jaggeree

Joining the dots to here. Button badges from my youth, the Rev. W. Awdry and Cory Doctorow.

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:29:46 +0000

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 to visit the famous Boston Lodge works and be allowed to walk around as people worked and to work there yourself for a couple of days.

A trawl through my old box of enamel and button badges that my parents had kept was like an archeological dig into my childhood interests and one which yielded these treasures. Badges of one of the engines that we scanned last week. It feels almost unfathomable in many ways.

Prince and the other England locomotives were old favourites. They had that fascinating quality of looking both old and very industrial but also very modern for their age - you knew that when built they were right at the cutting edge - the old new modernity. At some point in time every piece of history flips over from being the future in its own timeline.

I also liked them as one of my favourite characters in the Railway Stories, the original ones, was based on Prince. I always liked the stories about the small narrow gauge railways best. They were all based loosely on reality, mainly at the Talyllyn Railway. They also didn’t involve the tin pot dictatorship of the Fat Controller which is quite hard to read as an adult to children in this century.

This one, Duke the Lost Engine, was the favourite of my books from my childhood, this almost pristine copy is the one I bought for my boys.

One of my favourite books of my adulthood is Makers by Cory Doctorow. It had such a profound effect on me but I had no idea what to do with it for a long while. It instilled in me the idea that we could all become manufacturers of things. We didn’t need to own factories, we just had to invent things, to make products that others might want. To become, to use a wonderful word from my youth that Kevin Marks reminded me of recently, boffins. (When I was younger I always really wanted to be a boffin. Maybe that’s why I did a chemistry degree - the labcoat came with the course.)

So fast forward a few years from Makers to seeing some 3D prints at a model show and being impressed by their existence but knowing in my heart that they weren’t accurate models of things, they were caricatures and blunt ones at that. Having made very accurate models for a long while I knew that there had to be a better way to do some of this, but also that the route to an accurate end result is accurate data at the start.

The cover of Makers has always fascinated me, the sprues on which pieces of the real world sit have a profound nature to them. That’s what we’re setting out to do with The Flexiscale Company. To record physical things accurately in minute detail and to then split them up and put them on a sprue so that you can put them back together again. Then you can have a real miniature something that either sits on a shelf, or sits on a model railway or maybe you make run on a model railway.

It feels entirely wonderful that, a few years after reading a book which showed me a future I didn’t quite know what to do with, that I’m doing something with its germ of a possibility. Furthermore what we’re now working out piece by piece is allowing me to make the models I dreamed of in my youth.

Oh and we’re going to make some new button badges too. If you’d like them, they’re one of our Kickstarter rewards.

Making things that people want.

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:26:00 +0000

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. I’ve made them by hand out of brass, plastic and wood, customising existing things where I can, making from scratch where I can’t. I’ve also more recently wanted to make them differently, in collaboration with my sons. My methods and the methods they could cope with are wildly different and I’ve thought a lot about Airfix kits.

We also last year laser scanned a steam locomotive and 3D printed it. It’s all building up to something, and that something has been forming more over the last month or so. In January we opened a shop selling kits we’ve wanted to make and now have made using 3D printing, we’ve sold a few and that makes us very happy. We also launched a projects and proposals site where people could say what they wanted and get their friends to vote for it. Several new projects have emerged and there’s one which seems to have some critical mass. Today we can share another step, a Kickstarter campaign to make that project happen, the link is here.

We’re on a journey to test out this lovely phrase from John. We’re convinced that a combination of crowdsourcing/crowdfunding/micro manufacture through additive manufacture gives an interesting counterpoint to product development. We have no idea where it will all end up, and that feels good.

Things I loved from 2012 (better late than never).

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:30:29 +0000

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 shipping fast. I can see no design debt in the things in this book.

Toca Train made me fall in love with playing with trains again. Brilliant. Well done TocaBoca and Björn and Emil. I would happily ask the boys if I could take a turn with this app. And any toy that includes virtual tea drinking as gameplay wins. Made me think we’ve make model railways too complicated. Hmmm.

Makie Lab. Such a triumph. Very complex stuff, beautiful design and packaging, fantastic emotional connection between a “thing” and it’s owner. Perfect proof of the deeper resonance of items we commission over the mass produced. And I loved seeing Dan’s and Paul’s Makies be with them.

‘Lympics was wonderful and made me so ashamed I’d been cynical. They had me at Nimrod and the Shipping Forecast. It made me want to personally be part of an industrial revolution and also to believe in anyone’s ability. Oh and that Heatherwick bloke did something incredible and told a story with metal and fire in his cauldron.

The Government Digital Service Design Principles. I’m proud to have helped write the GDS Digital Principles but I’m in awe of these. They’re quite brilliant and Ben and the team should see them as one of the most important set of design rules published. I don’t want to sound too fanboyish but I think they’re on a level with Ram’s 10 rules. I also think they’re universally applicable to any startup, not just government.

Just outside the top 5, but definitely in the top 10:

Little Printer

This blog post from Dan Catt

Satellite Eyes

Stamen Watercolour Map tiles

Most of the things James did, especially the stuff around drones.

And of course the festive favourite of Radio Roundabout gets a special mention.

Printing stainless steel bits from the future to mend the past.

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:26:49 +0000

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. Part 4 details the high resolution imagery we have captured of Winifred.

