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

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

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

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

A snapshot from our whirlwind trip to Zurich

One of the biggest questions on our minds has been, "what next?" We have a clear idea of where HDL goes, but on a broader sense we're interested—maybe even concerned about—the hype that has been recently poured into the term "design." The danger is that the hype becomes destructive if the design community is not able to deliver. So far, many corners of the business world have been convinced of the importance of designers involved in many different, and more strategic roles, but what about NGOs, cities, or even nations? Although early evidence from that sphere is positive, as one can see in our case studies and elsewhere, the available pool of successes is small.

Which makes us curious: what should HDL do to grow that pool? What's the right role for design within larger organizations? How much design "presence" is necessary, or even wanted? Our own Studios are one proposition, but we're anxious to see more happening, and more quickly.

How will strategic design engagements be funded and by who? If one of the defining factors of truly strategic work is that it cuts holistically across silos, it might always be difficult to find funding. At the end of the day, the majority of the world operates under the cruel logic of the budgetary line item, so how can strategic designers find a place to fit when their work is naturally between the lines?

This is a true design problem in every sense of the word.

 
A temporary fruit orchard built in the heart of London as temporary nursery for plants and trees which will ultimately be gifted to local schools and community groups. Also home to Aalto University's Nest, sponsored by the Finnish Institute.

I started the week in London, where I was visiting the London Festival of Architecture to share some thoughts about design, complexity, and decision making informed by our work here at HDL.

Back in Helsinki we have things on the burner: working with XOXCO on a new part of this website, which will be helpful for sharing the work of the HDL Studios as well as supporting Studio-style work in the future; walking through HDL Global step by step with Emil+Stephanie to make sure that signage and printed material is designed for all of the needs, navigational, informational and otherwise; setting up contracts and schedule for some video work to kick off in early August; on the horn with Zurich to explore a potential new avenue for HDL.

We also put up a ton of images on Flickr. Over the next week we'll trickle some of those photos on the blog, but if you just can't wait to see you can find shots from all of our HDL Studios, most of which are by the talented Ivo Corda.

This is what Helsinki looks like at 01:00 on juhannus. Photo: Maanmatonen on Flickr

We've begun a new series of posts that reflect on the HDL Studio experiences from this summer. Check out the first two bits on building the right team and making the most out of a single week. Up next we'll have a post on knowledge transfer, to be followed by further posts on the all the behind the scenes work that goes on to support the studios.

Work continues on many fronts. Amongst them: zeroing in on September, starting a new project related to this website, and continuing to scope out the evolution of HDL.

Goodbye, June!

The event had a pretty good Twitter feed going and there were lots of lively discussions. The crowd skewed towards a more experienced, and thus older, level of individuals but it was nice to see some young faces in the audience as well. My eyes are especially attuned to these kind of demographics when I visit events these days.

With the HDL Studios and now HDL Global we've made a conscious effort to make space for younger voices in the conversation. Not only is the youthful perspective important, but we want to create opportunities to expose them to a new way of working and a new set of tools while they have an entire career ahead of them.  

Speaking of students, this week concludes the work of Anna-Leena and Christina who have been supporting the ageing studio. Rather than work part time for a month, they compressed their work into a focused week-long charrette, which might explain the "brain self portraits" they drew.

Not sure what this says about HDL, but it's a fun exercise to draw a brain self portrait. Give it a try!

While in San Francisco, Justin and Marco managed to sneak in a couple Low2No working sessions with Arup and I paid a visit to Adaptive Path, where I had a chat with Peter Merholz about his growing design consultancy, and global design practice in general.

It was a good week and now we begin our laser focus on getting ready for September.

• 1 studio space
• 6 weeks
• 3 studios
• 24 studio Members
• 17 of which came from abroad
• 2 combined count of volcanos and labor strikes that our travel plans managed to survive without incident
• 7 studio assistants
• 25 guest speakers
• 7 Sitra organizers (either full or part time)
• 9 fieldwork visits by the studios
• 13 "final review" guests
• 18 group dinners

We'll be spending the next couple months wrapping up the work of the studios and determining the best way to proceed. If you're curious about the outcomes, please check back here, subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter. As soon as we have concrete news, it will be posted to this site.

A snapshot from the Ageing Studio final review

With the studios now behind us, we've accumulated a body of strategic knowledge relevant to the three thematic topics of ageing, sustainability, and education, but we've also learned a lot about how one practices strategic design. During the summer months I'll be sketching out some basic thoughts about the experience and we'll hopefully have some guest blog posts from a few of the studio members as well. If you're interested in how to organize and operate a focused, fast, collaborative strategic environment stay tuned!

Since Helsinki Design Lab was re-calibrated as an initiative to foster 'government meets design' we've had three initial mini-projects. The first was this website, the second were the HDL Studios, and now our sights are set on HDL Global 2010, an invitational event this fall. So, in other words, tomorrow. Not that we're feeling the pressure or anything.

We've started to get a few little bits of press. The Talouselämä interviewed Darrel Rhea (printed in Finnish) when he was here for the Studio on Education. Linda Nathan wrote about the same week on her blog. Elsewhere, The World Changing Blog had some very nice things to say about us. We like you too, World Changing. And if you're the visual sort, Dan Hill has posted a whole heap of photos from his time in the HDL Studio on Sustainability.

Taru and Kristiina were suspiciously happy about their last day at HDL.

All that's left for this week are some very important thank yous. Taru and Kristiina, two Aalto students who were the research team for the sustainability studio have completed their work, so we say thank you and goodbye to them. Thanks also to Adriel and Ezra, who longtime readers will remember as the primary researchers of the Challenge Briefings for our Ageing and Education studios. And finally, a very big thanks to Hanna, Minna, Sanna, Miku, and Seungo for their continuing contributions to the project. Without such a great team offering logistical, practical, and psychological support there's no chance that the HDL Studios would have come off as well as they have.

Taru and Kristiina began the wrap up work for the sustainability studio. This involves reviewing the tapes of the final presentation, transcribing all the stuff from the walls, and beginning to collate the two. Ultimately this will result in a document which summarizes the 'final review' of the studio and supports it with further information that was discussed early in the week but just couldn't fit into the final conversation.

One of the paper "slides" from the sustainability studio, proposing one of ten action areas.

Alongside this work is a project to map the decision making territory around carbon. Who are all of the parties at the municipal, national, EU, and supranational level that have a decision making role affecting carbon? This is no small task and the research assistant teams have been fearlessly wading into the morass as they attempt to sort it out. When we started, I asked them to "draw the org chart of the problem," but now I see that this is more or less impossible: it's more of a disorg chart. These are huge messy tangles of relationships and it has been a very juicy challenge to sort it all out.

Working on a map of the decision making structure of climate change. The typical "org chart" style seen at the top has been abandoned for a radial arrangement in recognition that this situation is anything but organized.

Elsewhere in the studio, Christina and Ankki are at an earlier stage of a similar process, only their focus is on ageing rather than carbon. They started out with a pencil sketch, which is always a good idea.

The decision making map for ageing in Helsinki is shaping up.

Just as the ageing studio is about to begin, the education studio is being fully wrapped up. Johanna and Rodrigo put in their last day of work as research assistants at HDL. Although their work on the education studio is over, we're still in the early stages of a larger arc of work to discover how the outcomes of the studio can be best applied. In fact, on Thursday we hosted some folks from the City of Helsinki to see if there's a possibility of collaborating on their work related to supporting immigrant students.

Rodrigo and Johanna completed their the education studio wrap up work today. It's been great to work with them, and we wish these two luck in whatever they pursue next.

This week Seungho also introduced us to a bit of his student work at Aalto University in a pair of posts (one, two) about Cambodia. He has promised to check in again with some of the outcomes of the semester, including a strategic framework to rethink the role of NGOs in that context.

So with that we will say goodbye to Week 065, as well as thank you to Johanna and Rodrigo.

An array of research inquiry memos laid out on the "science lab table" in the studio. Supporting the studio members is a team of three research assistants who track down answers to questions and fix appointments. As the week wore on this table filled up.

For the final "review" we were joined by Mikko Kosonen, President of Sitra; Jukka Noponen, Director of Sitra's Energy program; Peter Lund, professor at Aalto and one of Finland's top experts in energy policy; Timo Mäkelä from the EC's Environment Directorate-General; and Helena Säteri, Director General of the Ministry of the Environment in Finland.

The conversation was wide-ranging but one major theme was the question of how to enable cross-ministerial action on sustainability, rather than just talk. As the studio heard from different stakeholders over the course of the week there are many cooperative relationships between the ministries and other key bodies, but these are generally non-binding. They have no teeth. The studio wondered if a "war on carbon" and a matching war cabinet be the right approach.

For now I'll leave you with that juicy tidbit and we'll check in later with the full outcomes, once the work has been transcribed and formatted in a sharable manner.

Wondering what the studio activities look like? Here's a video of five completely packed days compressed into 18 seconds. Looks easy, right?

While the Sustainability studio was ongoing, the HDL team was busy fixing last minute logistics for our next Studio on Ageing that begins in just six days, as well as continued effort on HDL Global 2010.

Justin had to duck out for a few days to attend a Low2No design meeting in London. While we were sad to have him gone in the middle of the Sustainability Studio, it's very exciting to watch Low2No begin to shape up.

What else?

Darrel Rhea wrote up his experience of the Studio on Education over at the Cheskin blog. We showed up in the Social Innovator methods index created as a collaboration between the excellent folks at NESTA and the Young Foundation. And did you know that you can follow HDL on twitter at @HDL2010?

Since we're at the very beginning of the week, let me introduce the studio:

• Alejandro Aravena. Executive Director, Elemental, Chile
• Dan Hill. Senior Consultant, Arup, Sydney (and prolific blogger)
• Janne Hukkinen. Professor of Environmental Policy, Helsinki University
• Seppo Junnila. Professor of Real Estate Business, Aalto School of Science & Technology
• Patricia McCarney. Director, Global City Indicators Facility, University of Toronto
• Federico Parolotto. Senior Partner, Mobility in Chain, Milan
• Matthias Rudolph. Project Leader, Transsolar, Stuttgart
• Katharina Schmidt. Masters of Spatial Design Student, Aalto School of Art & Design

This talented bunch will be spending the next five days with in Helsinki where their mission is to begin unpacking the complexities of carbon neutrality for Finland and to think about what a roadmap to carbon neutrality would look like.

One question we often get is "how do you pick the studio teams?" During the HDL Studio on Education someone went so far as to say that they felt like they were participating in an Agatha Christie novel: a group of people are mysteriously pulled together out of thin air—why are they here and what will they do now?

So, a few brief words describing our best guess as to how you build a successful team for this kind of work. To begin, it's important to know that as the research for the Challenge Briefings developed, we created expertise profiles for each studio. These were running lists that identified what we consider to be key perspectives for each studio topic.

In Sustainability we knew that building physics, transit, and policy would be essential areas, for instance. These are quite predictable. But we also sought some perspectives that might at first be unexpected. The thought behind this is simple: if you only include the regular suspects you will only get regular results.

Here are the basic rules of thumb that we used when thinking about the mix of the team and how to select the right individuals: 

Keep it small: With too few people there's a danger that conversation will not be robust enough, but with too many people in the room it's difficult to have a single conversation. Based on experience, and a bit of advice from Dan Goldin, a team of eight is optimal. This has worked out very well for us. Some things work well in large groups, but strategy sessions are not one of them.

No room for duplicates: The studio team will be working quickly, which means that the collective expertise and experience in the room is the team's largest asset. Although team members may have some overlaps in their interests, it's best if each member is the master of their own domain and offers serious, focused expertise about their field. Each member becomes a 'representative' of their expertise and no one is redundant.

Only accept the best: When it comes to selecting individuals, we've gone straight to the top. Across the board, we feel that the studio members we've attracted are either at the top of their respective fields or upcoming talents. High quality input may not quite guarantee high quality output, but it's certainly a prerequisite.

Flexible expertise: It doesn't matter if you're the top expert on the planet in subject XYZ unless you're able to relate to others and convey your ideas in an open, productive manner. For this reason, we look for people who are at the top of their field, know their material inside and out, but are also naturally curious about the world around them, and able to sociably entertain models that conflict with their own.

Be (a bit) local: One of the great strengths of the HDL Studio format is that it offers a very fast and focused infusion of international expertise. But bringing in a wholly international group can lead to fruitless conversations when the cultural context is not understood. We set a rule of thumb for ourselves that two of the studio members would be Finns so there would always be 'cultural ambassadors' in the core team.

Design is the glue: Each of the studios have two designers who work as facilitators amongst a group of peer-experts. It's their job to ensure that the conversation is balanced and holistic. Only a particular kind of designer will work in this context. They need to be able to apply their training to strategic issues.

If these are the rules that guide our choices, one might ask how we first narrow the field. So far, the best indicator we have is that the kinds of people who succeed in collaborations with HDL are those who have significant experience in multiple cultures. Marco likes to use the term Third Culture Kid. This may be "culture" as it's typically defined or it may also refer to different cultures of expertise or work.

If I have the choice between an expert in astrophysics and an expert in astrophysics with a previous background in agriculture, my bet is on the latter. There's something about having lived in multiple cultures that prepares an individual for the kind of lateral thinking that is required in an HDL Studio.

Finally, the mix of the studio in terms of both expertise and personality is important. While one my be able to judge an individual's expertise by broswing a CV and reading some publications, it's very difficult to assess whether an individual will work well as part of a team unless you meet them in person. Sharing a phone call works too, but it's not as effective as having a face to face conversation with someone.

For all of these reasons listed above, we devote a lot of time to sketching out the right mix for a team, courting a qualified pool of invitees, and working to secure their participation. By way of example, the process of defining the HDL Studio teams began eight months before the first studio.

Editor's note: These reflections on developing the HDL Studio Teams have been updated in a new post here.

Which brings us to the end of this rather long weeknote. It was full of powerpoints: Marco spent Tuesday in Valamo, where he gave a presentation the Valamo Monastery's seminar on Divinity and Truth, and then closed the week as a respondent on a panel entitled "Helsinki – an Open and Cosmopolitan City?"

Meanwhile, I was in Paris to attend the SIX Spring School, to share our work at HDL, and to continue digging in to the ageing content in advance of our own Ageing studio which will happen in June. Thanks Geoff, Louise, and everyone else for a great event!

Friday. A group discussion after the studio presented its findings and recommendations

Last time we checked in on the Education studio they were in the throes of developing a synthesized position on the education challenge. That work continued through the morning and afternoon on Friday and then we ended the day with a discussion between the studio, a number of people from Sitra, Timo Lankinen of the Finnish National Board of Education, and Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz of the European Commission. It was great to have such a high powered conversation in a group small enough that we could really dig into issues, a discussion that continued over dinner in the studio with the work of the week pinned up on the walls around us.

The question is: what next? One of the difficulties of the work of HDL and Sitra more broadly is that we're in the business of creating opportunities. Sometimes this means helping two organizations or individuals meet and discuss areas of possible collaboration; sometimes this means helping foster new business ventures, as Sitra's venture capital operation is well versed in; sometimes it means introducing new ideas into Finland, like the ways that Low2No has contributed to the discussion about sustainability; and sometimes it means creating space for reconsidering challenges from a new point of view.

So back to that question of what's next. From here we will continue the conversation with Timo and his colleagues, as well as our partners at the Ministry of Education, and other groups which are keen to learn more about the outcomes of the studio. In short, we're going to follow the opportunities as they arise—and we'll try to nudge a few along too.

Of course we have a couple ideas of what's next, but if we gave away all of our plans where would the fun be in that?

Besides feeling like a pack of exhausted zombies, this week was spent ramping up our next studio on sustainability while ramping down the studio on education. Ramping down involves transcribing the whiteboards, photographing everything, and reviewing the tapes of the final conversation. Ramping up involves continued work tracking down answers to questions that the studio members have sent in advance, so that they can hit the ground running.

