If you live in, work in, or occasionally visit a city, any city, but especially one in England's North, please set aside half an hour or so some time soon to watch and read two powerful critiques of the prevailing techno-determinist vision of the so-called "smart city". All 11,000 words of Dan Hill's post on … Continue reading Make mine a messy city: Riot Sim and the City that Didn’t Riot
For the past four years a story has accreted on this blog. It's a meta-narrative, a story about stories. Looking back, I believe the arc began with the partial collapse of Leeds' Temple Works. That's what led me to encounter the people who made this city, and then to talk about them in pixels, in … Continue reading How’s it going to end?
I once worked in a Parisian office where the walls were emblazoned with encouraging slogans in English, "share ideas!" "create!" "go!" But my favourite was always the half metre-high vinyl entreaty to: "do it simple!" In my more cynical moments I would claim this word art spoke volumes about the culture of multi-national business, more … Continue reading The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things
Notes from my presentation at Bettakultcha, Leeds Town Hall, on Wednesday 9 January 2013. What an amazing venue. I could spend the next five minutes just talking about this building. I could tell you how the Leeds Corporation raised a special tax and set a budget of £35,000 to build a grand new town hall. … Continue reading Five minutes, one year, two buildings, a thousand stories
SPOILER ALERT: It might not end well for the natives. Having spent more than a decade with job titles alternately containing the words "product strategy" and "customer experience," I'm all for the sentiment behind John Willshire's slogan: "Make Things People Want > Make People Want Things". And when I hear this thought presented as some … Continue reading Ad agencies are discovering products like Columbus discovered America
A post rescued from my draft folder... An invitation to speculate on "data as a currency" at the Leeds Digital Conference forced me to crystalise a long-held unease with metaphors that cast data as any kind of commodity or medium of exchange. It has become commonplace, even among people I trust and respect, to say things … Continue reading Data is neither oil nor currency. It’s much more serious than that
It's been a busy year. I start posts and don't finish them. Below are the working titles of some posts languishing in my drafts folder. Please vote for the one you'd most like me to finish.
For my wife's family it is the crockery. Staffordshire-raised, they can't resist upturning plates and bowls to check their makers' marks - Doulton, Wedgwood and what-have-you. And my own father grew up near Sheffield, so in restaurants I also study the knives and forks - David Mellor was a Noughties Brit cuisine staple. But Leeds, well … Continue reading Three machines made in Leeds
Excerpt from early C20th Children's Encyclopedia - date uncertain The day will come (he said) when we are all forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha covers, and iron bands will only be found in museums, and a person who wishes to speak to a friend but does not know where he is will call him with … Continue reading Excerpt from early C20th Children’s Encyclopedia – date uncertain
It's Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. In previous years I've written about Elizabeth Montagu, Lizzie Le Prince and Laura Willson. This time I want to highlight the unique achievements of Eleanor Coade, creator and entrepreneur behind one of the most durable … Continue reading For Ada Lovelace Day: Eleanor Coade, technology entrepreneur of the 18th Century
This is the text of my presentation at the Leeds Digital Conference on 12 October 2012. If you like this, you may also like my TEDxLeeds 2010 talk, The Makers of Leeds. In 1763, the Corporation of London, wishing to make way for bigger boats on the Thames, ordered the removal of a central pier … Continue reading The future beneath our feet
Friday's Leeds Digital Conference should be great. Look out for Dean Vipond, Victoria Betton, Tim Medcalf, Robin Cramp, Simon Zimmerman and lots of other speakers doing amazing work in the city. I predict I will be on a panel about "the future" with Tom Woolley from the National Media Museum and Steve Peel from IBM. … Continue reading What to look forward to at the LЗЭDS DIGITДL CФИFЗЯЭЙCЗ
On opening the great arch at London Bridge, by throwing two arches into one, and the removal of a large pier, the excavation, around and underneath the sterlings of that pier, was so considerable, as to put the adjoining piers, that arch, and eventually the whole bridge, in great danger of falling. The previous opinions … Continue reading Mr. SMEATON IN UR RIVR FIXIN UR BR1DGE
The fantastic culmination of James Burke's talk at dConstruct last week set me thinking about a misleading trope that seems to recur with regularity in our discourse about technology. Through his 70s TV series James was a childhood hero of mine. I wrote about his talk in my summary of the event, and thanks to … Continue reading A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home
The web is 21, says Ben Hammersley, it can now legally drink in America. And yet, as it strides out into young adulthood, it has much to learn. At dConstruct we hear some of those lessons - ones about humility, unpredictability and the self-appointed tech community's responsibilities to the rest of humankind. I agree with … Continue reading dConstruct threads: Arrogance, uncertainty and the interconnectedness of (nearly) all things
Matt Edgar writes here 