).

I’d said I was going to take a few weeks off between finishing at Naked and starting work, to spend some time decompressing and catching up on all the stuff (i.e. life) that’s been utterly neglected over the last few months of being totally manic and flying round the world running workshops for Coca Cola (including 5 countries in 4 continents in 3 weeks. Sorry trees, my carbon footprint from May/June was horrendous). I’d been meeting with lots of people to line stuff up, but the plan was to have a bit of time off over the summer before kicking off.

Then a short but v. interesting project came up courtesy of the brilliant Gareth Kay, to work with the very fine folks at Goodby Silverstein & Partners on a piece of work for a UK-based client of theirs (I’m not sure that BERG-style project code-names are really my thing, so for now I reckon it’ll just be ‘the Goodby project’ or similar). All good stuff, smart people, an interesting challenge…. and also getting my first taste of working at home. I haven’t yet had a full-on day working in my PJs but as I was promised that this was one of the perks of going freelance I’m determined to have at least one pyjama-clad day at work. I’m sure my vision of a clothing-lite future is going to be a crushing disappointment, but that’s life for you.

Not quite week 1, technically week -1 (or week 0?), which I guess makes me a week behind already, but bugger it, I’m playing loose with the ‘rules’ and bunging it in this week’s note: last Thursday I also had the pleasure of joining some fine folks to judge Cadbury’s Pocketgame game creation competition, which was terrific fun as my good pal Willsh made playing games an integral part of the judging process itself – you can see what a terrible time we all had in this little film of the afternoon’s proceedings.

Even further behind, as it was at the beginning of July, but I haven’t yet written it up and so I’m now really really playing loose with the ‘rules’, I spoke alongside some really kick-ass women (+ 1 bloke) at the first (of, I hope, many more) She Says conference, entitled SCAMP, as the theme for the day was ‘work in progress’. I spoke about a project I’m very excited to be getting involved with – the fantastic Chromaroma, which turns the city of London into a game and makes commuting really magical. I’m chuffed to bits to be doing some stuff with people like the brilliant and lovely Toby Barnes (of, amongst many things, Playful fame….you are getting your ticket for this year’s event, aren’t you?) – got lots of interest about becoming an alpha tester from attendees of SCAMP, starting to get involved with some development stuff with TFL, and been invited to go down & share some stuff about the game with the nice people at BBH and Made by Many, as part of the ‘Meet the Makers’ series organised by Anjali.

Other stuff I’ve done includes:

Backed Bud Caddell’s awesome Bucket Brigade project

Met up with some brilliant people about future projects / opportunities to work together. Exciting.

Finished some great books (again this isn’t just this week’s reading, and I’m cheating as I went on holiday so this sounds a lot more impressive than any future weeks’ reading will be): highly recommending Cognitive Surplus, The Spirit Level, The Hell of it All, How Not to Grow Up and my current read, Elephants on Acid (and other Bizarre Experiments)

Still not seen Inception

]]> 8b60a5c8b86a75f292bd44075866b59f Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:02:42 -0700 http://digitalbydefault.com/2010/07/30/jisc-weeknote-2433/ I’ve taken a days leave today as I am shockingly wiped out but it has been another interesting week.

The big JISC event this week was JIF10 – a bi-annual conference that brings together representatives of the majority of the projects and services JISC funds. It took place at the stunning Royal Holloway Uni and was a great success with an interesting mix of plenary talks and more interactive sessions plus plenty of time to catch up with people.

For me the real highlights were the Thunderbolts and Lightning sessions expertly hosted by the trio of Flanders, Phipps and Danson. These kind of sessions are always a favourite of mine and this was a fine example of how to really make them work.

The panel session on ‘open’ at the end of day one was also great in the most part – Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Ross Gardler gave especially interesting talks that resonated with a great deal of my thinking these days.

There was also a fun ‘Dragons Den’ session on day two. I usually find these things a bit too contrived and as I pretty much hate the show anyway I’ve never been a great fan but this was well handled and with a couple of great and fun ideas from Mark ‘Call me Dave’ Stiles and Yorick Wilks. Not that there was anything wrong with what David Prosser spoke about but it just didn’t seem to have the spark or the scale of the other two. I think these things work best when the ideas really are BIG and blueskies otherwise it all just gets dragged down by the reality of the times.

I am however glad I left before the final session as I fear it may have soured the event for me. I had Googled the closing keynote in advance and could see that it was unlikely I would get through his talk without feeling uncomfortable and likely a little angry so I used the ‘law of two feet’ even if it wasn’t officially in effect and headed to the train station. Judging by the Twitter buzz I did the right thing – one colleague in particular seriously got irritated.

Anyway it was pretty great and I go to meet alot of people I’ve only known on Twitter previously as well as catch up with many JISC people I’ve known over the last seven and a half years. The likelihood is that this will be my last big JISC event so it was a nice one to go out on.

Outside of JISC world I had the go ahead to push on with my education startup event idea. It is an evolution of my Bettr idea from a couple of years ago – this time shamelessly inspired by the format of things like Playful but also the conversations that came out of Hacking Education in NYC. Once I have a few more things locked down I will write about it a bit more but I’m pretty excited.

I also had a long, helpful conversation with Kevin – my former boss at Jiva and successful Angel investor with a particular interest in digital publishing and education (sound familiar!). He gave me alot of ideas and inspiration for the sort of thing I could do as a freelancer and re-ignited my confidence that things could work out.

I am still not 100% sure that freelance is the way forward for me – I have applied for two jobs that I think would be great – one of which I think is pretty close to my dream job and the other would be a nice slightly sideways step but one that would open up so nice opportunities so we’ll see.


]]> cc1b402bec4e3cb17347cddd11b9970c Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:48:39 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/832047892 The iterations of business sustainability subjects as the recession grinds on for architects and designers seem to be reaching, finally, that point of difficult decisions. So many firms in our area, and firms I have been associated with in the past, seem now to be confronting the need to restructure. Large firms, especially large architecture + engineering firms, grew to handle big projects for big clients. Most are now finding that the big projects are not materializing, and may not any time soon. Resources have been spent holding on to critical staff, and there is now no source for interim funding. Project opportunities with fees in six figures used to be avoided, but now are celebrated, cautiously, as big wins.

Our own agility has been helpful in gaining opportunity to discuss alternative paths to collaboration. It feels as if there is a move to p-time, as the necessity of alternative strategies opens up the professional space to more and multiple synchronous conversations.

Because of these collaborations, a couple of things this week had us reflecting on the differences between our profession’s approach to clients/customers and our clients’ approach to customers, wondering why there is such a difference and why clients don’t calibrate architects and designers to their philosophy.

Our clients have generally evolved to reflecting deeply on the experience that their customers have with their products and services. Architects and designers, however, despite claiming a dedication to long-term relationships, still call what they do “projects” and still measure their work by the acclaim given the physical place or space by peers.

In between the two, and perhaps the reason for the perpetuation of the abstraction, are the internal and external agents responsible for the selection of architects and designers and the delivery of their work to their constituents. In most cases, it appears, their metrics and their own approach to their “customers,” the people who will use the space, remains in the “push,” or control, mode of service delivery – “Here, use this space.”

As we’ve noted elsewhere, in between a business and its customers is this space where its people work. Overcoming culture and paradigms of practice to make the connection between purpose and place, never easy, seems more difficult in times of reduced resources, times when it seems the pursuit is more critical. We’ve reignited some thinking we’ve done about “creation spaces” in the past and are beginning to think about independent development as a means to prototype a model and prove our thinking.


]]> 0ca677279f940149628431098dc58e5e Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:34:46 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/802190860 We’ve been after a major project for a while. We have now, however, entered that silent period that is usually the signal that there is negotiation taking place with a preferred or selected firm, and sometime soon we will receive the news that we were not selected.

I’ll be disappointed if this is the case, of course. My disappointment, however, will not come from the deflation of not being considered “pretty” enough, nor from the anxiety of not having the business in a time in which business is so difficult to get. I’ll be disappointed because we felt we understood this client and their needs very well, and were comfortable that we were truly differentiated in this respect.

We had developed an approach to the project that was based on research and that uncovered the client’s deeply held values that had gone unexpressed in their RFP. We believe that our approach would not just yield a great project, but lead to the development of a “technology,” of sorts, a body of knowledge that would resonate both for the client and for us in all of our and their subsequent work. The opportunity was to use this project as the device to research, develop, test and prove a set of values for workplace design that would align physical space concepts with human performance in ways that have only been speculated on in the past, and rarely, if ever, thoughtfully applied in mainstream practice. We would be bringing concepts from the edge to the core that would not only enrich this project but enhance and enrich the voice of influence of this client in a sector of great significance for them – human dynamics in the workplace.

Being on the edge of a loss has me reflecting on the process that seems to characterize almost every project we are invited to propose on. A need is identified somewhere in the organization and is passed to a corporate facilities or real estate function of the CFO’s office to develop and implement. An outside consultant is engaged, usually a real estate broker or property manager who has some touch on the organization’s facilities, who then develops an RFP to solicit proposals from architects and designers. The RFP may contain some hints to larger organizational purpose, but usually only in physical planning terms and usually very tactical in scope. In this case, the request was for a design “refresh” for a small segment of the organization, with some implication of its use as a pilot project for eventual application across the enterprise. As is typical in these RFP’s, there is a request for a variety of information about the proposing firm and its approach to the project, but the real focus is on the proposed fee.

