For a few years I have been wondering what I would make if I had electronics training rather than software. We maybe about to find out. Iris were kind enough to invite me to their Arduino Hack Day
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Tag Archives: ideas
Make a Book
Don’t just write one. Make one. In the quest to make code sometimes it is good to diversify and do something non tech. Cook. Garden. Make books ?
After all books are the lifeblood of development. When I was small I needed magazines and books for copying little bits of assembler codes. Now google has the answers. Last year when I learnt Ruby I didn’t go near a book. It was some delight that the Arduino hack day this month had books littered around.
The book making class jcn and I attended was part of Selfridges Words Words Words campaign. Continue reading
The Digital Press Office
Tim Lloyd last month asked the question What Does a Digital Press Office Look Like ? What caught my attention was that the press office Lloyd pictures has a TV screen for displaying a social media dashboard. Which is exactly what we have in the office.
With the explosion of social media I have worked with a number of teams who are either located in the Marketing department (such as at Figleaves.com), or online teams who are either editorial (Sun Newspaper) or merchandising (Agent Provocateur) depending on the products they support. I am currently experiencing what it is like to work within a Communications and PR department. It is the first place I have worked, which has a wall mounted television displaying tweetdeck.
This new experience for me has reinforced Lloyd’s observation that monitoring or as Lloyd puts it “listening to the web” is very valuable. Reuters have just released a video on how they monitor breaking news stories. Again the emphasis is on gathering analysis and checking facts. To paraphrase @fionamclaren we like this because it is how we twitter junkies monitor news stories at home or in my case from my brother’s home wondering if I can get back through the rioting and looting.
Continue reading
Sense and The City exhibit @ London Transport Museum
During the buzz of Lo
ndon 2012 One Year to Go celebrations and my teams very well received competitive tweeting campaign I was introduced to Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith.We loved his teams visualisations of the 1yr2go campaign, so it was with excitement that I tore myself away from work ‘s summer party for my first visit to the London Transport Museum.
London Transport Museum is exquisite. One has to wander through an array of London buses old and new to attend the exhibit. I met Hudson-Smith sheltering in a proposed future bus shelter and he kindly showed me the city scape data visualisations from Carlo Ratti of MIT, Aaron Koblin of Google Creative alongside his own Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. Publicised best as ‘beautiful data’.
I found the past future sections the most riveting. Here was a series of images that showed transport of the future as imagined in the past. Robotic driven trains and flying cars.
Most disturbing were the objects that I would once have considered every day. Such as AtoZ or the floppy diskette . The curator of this section was deeply excited by her eBay shopping. Next time, I suggested, she should come over to my house and grab my old technology from the loft. Equally bizarre was the inclusion of a terminology section detailing words such as blog and tweet.
The star exhibit for me was this set of Modern Mechanix magazines. It was also purchased from eBay. I love that every transport on the cover has materialised in some form but doesn’t look nearly as beautiful as these illustrations. I do think we are poorer for not living the alternative universes shown in this exhibit.
Until Sunday 18 March 2012
The Bamboo Phone – Free Range Expo
On invitation by emerging new talent Eleanor Litten I attended the Free Range Exhibition this weekend. London based Eleanor Litten is a Graphiste and Illustrator. She specialises in mixed media illustrations using lino print, and technology such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Her awesome illustrations compliment any published material. Also she must have the coolest domain name crouching-pencil.org.uk. Her piece in exhibition is a meditative publication. I could easily have spent my time curled up in a corner consuming the illustrations. However that wasn’t an option as this is UK’s largest graduate art and design show and there was a lot to see.
The Bamboo Phone
A couple of pieces really caught my attention. Following the the buzz of creating my last film Free Pixel I have to mention John Peters Bamboo Phone. Much has been reported about the material scarcity in mobile technology. To reduce the use of indium and nikel the Bamboo phone uses electronic ink screens and a bamboo case. John Peters is a 3D designer who studied in South Indian International Schools and Cornwall.
The variety of design, architecture, photography, fashion, art and illustration will keep you enthralled, and with so many ideas fully conceptualised you may even find your next recruit or big idea or both.
