I’m going to quickly glaze over the fact there’s been an absence of weeknotes over the last few weeks and dive right into a bumper version of what’s been inspiring and motivating us the past few weeks:

The UK in 100 seconds

I met Dan Raven-Ellison a while back — he was one half of Crafty Explorers (one of the teams on the Design Councils Knee High Design Challenge which we designed the branding, publications, and event space for).

Dan is a Guerrilla Geographer & Creative Explorer (how jealous are you right now)… you could lose quite a bit of time delving into his projects but his most recent one will only take 100 seconds to explore. This short film uses one second to show each 1% of what the UK looks like from the air… all of the time a drone dutifully follows Dan; the camera trailing just behind – almost like your playing a video game willing the adventurer to keep exploring. The first time I watched this was with the sound off and it’s utterly beautiful, the woodlands provide a perfect but far to short a punctuation… but I strongly recommend watching with audio for commentary by Benjamin Zephaniah.

More on the project in partnership with Friends of the Earth here.

Be my eyes app

I’m yet to try this out but the proposition of this app humbles me. Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.

Warby Parkers story

I seem to be forever sharing the Warby Parker story with clients, specifically this video… WP is one of those businesses that kind of makes me go ‘I wish I did that’, its a wonderfully principled and successful business, all of the business decisions from the outset almost seem like design decisions. This talk at Columbia Business School is co-founder Neil Blumenthal talking about the first couple of years of the business. Its an amazing resource for how to design the way your product or service gets to market. Enjoy.

Building Number 20 (MIT)

On a podcast I recently heard Bjarke Ingels (BIG — Bjarke Ingels Group) talk about creating spaces that incubate innovation, in particular Bjarke was talking about Googles Mountain View HQ that his company is designing

Apparently in the briefing Sergey and Larry talked about MIT’s ‘Building 20’ in revered tones. I did some digging and this building really was quite special… entirely unremarkable perhaps from its outward appearance but entirely incredible in what it facilitated.

Essentially Building 20 was intended to be a temporary building at MIT erected in 1943… it was intended to last just the remainder of the war and then 6 months thereafter. It was however used for decades and only knocked down in 1998 to make way for a new campus building. Building 20 was built in a hurry, pretty much a timber construction with windows that would periodically fall out and a timber roof quickly covered in tar. The building was far from precious and allowed inhabitants to reconfigure the space exponentially… A DIY attitude prevailed throughout the building for decades allowing the interiors to morph and recalibrate. It seems to be a bit of a dynamite incubator… the DIY attitude and adaptable space led to a community that fostered notable research project after notable research project… I stopped counting the nobel prizes that were incubated in this space after I hit double digits.

This slightly kooky documentary by MIT is an endearing love letter to the building:

Forest by Numbers

Staggeringly beautiful. Forest by Numbers an installation by Emmanuelle Moureaux.

AR comics

AR comics need to become a reality. I want to explore the city and watch a story unfold around me… If you could combine this with something like Detour (an app for location enabled audio walking tours) I think you could make something really special. Let’s unlock location, movement and story in new ways.

Purpose

I had the pleasure of seeing david hieatt (co-founder of Hiut Denim, The Do Lectures and previously Howies) talk recently, what a legend. If only more people in business could be as earnest as this man in having a sense of Purpose and using business as a force for good. He’s a brilliant speaker, his books and newsletter are also inspiring reads.

Isle of Dogs

Earlier this year I popped into the Isle of Dogs exhibition and saw all of the models and sets of Wes Andersons latest movie… I only just caught the film and its absolutely delightful… I wish that I had caught it on the big screen.

Plastic straws and disabilities

Tea Uglow highlighted something really interesting lately, I can’t quite remember where I saw her share this but it made me stop and think about what ‘good’ means. There is an undeniable rise in more conscientious consumerism, which is ace… removing our dependency on plastic is incredibly important and it’s entirely necessary that consumers share a role in reducing our reliance on plastic goods. The awareness over plastic straws has especially lately been become part of the public conversation. I have to admit that I probably was firmly on the ‘ban all plastic straws’ boat but hadn’t really considered for some people an artefact as simple as a plastic straw is incredibly useful. Tea pointed to an article highlighting just how useful plastic straws are to some disabled people.

https://mashable.com/article/plastic-straw-ban-people-with-disabilities/

This all reminds me of similar issues around ‘shared spaces’… shared spaces are where the road level is raised to the pedestrian level in an effort to calm traffic (the removal of a kerb encourages pedestrians and drivers to act with a shared responsibility for each others welfare… or rather a coerced shared liability for how they interact with each other)… all good in theory, however shared spaces are a real nuisance for some blind and visually impaired people people who use the pavements inner and outer shore lines as a navigation aid. The outer shore line is literally the kerb so without it a core piece of infrastructure that enables safe movement is missing for some people in shared spaces. So where do we draw the line on designing to do good? It’s far from black and white if you look hard enough.

By the way Tea has an excellent blog over here: tea uglow

Scribit

I’ve been fascinated with drawing robots since first seeing Jurg Lehni’s Hektoraround 2008… Scribit is the latest, I love that it can write and erase… Not sure how this will fair as a consumer product but hell lets just find out, I wouldn’t mind one for client presentations!

Florence bins

On holiday in Florence I got a bit obsessed with bins. The thing is in Florence they are all underground. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but the impact of having no bins or refuse sacks hanging around on the pavement at street level is incredibly striking… Refuse collection for me has always just seemed like a fact of life — I had never really challenged the thought of taking the bins out for them to not sit on the street and await collection…

Is it not a bit mental that it is entirely normal (in the UK at least) for rubbish sacks and bins to act as a daily obstacle course in the urban realm?