And what else? It's spring, so we got some new flowers!

Actually, OK Do brought us the flowers. Thanks!

Meanwhile, Rodrigo and Johanna have been wading through piles of official documents and lots of phone calls to continue their work drawing out the organizational chart of the education system. This sort of work very easily turns into spaghetti, so we've been taking it slow. Part of the ramp up phase for the studio assistants is a nice dinner to get to know everyone. Annikki and I had the pleasure of taking the Sustainability Studio and the Ageing Studio to dinner this week which means that all three teams have officially booted up.

Marco, Hanna, Annikki, and I spent Thursday in Jyväskylä, where Sitra sponsored a workshop with a wide cross section of stakeholders who deal with issues relating to the elderly in that city. We heard a bit about some of the challenges of delivering care to a broad variety of different groups of people. One of the key issues in Jyväskylä, as well as the rest of Finland, is that it includes a dense urban core as well as vast expanses of lightly populated rural areas. Delivering equal levels of care to people in such disperate physical environments becomes a tricky proposition. This was preliminary work for the Ageing Studio which happens in early June.

And tonight things suddenly became very real. Marco and I met the Education Studio members who've just flown in from Singapore, London, San Francisco, Boston, as well as the two locals from Helsinki, and took them out to a neighborhood dinner in Töölö. Shaking the hands of these excellent people who've come to spend a week with us really underscored the fact that, oh yeah, this thing we've been planning for over a year begins tomorrow!

Seungho, Minna, Sanna, and Hanna have been handling all sorts of last minute items for the studio. We now have furniture, a full wall of whiteboard writing surface, internet access, a conference phone that looks like a space ship, and – most importantly – an account at the cafe next door.

Still rough around the edges, but getting there.

The instant we had furniture the studio assistants for our Education Studio were already powering full steam ahead. Rodrigo, Johanna, and Annikki have been covering a lot of ground as they research and map out the territory of education in Finland. Who are the key actors and what are the relationships between them? How are these institutions, organizations, and entities structured? Sunday is when the eight members of our studio arrive, so this work is not a minute too soon.

With May just a few days away, we ended the week with an all-hands meeting to review HDL Global 2010. The crowd grew from 10 to 12 as we welcomed Emil+Stephanie to present their work on the visual identity. The event plans are generally shaping up but there's still a lot to nail down, which is why Marco has been on the horn with Moscow, Washington, and many points in between.

Oh, and we launched the new website.

Feeling good about the accomplishments of 059, but already half way through week 060, it's time to turn up the Piazzolla and get back to work.

Unifying these projects is the ability of the teams behind them to work between different scales of their respective challenges, coordinating discrete decisions in a way that created opportunities to impact entire systems. We've started with three case studies but want to grow the library. Perhaps you have some ideas?

Can the specific architectural decisions of a house help lift its future residents out of poverty? Can something as basic as the material choice for a surgical tool improve patient outcomes? In the course of writing these case studies we found that the answers is yes! Talented designers are finding themselves increasingly able to tackle strategic questions and deliver measurable improvements for clients ranging from individual citizens, to global corporations, and government ministries.

Helsinki Design Lab wants to see more designers able to work at this level, more success stories, and more governmental clients benefitting from strategic design.

I'll let Marco follow up with a more complete introduction Helsinki Design Lab later this week, but for now "tervetuloa" and please enjoy our new site.

This site came together through the fantastic and speedy work of XOXCO and Rumors during the last six months, as well as early conversations with BERG on a fine September day, and a stellar visual identity courtesy of TwoPoints. Thanks everyone!

We moved in to our summer studio, printed a newspaper, and finished the new website. Go team!

Our location, soon to be furnished.

The studio space is located right in the heart of Helsinki, along the pedestrian patch of Kalevankatu. We've taken over from the excellent team at Nordkapp, who've moved on to a bigger office elsewhere in the city. To inaugurate the space we had a small party on Thursday with some of our local friends. With a bunch of people dropping by it seemed like a good opportunity to make sure they go home with some information about Helsinki Design Lab, so we designed and printed a tabloid newspaper in one week. Seungho took the lead on this and he did a great job. We'll have to figure out a way to make these papers available if you want a copy.

The first newsprint publication of HDL.

And the last big item is that we finally completed our new site. Once the eyes have been dotted and the tees crossed we will launch it, which means that the next time you read a weeknote like this it will be via our new online home.

But the biggest thing on our minds this weekend is what will happen with Eyjafjallajökull. If the skies don't clear up soon we're going to have to figure out a plan B for the HDL Studios, so this week ends with cautious optimism.

Courtesy of NASA Goddard's Flickr stream

We've been so focused on getting the studios squared away that it's hard to stop thinking about the week ahead. But last week some important things happened, so let's try to remember them.

The big item is that we welcomed another six new people to the team. Each of the three studio will have two Aalto University students supporting their work. Marco, Annikki, and I spent Friday morning introducing the new team members to HDL and strategic design. We're very excited to have them–and it's pretty amazing how quickly this team is growing. The studio assistants will be working with us through June.

Justin and I continued to shape up the case studies and website content while XOXCO made a final round of bug fixes. The new site is so very close to being done that I can barely stand it.

Tuesday was dedicated to video editing. Like our website, the brief interviews about HDL 1968 have been one of the items that we've been slowly chipping away at for a long time and they're finally getting close to done. Antti made some magic happen in Final Cut Pro. It will be great to have those videos online eventually.

We continued conversations with Emil+Stephanie who are providing design services for HDL Global 2010. It was a good meeting and we have some exciting plans in the works for the visual character of the event.

Seungho dedicated week 57 to designing a tabloid newspaper that explains HDL. We've been getting so many questions about what we do that it seems useful to have some kind of packaged information. That goes to press on Monday.

And thus week 57 comes to a close. It was busy, but with the first studio looming and many things on the docket, week 58 promises to be even more intense!

The first batch of Challenge Briefings are back from the printer! This is also a sneak peak into the new look of HDL. More when the new site launches.

A what?

A strategic design studio! HDL is hosting three studios this summer, each one looking at a systemic problem here in Finland. Since our new website is still forthcoming, here's a little peak into what the HDL Studios are all about.

The first studio will look at the broad theme of education with a specific focus on the "lost boys" of Finland, dropouts who disappear from the system completely. Our second studio is an extension of the intellectual capital devleoped by the Low2No competition and will concentrate on a national sustainability strategy with a focus on carbon neutrality in the built environment. Finally, the third studio is focusing on the challenges of an ageing society and how this impacts welfare and the welfare system.

For each of these studios we've built a small, top-notch team of eight experts with demonstrated leadership in their respective fields and a commitment to open and collaborative work. These teams will come together to spend a week with us in Helsinki and charrette on the topic. They are free to choose an appropriate medium, but each studio has been asked to develop a roadmap to strategic improvement and identify a "top ten" list of possible interventions. Given the understanding of the problem that will be collectively developing, what can be done to deliver significant improvement?

But back to those Briefings. They're following on the competition brief developed for Low2No and will be familiar to anyone who has seen a design brief before – only they're focusing on the opportunities for the redesign of systems rather than objects. Once we've seen how the studios make use of them we will revise the briefing documents and make them available on this website. This should happen later in the summer, so please bear with us.

With this one small but significant part of the puzzle completed, I'd like to thank Adriel Mesznik and Ezra block who took the lead on developing content for the Ageing and Education briefings respectively. Thanks, guys!

This was week 56: a short and blurry week. Three publications done and printed, one publication ramping up, a website that's almost done, and lots of other little bits keeping us busy.

Leif Sonkin and Kimmo Rönkä, two of the authors of a Sitra report entitled Seniori 2000 looking at ageing society, dropped by for a meeting. They are enthusiastically revisiting the material and will be checking in with the municipalities involved to see what has come of their visions for the year 2000, now that we're ten years on. This will feed into our ageing studio.

The Challenge Briefings (one for each of our three studios) are 100% complete and press ready. Those files will be waiting in the press' inbox Monday morning. We're treating these as versioned documents so this will be version 1.0. That version number should tick up after the studio as our thinking develops, and hopefully many times after as well.

Finalizing the covers.

Marco was on the phone with Palo Alto and New York, as well as a few places around Europe. Interesting things developing for both HDL and Low2No but my lips are sealed for the moment.

We ended the week with an all-hands away day meeting to review the full compliment of plans for HDL studios and HDL Global. With the first studio beginning in just over a month, things are starting to feel more discrete. Sure, there's still a lot to do, but the work is less and less abstract. The to-do list is growing longer but the individual items are easier to check off, which is probably indicative of some equilibrium of work Law Of The Universe.

Finally, we would like to welcome Annikki to the team! She is going to be helping us with the HDL Studios by coordinating the teams of student research assistants who will be supporting each studio. In the coming weeks we'll post more about what a studio looks like and Annikki will have a better chance to introduce herself then.

Looking to the week ahead – um, tomorrow – we have a bit of a sprint before Easter holidays shut down Finland for a long weekend. Back to it!

It involved some conversations with the in-house technology people who are now working on ICT for September, some preparations to bring on six Aalto University interns, confirming more guests for September, steadily taking care of logistics for the summer studios, and ongoing work on the Briefing documents.

Those Briefings are more work than we had expected, so they're eating into other projects (like the website). But it's worth it because the Challenge Briefings are the basis for the summer studios – they have to be great. We're supposed to send them to press in the upcoming week. That's a little scary.

Work on the case studies continued with calls to Leeds and London about knee caps and social housing, respectively.

Kari stopped by to fill us in on the plans for Helsinki Design Week. It's nice to have visitors, but I always feel a little guilty making them come down to Ruoholahti.

Which is why the big news of the week is that we finally confirmed the location of our summer studio space. It's a great spot right in the middle of Helsinki. I'm looking forward to seeing what Seungho whips up when he gets a chance to kit out the raw space as a hospitable studio environment for twelve people. We're going to look into having some open visitors' hours so that you can drop by and check out HDL too. Details on this when they develop.

We're definitely still in Ambiguous Middle Phase, but getting the hang of it now. If the next couple weeks go well, we should leave AMP behind and move to something that feels less like preparing and more like executing.

Marco has been steadily knocking things off the to-do list. Mostly in the section having to do with logistics and participants. We added two more confirmations to the Ageing studio, which is now almost full, as well as continued lining up speakers for all three studios. Jaana dropped by at the very end of the day on Friday with some special all-white, embossed Sitra stationery that none of us had ever seen before. Apparently it's reserved for diplomatic communiques.

I spent Friday interviewing Aalto students for the role of studio assistant. We're going to be brining on about three people to help with each of the studios, so that's a total of somewhere in the neighborhood of nine people to bring up to speed. Not to mention nine more seats that will be needed. Our new location in the Sitra building is bigger, but not that big.

Thus the studio. The biggest news is no news at all: we're still trying to confirm the HDL studio space. A couple very exciting options and we're very close, but the whole HDL team is quite ready to sign a lease and put this arduous task behind us. Who would have thought the real estate market in Helsinki to be so convoluted?

Week 053 feels like an extension of 052, one of the longest weeks of the project yet.

But we are just getting started. Our work will become more visible in the coming weeks as we build a greater web presence, publish case studies and host our studios. To this end, Sitra’s Boston office was in full-scale knowledge creation mode this week. With great sadness, Bryan left Helsinki’s epic winter and flew to Boston to join me for the first week of a three week case writing push.

Why dump all that carbon just to write a couple dozen pages?*  The short answer is that we needed to build a "bubble."  The bubble is a magical space of extreme efficiency, supreme cognition and canny recollection.  Once in the bubble, the complex work of creating documents that have real, lasting value is a little easier.  With notebooks and the standard array of corporate innovation tools in hand—and the supportive environment of the bubble—we revisited our first three cases to try and better understand what happened in the projects, where design was instrumental, and why they reflect strategic design.

The breadth of the case study project is exciting: from positioning cities as strategic reserves and short cuts to equity, to design as a targeted risk mitigation tool in healthcare environments, to revaluing waste as a resource in a way that can realign the interests of citizens and their government, consumption habits and the environment.   Each case provides evidence of how work at a discrete scale can have impact at much larger scales.  When the bigger, often highly conflicted fields of play are understood not only as being inextricable from the discrete focus of a project, but also that they themselves are open to adaptive intervention by a skilled design team and supportive client, then the work of strategic design is being done.

"The Bubble" in full effect.

The HDL and Low2No projects have necessitated new ways of working for our team.  The cases are no exception.  Our particular challenge this week was to rebuild the story of the projects both in terms of their chronology, and also the scales at which they operated.  In some cases, the scalar question was obvious to those involved in the project, in others, large scale impacts became apparent to us as external, neutral observers.  For instance, the redesign of a medical device had a clear impact on surgical pathway efficiency, and thus the hospital’s orthopedic business model (each surgeon could do roughly 3 more knee replacements per week).   What was less clear, but equally important is the potential for a more accurate and easier to use medical device to change the way a hospital manages risk.

To help discover new perspectives such as this, Bryan and I "invented" an organized brain dump methodology that attempted to capture key elements of the case according to the 3 main structural components of each case study.

In the coming week, Bryan and I will return to Helsinki for more time in the bubble.  We will add depth and formality to our case outlines and prepare them for publishing this month.  Meanwhile, the rest of the team is hard at work as our studios and the September event draw near.

*We do buy carbon offsets for our airline travel…

Nick and Matt B are in the other room, working together on new product development. They’re aiming to take a tech proof of concept to minimum viable product.

Two other products – one near term, the other medium – are also taking shape.

Campbell, Timo, Jack and Matt J are working on a film called Future Magic.

There’s been a lot of business development this week. Lots of exciting conversations. And accounts: it was financial year end recently, and that’s a good chance to revisit processes with Kari. I like that company administration runs so smoothly, like a machine. I’ve been making higher level metrics, attempting to attach meaningful numbers to the budgets of cash, attention and risk.

Last week I was in California with Matt J, recharging, hiking, and attending Foo Camp. There was a lot about robotics there – everything from articulation to low-cost development to fractional A.I. – and it has influenced my thinking considerably. Most of my thinking happens in conversations, or while writing, or while drawing.

The week before that we handed over Mag+, the end of a 9 month journey. It went from R&D design concept to iPad app, and from there to a constellation of systems and processes (production tools and help-desks), which were finally divided up and stitched back into a broader corporation to run as “business as usual.” That’s how R&D should happen. I’m pleased.

On our last night in San Francisco, walking back to the hotel from hosting drinks for our West coast friends, we passed the Apple Store, and just as we went past the giant iPad in the window started playing this. A great sign-off to Mag+.

It’s odd to be back in the studio, able to pay attention once again to health, growth and direction. It’s wonderful. This is a self-sustaining spaceship now. A culture garden full of my favourite people.

I can see the mountain-tops. I can see the stars. And I am impatient for them.

Client work. Trumbull (a little project with the BBC) is heading towards prototype. The production tools on the back-end of Mag+ are about to have a significant improvement, and the app is soon to have its next feature release — after a particularly tough development cycle. Schooloscope is a week or so away from its next feature release.

Internal work. Availabot is physically and electronically coming together. My mind is turning to software and to fulfilment. Weminuche has slowed due to sourcing delays. It needs to get to end-to-end demo before we proceed.

Opportunities. We had to turn one big possibility down. But July is pretty clear for us concentrate on a particular other (I’m sketching system diagrams to prep). My mind is on what client work we have in for August — we’re at only about one half capacity for that month so far.

I’m enjoying my personal less hectic pace. On my desk at the moment I have the old El Morro project proposal, written overnight on January 28th, and I realise that basically, since that evening, I’ve barely seen friends and colleagues, barely replied to email, and not had time to sit and consider at all. Time to re-connect with the community, and to do a bit of thinking.

