Theory & fiction books
Everyware by Adam Greenfield
Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling
A Manifesto for Networked Objects by Julian Bleecker
Smart Things by Mike Kuniavsky
Makers by Cory Doctorow

Research
Touch project, Oslo School of Architecture & Design
Anne Galloway
Tale of Things, University College of London
Web of Things
Homesense project or bottom-up smart homes. (self-promotion)

Tech Books
Getting Started with the Internet of Things by Cuno Pfister
Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe
Building the Internet of Things with the Arduino by Charalampos Doukas
Designing the Internet of Things by Adrian Mcewen and Hakim Cassimally (in progress)
Building Wireless Sensor Networks by Robert Faludi

Products
Nabaztag (now Karotz)
Ambient Orb
Ambient Umbrella
WideTag Social Energy Meter
Bakertweet
Botanicalls
Kickbee
Tiny printers
Bubblino
Poken
Swinxs
Green Goose
FitBit
Withings
Zeo

Startups
Good Night Lamp (self-promotion)
readyDIYmate
Olly & Molly
Rymble
Chirp

Web platforms
Pachube
Evrthng
Open Sen.se
IOBridge
Symplio
Stickybits (back in 2009, not the most current version)
Thingworx
If this then that
Yaler

Hardware platforms
Arduino
Nanode
Raspberry Pi
Xbee

Protocols
(Not my strong suit, suggestions anyone?)

Governmental
The IOT Council (EU)
IOT, an action plan for Europe (2009)
Open IOT Assembly
Technology Strategy Board, UK

Corporations
Cisco infographic
IBM video
Nokia Push (self-promotion as Tinker kicked the campaign off back in 2009)

Other
Quantified Self

Let me know if i’m missing anything!

That morning, I was reading about Alan Kay and tumblred upon a talk he gave presenting Ivan Sutherland‘s Sketchpad project.

A simple idea, demoed well. What went wrong? Why isn’t this included in my version of Illustrator or Autocad?

This reminded me of the Internet Fridge. For the past year, Roo Reynolds has been curating a site , collecting all Internet Fridge ideas and the latest attempts of large white goods manufacturers to address this venn diagram that simply won’t stick: Food management and the internet. Brilliant idea, crap implementation over and over again. But the hope lives on. You could say that the same goes for the 1930s Dick Tracy watch which LG tried to launch and might come to life with Pebble. There is a lot of hope in technology and in other areas of innovation. It can be a useful form of short-sightedness.

So I thought I’d talk about the Internet Fridge Factor (IFF) as a shortcut to a series of ideas around innovation:

- recurring ideas in design
- ideas that are brilliant but make terrible products
- ideas that are old, but so good, people keep wanting them to happen no matter what
- ideas that take forever to come to life
- ideas that age well (we refer to jetpacks almost 100 years after they were first mentioned) and illustrate some parts of our lives haven’t changed that much
- ideas where the implementation is always a disappointment because it doesn’t live up to the hype.

It’s useful to look at crazy demos through this lens and realise how much of our innovation stems from the inability to admit ideological defeat. I get the feeling robots might come under this category for example. Time will tell I suppose, as usual.

This is my post there as the site seems to suffer from Dreamhost being rubbish.

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After almost a year and a half post Tinker London, it’s a real pleasure for me to be able to share what I’ll be working on for the foreseeable future: The Good Night Lamp. I’m going to use this blog to share how the product is being developed, how the hardware and software are being built and the adventure of trying to do a commercially accessible “internet of things” product. You might have noticed I got quite militant this year in my blogging, but that was as much about spreading my opinions as it was convincing myself that the time is *now* for a tangible everyday “internet of things” product. When I first came up with the Good Night Lamp in 2005 as a student at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, the type of software infrastructure that we now find in projects like Pachube and others wasn’t around. Arduino wasn’t even around really as it was being tested while I was working on the project.

Now 7 years later it’s much easier to try to build networked devices and products. The challenge is no longer the technology, the challenge is in running a successful business and getting those products in people’s hands in ways that feel natural, useful and delightful. A tall order, but I think it’s a great modern challenge that I am excited to take on.

In January looking at Little Printer and sitting right next to MakieLab, I felt that it was time to get my hands dirty too. There is so much momentum at the moment in the SIlicon Roundabout and I’ve already had some fantastic feedback and advice. I am also blessed to be surrounded with fantastic designers, hackers and creative technologists. Andy Huntington had a go at helping me on the early stage technology prototype last autumn and now that’s being picked up by the very talented John Nussey. I have reached out to some people who were personal Internet of Things heroes and I’m delighted to say they’ve all accepted to support me on this adventure. Rafi Haladjian, CEO of Open Sen.se who was also the founder of the Nabaztag is one of those people. He joins our Board of Advisors. Others will be announced in the next weeks.