Nowhere in the RFP is there mention of a number of other considerations that to us were core concerns. The segment of the organization that the project addressed is a group that occupies only 10% of the space of the organization, but delivers more than 60% of its revenue. The current offices are among the most antique I’ve ever been in, and certainly inappropriate not only for the type of organization, but also for the type of work being done here and the types of people engaged in this work. The mean age of the staff in the group is well over 50 years old in a type of occupation that has skewed much younger in the occupation overall, and in an organization where new research and practice is the source of relevancy and influence. It would be impossible to recruit a younger generation to the type of space currently occupied by this group.

Most importantly, this organization sees itself as  promoting knowledge and methods to facilitate the resolution of personal, societal and global challenges in diverse, multicultural and international contexts, yet none of any of this is in any way directly, indirectly, or by implication, visible in the current workplace. In addition, the organization has a core component that has established a scientific link between employee health and well-being and organizational performance, yet nothing of what we know of healthy workplace design concepts is in place here, nor was anything of this subject requested in the RFP.

This failure to link organizational purpose and mission to the planning and design of the workplace seems to me to be a source of extraordinary waste, in opportunity, in resource use, in performance. I’ve begun to think a bit more about how to move practice in a more fruitful direction, like these small steps, but remain deeply concerned that the disciplines and metrics associated with projects delivering place and space consistently shape an inaccurate message and deliver inadequate results.

We’ve come to think of sustainability in broad terms, and certainly as ethical practice. RFP’s like this one, where selection is being made on the basis of inadequately defined problems and metrics cannot yield a project that is truly sustainable nor contribute to the sustainability of the organization or the people it serves. How can this sense of ethical practice be brought to the RFP shaping practice? Who are the types of people and what are the types of conversations that need to take place to assure practice in this form? How does an organization in the throes of developing a physical space project come to think of resources in broader terms than with conventional and limited metrics of cost? How can the productive capacity of an organization be made more integral in the development of project criteria?

]]> ccd97d3ec394d333cc226c65f027f325 Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:50:59 -0700 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_249 The sensor monitoring work has continued to be a common thread running through the past fortnight, and is entering the last couple of features now. It's felt good to just crank through the work and knock off the tickets in the issue tracking system I use.

Week 248 saw the sensor monitoring project interleaved with some Bubblino-related work. There was some refactoring of the code to add the ability to monitor any Atom feed as well as Twitter results, and also the birth of two new brothers for him. I was hoping to get them finished in time to take them down to London with me last Monday, but in the end a last-minute bug (which turned out, for once, to be in Passenger rather than my code) put paid to that. The extra time will let me perform some more extensive testing, so it's not all bad.

London was just an intermediate destination, as I spent most of the week in Ipswich. I was helping Tinker London run a three-day innovation workshop for around fifty BT senior executives. It was kicked off with a half-day TED-style session of talks, and then the group was broken into teams of four to design and prototype a new service to a brief based around voice.

It was less manic than last time as we weren't cramming it all into one day, and it also meant there was more time to get to know some of the people there. Three days watching new ideas being forged and chatting and bouncing ideas off some very bright people was pretty draining but fun.

]]> b5dda30407b67bb1f7deb312a17b734c Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:16:00 -0700 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_247 Things have been ticking along nicely with the sensor monitoring app over the past fortnight, and that's been taking up most of my time.

The MySQL replication is all up and running, along with a more robust backup strategy which is giving both me and the client more peace of mind. Now that there's a more stable foundation to the app I've been pushing forward with the new functionality.

I'm hoping to get most of the rest of this phase of the project completed this week, which will fit in nicely with my spending most of the week after helping Tinker London out with another Arduino workshop. I spent Monday down in London to catch up with them for some planning about it.

And Friday lunch time was another Cathedral Valley lunch. We've hit the posh, expensive stretch of Hope Street now - yesterday was the London Carriage Works, and next will be 60 Hope Street.

The lunch deal isn't actually that pricey - two courses from a limited (2 or 3 choices per course) menu is only £15. As you can see from these pictures of my courses the presentation is carefully crafted and that attention to detail carried through to the chicken which was delightfully moist. I wasn't quite so impressed with the asparagus for the starter though, it seemed rather tasteless.

]]> bdaec28d9b1c14251b288aa234ffe49f Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:36:03 -0700 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_245 Another couple of weeks with no big public announcements to make, although I'm not quite sure why I feel there has to be something important to say before I write some weeknotes. I think it's just my excuse for not writing them when there are too many other things of higher priority on the to-do list.

Bubblino has only had one outing of late, we headed over the Pennines for another great O'Reilly Ignite evening - this time the second Ignite Leeds.

Most of the remaining time has been the continual tension between getting on with existing projects and meetings, quotes and lining up work for the future. I've got a couple of projects confirmed for late June and July when the current big project should be finished, and a couple of others in the pipeline, so hopefully they'll come to fruition too.

The project taking up most of my time at the moment is the latest phase of the sensor monitoring app I've been building for a local surveying firm. I finished off the previous phase back in week 229 and this time round we're adding some new features and improving the redundancy and backup options for all the data. So the past week or so has seen me delving into the nitty-gritty of MySQL replication and backup - lots of new learning but nice when it all comes together as it's starting to do now.

And finally, the most important part of my weeknotes, the Cathedral Valley lunch reviews - there have been two lunches since my last weeknotes, both seeing us taking advantage of the gorgeous weather we've had here in Liverpool of late and eating outside. A fortnight back saw us descend on HOST where I sampled their Thai green chicken curry and managed (this time) to resist the lure of the chocolate and chilli brownie. Then last Friday we called into Ego for their Rapido "main course and a beer" lunch menu. The pizzas are some of the best I've tasted outside of Italy.

]]> 668a53c1a9dd2dc5f291461e3cdf1c37 Sun, 23 May 2010 18:43:02 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=273 So like Phil I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into Weeknotes after a holiday break. I tried doing the 30 Days Of Music which I will continue – just not right now.

I’m currently in a nice hotel room at the top on Nob hill in San Francisco. I arrived a week ago to continue work on a better digital music product, and this past week have been working with IDEO a bit. They wind down now and we shift to development with Pivotal Labs.

It’s a bit nerve wracking, I’m not sure we’re quite ‘there’ yet but we are a step or two forward from our prototype phase. The amount learned having built that is only now becoming clear to me and it’s been a big help deciding what is interesting and what is fun, rather than being dry and dusty about the whole thing. Users are not archivists, old records are not data.

Being Sunday I took some time away from work to enjoy sunshine, Blackpool winning their Premiership playoff and the Maker Faire here in SF. I can haz arduino, finally. The week ahead should be lots more work, not sure if it’ll be fun, but have a feeling it will be decisive.

]]> 108c173bc9e50979494e629bc3a519ba Mon, 17 May 2010 07:25:19 -0700 http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/week_242 Busy, busy.

Lots happening over the past few weeks has meant little time to spend capturing what any of it was and documenting it over here.

Bubblino has been flitting around all sorts of events around Liverpool - from watching news of the General Election, to a weekend celebrating open source and creative commons at OggCamp10, and accompanying me to two Arduino workshops this week.

One of the Arduino workshops I've already talked about, and I gave a cut-down version of it at the Liver & Mash library mashup event on Friday. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from a hackday for librarians, but it wasn't too dissimilar to any other sort of hackday with interesting, passionate people learning about new technologies, sharing experiences and sparking ideas off each other. I had hoped to get into some RFID hacking, given the prevalence of the technology within modern libraries, but through problems getting some new hardware ordered in time and it being a while since I last played around with the kit I've already got, that didn't happen. We only had an hour and a half for the hands-on session, which is only just long enough to get through the basics, so in practice it didn't really matter. Hopefully we'll get chance to play around with RFID some more in future.

Outside of the events, it's just been a case of carrying on with the client work and internal projects. No notable milestones reached of late.

The most recent Cathedral Valley lunch was at Rubato, in the basement of the lovely Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. They do a good range of hot and cold sandwiches, along with a daily specials menu of soup or quiche. My halloumi and onion marmalade baguette was very tasty.

]]> 04116224bd32b9108ae284b17a0767cf Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:08:04 -0700 http://www.neuromantics.net/blog/?p=253 The week just passed in a blur of events. We reviewed our prototype, which may be held in a little too much reverence. I see why – we aren’t a technology company, doing things like this looks risky or weird. It might have been better to spin it in music-speak, something like “working out some riffs” or “cutting a 4 track demo” perhaps. Anyway, it needs some changes, and additions, which will mostly be flat photoshop mockups pasted into ‘dumb’ pages I think. It was quite a chunk of work, and I didn’t finish until Sunday evening.

Meanwhile, a volcano erupted and clogged our skies with ash stopping flights. No problem thought I, not going anywhere. I’d ordered a brand new Macbook Pro on Tuesday but a little dealy wasn’t a problem. And then my current laptop went *poof* and properly died. Arrgh! Suddenly the efficencies of mass transit and globalisation becomes quite important.

It’s now Monday evening finishing this post, still no sign of where UPS may actually have my package (maybe Cologne, maybe Shanghai) and tentative signs of flights resuming. Getting work done if fine (ancient G5 tower to the rescue) but I’m a lot less portable. Work is at a very specific desk.  Laptops, I realise, are ace.

]]> 736bb9d5f89a4c64dae5348ee42c30a9 Sat, 17 Apr 2010 04:40:00 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/527983816 We spent the past couple of weeks in visits to several cities in the Northeast. Our objectives were to meet with some very interesting people doing great work in those places and to see how our work intersected with theirs.

We were impressed, despite the press reporting a turning in the economy, that everybody we spoke with was still greatly concerned and significantly affected by the economy. We’ve tended to look out from the black hole of the Great Lakes economy and imagine that everything is better in other places. Well, it is, but not in the much better way that we’d thought.

Among the impacts of this condition is certainly the fact that all are operating with considerably smaller teams and with a significantly narrower spectrum of work. They are dealing with conditions of surprisingly diminished differentiation and dramatically increased competition. In these markets, former brackets of firm size and project scale no longer apply as even the biggest firms are after any available work.

