Really Interesting Group

In late 2009, RIG experimented with post-digital products. Datadecs was born as a short run of laser-cut Christmas decorations and a rapid-prototyped plastic snowman for 50 of our friends.

Two years later, the frenzy around rapid prototyping (as demonstrated by the latest V&A exhibition The Power of Making) and a sort of general comfort around laser-cutting led us to focus our efforts into making the rapid-prototyped snowman come to life into something everyone could enjoy.

After months of work, finding the right partners, building the information flow, we’re very proud to announce the launch of FRSTEE today.

FRSTEE is a Christmas decoration rendered from your Twitter data.

You enter a Twitter username and your data is turned into a unique 3D design file. The snowman’s head gets bigger with your number of followers, and the buttons down the front represent the number of years you’ve been using the service. Your Twitter username also appears at the bottom of the snowman. The 3D file is generated (thanks to Andy Huntington) and is sent for printing to our friends at Inition. We then ship it to you. Simple! You can use anyone’s Twitter handle, making it the perfect Christmas gift.

Turning an experiment into a micro-business in the world of post-digital is always an interesting challenge and we hope you’ll give it a go!

We were invited by Ogilvy last month to run a “Future Making” workshop in Berlin for their annual planner’s conference. Future Making is a word I like to use to describe working with a mixture of highly technical tools and no-tech tools. We had Arduinos of course (and a crew of Tom, Cefn, Adrian, Nick and Andy) and some very simple tools like scissors, Play-Doh, card, plastic eyes etc. We got people to learn the basics of coding, electronics, product design and web design in 4 hours. Unbeknownst to them they were building prototypes of “internet of things”-type products.

After 5 years of running these types of workshops, I’m interested in the cognitive process we go through of understanding technology through making something with our hands. It’s not about the end product, but about the process of understanding the limitations involved in the making, in understanding what the components are capable of, how they bend, how they break, what makes them tick.

This isn’t new of course, that’s how we’ve always learnt but in these times of tippy tapping on iPhones and shiny surfaces as the new baby sitters, it’s good to remember the advantages of the tangible, using the whole of the hand and detailed work. We’re surrounded by incredibly forgiving interfaces that don’t require us to be particularly good at details. I wonder how this might affect us or even our expectations of the physical world. I wonder if there’s something about gestural interfaces that sort of is an extrapolation of the keyboard in a way that’s not useful. Sortof like the desktop metaphor of the 90s and how we still use a floppy disk as an icon for saving. Will we look back on the iPhone experience in 20 years and find it dated because we’re using our hands in different ways? Will Wii-like interfaces that focus away from the hand and towards the whole body take over, or Google voice make hands also unecessary? Dystopian futures of atrophied hands or strong thumbs and indexes? A generation of pointers.

As Marshall McLuhan famously said: We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Whisky Pancakes from stml on Vimeo.

Matt J of the BERG has written a really wonderful response to my post last week on the New Aesthetic:

It’s the lossy-ness that reveals the grain of the material and process. A photocopy of a photocopy of a fax. But atoms. Like the 80′s fanzines, or old Wonder Stuff 7″ single cover art. Or Vaughn Oliver, David Carson.

It is – perhaps – at once a fascination with the raw possibility of a technology, and – a disinterest, in a way, of anything but the qualities of its output. Perhaps it happens when new technology becomes cheap and mundane enough to experiment with, and break – when it becomes semi-domesticated but still a little significantly-other.

When it becomes a working material not a technology.

Go and read Sensor-Vernacular. Also, if you missed it, I’m continuing the exploration at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com.

This week, I want to talk about time-based interfaces. Or Reminder UIs. Or: another thing I don’t have a name for but I shall make by showing.

Photojojo’s wonderful Time Capsule sends you your Flickr photos from a year ago. You hadn’t forgotten them, you just hadn’t thought about them for a while. They will make you bittersweet happysad, but mostly happy, and you will be glad you outsourced your brain to a machine that has the capacity to remind you to feel this way.

There’s an extra, semi-hidden feature in Time Capsule that most people haven’t noticed: Talk to the Future. At the bottom of every email you can send a message to your future self, which will be included in your reminder in a years time. (This is pretty close to Slowpoke, which is, er, still in Beta, but I will finish it, I promise, if someone tells me a really easy way to send 1 off postcards programatically, and pay for them.)

The thing that I am thinking of isn’t just reminder services, but here are a few more.

James Wheare‘s TwitShift (which he promises to bring back up eventually is back up) retweets you from a few years back (you can choose 1, 2 or 3). Sometimes this is good, or interesting, or revealing (see above). Sometimes less so: I think I had more fun in March at SxSW last year than I did staying in London this year. I had to turn it off for a while. But still. In an age, socially and technologically, when history seems to be flattening out, it is good to have tools to remind us that it has texture.