Mag+ continues. The first iPad app on the platform, Popular Science+, got a cracking write-up on the Apple website: The magazine of tomorrow.

Nick and Lei are working on the next version of the app, and on scaling up. James is working on the authoring tools, aided by Loz and Simon who are making it easier for first-time users and laying the foundations for better InDesign integration. Campbell is our production expert, both helping James and answering queries from a few different magazine production teams. Together with Jack and Matt J, he’s also designing features for the version after next.

Schooloscope moves towards its second feature release! Tom’s working on that, while Matt B works on designs for the planned third release. Kari is replying to queries and feedback. Ben is helping us with data. (Here’s the Guardian’s write-up of Schooloscope.)

Both Mag+ and Schooloscope are now in operations. Ops is pretty new to us, and the continuous involvement it requires doesn’t play well with the clear open space you need for free inventive work. We’re using Tender for a helpdesk, and Codebase to track bugs and allocate features to releases.

The Michel Thomas iPhone app press releases will go out this week (get the behind-the-scenes tour). Matt B and Nick have done great work.

Trumbull is working towards demo: that’s Matt B, Paul and Matt J.

Jack and Matt J were in Amsterdam last week with Layar.

Andy continues working towards end-to-end demo for Weminuche. He’ll rope Tom in this week. Jack continues working with electrical engineers on Availabot. A previously unnoticed requirement about USB power draw led to a small design change, which led to a bigger opportunity to simplify the bill of materials, which had an impact on the industrial design. It’s utterly fascinating how all the different bits link together.

The last few months have been so busy. I completely underestimated the real impact of “Scenario 4.” (In short: it was that everyone’s been too busy to even think.)

But the nice situation now is that, with our capacity slowly coming back over the next month or two, we have the chance to speak with prospective new clients in a considered and practical way. So: lots of having coffee with people. Good good.

Deadlines, exhaustion, seismic events both real and psychic have conspired against us, but still – very remiss of us. We’ll try and resume normal service as soon as possible.

Busy times, a full studio, a lot on deck. Week 255. Off we go.

The week started with some nice recognition of Mag+ from Apple: there’s an in-depth look at the project we called El Morro in the iPad section of their website.

El Morro continues – the team are working on improving the reading experience, adding some extra capabilities to the platform, and most importantly perhaps – ensuring that the toolkit and knowledge necessary to create Mag+ is transferred to where it belongs in the editorial teams.

As the ashcloud subsided, face-to-face around a whiteboard replaced skype calls as few of our friends from Bonnier came over from Stockholm for a really useful day of workshops to that end, and as I type Mark P. from their US team is sat with the guys working away.

Jack and myself had an interesting chat with magazine art-director-and-enthusiast extraordinaire Jeremy Leslie over breakfast on Wednesday – hearing his feedback on the challenges and opportunities of Mag+ and digital magazines in general was awesome.

Ashdown is coming on leaps and bounds since going into Alpha, with Tom and Matt B. heroically-cranking through the phase we’ve started to call ‘tuning’ in the studio.

We don’t really have a fixed process at BERG, but we have approaches that we use and evolve. We’ve talked about the phase we tend to call ‘material exploration‘ before – and in fact Tom has written in depth about that in association with Ashdown, but ‘tuning’ is where I guess the instincts you’ve acquired for the territory and the material throughout the project really serve. It’s about taking the time once the core features and functionality are working to try and make the elements sing in harmony and shine them up best as time allows.

The first product from Ashdown is being tuned now, and I think the team have made something really gorgeous. Alongside the visuals and the interactions – the voice of the product is being tuned too. We’ve been joined today by Giles Turnbull who we worked with a lot on matters of tone and writing while I was at Dopplr, and he’s helping with that. Nice to have him in the studio today.

Back to ‘tuning’ – there’s an element of Disney’s ‘plussing‘ there, and trying to inject delight where you can – but the word ‘tuning’ just seems to fit better for us. It might be about removing things as much as ‘plussing’. When you find the signal, making sure that you are removing anything that impedes it, and do everything you can to amplify it.

Other projects.

Kendrick’s time for tuning has passed, and fingers-crossed it will shortly be in the world. Nick’s been shepherding that process in part this week. Trumbull’s design is progressing nicely – but a resource hiccup has put things back a little bit. I’ve been working to resolve that with Kari and Matt W this week, and, again – fingers crossed – we have a solution.

Jack had a great production engineering meeting on Availabot (remember that?) which left him grinning, and there are a couple other of our own projects, including Weminuche, which are starting to walk rather than crawl which is really satisfying to see.

As I started to scribble down what to put in this weeknote, it was mid-afternoon on Friday. It’s a long weekend here in the UK – we have a holiday on Monday.

The studio was waving goodbye to Webb, who had to leave a little early to go and buy shoes before travelling to an event this weekend. Everyone looked a little disturbed to be left in the studio as he went – a situation we’re not used to, and is usually quite the reverse.

The last few weeks have been crazy-busy for all of us, but especially him. He’s held the BERG helicarrier together through some extreme turbulence recently and seen that it’s still delivered, and I’m very glad we’re back in a rhythm that allows him to go and buy shoes.

After all – you make the road by walking.

Happy Friday from week 255.

We had a delayed All Hands on Thursday, because on Tuesday so many people were out: Matt J, Matt B and Tom were at a workshop for Trumbull; Jack and Campbell were shooting video with Timo.

I spent a few minutes at the end of the All Hands speaking about the shape of the studio over the summer. It’s exciting. A race! And the right team for it. But there’s a lot that’s uncertain and a lot that has to click together all at once. We’re timeline-ing, proposal-ing, and travelling (Jack, Matt and I, for a few days next week) to make that happen.

Now I’m going to find some socks so I can put on some shoes, leave the house and buy some milk, so I can make some tea, so I can settle down and write this launch post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s 1am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good night.

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

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

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

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

Super fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh there’s a bunch more to say.

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

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

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

What else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what metamorphosis feels like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is after lunch.

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

The first couple of days I spent mostly catching up on tasks which had been delayed for way, way too long. Upgraded my Movable Type installation to v5.02 and tidied up some issues left over from the old upgrade from v4.x. Spruced up my long-neglected Whit Stillman website. It’s only the default WordPress 3 theme, but it looks alright, and WP is proving ever-nicer.

I seemed to spend far too much of Wednesday arguing with people on Twitter and email about whether advertising was a good thing or not. A really pointless argument (no one’s going to change their point of view) which left me feeling angry, frustrated, isolated, and irrationally disliking more people than I feel comfortable with.

Towards the end of the week I was working out how to deploy a Django site. I’ve done some fiddling around with Django on my laptop, and worked on a site that was already live, but I have no idea how to get it working on a server from a standing start. Specifically, how to do so on my shared servers at Joyent. It might be possible but, for someone who’s only used to uploading PHP files and having them Just Work through Apache, it’s a whole new world.

Next week I start work on a project for a new client, which came about due to my Today’s Guardian site. Getting work as a result of something I did purely to scratch my own intellectual itch is a good thing.

I spent one day at Somethin’ Else wrapping up the final few wrap-uppable issues with the front end development. That’s all, at last, over, and a shiny new site should be coming to a browser near you very soon.

The rest of the week has been filled with catching up on overdue bits and pieces, approaching a wonderful feeling that I understand is called “being on top of things”. Crossing off tasks that have been nagging me for way too long is very good indeed.

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.

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.

So, that was a bit of a gap in weeknotes, my apologies. The weeks before the dev/fort were mostly quiet, like a coiling spring. The 10 days from Good Friday onwards were spent at a remote location in a big house near Inverness with a team of quite exceptional talents doing a mammoth sprint. A two day ideation generated something like 800 postit notes, whittled down to about 60 ‘groups’ and finally a couple dozen priorities. After a day or two exploration on things we knew we’d need (fundamental UI concepts like a timeline, a music player) and generating some data robust enough to hang it all off, we started building. And building.

At the end of the week, exhausted, we had a Thing. And the Thing was really good, exactly what we needed at this point (arguably a bit earlier…) that stands opposed to the glitzy video demos I’d previously completed by myself. They now look very thin indeed. This Thing on the other hand while not perfect by any means is deep, has layers and extracts attention from you in a good way – you gladly hand attention over. I played with it for 10 minutes at the end of the week, it was compelling – I want to spend more time with it and explore more, enjoy more of the artist we built it for. Rough edges aside, that is the response we want to illicit, so I think a success.

Now, sleep.

This week I had a day off across the middle of the week, it was great and I had a haircut. Work either side of the midweek is more calm before the storm, our monster offsite prototyping sprint over Easter.

We want to have layers of data visualisations as additional content or even as interfaces to the mainstreams of content. I’d been putting together examples I liked, and received two glorious books to add to this. Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless Data Flow. Really nice.

A little userflow doc I sketched together straddled 3 pages, almost without thinking I added three dots, centred to the bottom of each, one filled the others in outline. UI style pagination signalling in print – seemed completely natural.I like it, will use it again. As we use screens for more and more of our reading, it seems entirely reasonable to translate the visual cues from the screen and apply them to ‘legacy formats’ like paper.

I didn’t do a weeknote last week. It got to Friday and I was a blank: weeknote block. Last week we had a big release, the second with an ‘extra feature’ product so I should have plenty to talk about except… except I don’t. Because we didn’t do it. It was a special case, with much more work than usual handled by the artist and their own design agency. We only saw it the day of release and while it wasn’t terrible by any means, it was a bit disappointing. Good album tho, so hey.

This week has been revisiting early work. Recording our process doing a couple of ‘lite’ products with third-parties seemed like a good idea, so I’ve been drawing up wireframes and layout advice for future product teams to shortcut what worked for us.

I’m also revisiting the iconography I quickly put together at the start of the project. We’ve had a little feedback now, and spending a bit longer drawing a better “suite” of icons seems like good time spent ahead of our upcoming dev/fort powered prototype week.

More about that, another time, but I’m quite excited about it.

A good week, i think, but this is late posted. Product dev churns onwards, I’m up to other projects too so those took priority this week a bit.

It’s simple wireframing of standardised ‘bricks’ (chunks of content, navigation elements, components, plugins, widgets, whatever) to use on a wide range of websites built using Wordpress. Not dull exactly, but just stuff that needs doing.

On Thursday I attended the Music 4.5 conference, which was a mashup of music biz and tech startups. Full coverage here. It was really good, decent line up and well organised. Techcrunch had a Pitch segment there, which was interesting.

One startup in particular caught my eye, Decibel who are aiming to create a metadata service, offering much more depth than the standard Gracenote artist/genre/year/album dataset. A big undertaking, but properly researched, maintained and API’d could be extremely useful to build advanced discovery services and connective tissue for music content.

Patchy week, far too much time consumed doing tiny, but multiple, changes to a couple of sites. There’s a convoluted approval process for some release-projects here, so progress can be slow and frustrating, even with modern workflows like Basecamp (about which i’ll write about in the future). Between bits of that, I’m making slow but steady progress exploring mobile UX angles of our embryonic ‘digital deluxe’ project, now codenamed Lava. Ongoing…

A site I sketched out a month or so ago is live, the revised EMI.com – this is based on the Basic Maths wordpress theme, with some tweaks and custom plugins. For such a big name, it’s quite a pared down site, basically a release blog, artist roster, press releases, that kind of thing.

Having tried to be a flashy ‘music destination’ before without success this makes more sense. Fans head directly to the artist or fansites via search engines. Music discovery happens is many other ways, but (almost) never off a label site, especially a ‘parent’ label covering an incredibly diverse set of sub-brands. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

One last note, the lovely guys at DUB need a great freelance design/ux person to continue some initial redesign work I’d done with them. If you have the relevant skills and sparkle head over and present your wares.

Wow, week flew by and it’s a saturday weeknote.

Good stuff done: a couple of reskinned mockups of our product concept for a couple of rock legends.

Let me explain in english. I built a mockup of a *potential* future product in After Effects. Not having gone through a proper design and prototyping process, it’s an impression of a product rather than anything real. Thing is, it looks nice so we use it to show people (artist management usually) the vision and get them to sign up to a shinier, digitally immersive future.

Luckily, After Effects lets me do a quick reskin per artist fairly quickly now. It’s not progressing the product design, but it is building momentum with People Who Matter, which in turn means we’ll get to build deeper, better products when the time comes.

I’ve started on really working out a mobile version of the above now too, whereas before “mobile” was a couple of boxes and arrows on a diagram, it’ll be nice to see what really fits, what needs folding, and what needs reworking completely. I may be some time.

I also managed to get a few minutes to play with iTunes LP and some HTML5 experiments. The people at ituneslp.net have some great guidance on getting the most of of this platform, usually not using Tunekit and expose a couple of undocumented features like sampling the waveform of the playing audio. I couldn’t get any processing.js to work but that’s more likely my incompetence rather than a major technical hurdle. I did get an opensource asteroids javascript+canvas game to work while playing a suitably themed song, which is immediately 10x more fun than any real iTunes LPs!

Not the usual weeknote this week, seeing as I’ve only been able to do a couple of days of work. Monday was a hospital visit to check up following my heart valve replacement at the end of 2008. All is good, with dramatic remodeling of my heart so far resulting in a halving of the size of my distorted right ventricle. So yay that.

Wednesday and thursday not so great, some noro-type stomach bug I guess – short but unpleasant, hey ho.

So inbetween those things I’ve been looking at the amazing work and possibilities opened up for us on our future products by Processing.js which by all accounts is a marvel. More here http://processingjs.org

Considering we want to mash up high-end music experiences with all sorts of metadata, this might be a very tasty visual layer to add a degree of richness. Plus being completely open we can have a kind of developer API to all our products right off the bat. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Hoping next week is a bit more normal – I’m actually in London overnight Thursday 18th too, so it might be nice to catch up with some people in the hoxton ‘hood.

As this week passes it’s apex I’ve just about run out of room for manoeuvre on this iteration of the design. I’ve got some good things going, which we will probably stick with and some things that haven’t worked too well. Luckily some of these elements (UI bits for content manipulation tools) are things I’ve been leaving very basic, so am keen to go deeper on those anyway – a promising idea presented itself while walking the dog no less.

Basic layouts and navigation ideas have begun to blossom into something with a solid basis (referencing the Eamse’s Powers of 10 and Zooming User Interfaces) – implementation needs improving, but there’s definitely something there. Plus I’ve hopefully set the tone of a product that has less hoops to jump through and more cake. (Achievements and rewards vs direction and requests).

All that said, the next run needs to progress quicker and feel much more immersive while remaining, you know, buildable at some point.

In between then and now I've worked on a number of projects, taking some time of for christmas + new year (and being ill) and moved home + home office, and I'm gradually settling into a new working space. Having spent over 7 years building up my last working space it's quite hard to get used to the new space - making the desk right for my working habits and dealing with a smaller desk space.

The new 'office' space allows Angie and I to share a room for working, when she's not elsewhere which keeps our work space out of the rest of our livening space, but also stops me from listening to so much weird music when Angie is here.

Ergonomics have become quite a thing to work towards having been suffering from an increasing amount of RSI and back/neck pain in the last months - a combination of stress, DIY, lifting and moving and too many hours in front of the computer I'm sure. The RSI seems to be better over the last few days (touch wood) so I think the ergonomical adjustments might be working out.

Moving house was supposed to take a week out from work, but it feels more like it took out four, which means a lot of catching up. This week I've had my head down inside Lawson Park Electronic Library, Rhyzom, Spatial Agency as well as a catch up meeting on Rossi and Rossi, some fixing bits on Colchester Inn, Grizedale Arts, and some work on on-line look books for jewellery designer Florian. The Colchester Inn site is being displayed from today at First Site in Colchester, as part of the overall project and development of the next phase, and in similar news an off-line version of DIY Regeneration is current being shown in the Camden Arts Center. First Site is a blast from the past as it's where some very early work I did with Julie Myers, Peeping Tom was exhibited in 1996, and I have fond memories of going to install it.

