Anyway!

Here’s what was flying around the studio e-mail list this week.

Alex found this 121-megapixel satellite photo of Earth

Denise pointed us at these lovely British birds made of Lego.

Andy caused much excitement (and used many exclamation marks in his email) when he announced there was a new Katamari Damacy soundtrack…

A slo-mo jumping (portly) cat!

James pointed to the interesting, elegant UI details used in the new iteration of the (already-rather-good) Soundcloud.

Take a look at the video here of a flying robot that swoops to perch on a human’s hand like a falcon. It gets incredible around a minute and thirty seconds in…

Andy pointed out this very interesting development in home automation and ‘domotics’ from a startup called “Electric Imp” as reported on Gizmodo:

Electric Imp came out of hiding today, announcing a line of Imp cards that can be installed on any electronic device to put it online and even control it. The little cards appear almost identical to standard SD cards, but have WiFi antennae and embedded processors. You can install them to existing devices using some of the circuit boards Imp sells, and the company is in talks with OEMs to get them Imp slots pre-installed on a range of products. Once installed, they connect to the Internet and Imp’s cloud-based software controls, allowing them to both be controlled remotely and work in conjunction with other connected devices.

One to watch perhaps.

Matt Webb pointed out this interesting company, http://www.quadrigram.com/ who market themselves as a visual programming language for creating visualisations from complex streams of live data (for instance from sensor-laden nets of things…)

Andy pointed to http://chirp.io/ who’s stated aim from their website is to ‘teach the machines to sing’ but making links into music…

James shared http://littlebigdetails.com/ with the list, which does precisely what it says on the tin. Lots of very nice UI touches of the sort that lift a product or service to an extra level of consideration, commodity and delight.

And finally, as a nod to the biggest film of the year so far, and tribute to the recently-deceased illustrator/author, here’s how Maurice Sendak might have drawn the Avengers.

Have a great week!

Apparently.

This week, James reports he is doing “boring but important things” on Little Printer‘s infrastructure. He has also been wearing some spectacular trousers.

Simon has left us for a well-earned couple of weeks away, driving through California, but up til then he’s been doing Little Printer planning – technical prioritisation, meeting lawyers and various people about manufacturing ramp-up. He’s also been working with Vanessa on handing over things, particularly around our new business processes before his holiday.

Andy’s been focussing on Little Printer too – preliminary EMC testing in Cambridge, bridge board prototypes, soldering and ordering… and sending things to Slovenia. He’s also been assembling a robot arm we bought ages ago at Maplin for fun in the evenings…

Matt Webb’s been working on sales mainly, had a couple of speaking gigs, and has been meeting lawyers about T&Cs for Little Printer. He’s deep into some of the ‘Dark Matter’ of selling physical consumer products globally. Interesting stuff…

He’s also been wearing a brainwave monitor… more about his experiments over at his ever-interesting Interconnected.org

Nick’s working closely with Phil and Andy as always – wrapping up work on the BERG Cloud bridge, talking manufacturing considerations with Andy, and perfecting the OTA update routines with Phil amongst loads of other things.

Alice is finishing our “Miniseries” publishing platform for Little Printer, and working on some of the launch partner publications. Alex is working on some design considerations for the Bridge, and wireframing some of Little Printer’s web presence. Denise has been working on some forthcoming new business, which looks very promising and designing loads of stuff for LP’s user-experience.

Joe’s been working on project Sinawava – which is a consulting job that has loads of different aspects, all of which he’s leading magnificently. This week there’s been product design work, strategic roadmapping conversations, technical prototyping and some experience prototyping with a packaging consultancy, as well as designing app concepts for the project.

Eddie Shannon’s been in with us this week again, working with Joe on Sinawava and being very generous in his tea-making!

As for me, I’ve been supporting Eddie and Joe on Sinawava, helping MW with sales, trying to do some long-delayed blog post writing and wrapping-up Project Chuska.

Jack and Timo were in Stockholm at the beginning of the week, presenting the results of the first stage of our partnership with Ericsson’s UX lab to the wider research group there. We blogged about that project yesterday. I worked a little on it and had a tremendous time doing so! Nice to see it in the world.

Timo’s back in Norway now, finishing his PhD for the summer. He’ll still be working with us regularly on special projects and research while that wraps up. He is missed!

And finally… Jack has started designing BERG Cloud product #2… Vallecito!