Foursquare And Seven Years Ago (awesome name) does a similar thing for places you went to. The data cloud is our memories. They may be Soylent Green; they might also be cryptosam, our own emissions that reveal in hindsight deeper truths. Every man his own stylo.

Also: Rob T is messing with me.

Finally, Amazon does something rather nice with the Kindle when you log in online:

Kindle stores all the bookmarks you make in books and while it would be even better if it allowed you to share them properly, it’s nice that it gives you this little bump when you log in. I’ve got hundreds of dog-eared books and I never revisit them: there’s a little link to jump back to something – a mark, an action, a moment – I made over a year ago.

There is more to the time interface than the reminder, and it’s different to a simple timeline, which is just red dot fever in history, but. But but but. There is something there. I was just in Manchester. I’d never been there before, but one of the strongest cultural influences of my life took place there: it echoed in the stones, it was around me. I could feel my hopeful 18yo self trembling at my shoulder. Time is a working material: we can cut and shape it.

Have a lovely weekend. See you a year ago, next year.

UPDATE! Totally forgot to mention that I was prompted to post this by reading Paul Ford’s Time’s Inverted Index, which you should read too, and everything Paul writes.

We were invited by the Danish Centre for Digital Urban Living to show some 20 Danish journalists and editors around East London. Every year, the centre organises trips to so-called “digital cities” and they’d been to Seoul and Tokyo before so this was quite a challenge.

Beyond the obvious Silicon Roundabout malarky, one of the things that makes East London special is the combination of creativity and cheap real estate. We invited some of our friends from the immediate area and beyond to come and do quick pecha kucha-like presentations of their latest work. We also walked around to visit some studios so that our guests could understand the advantages of living a 10 minute walk away from some rather special people. Beyond the hip graffiti outside #shitoffice (also known as our former office space around the corner) the area is not particularly pretty. It was a surprise for our guests to see beautiful insides to the grubby outsides and I thought I’d keep track of them.

We invited friends from OpenIDEO, Moving Brands, Poke, W+K, Darq, Wired UK, Pachube, The Cities Institute and more. It was grand and we had fun. We ended the day with a drink around the corner and dinner on Kingsland road of course. It’s about the little things.

For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products.

(Some of these things might have appeared here, or nearby, before. They are not necessarily new new, but I want to put them together.)

For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures:

→ Guardian gallery of agricultural landscapes from space.

→ Updates on Bin Laden’s Death, New York Times

→ Tracking iPhone locations with iPhoneTracker, from Ben on Flickr

The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.

→ Tracking iPhone locations (Ongoing personal project)

→ Landscape Permutation 2 (2010), David Semeniuk

Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.

→ Three screens (for London 2010)

→ FER IN 1970 & 2010, Buenos Aires, Back to the Future Series, Irina Werning

→ Luminant Point Arrays, by Stephan Tillmans

Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.

→ Diptych 1 on Flickr (ongoing personal project)

→ CV Dazzle by Adam Harvey

→ Megabytes of Spring, Reed+Rader for vmagazine.com.

(I could put a whole load more animated gif stuff in here like this and this and this and this. But I won’t. Except to say: animated gifs are the first artform of the internet, and they are in some way the future.)

→ German Tornado fighter with splinter camouflage.

→ Low resolution Lamborghini Countach, by United Nude

→ Lo Res Shoe, by United Nude

→ Fabricate Yourself, Karl D.D. Lewis

→ Telehouse West, by YRM Architects

The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.

→ Robert Hodgin’s Kinect Fatsuit

→ NYC Street Art, photographed by Benjamin Norman

→ Minecraft

→ Embryo Firearms by Cornelia Parker

→→→→→→→→→→ And so on and so forth.

UPDATE: continuing the exploration at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com – submissions welcome.

I’ve been spending most of the months of March & April traveling for what I can only describe as “bird perched looking down with curiosity” work with Lirec. It’s unbelievable fun working with people who have a totally different vocabulary for what can be put as “intelligent product design”. Went to Lyon first for Innorobo a mostly french trade show on robotics which Russell covered very well with this lovely video.

InnoRobo from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Nicolas Nova had invited me to speak at RoboLIFT which was running parallel to the trade show. I thought the best things there was the scary presentation from Noel Sharkey about drones and unmanned vehicles in the army across the world, and Patrizia Marti’s work in looking at the impact of Paro, the robot seal, in patients with Alzheimers and dementia. There was something incredible about the opposing roles of those robots in our society, one for efficient killing, the other for creating conversations where they had dissapeared. I’m also reading about “engenderneering” at the moment, but that’s boring.

