Crossposted from tomarmitage.com

Quick announcement time: I’ll be speaking at Webdagene 2013 in Oslo, September 9th to 11th.

My talk hasn’t got a formal title yet – it’s quite a way off – but I think – in my head – it’s called something like The New Materiality Of Design.

Webdagene’s focus is on UX, and so I think it’s appropriate (given their theme of “The Generation Shift”) to explore the new materials that designers need to both work with and be familiar – both invisible and highly tangible. To that end, it’s a continuation of what I said at dConstruct – about playing with things as a way of understanding them – coupled to the thoughts I raised in Technology As A Material.

There’s a bucket of raw thoughts in Evernote that, over the summer, will get turned into a talk. But for now: a quick note to announce that I’m speaking there, should you be thinking of attending. The rest of the speaking lineup is great, and it should be a thoughtful few days.

Perhaps see you there!

News time! I’m very excited to announce that PAN Studio, in collaboration with myself and Gyorgyi Galik, have been awarded the Playable City Award from Watershed. Full details here.

Hello Lamp Post! invites you to tune in to the secret conversations of the city and communicate through lamp posts, bus stops, post boxes and other street furniture. Part game, part story, anyone will be able to play by texting in a unique code found on the city’s familiar street objects.

…except, of course, there’s a little more going on than that (although not how you might expect it).

It’s a hugely exciting opportunity. I’m particularly keen to see how the initial idea we’ve started from will develop and be honed as we design it, and work with the materials we have – which include both SMS and Bristol itself.

And, of course: it’s worth saying how flattering to be selected from such an excellent shortlist, full of peers and friends.

I’ll save writing any more about the design for the future – and, I hope, in a space with PAN and Gyorgy, where we can share our own insights into the project. Muncaster is go, then. Onwards!

A slow week, that livened up towards the end.

Early on, there were some meetings and phonecalls about Muncaster, which seemed to go well. I should be able to write more about that project soon. Various evening meetings pushed a few little tickles of ideas further forward, so will keep following up on them.

Thursday and Friday were spent working on Firle: a very last-minute project, building small content-managed maps for part of the BBC. Should be able to point at this soon. Though last-minute, and very brief, we managed to get to a really nice point with this: a sane, pleasant CMS; intuitive mapping integration with Cloudmade maps through Leaflet; a codebase that’s the right balance of “done proper” and “done on time”. And I got to get my head around a few new platforms. Despite initially implementing it in Cloudmade Web Maps, I ended up porting it to Leaflet, mainly for the better touchscreen support, but the Leaflet API turned out to be very pleasant. I built the backend out of ActiveAdmin, which turned out to be great. I was worried it’d be too dogmatic and not flexible enough, but in fact, it turned out to be the opposite: appropriately customisable, not in any way dogmatic, and nice and clear to build for.

The coming week holds: more news of Muncaster, more looking for options for things up to the end of February.

What I’m learning right now: managing the pipeline – as Sales on a Beermat calls it – has not proven to be a problem: it’s useful to have one, and I keep it up to date and push through it. The tough parts are keeping enough plates spinning at once should any one of them turn into a project. Brighstone was so close to the door but didn’t quite make it in January (though still might in the future); that threw a lot of my estimates and plans, but also threw my confidence a bit. So I’m wearing what Matt calls one’s learning smile and keeping busy, keeping learning, keeping pushing things through the pipeline.

The period between Christmas and New Year is quiet, as expected, so these combined weeknotes are very brief. Still, a few things to note.

Boxing Day saw the broadcast of my Four Thought talk, The Coded World. It’s still available for download from the Four Thought site. There was a really positive reception to it, from what I’ve seen and heard, so I’m very grateful for that.

I returned to the office on the 2nd. Since then, I’ve filed a proposal for an interesting, short project; chased a few other projects and organised some meetings; and spent some time hacking on a short project of my own.

That project has mainly been an exercise in code and deployment, to keep my fingers fresh, and gave me a chance to explore Sidekiq – an asynchronous queue for Ruby built on top of Redis. There’s some loose ends to tidy, and I’ll mention it here when it’s a bit more robust. I’m also looking forward to reviewing its code with a friend – always easier to refactor with a fresh pair of eyes.

And, of course, I wrote my Yearnotes.

And that was Week 12. Week 14 holds some meetings, possibly a presentation, and more hacking. I’m also still looking for projects in early 2012, so get in touch if that sounds relevant.

Happy 2013.

A week of ups and downs. Brighstone, which seemed a likelihood last year, isn’t going to be beginning in January, which is a shame, and led to me looking for new ways to fill the calendar.

Fortunately, there were a succession of meetings this week about future work, with some things to consider. All very different types of work – one physical computing project for the arts, one about integrated, kiosk-like platforms, and one web-based content project. Nice to be exploring this diversity in my work, and I’m hoping some of these might go further.