I've been really enjoying the work this week, playing around with visualising information in different ways for each of the projects, and to get across the wealth of details and create a different experience with each project. Each of Lawson Park Electronic Library (LPEL), Rhyzom and Spatial Agency have a wealth of information in their own way, and I'm looking at ways of representing that and allowing it to grow over time from various sources, be it user contributions, a network updaters, or curated content.

I've also really been enjoing playing with RaphaelJS this week, primarily for Spatial Agency but I can see it getting used in a lot of other places. I had a play with ProcessingJS and it also looks good, but it seemed to be a philosophical step - you were creating processing objects, rather than extending existing code. It also didn't work so well cross browser, whereas Raphael just seemed to integrate better with the current code base and what I was doing. Raphael is quite simple, but also powerful once you get into the SVG parts of it, and it's reasonably responsive so far (though I've yet to start dealign with Internet Explorer Issues).

Hopefully this post will get me over my fear of weeknotes I've been suffering from for the last 4 weeks, and I'll get back into posting them now. I find it useful to reflect, and really useful to come back and look at these as well. A log of where my time drains to, as February turns into March and spring starts.

Tags : camden arts center first site, florian, julie myers, lawson park electronic library, lpel, processing js, public works, raphael js, rhyzom, spatial agency, weeknotes, work,
Posted by Dorian on Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 16:20 GMT
Last modified Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 14:14 GMT

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!.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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. : . )

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In between writing this, me and Bernard are playing with the prototype, as Alper is hacking away at it. Meanwhile Simon (back from a vacation to Austria, his fatherland) is back in Rotterdam polishing some of the new screens we’ve identified after settling on a ruleset.

Aside from this I’ve spent some time again at the HKU talking to students. This included a live demo of a game a few of them are working on that involves brain control. They’ve gotten their hands on an Emotiv BCI and are figuring out ways to make mastering thought patterns as a player actually doable. Students have all the fun these days.

This week has been mainly about project Ebi. We kicked off a second iteration, after wrapping up basic functionality in iteration 0, this one is about adding the game specific stuff. Most of our energies so far have gone into designing a good ruleset. We had a breakthrough on wednesday and reconvened today to formalize those ideas, and fill in the blanks. We now have enough material to push forward on design, copy and engineering. It’s that stage of that project where the shape of things starts to become clear and you can’t wait for it to materialize so that you can touch it, use it, play with it.

In a short while I’ll be strolling through the centre of Utrecht to the current and soon to be old Dutch Game Garden, for a farewell party. We’ve had plenty of good times in Drieharingstraat 6, let’s give the old building one more bash.

The former has come to an end with the delivery of a video sketch yesterday. Leading up to that on monday we tested several paper prototypes of games for people and pigs with farmers. The response we got from them was encouraging. Having processed this feedback we settled on one concept that would be developed further into a video sketch. After this we developed a scenario, sketched a rough storyboard and divided up tasks. I hacked together a software prototype of one half of the thing, which is aimed at people (using Processing and the LiveView screencaster) while Irene built a to scale physical model of the installation for pigs. I can’t share the video just yet but I’m sure it won’t be long before I can.

Ebi’s first iteration has come to a close today and I am happy to see we have working software with pretty pictures and nice words, all thanks to the hard work of the team (hello, Alper, Bernard and Simon). I was mostly making sure these guys could do their jobs, as well as organizing work that will need to be done by others in future. Next week, after iteration two, I think we will have a thing we can show you. Can’t wait for that.

And now, it’s time to close this damn laptop and prepare for the afternoon’s game. I’m not a big fan of football but Netherlands – Brazil is not to be missed.

These past two weeks I have been pushing to get a new project, codenamed Ebi, off the ground. It is the next step in my involvement with the PLAY project in Utrecht. I’ve put together a team consisting of Alper, Bernard and Simon to build a game that will tie together several other playful things that will take place over the coming months at several Utrecht events. We’ve had our kick-off and are now in the midst of the first sprint, with delivery of a first rough system by the end of next week. Copy is being written, software is being developed and designs are being made. It’s a pleasure to see this ad-hoc team coming together so fast and getting down to business. That takes real skill, in addition to the craftsmanship each brings to the table.

Other than that, project Buta (another codename) started this week, which is a research thing at the new Design for Playful Impact group at the HKU. We’ve been doing field research and have been sketching and prototyping initial ideas. The subject matter is kind of controversial, so I can’t share too much about it, other than that it involves pigs. Yes, pigs.

In between, I dropped by the presentation of the U-turm project, a student project where I acted as advisor on. The demo worked nicely. With some additional work on the game design I am sure it will be a hit in Dortmund. I also attended Layar’s one-year anniversary event, where several things were unveiled that I had some part in, such as the all-new floaticons.

Looking ahead, I’ll be busy with Ebi for the next month or two and will also have to take some time to move into a new studio, that I will be sharing with FourceLabs in the new Dutch Game Garden on the Neude. Ace location, nice space, can’t wait for that to happen.

One of those new projects I’ve codenamed Ebi. It’s the next step we’re taking with the thing called PLAY that I’ve talked about here before. I’ve been building a team and we’re ready to kick off next week.

I’ve also seen my students again, discussing the aftermath of their mid-terms. Some are moving ahead without trouble, others need some help. The trick is to figure out which student needs which kind of feedback.

And finally, you might like to know I met with Ianus and Alexander to talk about the next batch of This happened – Utrecht events. There, it’s a challenge to balance our urge to make each edition better than the next one with the fact that, essentially, we’re doing it all for the fun of it, not for business.

1. preparing for and subsequently running a hand full of urban games at the NU Grounds festival in Leidsche Rijn (we had gorgeous weather and a lot of fun, can’t wait to run more)
2. sitting on a mid-term exam committee at the HKU (exhausting, but when a student nails it, as happened several times, it’s a real treat)

I also attended Kunstgras where a book profiling several creative entrepreneurs in Utrecht (for which I was interviewed) was presented.

That all left me quite spent so I took Monday off. Which, I think, is a first in over 6 months. And now we’re in the second week after my return from Copenhagen. It already seems ages ago since I stepped off that airplane.

So this week…

• I went over to Malmö to meet with Dan Gärdenfors at TAT and with Jonas Löwgren at MEDEA. In both cases there is reason for follow-up; it looks like there might be a TAT-Hubbub concept video about pervasive play and mobile UIs on the horizon, and I might come back to MEDEA to do some teaching.
• I had a marathon Skype session on wednesday. Talking to all my students who are now nervously prepping for their mid-terms. As well as sessions with Claudia and Karel in preparation of the urban games festival in Leidsche Rijn we’re assisting with.
• I lectured (and ran a little playtest of an audience game I’ve been tinkering with) at CIID. Look for a full report and annotated slides at the Hubbub blog, soon.

And now, it’s time to do a few more touristy things and then pack, and head home. The next weeknote will be Dutch flavored again.

I went over to LikeMind to catch up with my fellow Dutchman Mark, who seems to be doing great, living and working between Copenhagen and London. Not the shabbiest pair of cities.

I also had another chat with the guys running the U-Turm project who seem to be making nice progress with the image tracking side of things and are now really getting into the game design. Which means, as I told them, they need to start iterating on the rules like crazy, doing paper prototype after paper prototype.

Aside from this I’ve been doing some preparations for PLAY, reaching out to creative teams and individuals who I’d like to see be part of the productions we’re going to be running. Getting lots of positive responses so that is great. I also posted some background on the work we’ve been doing so far for this at the Hubbub blog.

Julius and Karel ran a successful second urban games workshop in Leidsche Rijn for Cultuur19 last saturday. We are now gearing up to assist with NU Grounds, a games festival in the same neighborhood where there will be several urban games on offer. That’s going to take place two weeks form now and should be good fun.

The relative quiet this week has allowed me some time to tinker with Processing, particularly the Box2D library that Mr. Shiffman has put together. I’m just making a little silly software toy with that to kind of flex my flimsy programming skills. Nothing special but I might post some screenshots and maybe a screencast later anyway.

And also, I bit the bullet, installed XCode, and had a go at OpenFrameworks, mostly to have a look at some of the Box2D stuff out there that is controlled with OpenCV (a computer vision library). That seems to be a really nice basis for gaming in public space using urban projections and such. I don’t see myself working in OpenFrameworks though, it really is an increase in complexity as opposed to Processing. Still, by messing with it, I can now appreciate it better.

Next week is going to be my last one here in Copenhagen and looks like it’ll be slightly more busy, with another trip to Malmö and a lecture at CIID. After that it’s back to NL. Time really flies.

I hopped on a plane last Sunday to the Netherlands for This happened – Utrecht #6. Wouldn’t miss out on my own party, of course. And I’m so glad I didn’t, because we had awesome talks by Berend & Sanneke, Matt, Sebastiaan and Keez, plus a surprise appearance over Skype by Mr. Buxton. The room was packed, interaction designers of all stripes were chatting away beforehand, during the break and afterwards over drinks. I had a blast and judging by the reports that have been coming in, so have many others.

Before heading back to the Netherlands the next day I managed to squeeze in a few meetings. One of those was for PLAY which, now that I’ve wrapped up project Tako,¹ is ready to move into its next phase. We’re planning to produce several playful ‘things’ for a number of cultural events and tie them all together with a meta-game. It’s a matter of getting all the right people on board now and getting going as fast as possible. So I’ve a list of folks to contact in the coming days.

I think I broke a personal record for the number of Skype sessions in one day on Wednesday, with back to back talks with my HKU students as well as a planning session with Karel and Julius for an urban games workshop they’ll be running tomorrow in Leidsche Rijn.²

And today, after spending Ascension day on a couch, plugging away at email and to-dos, I’ll be making the trip across the Øresund to Malmö in a bus full of makers and interaction designers to attend ThoughtMade, which I’m really excited about; an exhibition and talks including a candy machine controlled by Twitter. What more can one ask for?

1. I need to write a report on that one at the Hubbub blog soon.
2. A new development area of Utrecht I’d say is the closest thing to a real-world Sim City project that I ever saw.

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

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

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

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

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

First, I finished my dissertation proposal. If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here. They are tricky beasts, proposals are — they are arguments for something you have yet to write and research. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, every time I’d sit down to write the proposal, I’d start trying to write the whole dissertation in miniature. Finally, though, it came together (as noted, thanks to Ms. Vertesi’s help).

I presented and defended the proposal before my committee– Christine Boyer, Ed Eigen, and Axel Kilian — and another professor I’ve worked closely with over the last several years, Spyros Papapetros. Also in the room: 10 or so students from my PhD program, two from art history, and another professor in the architecture school, Miles Ritter, who shares my love for technology. The critique was really solid. I know what the holes are in the proposal and was happy that the committee and other audience members found them all.

Critique is an excellent thing. It’s scary, yes, but it’s an honor to have good people engage with your work in an intense manner. I learn so much from the dialogue about it, whether in a defense (such as with my general exams or as in Thursday’s presentation of the proposal), or in conversations with the people in and around my PhD program. It’s also been important to learn how not to be defensive in a critical situation.

Some of the questions and suggested approaches that came out of it: looking closely at the rhetoric that Nicholas Negroponte, Cedric Price & Christopher Alexander used; considering a number of figures around MIT & the Media Lab; looking at the influence of Noam Chomsky and linguistics; probing the difference between computation and the computer and how that affects architectural practice.

Wow. I guess I’ve been busy. Also in the last week or so, I:

• Spoke at the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University on a panel discussion about Infrastructure — it was part of the Networked Publics lecture series
• Wrote a piece for the catalogue of the  HABITAR exhibition Laboral in Spain on the 1970 Software exhibition, 1840s telegraphy and the annihilation of space and time through distributed intelligence
• Worked with a friend who graduated from Ivrea on the copy for her company’s product concepts
• Spoke in the lecture series at the University of Chicago in the History of Science department, thanks to a kind invitation from department chair Adrian Johns. (My subject: Poste Pneumatique.) Okay, so that was three weeks ago. Afterwards I was in LA for a few days to visit my boyfriend.

What’s ahead? My brother gets married on Grand Cayman Island next weekend: a week from today, I will be scuba diving with sting rays. (How I love diving! And I never really go.) Thereafter, a visit to San Francisco for the first time in a painfully long time to attend the Institute for the Future Tech Horizons conference, plus a few days in LA.

Tomorrow, I will give my advisor five pages of an eventual 15 page or so dissertation proposal. Writing isn’t the problme: I have tens of thousands of words. The problem is whittling it down. What needs to go in? I’m realizing that a dissertation proposal is not a dissertation, it’s not a chapter, it’s not an article– it’s an argument for my next two years, sure, but also, it’s a treatment– a means to sell everybody on the idea. So the problem right now is that I have 10 pages, not 5, and they’re not the right 10, and they don’t include the 25 pages I wrote last month. Here’s hoping I find the right ones.

In terms of running, I now run a mile nearly a minute and a half faster than I did six weeks ago, and at that, over four or five miles — this time on the Tow Path near my apartment. The speed increase was enough of a surprise that I doubted my Nike + sensor, but I know the route well, and I am indeed 10% faster than a month ago. (Note that someone drowned in the canal yesterday—that explains the ambulances and boats and police: do not cross tape)

Aside from writing, ahead of me this week: Dennis Crompton Mike Webb from Archigram will give a Media & Modernity talk at the Princeton School of Architecture tomorrow night. On Friday, the Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure (where I am a fellow) will host Mobility and Accessibility: Twenty-First Century Infrastructure, both a public session and an invitation-only seminar on Friday and Saturday.

Next week: I’m giving a talk at the University of Chicago in the History of Science department on the 16th and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—my alma mater!—on the 19th. More about that later.

Listening to Peterlicht and sipping a glass of grüner veltliner on my last Sunday in Venice. I smell like sunblock even after a shower. It’s my last Sunday in Venice after being here for six weeks. It’s been anomalous and unusual, but good. I’ve missed Princeton and will look forward to the start of springtime there, to immersing into my dissertation proposal and chapter.

There’s South by Southwest. I need to write about that separately, especially about the panel I moderated: “Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design.” This was the 13th year I’ve attended SXSW, the 12th I’ve spent on the advisory board. It was huge and messy and very inspiring. I didn’t know that it would offer that to me this time around, but it did. More on that soon.

I finally succeeded at updating, redesigning and moving Girlwonder to WordPress from Movable Type. I’ve had the Girlwonder domain since 1997 and websites of my own since 1995), but I vacillate between a personal site and a site that I create about my work, my interests and my professional presence. Over the last 6 years, I’ve had several sites– the latest of which is Active Social Plastic– that I used for writing on architecture, urbanism, social networks, literature. The inspiration for Active Social Plastic came from how Enrique uses Aggregat 456, his outstanding blog, for essays. I wanted to experiment with keeping separate the personal content. It turned out that I updated both sites less frequently. But also, it seems that the right mode for me is a hybrid, a blending of personal and academic/professional. Moreover, people readily know Girlwonder. So: I’ve blended the two sites. I’ve redesigned, though not quite as much as I’d like — the color palette needs work. After 8 years on the platform, I’ve left Movable Type for WordPress because it’s easier for me to redesign and manage. I also have an About page for the first time in a long time and will include more professional information there as well — articles, CV and such.

My writing continues on my dissertation proposal. When I go back to Princeton on Tuesday, I will be focusing very heavily on it, with the hope of presenting it in the first half of April. There’s not much to say till I finish it.

I wrote a remix piece titled “Today We Operate on Objects” for #lgnlgn that derived a set of rules on objects out of “The Great Gizmo” by Reyner Banham and “But Today We Collect Ads” by Allison and Peter Smithson. Rather than writing an essay, I wanted to create a set of operations from the two pieces that could be applied to objects. My overall body of work keeps coming back to how we interact with objects, whether 19th century interfaces to the postal service, or history of social networks, or digital systems, or holistic systems.