The strategies for dealing with this condition vary. Some are looking to newer, more robust markets (or expected soon to be) like health care. Some are moving firmly into the implementation space, working with a smaller volume of work but providing clients with integrated approaches to reduce complexity and cost, and increase the value of the relationship. Some have considered whole new ways of doing business through unexpected partnerships, but have not yet found the path or the resources to realize the vision.

In general, it seems that all are in an expectant condition, but it was clear that each and all must get energetically moving on a plan now or risk a backslide as the economy does warm up.

Previously loyal clients are opening projects to competitive bidding. There is certainly an apparent economic incentive for this, but in a number of cases, it appeared to us that the change in the competitive landscape has opened clients to new resources they had not seen before, and even to premium services to which their budgets had not previously given them access.

We think that this may be the most dramatic impact of the recession: that creative and innovative thought leadership is moving into secondary and tertiary tiers. As the big and complex clients have collapsed and are still caught in a cost conscious mode, this may be a significantly dramatic shift for the agile and nimble companies who can capitalize on knowledge, experience and expertise that had previously been out of reach.

We also think that this is an unappreciated shift. Firms that are looking at comparative volume and costs associated with the practice of the past generation are missing a tremendous opportunity. The knowledge gained by these firms, now applied to emerging energetic, motivated, agile, and clever clients can provide a rich resource for creativity, contribution and growth.

In this spirit, an unexpected delight in the trip was moving through a landscape coming into Springtime.

]]> ae6d5e16ad39e70900b26d14ddec5535 Sun, 04 Apr 2010 10:04:44 -0700 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/04/week-note-8.html Montreal and San Jose

Dived from the tail of my brief holiday back into the thick of it at Where 2.0 (the O'Reilly conference). I've had my paws in some location aware services at work for a while now but I thought I might be out of my depth (technically) for some of it, but luckily it wasn't too bad and the kind people explained the long words to me.

The mapping field however is very niche and damn complicated, far more than I had given it credit for really. Anyway, I met some great people in big hotels holding over priced drinks and learned a few things here and there.

I expect I'll write something at some point...

The secret to traveling this much is to have peoples spread around that you can call on and ease the stress of endlessly moving. I see clear as day now why Matt and Matt set up Dopplr...

Enjoying the Beach House album and the Joanna Newsom album muchly as my train currently rolls into San Francisco...

]]> 63bb503d10715b899ee6b6544ba4ab11 Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:41:17 -0700 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/03/week-note-6.html Austin and New York

I left the smell of BBQ overworked silicon chips at SXSW for the good living and low buildings of Brooklyn. I swear, I don't know better city living than Brooklyn. The weather in New york was better than Austin, incredibly, and I found myself tempted by, or rather drinking Margaritas every 20 minutes. Design goes well with Tequila.

I'm here working partially for the New York office and partially doing other stuff. The next work stop is the west coast and a Stamen meeting in San Francisco as well as the Where 2.0 conference. I hoping things will be a bit calmer.

I'm not designing anything right now or even really thinking about designing anything which feels a bit strange, almost like a holiday, but alas I have other tasks at hand.

I need to write something about the location war, opps sorry, presence war raging in the start-up community for the company blog which I shall knock out over the weekend. Then there's some iPad proposal writing which is as easy as falling off a log now. Otherwise things are rosy.

]]> 1a3e2f0c655e100ea71f78922814318c Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:01:46 -0700 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/03/week-note-5.html London and Austin

Everything was insane in the lead up to SXSW, mainly because there are so many other objectives after Austin for me than simply the festival.

I can barely remember what happened this last week. One thing has struck me of late though, and it's about these weeknotes, or perhaps only in part. I half wonder how boring they are for everyone to read, or rather not read. But generally I feel a lot of the personality and emotion in blogging seems to be slowly leaking out in the constant need for facts, nuggets of wisdom and permanently increasing genius, to maintain readership and I don't know... maybe status.

One very noticeable thing is how beautifully open writing week notes has become for me and the others. Here's a nice example from Matt Webb of Berg London recently.

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.

the first rule of weeknotes is?

damn.

]]> d81f6a559bc86a7ef5f8489950d04221 Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:41:14 -0700 http://smallpower.org/blog/week-133/ Kinshasa's heat wave finally broke this week, and we got three generous rainstorms. Construction on Blvd. 30 Juin seems to have accelerated. They may be trying to finish it in time for the upcoming 50-year anniversary of independence from Belgium. The less momentous 4-year anniversary of my (Tomas's) first arrival in Kinshasa will come just a few days earlier.

The past has been a lot on our mind this week, as we've been organizing every aspect of smallpower's history into a coherent narrative. Nicole and I burned DVDs of almost everything we've made in the last 4 years. In the end it took up more than 50 discs. I wrote a report about our efforts at measurement & evaluation. Ben, Lara, and Mette spent time getting our records in order.

Eric continued his work with the JAMA Video crew, putting them through more exercises and helping them pitch for work. Joys took Eric to his neighborhood in Bandal to meet the Chinese who live and work there.

Last night, we went to a parcel in Limite to pay our respects to a cast member whose 6-month old son died of a lung infection this week. When we returned home, the crew stayed up past midnight filming music videos for Trésor (he plays Dady Tola, Katya's boyfriend, in Rien que la Vérité) and José (our chroniqueur de musique.) This morning a parade of young women marched down our street, celebrating the anniversary of their school.

]]> ecf2188b334cbda36f087ab66f6cac8b Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:47:07 -0700 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/448343118 I think we’ve seen it said in other places that this is more like month notes than weeknotes. It is interesting how the cadences of work and life, unless otherwise embedded in a weekly ritual of reflections, can end up more as a clutter of thoughts in the back of the mind. Now that Daylight Savings Time has arrived, maybe its appropriate to reset all of the other “clocks” of lif as well. This, at least, will be the start of that intention.

We’ve continued and are expanding our work with organizations – companies or teams – at the front end of innovation. Our projects and opportunities continue to inform each other and contribute to a refining set of “design principles” for consideration either at the development of strategy or the shaping of specific place and space projects.

The concept of “scenius” showed up through a lost-again reference in other locations. The reminder was enough to have us do more research, reflect on our own work, write about it here, and set us on the path of a more defined point of view on this recurring subject in our work.

We are looking forward to meetings in the next couple of weeks to test our thinking and to engage in the activation of other’s projects where, we believe, these principles may not have been embedded, and where design to conventional functional criteria has left a lot of organizational capacity and energy undeveloped.

Jim Meredith

]]> 41e070098ddcb7a25c2d61bce1862b97 Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:39:53 -0800 http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2010/03/monthly-weeknotes.php These aren’t weeknotes so much as month notes – I’ve been somewhat tardy in writing them up, although things have been quiet enough that one post a month will cover things nicely.

The big project that I’m working on at the moment is a personal one – Conflict-of-Interest-o-Matic. It’s a iPhone client for the They Work For You API, intended to give you quick access to the wealth of data that TWFY hold on our representatives and their representativeness.

Apparently there’s some talk of an election some time soon – you might have heard about it, you might not – so there’s something of a deadline attached to this project. That’s great for concentrating the mind, but it’s also throwing into sharp relief the gaps in my Objective-C knowledge.

So far the app is trawling the API and grabbing data – the next stage will be to make the interface a bit more shiny and implement the various bells and whistles needed to make it beta-testable.

A small project for a charity has kicked off – knocking together a Bebo channel for the My Dangerous Loverboy project in conjunction with Quba. There’s a wealth of content which the project has created, and Bebo have chipped in with some generous sponsorship. The next step here is to put together the design assets, and then start getting the content uploaded.

And just to keep the social network theme running, I did a bit of poking around Facebook for Folksy and Rattle to see how they could integrate the two sites more closely. There’s a very, very simple quick win which will get it off to a good start and generate some hard stats on usage which will allow a decision about whether some more involved work will be justified.

Other than this, it’s been quiet and domestic. That was always the plan for the first part of the year, but with the new financial year approaching so is the need to start turning from personal projects to more renumerative ones. So, I’m available for hire at highly reasonable rates, and will have to start chasing down opportunities a bit more proactively in the next few weeks or so.

]]> 51b54c6e15f223a8fa96488d0154877e Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:04:48 -0800 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/03/week-note-4.html Berlin and London this week

Nice to be back in Berlin. Managed to get some more time Kreuzberg, which was good.

Working with a large German company opened up some intriguing possibilities to play with complicated data, hard but intriguing. I pointed out the potential value and the very significant ingenuity that would be required. Well I opened my mouth, and now it's my problem, sorry, challenge. This one is going to take some considerable time sitting in coffee shops staring out of windows to get ideas.

That chewed up most of my week really, that and some really fun public service brainstorming with the German team.

Also had some really intriguing thoughts around the differences between play and practice which I shall probably write more rubbish about later on...

I think maybe my highlight was my Chubby Checker psyche LP showing up, which is as crazy as expected.

This week begins the marathon US trip]]> 871ca632777e1c056dadf722c56bcc66 Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:08:47 -0800 http://smallpower.org/blog/week-132/ In an attempt to be a little less opaque, and inspired by Matt Webb's efforts at Berg, we're going to start writing weekly updates of what we've been up to at smallpower.

Kinshasa has been baking hot since we returned in February, and whether it's caused by Chinese road machinery or new construction blocking the breeze, even a short walk to the corner store can be exhausting.

So it's a mixed blessing that we're in a production lull at the moment, while some bureaucratic red tape untangles. In the meantime, we've got plenty to keep us occupied. I (Tomas) spent most of the week working with my friend Dave in San Francisco on the redesign of smallpower.org, which went live on Tuesday. Otherwise I was occupied with coding a video game, which I'll talk about more as it matures.

