Louise Downe

use and non-use

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:52:00 -0400

Spending a long overdue weekend wandering aimlessly in the New Forest.

Like everywhere else in the UK, it’s landscape never seems far away from human curation. A place where things that are un-planned are put to good use - and anything that cant be, is signposted.

In places like this, natural and un-natural are just shades of useful and not-useful.

more pictures

The impossibility of many in the mind of one (or something like that)

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:37:00 -0400

This is a picture of NASA mission central after the latest rover touched down on Mars.

Teams of hundreds of scientists spent years carefully crafting a remote laboratory that could survive the extreme conditions. They altered their body clocks so that they could operate it more efficiently, switched their language to talk about ‘sols’ rather than days. They did this all together, working as a team to explore mars

This is how their efforts were reported in the Scientist:

“The rovers enjoy significant support in congress…”

We live in a world where we think, act and make collectively. And yet we can’t seem to understand the world without singular authorship.

But how exactly would you describe the complexity involved in acting, thinking or even feeling something collectively? We don’t seem to have - at least in english - the language to talk about situations like this.

Our understanding of the world is largely controlled by words we use to describe it to others. What happens when we don’t have the words?

Restructing Britain

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:20:00 -0400

“’Disjointed incrementalism’ characterises public service design: where services are altered and adapted by changing political drivers, professional fashions, shifting institutional norms and boundaries, and the biased lessons of past experience” - Restarting Britain 2: Design and Public Services

All the usual disclaimers aside (few would argue that this report isn’t needed, nor that it contains a lot of really good points), this quote from the latest Design Commission report worries me. What is wrong with responding incrementally to ‘shifting political norms’? Aren’t shifting political norms supposed to respond to shifting social norms? And more broadly, isn’t ‘incrementalism’, disjointed or otherwise, how evolution works?

The quote fits in with a re-emerging attitude to design that appears to believe the world can be strategically planned, piece-by-piece. To do this, it’s argued, design needs to become ever more ‘strategic’ - morphing from UI to UX, from service design to system design.

I don’t care how you label it, but by any name this is modernism - a belief that the world can be designed by a small number of people towards some definite, knowable end-state. A belief that, for all the simplicity it brought - wielded debilitating authoritarianism and institutionalism with equal measure.

Strange then, that we should start to talk about it in the context of public service.

The successes of modernism were narrowly defined systems within the public space - transport, gas, oil and water. The problems they faced may have gotten larger or more complex as the network grew - but they were unlikely to change form completely.

Bar some famous examples, we’ve watched those other, larger structures of modernism revert to disorder with years of neglect, weather and weeds.

The problems we face today are those same problems that brought down modernism. We can’t control them with one solution, strategy or ‘five circled grid’. But just because you can’t control something, doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

Progress in science happens because we accumulate a collective knowledge. But in traditional, two-party politics we don’t learn from the other team, we react to them. And when our own team are in power, the mechanisms of the state take so long to change that we struggle to see any direct cause and effect, making it hard for anyone to learn from anything.

But when we change things directly on the ground we can observe cause and effect. Over time we learn what works and what doesn’t.

This is disjointed incrementalism. The kind that cannot be shoehorned into any strategy, program, work-stream or project. Perhaps it will force us to take the incremental decisions we make with more care and consideration, and who knows, things might change.

Important cracks

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:02:00 -0500

This is spit. Red spit to be precise.

Its a feature of many cities, created by chewing a mixture of tobacco and highly coloured spices.

I’ve noticed it in Bethnal Green for years, knowing it was a by product of the local Asian community that live here without knowing how, why or thinking much of it, until I saw a corner much like this one on the edge of covent garden.

Not unremarkable, however, at the time I had no idea where I was. Until I saw red spit and reaslised without thinking, that I was near to a place with an Asian population. I must be near Covent Garden.

Tracking though cultural presence, or using the traces of people as a map are familiar ways of navigating, what’s strange was how at home I felt the moment I saw this this corner in Dubai last month. Cracks are important as a space without function that can be filled. A crack can become anything, even a bridge.

Chicken shop entropy

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 18:09:00 -0500

This chicken shop It is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is filled every day, not with people who don’t want to cook, but with people who cant afford to cook.

A chicken burger costs £1.75. Cheaper than you could cook it for at home.

Waste is created when any information is transferred - heat, money, and power all lose bits when they’re transferred. When energy is scarce, waste will become a luxury.

We are actively trying to reduce this transferal by centralising our lives. Moving towards a collective future where much of our lives are run centrally. The heat in our homes is already centralised, whilst eating, washing and cooking become more expensive.

The trouble is, this collective way of thinking is incredibly difficult.

This is a picture of NASA’s mission central after the latest MER rover touched down on Mars.

Teams of hundereds of scientists had spent years carefully crafting a remote leboratory that could survive the extreme conditions.

They altered their body clocks to mars time so that they could operate it more efficiently from earth, switched their language to to talk about sols rather than days. They lived and worked as a team of diverse experts, yet his is how their collective efforts were reported:

“The rovers enjoy significant support in congress…” The Scientist

We live in a world where we think, act and make collectively. And yet we cant understand the world without authorship.