LA has been good in terms of art. We saw the Learning from Las Vegas exhibition at MoCA — a subject I devoted time to my first semester at Princeton in the Learning from Levittown seminar (the lost studio). We’ve been to the Rachel Whiteread drawings exhibition at the Hammer — lovely to see her working process in action. I saw her drawings as layers that build up to a final, cast and sculptural work.

It’s also been good in terms of architecture. We saw the London Eight panel and opening at Sci-Arc, with Peter Cook, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, Pascal Bronner and several other architects associated with the Bartlett. I loved their work: drawing as architecture in its own right is a subject dear to my heart, but found the panel discussion annoying. There were entirely too many people on stage, and the moderation dulled down what might have been much more interesting. A few days later, I returned to Sci-Arc to see my friend Michael Kubo speak about architectural publishing practices. The following night, I joined Alissa Walker at the Unplanned exhibition at Superfront LA and 2D3D: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a show on architectural drawings at the Woodbury University’s Hollywood Gallery. I liked the work at Unplanned (kudos to my dear friend and former classmate McClain Clutter for his work), but it could have been as easily perused online or in a book (much of it, at least). Interesting that LA has two shows right now on architectural drawing.

Meeting people here who teach and write about architecture and design is heartening and frankly, fun. It also inspires me to write more here — part of the reason for the website move and redesign. I’m curious to see what the next weeks will bring.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Launch!

The service has been in the making for quite a long now. It’s good to finally see it go online and start to pickup users. In fact, due to the unique nature of this service it has a potential to grab huge number of users from the general populace. This project has seen many people since it’s beginning, but mainly the final design is done by Sami and myself. Talented people from the client and a 3rd party agile tech house have also had months long endurance, fighting all sorts of technical challenges, and working a lot with us on the design, too. Sadly we can’t say which service this is.Thanks from our behalf as well, it’s been a long ride.

And it’s not over yet. Now we are planning the next half a year’s worth of development on this one and other sibling services in this service ecosystem.

Concept!

In the multitouch tablet TV concept for our dear client SuomiTV, Mikael the client and some of our people talk about the place of tablets at home, our research on the topic and some new fantastic interactions we came up with. Panu, Sami, Ilkka, Sauli, Tia and Samuel were the main team in this project, but the final concepts include ideas from probably all of us.

The video comes (so far) with two blog posts that further iterate the concept. Have a look at them if you’re interested in multitouch interactions.

PART 1: TAP THE TV – The Concept

PART 2: TAP THE TV — New Interactions

In the end this is all about how watching television is changing. And naturally anything that is (or could be) in the middle of change, is something that we at Nordkapp are interested in. Nice, quick, fun, inspiring project. Let’s have more of these.

See you in one or two summer weeks. Maybe.

People are still excited about the iPad project. You can see one of the many project group sessions going on in the above picture. The project is coming together and a cool video concept looms in the future.

Design-wise iPad also brings challenges, as there’s so many ways interaction could be done on it. One could select a more traditional route or go completely crazy with it. The perfect solution is probably often somewhere in between. It’s inspiring to see so much effort from the tech and design communities being put into developing platforms and best practices for these devices. This sort of innovation was probably happening when computers were being invented, and has always been going on, but nowadays it seems to be happening at shorter and shorter time intervals. Sharing is a great thing.

In fact, the iPad and the communities around it remind me of the often quoted words here at Nordkapp:

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson

Whatever we design can implemented and used immediately by people, which is extremely refreshing for future-looking designers like us.

In The Feed

If you haven’t noticed yet, our blog also features a section called “In The Feed“, which includes a flow of interesting items from the internets our people have deemed noteworthy enough to be added to Tumblr. In The Feed is present in the blog homepage and also now on its own URL.

This section will give you a good and near constant flow of hot topics in Interaction Design, Data Visualization, Cities, Design, AR, Management, UI innovations and what not. Anything even distantly related to the interesting world of digital communication and interaction. Check it out if you want to be entertained or inspired.

Weeknote break coming up?

I’m thinking I need a summer break from writing weeknotes soon. I’m currently extra busy on my freetime and work hours are pretty much minute-to-minute all client work. Therefore weeknotes are sadly getting a bit long in the tooth. (As you can see from the title, I’ve already taken a shortcut of grouping two weeks in to one weeknote.)

Besides, the Finnish summer is finally starting. During summer companies and projects go in to slow-mode. This slowing down normally starts after Mid Summer, which is next week’s weekend. You know, Mid Summer is a huge thing in Finland as we’ve suffered a long winter before that. Often that’s when peoples’ holidays also start. Some of Nordkappers escape to the nature then, too. There might not be too much to write about and I might want to be on a beach.

In effect, don’t expect too much from the weeknotes from the weeks to come. But I might stick around for some more weeks, before chillin’ over summer. Let’s see.

Take it easy in the meantime, dudes and dudettes.

Media house project’s first phase will be ready this Friday. During next few days we’ll finalize our presentation materials and specification document while design team finalizes the look & feel.

The client is very interested in deepening cooperation with us. This development looks very promising going forward. It seems that Nordkapp’s honest, open and user centered approach on concept and service design is much needed “breath of fresh air” for big organizations as well. Making development based only on technical decisions or hand-waving just won’t do it anymore.

Elsewhere, the service ecosystem thing is nearing its first launches. The IxD+GFX team pulled together some interesting UX-solutions; ideas that only happens through open, laid-back work processes; basically through sketches on the wall in the project rooms and random co-working sessions next to a display. Furthermore; the challenge of production tracking regarding exact uniform pixel outcome, is once again ahead. Times many.

On the TV front, our brief is “online strategy for a television channel” but it should be “strategy for television channel” – Matti thinks our big challenge is to make stakeholders understand that there is no online versus offline. Anyway, this week we’ll basically write our own brief and after that start workshopping and evolve things further with the client. Interesting stuff!

Agile moves quickly: after last week’s rant on Agile the situation in some on-going projects has improved significantly. Coders seem willing to evolve the Agile process, too! This same insight is also being put into use in projects starting during summer and fall. Agile is looking good again.

First iPad UI case is also coming up. We’ve been fooling around with an iPad for quite long now, and we are all impressed by the potentials of this new groundbreaking platform. Fabian gave a small presentation to the customer about readability and navigation on the iPad together with Sauli. Fabian’s personal conclusion: “goodbye dear old print media”. Pretty much everybody have been given a chance to participate in iPad ideation and now the process continues in a smaller team, where all extra is being ripped away and design is being concentrated on most important features and their usability.

Quickies

• » If in doubt, ask users. If client is in doubt, tell what users said.
• » Forcing yourself  to think how to explain the basics of your craft opens your mind up for different angles. This is the very reason Sami likes lecturing as a “side hobby”.
• » Apple announced iPhone 4. Some people are now counting weeks/months towards the end of their iPhone 3GS subscriptions — when can they upgrade?
• » We helped our old colleague Ville with his tippingeurope.com and villevesterinen.com sites. He seems happy about that.

Until next week, peeps.

Last week, like any other week, we worked quite a lot on projects done in Agile. Nowadays there always seems to be a few of these going on, and new ones being planned.

Our relationship with agile is interesting, as we are neither big or small agile house ourselves. We are an Interactive Design consultancy which means that we get to work with both big and small companies, experienced and not-so-experienced product owners and see different scrum management software used by coders who all seem to see sprint & iteration work a bit differently from each other.

The amount of design we do in and for Agile Scrum projects is therefore quite high and we see several interpretations of “how it should be done”. Being in this position gives us quite a good understanding of the potential problems that can happen in a project when certain criteria is met.

Some of this know-how was already shared a little while ago by our Sami in the UX Lx conference. Several important points are described in his presentation. One main idea is that design tasks should be known 2 sprints ahead. This gives enough time for necessary design tasks: user research, design iterations, prototyping etc., and makes sure that when coding starts in 1-2 sprints, the basics design problems are already solved and everybody knows what needs to be done.

Typically this pre-planning works initially very well for sprints 0-2 maybe, but then starts to fall apart when the original task order is changed in the Scrum. Suddenly it seems more difficult to see 2 sprints ahead. Also the sprint starting right now might end up having different tasks than originally planned 2 sprints ago. This is what forces the design into playing catch-up with the coding.

How all of this can be solved is will be our task for the rest of the year. I think we need to add to Sami’s manifesto and create a Nordkapp Agile Manifesto which includes clear action points for all stakeholders and what they need to do and when for an agile project to succeed.

Work

Sami will be lecturing in Aalto University Business School next week about User Experience Design. Program includes paper prototyping, layouts and sketching and what not. See more here.

Generally people are super excited about new iPhone & iPad projects they are working on. Foamcores are filled with hand drawn and computerized UI drafts and there seems to be workshops related to these every week. What’s extra fun to see is that our newer people are heavily involved in these as well. Apparently they’re also feeling happy about this kind of work.

Until next week, people.

Photo cred: Defensive Scrum (Rugby term) by P D

This Saturday we held a workshop as a part of the ideation for the forthcoming World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. The theme was “Touchscapes: Toward the next urban ecology” as coined by our friend Adam Greenfield. He also gave a talk about Taking Networks Seriously and Petri Kola from Aalto Medialab talked about open data in Finland, and also about “method Mastomäki” developed on using data for your own benefit.

A few clear main themes rose up from the discussion and concepts: Personal interaction and play in urban environment, way-showing and enabling communities through urban media. Personally I was attending some other business, but I’m told is was a very nice and rich afternoon indeed.

The ideas will be at WDC Helsinki website, and all material will be made public during the following days. The first batch of photos are out on Sami’s Flickr already.

Boing Boing’d

This is a tough one. Our intention to soften and transform an industry is going as planned, but it ain’t easy to teach an old dog new tricks. The outside reactions have been strong, and as expected most people use the topic to vent their frustrations from the last 10-15 years. A good thing is a few people seem to get the point, too. Sami’s a bit worried about the speed of progress here— due the amount of stakeholders the decision making is slow, even to the point where the original pitch will be 2 years old next month.

But in any case the ball is rolling now and we’ve done all we can. Our partners in crime, Henrik W & Kennel Helsinki, have done a stellar job here, and the result is first piece of work we’ve done that got Boing Boing’d. Looking forward to some more media attention in the following weeks, and the final get-go for the second, very different part of the story.

Other news

During the week we found out some idea we had some time ago are on their way to being patented worldwide. It always feels nice, even though we think in general patents are a bit evil.

And one more UX LX thing: Panu’s UX LX Twitter engine and talk made it to Johnnyholland.org’s UX LX wrapup. Go check it out to see what was the UX LX conference all about, and to read main points of Panu’s presentation. His ideas resonate so well with designer’s reality that perhaps everyone should learn them by heart.

That’s it for now, until next week it is.

50% of Nordkapp were in the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Bruno and his friends really outdid themselves with this very well organized, world class conference with big name speakers, room trashing workshops and lots of afterski events. Thank you organizers and fellow conference goers! UX Lx is definitely now on the map as a major conference.

However, there is simply no time to write a longer weeknote about it, as we came back in the early hours of Monday morning, barely dodging the ash cloud’s second coming. After that it’s been quite a busy week so far, as at least I’ve been re-immersing myself with the family and work again. And it’s already late Tuesday. Need sleep, will upload photos soon (one day) and share notes with fellow Nordkappers.

BTW: Sami’s and Panu’s presentations in UX Lx went well. Especially fun was Panu’s “by magic of technology” system that tweeted his slides to Twitter with the #uxlx hashtag, while he was still speaking! That generated quite a lot of interest. Sami’s ideas also generated discussion about agile and designing for it. His crowd seemed to be half designers, half developers.

One more thing: You should get ready for next Saturday’s WDC 2012 Idea forum: Touchscapes at our office. Lot’s of ideation and dreaming up the future.

This week we were mostly hard at work with current projects. Several things in finishing phases. Nothing too new there.

Meeting and team room name competition winner was selected. Matti won and the names will be Valhalla, Asgard, Ragnarok, Odin and Thor. Quite Norwegian. Congrats to him! I’m not bitter even though I became second and third. Special thanks to people in Twitter who gave me good ideas for the names. We didn’t win, sorry.

About half of the company is finally heading to the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The damn ash cloud from Iceland has just made a comeback and how we get to Portugal on Tuesday morning is still uncertain. Currently the airspace seems quite clear over Germany but who knows what the cloud will do. Anyway if conference goers actually get there Twitter will probably be quite busy with #UXLX tagged tweets this week. In fact, it already is.

An important announcement: we are organizing a workshop as part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 Ideas Forum -day. The workshop deals with our recent favorite subject: Urban screens and information design for urban context. Read Sami’s more thorough blog post about the topic.

That’s it for now. See you in Portugal!

This week’s weeknote will a be a bit shorter, because noteworthy things this week consisted mostly of presentations, events and blog posts. Or maybe because the weekend was dominated by Vappu, the Finnish Mayday, a country wide celebration of workers.

This week Panu released two blog posts: UX leadership insight #15: You and the series ending UX leadership insight: wrap-up. Be sure to read and understand them, you’ll become a better design lead and designer in the process. Panu will soon also be iterating around the same concepts in the UX Lx conference in Portugal. If you are going, come meet him and rest of the Nordkapp UX Lx team there.

On Tuesday Sami gave a talk about Agile to a group of Product Owners at our client’s. He’s also going to talk more about that topic in the same UX Lx conference.

Sami tested the waters with the Finnish version of his UX Lx presentation about combining agile methodology with interaction design by giving a talk to our client’s product owners. Went down really well, and the English premiere of the same thing will be in week and a half in Lisbon.

On Wednesday Matti, Sami & me attended Kick Off event of Luovimo, a Finnish project that aims to help creative companies go international. The keynote speaker was inspiring mr. Roger Mavity who gave a funny talk about pitching. Other companies included in the program include ACE-Production, Aivan, Backstage Music Factory, Blue Media, Casual Continent, Citynomadi, GigsWiz.com, Idean Enterprices, Matila Röhr Nordisk, Miltton, Nordic Drama Corner, PES-Arkkitehdit, Produs, S.E.O.S Design, Songhi Entertainment, Stereoscape, Tarinatalo, Toothpick and Undo. We look forward to working with them. The event was described as “Luovimo picks out creative elite” in the Finnish advertising media M&M. While that sounds a bit posh it’s funny because it’s true.

On Thursday Sami & me gave a talk about information design in the design school in Lahti. The audience was half students, half professionals. The school churns out the best graphic designers in Finland on a regular basis, who apparently originally commented on our presentations that the topics “sounded scary”, but they also considered them visually cool and interesting. Sami talked about data, context and information design while I talked about urban screens and how research is transformed into interactive design. Hopefully our talks gave them inspiration to go interactive and gave them trust in their skills. Basic concepts of visual design are very similar in print and digital after all. We also learned good points about information design and data visualization from Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest news paper in Finland. A nice and varied seminar in total.

On Friday we had our internal demo day. We heard in depth presentations of design processes behind few recent big projects Nordkappers have been doing. Special mention go to Panu & Matti, who have been doing long lasting and good work on the project Oslo. Aki presented an design evolution timeline of a old, large web service that coincidentally I have been working on as well sometime around 2000. Its latest incarnation is now fully designed in Nordkapp and will become public sometime in the future. Sami & me also recapped our Lahti presentations for others. After the demo day people escaped to the city for their Vappu celebrations.

Old space

By the way, Ii you are interested what happened to our previous office you can read all about in the Helsinki Design Lab weeknotes. Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, to “advance strategic design as a new discipline in tackling the problems of the interdependent world”. We are happy to give them a venue for their work.