‘Behind the mountains. More mountains’ — Haitian proverb

See you next week.

Two short weeks at FF… and we’ve largely been ideating in the field, or in particular amongst the trees for Project Canopy (back on track) and Project Lumière (near the finish line).

Friday Links

This weeks Friday links is a bit of a tree special.

Over in Melbourne the city is doing some good work in terms of creating a dataset of the cities urban forest. Oom Creative have done a lovely job of making the cities trees legible in terms of their species and health. My favourite aspect is through the website you can email any of the trees — the email is actually to the cities tree department and is a really smart way to report to the city on the trees health, vandalism etc.

See Melbourne’s entire Urban Forest here.

I’d heard before of early experiments in turning trees into antennaes for trans-atlantic communication — and it was a delight to discover Jalila Essaïdi a dutch artist re-exploring this and reinvigorating the ubiquity of trees as a medium of communication. Take a look at her ‘Living Network’ project here.

This project is utterly beautiful. I couldn’t find out much about it other than it appears to be an artist commission for a beer. To be fair it really doesn’t need an explanation as it really speaks for itself:

In a similar territory:

Another project that caught my attention was this: Dr Matthias Disney of UCL has been using terrestrial laser scanning to accurately weigh trees… interesting in it’s own right but the real value here is by measuring the carbon biomass stored within forests so we can better understand how important the forests of the world are in storing the increasing levels of carbon produced by man… We hope to see this research create a solid argument for halting unsustainable deforestation.

All of this is making me really obsessed with tree visualisation... I’d especially love to explore using LIDAR at some point in the future.

Meanwhile over the last two weeks we’ve been over to Walthamstow Wetlands where we saw some lovely looking bat-bricks.

We popped into the V&A to see The Future Starts Here. A really lovely show, well done Mariana and Rory.

We also swung by a second time to the Serpentine to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s London Mastaba in all it’s glory.

Finally a nice little surprise to find The Art of Campari at the Estorick Collection

This week we also wave goodbye to studiomates Comuzi — really sad to see them go but rumblings of a possible collaboration with Comuzi and Studio Lovesong down the line.

Next week we carry on with Canopy and Lumière and also kick off Jagger a small but potentially lovely new public realm project.

See you next week.

This weeks main focus has been on the Lumière project, we had a site visit on Monday to meet the team and catch up on development and now we’re working on the launch campaign — meaning we are just a couple of weeks away from completing this project.

We’re starting to reach out to a few people about Lunar… we are looking for individuals, organisations and spaces that may be interested in bringing this project to life with us. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and we have been designing experiences to engage the public in the wonder of the moon and its transformational properties. Get in touch if you want to hear more about what we are working on.

Kiosk. This project is a marathon but we’re getting into our pace for the final couple of miles. This week has been spent mostly on designing assets for video prototypes.

Some sad news this week too. After last weeks wobble, the Polymath project is no more. This project shoots straight up into my top five biggest ‘Ones that got away’… Genuinely this project had the potential to be incredible. It’s a really odd turn of events that led to the project being scrapped however we left on great terms with the client and stopping the project wasn’t a reflection of any of our work. Here’s hoping the dust will settle and the client will be back in touch to pick up where we left off in the near future.

Without Polymath on the slate we do have space for new business. If you are looking for a design studio to help you explore uncharted territories get in touch!

In case your wondering… Here are my top projects ‘that got away’.

(Criteria: we’ve had plenty of fingers burned and near misses over the years but these projects are ones that got cancelled for reasons out of our control… projects we were incredibly proud of and hoped to become mini landmarks in FF’s journey).

No. 4 The studio‘s first major international project... we designed the branding for Dubai Design Week... the first major design fair in the middle east... We got all the way to guidelines and the project was pulled so they could work with a local agency.

No. 3 The time we worked on immersive experiences for Tate Modern to coincide with a programme of events... never happened unfortunately.

No. 2 Polymath

No. 1 We designed the graphics for Team GB’s cycling squads helmets. I worked on this project for over a year ahead of the 2012 London Olympic Games... the project was cancelled a month before the Olympics because of a sponsor upset. That one hurt.

Funnily enough (not really) No.1 and No.3 where the founding projects of the studio!

Thought starter of the week.

We (as in us human folk) are obsessed with finding life on mars. And we are also obsessed with putting life on mars… i.e. getting humans to visit and perhaps even colonise Mars.

Before we put humans on Mars is it not likely we will put AI on the red planet to test the environment and prepare for human arrival? … What are the implications of the first intelligence from Earth to visit Mars to actually be Artificial Intelligence? What responsibility will that bot bear to set a precedent for Earthlings colonising Mars?

Friday links

This ace article on hypocognition got us thinking about known unknowns and how we approach known unknowns in our design practice.

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

This is one pretty impressive light painting rig:

Karishma over at Somerset House told me about this lovely project by sound artist Nick Ryan and Cath La Couteur — Project Adrift.

I especially love Nick’s ‘Machine 9’ instrument:

'Machine 9' is a handcrafted electromechanical sound instrument that tracks the positions of 27,000 pieces of space junk, transforming them into sound, in real time, as they pass overhead.

Finally, this instagram account tracks the changes from script to final film… say good-bye to the next hour of your life. @script.to.screen

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Script to Screen (@script.to.screen) on May 22, 2018 at 9:36am PDT

See you next week.