designswarm thoughts

I’m in Amsterdam just back from dinner with friends and speaking at #momoams, having had the best indonesian food money can buy, un-laced home made brownies, and speaking to clever friends starting their own businesses or figuring out big changes in their careers.

Flying back tomorrow and dining at the Ivy. Feel I’m making progress holding on to the English Social Ladder (which I will now refer to ESL) for dear life.

Joost, my intern this week, is making me pannekoeken.

That time of the year again and right on time considering the amount of ink that has been spilt (that expression I guess will have to be revised when the infamous death of paper things happens, oh well) recently about feminism, its impending death (we’re trying to kill off all of our large cultural concepts it seem). My choice this year is my very good friend Carole Collet.

Course Director of the Textle Futures course at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, she is originally French but moved to London about 13 years ago. She founded the course on the back of the Fashion department and grew it into a multi-disciplinary department that teaches students about using their traditional textile skills in completely different fields: environmental, science-based, architectural approaches alike. Their graduate show is the richest and most diverse work I enjoy seeing, year after year.

You could claim she is working on the outskirts of the “women in tech” definition, but I think the definition of technology and where it is applied needs to be constantly revisited. Something Carole does very well both as an academic and her own research and work.

I’m in Austin for the geek version of spring break. I had some ribs. I can’t move anymore.

I realised I don’t write very often about my day job here, perhaps because this feels like a different space that I can use to talk about the meta-job of running a company. Last year, I wrote about running a business but I’m very interested in the dynamics of running a design studio at the moment since we’ve just finished moving for the 4th time in our London office and are part of London’s so-called Silicon Roundabout.

Once upon a time in Ivrea, I borrowed a bunch of DVDs on the Eames’ work and was totally fascinated by 901, their studio in Venice California. Through the years that studio and their work in general has actually been more and more of an influence and reference point. The big challenge in the 21st century activity of running a business is deciding what you are defined by. Are you defined by your work? If so, which part of your work will people hang on to as a mental hook? In our case it was Arduino even if we didn’t develop it, and don’t even sell it anymore. Are you defined by the people in the business? If so how do you give them a voice outside of the business? In our case, I push people to speak at conferences so that I’m not the only one people see. Are you defined by your approach? If so, how do you communicate that? Really hard but I suppose we’re slowly getting there.

One thing I’ve been really looking into lately is how to build culture internally and what that culture means. I’ve come to the conclusion that business culture comes from the types of habits that are formed. In our case, that habit is around sweets. Let me explain. Everytime someone goes somewhere for a conference or a holiday, they always come back with sweets from that place. Small thing, but that makes the office feel like a family which is important when some people are full time and others aren’t. Some people have office breakfasts, friday morning meetings, ours has weekly office emails, sweets, Bantam and Google docs.

I was invited by Monika to attend the Experimental Objects workshop hosted by the Storey last month and found it a fascinating event for many reasons. I don’t hang around academics very much and this was my first truely academic event, with material culture academics. The first thing that struck me was how much of a language different fields develop in order to talk to each other and understand each other, jargon if you will. I found that my web jargon was totally useless to me in this context and pondered over this at great length. The second thing was what I can only refer to as “audio hyperlinks” where people would mid-sentence, off the top of their head, be able to quote a seminal paper written by so-and-so during this-or-that year. Made me feel pretty lazy with all my tinyurls. Anyway, this was a really interesting place to be lost in and I thought I’d highlight the best bits and my favorite speakers.

- John Pickstone spoke at length about how to understand art as an experimental process akin to those developed in the latter part of the 19th century in science.

- Bruno Strasser who teaches a class at Yale on the intersections of science and history (don’t know the official title) spoke at length about the work of Alan Boyden, the birth of labs as museums and history of collecting. I really want to read his book when it comes out.

- Finally Gail Davies talked about mice as “objects” of objectivity in scientific research and the problem caused by “virgin births” which is when mice reproduce without a mate or unexpectedly. She discussed the implications of basing objectivity on something that is from nature and by default uncontrollable.

Terribly fascinating and made me rethink what we do as designers in the context of science and experiments. I left the even thinking there was much conversation that needed to happen between the 2 worlds, now only if we could talk to each other in a language we’d both understand, that would be grand.

Highlarious. Thanks Megan and BERG, made my day.

I’m in a hotel room in Barbados, it’s 5: 27am. I’m about to go to sleep after taking a client out to drinks. This one insists on meeting really late in the evenings and on weekends, not sure why. I think he’s trying to disrupt my work-work balance. Thankfully I have jetlag taking care of that on a permanent basis.

I’ll be taking the day “away” tomorrow which is where I get to catch up on the internet, creative stuff that gets me to be well…creative… and look at chatroulette for a while. I’ve heard the cool kids talking about it.

I’m up-to-date on admin and did VAT for Q2 as well, just to be sure.

Project for London Zoo still in discussion as their Health Department have to consider the implications of LEDs in the animal’s food. I’m hoping we can work this out and move on to phase Agronomy of the project.

Naomi my PA for this week is knitting me armwarmers. She’s from SFO you see and that’s how they roll there.

“the Canadian economy will remain vulnerable to cyclical downturns in commodity prices (forestry is one current example); firms and people will move to more dynamic regions; and wealth generation is dampened” say these people.

Nothing like post-hockey victory kicking.