Winifred is, for many of us, a perfect example of make do and mend and engineering culture. To keep a utilitarian piece of equipment working for 80 years is an amazing achievement and as the restoration progresses we will find many examples of both ingenuity and also of the use of manufacturing practices contemporary to their use, but which would have seemed like the future when Winifred was originally built.

One example of this is welding and her welded water tank. Welding was just being invented when Winifred was built in 1885 and her original water tank was riveted. During the First World War there was a major surge in innovation in welding technology and practise and when Winifred needed a replacement water tank in the 1950s a welded tank was made, probably in the Quarry’s works.

One part of Winifred which is currently life expired is the smokebox door. As can be seen from the photograph below the door has some holes in it which will reduce the efficiency of drafting. The smokebox door is the face of a steam locomotive and to fit a brand new spun stainless steel one would have the same effect as a particularly harsh facelift.

We are investigating making a new smokebox door for Winifred using 3D printing in stainless steel. We’ll use the laser scanning data to reproduce or represent the pitting and scarring accumulated over 80 years of work and repairs. The smokebox door is reasonably large but quite thin and so should be fabricable by additive manufacture.

To start testing this premise, and to understand the properties of the prints, we have printed the door latch from Winifred in stainless steel at Shapeways. Having used the plastic print, shown above, to test that we had the correct functional geometry of the latch from the laser scan and reconstruction, a stainless steel part was ordered from Shapeways.

The part arrived in a suitably futuristic cardboard box and I was helped to open it by my youngest son who was in the office that day. This felt somehow appropriate. Just as we are now surrounded the output, and almost oblivious to the mechanics, of the industrial revolution and of robotic manufacture, his generation will be comfortable withe the output of additive manufacture.

The part feels incredibly strong and will now be handed over to the team at Bala to test it. Hopefully we can use it for a period of time on one of the other sister locomotives to see how it stands up to the wear and tear of use.

The surface finish of the part is not uniform or high resolution enough for us to currently be able to print the smokebox door and categorically say that the surface finish comes from the data rather than the manufacturing process, however I am confident that during the time of the restoration that will change.

One consideration in all of this, raised by Tony Streeter (the former editor of Steam Railway and a respected journalist in the field of railway preservation) in discussions in Bala, is that the crafts involved in the restoration also have an originality as well as the parts themselves. He’s totally right. We need to take care not to lose the crafts which kept these engines working during their early life and replace them with new technology just because we can. However I am convinced that given the use of welding and other contemporary techniques in previous repairs, that were additive manufacture available during Winifred’s working life and if it had been a cost effective methodology that it too would have been used.

Capturing rust and patina with lots of pixels.

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:25:00 +0000

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.

Unfortunately the Gigapan site only displays the images using Flash therefore this blog post will make little sense on mobile platforms.

The shape of a historic artefact is only a very small part of it. With an object as original as Winifred the majority of information is in the patina and surface condition of the object; where the life of the object bleeds through. To attempt to record this before Winifred is dismantled we have taken a set of “gigapixel” images which show how the locomotive interacted with her drivers and the mountains she worked in.

The high resolution views of the cab and fittings will be of great use during the restoration and reassembly and highlight the hand bent and possibly hand beaten nature of the pipework.

On the driver’s side the wear at the base of the cab side is a testament to how the driver stood and worked. Leaning against the back of the cab his foot would have rested against the base of the outside of the cab panel day in day out leading to the wear seen above.

The backhead and the instrumentation in particular reward close inspection with places where individual scratches on the brasswork can be seen and where some of the engravings have been worn almost smooth through an 80 year working life.

Above the nameplate you can see wear on the lining. A close analysis shows at least two sets of lining and probably a third and original set of different colour (orange and red/brown) and style lining from 1885.

We now have about 2000 images of Winifred at high resolution, most at 36 Megapixel, taken with low distortion lenses. Before the restoration starts we will take yet more of key parts. During the dismantling of the locomotive we will further photographically catalogue parts and the dismantling itself, focussing on places where the condition has a historical relevance and on the interiors of the cab and the frames and inside motion which we have not yet been able to photograph.

The Gigapans of either side of the locomotive are of sufficient resolution to allow printing at life size giving an accurate record of overall condition, allowing future generations to see Winifred as we do now and as the workers in the quarry did in 1965 when she left for America.

Printing trains.

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 09:56:04 +0000

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 Digital Surveys to produce an engineering model of Winifred.

Above is the model they produced. The quality of the model is exceptional and will be of great use in the reassembly of Winifred during restoration.

The ability to remove swathes of the model to see clearly certain details will also prove useful for those restoring the locomotive. We are now working at how we pull some of the more historical detailed data into the model, such as the damage to the dome.

However clearly nowadays one of the things that you want to do with geometrical data the moment you have it is to print it.

An order was made to Sculpteo for a copy of Winifred at 1:25 scale and there was then what felt like a very long week waiting for it to arrive.

What emerged from the bubble wrap was something that felt very different to a model. It feels far more like data made physical, which is of course what it is.

Even printed in the cheapest white plastic and with all of the inherent faults of the medium and process it is an exquisite model and so much more. It is an artefact of digital reproduction and the industrial revolution; both the old one powered by humans and the new one which has more computers and robots.

