Russell Davies

the unsettling fruit bowl of melted men

I saw this post on Boing Boing the other day, thought 'I can do that' and bought some toy knights at our corner shop on the way home from work. I was going to get Arthur to help but apparently he doesn't believe in melting army men.

The instructions were clear and worked. The only thing I'd add is that you get some pretty noxious fumes off it. They're probably not that healthy. I'd make sure you do it with some windows open.

The only problem is that I don't think anyone really wants it in the house. It's more than slightly disturbing, especially if you've seen the Chapman's Hell.

Still, perhaps, a nice gift for the festive goth in your life.

marvin the device of unrevealed purpose

Daniel came round yesterday to help with our Homesense project. He's an incredibly patient and helpful teacher. And he got me doing actual coding on our arduino. Rudimentary but very satisfying.

We installed and tuned it after he'd gone and it's working like a charm. But Arthur doesn't want me to reveal what it actually does until we've installed the soundchip we ordered yesterday. So it will remain secret for a while.

I also think I've roped Tom in to help with one of our other ideas which requires a bit of delighting with data, and means I'm looking for old maps of our area. That's going to be exciting too. We're going to need a bigger arduino.

wharf / november / lunchtime

wharf/november/lunchtime from russelldavies on Vimeo.

festive fabric fab

Remember Weare by Moving Brands? That was a great idea. Annoyingly I seem to have lost mine. Wish I could order another. I always like it when the web gets squeezed into fabric.

 And here are two really good examples which would make ace Christmas presents.

First there's the Tweet Towel from We Are What We Do. A tea-towel with a tweet embroidered on it. Obviously.

Second there are the Pistil SF map/blankets - blankets with lovely maps of your area (or wherever you like) on them. Designed by Stamen/OpenStreetMaps/Cloudmade. Splendid.

 

 

 

back in the day

Every 6 months I update Dawdlr and it makes me think about something different. This time I noticed the stuff I put in the sidebar back in 2007.

"dawdlr is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: what are you doing, you know, more generally?"

It's a tribute to the copy on the twitter site. Or what used to be there. I presume they don't say that any more. It's a shame - there should be a service that does that, that was good.

(Postcard above is from Anna's genius Snailr Project.)

sad sweep being abducted by evil sooty

winky dink and you

I was reading about Winky Dink and You recently. (in the splendid Paperweight newspaper). It was a 1950s TV show where you got a special plastic sheet to put on the TV screen - which you could then draw on and interact with the cartoons on the TV. Brilliant. A genius idea.

But it feels deeply transgressive doesn't it? The price and delicacy of screens means we've learned to treat them with enormous reverence and care. We polish them. Keep them in cases. Don't draw on them.

I wonder if this reverence was what led to some of the horrified reactions when I painted my macbook with blackboard paint.

But that's going to have to change isn't it? We're going to be carrying them around, pawing and dabbing them with our fingers too much to keep treating them that delicately. I bit that means we'll get new aesthetics for screens and their boxes. More tolerant of damage and dirt. (Less pretending to be Deiter Rams and more pretending to be Ray Mears.) And if it doesn't happen with the glowing rectangles it'll definitely happen when we get E Ink everywhere. I'm looking forward to that. Scuffed and patinaed screens.

I remember wondering the same about cars - whether the industry would develop a less shiny aesthetic. And it's starting to happen. There are a couple of cars round us with an aftermarket matte black finish. They look brilliant, sinister and subtle. It's a high-end, expensive thing at the moment, but I bet it migrates through the modding scene and into the mainstream.

home sense or home silly

We've signed up as a guinea pig family for the Homesense project. The idea is to give people some tools and a tame expert and see what home automation/monitoring tools they build for themselves. Arthur was tremendously excited when Daniel and George came round to demo everything. We've recently watched the Hitchhikers Guide movie and he was hoping we'd be able to build an android and doors that sigh. It was brilliant to see him get excited by electronics.

 

But as we actually sit and decide what we'd like to build though it's gotten a lot harder. It turns out that homes are mostly full of solved problems. Generations of dedicated and professional engineers and designers have worked out how to do most of the things we want to do in the house, and huge industrial economies have been spun up to send us those solutions quickly, efficiently and for reasonable amounts of money. And every idea we have that involves notifications or messaging is more quickly and easily done with a phone.