Also this is strange but entertaining (seen at a tradeshow in Västerås at the EU Robotics Forum 2011) . I’m sure it should be a toy and nothing to do with the Army. They’d probably make more money from it.

Finally I spent my Friday afternoon in a cold but sunny Stockholm roaming the absolutely brilliant meta- exhibition of the Moma’s 1972 exhibition on modern living in Italy at the Architecture museum. It made me think of the domestic space as a place of constant creativity and flux in architecture in the 60s and 70s that seemed to have stayed there. I see more statements about smartness in cities than I see about homes in the little architectural projects I follow. Maybe there’s no money to be made in homes, but I think there’s tons of interesting things to be designed that are beautiful and practical and not only utopian. One of the studios showcased was Superstudio’s work and here’s something they made once for the Milan Furniture Fair (which is on this week incidentally).

We were lucky enough to be invited to view the HSBC archives the other day. A fascinating treasure trove of stuff from 1776 onwards.

There’s some wonderful stuff in there.

Gorgeous lettering.

Monkey business is good business.

Inevitably hilarious pictures of computers from not that long ago.

Newspaper!

Tates Improved Arithmometer

And lots of other wonderfully fascinating stuff. Loads more picture here.

The HSBC archives are open to the public by appointment only. We’re interested in archiving. Makes us wonder what other archives large corporation hold. Are they open to the public? Are they online? Anyone know?

Right then. It’s my turn. Actually it was my turn three weeks ago, and I’ve not been forgiven for missing it. RIG exudes an image of calm and relaxation, but inside it’s a pressure cooker of stress and fear.

Anyway.

I spent a bit too long playing Rock Paper Scissors against a weak AI. Specifically, an AI that’s been designed to optimise its game by analysing the patterns from over 200,000 previous moves. James and I really liked the way you can ‘turn over’ the computer player to see how it’s thinking. It’s a great example of how to explain how algorithms work. As we weave AI into more and more things we own and use, we’re going to need more of this.

I’ve been overly interested in Bitcoin (the wiki is more useful), a virtual P2P currency. It’s like a currency, but backed by solutions to computationally difficult problems, rather than gold. It’s a crypto-currency. It’s P2P because there’s no central point of trading or distribution – it’s like BitTorrent. Which all sounds fanciful, until you discover that yesterday the Bitcoin market was worth $4.8 million, and $0.14 million was traded in 3100 transactions. The video on the home page explains it quite well. And then you can watch the markets. Interesting. Maybe.

I loved the aesthetic of this series of photos by Stephan Tillmans, called Luminant Point Arrays.

They show tube televisions in the moment they are switched off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light.

Aaron Straup-Cope, of our friends at Stamen, whose Prettymaps you may have seen recently, has produced more magic with Polymaps and OpenStreetMaps. Airport City is a map of airport runways and motorway on and off ramps. He explains it best.

And Aaron’s Prettymaps also adorn the cover of this custom guidebook made by Blaine Cook for last week’s SXSW 2011. Inspired by and similar to James’ bespoke guidebooks from SXSW 2010, but Blaine generated it dynamically, using wkhtmltopdf. He tells me the code will be released on Github soon.

But most importantly it’s Phil’s birthday today. Happy Birthday Phil! We’re off for Mexican. Have a nice weekend.

Hello, James here. It’s almost-weekly RIGnotes time!

Alex won the week, obviously, with the launch of her marvellous Curious Scarves. She also wrote a great post about why they cost the amount they do: thoughts on the cost of making things.

This is is important; it crosses over into a lot of what we do, from making newspapers to printing books on demand to bespoke electronics. Physical things have more weight in the world, and new technologies make these things ever more doable, obtainable: the internet as cornucopia machine. Anything that can be automated can be hooked up to the internet and opened to the public, whether it’s flat-pack furniture or clothing.

But there’s always a trade-off. And people are hooked up to the network too: both digital freelancers and digital sweatshops. What we choose to make, how we make it, and what we’re willing to pay for it, have real consequences. The network is real, it has weight in the world too.

Anyway, it’s not Summer yet. In fact it’s still pretty chilly. You should probably buy a scarf.

This is Ben, a couple of years ago apparently. Russell and Ben have been in the office a lot this week, which has been nice. The only thing I know they’ve done is set up a ladder for Words With Friends. Important stuff, although I’m sure there was more.

Ben blogged a bunch of really beautiful hand-drawn type as part of this post on fonts and Fairtrade Fortnight. I’m always really struck by this stuff when I’m abroad, whether it’s hand-lettered shopfronts in Africa, or beautifully decorated trucks and taxis in the Indian subcontinent. Here are some favourites from Mauritius, Mexico and India – and there’s a whole set of Cuban billboards.