Cory Arcangel Beat the Champ installation at the Barbican
Spent an evening considering @cory_arcangel Beat the Champ installation at the Barbican with @SmileyBen, @rossf7, Jon and Ira.
The first thing I noticed was the space. I had suggested that we meet at the entrance and found that space ran arched around the back of the orchestra pit. As there were two potential rendezvous point my first experience of the show was racing through the elongated round. I felt like the protagonist of a 1980′s cyber film set inside a game.
14 massive projected video games screens and their associated noise kept me company. I really wanted to grab a board and skate through the space with the show on. According to Arcangel’s website “Barbican install was made especially for their crazy big space” so sadly this was one you had to experience in person. Each screen showed a bowling game where the bowler threw a gutter ball each time. We worked backwards starting from games made in 2000′s. By the time we hit games made in the 1990′s the thing that was most striking for me was the varied emotions of the characters on the screen. As we weren’t the player and knew the outcome, it was easy to simply compare screens. The onscreen bowlers were angry, frustrated and sometimes distraught by their awful bowling. One constantly dropped the ball on his foot and was in massive amounts of pain.
There were a relief to hitting the games made in the 1970’s. The emotions had gone and that simplicity of game play was highly watchable. Like extreme sports the quick repetitive nature of these basic games brought through that feeling of the being in zone trance even though we weren’t controlling the games.
Once nudged out of my trance it was the bell shaped arch of realism of the games that struck me. Somewhere in the late 90′s the games were closest to a realistic bowling experience. The pins were reset after each attempt. Other lanes were occupied. The on screen bowler was truly distraught. Early games couldn’t do this. More recent games didn’t bother.
For me the most fascinating thing I wanted to take away and learn was how the games were controlled. Arcangel describes his games as “hacked”. It would be an easy task to film the game as it is played. However Arcangel chose a more complicated approach. Each game was controlled by a chip.
The show moves to NYC is late May and it is worth checking out.
Big Cats
Tad obsessed after watching the first episode of the the recent BBC documentary on lions. I didn’t know that lions could count or that they roamed most of the earth some 32 thousand years ago.
I think of Big Cats as fundamental to India. However I was painfully made aware that this is not longer the case. Once on a trip to Jim Corbett’s park I didn’t see a single tiger not even a paw print. Elephant rides desecrated swaths of the so called jungle which was more like a home counties forest found on the edge of a nice cricket field hosting picnickers with their Pimms. Not a vibrant colourful place full of creatures.
The decline of the big cat in the wild makes me sad.
Wild big cats should be preserved and their are countless great campaigns to help. Virgin Airlines are currently showing a documentary on their flights that explores the forest of Burma. The idea is to create a corridor between isolated South Asian tiger communities. In effect creating a highway allowing these amazing creatures to mingle, date and maybe create beautiful cubs.
I have to do my bit. If you have a birthday coming up don’t be surprised if your gift is a Tiger. Adopt a Tiger from the WWF.
The next Axial Age ?
I think we might be starting the next Axial Age.
German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term Axial Age to describe similar revolutionary thinking which appeared in China, India and what we now call the middle east. My understanding of the period running from 800 BCE to 200 BCE is shaped entirely by Karen Armstrong‘s incredible book The Great Transformation. As I read Armstrong’s book Buddhism I wonder if we could be at the start of another Axial Age bolstered and supported by the Internet and other forms of technology.
I disagree.
There are non religious ideas and human organisation that arose through the Axial Age and as these break down with the advent of the Internet it will be anything but the same going forward. Technology has already pummeled, shaped and reinvented key systems of human and idea management. Many of which were created well after the Axial Age ended. We, humanity, are rethinking books, libraries, agriculture, banking, music, news dissemination, film and television to name a few. However it is the things that have been left unscathed so far that worry, scare and excite me. These were the bedrock of the Axial Age and if these change, we may see a complete change in the direction of humanity. Evolution perhaps ? I am thinking about such diverse trends as story telling, trade and governance.