We’re aiming to ship some lamps for Christmas and to share the making process along the way. In the meantime, follow us on @GNLteam. We won’t spam you trust me. We’ll also be hiring in the next months, so if this is an exciting idea for you and you want to get involved, please get in touch with me at alex (at) goodnightlamp (dot) com.

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I gave a talk last week at Made North in Liverpool. My point that time around was suggesting a way forward for “industry” in a time where economic growth is a key agenda item for Mr Osbourne.

The Children
I think that when we talk about industry, most people have a romantic view that ignores the reasons why we stopped “making things” in the first place. One of the reasons why industrial times was so successful was partly because we had no qualms about hiring children to work (something Lewis Hine documented very well). Eventually when that was socially frowned upon, we started outsourcing the work to other people’s children and developed better technology to do less work. Cheap labour is China’s competitive advantage and short of going back to slave labour, the UK cannot go back to “making things” in that sense. Sorry.

Stuck in the 20th century
Traditional manufacturing is not only losing out to China but also to the US which is inventing products that people want to buy, and offering services in new ways. When products like Scalextric and model trains are losing to digital toys (iPads and iPhones), we have to wonder not only what is happening to local manufacturing, but also whether demand for those products will ever be the same.
However, the manufacturing industry in the UK seems convinced that this digital revolution has nothing to do with them. The website for the UK’s Manufacturing Summit is the poster child of a cultural disparity across the country. With so much local talent in the creative industries, how could they possibly get away with a plain html website with no social media presence and a form to fill in to book tickets. We’re not in Kansas anymore and this isn’t 1995.
Creative people around the UK want to learn from UK experts and want advice about developing their products. But if a 20 something can’t find your business on Google, you don’t exist to them now. This is the kind of world we live in.

New ways of making
This should be a golden age for UK manufacturing. People are making things everywhere at various scales. In Hackspaces, studios, universities, at home, in their sheds. This is a nation on tinkerers after all. People are coming up with an idea using an Arduino, building a prototype, redesigning the electronics using Fritzing going to Tinkercad to build a box for the prototype. Then they will have the box made by a Makerbot, Ponoko, RazorLab, i-Materialise, Shapeways or other rapid prototyping manufacturers around the world who understand their users want to click a “upload” button and have something sent to them in the post.

That is a different kind of customer for UK manufacturing. It is a digitally-empowered one and to understand him/her, the industry has to adapt. Once that customer has a product they are happy with, they will look for funding through Kickstarter or sell their product online through Etsy or Folsky. (Most of these digital services were not developed in the UK, I hasten to add.)

New business models
The opportunity may no longer be in large scale production, but in pre-production and longer-term production support. The UK’s manufacturing expertise should be the ideal trampoline to enable local entrepreneurs to get something made quickly with someone locally who is exploiting their existing networks in Asia. UK manufacturers should be China’s agents in the UK and reach out with the latest technology to young entrepreneurs who need help.

This is a very exciting time for UK manufacturing if it accepts that their clientele is changing. If anything, the Uk government should be looking at helping all these companies digitise their services and really understand what an online presence can do for your business. This won’t mean as many large contracts but will mean lots of small contracts. If Newspaper Club has re-invigorated the struggling industry of newspaper printing, it’s possible for any industry to benefit from a more digital attitude. It’s only a question of faith.

I went to Hong Kong and Australia a few months ago and relished at the idea of bringing back “things”. When going to a foreign land, your wallet gets a little out of control and I looked forward to bringing back treasures from the east, like some Marco Polo in a dress with a credit card. I never thought it would turn out to be such a challenge.

As I walked through the markets of Hong Kong, staring at jade jewellery and Angry Birds paraphonalia, it occured to me that I could order everything on eBay or Amazon. The foreign land’s treasures have been globalised to a point of total consumer disinterest. The only thing that was left to consume was food and architecture.

Despite empires worth millions, it’s very hard to export a restaurant experience well. The coffee is still better in Italy, croissants more buttery yet flaky in Paris and in Hong Kong, the chinese buns fresh off of a tiny stall are more delicious than in any “Chinatown” I’ve ever visited. Maybe that’s the end of a global marketplace, when there’s nothing left to buy, when you go to a place just for the scenery and the food. No wonder the First World is obsessed with restaurant experiences, chefs and cookbooks, it might be all we have left to define ourselves.

The consumption of architecture is different but has a lasting impact on how we remember a place. I went up the Empire State Building one night with a friend and looked down onto the city, the landscape from above being as important to life there as life on the streets. I took pictures.