This is smart, it builds on our innate familiarity with social networks, but also acts as a provocation for us to think differently about the internet of things. It also happens to cross over with many of the BERG’s interests including Little Printer, BERGCloud and very close to the ‘Products are people too‘ concept that has been guiding much of our work.

So over the last few months BERG and Ericsson have been working in partnership to explore some practical and poetic approaches to networks and smart products. We have been developing concepts around the rituals and rhythms of life with connected things, and creating some visualisations based on network behaviours. Phase 1 of this project is complete, and although we can’t talk about the entire project, we thought it would be good to show some of our first sketches.

You can also read more about the collaboration from Ericsson’s perspective here.

We kicked off in a product invention workshop where some really strong themes emerged.

There are huge areas of network-ness, from the infrastructure to the protocols, from the packets to the little blinking lights on our routers, that are largely ‘dark matter‘: immaterial and invisible things that are often misunderstood, mythologised or ignored.

There are a few long-term efforts to uncover the physical infrastructure of our networks. Ericsson itself has long understood the need to both explain the technology of networks and their effects.

But – we mostly feel like the network is out of our control – tools to be able to satisfyingly grasp and optimise our own networks and connected products aren’t yet available to us. Working towards products, services and visualisations that make these things more legible and tangible is good!

Joyful (net)work: Zen Garden Router

Inspired by Matt Jones’ idea of a ‘Zen garden router’ this video sketch focuses on the ongoing maintenance and ‘tuning’ of a domestic ecosystem of connected products, and the networks that connect them. We have modified a standard router with a screen on its top surface, to make network activity at various scales visible and actionable at the point at which it reaches the house. We’ve used a version of the beautiful ‘Toner’ maps by our friends at Stamen in the design.

This looks to metaphors of ‘joyful work’ that we engage with already domestically – either mechanisms or rituals that we find pleasurable or playful even if they are ‘work’. Here there are feedback mechanisms that produce more affect and pleasure – for instance the feedback involved in tuning a musical instrument, sound system or a radio. Gardening also seems to be a rich area for examination – where there is frequent work, but the sensual and systemic rewards are tangible.

Network Murmurations

Different network activity has vastly different qualities. This is an experiment using projection mapping to visualise network activity in the spaces that the network actually inhabits.

When loading a web page a bunch of packets travel over WiFi in a dense flock. While playing internet video packets move in a dense stream that persists as long as the video is playing. On the other end of the scale a Bluetooth mouse or a Zigbee light switch where tiny, discrete amounts of data flow infrequently. Then there are ‘collisions’ in the network flow or ‘turbulence’ created by competing devices such as microwaves or cordless phones.

We use as inspiration a ‘murmuration‘ of starlings, a beautiful natural phenomenon. In this visualisation the ‘murmuration’ flits between devices revealing the relationships and the patterns of network traffic in the studio. Although this sketch isn’t based on actual data on network traffic, it could be, and it seems that there is great scope in bringing more network activity to our attention, giving us a sense of its flows and patterns over time.

The network is part of our everyday lives. Seeing the network is the first step to understanding the network, acting on it, and gaining an everyday literacy in it. So what should it look like? These video sketches are part of our ongoing effort to find out – a glimpse of our first phase of research, there is more work in the pipeline that we hope to be able to talk about soon.

Thanks to the Ericsson’s UX Lab for being great R&D partners.

A slightly shorter working week due to a Bank Holiday Monday in the UK, although the processes in motion around Little Printer don’t obey such things. It’s really a case of shovelling coal to keep the furnace burning as hot as possible!

So what’s been going on?

Matthew has been following up new leads, developing existing proposals and working with Helen and Simon as the year end figures start to be compiled. Matt Jones has returned from the US and brought us Hobo Bread from the Henry Ford Museum, this filled the studio with a amazing aroma of maple toasted walnuts and inspired James to bake his very own.

Jones has also been working with Joe on Sinawava drawing together the last few weeks worth of material across the different elements of the brief. We’ve enjoyed the company and exceptional handiwork of Eddie Shannon whose been further developing some of that work too.

Alex has been splitting time between Chuska and BERG Cloud, working with Jack and myself on graphics for the hardware.

Meanwhile Nick has been bouncing around the different levels (from user experience to chip level voltage transitions) of the BERG Cloud stack as we push ever closer, ably assisted by James and Alice chipping away at codebase items to do with partworks and scaling with delightful results.

Denise was ill for a bit, but it was grand to have her back, and to have Little Printers emitting her lovely proofs.

Jack’s been back in working on Chuska, LP and Bergcloud too.

