Russell Davies

future-o-matic theory maker

Your next book title is here.

pie and mash

I've been working at Canary Wharf a couple of days a week. It's a funny old place. Felt like I had to escape at lunchtime today and wandered into Poplar. And there I found this Pie & Mash Shop. A tremendous place. I can see I might be doing that again. And possibly visiting some of these too.

1996 weeks

I've just finished writing a piece for Wired about weeknotes so it'd be rather sad not to actually write one myself. But to be honest, it's last thing on a Sunday, I've been writing all weekend and I'm not especially in the mood.

Things I did this week:

Lots of PowerPoint, lots of email.

Highlight of the week:

Ben Terrett's Newspaper Club won in the Graphics category in the Design Of The Year thing at the Design Museum. Which I'm especially pleased about because, if anything, what we do is remove the graphic design from things.

We've had a few people tell us that the marketing strategy for Newspaper Club is naive (which is fair, really, because it's non-existent) but so far we've been featured on Radio 4's PM programme, BBC 2's Culture Show and we've been mentioned approvingly by the Prime Minister. That's not because of clever marketing, that's because we're making something interesting and we talk about it without overselling it.

Lowlight of the week:

Got dates on lots of invoices wrong and had to re-do them.

hotel TV

I have a habit of photographing hotel TV - one shot for every available channel, no consideration, just shoot whatever's there as soon the next channel comes on. Occasionally, very occasionally that produces an interesting picture.

1997 weeks

I'm at the Four Seasons Bosphorus for the weekend, to do a talk for some planners from a global agency network. It should be impossibly glamorous, and I'm very grateful for the work but, right now, I'd really rather be at home watching Harry Hill with Anne and Arthur. It's the most contemptible whining, this is the path I've chosen, but there it is.

Arthur gave me this finger-puppet turtle to keep me company, which is helping.

The rest of the week's been good. Did some large-sports-related-organisation work, that's getting even more interesting, and they're really nice people. Did a talk in Dublin. That was fun. And actually managed to spend a day at BRIG and we had a proper Newspaper Club meeting (though Phil, who was overhearing described it as 'like panto'.) That's the good stuff. Making proper decisions, ourselves, about our own business, not really knowing what we're doing, but doing it anyway. It's good.

I did 1,250 words for next week's Campaign about political digital campaigning which was hard - actually needed to have some facts in it, which I'm not used to. But, managed to do my regular column on the plane on the way here so I'm a day ahead of myself. I've got to do a Wired column next week so I'm in the worrying about it but not actually writing it phase.

A good week.

like a sports thing

Tom's piece about curling reminded me of Matt's piece about sport and metaphor and connected with James' words about words and reminded me of a little theory of mine.

I think part of Nike's success is that they have access to an enormously rich and nuanced library of sporting metaphors and analogies. They're all athletes, or at least sport enthusiasts, they use sporting analogies all the time - and with tremendous subtlety. It's not just 'getting over the line' or 'hail Mary passes'. It's much deeper and well constructed than that. There'll be much more delicate use of metaphors - sometimes crossing sports to make precisely the right point. (I can't, of course, think of an example right now.)

This is especially helpful in new territories - when you're doing things that have never been done before and there is no established jargon or terms of art. Naming is important, and importing resonances and meaning from sport is tremendously helpful.

cheapfuturefashionfomatics

This is the S2H replay; an activity monitor/pedometer thing that does a similar job to the fitbit. Except it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it's cheap, fashiony and simple. And they'll actually deliver you one outside the US.

There's a simple watch unit that fits inside a rubber band/casing - which means you can get loads of different colours.

It tells the time and measures how active you are in four chunks of 15 minutes each. Represented by these little bar charts / level meters. Complete an hour of activity and it gives you a code you type into the Switch2Health website - no USB, no wifi, no bluetooth, no whispersync - any browser, any computer, a bit of typing and you're done.

Your hour of activity gets you rewards - downloads, ringtones etc. I reckon about a week of ordinary activity will get you a month of Club Penguin. And there are leader boards and all sorts of capacity for games to be built on top of the activity monitoring.

And if you're not being active enough it tells you with a smiley face or a frowny one.

It's good because it's dumb, simple, obvious. (And rabidly commercial - they're furiously building a commercial ecosystem for this thing.) There's not much to go wrong. (Except my browser keeps warning me that the commerce site is 'untrusted'.) This feels like another prototype of a measuring pebble; something small and simple that will enhance my devices, something I can afford to break or lose but that connects to my expensive, unreliable, easily damaged phone/pad/whatever. And using the code to connect is genius - no need for capacitive sausage skin or hacking into the headphone jack. Easy, cheap, good.

