February 2013
2 posts
Joining the dots to here. Button badges from my...
I’ve long been interested in the narrow gauge railways of Wales and in the Ffestiniog in particular. This interest was formed on wet “summer” holidays in Wales. They were wonderful and so is the railway. It is a deeply historical place. Engineering problems of great magnitude were solved there with great ingenuity and skill. It was an honour and a bit of a schoolboy’s dream...
Making things that people want.
For a little while now I’ve had a feeling of disquiet about the 20th century and the cycle of overconsumption fuelled by mass media and economies of scale of mass manufacturing, and I’ve been fascinated in what the alternatives are and how we explore them. I’ve also been rather obsessed by this image from John Willshire.
For many years now I’ve made model trains....
January 2013
1 post
Things I loved from 2012 (better late than never)....
Kenneth Grange “Making Britain Modern” technically from 2011 but I only read it last year. Wonderful. Made me think that no matter how much we pour ourselves into web user centricity and product thinking we have a hell of a way to go before anyone even comes close to product designers like Grange. Also we need to think about design debt as well as technical debt as a price to pay for...
November 2012
6 posts
Printing stainless steel bits from the future to...
tl;dr We’ve printed a stainless steel part of the engine with Shapeways to test it’s strength and suitability and as a test for printing an important part.
This is part 5 of a series of blog posts. You can read part 1 where we talk about why we’re doing this and part 2 where we talk about laser scanning the steam engine and part 3 where we print out the locomotive and parts of it....
Capturing rust and patina with lots of pixels.
tl;dr The geometry is only part of the record of the condition, in some ways the more important data is in the condition; the rust, the patina and the wear marks.
This is part 4 of a series of blog posts. You can read part 1 where we talk about why we’re doing this and part 2 where we talk about laser scanning the steam engine and part 3 where we print out the locomotive and parts of it.
...
Printing trains.
tl;dr Now we’ve got the data from the laser, the obvious thing to do is to print the steam engine or parts of it at a scale of up to 1:1
This is part 3 of a series of blog posts. You can read part 1 where we talk about why we’re doing this and part 2 where we talk about laser scanning the steam engine.
Taking the laser data as a starting point the next part of the journey was for...
Scanning a steam train with fricking laser beams.
tl;dr We scanned a real steam train with fricking laser beams and what emerged was better than we could have expected.
This is part 2 of a series of blog posts. You can read part 1 here, where we talk a bit about why we’re doing this project to record a steam locomotive called Winifred and the historical context.
As part of a generation who grew up with Tron and the digitisation scene...
Preserving the past with the near future.
tl;dr For the past few months we’ve been exploring how we can use emerging/partly emerged technology to help in the preservation/recording of a very special steam locomotive.
This is Winifred. She is in many ways a very ordinary steam locomotive, however through a quirk of fate she is quite extraordinary.
She was built in 1885 for the Penrhyn Slate Quarry. For most of her 80 year working...
The Best Desk in the World Ever.
A couple of times in the past few months this has been my desk. Tomorrow I’ll be starting to tell the story of how and why and discussing how it will carry on being “the best desk ever” every now and then for the next couple of years.
September 2012
3 posts
User centric design and real stories in hobbies
tl;dr Some thoughts which have been percolating for a few months part written and now hurriedly rushed out in a Brighton cafe so that people don’t think I just stole it all from Tom Armitage’s dConstruct talk.
My current fascination with 3D printing model railway items stems from what I now realise is years of dissatisfaction with my hobby; making a model railway. I’m currently...
While I was Sleeping (Oxford) - a tale of modern...
tl;dr I quite like making models of trains. Here’s a short story about how I seem to have become a manufacturer where I did almost none of the work especially as I slept for most of the time due to contracting Chickenpox.
Matt Webb’s 100 hours project things have long fascinated me. I started one recently, about making and marketing small niche products, the sort that 3D printing...
July 2012
4 posts
Tim Berners-Lee and 2001/2010 : Open and closed.