Ben has been working hard on several fronts, unsnarling some of that afore-mentioned red tape, planning logistics for an upcoming documentary and live concert project, pitching new work, and keeping our donors happy. In the few hours left to him, he's doing post-production work on season two episodes.

Eric's doing an amazing job as our new CEO, working with Becky in London to get our work entered in competitions around the world, and with Mimi in South Africa to drum up media interest in what we're doing here. He's also making it possible for JAMA—the Congolese non-profit we produce our show with—to get work covering government and corporate media events while we're not in production. He wrote a 10-page training manual, started running workshops with the crew, wrote a brochure for potential clients and had it translated into french and chinese, and set JAMA up with email and a website. They've got two clients already. On top of all that, he's documenting the whole process on this blog.

Lara has been managing finances and the office here in Kinshasa, and working with Mette in San Francisco to keep our books in order. She's also been taking inventory of all our equipment, a long and arduous process. Nicole was helping with the inventory, writing for this blog, and getting all our footage in order, until she was struck ill mid-week. She's feeling much better now.

Finally, Ian and Kathryn are in San Francisco, eagerly waiting for production to start again so they can come join us here. And Owen is on leave in Los Angeles, working on a short film until fall.

]]> 4778c072ff2910cb753e78bc287554c1 Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:05:55 -0800 http://doprojects.org/news/weeknotes-013-week-ending-2nd-march-2010 And we’re back in Helsinki again, after yet another extended roadtrip — this one to Wellington, New Zealand for the Webstock conference, with stops at Singapore (on the way down) and Hong Kong (coming back).

It was a genuinely necessary trip, on a lot of levels. For almost two solid weeks, we soaked up Southern Hemisphere summer, ate foods it’s all but impossible to get in Finland in any season, and basked in the extraordinary generosity of the event’s hosts and participants. We also found, once again, that we were able to ship Tokyo Blues orders from the road.

But the real revelation was the response to Systems/Layers, our “walkshop” on the experience of urban space in the era of networked informatics. The feedback we got was so positive that we’re determined to do it again both here in Helsinki, and later on in New York and anywhere else we can mount it; not coincidentally, it was also a rich source of ideas for future Do initiatives.

The method, to the degree there was one, was pretty simple, and drew heavily on a similarly-themed walkabout developed by Martin Brynskov for the NordiCHI conference in Lund a couple of years back. We basically walked around the Cuba Street district of Wellington for an hour and a half with eyes wide open, looking very carefully for all of the sites in the streetscape where information is being gathered up by a networked system, or drawn back off such a system and displayed or acted upon. (You can see Nigel Parker’s video of the walkshop here and check out participants’ visual responses here.)

Then we returned to a command post we’d previously set up and provided with a map of the area, to plot our findings and consider what we’d seen in the light of a couple of fundamental questions: who owns this data? How might one get access to it? What kind of interface might be involved? Whose interests does it tend to support, or undermine? To a person, the participants all said it had raised their consciousness regarding the present-day, real-world effects of networked informatics on urban life, and we learned more about the texture of Wellington than I’d have wagered it was possible to discover in 90 minutes. Superthanks to Tom Beard for helping to plan and run the event, and endless gratitude to Mike, Natasha, Keith, Ben, and everyone else who helps to make Webstock what it is: you’ve really got something special going on. (Xtra bonus shout-out to Dr. Anne Galloway and the Snapper guys.)

Our next challenge is going to be figuring out how to do this as a regular, repeatable event, and to produce documentation (perhaps along the lines of the wonderful things Candy and James are doing with Civic Center) that helps people further unpack the dense urban systems they live in, around and between. In the meantime, we’ve got a couple more weeks yet of winter to trudge through, so wish us luck. : . )

]]> 0b8e4aaae4914116b6a459c6c31ce90c Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:05:02 -0800 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/02/week-note-3.html In Madrid all week

Nothing sucks the life out of you, like grey days and rain and that's what Madrid has been serving me up this week. Lucky me. Of course I've been blamed by everyone for bringing them more rain than they've ever seen! And now I've also been blamed for Helsinki's persistent winter by the team there. So I'm know known to some, as the weather demon! Charming.

Anyway...

Working with a Spanish telco this week mainly preparing for a big workshop which was today and tomorrow. So far so good, people seem pleased, but it's late  I'm tired and I need to re-work tomorrow's schedule based on today's output. Humpf.

Nice bunch to work with though... these Spanish folk

Some good progress on our internal Fjord program which seems to be extremely popular with the troops. Well, who wouldn't want to go paddling in Kayaks in remote Greenland for free?

Generally a good week, the Spanish Fjord office are an amazing bunch of people. I almost feel afraid to open my mouth for fear of mockery, but only almost.

Meanwhile the crazy ping pong event I have myself knee deep in continues to loom large on the ever closer horizon. Gulp. Another eyes bigger than stomach moment when I agreed to do that!

I fear Mondays presentation to a huge German multinational will be challenging. I feel slightly under prepared. Thankfully I have a great wingman (woman) on my side. But I worry she's saying the same thing...

]]> dc96a78c8fc614b43e10a8d5d686b0e9 Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:54:51 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/400005070 If you’re here, you probably don’t need this. If you’re thinking about being here, you may need this. It’s a calculator that will help you count what week you’re in. Thanks to Adrian McEwen at MCQN!
]]> 4f285f4a2a25e9d436a1c7a027189aeb Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:08:19 -0800 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/02/week-note-2.html In London all week

Slight novelty being back in London. The thing I'm really noticing staying in other places is the really short work commute. My journey to work was much more pleasant in Berlin, Helsinki and Amsterdam and I expect Madrid to be the same next week. London is big and messy.

Anyway.

While this week has hardly been downtime, I certainly had more time to reflect than usual. The job I'm doing this year has me slightly confused as I'm making it up as I go and while I have complete autonomy, it's slightly unfamiliar territory compared to the direct responsibilities of the previous year.

I read Hugh McLeod's book Ignore Everybody yesterday and I think his mantra in regards to grabbing the power perhaps along with Dan Pink's ideas about Mastery and Purpose have put me back on course.

Or at least for now...

I also decided to put my money (literally) where my mouth is in regards to the flaws of extrinsic motivators for creative tasks. Someone has to be the guinea-pig right? I think that's my job

I'm at the Story conference today which I'm very much looking forward to.

Brushing up on my Spanish for next week when I get airdropped in to solve what seems like an unsolvable task for a telco. Well, at least it should be a bit warmer...

]]> b8456549227fa3146fcadda733e64b74 Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:38:00 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/385326947 Weeknote #312316:

Please welcome, Charlie Gower to Weeknotes.com. Since Charlie travels a good bit, including regular visits to Berlin, that means we can more or less bump the country count up to six. The next weeknotes participant will bring the total to twenty! So that’s the state of the site this week. In just a few months we’ve grown from an initial crop of about five. Let’s see if we can hit forty by the end of 2010.

]]> 8e243bbe4a52241d70383f35dd3ceacc Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:58:33 -0800 http://charliegower.typepad.com/tantramar/2010/02/week-note-1.html Berlin All week

• Germans don't cross the street until the lights change. Apparently because they are 'the rules'.
• Simple design and function is the only way forward for mass use. Why do so many not understand this? Thankfully some do.
• Spent a lot of time around a group of Germans who are speaking English for my benefit. Feel guilty.
• Finally find something I want to track in Daytum; emotional state, wonder how soon this depresses me and I stop.
• Diner with Olof (CEO) was intriguing. I mainly subjected him to the pitfalls and evidence against motivators for creative professions. I bet he loved it!
• Some of my white label work went down well, felt quite good. But it's one thing not getting thanked, it's another not even getting acknowledged.
• There is so little traffic on the roads here. Where do all the cars go, I mean really?
• Struggled this week balancing my need for design perfection and the time an animator had for the job. I think I'm mostly happy but it's funny how the little things I see that drive me crazy others don't see.
• This is a great city, they have good beer, I wonder if I should move here.
]]> 35e51333116f26e7c23ae529bff0138a Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:22:37 -0800 http://doprojects.org/news/weeknotes-010-week-ending-9th-february-2010
A real-estate agent’s map of Seoul. Jongno, January 2010.

The last seven weeks have seen us taking our fledging operation on the road. Between our last report to you on the 22nd December and mid-January, we found ourselves in Palm Beach, New York, London, Seoul and Tokyo: the price of having a far-flung family.

As you’d imagine, we spent a lot of that period in a jetlagged (but well-fed) daze, and as you also might expect, it’s been a little difficult to reintegrate fully into Helsinki life. We’ve been helped immeasurably in this effort by our dear friends Sasha and Petri — and suspect we would be by Bryan as well, if he were ever in town.

The pace of Tokyo Blues orders has slowed after its initial spike, but we’re actually happy in that this has allowed us to handle fulfillment from the road. We took a stack of books with us wherever we went and shipped them from wherever we happened to be as orders came in, which is a luxury/burden I can’t imagine too many other publishers experiencing. We don’t believe this led to any problems with delivery, but please let us know if for whatever reason your order hasn’t arrived.

Our trip to Tokyo was brief but instructive: the city’s homeless, having already been chased out of the subway tunnels at the end of the 1990s, are now being exiled from the public parks they colonized in the early part of last decade. One unexpected, minor, but very interesting consequence of this is that Tokyo Blues has acquired new value as historical documentation, as the conditions it depicts are no longer extant — at least not in the parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya we were able to reach.

