noise plus filters
January 22, 2010
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Playful Highlights
November 3, 2009
Ta to Richard (Biff) Birkin and all at Pixel-Lab who made Playful happen. Highlights for me were:
Alfie Dennen & Paula Le Dieu
Their new project Bus-tops, and will create a london-wide networked canvas of LED displays on the roof’s of bus shelters that anyone can create art and games for. Bus-Tops was the winning entrant in the London arc of the Artists Taking The Lead fund, an Arts Council and London Olympics public art project.
Katy Lindemann
Behaviour change through play. Slides etc here.
Chris O’Shea
Shelter Air Guitar Championship 2008 from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.
Who? Chris O’Shea sits somewhere between artist and designer, creating experiences that playfully challenge our perception of spaces and objects.
What? He will talk about creating installations full of charm, joy & wonder, including police lights, chickens, giant hands, air guitar, xray torches, spinning mirrors and music boxes.
Molly Ränge
storytelling, pedagogy and creation of learning contexts in a post digital age. http://www.fabel.se
Daniel Soltis
Who dat? Daniel Soltis is an interaction designer at Tinker.it! and a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His work focuses on physical computing, large-scale interfaces, and playful interactions….urban and pervasive games.
GPS puzzle box made for a wedding present was a highlight.
Two reviews of the day here and here.
Feedback would be – lets walk the talk and make it more fun and interactive next time (eg Kaos Pilots and Sandpit/Hide & Seek), and make sure the non-gamers feel welcome in the first 10 minutes. Also consider getting someone along from Reggio Children if we could be so lucky.
Thank goodness for the Moral Compass folk (eg. Molly, Katy) who helped us work out the big Why? on it all… lots of smarts and loveliness in the room – people that could really make a difference in the world. Still not convinced online life/games are going to help us all to share and be happy. More mention of directing our efforts towards Climate Crisis solutions would also have been welcome.
Who would a keynote Moral Compass person be, with a playful style? Alain de Botton comes to mind…
Copenhagen climate change talks are last chance, says Gordon Brown | Environment | guardian.co.uk
October 19, 2009
Gordon Brown today warned that the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic” future of killer heatwaves, floods and droughts unless governments speed up negotiations on climate change before vital talks in Copenhagen in December.
This applies to the US as much as anyone, he said, adding that “there is no plan B”, and that agreement cannot be deferred beyond the UN-sponsored Copenhagen conference.
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Information is beautiful, visualizations ‘help’
October 3, 2009
In search of compelling visualizations to explain CO2 use and savings, I’ve come across Information is Beautiful, a blog collection of ‘qulaity’ visualizations by David McCandless is a source of delight and inspiration for the how-to-explain-this-so-people-will-get-it moments that occur more and more frequently.
See this, which caught my eye. This is information I actually wanted to know.
Very complex issue, well explained in pictures/metaphor:
Dave’s new book is going on the wishlist right now.
Posted via web from CO2
Savings from turning off computer/TV accessories
September 29, 2009
The TrickleStar calculator works out your CO2 and money savings when
you install a TrickleSaver (a USB or power sensor) that then switches
off accessories attached to your TV/Home Entertainment setup or your
home or office computer setup.
computer, then work out how much they are normally left on or on
standby. Then the calculator will tell you how much you save in a
year, and the payoff period and CO2 savings. The payoff periods end up pretty small especially if you have a game
console that is left on. Wow. A lot of them use a lot of power. I really like this calculator, but I would say that. I built this
one for TrickleStar. It is embeddable, sharable, and comes in an
increasing set of languages. We spent quite a lot of time getting the data together for this
calculator, ending up getting some help from AMEE and the MTP Whatif
data for estimating average device power. Try it out at http://calculator.tricklestar.com
Posted via email from calculators
In Recovery – Affluenza
June 17, 2009
Troubled?
Read Affluenza.
Watch/listen to Lily… she’s growing up. Maybe we all can.
“I’m a weapon of massive consumption. But it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.”
Spread the antidotes, not the virus.
Alan Watts v South Park – Meaning of Life
February 28, 2009
Love Alan Watts. Interesting that the South Park guys wanted to team up to do this.
And on that note, we’re off on holiday for a week’s food, love and snow in Bardonecchia, Italian Alps.
Many thanks to Bea’s outstanding school Down’s Junior for approving of the extra holiday. No doubt it will be highly educational, in the deepest, funnest (is that a word?) sense of things.
Many thanks also to the 16 Guidelines to Happiness / Essential Education folk for sharing the video. More good clips and resources on their website.
THE most amazing video clip (really!)
January 15, 2009
Many thanks to Jenny Davy for this short piece from David Attenborough and the Australian Lyre Bird – now officially one of the most interesting species in the world. This is no hoax – just ask Dickie bird.
Ironically, this is an Aussie via a Pom via an Aussie to an Aussie in Pommy Land!