That’s it for now. Until next week!

Last week Ville V. from Arcticstartup.com asked me “what kinds of benefits, if any, you have had after you started the habit [of weeknotes]. ” Here’s some sort of an answer that I skipped giving him earlier, starting from the very beginning.

Background

This all started with us having our weekly company meetings, where we discussed what everybody was doing and if there was any major problems with them. It worked really well for a year or two, but recently there was a growing feeling with everybody that it just wasn’t working anymore. Maybe it was because we got more people now, and the meeting started to take longer and longer. It was fun to know what others were doing but for example the decisions to help others in their projects were done over the week, not really just in the week meeting. So on an individual level it wasn’t quite useful anymore. Instead many were trying to hold themselves back from rushing to their computers and post-its to start working already, no matter what time the meeting was held.

One of our core values as a company is transparency, but apart from actively sharing on Twitter, we felt we weren’t really communicating this. The concept of weeknotes made a perfect sense to both of these challenges: the notes would work as information sharing within the company and also create transparency by telling other people what it is that we actually do. Especially the later point was interesting, as our projects are very restricted with what to communicate outside, and thus often cannot simply present what we do. Weeknotes provide a nice way of telling about our work, while making sure we don’t disclose any confidential project details.

To clarify a bit and spill a secret: there’s a more precise version of weeknotes we use internally. New or interesting stuff is dug from there. Any recurring patterns in peoples reports are also written about here in the public.

Readers and outcomes

From what we hear, our weeknotes seem to be read by various people, include of course our employees but also clients, friends, large companies and even our competition. Apparently our weeknotes are making positive waves in some random (as in not associated with us in a client relationship) big companies in the lines of “This is great! How do they do this? We don’t even have a blog! How could we do something like this?”. Maybe weeknotes as a concept will bring more transparency to some big companies in the long run, too?

Also some of our clients read these. Maybe they find it fun to try to find their project from the mysterious descriptions of things? When we meet them in real life they quite often comment on things they could only know from the weeknotes. And I think it’s fun. They get to know Nordkapp as a bunch of humans with human issues, instead of just hired robots. In general, weeknotes don’t seem to be hurting our relationship with our clients, on the contrary: we are getting bigger and bigger single-supplier deals all the time. And this we appreciate this very much.

What comes to our competition, we hope they get some good ideas from the weeknotes and our blog in general. We are probably dealing with very similar issues anyway and sharing is the best way to take the design profession forward.

Internally, I believe, weeknotes make people more proud of what they do. It easy to get lost in the daily work without realizing that the thing you do is often actually really meaningful to potentially thousands of employees, not to mention our client’s customers, which could be in the millions. Weeknotes help us understand that we are working in a world class design agency here, and not feeling too small and sad like a Finnish tradition would have as do. A proud designer leads to better design leads to better service leads to more satisfied customer.

All and all, everything about the weeknotes is positive. We recommend the concept to any company of any size.

Now, let’s get back to the actual weeknote.

This week

This week we all were mostly just amazed about our new office. There’s always a certain mental boost with every move, but this time it also means that finally we have enough space to simultaneously run multiple workshops and yet maintain a peaceful working environment elsewhere. Our main meeting room equals the size of a Finnish two room apartment. All of this made everybody happy and it’s been really nice to see spontaneous team work happen in our new team rooms, kitchen or lobby.

We sponsored BarCampHelsinkiV at YLE this week.

In other news, Aki and Sami finished a project with Petteri H., to a client called Rossum. The application deals with industrial task management, and client is extremely happy on what we’ve done. A case study to follow at some point. In this project the iPad proved to be an excellent demonstration tool by the way.

Fabian came up with some new ideas together with Sami regarding our visual design methodology. This cooperation could provide to be a excellent asset in the future. Internal workshops are coming. This was also his first full week at NK and he says the massive know-how of such a small group of individuals is a great personal opportunity to learn and grow for him. That’s great to hear and we are surely going to learn from him too! In fact, Sami says it’s really good feeling to work with someone coming from a different, but very competent point of view. It challenges you, and forces you to grow professionally.

Petri worked on the TV and banking projects and gave a lecture about Design Management in Helsinki Institute of Marketing and another one about Service Design in Joutsa.

Samuel’s new big task is getting into design tasks related to a web service with the largest amount of public data available in Finland. I’d call this a good and challenging task for an intern.

Panu’s been doing many things: 2 projects in hand off phase and one in concept. He re-discovered some of the not-so-new topics of persuasion, conversions, funnels, metrics etc. According to him tt’s good to get back to the basics every now and then. He also blogged about Tacit Knowledge.

Matti’s been having face-to-face sessions with our people, digging out peoples’ hopes and dreams. More of that to come. He’s also quite busy with project work and happy to see the office build up. He wants to thank Ilkka personally because our business looks so good. We join him in these thanks.

I’ve been doing IxD for two projects that go hand in hand, and also been learning Objective-C with Sauli. It’s good to keep learning new stuff, even if it seems overly complicated at first. Sauli’s also been doing quality assurance on older projects with Peetri and doing “stuff they do in real jobs” AKA building and carrying furniture.

Me and Sami should also sync our presentations for next week’s Information Design 2010 Seminar in Lahti.

OK, that’s long enough. EOF and cheers.

As said before, we are between offices. Our old office has some new use to it already, but the new one is still getting its finishing touches by the renovation crew. Well, actually we are waiting for the floor to dry and get its hardened properties. In effect, we had nowhere to go.

Surprisingly, this was not a big problem. People just had to choose whether they wanted to work from home, cafe or wherever (of course depending on the level of secrecy required by the project at hand). Because this also coincided with the arrival of company iPads, several emails this week contained greetings from “this and that restaurant” and included the signature “Sent from my iPad”.

Other than that, for the info on what happened this week, I have to trust our digital systems and people’s own explanations of what has been going on. This is because I’ve just been working from home, been on a holiday in Estonia, had a flue, and haven’t really spoken to any colleague face-to-face this week. People, have your say:

Matti

Last week we managed to push OSLO forward huge steps – on Tue we presented concept alternatives to the client, and workshopped an implementable concept approach, which the client approved. Rest of the week we pushed this selected concept forward. Next week we’ll finally got approval for the project’s 1st phase and hopefully get a full reference right from the client as well!

Apart from that, I’ve also talked about new resources with Ilkka and planned how things would work if we would have one more COO kind of a guy involved.

Oh and one more thing, the iPad, which is way too cool! Some days I mostly worked with it, and it worked pretty well. Only keynote is still missing.

Aki

Finalizing a prototype of a mobile UI project, verifying client’s wireframes and mostly excited about iPad, iPad, iPad.

Sauli

I built a video site. Wasted lots of time on rendering the videos. It’s hard to find good balance between quality and reasonable file size. I think in maybe 5-10 years we don’t have worry about this kind of things.

What if a some browser vendor would get so much money and resources that they could build the ultimate browser. What new features it would have?

Did Teppo’s creativity exercises.

Samuel

Handed video site’s layout to Fabian and started on a web brand guidelines for a company. Excited about the move to the new office and a Trip to Tarto, Estonia.

Fabian

Thrown into full steam agile project with Teppo and Panu’s leftovers.

Panu

Projects never finish, they just move to maintenance phase. This week we designed a couple of small design additions and improvements to make a old project even better.

All systems go in a new project! Implementation project starts right now. Teppo and Daniel will take over and correct all the design flaws that I created in the concept phase. (editor: the design’s fine)

The media house project will this week create the first UI concepts. We’ll get these reviewed by Tuesday. This is the messy part of the project, where we communicate actively with the client so that our and their expectations will meet.

In the near future, we will be starting to design a mobile version of a web service that we designed. It will be fun to put some mobile experience in good use again.

This week, I’ve been mostly getting excited about exploring alternative working locations.

Petri

I’ve been creating and updating two lecturing sessions: First one will be about Design Management or Design Thinking. Second one is about Service Design and how small business units can utilize design efficiently in general.

This week’s most exciting meeting was with colleagues from ‘southern Helsinki’ —Tallinn. Looking forward to give them return visit in few months as promised.

Definitely all the eyes were focused on Iceland due to dramatic events. Because of these ash clouds, our sister company Lillehammer seems to be stuck at Milan and few other friends have had to change their flight schedules into ferry-car schedules. Maybe this is the mother nature’s tactic of turning business into trendy slow-living mode. Yet it remains to be seen how this event will affect weather and food production conditions in long term.

Sami

Made a pitch for a large software company. Worked on Nordkapp.fi 4.0, synthesizing Sauli’s IA to design drivers and principles. Working on NK products & services v2.0, and also updating other corporate assets for the future. Some work on roles and job descriptions too as well as with finalizing the values & culture.

Lots of work on concept and graphics from the future in one project. Taking load of Panu & Teppo.

Elsewhere, first of a group of services is now ready for private beta. Visual style needs some tweaks still but can be implemented to other projects too. Which is where I am helping Fabian with this week.

Lots of pieces falling together which is nice.

Oh and got an iPad, eBay’d some gift cards for the US iTunes. Result: iPad now loaded with iWork, concept magazines and alike. Device is cool, but apps seem to range from very cool to utter crap. Like mentioned earlier on Twitter, some of the designs remind me very clearly of first days of Flash 10 years ago. it’s about the context people, not doing stuff just because you can.

Teppo

Among other things already mentioned, I urged our people to do “creativity enhancing things” from one of those lists while they were away from the office this week. I was thinking about listing what people did here, but the submitted list became just way too long. Basically I would have ended up reposting nearly the full list here! Instead, I urge you try them at your work / life!

That’s it for this weird week. Happy creativeness for the upcoming week and hopefully we get to our new office soon. Cheers.

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

This week we:

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

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

It made me think about how important authenticity is to an experience, the use of sleight of hand in design and all the empty, awkward urban corners of scrub, stone and tar that are lost to footsteps and care.

Safely back inside the studio I’ve completed two design challenges this week. One being the revamp of Project Largs and the other a collection of sundry design pieces to support the project that we all built over one day last week. Lightweight with a clear, single use it’s going to be available from Monday. We all really like it and hope you find it useful. Rob spent a while polishing up the application code, revisiting a proposal we made earlier in the year to a large newspaper publisher and joined James and myself to work through some necessary Folksy planning.

As some projects race towards completion others are just getting into their stride. James and Frankie cranked up the idea engine (Only qualified Visioneers can operate the controls) once again to produce a bucket of ideas of for Project Clarkston that will be demonstrated during next week’s workshop. Still warm, the engine continued to pour forth ideas for our next hack day and how we might create playful ways for people define entities and, in doing so, improve public data.

This was a week when I changed a background colour from a meek yellow to a dirty orange, abandoned the stiff elegance of serif for a brutal monospace and learnt that hindsight is a powerful weapon to be used with care. Spare a thought.

The most interesting thing we did this week was on Wednesday, where we had the whole team in the office for our second internal ‘Hack Day’. We started this back in May, and the idea is each month the whole team works together to build something in a single day. The output from the last Hack Day was the Pretend Fan Machine. This time round, we’ve build a mobile web app. I won’t say too much about it yet, because we’re still giving it some final polishing-up and are going to launch it properly mid-next week, but the day went pretty successfully, and at the end of it we had a working app that we were pretty happy with.  More importantly, it was good fun and we all learnt something new in the process.

Project-wise, we’ve spent a fair chunk of time planning ahead for the different bits of work that we might, maybe and almost definitely will land in the coming few weeks. Planning the resources around these is pretty tricky at this stage, as there are a lot of unknowns, which prompted Andrew to mutter something about “planning is guessing”, but at least we’re a little more certain about the scope of the different projects ahead.

Incidentally, “planning is guessing” leads me onto our lastest books order, which just arrived today from Amazon. The phrase is one of several mottos repeated in 37 Signals’s book Rework, which is one of the books we’ve ordered (on Andrew’s recommendation). Also in the order was Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus, which I’ve started reading, and Time To Think by Nancy Kline, which James is reading, as well as Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do? , which has gone straight in the studio’s well-stocked library (have a peruse next time you drop in).

In other exciting studio news, we’ve finally got the flat screen TV hooked up to a working Freeview box and an aerial (bit late for the World Cup, but oh well), as well as a long cable and various HDMI/DVI/miniDVI/whatever adapters which let us use it as a kind of projector. Should be useful for meetings and workshops, this.

I also attended Social Media Cafe Manchester this week, where Ian Forrestor gave an interesting talk about the future of internet-connected TVs (like Google TV, Apple TV and Boxee), which was thought-provoking (also great to see Ian out-and-about again).

Oh, and James will be speaking at Interesting North aboout “push bikes, single speed, fixies and fads”. You should definitely book tickets for that.

Office banter this week has mainly been anticipation of the Banger Racing at Buxton Raceway, which some of us are going to on Sunday for a proper fun day out. Come along if you fancy it.

Cheerio.

In other news, as mentioned last week, project Southwold has had sign-off. It’s is a nice feeling to have everything signed and sealed.  We’ll be scaling up for that over the next couple of weeks, it’s fair to say we’re all really looking forward to getting our teeth into this project. We’ve also had the thumbs up on another project from a news organisation which we’ll be scoping out in the next week or two and which we’ll hopefully begin work on later in the summer.

Frankie has returned from his holidays, taking in canals and camping across the UK, picking probably the best two weeks of the year for holidaying.  He said the midges were vicious, but received little sympathy from the rest of us who were office-bound.

James has been putting the finishing touches to the evaluation report for the Amplified Cities project and we have produced a selection of learning materials based off interviews with people using participatory media in interesting ways, which will be released as a short collection of videos from NESTA.

Its Festival time of year again and although we missed Glastonbury, we’re looking forward to doing some work for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which bills itself as “the UK’s largest international festival of new and experimental music”.

We’re also planning our second #rattlehackday, with ideas being submitted by each team member and a Battle Royale style selection process employed to see whose idea gets built.  We’ve previously debated building #waitingforjameb as a game for Rattle employees, who knows maybe this time we’ll build it?

It’s also end of year time accounts-wise so Christine, our administrator, has been chasing us for all our invoices and statements which has lead to some interesting digging through piles of paper (and occasionally rubbish bins) so we can satisfy HMRC.  Fortunately, this meticulous approach to accounting has led to the realisation that we’ve  been overcharged for rent since April 09, so we’re getting a refund on that, meaning a Rattle Summer Social may be on the cards.

Finally, we had a bit of good news about a project idea we submitted to a large newspaper publisher, hopefully we’ll be helping them out with the local news audience problem and how you retain them.  This has yet to receive a seaside town project name, if and when it does, you’ll know the project is on the move.

Working from home means I can’t really round up the office banter, so I’ll just list some things that were interesting this week :

• Amarino – Android meets Arduino or ‘control your gadgets via your phone’
• MetaOptimise Q&A – Stack Exchange machine learning and NLP clone
• Open source Facebook App Engine – possibly useful facebook app engine has been open sourced
• Github Organisations – means we should really get around to releasing all the various bits of source code on the Rattle github page

Apart from noting fissures in the Universe, the last week has involved work on project Clarkston for Sheffield University Students’ Union and project Elgin which is our own Rattle ID project. This is real Elgin, and this is also Elgin, courtesy of Anne’s postcard set:

We’ve also had good news in project Southwold for 4IP getting sign off.   This is a gamey thing, or at least a playful thing that taps into some fascinating issues about how we judge people. Things will be ramping up on that project in the next month and we’re looking forward to working with some fine games designer people.

A big chunk of my week involved doing a training course around communicating more effectively.  It involved a fair bit of learning and practice of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Non Violent Communication (NVC) and some of the ideas in the work of Nancy Kline. I’ve not explored the use of language much before so I didn’t know what to expect but whatever expectations I did have it exceeded them and I’m finding the tools really useful. The rest of my time has been taken up with admin and completing a bit of work for a NESTA project which has brought me into contact with a bunch of interesting people doing work in “social innovation” around the UK.  We’re trying to speak to a bunch of people beyond the usual suspects, so any suggestions gratefully received – I’m particularly interested in the work of architects and planners.

