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.

- 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’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.

Nothing like post-hockey victory kicking.

This week, I’m spending my time having cups of Earl Grey and Jasmine Pearls, working from Liberty’s tea room downstairs. It’s London Fashion Week and my personal assistant is texting me the latest collections and only the bits I would want to wear. It’s like RSS but in human form, without the need to sit on horribly designed chairs for the proles. Brilliant.

I’ve finally purchased an iPhone as they got their shit together and made a beautiful silver version commissioned by my friend Karola.

Met with the Hon Ben Bradshaw and told him about the massive missunderstanding that the Department has about creativity and culture and that simply pouring money down the local development agencies gullet wasn’t going to help at all. He suggested I be made OBE but I reminded him I was Canadian, to which he responded “Oh, your accent is very good”. I continued to sip my tea with a smile.

I’ve got some meetings planned with the London Zoo, I’d like to propose a massive animal-centric interactive piece, but I suspect they might have some problems dealing with the health and safety issues. Bloody nanny state.

Going to see my friend Sanjeev talk at a RIBA event on his work in India and over the weekend will be seeing a friend get the shit kicked out of him or beat the shit out of someone else in a boxing match. One must have balance after all.

Adam my PA for this week is making me pancakes.

Instead, most of a program’s overall functionality is coded into a single “all-knowing” object, which maintains most of the information about the entire program and provides most of the methods for manipulating this data. Because this object holds so much data and requires so many methods, its role in the program becomes God-like (all-encompassing). Instead of program objects communicating amongst themselves directly, the other objects within the program rely on the God object for most of their information and interaction. Since the God object is referenced by so much of the other code, maintenance becomes more difficult than it otherwise would in a more evenly divided programming design. [...] While creating a God object is typically considered bad programming practice, this technique is occasionally used for tight programming environments (such as microcontrollers), where the slight performance increase and centralization of control is more important than maintainability and programming elegance.

Quote 1: “It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.”

Comment 1:
- Amelia Earhart
- Joan of Ark
- Suffragettes
- Benhazir Bhutto

also about the ones not dead:
- Anna Wintour
- Zaha Hadid
- Paola Antonielli
- Kathy Sierra
You get my drift.

Quote 2: “They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.”

Comment 2:
- Ghandi
- Nelson Mandela
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Oh, you meant white men I guess.

Quote 3: “What I do know is this: it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.”

Comment 3: I know _plenty_ of men in tech who would never dream of doing that and who sit there, not living up to their full potential. When talking about the elite, one must perhaps consider one’s expectations carefully. There is also a dramatic difference between the US attitude to performance and the rest of the world, perhaps why it hasn’t been blessed with the best of reputations. A loud obnoxious man (we’d say a wanker in England) is changing your country for the worse Clay, just now, probably because he is confident, louder and is lying about being able to do the job. Fabulous.

So with inflammatory rants, and I’ve been the first to start them in the past, I’ve learnt something important: more than anything else on the subject of women in tech, education, design, let us not wallow in the valley of despair. It’s completely unhelpful, makes people angry and gives out more bad vibes than not. As a woman in design and tech, let me grow in that field, make my own place and find my own voice. It won’t be a man’s, I assure you. It might take me time, but I’ll get there.

- talk about something that’s related to my design interests

- break the Ignite format (as I did with Interesting)

- Reflect on the current discourse around cities (more on that below)

- see friends and meet people I’d not had the opportunity to have a proper chat with before (nod to Christian, Aaron and Adam and Jennifer )

So I had a long hard think about the theme and decided that instead of doing what a lot of internet-types are doing which is to see the city from above (maps and all) or from below (infrastructure and all) or even the surface of it (advertising and LED walls), I was going to focus on what makes my experience of cities (having lived in large ones like Amsterdam, Paris, London, Milan, Montreal) unique and enjoyable. A user’s experience. I quickly realised that most of it had _nothing_ to do with anything technology related. You might argue that by not owning an iPhone (gasp!) I’m missing out. Perhaps, but I’m happy with what I found.

Wanting to highlight these aspects of cities, I did something I hadn’t done in a while: I wrote. I used to love writing fiction in school as a girl and this was a lot of fun. So it kindof ended up as a photo montage of sorts with a piece of text, probably because I’ve been watching La Jetée.

If you manage to guess the order of all the cities pictured, comment below and you win a plate.