I’ve been working quite closely with Simon around timings for LP and responding as quickly as possible to different suppliers at rather different times of the day.

Onwards!

(ps. 361 part of the Mian Chowla Sequence, apparently.)

Matt Webb sent us Music for Programming:

A series of mixes intended for listening

while programming to aid concentration

and increase productivity (also compatible

with other activities).

In our ongoing email series entitled ‘HTML5 watch’, we found Suit up or Die Magazine and the browser version of ‘Cut the Rope‘.

Simon sent us the IBM Glass engine, which ‘enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.’

I really like this blog from the people behind the NYT graphics department, showing some of the data sketching behind their infographics.

Nick found this really nice prototype for a cursor based iPad keyboard.

This is what happens when you put a Kinect and a projector over a sandpit:

And finally, this has blown my mind this week. Araabmuzik plays live sets on Akai MPCs. There’s a lot of clips floating around of him making hiphop beats on the fly, but this dubstep clip is particularly good. Enjoy.

It’s not as nice as the best Ferrari ever made though, which was the F40. F40 will never come up in weeknotes so here’s a crudely wedged in picture of what I consider to be automotive perfection.

But I digress. What are we up to this week?

Little Printer is consuming a lot of the office’s time at the moment. We’re just about to press the button on packaging manufacturing. Andy is working on Bridge boards and a million other things. Alice is working with Denise on API documentation and font testing, and meeting people to talk about publications. Nick and James are working on the claiming process, with lots of diagramming and whiteboarding and speaking. Matt Webb is meeting a lot of people and introducing Little Printer. It’s brilliant to see it all coming together.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on as well. Myself, Alice, James, Matt Jones and Jack are all working on wrapping up Chuska. Joe is back from his holiday and working on Sinawava – a few workshops, a bit of UI, and a bit of everything else. Helen and Simon are working their usual magic and making sure everything project and office related is running smoothly. Matt Jones is currently in the US and making me jealous with his pictures of nice looking beer. Jack is back in the office and flitting to and fro getting up to date with what’s been going on. Vanessa isn’t in today but is working a bit with Jack on sales stuff. Timo’s still away. I think we’re all looking forward to him coming back.

I think that’s it. It’s been fairly quiet today so far after a slightly radgy week last week (thank you Matt Webb for introducing me to that word, by the way). I like to end weeknotes on a musical edge though, and James did a sterling job yesterday of easing us into Monday with a nice bit of vintage Trojan Records amongst other things. See you on Friday for some Friday links.

SubMap is a visualisation for time and location data on distorted maps. The example above is a point of view map — a projection on a sphere around a particular point.

Planetary Resources is uncloaked this week as a company set up to mine the asteroid belt of our solar system. Yeah. We live in the future.

Planetary Resources is backed by, amongst others, James Cameron, the film director, and Larry Page, CEO of Google. Personally I am somewhat keen on getting society into space. But I didn’t expect it to be done by the International Legion of Billionaires. Brilliant that they’re doing it. Thanks, billionaires!

We are very much in love with Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera, which instead of a picture produces a text description of what you shoot, printed on a thermal printer!

Corner of a wood floored room with a tool chest, bike, stack of books, box leaning against the wall, an open door with a bag hanging off the doorknob, and a pair of closed double doors with cables hanging on the handles.

Gorgeous.

It gets better: the text descriptions are produced by anonymous individuals distributed around the world, and compensated for their work through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I love imagining the crowd of the internet all teeny tiny, all inside the camera.

Let’s wrap with a bit of self promotion.

The Lytro lightfield camera is one of those WHOA products — photos that you can refocus at any time. It’s magical. When I ran into them last week, they took a photo of Little Printer. Check it out! You can click to refocus (requires Flash).

We take it in turns to write weeknotes (there’s a rota on the wall), but I wasn’t around for All Hands this week. Matt Jones kept the following notes and emailed them to me afterwards.

Wolf 359 is an awesome star!

It's also where the stand against the Borg takes place.

MW - visits from the taiwanese and swedish. sales meetings. dealing with studio stuff

SP - sales and new project set-ups, capacity planning. LP publications.

VOC - working up proposals, case-studies, target list of consumer products companies, proposition development

NL - bridge code to get claiming working under the new crypto scheme with james, documentation of apis. more cleverness under the hood

AH - going to slovenia, LP production ready boards, bridge production

AB - chuska wrap-up, working on LP 

JD - working on realising the service design of LP with denise and nick, a lot of whiteboarding

DW - publications stuff for LP, packaging with alex, sales and proposals

HR - a mountain of scanning, making sure everyone gets paid, helping simon with his studio dashboard spreadsheets

AJ - LP packaging - deadline this week... wrapping up chuska...