Even though it lost a few of the more fragile parts in the process and in transit and it is full of the striation of its manufacture if unequivocally is Winifred with the bent brake handle and hand bent pipework.

Obviously we took the model to Wales on the latest trip to compare it to the real thing.

The other thing we took to Wales was a part of the model at 1:1 scale which the lovely people at MakieLab had very kindly printed out for us on their MakerBot. We did this in part to see how the latch compared to the real thing to test the dimensionality of the model and we did it in part just because we could.

What it showed us clearly was that we were, at the macroscopic level, dimensionally accurate. What it also showed was that if we did want to print out individual items from the locomotive at 1:1 scale we should probably do it with far closer reference to the mesh data from the laser scan, since that provides the more complex geometry which has occurred through wear and use to an item such at the latch, the model of which is held by Julian Birley (Winifred’s keeper) in the photo above.

The printed latch would function perfectly, but if we were creating an exhibit or a real part for the loco based on the data, clearly we’d want to make it match the scanned data far closer.

Many thanks for this part of the project go to Peter Setterfield from Digital Surveys who has worked wonders with the 3D modelling from the data, to Alice Taylor, Ed Sludden and Sulka Haro from MakieLab and to Bre Pettis from MakerBot for being so overenthusiastic about what we were up to when I told him at the 3D Printshow in London (always useful when you are embarking on seemingly insane side projects).

There are more photos of the 3D scans, the 3D model and the prints here.

Scanning a steam train with fricking laser beams.

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:53:00 +0000

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 I’ve had a feeling of awe and almost overblown expectation of scanning real things with lasers to make digital objects. This was only heightened by recent “cultural objects” such as the Radiohead “House of Cards” video. It currently feels as if any 3D object is digital shape and mesh data waiting to exist. The speed, quality and price of white light and laser scanners appear to be adhering to something akin to Moore’s law if not an accelerated version.

Still from Radiohead “House of Cards” by Aaron Koblin.

Having started to think about creating model kits through 3D printing, one of the next considerations was how to get complex collections of geometries into the kit production pipeline. Laser scanning is a clear and obvious route for this, however the price and ease of acquisition of the data was an unknown. Given Winifred’s historical importance there was now a clear test case for this where the data had an intrinsic value to the railway preservation scene as a historical record and as artefact in its own right.

Researching laser scanning firms shows an industry emerging strongly, with the usual strata of quality and attention to detail at one end and buzzword chasing charlatans at the other. In my research one firm stuck out as very suitable for the project of scanning Winifred. That was a firm, Digital Surveys, who had a specialism in measuring and surveying “as built” installations such as ones in the petrochemical and offshore oil and gas sectors. These would have similarly complex challenges in terms of pipework and occluded areas. In addition they had the in house skill to interpret complicated point cloud data into complicated 3D models of engineering prototypes.

After almost 2 months of intermittent planning, Ben from Digital Surveys came to Bala with his Faro laser scanner and collection of white reference spheres.

He took a test scan and seeing Winifred in three dimensions emerge out of the workshop on the screen felt like the digitisation moment. It was the precise moment that Winifred became a digital object; a shape which could be “reproduced” if not in function, hitstory, totality, and at a lower resolution, but at will.

Throughout the day and in sometimes cramped conditions Ben took a total of 15 scans.

A couple of weeks later we were sent this video of the point cloud. I can’t even begin to describe how it makes me feel. It’s so much better than we could have ever expected and expectations were already fairly high due to the cultural reference points described above.

Winifred Point Cloud Animation from Digital Surveys on Vimeo.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the next phase of the journey deeper into the geometry.

We’d like to thank Ben and the team at Digital Surveys for all their work and also Dan Crow for all the company and help he gave on the day of recording, helping to document what was done. Thanks as ever to Julian Birley, Winifred’s keeper and the ever helpful team at the Bala Lake Railway.

Preserving the past with the near future.

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 09:32:00 +0000

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 life, she worked at Port Penrhyn helping in the transfer of finished slates to be transported around the world. Later she was moved to the bleak conditions of the levels where men and dynamite relieved the mountain of its slate. Britain built much of the industrial revolution; the Welsh slate industry put a roof over it.

Image shown by kind permission from Ted McAvoy

Nowadays an 80 year working lifespan for a utilitarian object such as Winifred would seem amazing. She is effectively a Victorian era tractor. The culture of engineering and make do and mend is largely to thank for her existence. She started working in the age of Queen Victoria and, thanks to regular repairs, finished working in during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. She has worked through two world wars.

In 1965 the Penrhyn Quarry decided to sell its steam locomotives and the BBC showed a short piece by Fife Robertson on the sale and at this point Winifred’s journey from humble to celebrity began. An American antiquities dealer saw the piece and bought six of the locomotives and had them shipped to the USA. There, an American businessman called Tony Hulman, who ran the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, bought Winifred and two other locomotives for a museum which sadly, but fortunately for us, never really happened. Winifred after 2 years on display, during which no restoration was performed, was then placed in perfectly dry storage in the shadow of the grandstands and a short distance from the famous Indy 500 yard of bricks. There she sat for over 40 years, sleeping through the advent of the personal computer, digital photography, the commercial applications of lasers, the internet, the mobile phone and all the technology which we now see as normality and all of that which soon will be.