The city’s parks, playgrounds and interstitial spaces have been swept clear of any sign of their former use, to the extent that I have a hard time imagining how anyone encountering them for the first time now will understand just how richly and cleverly they were inhabited. What we thought of as a more-or-less permanent feature of the cityscape turned out to be just the way things were done during a very particular interval in time. I feel very lucky to have something we can point to and say, this is the way it was.

Another nice piece of luck: after many years of poking around Seoul, obviously in the wrong places, we’ve finally touched base with something that feels to us like vibrant alternative culture. Nurri had read about a bookstore/imprint out of Itaewon called Post Poetics, and we dropped in to have a look. It turned out to be this amazing oasis of lowercase cultural production — somehow simultaneously spare/minimal but ad-hoc and funky — run by a lovely guy named Jowan; he, in turn, let us know about a sound-art opening at the brand new Space Hamilton around the corner, and that was also pretty great.

It was all a little uncanny for me personally, since this little nexus of activity lies just up the street from the place where a pleasure district (“Hooker Hill”) once huddled up against the gates of Yongsan, formerly the main US Army base on the peninsula. I spent a decent amount of time up in these alleys in the late ’90s, watching twenty-year-old Rangers kill their neurons by the millionfold with soju kettle (a concoction of 86-proof rice whiskey and Kool-Aid, served in two-liter soda bottles with the tops hacked off) before setting off to making fools of themselves by trying to bargain with the working girls.

After the turn of the century, and especially since the return of Yongsan to Korean control, the neighborhood’s lost most of this character, becoming heavily Bangla and Pakistani (and gaining some incredible hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the bargain), but my own memories of Itaewon tend to feature landmarks like Polly’s Kettle House and the supercheesy Reggae Pub. Post Poetics isn’t entirely detached from this legacy — it is, reassuringly, one floor up from a tacky little sex shop — but I have to tell you that walking into a space hereabouts and seeing shelves lined with Apartamento and Kasino A4 and Butt still strikes me as nothing short of surreal. Here again, a study in changing urban dynamics. (Congratulations to Jowan on bringing something lovely into being, and our thanks for having pointed us at some other great stuff.)

The last thing we have to report to you for now is something that makes us really happy: Nurri’s won a 2010 Finnish Arts Council grant for work on an upcoming project, of which we’ll tell you more in days to come. For now, stay warm, keep in touch, and keep sending us those pictures of you with your books.

]]> e725cd3e56192014b913f152a114d0b5 Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:05:01 -0800 http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2010/02/weeks-3-and-4.php This has actually turned out to be a biweek note, because I didn’t get around to posting anything last Friday.

Last week was mainly a quick trip to London – partly to chase down a few potential opportunities, and partly as a chance to behave more like a tourist than an inmate.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is running the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition which is something I’d been wanting to see. From the exhibition microsite:

“Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.”

I’m not convinced it managed to reach those aims. The interactive exhibits were pretty good in the main – some fell firmly into the “draw something on a screen” category, but a couple seemed to have the ability to make people stop and think. Weave Mirror uses a camera to capture visitors, then displays a low fidelity image of them on a grid of rotating rings that are shaded from light to dark. The resolution is only 32 x 24, but I was surprised by how recognisable the results were, and how you “fill in” detail to recognise yourself.

Videogrid displays a grid of individual 1 second clips captured by a camera pointing at the passers-by – what fascinated me was how within the expected mosaic of people waving frantically at themselves, there were a few who would stand still, or embrace, or look away from the camera. The effect was to create little oases of calm in the middle of the blur of activity.

The ‘code’ exhibits were something of a let-down for me – the problem is that the standard of everyday computer generated imagery is so high, it renders the impact of the artworks at the level of “wow, another iTunes visualisation”. There were a couple which felt more like “my first Processing sketch” puffed up by catalogue-worthy statements of intent.

And on the whole, the ‘network’ section seemed to either rehash old ideas that work best on the screen of a laptop – We Feel Fine, or Flight Patterns – or simply didn’t work. There were a number of exhibits that were broken or had crashed – in one case with a Windows error dialogue displayed prominently. Or perhaps that was a statement in itself?

However, the rest of the Museum more than made up for the Decode letdown – much of it has been redone since I last had a chance to just wander around. The new medieval galleries are overwhelming with the sheer volume of exhibits, but it’s the smaller, more tucked-away galleries where the real gems lie. I hadn’t seen the jewellery or silver collections before, both of which are displayed to real effect.

This week was divided in the middle by the Sheffield Social Media surgery, and Geekup. There were more surgeons than were needed this time around, so it was a chance to chat to some very interesting individuals about wider stuff. Then after 12 months of trying, I finally managed to make it to a Sheffield Geekup, and was talked into doing a presentation. I find it difficult to think of a topic when faced with that kind of audience – there’s not much I can really tell a Geekup crowd about technology – so instead I went for a “what you can do with it” angle and did 15 mins on “Mad Things To Do With Twitter”. Some of those were mine – River Thames and the Shipping Forecast – while the others were things like the twittering bridges. People laughed more than I’d expected, which I’m going to assume was because it went reasonably well – whenever I speak in public, I always end up doing it in a haze of adrenalin which makes it impossible to remember afterwards if it was successful or whether I died on my feet.

And inbetween everything else, I’ve been plugging away at Objective-C and the iPhone SDK to put together an app for Wordr. It’s taking far, far longer than I’d ever have anticipated, but the learning curve is fairly steep and seems to be best handled by my subconscious trying to make sense of things while I’m sleeping or walking the dog and so on. The basics are in place, so now comes the stage of trying to embed oAuth authentication into it so that it will use Twitter to log into the Wordr site itself. Which should take care of most of next week…

]]> 8029d2b09d5246885a61eb93d0e5c1d7 Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:51:00 -0800 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/448351520 DRAFT

We were interviewed as part of a global survey of people and organizations providing consulting services in that space between clients and architects and designers. In the context of other conversations we’ve had this week, I am impressed with what feels like a significant change taking place in the economy. Those who have been serving clients in cost cutting modes are losing ground. Organizations who have gone through that effectively one-time event are now wondering where next to go. Since in the old expression, there is nowhere to go but up, the agenda is changing. Those consultants who have thought about what’s next in building the new economy are now being sought out to help build value with client organizations. I do not yet see this as a turning point in the economy, but do see the increase in this activity as a precondition for change and growth.

The conversation roughly tracked the one I had with another group who are seeking ways to transform their business from one that consumed (services for fees based on the cost of capital projects) to one that itself can build value. This is not only a transformation in how they are thinking about their clients, but also a change in the core concept of their own business and, I think, part of another positive trend.

]]> 59c6c1e722171d8f0a9af9b698d28827 Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:10:54 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/354931338 Great news! In adding some new feeds I started looking at the code for the site again and realized that there was a serious (and simple, dumb) error in the aggregated feed. That should be fixed now.

We’ve added a few new Weeknoters to the mix. Say hello to Tim Duckett, Robin Sloan, Rattle, Nordkapp, and Jim Meredith. Phew. That’s a total of 18 feeds from 5 countries now.

The US (7) and UK (6) are neck and neck, but little Finland (3) is not doing bad if you compare Weeknotes per capita. If the US had the same weeknotes/capita ratio as the US there would be over 1600 Weeknoters! Don’t worry, we think you’re pretty special too, Sweden and Holland!

We want to move away from Yahoo Pipes, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and write a proper parser that can regex the appropriate content if the feed does not come to us pre-sorted. For the record, people who offer a specific feed of only their Weeknotes in full text–I’m looking at you, Molly–make our life much easier and we appreciate that. A lot.

]]> ef6ef41ca9f2c890184baf626ca669c4 Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:02:22 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-79 For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:



Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.

As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.

Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.

But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.

In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.

We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.

]]> b289c35a43b664e51d280246fd321898 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:23:29 -0800 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/352766966 For a long time we’ve been interested in creative organizations and the role that the design of place plays in their success. With the increasing importance of innovation the corporate agenda, nurturing creative thinking has expanded the domains of our interests.

This has, of course, increased the numbers of opportunities to explore concepts for nurturing the volume, pace, and success of creative or innovative endeavors, and test what we’ve done more broadly.

Intersecting with this work has been an interest in the growth and development of organizations and, more specifically, how knowledge is created and developed in the organizational context.

This past week has been a preparation week for an expanding engagement we’ve had with a group of people whose innovative work is expected to generate and grow new organizations of significant scale. This intersection of innovation and knowledge creation is at the center of our work there.

We continue to test the research and theories of Nonaka as the basis for the development of spatial typologies that we believe will perform differentially well both in the daily dynamics of people engaged in creative work and in the development of the organizations where they do this work.

Last week, then, we looked back to our earlier work and reflected on our findings and research. This week will be further development of our toolsets, and then off for several days of observations and workshops.

Experiential scenarios Separate from our direct engagements but, I expect, influential, we are looking forward to meeting Stuart Candy this week. Candy’s work focuses on the creation of experiences that embody compelling and provocative stories about how the world could change. More on that next week.




]]> 967d74a936934efd7b504eb6b1d88cee Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:54:29 -0800 http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2010/01/week-2.php This is going to be a quick one, ostensibly because I’ve been on holiday all week in the Lakes. This has involved doing as little as possible, which translated in practice into getting my head around the way iPhones handle multiple views within an application; and reading an entire 756-page novel from end to end.

I hadn’t intended to do *anything* technically-inclined, but that was obviously the cue my brain needed to slot various different bits of Objective-C syntax into place in a way that now (seems) to make sense. The book is the first entire piece of fiction I’ve read in a sitting for several years, and it’s something I’ll try to make a habit of given the time.