As Jen says, in her usual understated way “Fascinating stuff, eh?”
Enjoy. Comment. Do something about it even.
People + Blog + Education = Fish
December 12, 2008
So far so good on our new project with SCIP Mark Walker (South East Regional ICT Champion and the man behind the ever-popular SCIP-list, amongst many other things) and the Coldean Resident’s Association. They approached SCIP wanting to be given a fish and, yep, we offered to teach them how to fish.
The fish they wanted would probably have gotten rigamortis pretty quickly. That is, when people hand over the power to publish, when the ask other people to build them a website, time and cost restraints often mean their websites die. Especially if they haven’t budgeted for a content management system at the back end and training for those that directly need it. And even then, it doesn’t necessarily make life easy for the novice.
If content can’t be added or changed easily, if we don’t learn how to do it ourselves, then our websites can get really stale and we all lose interest.
The cool folk at Coldean have taken our suggestion and run with it beautifully. After only two sessions, they have:
- imagined their very own community webspace into being, as a living, breathing, online gathering…
…where various sectors of their community from young to elderly can be informed, connected, maybe even inspired to get involved online and at meetings, etc. Online via comments, contributions (including logins to upload their own articles), feedback via private email.
- created a test website using Wordpress, and started adding pages, posts, words and images
- started identifying key roles and tasks for building and sustaining (eg. webmaster, editor, contributors)
- thought about how to launch the site and encourage people to engage with it
- begun an understanding of the wider online world and how it is changing and growing
The test site is already No. 1 in Wordpress community for “Coldean”, and no doubt when they launch it will be at the top of the Google ranking, making it easy for people to access (hopefully) up-to-date, interesting, relevant information about what’s happening and what matters in their own area. (Actually it’s already No. 2 for Coldean + Christmas and probably a range of other expressions.)
It’s been a delight to work with everyone and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go next – with Coldean and with SCIP Mark. One thought I am having now is, it would good to get Coldean contributing to their wikipedia entry, which is always a way to build debate and involvement!
Fresh fish for everyone, and a pond to grow them in (with apologies to the Vegans out there).
Now off to meet Mark and see where things are going next… personally I would like to see this service made more widely available to others in this community and beyond! All very affordable in the short and longer term too.
The bubble of unreality that is Thursday afternoon
October 9, 2008
The Future of Web Apps spent thursday afternoon in that pleasant reality that is the most positive future. What I mean by that was we were all buying into business as usual — there’s a rich VC market waiting to snap up and fund innovations and we all have a shot at being rich, well, any time now.
But before I get into that, here’s a review of this afternoon’s sessions:
Learning Journey
I missed most of Alvin Woon’s presentation, but took away this, badly paraphrased: You can do user centered design with users that domn’t know what they want. If users have never had it before, the can’t know what they want. There’s something wise and hopeless in there. Mostly a cry for iterating to solutions. Building something new is learning, for all involved. The learning journey is the key here.
XMPP and PubSub
Blaine Cook was back on the stage talking about XMPP and PubSub as a way out of endless wasted polling of site A by site B looking for, say twitter updates. It sounds great. I’m a huge fan of XMPP as a mechamism for handling the more complex connection cases than simple HTTP. Good stuff. I asked a question about the requirement of the server, now, to have to manage potentially millions of subscriptions. Blaine says it will be no worse than current, but I’m still left feeling that my app that is PubSub aware is going to be having to keep some sort of state for the potential millions of connections. I’m not sure about this, just a feeling. I’m dying to do some XMPP experimentation soon, maybe with secret project BrightLunch or something.
Open Tech
Dave Recordon from Six Apart did some nice work on stage, putting the case for open standards, like OpenId, OAuth, microformats etc as the essential next steps in blowing the social web wide open to all. Thanks Dave, it made sense and was a compelling case for all the pen tech that you and yours been working on.
Objective J and Cappucino
Thanks Francisco. Interesting. Not sure I want or need Cappucino, though. Unless I was quickly making a desktop app for the web, but not sure I want to replace a desktop app with a web app just because I can. Sorry, but it all felt a bit 4GLly to me. “We’ll solve all your problems for you, etc….”
The Pitch Competition
Are we noticing what is going on out in the real world? The pitch comp felt a bit weird. I’m sure I saw the panel talk down at a solid business model that might work now and encourage the pitcher to go for some model of giving it all away for free for a bit. Maybe they were right, but I’m getting the feeling that we’re in a bit of an unreal bubble. The economy and banks are in trouble, and we’re still going on like there’s a lot of hot VC cash for your ideas. Is that true? Or are we living in a cute little bubble for the next couple of days.
A great day all around, though. Thanks Carsonified people, and especially Mike for the handwritten note on the postcard attached to my badge. And as the train pulls into Brighton, I’m ready to do it all again tomorrow,
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