In 2012 thanks to the efforts of Julian Birley, and a promise to the Hulman estate that she will be restored sensitively, she has returned as a time capsule contained in a shipping container. We are now introducing her to all of the technology that she missed out on seeing arrive with the aim of getting the most accurate record possible of her extraordinary condition.

She is almost exactly as she was in 1965. Time has stood still for her. When you see her condition you realise you are in a room with the past. It is quite extraordinary and very moving. The remains of the final fire of her working life is in the firebox.

There is still a mixture of slate dust, ash and coal on the footplate.

Her paintwork shows where she has interacted with people in their every day work and the Welsh countryside during the course of her working life.

Her brass displays the patina caused by the hands of her drivers and the harsh weather conditions.

The driver’s side of her cab shows where the driver rested his foot as he went about his day’s work.

The seal of the capsule has been broken and now the only thing to do is to try and create a record which will act as a time capsule for future generations to enjoy. They will probably scoff at the crudeness of the recording, but hopefully will be pleased that we captured as much data as we could.

The first parts of the recording are now almost complete. We have used a laser scanner and gigapixel photography to get as accurate a record of her geometry and condition as possible. The next part of the recording which we’ll do over the next year to 18 months will be to photograph all of the parts as they come off the locomotive and scan many of them. This will enable us to create a full catalogue of the locomotive and to have a complete record to use when she is put her back together again, just as she is now, with a few extra surprises about how life expired parts will be replaced along the way.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the laser scanning part of this process.

(Also see part 3 where we print the train)

The Best Desk in the World Ever.

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:32:13 +0000

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.

“Thinking of a world where hobbies have user centric...

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:35:35 +0100

“Thinking of a world where hobbies have user centric design” a talk I recorded for an event at Shoreditch House organised by Hugh Garry as I was in Finland which sadly was never shown as Roo Reynolds is just way to interesting.

User centric design and real stories in hobbies

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:45:32 +0100

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 “working” in understanding manufacturing and supply chains, but I am also interested in seeing if I can through whatever “entity”/”objects” that comes out of this that I fix a personal piece of repeated behaviour as a part of this process and to understand what that means.

For many years now I have had a wide collection of part finished and fully finished models that I have lost interest in in many ways. Some of them are excellent in terms of quality and they’ve all included a lot of effort. I’ve always put it down to a lack of time due to family and work pressures, but I’ve come to realise that it’s because of other factors. What I’ve done in the meanwhile is make really good things but in many ways emotionally unsatisfactory models of things other than what I really want to make.

Recently I saw a quote which summed up in a different direction some of what I’ve been thinking:

“We should own less but with more value – Things we own need to perform better for us”– Assa Ashuach

For me, the twentieth century and mass production has created a large number of objects which we are taught we want or need. Mass production and economies of scale have meant that products are designed to fit the needs of a purchasing audience rather than a “user”. In a pre-industrial revolution era you would either commission to a greater or lesser extent, or make yourself. What this has meant is that we end up “settling” for things, which through not being quite what our heart desires, are close enough,and end up not being a terribly long term purchase often leading to other things we settle for.

3D printing has a potential to a greater or lesser extent to fix this. Yes, objects may be more expensive, but they can in theory be the exact thing we’d like and will have greater longeivity. At some point our phones will probably include quite good 3D scanners and our homes will probably include something that is akin to a multifunction 3D printer. Manufacture will once again be local and more bespoke, more personal, hopefully less resources will be consumed and we’ll have less but better.

There are currently two almost polar opposite branches of the model railway hobby which relate to this and I fear will lead to a demise. The toy/model train market and the high end kit/scratch building market. What is lacking in my opinion is a middle ground.

What has tended to happen in the “toy” side of model railways is that the manufacturers have competed in advertising terms on accuracy, which has in my opinion has had a quite damaging effect. One part of this is that there models appear more slowly from the manufacturer and they may not make what you want, so you settle for what is there. The other part is to do with a missing social interaction; the story of *your* personal one of the object.

When I was growing up, the models were significantly less accurate and detailed, and as a result you would spend a lot of time modifying them to a greater or lesser extent and greater or lesser success. They took on a life of their own. You had invested more than just your money in them and could tell friends a story about them, about what you had done. You could inspire each other and provide tips. The raw material was readily available, more reasonable and less finished, and thus felt readily malleable; there was a good chance that through your efforts you could improve it. The same is true of the stories which permeate the making/painting of Airfix kits or Warhammer models.

The only story with today’s highly detailed and pre-painted and weathered models is that of purchasing and unboxing. There is little emotional connection. Someone could swap your model for an identical one and you’d not notice the difference or have a sense of loss. You also have no opportunity to improve and to get a deeper skill, and hobbies as well as being about an enjoyable way to pass the time are often about deepening a skill or thinking about different non-crucial problems. There’s only so far you can go in improving your abilities to purchase something online and to remove it from its box. The story is much shorter and far less personal.

On the other hand, the highly skilled people, who probably developed their skill through modding the less detailed trains, have very long and very complicated stories to tell with arcane and complex tools (e.g. piercing saws) which if you don’t have the vocabulary can be confusing. It’s hard to get into socially.