The slogan ‘if your minicab’s not booked it’s...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:00:23 -0500

The slogan ‘if your minicab’s not booked it’s just a stranger’s car’ makes sense on the surface of it.

Until you realize that, of course, any taxi car is probably a ‘stranger’s car’

The thing that makes your booked car not a stranger’s car is that it is part of a system, and one that is reasonably predictable.

Working for a taxi company has a higher barrier to entry than just buying a car and parking up outside a tube station right? The driver is probably CRB checked, has a clean drivers license, or at least has a record with the company that makes him traceable and unlikely to try and rape you and do a runner.

How do you know this? You probably don’t unless you’ve ever worked for a cab company. But by piecing together your knowledge of the systems that a make up a taxi company - an employee register that needs a bank account, and a bank account that needs an address - you can take a rough guess.

What happens then, when we have no longer have any knowledge of the systems that go into delivering a product or service?

Systems are usually created for a reason, by many people over a period of time with significant investment. They are more trustworthy than chaos, which has no such collective authorship.

What happens when the systems that we think we know require little investment to change, or are completely personal, will we trust them then?

growth. When things move on, something will always get left...

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 09:41:00 -0500

growth.

When things move on, something will always get left behind.

A person has to design the way that a machine thinks, but how often do we know who that person is?...

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:18:00 -0400

A person has to design the way that a machine thinks, but how often do we know who that person is? They are anonymous, collective and almost completely unaccountable.

It’s just so easy to sleepwalk into these leaps from connected technology to surveillance because although you get to vote about significant changes to human systems, when have you ever had a chance to vote on changes to an algorithm?

unhelpful evolution

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:23:00 -0400

We’re getting bigger, but our houses are getting smaller. The fact that you rarely hear these two things mentioned together says a lot about our approach to city planning.

In a bid to house New York’s growing number of single occupant and ‘pre family’ households, Mayor Bloomberg recently commissioned a competition to design a new micro apartment measuring 26 x 28 square meters.

That don’t seem so bad to me, but then I’m 5.2”, roughly the same height as an average Chinese woman. The average American woman is 2.5 inches taller, and American men another 5 inches taller still.

Height doesn’t just determine the amount of ceiling space we need, or the amount of space we need for a bed or wardrobe that’s large enough. It determines the amount of power we need, both in calories and in cooking and cleaning for ourselves.

Will we one day see a person’s attractiveness linked to their environmental efficiency? Will we start to shrink, as the amount of space in our cities, protein for us to eat and energy for us to burn shrinks too?

And what will it look like to live in a world that was made for people bigger than us?

* Kudos to Toby Barnes for the concept of an ‘unhelpful future’, he’s been talking about this a lot lately

all good things must come to an end

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:22:00 -0400

This week I saw Erik Kessels talk about ‘In Almost Every Picture’, a series of found photo books that show one thing, by a fluke of documentation repeated in almost every picture.

One book is famously full of Oolong the Japanese rabbit balancing things on its head, another tells the story of a woman who’s been swimming in her clothes for almost twenty years. I like repetition, so I asked:

“Me: What do you find interesting about repetition?”

“Erik: You see the progression of a story, which means you see when it changes and when it ends.” (paraphrasing, I couldn’t find a pen)

All the stories in Kessel’s books come to an end one way or another, mostly because someone stops documenting them.

At Playful Simon Cutts from Coracle press talked at length about his love of producing boxed books, saying:

“They feel like finished objects, like real things”

(paraphrasing again)

Protection patterns. A small chaotic pattern protecting a...

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:55:00 -0400

Protection patterns.

A small chaotic pattern protecting a large, ordered one.

physical evidence of digital systems

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:46:00 -0400

This Friday, thousands of people (myself included) were left without cellular and data services when O2 went down.

It’s the second outage in less than three months. Back in July, O2’s response was met with universal praise for their witty fight against the barrage of ‘Fuck You’ messages they received on Twitter.

None of which helped those who didn’t know it was happening, which was almost everyone at some point, because it’s was a blackout.

What’s makes this kind of collective experience different to a power outage, or pandemic even, is that you have no idea it’s happening until it’s not happening anymore. It’s exactly the opposite of any other kind of collective experience.

A failure of the data network acts instantly, with no warning and is completely silent. So I tried to take my SIM card out. In the rain. Under a railway bridge in the dark. It didn’t work. I got angry. Got on a bus and then, I saw someone else try to do the same.

Only at that moment did I realise that it wasn’t my phone at fault, that potentially no one else in the world could access anything or anyone - other than the people and objects around them. That maybe it had finally happened. The internet was broken.

It wasn’t of course, but how would we know if it were?

In densely populated areas, power networks are extremely localised. We know by experience, usually by looking out of our window and seeing that the other side of the street is still on, that when we have no power, the apocalypse is not nigh.

But what about the internet?

It is infinitely vast, it comes from nowhere and ultimately is invisible. How will we know who’s to blame when it’s not there? And how will we know if the apocalypse is nigh?