That’s why we keep taking pictures of places that have been photographed for a hundred years. Our picture is our way of saying “I was here too”. The picture has stopped having real meaning, it’s the act of pressing the button that acts as a reminder to remember.

In Apartamento, a wonderful magazine about people and their interiors, a antique store dealer was talking about the fact that American taste has become a bit “vanilla”. He said people didn’t want exotic things anymore, they didn’t want to be unique. They wanted to be like everyone else. Could it be that When you are drowning in a digital culture that says that social is everything then you might forget what makes you special? When Amazon and every ad banner online knows what you like, what happens if you forget what you like. Anti-consumption. A broken looking glass.

Kevin Slavin occasionally posts pictures of himself with a local newspaper and I think that’s exactly right. When you can be anywhere, you have to celebrate where you are right then and there. That’s luxury.

True affirmation of identity and uniqueness has become tricky when you are constantly forced into relationships with “friends”, Groupon deals and “other people also bought this” prompts. Perhaps travel and food, as sensorial experiences that one cannot share, will become even more prized than they are now.

Happy Monday!

I won’t go into the details of the full presentation but it seemed that pre-2007 (launch year of Twitter and the iPhone) the market was full of strange and smart exciting products. Not platforms, not hacks, but proper things you could by on a shelf on the high street. Pleo, Aibo, Nabaztag, the Ambiant Orb & Umbrella and the promise of the Hug Shirt. Most of these products failed, were discontinued, or were never developed past the trademark stage. The hacker community took over and the commercial game became about platforms. Arduino spawned endless compatible shields, kits and competing products sold through the likes of Sparkfun or Make Magazine. The community created a design culture of one-offs.

In the last 2 years it’s been about building web platforms for the internet of things. Started by Pachube, the marketplace then filled with companies whose existing business models fit the new mould. We have to do better than that.

As CES is under way and initial reports of the latest dancing robots flood the internet, I think the UK design scene has a tremendous opportunity and can’t afford not to get involved. Most of the people who have pushed the field forward have been hackers, producing on-off products that need support to get to the shelves of the high street.

In the midst of quite a lot of angst around manufacturing in the UK this is an opportunity the UK can’t afford to miss. Bridging links between hackers and manufacturers is an opportunity that won’t suffer from misplaced nostalgia, and will create new business opportunities. In the same way the north of Italy supported most of the manufacturing boom of the 1960s, using the UK’s expertise in manufacturing should enable it to become quickly THE place to get your internet of things devices ready for mass production and onto the high street. That’s something the government should help with and maybe that’s what Tech City should be about…

If anything, 2012 is the time for crazy bold entrepreneurship and enthusism in this stale consumer product space. Austerity periods are often a wonderful time for creativity and we need that boost. The failure in the take-up of smart energy meters have proved that we have to go beyond pure utility to make the internet of things part of our daily lives, and really tap into people’s desires for whimsy and fun (see Homesense if you don’t believe me). People didn’t buy an iPhone because it could make better calls. This is the time to really do something different and make connections that didn’t exist before. Onwards and forward and Happy New Year everyone!

One thing that really gnawed at me during my holiday was the way in which people used the word “make” at the event. There was an agreed use of language in the art world that didn’t seem to mean the same in the hacker community. Also, somehow, everyone thought that an artist was the most noble of every kind of creator. This is interesting. If we have found a common language in the word “making”, noone seemed to agree on how noble we consider the output of the “making” itself. Someone with the 40 year skills in engraving a gun, was considered less interesting than a designer who produced rough sketches and had them made by others. There’s a perceived value in not getting your hands too dirty, as if ignorance was bliss, or technical knowledge in itself was an incomprehensible elite (a woman in the audience complained that as an artist, she’d need to learn CAD to make something). My panel was viewed with a mixture of sniggering and fear in such a place. Most of the establishment was ready to rule it off as being for “geeks”. I think what differentiates the two communities is a mixture of curiosity and humility. It takes humility to admit that you can learn new tools and that those tools might make you a different and better designers/ artist. That probably comes from the meritocratic environment of the internet and not the traditional hierarchy of academia. This will have to be addressed in the design and art schools of the future as it’s an important barrier to collaboration.

As I work my way through my notes on the event, I also wanted to start to unpick who was using the word “make” and what they were making. This is a first stab and not really about creating collaborative connections yet. I might also be missing some things, do let me know. In this, I think we can see where the “creative industries” overlap and therefore where skill sets overlap. This also proves perhaps that one should be quite careful with using any one term. Designer, artists, engineer…when you look close enough, can become one and the same.