They make very difficult kits or scratch build models. The kits are often either low run high quality resin prints (costly and easy to break), low-medium run medium-low quality white metal (always needs bending back to shape and a lot of sanding) or my personal nemesis the etched brass kit which first of all demand that you imagine an array of two dimensional objects into a three dimensional object through a set of origami moves augmented with solder and burnt fingers.

The stories that anyone apart from an experienced practitioner could tell are only ones of failure and disappointment, not a way to encourage more people into the hobby. I have recently vowed to no longer buy etched brass kits as I am only contributing to a point of peak brass and boxes that my children will find full of shiny sheets of metal that I have never done anything with.

There seem to be a group of people missing currently in the world of making kits for hobbies; the “user”. All too often the kits I encounter are designed for the manufacturer not the customer. We’d like through the project we’re starting to fix that.

The other thing we’re going to try and fix is designing for more than one. I want to build kits which are designed all around the experience of the customer and for them to tell a friend/peers/others what they’ve done. It is all about, to use a phrase from Matt Locke, about designing for at least two.

Onwards again.

While I was Sleeping (Oxford) - a tale of modern "manufacturing"

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:26:54 +0100

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 has suddenly made possible. This is a kind of an early-mid-term report. I’m not sure how many hours I am through it, very few I’m guessing, I should probably count. Full disclosure, it’s about making very precise models of very obscure pieces of railway equipment.

One of the questions after Matt’s talk at Activate puzzled me and I think him as well. It was about how all he was talking about related to “digital” which is one of the core themes of Activate. In my opinion and in my project it has everything to do with digital. Digital makes things faster and makes more complicated things happen more quickly or be possible at all. The findability that digital brings to both information and possibilities is the true agent of transformation at work here.

Firstly the majority of the research has been online. I downloaded a copy of a 3D modelling package and decided that learning how to use it would take pretty much all of my 100 hours. I then researched the forums on Shapeways and found the very excellent Vijay Paul who runs dotSan. I did some research of his earlier work on Flickr and felt he was the person for us and then emailed him and then engaged him to make the kit. Vijay and I have never met. I realise as I write this we have never even spoken on the phone, all of our communication has been by email. It’s been a joy and I have exactly what I asked for and hoped for, and probably better.

Secondly, I researched our test prototype almost entirely online. Looking for photographs that would help Vijay to produce a model. I also referred to a few books and plans (all ordered through eBay or Amazon).

It was at this point that I contracted Chickenpox and slept for almost entire days. The asymmetry of email became instantly utterly wonderful and essential. I would wake up every now and then and find an email from Vijay with a question or with a render of work in progress and be able to provide a very quick and concise response and then go back to sleep. It’s obvious, we use email all the time, but in our rush into the new and shiny of real time communications we forget what is magical about email; that it can wait, that we don’t miss it if we don’t see it straight away.

Thirdly I sent the file off to a manufacturer (now both Shapeways and Sculpteo) digitally. I have no idea where it’s made, I can guess Amsterdam and somewhere in the Pyrenees but I’m not sure and it doesn’t matter. Actually it goes further, I just don’t care. It’s similar to the feeling I have not knowing where the server is where this blog is. Someday I’ll see some piece of marketing spam about cloud manufacture.

Through a few rough iterations we have ended up with a wonderful prototype model kit. Some people are currently beta testing kits. More are about to go out in the post soon. I took the first one that I made up to the Welsh Slate Museum to meet it’s full size brother where I took more measurements which will make version 2 better. The experience of making other prints of the kits, and feedback from Shapeways and Sculpteo when kits broke in transit or where there were defects in printing will improve it further.

From here on it’s all about user experience, working out how to sell them and improving the kits. In well under 100 hours, and between sleeps, there is now a very loosely shaped entity that has researched, commissioned and created an object that didn’t exist before. Onwards.

Tim Berners-Lee and 2001/2010 : Open and closed.

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 21:26:35 +0100

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 just too amazing. However here’s the Tweet.

This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c
— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) July 27, 2012

In the middle of all of the symbolism of the Opening Ceremony about the industrial revolution and now the digital revolution and against the backdrop of the commercial aspects of the games, which have definitely been about constraint of intellectual property and restriction of choice, it felt like a defining and hopeful moment, albeit one we should cherish, treasure and defend.

I also can’t seem to get this comparative set of images out of my head. The symmetry is almost too perfect. A black monolith as the machine of creation and a message to humanity; one full of openness and the other full of restriction.

Tim’s gesture of giving HTML/HTTP to the world is unparalleled in it’s wondrousness and generosity in modern times. That message in lights and on Twitter at the moment he is celebrated is such a powerful one. We must keep the web whole and for all.

And thank you Tim. I’m personally so glad for what you did, and more so that what you did was recognised last night.

What a difference a year (and a bit) makes.

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:48:00 +0100

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 wired and very tired. I’d started working with Mike Bracken at the artist now known as the Government Digital Service on July 3rd as Mike’s auxiliary brain (as someone described it) and as part of the team pulling together the vision for the Government Digital Service. We’d had to hit the ground running at great speed. I started 2 days after Mike I seem to remember, on 3rd July. On the 26th July he had to present the vision and the background as to why GDS had to totally transform Government service provision to Francis Maude and ask for the mandate and the budget to do it. The picture below is me sitting outside Francis Maude’s office. Trying not to fall asleep on a comfortable seat and feeling rather underdressed in cords and crocs. However people had to get used to people going to meetings dressed like this and it was a hot sunny day.

