designswarm thoughts

• CSM MA Innovation Management
  Interesting new masters at Central St Martins college in London
  (tags: education design thinking)

• Boing Boing : day in the life of smart things
  some nice review for a project I contributed to
  (tags: visualization internetofthings future)
• YouTube - Google Maps for mobile with My Location (beta) UK
  google does geo-locative
  (tags: mobile googlemaps)

• residents-of-london: listen online
  Great soudbite with the voiceover of the woman who does announcements on the tube in London
  (tags: sound london public transportation)

On why Firefox is always slow, even on my new machine, Matt said:

- Firefox can be like a drunken homeless man vomiting all over himself, at that point all that’s left to do is clean everything up and use anti-bacterial spray.

• cocoon characters
  Beautiful illustration work by Lina
  (tags: illustrations art)

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So I am no longer a “St-Pancreas virgin” as a fellow traveller in the train referred to it, and it’s frankly really great. It took me a little over 2 hours (or about 40 rows of knitting since that’s what’s making transportation such a breeze these days) to get to Bruxelles and 1h50 minutes to come back! I can’t even get out of London in a car in half that time!

The problem of course with super efficient services everything else starts to pale in comparison and your expectations get skewed.

I was supposed to get to Antwerp for lunchtime on Friday and since it took me 2 hours to cross the Channel and get into Belgium, I figured going to the Netherlands was going to be a breeze… what an idiot!
Turns out it takes about 3 hours both ways and would have cost me about half of the price of my Eurostar ticket. Obviously this was unacceptable and totally unfeasible (It would have meant I would have had to be in Antwerp for a little over 2 hours before turning back to be able to catch my train home), so I had to cancel…

Would I have planned better without the Eurostar? Probably. But I would have ended up taking the less sustainable solution of grabbing a flight back to London… Maybe this is something services like Dopplr can start to address more clearly: managing travel expectations in a world where the diversity in service delivery forces users to make less sustainable decisions.

“You can fly tomorrow and meet Y, and if you’re in town B suggests you go have coffee at Tree & Leaf”.

Thanks to Lina from fo.am for a great stay in Bruxelles.

• greyworld
  nice stuff here
  (tags: art)

It’s that time of the year again so put on your hat and gloves, brush up that powerpoint and get thee to the SAT for a 3rd edition of Pecha Kucha.

Think you can find a job in design in Montreal without promoting your work? Ha!
They’re looking for a few more presenters so what ARE you waiting for?

• Teaching service design · 31Volts Weblog
  posted a rant about service design and education here
  (tags: service design education)
• YMYL - Holster - Your Music or Your Life…
  Because an ipod is really like a gun
  (tags: iBitch)
• Yo Smushi [Monocle]
  yum, now that’s what I call nouvelle cuisine… must make this at home one day
  (tags: food Denmark)

• Spence - video podcasts
  One of my favorite Scots online
  (tags: web2.0 video)
• manOmine
  plush toy craft for a good cause
  (tags: toys charity web2.0)

I’m about to go into hypertravel again but this time it’s a little different. Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent in Milan working with Massimo and greeting our second intern. Then I’m back in London for an evening before embarking on the spanking new Eurostar to Bruxelles (2hours 20 minutes…woah)

The event I was supposed to attend unfortunately got canceled so I will actually be somewhere I haven’t spent any time in, with the people I know being out of town… is that what real tourists do? I doubt it, they usually plan this ahead, it isn’t accidental.

So I’m left with an open day that I can fill up in whatever way I please, so if anyone has suggestions, do ping me! I’m thinking “moules frites”, having a look at cartoons and books, and walking around flickring, buying chocolate…

I’ve been heavily involved working with Blyk and tinker.it lately, so I could do with a day off in an unknown city.

On Friday, I’ll be having lunch with the nice people at 31 Volts in Utrecht… which reminds me I have to write something for their blog… argh.

• Ecotourism, Responsible Travel and Sustainable Tourism information and resources
  the new trend in tourism
  (tags: travel sustainability)

• Intersections Conference Podcasts are up!
  Service design panel lead by ex-Ivreans, the most interesting bit is at the end during the questions period
  (tags: service design conference)
• Ten Myths About Selling Intangible Services
  Interesting article on how to sell yourself as a consultant but many of those points could be applied to selling or building a service
  (tags: service design freelance)
• Emergence 2007 » Working Toward Sustainability
  An interesting list of how service design could have changed the world…or the service designer as the treeehugger2.0
  (tags: service design)

There are a million entertaining things about living in London and this is definitely one of them. With all the press about offsetting your travels, it’s interesting to see the term used in a completely unrelated context (the mortgage industry apparently has always used this term to define payments made) and questions perhaps its power to get people to act or relate to the issue of global warming.

“[Weblogs are] the VHS cassette of media delivery.”

via Things magazine