Rob’s been spending most of his  time doing trending work on project Largs for the BBC and a Facebook application for Folksy.  Largs is particularly interesting and we made some real progress on developing a dashboard that worked more effectively as a dashboard, work which we’re hoping to share next week.

We’ve also been finishing off Project Largs of which this is an early beta view:

There are a heap of things we’re really pleased about with this and hopefully in the next few days we can sort out the stuff that we’re not as pleased with. Project Clarkston for Sheffield University stalled due to the accident I had (a car ran into me on my pushbike) but is now up and running jogging again and we’ve been sorting out a heap of administrative things that Christine, our office manager, has been kindly collecting for us.  The Pomodoro Technique is still going strong, though whether is survives Frankie’s absence for the next two weeks will be key to it becoming a habit.

Andrew has spent a couple of days progressing the Rattle identity and implementation of the identity.  We all gave consistent feedback on the first round of thoughts and it’s now clear where we’re headed with it, which is a simple, technical and unpretentious mark we can use to stamp all manner of offline as well as online stuff.  Some of the last days for Rob on Folksy (for we have a new full time developer due to start soon, woohoo) were spent implementing some Facebook socialness, learning which should come in handy for the ‘game’ we’re hoping to build soon.

If you have a suggestion for a hackday, which we’re aiming to do once a month, then do shout. Likewise if you fancy joining in. We’re running our next one in 2 weeks, the 28th June.

I’m digressing. And I’ve only allocated two pomodoros to the task of writing these weeknotes, so I’d better speed up. See, having a focus on the ticking tomato is working already. Although I think part of the success of the method is in having a slightly silly name – the ridiculousness of telling people that you’re are “mid-pomodoro” and so don’t want to be distracted is an amusing cover-up for the slight obsessiveness that it requires.

If I look at the various pieces of paper on which I’ve scribbled my to-dos onto, I can tell you that in this 4-day week I’ve spent most of my tomato time finishing up Project Largs – a Dashboard prototype for the BBC. It’s now very nearly ready for launch, barring some minor tweakage from Andrew, and hopefully a sprinkling of added cleverness from Rob.

James has spent most of the week recovering from the awful bike accident he had last week. Judging from his (now subsiding) bruises, being hit by a taxi doesn’t look like much fun. Thankfully, he’s a lot less injured than he could have been, and he’s reminded us all of how potentially life-saving a bike helmet can be.

Terrace Tweets has been re-commissioned by Umbro for the England vs USA World Cup match on the 12th June, so we’ve also been busy giving that a quick redesign, and working out how to scale it up to cope with bigger traffic spikes (Rob mentioned something about being able to provision extra Amazon servers at a moment’s notice).

The one-day-hack that we mentioned last week has had a bit of extra polish (and some extra data input from a helpful local student), and will launch next week in time for the start of the World Cup.

Looking further ahead, I’m on holiday for two weeks from next Friday (woop!) and so next week will be mainly spent tying up loose ends and helping James catch up with a research project.

In admin news, we now have a spreadsheet for expense claims (rather than scraps of paper), and James and Rob are working on a proper ‘employee handbook’. As a small company, putting all these proper HR procedures into place takes time – and you have to work out what’s essential, and what just gets in the way – but we’re slowly getting there.

The fun task of the week has been defining a list of “TV cliches” – mainly from the world of football commentaries at the moment. We have the obvious ones like “a game of two halves” and “the better team’s won it”, as well as ones I hadn’t heard of like “they need a playmaker who can make a difference” and “strength in depth”, but if you have any suggestions, let us know…

Enjoy the weekend – according to the forecast, it’s going to be hot hot hot. Time to get outdoors!

On Monday we had our first #rattlehackday, where we spent the day producing an application to a brief we’d previously thought up.  Frankie managed us using the Pomodoro technique, splitting our day into 25 minute blocks where work-packages were allocated and progress reviewed after each Pomodoro.  This seemed to focus us all, although I’m not sure it helped anyone’s blood pressure.  The app is based around football support and it created an interesting debate about what compels someone to support a football team, other than it being ‘their team’.

We all learned a few things, namely :

• estimating time is hard
• focusing on a discrete objective makes us very productive as a team
• compromise is good
• it takes longer than a day to build an app (that you’re willing to share!)

It’s nearly ready to go out, I suspect we’ll probably have spent 2 days on it when all is said and done, but still an app in two days isn’t bad, right?

Project Largs is nearing completion and provides some interesting visualisations.  Hopefully it might ship next week, although we’re still unsure of whether it will be ‘private beta’ or not, we’ll have to wait to see what the client asks for.   We’re also hoping to do another Terrace Tweets with Umbro, but this time for the World Cup.  We’ll be making a few minor changes and doing some scalability work to ensure we can handle the load as we found last time a ‘real-time’ application like this has a very different profile when compared to an ordinary app.  This should include moving over to a dedicated MySQL cluster from Brightbox.

Finally, we’ve been doing a little work on Folksy, adding some of the new Facebook Open Graph functionality and preparing a Folksy Facebook application.  It’s lead to some interesting problems, as FBML and the old REST API is being deprecated in favour of the Graph API, but the Graph API isn’t really finished yet !  However this is all good preparation for Project Southwold – a Facebook game for 4IP which is still wending it’s way through the legal and financial processing machines.  We were also pleased to learn that Folksy came in at number 5 in the Mashable Top 10 places to buy handcrafted goods.

Banter in the office has been a little curtailed this week, partially due to the accident, so there were a few discussions about how long it takes for a fractured skull to heal and when it’s appropriate to take over someone’s work email.  Also, Frankie has now adopted the Pomodoro technique in earnest, so we’re only allowed to talk to him during breaks.  We’re wondering if there are more ambient methods we can use to communicate with him – any suggestions?

Rob completed the replay action for Terrace Tweets the application we built for Umbro and the FA Cup Final.  We got a lot of positive feedback from industry folk and football fans, which was nice.

We got the paperwork completed for Project Southwold, the Facebook game for 4IP, and this is now in the legal and financial processing machine.  We’d like to develop our own processing machine, one for invoices, expenses and things because that still seems to be a pfaff for us.  We’ve flirted with using Mazuma, where apparently you just put everything in an envelope and send it off, returning a short while later in tables, forms and officialness.  Envelopes sending things to get processed, very 80s (remember the photo services) but seemingly so very future.

On Wednesday, myself and Andrew went to see Edward Tufte speak at the Royal Geographical Society (the RGS didn’t organise this event but they do the most brilliant stuff like this Vehicle Dependent Overland Travel Workshop).  We like Tufte and he’s become ever more significant as data representation itself has risen in importance, both for us as a team and a business but also as a domain of knowledge.  However, he’s not the most engaging of speakers and frankly there wasn’t much he covered that wasn’t in his first book on data visualisation, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, although his concept of datawords was appealing in reference to sparklines. The Tufte lecture did, however, spark internal debate about our BBC project, project Largs m which is due be released next week and has kept Frankie and Andrew busy for much of this week.  Largs aims to communicate what the BBC broadcasts and do so in a way that is both engaging and also easy to interpret. Another stimulus for this project was the release of the lovely School-o-Scope from BERG which also prompted lots of discussion, mainly around how you provide meaningful information on complex data at a glance and with the appropriate level of detail.

I’m in the last stages of a bit of NESTA work which involves speaking to some great people about their work and then making it digestible, not unlike the “5 Minutes With…” format I enjoy on the BBC.

Lastly, Rob and Andrew were interviewing for the Folksy developer role yesterday, a process which continues into next week. There’s some fun stuff planned for Folksy, but we desperately need a developer to enable it to happen.

Some of this week’s chittah chattah and distractions included:

• RIG’s headcam “the first head mounted iPhone app”.  Fun.
• Rob and his new house in Otley which has a wood, a yurt and a sauna (very Swedish, very not Rob)
• Doing stuff with radio to make it machine readable and hence more point-at-able and usable
• Ideas for our upcoming Rattle hackday on Monday, our first attempt to do something so time constrained. We’re all quite excited by this and all wondering how on earth we’ll manage to not get distracted by pressing client jobs (phone off, email off).  The topic we’re focusing on is a familiar one to us now
• Google TV and passing the Mom and the Nerd test
• Original TV content shown daily and why this is the key to any social TV app (more on this soon)

All very well, you may sigh impatiently, but what has this to do with interrogating the playful use of data and serving up examples of smart interaction design? Perhaps a clunky metaphor on the industriousness of the workplace, the craftsmanship and permanence of what we produce or nothing more than a touch of nostalgic whimsy? I’d happily take the latter for when you have spent the working hours bent over a screen that whispers only fragments of code the comfort of such thoughts is of some restful, albeit fleeting, charm.

So, industrious development indeed. Other than James we have had our gaze locked on our text editors this week conjuring up code for Project Cromer and Largs. Largs is progressing well if not a little slower than we anticipated and project Cromer successfully launched as Terrace Tweets yesterday prior to it’s defining event, The FA Cup Final. James has written a decent overview of this new service, named Terrace Tweets, and if detail and discussion is your desire take a read otherwise go and watch the action live. We think it’s working well and, notwithstanding time set aside for pride and relief, we have begun to think about possible improvements for future releases.

Before writing about the complexities of modelling football games, James has been fine-tuning the proposal for Project Southwold (which if it continues it’s trajectory can only bring a Summer of wonder to the studio as we design a game that promises a wealth of judgmental and discriminatory fun) and starting on a series of user interviews to inform Project Clarkston (technically not a sea-side town being a town south of Glasgow but we think it sounds like it should be a sea-side town so we include it here), a research task for the University of Sheffield.

At the tail end of the week, Frankie stepped out to Future Everything and found something interesting to tell us about on Monday.

To round up then the following personal habits have been noticed: James doesn’t return his trouser leg to it’s full length following his morning commute (the fashionable turn up acts a precautionary measure against chain grease) and Frankie tends to leave his emptied crisp packets around the office, the messy pup.

Unfortunately, the colour of the week is #0087d. No Swallows have been sighted and sometimes, Frankie and I both decided, you can have too much of Helvetica.

Images courtesy of Anne (all rights reserved).  Buy the seaside postcards here.

I did finally get my iPad—and it’s glorious. I have a very simple shell for Pinnebog (that’s the code-name for my iPad-specific story) up and running; even without any bells and whistles, it’s a wonder to see words and pictures presented inside this frame. Long-term, I think this is going to have to be my medium.

I’m faced with a bit of a fork in the road now. The two months of Coldwater are coming to an end. What a good run: the last seven weeks kicked out Last Beautiful, Normal Heights, and a short piece in the amazing 48 Hour Magazine. (See also.)

And now I have two clear options:

• Return to Pilgrim as planned. (For the uninitiated: that’s the book-length expansion/explosion of Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store.) The good news is that Coldwater had the intended effect: I am now hungry to get back to the book. I’m bursting with new ideas; I feel sort of “re-pressurized,” if that makes any sense. The time is right for a story like this, and I’ve just got to sit down and write it.
• Keep jamming on the iPad and get Pinnebog released ASAP. This is appealing because the iPad is simply so enchanting, and so ripe. I feel like there’s buzz to be had for fiction that really takes advantage of its canvas—maybe even a kind of first-mover advantage? All the pieces are in place for me to grab this.

But on balance, I have to pick Pilgrim. The iPad’s not going anywhere; in fact, it’ll be even more attractive in another three months, with even more users and an even better OS. But I really believe this book is pegged pretty firmly to the moment we find ourselves in—the fact that I’m faced with this sort of decision underscores the point!—and if I want it to be a real book on real shelves in real stores (and I do) I gotta get cracking.

I’m going to be crisp about this: starting next week, it’s 100% Pilgrim again. Pinnebog goes on the shelf, to be resumed sometime later in the summer. In the meantime, I’ll paw my iPad fondly and imagine all the cool things to come.

I need to set some new milestones for the book; look for those in the next weeknote.

We’re actually closing in on the story’s one-year anniversary—how cool is that? It feels right to be working on it again now. The surprising success of Mr. Penumbra is really what launched all of this, after all. It’s time to get back into the Twenty-Four Hour Book Store—and find out what’s beyond it, too.

Here’s a cryptic clue: Mátyás Hunyadi, the Raven King.

Related posts:

1. Week 1576
2. Week 1572
3. Week 1577

Pinnebog (the iPad project) is plotted out, but I haven’t really put any sentences or functions together yet. I’m telling myself it’s because I don’t have my iPad yet (it’s a 3G, and should arrive this week) but really I’ve just been lazy/busy.

I have another project brewing, too—an audio collaboration. In fact I have the intro and call-out drafted, but held off on posting it this weekend because I don’t think I have it quite right yet. This medium is not native ground for me, so I’m a little less recklessly confident than usual. But let’s go ahead and give it a name: Trap Rock.

And there’s another sonic surprise coming soon, as well! Remember the Remix Project? Remember the winners? Yes indeed.

This is going to be an intense, truncated week, because on Thursday I’m flying up to Alaska, where I’ll stay through the weekend to a) address the Alaska Press Club, and b) compose a contribution to 48 Hour Magazine.

Two weeks after that, I’m flying to Qatar.

See what I mean about a slippery season?

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1. Week 1576
2. Week 1580
3. Week 1564

So my next project—still part of the Coldwater stream of quick wins—is going to be an iPad app. I’m calling this Pinnebog. (I pronounce it PIN-eh-bog. I wonder if that’s right?)

This was a tough decision. On one hand, an iPad app is a terrible idea: not that many people have iPads yet; it’s a more difficult platform to make media for than the web; and at some point in the process, I’ll have to wait on Apple’s approval. Bleh.

But on the other hand, the moment is just so ripe to put a stake in the ground.

This morning, I started reading Ken Auletta’s New Yorker piece about the Kindle, the iPad, and big book publishers but couldn’t finish it because it was just so uninteresting. The headline claims it’s about “the future of books,” but Auletta and the big publishers—and Amazon and Apple for that matter—really don’t have much to say about that at all. At least not in the bookfuturist sense. Not in the underwear sense.

Not when there’s stuff like this trickling out.

Now, the real challenge here is to design a project minimal enough that I can do it very quickly: in weeks, not months. I’m taking The Truth About the East Wind as a sort of starting point. Pinnebog will also use images and sound to tell a tale, but my intention is to up my game considerably: richer images, deeper integration into the text, and cleverer interactions along the way. And in order to make that feasible, it’s going to have to be very, very short. Just a wee slip of a story.

I foresee offering it up for free, of course.

Okay: now I’m off to scheme a bit more about how this will look, and what tools I’ll use to create it. I decided on this next project about ten minutes ago—so you could not be more up-to-date.

Do go check out Normal Heights if you haven’t seen it yet.

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2. Week 1577
3. The myths aren’t all lies

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You should be following Kovet Moire if you’re not already. He will be the key to everything. See you Friday.

No seriously, that’s it.

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2. PSA
3. Behold, an agent of Oberon

In other news, Eric Rosenfield writes:

I’m probably going to have to write a whole piece on Robin Sloan, because he seems to be doing everything you’re not supposed to do as a writer and being very successful at it.

Yesss!

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3. Week 1580

I mean, in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big decision. It’s a big decision when you decide to move to Mozambique. It’s a big decision when you decide to vote for a health care reform bill. So yeah actually, maybe I just made a small decision: I’m going to put Pilgrim (Mr. Penumbra) on the shelf for about two months. I’ve been lamely whacking at it since mid-February and simply not making real progress. This is bad because:

• it’s no fun; and
• there’s nothing to share along the way.