I had 22 days to help Mike do this; gathering information on what was broken, what was working, where the big wins might be, how Government compared to internet scale businesses and working diplomatically with many people already within the organisation to build the values of the new organisation. He needed help as he was being pulled this way and that. He was in so many meetings he’d have never been able to collate, synthesize and produce the required vision. I’m incredibly proud to have been asked to help him and to have been able to. It’s a highlight of what I’ve done professionally, and I’m lucky to have had a few of those, this may well be the most important one. Producing such a complicated vision in such a short amount of time would be a huge statement about being able to deliver as an organisation. A key principle.

Lots of what we wrote is now part of the walls of the new GDS building. It’s important stuff. It’s contains messages for Whitehall like the one below.

It contains reminders of how it should be done to all who enter the building. If you want to see more of these, go and visit them. I suggest if you are committed and good enough at what you do that you apply for a job and go for interview as part of your visit.

The original vision also reminded government that it has the monopoly on delivering services to the public, but it should act as if it could lose that position at any time, just as any internet scale company does. It’s all about exhorting the government to build services on and in the internet; as if it is a company such as Google, Facebook or Twitter (all of whom along with Mind Candy and others provided sensitive information to help inform Francis Maude how internet scale businesses worked, thank you).

People use these services everyday, they buy things through services such as Amazon and Ebay and they have expectations about how services work. Going forward they’ll used Government services online almost every day too; that’s the implication of Digital by Default. Government services should and can be as good as these services if not better. Through better public service provision the population will have the times of their life when they need government made easier. One slide in the deck shown by Mike to Francis Maude included the phrase “Design with Empathy”. I stand by that as a key principle of any user centric design.

The GDS will, I believe, work. It is doing what it needs to do. Building its services in the way that they should be built, with the user at heart and the technology stack of the web at its core. It is building a very talented team who are owning the creation of these services; an important distinction from managing the creation of them as has gone before. It’s already resetting the metrics for success. No one can claim a service is successful, even if it has come in on time and on budget, if less than 70% of users successfully complete a transaction through it without having to go off to the call center.

I was equally proud to sit in the front row at the Guardian Activate Summit and see Mike present, a year and a day later, the core principles of the GDS that we’d worked so hard on. Proud and very moved.

These core Organisational Principles and Ben Terrett’s team’s Design Principles I think set out the framework for delivering on the promise of better public services for the citizens who pay for them. I know of no other government organisation who are doing so much with such conviction and such thought and at such speed. What they’re doing is inspirational and brilliant.

I look back on that hot day, the 26th July with very fond memories. Mike was in with Francis Maude for a long time, longer than any of our practise runs of the presentation of the vision. It could have been good or bad. It felt like waiting outside the headmaster’s office for your best mate at school. I’m glad to say it took a while and Francis liked it and the rest is becoming history. An amazing day and feeling, I’m honoured to have signed this sign.

Image kindly provided by Paul Downey

Onwards GDS. I’m proud to have been a part of what became you and I hope to help wherever I can in the future. You are doing stuff that matters.

Tim of the FT photographing “that” graphic. Job done :-)

Postscript:

I will always be grateful to Mike for being flexible about how and when I worked on this project. I was at the time being diagnosed/investigated for a stress related illness that had led me to leave Artfinder. I did 10 days in the month of July for the Government on the project and Mike and other colleagues at what is now GDS were incredibly accommodating to me when I was tired or ill or when I was fighting the panic attacks, incidents of vertigo and short term memory loss that had made the previous months hard. Thank you Mike and team.

Why I think the most crucial thing that the government/GLA can do for Tech City is to fix the broadband.

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:57:27 +0100

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 in the past about how long it takes to get a line installed, how slow the broadband is. Some of us even have the war wounds to prove it and have had to go to some quite ridiculous lengths to get almost acceptable broadband at an almost acceptable price.

I’m not alone in thinking that broadband is incredibly important for startups. Fred Wilson talked about Talent and Bandwidth being the two things you needed in New York in 2011.

There is a product which could fix many things quite simply. That product is Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or Infinity as BT call it. It’s a patch onto the existing copper network. For the majority of the distance the signal has to travel it does so over fibre optic. It comes into the home/business on the conventional existing copper wire with conventional but slightly upgraded socket. It has some of the distance from cabinet issues which are analagous to distance to the exchange for conventional ADSL and ADSL2 but the quality is more than good enough for early stage startups, and those in my opinions are the ones we really need to help. When you’re out of angel/early stage you can afford a leased line, before then it’s impossible/very risky.

It is available domestically in many residential areas in London and is available in places such as Oxford. I know this from experience as our office runs very well on FTTC. Using commodity speed testing tools such as Speedtest.net we regularly get ping times of 15ms, about 36Mbps down and about 1.6Mbps up. We’re about 100 yards from the cabinet we’re connected to. We had to wait about a month for it, we’re on a 12 month contract and it costs about £36 pounds per month. The theoretical maximum is 38Mbps. There is an improved version which is being rolled out in some places which gives 76Mbps.