For some reason I can’t get one set of images from last night’s Olympic Opening Ceremony out of my head. It’s the moment where Tim Berners-Lee is revealed underneath the house, typing at a NeXT Cube and then the words THIS IS FOR EVERYONE emerge in lights in the crowd and on Twitter. I’d show you a video, but LOCOG are removing them all from YouTube. The irony of that is...
What a difference a year (and a bit) makes.
tl;dr The GDS has the potential to change how government serves citizens. This is a story about the little bit I did about a year ago. I’m quite proud of it.
I had originally meant to write this post a month ago, but Chickenpox as an adult does some funny stuff to you.
A year ago and a month ago, just about now from what I remember, I was nervous. Very nervous. I was also probably quite...
Why I think the most crucial thing that the...
tl;dr The best thing I think that could be done for accelerating smaller startups in Tech City could well be to persuade providers to provide Fibre to the Cabinet and/or Fibre optic broadband.
Today Mike Butcher gets to talk to the GLA about the importance of broadband to the tech startup industry in London and I just wanted to add a few of my comments.
We’ve all heard the horror stories...
Learning to make products in a different way. A...
Every now and then the future plonks itself on your desk or doormat in a way you can’t ignore it. That happened recently when some items I’d found on Shapeways arrived. It made me think how services such as Shapeways change the possibilities of hobbies and of small cottage industries alike.
It is the essence of digital extended into the physical world and it brings with it that sense...
April 2012
2 posts
In which I come over all Herbert Read about...
Yesterday I was transfixed by images of Coventry Cathedral on BBC 1 and not just the extraordinary modern geometric post-Brutalist architecture of Basil Spence’s new St Michael’s but some of the art and design contained within it.
It is a building in and of an age, just as we are now “in and of age”. The environment and recent history of that age bleeds through into it,...
Play. An API explorer mashed up with a tutorial.
I had the pleasure of visiting Henrik and David at Readmill at their lovely offices in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. I’ve written about Readmill before and I stand by all of my comments of it being a lovely meaning full social product. I have a great deal of respect for them as a pair of founders and as a team focussing relentlessly on making a beautiful and well designed product.
As...
March 2012
5 posts
That women in tech thing...
It’s not worth for a moment going into why we’re all talking about sexism within the technology industry or why there are less women in tech than men, other people have written about it eloquently.
Earlier I suggested we used that most “now” tech industry word to pivot the conversation to asking “Why there were so many misogynists in tech?”. I was surprised at...
While I was Sleeping (Berlin)
Not quite resigning.
Earlier today I considered resigning my place on the Mayor’s Digital Advisory Board which I have been proud to have served on since its inception. I considered resigning over the change to the Mayor of London Twitter account to Boris Johnson. What appears to be a simple change of name is not just that in my opinion. The followers and engagement, built up throughout tenure in public service,...
Products, not campaigns or products as campaigns.
I’ve spent nearly a year thinking about this fantastic campaign by The Guardian that Ben Terrett worked on (he talks about them here). Like all good things it works on an exceptional number of levels, some of which are only just revealing themselves to me after a lot of thinking. It struck me as brilliant straight away, only now do I think I fully realise why.
For starters the adverts...
You're doing it wrong. Write your algorithms...
This misplaced advert annoyed me more than I can say. It appeared next to the picture of my best friend’s daughter who turned 16 today. It was posted by my best friend’s wife. Facebook know’s they’re married. They’ve already given over that data. The only other person who commented on it was a mutual friend from school. He’s also married and Facebook knows...
December 2011
1 post
Frictionless and frictionfull sharing and where...
Since F8 I’ve been thinking a lot about frictionless sharing and what it means and in particular how I feel about it. I think it’s best summed up for me by bastardising a Douglas Adams quote - ”I love frictionlessly shared things. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Frictionlessly shared things feel devoid of meaning to me. They were shared automagically...
November 2011
4 posts
DACS Open. Working with artists to find new ways...