Ah, I feel warmer already.

Russell announced Interesting 2011, which sounds mad, but I bet it will be awesome fun:

Boring, Playful and The Story are all now much better ‘people talking about stuff’ events than Interesting. Better curation. Better organisation. Better names. And I don’t want to organise something similar but not as good.

So, this year it’s going to be more about activities than talks. And it’s going to be divided into sections run by different people.

And there’s going to be another Radio Roundabout – next week! Friday! (Tom promises he’ll update the homepage. He promised he’d do RIGnotes last week too.)

Russell also did a whole series of posts on interfaces and screens, all accompanied by lovely pictures. You probably follow Russell anyway, but seriously: multi image projector pop, screen inflation and beautiful buttons are eye candy. And then there’s this, which we won’t talk about again:

Russell wanted me to mention Instaprint, which is very nice. It prints your Instagram pictures using that Zink stuff we’ve mentioned before. I love Instagram: it’s a service that sits at another level of attention: not as intense as Twitter, not as serious as Flickr. It fits its medium, the iPhone, perfectly. Instagram pictures look rubbish on the web, or uploaded to Flickr, but the filters are very well chosen to make rubbish photos look good in your hand. But most importantly, it’s the first service friends of mine who aren’t web geeks have used socially outside Facebook (“a swimming pool on an ocean liner”). I hate Facebook, so it’s really nice hanging out with them there.

Tom and Phil have been knee-deep in code all week, it would appear, with all the associated coding frowns and coding air punches that accompany that. This is the meat, but it’s hard to talk about. So I won’t. But you know: they’re the best. Phil did sneak out an awesome post on Trailers As Movies which you should go read now.

In friends-of-RIG news, We Are Words And Pictures announced Paper Science 4, which looks even more awesome than the previous 3, if such a thing is possible. Adrian Hon’s A History of the Future in 100 Objects got funded and will be marvellous. BERG’s SVK project decloaked in Wired.

I’ve mostly been writing stories for bots, which I’ll talk about another time. And finding out about a New York City lamppost mystery, the Quaid Conspiracy and Chinese “officialdom” novels.

My favourite thing this week was You Are Listening To Los Angeles. Ambient audio overlaid on LA police scanners. Dreamy, sussurating… the sound of a city as a whole organism. We did a hyped up version of that sort of audiomashing on Wednesday in the office for the shuttle landing, combining this audio feed with this one. It was fun. And while I’m talking about audio, I’m going to tell you again to subscribe to Love+Radio, the best podcast in town, and I will not stop telling you until you do.

That’s enough of my rambling. Beer O’clock. Have a lovely weekend.

Clay Shirky once said: “Anyone who’s predicting the decline of big cities has already met their spouse.” and Nassim Nicholas Taleb finds “living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters – you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”

I’ve been wondering about life in the big smoke and the cultures of serendipity that are unique to London. I’ve also been fascinated by English behaviour in the public sphere. The multitudes of fashion subcultures are tools that people really use to increase awareness of each other without having to say a word. Speaking to strangers in public is awkward at the best of times, so dating and flirting becomes a very different game, especially when it’s been this cold for months now (what with hiding under 3 layers of clothing, feeling grumpy because the sun sets at 5, and trying not to lose it in the Underground). That public sphere is seldom connected to the rich and strange landscapes of digital experiences we have through places like Facebook or online dating sites (with exceptions).

A few months ago, Damaris and I started thinking about how to bridge the two. Clothing as a first step to encourage conversation between 2 people with something in common and also clothing for comfort and warmth.

Months later, I’m proud to introduce Curious Scarves, unisex scarves that allow you to share you relationship status with the world.

You have the choice of 3 patterns that signal “looking for men”, “looking for women” and “looking for both”. They come in 2 sizes, a cravat type and the all-encompassing-wrap-around-twice type.

Soon you’ll be able to order them with a bespoke tag with a word of your choice embroidered on it. Something pithy, smart or your twitter username perhaps?

The pattern is inspired by the game of noughts and crosses, an easy visual system to use that only makes sense if you know what it refers to. It’s not screaming out your availability, it’s keeping things subtle.

We are collaborating with Alexandra Jarup, a graduate of the London College of Fashion to machine-knit them on demand. Slow-fabbing if you will. Tom built the website of course.

This is very much an experiment in the role of fashion and the public sphere. I’m curious to see which models are more popular, which designs, which colours. Having dealt with the world of technology for the past 5 years, this is a very different sort of project and I’m very excited. I hope you like them.