Airports. Everything starts with an airport when you start with a city. Bergamo, Heathrow, Gatwick Schipol, JFK, Trudeau. All the same in some ways, all offering the same entry point to a city: a view from above. Sometimes you can see it as clearly as a google map, but often its at night, and it only reveals its glowing downtown, like woven by a moth with luminescent silk.

The sounds. Police sirens, shouting in a market, ambulances, arguing, honking, pigeons, church bells, the sound of a kiss, a pair of high hells on the pavement, the muffled sound of boots through snow or leaves.

Time. The time it takes to have a shower, order coffee, take the underground, metropolitana, subway, train, bus. Waiting there, with some music in your ears perhaps to kill the time, the boredom, chop it off in 3 mn slices. The time to walk your daughter to school, check your email, see a movie, eat a meal with a friend, walk the dog in the park.

The hip place to be, the right café, the right exhibition, the right pub, apperitivo, the right time to get there, 8pm, 10pm, 1am, 3am. The way to order a cocktail, stampot, koffie verkiert, flat white, the right clothes, the right skinny jeans, the right look. Feeling hip, seeing others recognise it.

Fall in love in the subway, in a gallery, in a bar. So much lust and dreams clashing, bumping into each other. The parties, friends gossiping, people jogging at 5am, on Christmas day even, making everyone jealous, old couples ignoring each other at a restaurant.

Sitting in the same café, or maybe a different one. Eavesdropping people talking about their mother, their latest vacation, their aspirations, complaints, gossip, criticism.

Layers of sounds, stories, histories that melt, meet, separate again, never quite belonging to each other.

All the people that make up a city. If no one lived here, would it still earn that title?

Manhattan, Un Americano a Roma, Paris je t’aime, Love Actually, Gotham City, Blade Runner, you’re in a city because you want to be in love. You’re in love with it, with what it could be, with what it isn’t quite. It loves you, rejects you, elevates you, helps you, pushes you forward or away, supports you, allows you to live, to work, to survive, to thrive, to go places, to move on elsewhere, to stay there forever.

The city and its ins and outs. In it, under a roof, in a museum, a factory, an apartment building, a council estate. People stacked on top of each other, never more than 3m apart.The patina of the out, the graffiti, the architecture, the heights of it.

The city where everyone is from everywhere else. It’s constantly trying to be what those people want from a home, made up of foreign words, made up of nostalgia of where they came from and where they are now. Could be anywhere but its here, a patchwork that makes no sense, that doesn’t belong to one time, but every year and every decade is written in brick, in cement, in iron, in wires.

The view. Always the view. You own the city and it owns you. The birds constantly watching over you.

Lights, signage, flickering.I am in a city that I don’t know but recognise. Yellow, blues, greens, black, white, movement, music playing next door. Posters, ads, all telling me what I should care about right now. I glance away, ignoring the glow of information, I’m too busy crossing the street.

Walking. Sense of scale, sense of how long it takes me to get to the end of the block, the end of the line, the end of town. When does the city stop exactly? When there is less? How much less? How much more? I’m going everywhere, and nowhere. Slow things down by walking. Let the scale hit me, look up. Look at how tall it all feels.

For you, dear readers, these will be bits of sentences which I am sharing, not because I know you’ll understand them, but because I know you won’t ;)

page 30:
“Mais des tas de fois c’est comme ca, et presque tout le temps: on découvre à la fin que la souffrance, toute cette souffrance-là, était inutile, on a souffert comme des betes et c’était inutile, ca n’était ni juste ni injuste, ni bete, ni moche, c’était simplement inutile, et tout ce que tu peux dire à la fin c’est ca: c’était une souffrance inutile”

page 140
“peindre le rien”

page 153
“s’il y avait une solution une femme la découvrirait, ne serait-ce que par une complicité objective entre enigmes”

page 180
“ou tu regardes, ou tu joues”

page 219
“C’était un mélange de force indiscutable et de solitude définitive. Il les mettait à l’abri de toutes les défaites, et de tous les bonheurs. Ainsi ils perdaient, invaincus, toute leur vie.”

page 232
“Car c’est exactement ainsi qu’apparait la position destinale de l’homme: etre face au monde, avec soi-meme dans le dos.”

page 334
“la cruauté c’est la vertu par excellence des médiocres”

page 476
“la belle époque: on mangeait bien et les heures passaient vite”