We’ve found it’s fine. On days when we’ve had four people in our little office working on a soon to be released product it’s coped just fine. No one has complained, nothing has slowed down and Spotify has carried on playing. I’m guestimating you could probably support a team of 10-20 on it comfortably.

One of the biggest fallacies that floats around about business needs of startups and broadband is that of symmetry. That you need or want as much bandwidth upstream as you have coming down. I have no idea why in the majority of tech startups this would be the case, especially as more and more startups move more and more of their infrastructure to the cloud. I can see that media businesses would need symmetry, but most startups aren’t media businesses.

With source control there are significantly more downloads than uploads when you have a team size of greater than one. When you deploy you tend to only do it to one place only and even in continuous deployment situations you aren’t constantly deploying, especially with deploy tools such as those on AppEngine which only push the changed files. We’ve noticed no problems in this so far on FTTC.

Email within companies much of it is more about download than upload, when you’re working with cloud email providers such as GMail and you send an email to the whole team, download speed is more crucial than upload speed. Very rarely will everyone reply exactly at once. The same with document hosting and calendaring.

All you really want is fast uploads and faster downloads. 1.6Mbps is pretty good for uploads.

The current situation in Tech City for small companies comes down to this:

On one hand you can accept poor quality highly contended ADSL or at best ADSL2 and spend less upfront. You’ll have a shorter contract and a lower monthly bill, but be constantly frustrated.

On the other hand you can spend some of your hard earned investment on the upfront install costs for a leased line (large sum of money), wait a fairly long while (about 3 months) for it to be installed and then pay a significantly higher monthly cost for it. If you grow and you need to move then you’ll have to do it all over again and you may have to try and negotiate your way out of a contract.

In both cases you will probably wonder a lot why your office connectivity is slower than what you have at home and in the latter case will ponder if it’s worth it, or if that spend is significantly reducing your runway or what resources you could have bought in instead of it.

Or you could move. We did, not for the broadband, but it’s working out well on that front. We can’t really claim we’re a part of Tech City any more though.

Learning to make products in a different way. A 100 hours (and probably more thing).

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:01:06 +0100

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 of possibility that the time cost of making one thing is the same as making many, something which is less true in the purely physical world. Things you make for your hobby can now be easily made available/sold to other people who may want the same things.

At Activate, Matt Webb kicked off with this slide. It resonated with some thoughts I’d been having about why we often buy things, albeit probably obliquely. We often buy things as we hope they’re the things that will “do” in the absence of the availability of the thing we really desire. As compromises they often don’t work out so well and the cycle begins again.

3D printing alters this. It lowers barriers to effective manufacture. Instead of paying someone to make a bespoke thing we’re unable to make ourselves we can commission someone to model it and we now have the potential to make many of them, some we could even sell to recoup the cost of paying someone to model it. The resolution is in some ways imperfect now, but it won’t always be so.

At the end of Matt’s talk he spoke about 100 hours projects and it was apparent that what I’d been starting to ponder and even started to work on a bit was one. What it was was a 100 hours project which didn’t yet have an absolute aim.

So here’s the aim: I’m going to research and then learn how to make and market physical products. I may do some, none or all of the making, but through it I hope I’ll create something that some people in a small niche think is cool (and come to an understanding of the possibilities of new materials, new methodologies and new supply chains).

In which I come over all Herbert Read about Coventry Cathedral and The New Aesthetic

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:03:14 +0100

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, just as ours does now. It is a pure response to the effects of war, and much of what it contains is a response too, albeit indirectly.

There are some principal art, architecture and design movements and references at force. The choir stalls by Basil Spence invoke echoes of design elements of the atomic age as made popular through the graphic work of Charles and Ray Eames. The age of commissioning of the cathedral has bled through. The atomic motif was a benign motif in the 1950/60s. It signified science and hope in a pre Three Mile Island era. It is the softer of the two principle aesthetic references and is in sharp and almost jarring visual contrast to the artworks such as the Christ figure on the pulpit by Elisabeth Frink.

The stained glass in the cathedral was the work of John Piper a former war artist and the painter of “Interior of Coventry Cathedral”. Painted just after the destruction of the prior cathedral during a bombing raid, “Interior of Coventry Cathedral” is thought of as Britain’s Guernica. Just as the horrors of the Spanish Civil War are manifest in Guernica, the experiences of Piper and other war artists have been woven into the art in the Cathedral. The light cast by the windows is hopeful, yet they clearly their form relates to the violent fracturing of the original cathedral’s windows by aerial bombing.

The altar piece is another case in point. A masterpiece by Graham Sutherland.

Sutherland was also a war artist whose style changed radically after the Second World War, as did a generation of young British artists whose work bridged the softer shapes of Moore and Hepworth and the abstract shapes of Caro, Annesley and King.

This was most noticeable in an exhibition that Sutherland participated in for the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale, a group show - “New Aspects of British Sculpture”. Also represented were Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull.

The works were radical and are still uncomfortable and painful to view. In a now famous part of his introduction for the catalogue Herbert Read wrote of them:

‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance… Here are the images of flight, or ragged claws “scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.’

The phrase “geometry of fear” is now often used to describe the art of the early ’50s from this group of British sculptors. Their experiences of the war directly led to the aesthetic of their art. In their case there was a dramatic and sudden reforming of the world through war.