As part of RIG, I worked closely with Phil, Andy and Amanda (an absolute pleasure, you should hire them, seriously) to launch FRSTEE a few weeks ago. The most interesting thing about this project for me was the opportunity to work with rapid prototyping in a way that made economic sense. To build a micro-business in the heart of the Silicon Roundabout. That’s what Tech City is about no? I was told in 2000, while at my BA, that those technologies were the future of manufacturing. 11 years later, that’s still the message, but I’d like to think our little contribution gets us closer to that objective. Realistically though, rapid prototyping is still incredibly expensive when you want something that is beautiful, of variable size and made quickly. Qualities that DIY solutions don’t cope well with so far. I’m sure that’s only a matter of time mind you.

The design of businesses and the business of design
Building businesses is the kind of design work I find myself doing. It is a design activity in a strange way and my design background along with the experience of running Tinker has been invaluable. The most important skills I think I’ve developed are predicting future problems and handling money. 2 things I wish they would teach in design school to make young people a little more ready for industry. So here are some quick things I learnt in helping build FRSTEE.

Things you need to remember when building a micro-business

1. You need someone to do the boring work
There’s a ton of boring work in a business. In this one, it’s about collecting the orders once they’ve been rapid prototyped (round the corner on Curtain Road at Inition), checking them, tying a festive piece of string through them, looking at orders, putting the right one in bubble wrap, in a box, printing out the address and stamp (using online stamps by Royal Mail) on a label and finally walking over to the post office to send them. Because each piece is unique, that pretty much prevents us from using smart fulfilment solutions like Amazon. All of this incredibly tedious work is done by Amanda. She is a star.

2. You need to worry about the smallest numbers.
Something to remember is that all of this costs money. Amanda’s time, packaging, stamps, boxes, bubble wrap, tape. Stuff you have to buy and cost out for every package you send out to make sure you’re still making some money somewhere down the line. Tricky when you can’t drive the cost of rapid prototyping much lower than it is, again because of how unique each is. Tricky also because charging too much for a bespoke product starts to feel like luxury and in these economically challenging times, that’s not a good idea. A glass ceiling in a way.

3. Never drop the ball
Not unlike launching a web service, you have to constantly be in touch with people. In our case that means our suppliers and customers. I live in a constant flow of emails, ordering supplies and keeping on top of everything. We send out orders every week so far and that feels good, a rhythm is setting in even if it’s a seasonal product.

4. Always work with awesome people who understand technology
Phil implemented a design that was initiated by Ben. He also built the connection between Andy’s ability to script designs in 3D and Paypal. Andy made the rendering easy and connecting it to Inition a breeze. Magic as far as I’m concerned. When you’re working with people who just understand the technologies they are working with and are willing to learn new things, things just get done much faster. After all these years I value a “yes maybe” much more than I value a “no but”. It’s an attitude that gets you through a lot in a business even a small one.

Silicon Roundabout / Tech City: it’s not about location
Since November 2010, things haven’t changed much in Old Street, except that the Silicon Roundabout thing went from a joke to becoming a marketing vehicule for Shoreditch. Companies moved in the area and started waving the flag around. I started to track activity around the expression on a Tumblr site. Journalists from the US came to visit, companies from the world of advertsing, PR and others are organising tours, walking around trying to understand what is happening behind the converted factories. Local companies had a football match, organise recruiting events and shared food recommendations. I use the past tense as activity has diminuished over the summer as London snoozed. I’m curious if it will pick up again, or we’re kindof collectively over it. If anything, I predict that Tech City will replace the tongue-in-cheek moniker, and Stratford will stay isolated. Right now, the idea of a technology & innovation hub makes sense in Shoreditch, not Stratford. Google’s choice of (sales) offices south of Old Street means they’ve understood that too even if becomes just another TechHub. I’m not sure where the Olympic legacy fits in anymore. It’s even dissapeared from public discourse as Cameron finds himself with other fish to fry.

Show me the money
Having a bunch of startups in a city means you have to build an investment ecology around them. What’s changed the most in the past year is how many of those startups started to turn to government for funding. VC & angel funding isn’t quite there yet but The Technology Strategy Board, a governmental funding body started putting out calls for more web & tech centric topics after years of catering to industrial manufacturing only. Their call on “internet of things” for example generated a lot of buzz, as did the Tech City call that fueled Makielab. It would be useful, instead of bullying corporations to open offices around here, for the government to get them to invest some money in start-ups funds, not unlike the Awesome foundation. I’m sure this sort of scheme could count as social corporate responsibility. Of course if most of these startups end up being acquired by US businesses, you could argue this isn’t doing our economy much good on the long term, but as we all know governments aren’t good at long term plans anyway.

So I’m not sure if I’m excited or not yet. And I guess that’s the problem.