Something I’m very proud of and honoured to be involved in launched yesterday. It’s a project called DACS Open. Its name harks back to events such as the Whitechapel Open which was an annual event which was renowned for supporting the local community of artists, many of who moved to East London because of the low rents for both housing and studio space.
It’s important to...
A Dream Within a Dream and the futility of...
Mark Simpkins and I took a very different approach to the Honda Hackday to the ones that we both take both at hack days and in our working lives. We decided to make some art together. Mark’s talked a bit about it here. We jokingly called the movement the Algorithmicists. Both of us have wanted to explore how you make things to provoke thought and invite inquiry in the observer and have no...
How not to do developer launch events and an...
I just received more details about the launch event for a competition to engage developers to make things for the much hyped Nokia Lumia 800. I love Nokia. I actually like Windows Phone 7. I had a play with a Lumia 800 when buying my iPhone 4S. It’s a lovely device and with the right apps it could possibly do well.
However, the event is on a Saturday, and it’s three hours long. Ten am...
Give Us Your Dream
Mark Simpkins and I are collaborating on a project for Honda Hackday. It’s all about dreams and algorithmically scoring them, in the loosest of senses, and then doing something physical with them where we write them out on paper and then do something with that. I won’t give it all away now.
If you’d like to be involved, and we’d love you to, please just tweet your dream...
October 2011
4 posts
The Later On Today Guardian, iPad apps and news...
A few short days ago Dan Roberts and the rest of The Guardian team did something really rather extraordinary and yet really rather simple - they opened up the news lists as Google Docs. It was extraordinary for two reasons for me. Firstly the news lists are a prized asset; less scrupulous newspapers have bribed people at competitors to see them. One way of viewing the move is that opening them...
The Palace and the Conway Hall. State and "church"...
So last week something quite monumental happened. Many digital people, myself included were invited to Buckingham Palace. I say myself included at the start not from wanting to big myself up, but because last time someone wrote a blogpost like this, the excellent post by Bobbie Johnson, someone said that it was sour grapes about not being part of the in crowd. Knowing Bobbie I can’t think of...
Thinking. Different
Today my 20 month old son delivered the perfect epitaph to Steve Jobs. He closed my laptop. Humanity over technology. You’re right Tom. Steve was right too on that.
When we started the Activate Summit at The Guardian it was designed to be all about the people who do, not the people who talk. The people who do the hard thing and ship, not just talk about it. The summit also had to be about...
September 2011
8 posts
In the open internet very few people see you click
I like many others watched bits of the F8 keynote the other day. Just as with the unveiling of the Like button over a year ago I watched and I worried a little.
To me the Like button is a human powered web crawler. Most crawlers index the known web. When pressed, the Like button indexes the declaratively important web. Some may say that it indexes the visited web because the Like button is an...
Glanceable →
iamdanw:
Barnes has started a tumblr tracking glanceables
Well that got quite recursive quickly.
Toursquare. A little audiotour thing full of...
I’m getting rather fond of the Foursquare API at the moment and more and more with the service. In particular I’m liking the way that both the dataset and the API calls are, as the service is getting more used, becoming a bucket of sentiment and post-hoc intent wrapped around the geopoints, rather than just being the bare geopoints as it felt last year when I first played with the API....
Making meaningful and emotional utility out of...
I’ve been pondering how we can generate digital peripheral vision of late and this utilitarian miserablist sounding title relates to some recent thinking and playing about how to do it. Parish notice boards and signs attached to lamp posts do all sorts of wonderful things, but one major thing they do is they trigger our peripheral vision; that most basal of responses, the response which...
Ten years ago and today
It’s rare you get to look at an exact decade of your life. We all know what happened ten years ago. We can discuss deeply and from a vast collection of perspectives if and how it has changed the world on a macroscopic level. Today felt moving and poignant though as a result of seeing what changes ten years has wrought.
Ten years ago today I had lunch with my boss, Theo Bloom. My then...