]]> a3bc9600d963488c3d9313a872fe1b4d Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:05:44 -0800 http://secondverse.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/week-28/ Writing a weeknote on Sunday means you get to cheat a bit, see what everyone else has got going on. Reading through the posts, I found my self nodding in agreement, especially when I got to Ben Brown’s admiration for BERG, and his desire to get the internal processes of XOXCO worked up to a high gloss. I can certainly empathize; between client work, IxD ’10 prep and Pumpkinhead, there’s sadly been little time to really define Second Verse. I’ll be needing to manufacture an opportunity to change that.

If Ben sorts out that cloning procedure, I’m next in line.

Thankfully, this past week offered the chance to work with Kristin Nienhuis – as talented and forthright a collaborator as I could ask for. She and I will be knocking out the KickLight work over the next few weeks, making certain that the best ideas make their way off of the whiteboard and into the product. Friday’s all day review with the KickLight team was illuminating – initial presentation of working artifacts is always nerve-wracking, but I find it provides the best possible gut check. If your concept deviates from your client’s intended direction, the opportunities to course-correct are fleeting. Sort it early, and check in often.

Production work for Pumpkinhead is increasingly gaining momentum. I take an enormous amount of pleasure in responding to Tony & Tim’s “wouldn’t it be awesome if” messages with realized sketches of their proposed functionality. We are unapologetically building for ourselves, putting pieces of the experience together in ways that keep us motivated to push everything further, faster.

Two weeks remaining before Savannah, and plenty to do before I leave.


]]> d925459649176ce33e64c427256a0e58 Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:02:00 -0800 http://meredith-weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/338070654 “Sitting there waiting for the economy to get better”
A bit out of context, this is a quote from Anna Wintour in reference, obliquely, to the sisters behind the Rodarte fashion label. We’re using it as a theme, of sorts, for the development of some thoughts about the state of “sitting there.”

Wintour was referring to some fashion houses who, currently sitting things out, needed a talented designer to get things going. Our interest is the implication that even great brands are losing ground. Some assume that it is the financial market holding them back, when it may be other, internal conditions that affect their perceptions and confidence, and therefore slow momentum and affect their position.

So we’re reexamining some of the issues associated with projects that have been put on hold over the past year or two. Then later this month, we’ll join others to explore combining creative financing with creative consulting, and develop concepts to help our clients grab leadership and move things forward.

Activation strategies
We finished the year with some very interesting projects. The subjects were right in our “sweet spot” and were made even more fulfilling by clients who understood that the world of work is changing quickly. In each case, their interest was in new kinds of work settings to  engage people more effectively and innovate more quickly. In each case, the workspace became a place for others outside of the organization to participate actively and deeply in projects.

We’ve begun to outline a presentation on what we’ve found as common concepts and principles we’ve developed in this work.

Agile organizations
We’ve been connecting with an increasing number people we’ve worked with in the past and developing ideas together about our next moves. It’s impressive how much the organizational model, for both clients and colleagues, is changing toward a more flexible platform with more dynamically scalable resources.

Directions in innovation
We were pleased to get an invitation to write a paper on new directions in innovation from the leader of a group whose work has been part of an earlier publication.

Boilerplate
In every life there comes a time for the necessary introduction presentation. We’ve bit the bullet and are outlining and preparing a visual statement of qualifications, interests, curiosities, accomplishment

Archizoo
We updated the blog with some speculation on some subjects of interest. We’re keeping the list a bit light, perhaps superficial, yet, as we warm up to a deeper exploration of some of these subjects.

Matthew Barney
We went to a presentation and conversation with Matthew Barney at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Barney is an artist, perhaps best known for some extraordinarily interesting and beautiful films composing a work called the Cremaster Cycle.

Barney found an interest in Detroit and is now working here to develop some pubic and private performance pieces, and record them as part of his next major work, a years-long effort to develop an epic “opera” based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings.

Barney showed some “rough cuts” of the work that were extraordinary as images and surprising as Detroit contexts. A portion of the piece takes place in and around a more than 100-year old Catholic church in Detroit’s Delray neighborhood, the former St. John Cantius, now surrounded by a waste treatment plant.



Some other interests
Walking through walls We had a short exchange over on BLDGBLOG about the concept of “walking through walls.” Although the tone for us there was political, we nonetheless are considering further the concept of open, fluid space and how walls in some contexts defend and in others limit.

Red Cliff We’re assessing whether we have the stamina to get out and see Red Cliff this weekend. It’s a five-hour commitment, but the movie is one of the greatest – and the most expensive of all time – to come out of Asia.

October Sky In the meantime, we enjoyed watching October Sky, a good movie to inspire the entrepreneurial, start-up, competitive spirit.

]]> d06accf795022e76d3c7b9e935217b9e Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:40:50 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/337970702 Two new feeds on the list this week: Molly Steenson, a PhD Student at Princeton, and Kars Alfrink, a freelance interaction designer. Welcome!

*Due to Tumblr’s curious non-timestamped javascript embed widget I have sort of given up keeping track of the actual week.

]]> ceec92109c99e53a7222f583d995b081 Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:04:13 -0800 http://www.adoptioncurve.net/archives/2010/01/week-1.php I used to hate having to write weekly reports, mainly because when the week’s work is set down in black-and-white, an outside observer can look at it and say “is that it?” – regardless of what’s actually been achieved.  There was also a strong whiff of “what I did on my holidays”-style essay about it all, too.   That said, they’re actually a very effective way of keeping track of what’s happened from the perspective of looking back into the past

Matt Webb started the trend, Brian Boyer aggregates them, and James at Rattle can legitimately claim to be up to week 1189.  But this is my week #1 of independent existence post-Headshift, and it’ll also have to serve as next week’s as well, because I’m away all week in the Lakes on the annual pilgrimage to Langdale.   The mobile coverage in that part of the world is spotty, which is the excuse I shall use if anyone get upset about the length of time I’ve take to reply to emails.

This week was basically decompression after finishing up at Headshift.   I’ve built and wired up a desk, set up a new Macbook ready for action and done a lot of dog walking in the snow.  It’s a lot like being on holiday, except that it’s unpaid at the moment.   I’ve also sat down and made serious inroads into getting my head around Objective C and the iPhone SDK – the ulterior motive being an iPhone client for Wordr.   The learning curve is not so much steep as practically vertical, but the one advantage I’ve found myself with so far is that having had some exposure to Rails, I’m used to the idea that stuff Just Happens when you’re using frameworks.   If you can suspend belief, accept that things Just Work even though you don’t fully understand why, and concentrate on making the important stuff happen rather than panicking about what’s going on in the background.

Inspired by Pepys’ Diary, I came across The Diary Of A Country Parson – it’s a diary written by an 18th century priest between 1758 and 1803.  I’ve started posting entries at parsonwoodforde.adoptioncurve.net – the site’s theme isn’t finished yet, so it’s a bare-bones WordPress site at the moment but will get tarted up in a week or so.

On Thursday night there was a social media surgery run by Voluntary Action Sheffield, which I lent a hand at.   It was actually a pleasant change to be talking to people about social media when it’s not being seen as a profit-maximising tool.  I was surprised by how many organisations came along, and also how widely the use of social media ranges amongst them.

Next week is holiday, which will hopefully involve a lot of reading, a bit more Objective-C hacking and a chance to walk up some hills.  The week after that I’ll be back in London for a couple of days to catch up with some people, and talk to some others about potential future projects.

]]> 41d5c7b7077c9126983fc24035fb4080 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:59:24 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-77 As Week 77 closes, we are hosting the one and only Matt Haughey in our offices. He is sitting behind me right now moderating spam users on Metafilter. I challenge you to find another person as experienced as Matt who still does the dirty work of running a community every day.

We were up to our eyeballs in design this week. We started the week evaluating the first round of MediaBugs designs that CourtneyP created, and we're ending the week with the very exciting second round of design that Rumors did for Helsinki Design Lab. Both of the sites are coming to life quickly, and it looks like we're on schedule for February and March launches.

Jesse Keyes, our frequent partner in crime, has been kicking out revision after revision to an all new, all awesome homepage for SMITH Mag's Six-word Memoirs. Larry Smith sent us his last little chunk of feedback today, so the new design will hopefully go into production some time next week.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Katie and I put together a report on our session with Bryan Boyer last week. It was an intense few days featuring lots of whiteboarding and pages and pages of notes and drawings. We pulled it all together so Bryan has a clear record of the things we looked at, the decisions we made, and the next steps we all have to take towards finishing the HDL site and moving onto the next phase. I love creating these kind of documents - thoughts and processes made concrete! Here's a zoomed out version of the document we sent to Bryan on Wednesday:



One of my early 2010 goals is to spend some time redoing all of our XOXCO document templates. Some beautiful PDF files have crossed my desk recently, and it makes me jealous. This is just another item we need to add to the agenda of our upcoming (and as yet unscheduled) XOXCO retreat. I love reading about BERG's internal processes and the efforts they are making to define the culture of their studio to themselves and to the outside world, and THAT also makes me jealous. We are so busy being externally focused, we haven't spent enough time focusing internally, defining our own goals.

We can't wait much longer to tackle these internal issues. My goal is to set aside a day or two during January to sort ourselves out, and to give ourselves the full XOXCO experience that we normally reserve for our clients. I want to draw some stuff for myself!

Another thing I want to spend more time on is doing pure research. It occurred to me the other day that I very rarely get lost in a chain of Wikipedia articles anymore, or find myself having spent hours reading about a new technology or API. This week I had cause to learn all about (and implement) an oauth consumer, and it was really refreshing to learn something new. If only I had a clone.

]]> d9ed4fd8799d898b002576c47986fdf9 Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:42:50 -0800 http://secondverse.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/week-27/ The second Friday morning of January, and Second Verse has officially entered its second calendar year. What a complete difference from a year ago. I find myself pausing to consider the delta between the then and now at regular intervals, and generally end up with a smile on my face.

