Really Interesting Group

Some things I noticed last week (mostly videos) include:

The lovely Tom Armitage who works next door at BERG did an awesome presentation on games mechanics for Interesting North.

Lovely video of robots in Brixton from Kibwe Tavares

Daniel Weil from Pentagram was talking about drawing as a way of working through and across projects and ideas. Made me want to draw more again.

Molly Steenson linked to this lovely video of pneumatic tubes in Paris in the movie Baisers Volés (titles from the Charles Trenet song if you must know).

Happy Monday!

When we started the Really Interesting Group, the goal was to build an organisation that would support smart people working together on interesting projects. To help each other out when needed, and to compliment each other’s skills. To share resources, and to be able to take on larger, meatier projects, for both ourselves and others.

Newspaper Club was our first major project for ourselves, but in 2010 we’ve also worked with Apple, the BBC, Innocent Drinks, and others.

In the first week of 2010, we moved into our space on Scrutton St, and invited some of our friends to join us. Despite a little bit of flooding in the first few weeks, it’s grown into great space, full of interesting people and strange objects. We’re very lucky.

And naturally, by being in the same space and a friendly bunch, we chat and regularly help each other out, with everything from logo designs to sinusoidal tidal wave calculations. In many ways, part of what we set out to achieve with the Really Interesting Group has been achieved in the space itself – the architecture is the organisation.

2011 seems like a good time to formalise some of those relationships, to combine forces in a more explicit way, and to explore wider opportunities in the space where the web meets the world.

So, we’re proud to announce that Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Gareth Williams, James Bridle and Phil Gyford have joined the Really Interesting Group. All of these people need no introduction, but that would just be rude.

Alex is an interaction designer. She’s been working on internet-of-things products and services since 2005. Until recently she ran a design studio called Tinker London. Ask her about emotional robots.

Gareth helps start-ups and young businesses establish themselves and grow, working as a manager, non-executive director and consultant. He knows his CapEx from his FTSE. And he can write too, often on his own blog, or The Dabbler.

James is a publisher, writer and technologist. Recently, you might have spotted his Iraq War Wikihistoriography or Romance Has Live Too Long Upon This River. In 2010 he also talked at dConstruct 2010 and Web Directions South, about the space between books, history and web.

Phil has been designing and building websites since before most people have heard of the web. His clients include Google, the BBC and Channel 4. You might have heard of his Pepys’ Diary project, or Today’s Guardian.

This is very exciting for us. It gives us some clearly defined units of people making, doing and thinking, that you can hire. It gives us more opportunity to put our own products and services into the world. And it means we get to work more closely with people whose work we greatly respect and whose company we enjoy.

If you’d like to chat to us about working together, please drop us a line: workwithus@riglondon.com.

Over a year ago, we designed Silicon Roundabout hoodies as presents for the Dopplr team who were moving to Berlin when they joined Nokia. Since Matt Biddulph, Dopplr co-founder, had originally coined the name, it seemed a good way of honouring his contribution to the friendly community in this neck of town. And we made a few for ourselves.

But lots of people seemed to like them, and kept asking us where they could get them. Well, ask no more!

It’s taken us a while, but we’re now selling Silicon Roundabout t-shirts and hoodies in a variety of colours and sizes, and you can buy them direct from our Spreadshirt shop.

And not only that – we’ve also released the logo as an Adobe Illustrator file, EPS and JPG. It’s licensed under Creative Commons (attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives). If you want to do anything that doesn’t fall under that, please ask us. We’re friendly.