Pondering the Kindle Android tablet vs iPad and...
Yesterday something really clicked for me. On my way to Shropshire Geek Fest Revolution I had some, ahem, issues with my rather beloved MacBook Air. It refused to read the memory stick with my as yet unfinished presentation on it. Since I had to change at Birmingham New Street I went into the Apple Store in the Bullring to do some file transfer things and to see if I could get someone to look at...
Big Bang Blues (Restaurants and communities of...
I currently have a bit of a sad face. It’s nothing really bad, it’s about a restaurant. My favourite restaurant in Oxford, my new home town, closed just under a week ago. It’s not because it’s economically unviable, it’s due to property development that will lead to a greater creep of that great homogoniser, chain supermarkets, into an area which is largely about...
August 2011
3 posts
Sheddable identities and why banning people from...
If anyone wants to think deeply about the structure of social networks they should gaze deeply at this image created by Isaac Hepworth of Twitter. It’s a universe of mentions, but it, like all things in social network land, is more organic than shallow thoughts on something digital would belie.
The trouble is that lots of people who don’t spend their life involved in digital things...
Thoughts on my week at Young Rewired State 2011.
I spent lots of last week in the company of younger people. They were inspiring and wonderful and we must do all we can as a group to help them to shine. Not really that they need much help in that. I was proud and privileged to be a mentor for Young Rewired State.
When all around are seeing “youth” and young people in a slightly negative and derogatory way, as a result of the...
Things to be proud of: Young Rewired State (post 1...
These last few days and weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the last year and things I’ve meant to write about, but for many reasons just failed to. So let’s start here. Young Rewired State. It’s just awesome. The idea of getting young people to show off their talents, their creativity, their energy and drive and their pure chutzpah is wonderful. It also is part of the...
July 2011
1 post
March 2011
4 posts
Day three of the many phones challenge.
Well the BlackBerry
So the BlackBerry is now back in the cupboard. The battery life is great, it makes calls just fine, but then so does my ancient Ericsson T29 which may get an airing. The battery life may be great as I never really used the internet on it. The browser is an abomination and very hard to use without a touch screen. Couldn’t get BlackBerry App World installed (dear phone...
The little festival that could.
Two years ago, some amazing things happened. It snowed for one, and we all stood out in the snow, queuing to go into an East End warehousey type building. We did it because one of us had organised something amazing, partly without organising (although there was a lot of that going on behind the scenes). Amanda Rose, she’s the one on the right of this picture which is one of my favourite...
The few weeks of the many phones
So, this post starts with a cautionary tale. iPhones are not good coffee stirrers. I didn’t find this out, our one year old did. Actually I believe the coffee was successfully stirred, it’s simply that the iPhone didn’t enjoy the experience. I’m all for children learning through experimentation and play, just not with my phone, and certainly not with my phone about 2 months...
Get excited and have a haircut
Not quite sure that’s what Matt Jones said by the way. Ah. That’s better, that’s it.
Haircuts have been on my mind of late though. I haven’t had one for a while and clearly it shows. I started thinking a tiny bit more about them this week when I read some posts from the ever thought provoking Dave McClure and my eyes rested on this very lovely picture of a list of...
February 2011
2 posts
From Dusk till Dawn - an ambient "art radio" for...
As I said at the start of my lightning talk at the Guardian SxSW hackday today “hello, I’m Chris and I’m an insomniac”. Often when I travel, I suffer really badly from insomnia. The best things I’ve found to switch my brain off so I can sleep are either old episodes of the IT Crowd, Father Ted or Black Books, or even better where I can find it, the Discovery...
What if you could see through the walls of every...
Recently I was lucky to be invited to speak at Culture Hackday. It was a truly wonderful two days and I’ll write up soon the thing that we made there.
There’s a video of my talk I’ve embedded below and a slight reworking of the slide deck with some notes. It outlines some of the aims and aspirations I have in working for the startup formerly known as #newstartup but now...