The news is up on Crunchbase now, so I should probably mention that I’m involved with Tony Conrad’s latest startup. Yes, it’s called Pumpkinhead. No, that’s not the name of the product. Pumpkinhead evolved as a project code name early on; Tony had asked Jason Santa Maria and I to help flesh out an idea he had been discussing with Tim Young. Both Jason and I are fans of horror films – his taste is more refined, I like them dumb. REALLY dumb. “Leperchaun” franchise dumb. Given the time of year (and the fact that it stars Lance Henriksen), I thought “Pumpkinhead” would work just fine.

Then Tony named the company after the codename. Guy has a sense of humor, one of the many reasons I’d follow him into hell.

So, yes. Pumpkinhead. It’s evolved past the original concept into something refined… and wonderful. The further we get in building it out, the more excited I am to get it out in the world. It marries quite a few of the things I care about into a very straightforward package, and thanks to Jason, it’s starting to look pretty sweet.

There’s more going on. I’ve been balancing Pumpkinhead with running Second Verse; on most days, successfully. My business development efforts in early December worked out well, and I’ve contracted with some folks from SRI to work on a video product called KickLight. They’ve been successful in proving the value of what they’re building, and they’ve asked me to help them refine and build it out.

In my work with them this week, I’ve already wound up re-learning the truism that the more you try to simplify things, the more you risk eliminating or obfuscating what differentiates the product in the minds of your users. Looking forward to getting deeper, seeing how to evolve the experience.

Finally, as the organizer for IxD 10‘s Local Design Challenge, I’m delighted to say that submissions should start coming in next week. The judging panel has been selected and briefed, and everything is coming together for the conference early next month. If you’re attending, please let me know in the comments.

Happy new year to you.


]]> 4d57359af4a36a8381713b40f3b80fd6 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:57:36 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-75 Katie and I spent New Years last week in Marfa, Texas where we got to explore the Chinati Foundation's collection of modern art. For a town of about 2000 people where most of the restaurants are only run as a hobby, Marfa contains a lot of great art and architecture. Katie posted some photos on her photo blog and even more on her flickr site.

While in Marfa, we visited Prada Marfa. We drove from Marfa, 35 miles out into the desert. For the entire drive, a creepy border patrol blimp hovered motionless overhead. I was convinced we were looking at a UFO. The desert rolled on in all directions. And then, just when we started wondering if we were going to run out of gas, we arrived. And, there we were, in the middle of the desert, looking at a fake shoe store. And as the sun set over the mountains and cars whizzed by at 95 miles per hour, it felt like it was the greatest thing ever, like having played a part in our very own personalized absurdist road movie. The entire experience was very immersive and felt highly designed.

I noticed that along the side of the building, people had left a long line of business cards and notes, each one under a little rock sitting upon it so that it wouldn't blow away. Whether they were left as some sort of offering to the piece, or just as proof that someone had made the trip, the underlying purpose these cards played there in the middle of the desert was to open up a communication channel between distant strangers.

"Can you believe it?" they say.

"I did this too!" they say.

It reminded me of the internet.

]]> 4d9847da824ae93e5488d94bf9251ca5 Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:24:00 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/317176648 Please welcome Finn Brunton to the mix.  Finn is a research fellow at NYU working on the history of data mining and obfuscation and is currently working on a book about spam. He’s also our first academic on weeknotes. Progress!
]]> 389d2b29c99d712cebee987435003265 Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:07:59 -0800 http://doprojects.org/news/weeknotes-003-week-ending-22nd-december-2009 Slow week, snow week, holiday week. The only thing of substance we have to report to you is the appearance of a generous feature on Nurri’s Feeder series in Photo Raw magazine. The copy we got our hands on looks gorgeous, and so does the work: very gratifying. Pick up a copy if you’re able.

For now, here’s wishing the happiest of holidays to you all from Do HQ here in Helsinki: cozy, healthy, relaxed, and surrounded by those you love best. See you here next week for a year-end wrapup.

]]> ec666d4fbae2310eb261c783df345824 Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:15:34 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-73

It's the end of the year, so as we try to hit our deadlines and move projects forward before the holidays, I have the glamorous job of organizing all of the financial information to have it ready for taxes. OK, it's not really glamorous but it is oddly satisfying.

I held the fort down in Austin, and Ben flew to San Francisco. While there, he met with Micki from NeighborGoods, Scott and Mark from MediaBugs and Amit from Photojojo.

When he returned, we watched the video prototype for the potential future of magazines, Mag+ brought to us by BERG and Bonnier R&D. Sadly the prototype comes at us the same week that the folding of ID Magazine is announced.

]]> ad690571b4a2b73a0f1d6b8e960dbee2 Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:33:56 -0800 http://doprojects.org/news/weeknotes-002-week-ending-15th-december-2009

Another good solid week; orders continue to come in at a pleasing pace, and we continue to bring stacks of books down to the post office for shipment on a daily basis.

Three things have come up in all of this. The first is that we’re contemplating bumping up our shipping rates to Zone B (i.e. anywhere but Europe) by about a dollar, to reflect higher-than-expected costs. We’ll come to a decision on this in the next few days, and let you know as soon as we do.

The second thing is that we’re especially curious to hear how the first shipments of Tokyo Blues have fared in the mail – if we’re packing the books adequately to protect them on their journeys, how they look when you get them, and so on. We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know when you get your books, what kind of condition they’re arriving in, and how well the packing meets your expectations.

But the last is that shipping orders – which ought to be nothing but drudgery, given that it involves delightful tasks like printing labels, stuffing envelopes, and waiting on line at the post office – unexpectedly turns out to be one of the most rewarding things I can remember doing, and infinitely more gratifying than anything I’m doing at my day job. (Maybe that’s why they call it “fulfillment.”) Every time we walk out of the Posti with another batch of orders shipped, I feel the kind of solid-but-humble, and humble-but-solid, sense of accomplishment that’s all too rare in this life.

It’s a wonderful feeling, and especially welcome in what would otherwise be the lightless and depressive depths of a Helsinki December. I recommend doing whatever you have to do to put yourself in the same position, as soon as you possibly can. The economics of small endeavors like Do will always be brutal, but this is a life-changing sensation.

Adam is hoping to grab some time to dig further in sources for The City Is Here For You To Use, primarily oddball Frei Otto‘s oddball Occupying and Connecting and material on favelas and slums. Nurri’s continuing her work at Refugee Hospitality Club Punavuori, conducting resident and stakeholder interviews and collecting information about how residents sense, understand and make use of Helsinki.

Finally finally, just a quick reminder that it’s holiday season, and while we’re doing our best to get orders out within 24 hours (and in many cases, on the same day they come in), you can expect the mail to be sluggish from now through the end of the year. The people at Posti advised us that orders going out this week will probably show up no earlier than the first week of January, no matter where they’re going to, and we’ve adjusted our expectations accordingly.

]]> abeb04d8aa1f2e6e48bfedeedec30063 Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:15:26 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-72 Katie and I went to New Orleans this week to attend Do it With Drupal, a great conference for lovers of the dark Drupal arts put on by our friend Jeff Robbins and his cohorts at Lullabot. I have been wearing one of their teeshirts for years, so it was quite an experience to walk through a hotel convention center and see hundreds of people wearing the same shirt.



Jon Armstrong and I gave our talk about online communities. It went well, and I had a lot of interesting follow up discussions with other attendees. dooce Community makes such a compelling case for the kind of personality filled niche communities I love to build. I really wanted to sell the rewards these kind of sites deliver, so we talked both about the traffic boost they've seen - Jon showed snapshots of his analytics that show the community users spend nearly three times as long on the site as they do on the main blog - and about the emotional outpouring they've seen from the nearly 20,000 members they've signed up in the first month. See this thread, it melts my heart.

I said a few things that people liked and tweetered about a bit. I am always mega-honored when anyone quotes a talk I give on Twitter. This time around it was "When I build a community, I'm hoping it will actually improve people's offline lives as well as online," and When you open up community access to a site you own, you're essentially selling shares in your site."

These choice nuggets are from a section of the presentation where I was discussing the responsibilities we have as purveyors of web services and online communities. The tools we have to measure our impact on the people who use our products focus on anonymized trends and aggregated cross-sections. But the communities we manage are not these aggregates! Each member is a person, sitting somewhere in front of a laptop or holding an iPhone. Each, a person who has made the decision to trust us, that we as software providers are trying to make the world a better place through technology, by connecting them and letting them speak to one another. I believe that the software we provide creates a connection between us and each one of these people, and that we need to respect that connection. So I rant about it!

While at DIWD, we got to hang out with some charming new friends. Kristina Halvorson gave a great keynote about content strategy, and then gave me some great advice about running a small business. NOTHING BUT CLASS, that lady.



We also spent some quality time with Rob Purdie, who presented about his work with The Economist and all of the magic that can be achieved using the Scrum development method. I impolitely complimented his politeness about three times, so I hope he won't avoid me the next time we're in the same city.

Our lovely client, Micki Krimmel was in town as well, presenting about the job of community manager. She gave a great presentation, and it was exciting to see NeighborGoods up on the big screen. If any DIWD attendees are reading, join up to share your old Drupal books with your pals.

In between all of the excitement, I found just enough time to upload the first baby version of Media Bugs to our dev server. After weeks of planning, it's always fun to see the software come to life. Scott has already logged in and posted the first few bugs. Meanwhile, the team at Rumors Studio nailed their deadline and delivered some awesome wireframes for our join project with Helsinki Design Lab.

The only thing I haven't checked off my todo list is to check out the newest version of Flixel. Adam Atomic has been twittering about all the improvements he's made, and I'm anxious to dig in and see what the new capabilities inspire.