Let me take trade as an example (not least because e-commerce is currently my stock in trade). Trade can be traced back to prehistory. Hammond in his book Smart Retail explains simply, that once man has taken care of his family and community, and had surplus produce, he would then embark on trading what was left. From this activity markets and merchants were born. Producers sold what they produced and peddlers “a chancery bunch’ would purchase goods that they could resell at a profit. Markets become permanent shops. By the end of the Axial Age shop chains were formed. A lack of trusted workers and long-distance travel maintained the shape of this kind of retail till the 19th century. However excellently simple Hammond’s history of retail, his statement that “the Internet is just a development of catalogue-based mail order and don’t kid yourself that it isn’t” is hilarious. Websites that allow customers to search product catalogs might indeed make Hammond’s point. Companies that provide markets online such as eBay and Amazon have done really well. Virtual worlds that copy real world practice have also done well. However this surely is just a starting point. The Economist explained how Robert Jensen a development economist at Harvard University surveyed the price of sardines along Kerala’s coast before and after the introduction of the mobile phone. Free flowing information about price and availability from the market out to sea allowed the fishing community to meet supply and demand more effectively raising their profits but reducing the cost to the consumer.
Could the future of the Internet be the development of transparent and fair market places ? Certainly it will become more than products in database. If so, is that revolutionary thinking in itself ? Or will that lead to more revolutionary thinking which will change the way we organise ourselves ? If is difficult to know, this is just a single blog piece and we are very much inside the eye of the storm. Well maybe to the left of center of the storm. Also Armstrong introduction in The Great Transformation should give this dreamy question a realistic kick. “Perhaps every generation believes that it has reached a turning point in history”.
Perhaps. However we are in a transformative age. That maybe this transformative age may mimic the original Axial Age.
My Mobile Phone
I got my first phone in 1995. It was a massive Motorola brick. It was so heavy it wore out all the pockets in my jeans. My phone needed to be smaller or my jeans stronger.
As the century rolled over my mobile phone finally become tiny. Small. Beautiful. It broke, if dropped once. I connected it to my HP PDA and used it to download email and news content. Juggling both devices and my non existent iPod meant something would be dropped sooner or later. In a rush at Gatwick airport I smashed my lovely PDA and blamed the phone. When would I get a single device that could provide all the software a modern women needed ?
2009 and now all those devices are merged and in a single device. I drop my iPhone all the time. It bounces, scratches but stays intact. Just. It still isn’t good enough. It doesn’t scale. Isn’t fit for purpose. Apple tells me I need an iPad and iMac. I need a TV and Radio and Games Console. In fact I need phone. As my iPhone doesn’t really make great phone calls.
At each stage I knew what I wanted and it wasn’t available. When it finally arrived it wasn’t good enough, I was by then ready for the next device. My imagination far out paces what can be delivered in the market place. Yet I do nothing about it. I wait and hope that the corporate machine will catch up. It doesn’t.
Future Technology for Mobile Phone’s
I have spent the summer looking at how we could create a mobile phone of my dreams (and hopefully yours). The results of which feature in a small concept film called Free Pixel.
My research focuses on the geometery of the mobile phone (or form factor). History has produced a series of phones which are rigid or have a moving part (such as flip phones).
I however am looking for form factor that is extensible, a single device that has a display that is the size I require to do the job in hand.
This Samsung phone is a great starting point. I love how is looks like an old ‘skool’ (by which I mean 2003) phone and folds open into a square screen.
For a number of years my friends and some clients have been waiting for a paper like digital screen to replace their newspaper and books. These screens are robust and have great display for example sony have a form factor that they are showing off currently.
Our research also led us to Displax product Skin. It is completely transparent and works on surfaces that are also transparent such as glass. This hardware operates via a grid of nanowires embedded Skin’s polymer film. Each time a user makes contact with the surface “a small electrical disturbance is detected allowing the micro-processor controller to pinpoint the movement”. Probably not likely to make a great mobile phone in the near future. Unless we carry glass screen around with us at all time. mmm maybe.
For a different take on mobile phones what about one that projects tactile images onto the surface of the phone. The New Scientist described one in Sep this year.
So then we turned our attention to projection technology. Firstly I was inspired by this Ted Talk which shows how a mobile phone and projector can be combined to make an extensible device.
And also from MIT is this device which hasn’t had nearly enough online buzz about it;
These project concepts were extended by Mozilla Labs in their concept phone video.
So where is this all leading ? Well I want a mobile phone that really works and made my own concept film called Free Pixel.