Archive for the ‘thingsimade’ Category

h1

Tiny Useful Things: KeyMaps

April 21, 2011

I’ve been thinking about embodied contexts for maps lately, beyond flat paper maps.

I have 3 sets of keys that I carry around and I thought that a simple way of differentiating them would be to design location-relevant key rings. There’s such a familiarity with specific locations like the office, home, your partner’s home, that labels aren’t necessary anymore.

KeyMaps are key rings with a very focused zoomed-in map of where that key goes. The hole in the keyring is the place those keys are connected to. Around them, the area. Something that only the owner could make sense of. Granular, but not too granular.

I think they might be nice made out of wood and generated easily online somewhere.

That’s it. Happy Easter!

Posted in interaction design, maps, Product design, thingsimade | Comments Off

h1

Tiles: Twitter as visual dictionary

March 11, 2011

tiles

(Warning: Firmly in the “things I don’t know how to build and can’t be bothered to learn how to” category.)

I grew up flicking through the Dictionnaire Visuel on my mother’s bookshelf right next to that year’s Larousse Universel. It shaped my knowledge of words and the world beyond my bedroom in the 13ème. I grew to love writing and words, even if I still struggle with english sentence structure. When Twitter launched naming convention led to lots of people hogging famous people’s names and company names as a quick way to make money. I was interested in more common words, words that don’t matter. Seeing what people had done with them, seeing who owned them.

I took a classic William Blake poem and looked up all the words and dates as twitter users. Only “bed” was an account that had been suspended (the word “they” linked to a stupidly large image so I took that out too). I pasted the acount’s avatar next to the word. The result is interesting to me, as you could easily create a language around it, and the fact that anyone would bother registering dates as usernames is interesting. Not very many of these accounts were popular. Many came from asia. Most only had ever tweeted once. Ghost accounts for the modern dictionary. Dunno, it entertained me for a few hours as I avoid prepping for Robotlift.

Final thing here.

Posted in thingsimade | Comments Off

h1

Curious Scarves: thoughts on the costs of making things

March 8, 2011

I’ve just launched Curious Scarves today and lots of people are commenting on the price. That’s good. People aren’t commenting on the idea.
This is the second thing I make for sale. The first one was Topoware. I learnt that there are a few ways to go about making things for the world and have learnt some hard lessons on the back of it.

1. Get things made and try to sell them in shops is hard.
When we designed Topoware, I put down £4K for 50 plates and bowls to be made at Caverswall in Stoke-on-Trent. It was a lot of money. I tried to sell them on Etsy but they shut down my shop because it wasn’t handmade. Eventually sold about 4 to 5 sets to friends through Folksy. At the time this wasn’t my day job or Karola’s. We didn’t push the retail side of this as we should have and I learnt that shops never answer email requests or any emails for that matter. You have to go see them with a sample, let them look at it for a while, and then bug them about it. Lack of total dedication to this sales activity hurt us on the long run of course and most of the collection is still sitting on my shelf.

2. Selling things for cheap doesn’t pay unless you’re in China.
I sold Arduinos for the first 6 months of Tinker, from Matt’s flat, putting things in envelopes, going to the post, etc. Selling a thing that cheap meant there was virtually no money to be made if I bothered to pay for my own time. I was running a business, not an expensive hobby which is why eventually we stopped. Living in London and selling things that don’t pay for my time is pretty much the dumbest thing I could have done.

3. Sell things locally and on demand: it’s the internet way.
Curious Scarves are made on demand for now as I don’t have the money to just pre-make a bunch. That’s what the internet is good for too. I didn’t want to waste Alexandra‘s time or mine, I wanted to get something right quickly and give people as much flexibility as possible. She made some beautiful prototypes which I used to tweak the dimensions and take some pictures. She lives 10 minutes away from RIG so I could have the conversations I needed with her and get her to respond quickly. For all those reasons and more, I prefered working with her. She also needs to be paid properly for her work, which is only fair as for a “large and wide” scarf, she spends 4.5h knitting on her machine. This is worth paying for. I prefer to encourage local production and young designers than going off to asia and get kids to be exploited. I think that’s also part of being a responsible designer. This might mean I get very little traction because it’s a little more expensive than your run-of-the-mill high street shop, but that’s ok, because it’s not a high street product.

Smart, local, global design. I think it’s worth thinking about.

Posted in business, thingsimade | 3 Comments »

h1

Tiny interesting things: Pieces of Shoreditch history

February 25, 2011

Designed this today as I try to wrap my head around the beast that is Shoreditch. See post at RIG or go buy it on a tote bag.

eastlondon

Posted in thingsimade | Comments Off

h1

Tiny Useful Things: Radio Cards

January 24, 2011

IMG00491-20110124-1259

I did a bit of Olympics-related media thinking for a client last month and it dawned on me that the most interesting thing about that 2 weeks will be the social and cultural gap that athletes and their entourage will have to deal with, not to mention the millions of tourists. How do you make the whole experience of living in England for a short amount of time less troubling. Often, when you visit a place for a short while, you accept the cultural differences, but some of these people will be here for months, training before the events. Linguistics is not that much of a challenge and something like Point it will do a basic job. But how do you explain simple everyday things like: what should I listen to in the morning?

Radio Cards are a little set of cards attached to the aerial of a radio to remind you of the major UK radio stations.

Just a friendly tiny useful thing. It took me about 2 years before I started listening to Radio 4 and I sometimes switch to a classical channel (not sure which) when I can’t fall asleep. I had to look up the other stations for this. Radio is a funny old thing, a thing of habit. To an English person, this will make no sense because it is assumed you know these things, but from a foreigner’s perspective, every little helps.

More pics here.

Posted in interaction design, thingsimade | Comments Off

h1

Deep City (the printed edition)

December 20, 2010

Giles Lane invited me to lead one of the days in the series of hands-on explorations called “City as Material” which resulted in Layered being published. I came into the Proboscis offices a few weeks later and decided to revise the Deep City talk I’d given at the Microsoft Social Symposium and put those thoughts down into a little e-book. Download and enjoy!

Posted in architecture, cities, designswarm, thingsimade | Comments Off

h1

mybookmarks and the death of del.icio.us

December 18, 2010

As the mass exodus to Pinboard takes place in the wake of the almost announcement of “sun-setting” del.icio.us, I had a real long thought about these bookmarking sites and exported by bookmarks from delicious in order to look at all of it. I found stuff I hadn’t looked at in ages. Some of it made me smile. Like opening a box of photographs.
Thoughts:

- I used to use online bookmarking a LOT more in 2006.

- Bookmarks, for me, are about forgetting, but knowing where to forget.

- For me, there’s nothing social about bookmarking, it’s mostly deeply personal, but I’m glad other people used the same platform. When people would blog their del.icio.us bookmarks, I knew what that meant. I’ve never followed anyone else’s bookmarks, but I clicked on what people linked to.

- I cannot find it in me to sign up to new things like it’s 2007. I’m done being social online.

So I decided to hold on to the 1073 days of using del.icio.us and make a thing. I called it mybookmarks.

It’s a sort of archive, as we near 2011 and as a way to tell when I was most active, and what I was interested in. It’s like my Twitter profile, but just with my bookmarks and my comments, sorted by year. It’s for me, hosted by me, not going anywhere, not being sunset, just sitting there quietly being useful. It makes me happy. So there.

Bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks.

(It also probably doesn’t work on anything other than my version of Safari, sorry.)

Posted in books, designswarm, thingsimade | Comments Off