I'm off to San Francisco on Monday for a few days of in-person time with our friends in PST. Katie will be holding down the fort in Austin while we prepare to close out the year. Excelsior!

]]> 4385758623a97eb19f4218c852eebc13 Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:54:59 -0800 http://secondverse.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/week-23/ With twenty days remaining in the year, there’s about six blank pages left in my current, much-abused Moleskin. With the amount of work that’s going on, I’m fairly certain I’ll be breaking in the next before New Year’s Eve.

Last week’s opportunities have sorted themselves out, and it’s clear what I’ll be working on in the weeks and months to come, though timing is still a little up in the air. End of the year is always like that. I’ve had meetings this week with both my accountant and tax planner, and we’re looking to close 2009 on some very positive notes.

Speaking of positive notes, the holiday season got off to a rousing start with some great parties from the folks at Social Cast, Kissmetrics, Mule Design and Kicker. It’s amazing that anyone get anything done with all the festivities, but everyone I’ve been speaking to says business is good, bordering on great. The economy may have done some damage to the availability of venture capital, but startups and the agencies who serve them seem to be pretty healthy.

Best non-party work event of the week was certainly the Quantified Self meetup at Wired on Monday night. Excellent presentations from the WakeMate guys, plus Dave deBronkart (aka ePatientDave), Esther Dyson, Ashley Tudor and Jen McCabe of Contagion Health. I’m most interested in learning more about actigraphy, especially with its potential for valuable insights when combined with historical infographics.

One more week of work before the holiday shut-down. I’m hoping the effort I’ve put in over the last two weeks helps Second Verse come out of the gates sprinting in January.


]]> 046ed4005a1cde0e09ca04c5d3105fde Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:00:03 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/279162293 Not much to report other than the fact that we’ve added a new member. Please welcome Do Projects to Weeknotes. Do Projects is a collaboration between Nurri Kim, Adam Greenfield, and occasional other members.
]]> eb065aa4d4d8999cec1c1a8ec9200f44 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:07:39 -0800 http://doprojects.org/news/weeknotes-001

Launch week, and a flurry of activity:

- Very gratifyingly, Tokyo Blues was featured on Dwell, MetaFilter, Space and Culture, Boing Boing, Jean Snow and Warren Ellis’s sites, and in too many tweets to keep track of. (Our personal favorite has to be William Gibson’s.) There’s very little more rewarding than seeing how many of you get what we’re trying to do.

- As you can see from the above picture, we’ve been making daily fulfillment runs to the Posti. The first orders went out in last Wednesday’s mail, and while things are bound to be crazy this time of year, those of you who ordered Tokyo Blues might want to start keeping an eye on your mailboxes.

- If you’ve already got your hands on the book, send us your pictures and we’ll publish them here!

- Nurri’s continuing her research at a local reception center for refugees and asylum seekers, with an eye toward developing materials that explain the city and its new residents to one another. Adam took advantage of a trip to San Francisco to discuss requirements for our forthcoming Emergency Maps project with Stamen’s Tom Carden and Michal Migurski.

That’s about it for now, with thanks always for your support, your insightful comments, and (especially) your orders. More news next week.

]]> 48c25e1c48eb70ca4d8ce51162e2a1e5 Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:57:26 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/271766991 OK, a couple things. We’ve tweaked the formatting a bit to order the items by date starting with newest on the left.

Some of you have mentioned that this site is not the most legible. You’re correct. Suggestions on alternate layouts? We’ve been toying with an ‘expandable tile’ format but it’s a pain in the CSS-butt.

Also, we’re testing out a new editorial standard. I’ve removed Kicker from the list since their updates are basically just link lists. Kicker, if you’re out there and upset about this please get in touch. I’m easily convinced to change my mind.

]]> 56cc2d43363de5539119f8a6e2c85e81 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:46:11 -0800 http://xoxco.com/clickable/weeknote-71 I spent far too much time this week thinking about and discussing with people what week we would start our weeknotes with. Should we start counting from the day I left Consumating.com and went back to being an independent developer? Or maybe we should go all the way back to 2003 when I first embarked on this style of business? Or even further back, to when I quit my last "real" job to start Deepleap in January of 2000? In the end, we decided to count from the date we incorporated as XOXCO, Inc. Then I used the Wolfram Alpha search plugin I made a few months ago, and voila: Week 71.

When we begin a big project with a new client, the first part of our design process is to write a detailed software specification. These are gigantic documents that describe each and every page type on the site, and each and every function that will be present on each page type. We create these documents so that everyone involved in the project has a crystal clear idea of what we're going to be building throughout following rounds of design - where we define the actual structure of the pages, and eventually the visual and user experience elements. Then, once the site is built, we use these documents as the basis for our quality assurance process. Are all these elements present? Do they function as described?

This week, two specification documents like this were approved by their respective clients. Getting these approved feels like the website's actual birthday: now we know what it will grow up to be. All that's left is the hundreds of hours of design, coding and testing to come!

Meanwhile, I was able to finish up the changes to PeoplePods I made while in my turkey-induced coma last week and release them as PeoplePods version 0.7. This new version goes a long way in simplifying the interfaces to creating, querying and displaying content. As part of this release, I've also posted a quick start guide for developers who do not want to read the full 20,000 words of documentation before getting to the nitty gritty of actually making kickass software.

Along the way, I had the opportunity to pitch PeoplePods to a few folks, and I noted down a few bullet points that I need to add to our sales pitch to other developers. Among them were:

PeoplePods is a great upgrade path for people who have reached the limit of what Wordpress can do. Instead of trying to trick your blogging software into being a social application with dozens of third party plugins, use software freshly designed for creating social applications!

Even though PeoplePods is free and open source, it is being maintained and supported by XOXCO, so we can keep tight control over the software and everything that comes with it. There are only 2 fingers in this pie, and they both belong to me.

We here at XOXCO believe that the future of online community revolves around smaller sites, member organized groups, and functionality that emphasizes the local and personalized content. PeoplePods was created to provide exactly these features, with built in support for member groups. You can see one way groups can be used on NeighborGoods.

Next week, we're off to New Orleans for Do it with Drupal, where I will be presenting alongside Jon Armstrong about creating online community. I may also try to organize a rebellion AGAINST Drupal... If you're going, come say hi!

]]> 8d240b2e9b023e0ed85fe2ee36cf53a3 Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:48:00 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/269187511 We're now spitting out a merged RSS feed of all the notes!:

Let’s consider this a first attempt. I think it’s working, but please report any problems.

]]> 66f88b4b50f63d1a9f7fcafff835ed0f Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:00:00 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/268850619 As of today, please welcome Second Verse to the mix. SV is a one-man-shop headed up by Ryan Freitas delivering the very finest in experience design from a office in the Mission district of San Francisco.

At the end of week one this puts our total at nine offices keeping Weeknotes: three in the SF Bay Area; three in London; and one each in Oxfordshire, Stockholm, and Finland.

*Yeah, because duh, we have to weeknote the weeknotes, right?

]]> 76f6a8061eeb688cb0be8ca2acef1dc5 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:14:59 -0800 http://secondverse.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/week-22/ I had been expecting December to be quiet from a business development perspective, and had front-loaded the workload for the quarter to compensate. I decamped for New Orleans in week 20 having successfully delivered on all of Second Verse’s outstanding obligations. While I was off eating more po’ boys than I really should have, Om Malik announced the work I did with his team on the redesign of the GigaOm Network blogs, and a variety of new opportunities have emerged.

The earliest part of this week was spent prepping for and conducting a one-day workshop with a new client; it looks likely to move forward, affording me a welcome opportunity to revisit the online video space. One of the projects that completed before the break may require some additional oversight, so a retainer relationship has been proposed. Finally, I’m getting a second bite at the apple with a project that would have me working with some of my favorite big-idea folks in a rather heady problem space. The majority of my time this week has been spent drafting and submitting proposals for all of this new work. I’m realizing that I was overly conservative in my estimation of demand, and will need to retool my Q1 projections.

There is one opportunity I won’t be able to pursue, despite it being right in my wheelhouse. I’ve been offering a bit of UX advice and direction to some friends working on a digital comics application, but they’re in need of a dedicated resource. Do you love comics, and solving hard UX problems? Leave a comment and I’ll connect you with them.

Meanwhile, there’s been some progress in making Second Verse more of a “real” company. I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the secondverse.com domain, and have redirected blog traffic away from the original dot WordPress address. The goal is to switch over to my own WP install and put up a marketing and communications site for SV, though right now I’d settle for having business cards. More on that soon. On the physical front, I’m extending my tenure within the Small Batch (Typekit) space through 2010. I’ve now got my office to myself (doubling my previous meatspace square footage!), and Bryan promises I’ll have a door at some point.

Real enough, for the time being.


]]> 407cbe3114a40f417ce9b03171d8562a Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:31:51 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/267543935 They may be persnickety, but you can’t help but love them.

So yeah, the HTML should be rendering properly in Safari now.

]]> 986ba77d0fd7730b80668b51023e2645 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:58:44 -0800 http://weeknotes.tumblr.com/post/266243109 After thinking about doing this for, umm, weeks now I’ve finally gotten around to setting something up. While I’m not in the habit of making web things much these days, it’s amazing how easy you youngin’s have it. Back when I was doing web stuff as my day job there was nary a thing called an API.

So anyways, we’re big fans of Simple Pie, whose PHP class we’re using to hoover up all your feeds and present them in one centralized place.

Weeknotes is a view into the world of SME designers, makers, technologists, and smarties.

Drop us a line if you have some ideas or if we’re missing someone on this list. fervor [at] weeknotes (dot) com

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