On Monday, this year’s Year of Links arrived. Very satisfying that, bar the install dance of being on a new computer, the code just worked, and a week later, I had a paperback of the previous year on Pinboard. Really satisfying.

On Tuesday I went down to Stratford-Upon-Avon to present Spirits… to a selection of the team there. It was a straightforward presentation, but it was great to be able to wrap the project by showing them the final output, and the discussions we had around it were excellent – and went towards some interesting potential futures.

Finally, I had a few meetings with the Caper team about Detling, lining things up for our March kick-off – always useful to be lining up planets and ducks, prior to project kick-off.

(And: as Matt’s suggested, I’m going to start publishing these at the beginning of the next week. I wrote them in a spare moment at the weekend, but it’s much better reflecting on the week not on a Friday evening).

Onwards!

And that’s the end of 2012.

A very quiet end to the year: a few little meetings to wrap up one short project and investigate another. Otherwise, I treated it as roughly a half-week, and focused a bit on some personal work, none of which is really near completion.

On Monday, I also built the visualiser for this year’s Radio Roundabout. They wanted something “a bit New Aesthetic” for this year. I loosely interpreted this brief to produce a Kinect-powered visualisation of the studio.

It’s very straightforward: it takes the IR point cloud in 3D, colours it according to what the video camera can see – and then applies a strokeweight to each point based upon the audio line-in level (RMS).

So what you get is a room full of blobs that pulse along with audio – particularly fine on the Dan Deacon or Todd Terje that played on the show, but fun with spoken-word too.

The whole project – all two hours of gluing other people’s code together – is on Github.

And that was it, really – a few leads on work I’ve followed up, but a quiet end to the year. Weeknotes are now on hold until 2013 – after the Radio 4 talk – and I’m hoping there’ll be a bit more news to share then.

Not a bad start to freelancing, then; here’s to 2013.

A few weeks ago I took part in a recording of Radio 4’s Four Thought. My episode of Four Thought will be broadcast on Radio 4 next Wednesday – the 26th December at 20:45pm. It’ll also be on iPlayer for the rest of the year, so if you don’t fancy interrupting Boxing Day for it, you can catch up later. I’ll probably link to it once it’s up on iPlayer.

What’s it about? It’s about technology education – from the “learning-to-code” meme that permeated 2012, through “computer science in schools”, and into what the real values of teaching technology are, and how you might go about that. Matt Jones’ post about a new age of STEAM was very timely, and suitably poetic; I’m only sad I didn’t talk a bit more about the value of the arts in my talk, though I hinted at it a bit.

So, if that sounds up your street, do tune in or catch up later.

Week 9 seems to be the last work of client work this year.

Monday was mainly about meetings, hopefully lining up some work for early next year. In the rest of the week, I spent a couple of days working on interaction design for an iOS product, drawing out maps, wireframes, notes on aesthetics and animatics.

It turns out the Four Thought I recorded will be broadcast on Friday, 26 December at 8:45pm. Flattering to be in the Christmas week, even if it’s a time when most people might be busier with family! It’ll be on iPlayer as well; I’ll probably mention that in its own blogpost nearer the time.

Otherwise, the usual admin – and beginning to plan Week 10, which is likely going to be a form of “project week” – prodding a few one-to-two day personal projects into life, if only to keep my hand in and get me up each day.

And, today, it was exciting to share that my work with PAN is shortlisted in the Playable City competition – that might go somewhere exciting next year; even if it doesn’t, it’s great to be shortlisted given the quality of the other entries.

And that was Week 9.

I spent a couple of days a few weeks ago working with PAN Studio on their proposal for Watershed’s Playable City project. I’m excited to announce that PAN (working with myself and Gyorgyi Galik) have been shortlisted for the competition, with their project Hello, Lamppost. You can find out more about the project here.

It’s an exciting shortlist – lots of friends, peers, and former colleagues on it – which really captures the breadth of thinking around play in the urban landscape right now. Final results are announced on 21st January; we’ll wait to see what happens next. Congratulations to everyone on the shortlist.

No weeknote for Week 7; I was on holiday.

I came back straight into the thrust of Week 8, though: two pitches, a talk, and a bunch of meetings.

Wednesday itself was taken up with finishing writing, and then delivering, a talk for Radio 4’s Four Thought. This went very well in the end – and it should be on air around Christmas time. I’ll link to it when it’s available on iPlayer, of course.

Pitches went out on Wednesday and Thursday, one in conjunction with PAN, for the Playable City brief, and one with Caper; with any luck, I’ll be writing about them more in due course.

And then a Friday of meetings and post-holiday admin. Hitting the ground running, then, and with any luck, lining up a little more work before breaking for the holidays.

So, from a week off, straight in to a somewhat full-on week with typing. But: good things emerging, that I’ll write about more in due course.