So I believe the situation demands a sharp shift in strategy. Here it is: for the next 60 days I am going to focus on some small projects that I can create quickly and share immediately. I need to put some points on the board. Jeez, I need to give you a reason to stick around!

The first one is probably going to be a very (very) short story. The next after that will probably involve sound. Ooh, I’m excited; simply making this decision, and sharing it here, is really energizing. Watch this space.

The code-name for this new strategy is Coldwater.

P.S. What happened to weeknotes 1570 and 1571? Digital archaeologists will be wondering about this in a hundred years, no doubt. Shhh. Say nothing.

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I’m typing this from a plane. My tweets this week are going to be 100% geotagged photos; you should follow along, because I think it’s going to be weird/fun.

Coming tonight or tomorrow: the first of the Annabel Scheme remix projects! Yep, it’s Emily Cooper’s renderings—and they are beautiful.

Have just realized that, given my aforementioned tweet experiment, I will be unable to tweet about the renderings this week. Hmm. You’re going to have to help me get the word out.

This Friday I’ll be in Austin for a few days of SXSW Interactive; drop me a line if you’ll be there, too.

(Note to weeknote aggregators: you’ll probably want to take me off your list, as these are increasingly tenuous approximations of the weeknote genre.)

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That’s okay: sometimes you have to really invest in one part of your life so all the other parts can, in short order, reap the rewards. Like Shakespeare said: “There is a tide in the affairs of men…”

Someday very soon, the sea will subside and we’ll walk on land again and unfurl the tents and banners and scrolls we rolled up so carefully.

But until then: wow, what a flood.

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As expected.

See you next week!

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Working in a cafe helps me understand the difference. While the program is still loading, I am of course totally interested in my surroundings—faces and book-jackets and conversations overheard. But after hour two? I become, to my delight, the weird person in the room: oblivious to everything around me, lost in the screen, mouth moving silently. (Just a little bit.)

The point is: I managed several four-hour (and longer) writing sessions this week and they were hugely productive. What a joy.

(I don’t want to make it sound like ooh magical writing. It’s still mostly just banging things out and writing “[[X]]” when I can’t think of the right word or “[[SOMETHING]]” when I can’t think of the right… something. [You’ve never seen my roughest drafts; they’re full of these placeholders, like variables.] It’s just that, in the third hour and beyond, it all picks up speed dramatically—like I’ve finally escaped some gravity well.)

In other news.

I added a new tool this week: a simple logbook, not intended for idea-capture (that’s the iPhone) or reflection (that’s this) but rather the very basics: what I did and what I ate.

It is cheap and tiny (3″ × 5″) and entirely un-precious. All data, no poetry.

This week I fired up Xcode twice, vaguely intending to fiddle with the new iPad stuff, and then forced myself to shut it down immediately both times. Focus. There will be time for that later.

I start at Twitter on Tuesday! Hmm: how many four-hour writing sessions do you think I can pack in between now and then?

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I’ve started to think of 2009 as “long 2009″ in my personal history. It began in November 2008, when my co-conspirator Andrew Fitzgerald finished his first novel and I, in a fit of (let’s be honest) jealousy, decided to recommit myself to writing. And now, “long 2009″ ends this month, when I begin at Twitter.

Which is not to say that the writing ends! No: that course has been set. What I mean is that the fulcrum-power of the year is bounded by those dates. And “long 2009″ was certainly the most important year for me since, say, 2004, when I co-produced EPIC 2014 and joined Current.

Mostly I just enjoy telling stories about time: marking out epochs and hinge-points. Maybe a bit of counterfactual thrown in there, too.

This week I saw Sep Kapmvar give a talk at Twitter. His project with Jonathan Harris—We Feel Fine—was one of the very first things I encountered that had been made with Processing, and one of the things that made me want to learn it for myself, which led to all sorts of other things. Something about seeing this old influence in this new context… it was a nice juxtaposition.

This was a very successful week for Pilgrim. I wrote a lot of material. Very rough, but all in sentences and paragraphs, committed to the screen, which is the essential thing. I’m mindful of my notion to have a barf-draft done by mid-March, with SXSW as my arbitrary deadline; I think it’s quite possible, and hitting that deadline is my focus and my measure of success.

That’s it! Short weeknote this time.

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Among the media I consumed was Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which takes a while to get through—it’s four dense volumes). I find myself re-reading it more frequently than any other work of fiction, manga or otherwise; I think this was maybe my tenth time through. I just cannot wrap my head around how good it is—and how it was essentially Miyazaki’s side project for years. The scope of the world, the specificity of the vision… and the humanity of it. Nausicaä makes me cry every time.

I haven’t delivered on my tease about big news from last week; soon, soon.

Head spinning with iPad possibilities. It looks like such an insanely cool canvas. I can’t wait to get my hands and fingers on one.

Okay, really, that’s it. This week is now OVER.

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It was a good week for making memes. Stock and flow got wacky-incredible traction over at Snarkmarket and my post on instrumented reading made the rounds in the data viz world.

And if I’m right about stock and flow (who knows?) then some small fraction of those swarms got curious and made their way over to meet my stock—maybe Penumbra, maybe Scheme, maybe something else. Maybe one of those people is out there flipping through Scheme this very moment. It’s a delight to think so.

Another delight: it felt so good to put together that post on instrumented reading. I have been thinking about that idea, and imagining that very graph, for a year entire. Whew. Done. Exorcised.

I announced the Remix Fund winners this week and made the initial payouts. I like the feel of money flowing, even in small amounts. It feels healthy. Almost… metabolic. It’s a sign of life.

About 2000 words added to Pilgrim this week, which is less than thrilling, but whoah I will totally take it!

This week I started and finished Jumbo, and I’m very happy with the result. It’ll be published on February 3—I’ll give another heads-up when that happens, of course—and there’s reason for Annabel Scheme fans in particular to take note.

There’s something wonderful about a chunk of work that size. (Jumbo was less than 500 words.) I’ve been thinking about how I might construct larger stories out of such chunks. Could you come up with a framework in which they maintained their, er, chunkiness—their small scope and lack of dependencies—but also added up in a really significant way? Some webcomics do this pretty well; they’re these long, complicated sagas metered out in day-sized bursts of effort. But that’s not quite what I’m going for—not just straight serialization.

What would a narrative Lego set look like? Alternate analogies: a box of narrative toys; a narrative train set; a narrative Settlers of Catan.

Over at Snarkmarket, Tim’s post on James Patterson (profiled in the NYT Magazine) has got me thinking, too. The basic takeaway is that James Patterson sells an insane number of books, in part because he simply produces an insane number of books, in part because he divvies the writing up among a whole coterie of co-authors.

So in a comment on the post, I wrote…

I won­der if there’s a way to take some of that spirit—the notion that author­ship is not one-size-fits-all, that there are lots and lots of ways to orga­nize peo­ple around the pro­duc­tion of creative work—and apply it to the objec­tive of actu­ally mak­ing stuff that’s great… not just mak­ing lots of stuff.

…which is totally rhetorical, because obviously the answer is, yes, there is a way to do that. So the question is actually: How do you want that organization to look? And what are you trying to make?

You’ll detect some Remix Fund thinking in there. But I think it goes way beyond that. Or it could.

Okay, to tell you the truth, everything in this weeknote is really a sideshow; there was big news this week that I can’t share yet. Watch this space.

I like this guy a lot right now.

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Though I didn’t give Gogomain the time it needed earlier this week, I made up for it on Friday and Saturday, and it’s on track for a full rough draft by tomorrow. My rough drafts are truly rough—not like those fake rough drafts that have been polished up for inspection. Over the years I’ve become pretty comfortable sharing stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it’s a true strength. (See: Ed Catmull on sharing stuff that sucks at Pixar.)

Pilgrim abides. Did I mention I released something this week?

I have a wee story-let—a contribution to a larger project that you might have heard of—due on Wednesday. I haven’t really started it. Let’s call that Jumbo. (You can tell I’m as excited about the code-names as I am about the projects.)

I had another story-let assignment back in December—it actually paid shockingly well—and I have to say, I love writing stuff that’s very short under very specific constraints. It’s not that it’s easy; I mean, we are talking 250–500 words here, so you have to choose each one very carefully. It’s that it’s easy to begin: You can see the whole shape of it, and you know that if you start typing right now you’ll have a whole rough draft in, like, fifteen minutes, max. There will be many, many revisions after that… but that’s no problem. The draft is the thing.

I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist all the way through on Friday and absolutely loved it. It’s a book about constraints—specifically the constraint of rhyme in poetry, but I think this applies to a lot of things:

All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking—you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You’re in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough; it works on every level, from the tiny cutting-cucumbers-in-the-kitchen micro to the huge meaning-of-life macro.

Makes me think of Yosa Buson’s poem, too:

    Lighting one candle
with another candle—
    spring evening.

So anyway. East Wind was a prototype in the truest sense: much more a proof-of-concept than an actual product. I like the way it turned out, but I don’t think the story is particularly earth-shattering or the images particularly coherent. (With one exception! The part of the story where the pendulous white moon comes rumbling into view is, I think, one of the best moments I’ve ever engineered.) I was just supremely anxious to try the format—and I think the format was a success. Already I can see the toolkit coming together: the arrangements of words and images that might reliably deliver a certain effect.

The grammar of the long-ass scroll!

So now I’m thinking hard about where to take it next. Someone made the comment that East Wind “feels lonely” because it’s the only story of its kind—certainly in my world, and maybe in the larger world, too. (Even its inspiration, the long scrolling essays of Maira Kalman, are really something else entirely.) So that makes me wonder about a series: a story told in chapters, each one a long scroll like this. Or maybe it’s a bunch of stand-alone stories that all orbit around some central point. One prerequisite would be greater coherence: in the language, in the images, in the overall design. Or maybe I go in the opposite direction entirely and enlist other writers and designers with wildly diverse styles! You can tell this is quite unsettled in my mind. I tested the prototype; now I want to make something that kicks ass.

I had a lot of fun doing the sound for East Wind, so I think my first A/V project is going to be sonic. What would you think of a fairy tale done in the cut-up, hyper-modern style of Radiolab?

In any case, I will not be releasing anything this week, so it will have to be really truly productive. There’s more Gogomain; there’s time allocated daily to Pilgrim, no matter how little (because it’s such an easy thing to neglect; it makes not a peep when I ignore it); there’s a sprint on Jumbo (on Monday); and, early on, there’s the results from the Remix Fund.

I’m also going to share some semi-interesting findings from East Wind’s first week in the wild. Here’s a preview:

Can you guess what’s being depicted?

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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.

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…

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A marketing agency had been let down at the last minute by one of their suppliers, leaving them with a couple of unfinished interactive displays for a big show. They found Tinker, who agreed to help out, and then drafted us in to provide some extra manpower as it was such short notice.

So this week I've had two day trips to near Lincoln, and a morning just outside Warwick. In between, there have been RS orders, some soldering, Arduino coding and even reverse engineering the (half-)workings of the existing exhibits. Friday was a particularly long day (strictly speaking I didn't get back to Liverpool until Saturday) but we managed to pull things together and it was great to see the disparate parts working as planned when we got them integrated.

Squeezed round all of that were a couple of meetings about future projects, and we got the green-light for the next phase of work with one of our bigger clients, which is lovely news. And on Thursday evening, Bubblino had an outing to a local leaders debate party. He was restricted to looking for tweets from the local area, but was still the most active he's ever been - running out of bubble mixture twice during the ninety minute debate. Hopefully that bodes well for the state of politics in the Liverpool area.

The evening before, on Thursday, both Bubblino and Adrian were downstairs in the same building for the second O'Reilly Ignite event to be held in the city. Once again, Adrian was involved in organising the event and this time was manning the camera that was filming proceedings (so blame him if the video isn't any good). There's a write-up of the evening on the Liverpool Daily Post Creative blog, and I'm sure the videos will be online somewhere soon too.

Events apart, not a lot to report. There's been further work on a Bubblino commission and more internal project website work, but nothing noteworthy last week or this.

One thing I did miss in skipping last week's weeknote was the "Cathedral Valley" lunch review. We had an excellent turn out (over a dozen of us) which I think overwhelmed the kitchen at Korova a little. It was a bit of a dingy location for such a gloriously sunny day, being a bar rather than a cafe/restaurant, and the only food available is noodles. That said, there's a decent range of noodles available all served in New York-style cartons, and they manage to hold a deceptively large amount of food. We managed to resist starting the "Cathedral Valley" pool league, despite the allure of the table in the corner.

Lots of small and disparate but essential things, that break up the flow of work and leave you feeling like not much has been achieved. Next week should be better.

Maker Faire UK 2010, which happened just after the last weeknote, was excellent and I wrote up some notes on it separately. Other than writing up that, and a little bit of quoting on new projects, it's been a fortnight of hard graft on the set-top box project.

And it's been a fortnight of extremes with that work. The deadline for deployment was the end of the month, and things turned out to be a bit more complicated than anticipated - last week saw me delving deep into the source code for Firefox to add some new classes to the javascript libraries - resulting in some late nights and working the weekend to have things back on track at the start of this week.

Then in the progress meeting about it on Wednesday, it turns out there have been some developments on a different part of the project, which have pushed the deadline back a couple of months at least. So I spent Thursday mothballing the code and documenting what still needs to be done so that I can pick it up easily when we get the green light again.

All of which meant Friday was unexpectedly quiet. There are a few bits of client work booked in to be getting on with, but I'm looking forward to getting on with some internal project work and pushing on with some product ideas.

As it's an odd-numbered week, we had our "Cathedral Valley" local tech scene get-together for lunch. I missed the trip to the Everyman in week 233 as I was en route to Maker Faire, so this is eatery no. 3, The Side Door Bistro. It's a restaurant rather than a cafe, and I forgot to check for WiFi, although you'd stick out quite a bit if you tried to use a laptop. The food was lovely, with the steak sandwiches proving particularly popular amongst the group, accompanied with some spot-on chips and garlic mayo.

The main reason they've been delayed is because I've had a full-on three days away in Newcastle over the weekend at Maker Faire.

I'll leave the write-up of the faire until the next weeknote, so last week was mostly getting stuck into the ins and outs of Firefox extensions and plugins. This week it's looking like I'll be modifying/writing a new browser plugin as part of the set-top box project.

Then at the end of the week there was a bit of time getting everything ready for the weekend, piling it all into the car, and heading up to the North-East.

The main part of the week has been spent working on the set-top box project - so far mostly building hardware and installing Linux, followed by lots of fighting with device drivers in an attempt to make it talk out of the TV outputs rather than just to a monitor. As a result the office is resembling a bit of a computer graveyard with machines in assorted states of construction, and as I type, one of the machines is sat in the corner chugging through a Windows install to let me double-check that the hardware is at least functioning.

Mid-week saw me out of the office helping the guys at Tinker.it deliver an intensive day-long hardware hacking workshop. It was a full-on day, starting at quarter-to-eight, but every team had some kind of functioning hardware and software demo by the end, with many also feeding data into or out of Twitter. I also got to meet a collection of Tinker.it's other hardware hacking "friends" and they were all great to work alongside. Hopefully our paths will cross again in the future.

The train journeys to and from London gave me opportunity to work on the slides for a talk I gave on Thursday evening, although searching Flickr over an intermittent 3G connection isn't something I'd recommend. As a result, some of Thursday day was given over to slide preparation as well, and all seemed to go well at Ignite Liverpool; an event I'd helped pull together in addition to kicking off the talks. My slides and some thoughts are over on my personal blog and I even got my name in the local paper (although as usual, Bubblino upstaged me by getting his picture in too).

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.

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.

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.

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.

*Due to Tumblr’s curious non-timestamped javascript embed widget I have sort of given up keeping track of the actual week.

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.

Let’s consider this a first attempt. I think it’s working, but please report any problems.

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?

So yeah, the HTML should be rendering properly in Safari now.

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