Herbert Read writes about the relationship between artist and experience in “Art Now”, quoting from Ernst Cassirer’s Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture:

‘Art is for the first time clearly conceived, not as the mere reproduction of a ready made, given reality, but as the discovery of reality which discovery is communicated in a symbolic form.’

(aside: that looks familiar)

(a Guardian image from an article about drones, rendered using a pxl effect by Dan Catt)

and further on Read says:

‘Art is indeed the discovery and establishment of a new world of forms, and form is rational; but art is a continual transformation of form by forces that are vital and irrational.’

Dan Catt wrote an excellent essay on the New Aesthetic a few days ago which has had me thinking continuously about it in relationship to Read and the Geometry of Fear, a thinking only catalysed and crystallised by the images of Coventry Cathedral on television.

There have been several responses to a Bruce Sterling essay which make me feel that the art world is confused in responding to the New Aesthetic and is either aiming to co-opt it by the suggestion of making work in response to it or to downgrade it as merely a set of observations. Here the parallels between the Geometry of Fear and the New Aesthetic just become stronger for me and relate to truth to materials. The New Aesthetic is not merely an observation, it is a series of works, a transformation of the observed forms in an appropriate medium.

Just as that generation of British Sculptors wrought their art (their response to the experiences and the environment of a post-War age) most successfully through hacking and gnawing at clay and casting it in Bronze - making their responses both physical and visceral, the most appropriate part of the New Aesthetic is the making of the responses and investigation to it through the medium most directly related. To experience machine vision through simulations of the eyes of the machine. To see the world that we now co-inhabit as the machines see it, and to look evermore for the hitherto ignored traces of this sharing of worlds and the spaces where it bleeds through into our age and society. Just as war bled through for Sutherland, Piper, Spence and the artists of the Geometry of Fear.

Sir Phillip King described post-war sculpture as being:

“somehow terribly like scratching your own wounds - an international style with everyone showing the same neuroses…”

A statement which has a resonance for our times too with the inexorable linkage of machine vision, filter bubbles and surveillance.

I’m not trying to suggest for a moment that the New Aesthetic is literally only about geometry or fear. It is in fact, in my view, neither. However for me there are similarities between the two “movements” in that the New Aesthetic is becoming a set of manifested and moreover material responses to the experiences of a radically new era which is dramatically breaking through. This materiality and truth to materials is however often invisible to those who are not inhabiting the space.

Play. An API explorer mashed up with a tutorial.

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:59:28 +0100

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 with many startups they have an API and they have hackdays the latest of which was over the weekend just gone and when in Berlin I offered to join in remotely from home and office in Oxford as I had a few ideas about what to do with their API.

The idea I ended up making for their hackday was a playful experience for starting with an API. I often find myself frustrated by a few things with new services and their APIs. They start from the wrong angle: one of “we have an API, you want to play with it, here is the unwieldy documentation”.

Often it’s a joyless experience, registering for a key, wading through pages of documentation, occassionally seeing a glimpse of a sample return as if on a wildlife safari. Often it involves diving into the command line (which I like) and using curl (which I also like) but often finding that I need to remember the arcane collection of flags and options to simulate accept headers (which I hate) and then getting back ugly unreadable JSON which has been stripped of whitespace (which annoys me and puts me off playing).

It feels like there could be a more funner way of doing it, of smoothing the on-ramp, of being accepting that there are an enormous number of APIs out there competing for people’s play time (after all there are precious few APIs that are “must learn”). It would be lovely if someone took you on a journey through the API, telling you a story of how it fits together. But one unlike those horrible tutorial videos, one in which you could cut and paste and try stuff out and experience the real thing. Learning by doing. Like a choose your own adventure, because after all, that’s what an API is.

So that’s what I attempted. It’s called Play and you can find it here. At the moment it only deals with the Book methods of the Readmill API. It has terrible copy and if you veer from the path there’s no way back. It’s quite broken really, but it’s the product of two evenings tinkering. More bits of the API need linkifying. It’s a hackday project, not a product. But to me there’s something interesting in there to be explored further.

There’s one more useful space for this sort of thing to exist in. One set of things that have emerged of late which are very interesting are coding tutorials. This could be a good accompaniment to them. Once you’ve learnt bits of coding then the next thing to do is to make something, anything, but often that gets squashed by working out where to get content or materials for your thing from. APIs do that. They’re full of content and malleable stuff you don’t have to type in or make a CMS for and populate. When we teach people how to code we should teach them how to play in APIs as then they’ll develop skills and add APIs into the things that they make and the loosely joined world will get more blocks of lego to play with.

That women in tech thing...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:15:13 +0000

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 some of the denial I saw in replies that there was a problem.

Some of the people I admire most in tech are women. I admire them deeply for two reasons:

1. They’re talented and I admire them for their skill and clarity of thought.

2. They’ve gone through utter rubbish that I haven’t had to just to do the things they do because of their gender. It’s a waste of energy, time and emotion and the fact that they still do the things they do is wonderful and a testament to their talent.

I wonder if the fratboy style comments are just emotional immaturity or a symptom of a part of our society we sweep under the carpet or are in part fear that people who have, through gender stereotypes throughout the ages, been denied rights in the workplace are better than them. Either way these attitudes have no place in an industry that is all about being progressive.

While I was Sleeping (Berlin)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 05:42:28 +0000