MJ - working on sales, helping alex with wrapping up chuska and doing some work on sinawava

JS - ???

Thanks Matt!

So here’s what’s occupying my head this week…

1. I’ve been to a bunch of brilliantly exciting client meetings this week. One of the things that seems to have changed in how we approach projects, in 2012, is that there’s more collaboration with clients earlier in their initial process of developing the brief. We get to poke at much more why the project is happening, and what it’s meant to achieve, and we get to feed in what we find super interesting right now, and our intuitions. So I’ve spent a good amount of time every day this week very enthusiastic about this, setting up brilliant briefs, feeling expansive with ideas and possibilities.

Then for some reason there have been lots of meetings with interesting people this week: a trade delegation from Taiwan, organised by UKTI and hosted by ustwo; a group of executives from the Bonnier Group on a training day; more with individuals. These are good opportunities to speak out loud about projects and about BERG, and I find that talking is an act of recall, improvisation, and renewing of mental tracks during which valuable thinking happens.

Alongside that, to be honest, I’m having a pretty heavy week, dealing with some of that kind of stuff where (a) the best person in the company to deal with it is me, and (b) it’s tiring to think about.

Switching rapidly between conversations that delight me and mental work that grinds me down has its own particular effect: to be fully involved in each activity, the feelings appropriate to the other activity have to be contained or suspended for the moment, and it’s that continual packing/unpacking/repacking that creates a novel kind of tiredness, a kind that I can only describe as – I don’t know whether this word exists outside the UK – radgy.

Which means I’m having to watch myself. If I look at something and I don’t like it, is that a real opinion or am I just a bit annoyed at everything? If I think somebody is agitated about something, are they actually or is it my own agitation I’m seeing?

It’s good to be aware of this I suppose, but phew, turbulence is tiring.

2. Here’s the thing. If you asked me to sum up the mood of the studio this week, I’d say frazzled and radgy. Is that because it’s me that’s frazzled and radgy and so I’m seeing it where it doesn’t exist and focusing on it where it does? Or is it because everyone’s tired at once, certain streams of Little Printer are coming to a head and that’s pressured, a couple of recent projects might have been recently or might be currently in the middle of their “lost in the fog” phase (which often happens but you need to find your way out of it by knack or luck), we’ve had a crunchy couple of weeks of multiple projects at crunchy points anyway, and I’ve not been paying the Room enough attention?

Some combination of the two I suppose. These things happen.

And I guess this says a bunch about my temperament but I’m reminded of running and those real grinds of hills you sometimes encounter that make your muscles burn and your lungs feel like hot raisins. I love that feeling.

Mainly what I’ve been saying this week (about my own week) is “it’s all a lot of fun.” It’s not the kind of fun that I go to the pub for, sure, but it’s the kind of fun where you listen closely to your muscles and you cuddle up to the sting and you feel the push to keeping running up the hill as a resolved exuberance. And boy it stings, you can’t think of anything else.

As fun as it is, you make sure to do your stretches afterwards so that it doesn’t sting next time.

3. I haven’t done weeknotes for a while, and it’s a shame my turn on the rota has fallen on a week I’m feeling particularly introspective!

So let me also say that this week my general (and hidden from the studio) obsession with David Bowie’s 1972 single Starman continues.

Here it is on YouTube:

As you listen, listen out for (from this description by Thomas Jones) the build-up of tension as the song opens, and the sense of as he says “release and climax” when the chorus kicks in. Here’s what’s happening:

What happens is that for the first time, the melody hits the tonic; Bowie gets through 15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ he hits two of them, an octave apart.

It’s astounding to hear once you know what’s going on, grab your headphones and listen to it now. That first staaaar-maan gives me shivers.

I believe that the reason I can’t stop listening to the song is that here, in week 359, our own chorus hasn’t yet kicked in, and I’m impatient, I can’t wait.

I’m going to speak a little bit about infrastructure, phones, watches, time and timetables – following on from this short post of mine from a while back.

But – mainly I’m going to listen – to the amazing line-up of actual serving and ex-FBI heist experts that has been assembled for the evening…

Hope to see you there.

I’ll also be speaking at Studio-X on Monday evening, April 30th as part of their “Breaking Out and Breaking-In” series of events. Hopefully see you there!