It has become a commonplace of our culture that we live in a time of accelerating change. Take this extract from Stephanie Rieger and Bryan Rieger’s dConstruct presentation. Slides 52-56... It took radio 40 years to reach a market penetration of 50 million... by comparison we only had 10 years to 'adapt' to television... while … Continue reading The pace of change
Kelly Goto stands on the stage at Brighton's Dome, head down, staring at her palm, a perfect mimic of the modern smartphone user, and issues a simple challenge to the dConstruct audience: "Help people to stay upright." This is the pivotal moment at which digital design finds itself. After decades training people to gaze into … Continue reading At dConstruct, the real world is calling. It wants its designers back
In the corner of an attic room in one of Britain's oldest factories a small group are engaged in the assembly of a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. They - it - all of us - are there for Laptops and Looms, a gathering of people whose crafts cross the warp of the digital networked world with the … Continue reading The Dissolution of the Factories, or Lines Composed a Few Days After Laptops and Looms
So my two best things ever of the past fortnight are Punchdrunk's Doctor Who adventure the Crash of the Elysium and SVK, a comic from Warren Ellis, Matt "D'Israeli" Brooker and BERG. The former is a live performance for six to 12-year-olds, so if you're a grown-up you may have to borrow a child to … Continue reading A fanboy with a strange device
In my dayjob, mobile media, we spend a lot of time talking about platforms. Curiously we like to think of these platforms as eternally new and shiny. “Legacy” is is not a windfall from the preceding generation. It's a perjorative term. Sometimes we even set our old platforms on fire, which is strange, because, as … Continue reading The past is a platform from which we launch into the future*
Can one person be in three places at once? The most requested superpower among Foo Campers seems to be time travel. Maybe it's because with a dozen or more amazing things going on at once we'd like to loop round at the end of every day and do it all over again. With only one … Continue reading Breathless from the fumes of the data exhaust
The 17th Century terraformers who carved out the Canal du Midi enlisted an army of plane trees and cypresses to strengthen its banks. These days, sadly, many of the trees are dying off from disease and old age, but their roots still make for good moorings. Floating along the first canal to link two oceans, … Continue reading Press the green button to raise the ocean
Thanks to @MrAlanCooper for highlighting Rahul Sen's beautifully-written piece on the relevance of the Bauhaus movement to modern-day interaction design. The world would be a better place if more designers could cultivate such a deep appreciation of the history. I tried to comment on the Johnny Holland blog but was foiled by the pernicious Recaptcha, … Continue reading Mobile experience in use and ornament
Culture Vulture Emma challenges us all to see our home town anew through the eyes of a tourist. My contribution is over on the Culture Vulture blog: A railway that runs on coal and love And if you liked that, you might also like this: Good Engines a 12-page black-and-white newspaper telling the tale of … Continue reading A railway that runs on coal and love
This is my youngest son, Pascal, when he was two years old. He's looking sheepish because he's just picked an apple. It's an apple from the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, the orchard where Isaac Newton first conceived of gravity. We were drawn to this beautiful, remote farmhouse for a tea break on a long … Continue reading “The bit where the screen went black and you said ‘look up'”: on the irresistible pull of a story in the place where it happened
Cornelia Parker got the army to blow up a shed full of stuff and then hung the shards from an art gallery ceiling. It felt like a metaphor for almost all the talks at Matt Locke's brilliant event, The Story: everywhere narratives are fragmenting, and no one seems certain how to put them back together. … Continue reading Small pieces loosely joined: on the way home from the Story
We have three great presenters for the next Service Design Thinks Leeds on Tuesday 1 February 2011. Simon East, of Drivegain, on "Designing a new eco-driving service" Jean Mutton, Student Experience Project Manager, University of Derby, on "Designing the Enrolment experience" Lauren Currie, Snook, Glasgow, (by Skype link) on "How Snook do Service Design in … Continue reading New year, new thinks
The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we're going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We … Continue reading And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet
If knowledge and enthusiasm are the raw materials of our post-industrial society then The Culture Vulture is proof of the rich seam of the stuff that runs beneath Leeds and Bradford. It's all the more amazing because it's the independent, unfunded achievement of one person, Emma Bearman, who routinely marshals a large and eclectic mix … Continue reading Bee meets bonnet: the Other Fourth Plinth
So, narrative capital. The social scientist has it like this... ... the power [research participants] have to tell the stories of their lives. This ‘narrative capital’ is then located in the ‘field’ of social science research and Sen’s capability approach is introduced to prompt the question: What real opportunities do research participants have to tell … Continue reading Who wants to be a story millionaire? Some thoughts on the value of Patient Opinion
Matt Edgar writes here 