1998 weeks

Got in early on Tuesday morning and discovered an inch or so of water covering the floor of our offices - our bit and BERG's. The water was geysering out of the plughole and pouring over the edge of the sink. I was very tempted to turn around, head for the cafe and let someone else be the first to discover it. Instead I steeled my resolve and set to simultaneously calling Berg to get keys to their bit, getting as much that was valuable off the floor and trying to bucket the water coming out of the sink. Thankfully it was just rainwater coming from the roof. It could have been worse - we had to get the toilets unblocked a couple of weeks ago. Fairly soon more BRIGands arrived and calm efficiency began to take over. It was interesting to see how quickly we reverted to roles as officers and men; I quickly shirked any responsibility for dealing with authority figures and set to bailing water out of the sink. Matt W and Tom T were much more capable of getting hold of plumbers, builders and landlords and trying to get stuff sorted.

We had an eventful morning of pumps, buckets and 4-foot squeegees but have escaped any serious damage. We're still living under the threat of flood but hopefully it'll be sorted out soon. Big thanks to Tom T for writing stern emails to the landlord and to Matt W who had to spend most of his birthday evening operating a submersible pump.

I've always looked forward to having my own little office space, sharing it with colleagues who are also friends and so far it's been a joy. But it's important to remember it's not all tea, biscuits and fibre-optic fairy ornaments. There's also blocked toilets and flooding.

(I wasn't in on Monday because I had myself a day off - it's half-term. It's a sign of slightly harder times that I only got a day off this half-term. When I started freelancing I was determined to take all the school holidays off - that was part of the point. That's not possible at the moment, I'm not earning enough to have that luxury. Ah well.)

Wednesday and Thursday were with the large sport related organisation again, where I think I'm beginning to make a bit of a contribution. I've found myself remembering those large org skills and tricks again, like a retired golfer rediscovering his swing. It's hard being in the same office all day though and it's a big building, hard to get out of. I just had to get outside for 10 minutes on Thursday and fortunately it was raining which felt like concentrated outside. I just stood and let it rain on me before heading back to the powerpoint.

And Friday was a treat, I got to be the MC at The Story which meant lots of the fun and none of the work. It was a really interesting and rather lovely day. Personally I'm still rather skeptical about whether the idea of story deserves all the hooplah it gets - to me it seems more like a convenient framework to hang all the important stuff rather than being that interesting in itself - but I have absolutely no way of making that case so I'm really glad I didn't have to do a presentation.

In the background Tom continues to push beta invites out for Newspaper Club and a trickle of people are starting to make papers - the good news is that all of them seem delighted with the product and the process. Hurrah.

On the whole, a good and interesting week. Here's hoping the office won't be underwater when we get there on Monday.

 

always a good sign

1999 weeks

First thing I've realised - Monday is the wrong day for weeknotes. My head's full of the week ahead, not the week behind. It's already a struggle to remember last week. So this will inevitably be brief. And the next one will probably be on a Friday.

I've signed up to do a couple of days a week for a large sports-related organisation, but I haven't signed a contract yet, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about it, so it'll have to remain anonymous for now. Good, nice, smart people and it's so nice to be thinking about sport  and sports culture again though. It's something I've done most of my working-life, I've never been the world's biggest sports fan per se, but I've always been fascinated by how it intersects with culture and society. Same as with cars and fashion. And technology.

I caught myself saying this in a meeting last week: "It may not be obvious to look at me, but I know a lot of about running."

Tom and I also had a meeting about a secret thing with a secret person, which was interesting and secret. And we've been working on something vaguely related to SAP which has involved looking at lots of these and researching radar screens and sound archives which has been a joy. Need to fix up a date to debrief that.

And, I did a spot of pontificating for the COI, about learning organisations and learning in organisations. I haven't really spoken/thought about that properly before. Made me realise I've seen a lot of of different companies deal with that in different ways, it might be something to write about some time.

And, speaking of writing, the blog is finally starting to be of some use to me. After I wrote last week's entry about weeknotes Wired got in touch to suggest that as a topic for a column - which is such a blessing because I've just delivered one and it means I've got four whole weeks to swim it around my head before writing it. And, after I wrote this, Campaign asked me to do a feature for them on the same topic, which gives me an excuse to research it properly. Result.

And, of course, there's Newspaper Club. Not much for me to do this week. We're pushing out beta invites, waiting to see what people make of it. It's exciting. And seeing people's (so far, very positive) reactions is incredibly satisfying.