So, we keep coming back to silliness and fun. The Tinker guys asked us some questions at the beginning of the process - what we wanted from it, what problems we had with the flat, that sort of thing. Arthur said his number one goal would be to make the flat more exciting. That's the brief we're working on now - how to make domestic stuff more interesting, funny, delightful. I'll let you know how we get on.

post digital - an apology

I had lunch with Iain with the other day and he was telling me how annoyed he was by the term 'Post Digital'. Or perhaps, more specifically, by how some people are using it. And, I must admit, I've been getting more and more embarrased by it myself.

Now, coining or promulgating a bit of jargon gives you no proprietary rights over it, I know that. It'll end up meaning whatever people want it to mean. But, just for the record, this is some of what I meant and what I didn't.

YES

Post Digital was intended as a possible condition we might get to. A place where we're able to evaluate digital and analogue tools equally and fairly, from a position of equal familiarity and expertise. Right now, there are tiny handful of people qualified to do this. I'm not one of them. Tom might be.

And it's a condition - in the world - where most people have powerful and easy to use devices full of applications and services which work well and satisfyingly, where you can get all the media you want on all the screens you like. And where occasionally you might go, you know what, I'd rather have this thing printed out for me, or made into an object, or read to me by a robot in the shape of an egg.

Newspaper Club or Bubblino aren't proofs that we're living in a Post Digital age, they're little indications of what it might be like when/if we finally, eventually get there.

To use a horribly inappropriate and over-weighty comparison I'm using Post Digital in the way that people might have used Post-War in 1913 or 1938. They were speculating, hoping, not describing something real. It's an idea not a reality. We've not had the war yet.

NO

Post-Digital was not intended as a sop for the complacent. It's not supposed to suggest that 'digital' is a solved problem or yesterday's fad. It's not a suggestion that digital* is just another channel. It's not supposed to be a synonym for integrated, 360, channel-neutral or any of that stuff. Doing some telly AND a website does not make you Post Digital.

The only way to be a Post Digital business is to be a thoroughly, deeply, massively digital one. To be digital in culture not just in capabilities. To know how to iterate in public, to do experiments not research, to recognise that it's quicker and better to code something than it is to describe it in meetings. You need to be part of the wider digital culture, to have good sharing habits, to give credit where it's due, and at the very least to know how to do ellipses in Processing.

Post DIgital was supposed, if anything, to be a shout against complacency, to make people realise that we're not at the end of a digital revolution, we're at the start of one. The end game was not making a website to go with your TV commercial and it's not now about making a newspaper out of your website. Post Digital was supposed to be the next exciting phase, not a return to the old order. It's the bit where the Digital people start to engage in the world beyond the screen, not where the old guard reasserts itself.

If I'd paid more attention in history I'd probably be able to throw in a Russian Revolution analogy at this point - possibly something about the Mensheviks.

SORRY

So, to the extent that Post Digital is being used as a cover for complacency or sloth I apologise. If you think it means we're entering a period of post-revolutionary stasis you're wrong. Sorry for the confusion.

Equally, if you're working inside a business, trying to get them to really, thoroughly understand digital (and see how much they still don't get it) and I've made your job harder, then I'm also sorry. In mitigation I might point out I wasn't writing / talking about advertising or media agencies, I almost never am, I was talking about the world, a possible world.

BUT

However, I remain delighted that people are thinking about Post Digital as an idea; imagining products and services that thoroughly, competently, delightfully integrate the Analogue and the Digital. That's great. Keep doing that.

The other thing, not so much.
 
Anyway.

(* I'm also deeply aware that using - Digital - like this is horrible. Like it'a a thing. But I can't see a way round it. Sorry.)

player one

I was on a train back from Newcastle yesterday. The man opposite me played Tetris on his BlackBerry the whole way. I read Player One by Douglas Coupland. I bet the exeperiences were slightly similar. I felt like I was ticking through a set of really interesting ideas, lining them up in my head, assuming that they'd fit together at the end, which they did - but I wasn't really reading a story.

I'm sure I'll read more of Mr Coupland's books but I'd almost rather read his lists or his notes. It seems like he's the perfect novelist to write the something-that's-not-a-novel that must be just around the corner.