We probably wont.

defence patterns

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:03:00 -0400

Light and water move in very similar ways. It’s not surprising then that the methods we use to control them are often similar.

A wave is a pattern. It can easily be disrupted with another conflicting pattern - like a matt surface, or a rough texture. It’s something that we put to good use in sea defences, and on the inside of envelopes.

I’ve been looking at repetitive patterns like this recently and am going to be working on a project to compile groups of them wherever I find them.

You can see the full set of defence pattern matches here

responsive aesthetics

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 09:11:00 -0400

Who can tell which came first, Derek Downey’s beard or his job as the warden of the Davis Bee Sanctuary in California, but I’ve seen this kind of thing before.

I once spent three months working on-site at a well known red-branded telco. Like most large open plan offices, the company’s brand colours were proudly displayed around the building so that you knew where you were - on signage, chairs, banners and posters.

Corporate dressing isn’t usually flamboyant, so for several months I didn’t notice it, then one day at a product launch party I spotted it, they were all wearing purple.

No red, no green. No yellow, orange or turquoise. Apart from the new male contractors, who almost without acceptation were wearing red ties.

Some patterns are self replicating, and it’s not always the big ones.

IMAGE: Derek Downey, Bee Jesus and proud owner of a fantastic beard.

nudity permitted

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:42:00 -0400

I’ve been spending alot of time at the London Fields Lido this week. Some long overdue downtime between projects, not just because I have a not-so-secret ambition to live the life of a Miami pensioner.

I’ve started to notice something strange about our local pool in that time, and that’s that people don’t go there to swim.

Our pool is a pickup hotspot, as you might expect, but it’s also a popular place to breastfeed.

In fact, our swimming pool is a place to be ‘naked’. Free from gravity, ties, suits and heels. No more intellectual meritocracy, and for the breastfeeding mums, no more being the only one you’re trying to avoid eye contact with.

Pools, like most spaces we create for ‘leisure’, exist outside of the kind of normal behavioral structures we create for the survival of ‘civilisation’, and they’re bloody fascinating.

Take it away Louise…

BERG Little Printer hackday

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:48:00 -0400

Last Saturday BERG held a practice hackday for Little Printer. 30 or so people spent the day coming up with content for the soon to be released printer, which allows users to subscribe to and create publications that are printed whenever they choose.

It was a great day, with some super smart people and some interesting ideas for what to do with thermal paper, self-publishing and an open API. I got to work with Mark Hurrell which doesn’t actually happen that often, less still I get to dick around with a soldering iron.

What we built

We wanted to make something that used the physical qualities of the Little Printer - it’s a connected device that prints things, the paper it uses lasts for only a few months without degrading or falling apart, and it’s tiny - it has human scale and trusted position in someone’s home.

Night Sky (aka ‘let’s sleep together’… ehm) allows you to subscribe to the night sky view of a particular place, or time, using images generated by John Walker’s Your Sky.

Because thermal paper is translucent, the picture can be slotted into a light box (like the prototype shown) to create a mini paper planetarium*.

You could choose to subscribe to you own location if, like most of the world you live in a place where the level of light pollution stops you seeing the stars. Or you could subscribe to the location of a loved one living abroad, allowing you to ‘sleep together’ under the same night sky.

If you fancied sleeping in a different city every night, you could. And because the images are auto-generated, you could travel forward or backward in time to see say, the sky Christopher Columbus would have seen when he discovered the Bahamas in October 1459, or the sky on the day when we’re predicted to have used the last barrel of oil on earth.

Over time the image will fade to black with the heat from the light, hopefully in time for your next issue of night sky.

What we learned

A printer is an intimate form of communication. It’s not like sending someone a Facebook message or an @reply that you’re at liberty to ignore. It’s an actual physical thing pushed into your actual physical space. Who or what you’ll subscribe to using your Little Printer will, I think, have a similar level of intimacy - more akin to the kind of thing you would subscribe to through email over RSS, the people you’ve met in the real world, or personal forecasts & schedules.

Nick O’Leary & Kass Schmitt made ASCII Meteogram, an ASCII art weather forecast.
Chris Heathcote, James Stewart & James Weiner. made Localondon, a London exhibition guide.
Richard Pope made a google calendar, but one that uses icons instead of words.
Roo Reynolds made a google calendar printout.
Tom Taylor made a Low Flying Rocks list of upcoming asteroid near misses.
Dam Williams made Little Emma, a publication sharing the location of the worlds largest container ship to help his understanding of food origins

Paper is an ephemeral form of communication. It’s is exempt from our everyday digital filing systems, or the kind of ‘I’ll just search for it in my inbox’ information security we rely on. Receipts are at the extreme end of this. They turn yellow in the sun and black next to heat. They also have the uncanny ability to be crushed into tiny, anonymous balls of bag fluff at any moment.

Although the little printer’s content isn’t a receipt, it’s form carries with it the memory of it’s former function, that’s part of its charm. But that function doesn’t come without baggage - will I want to be seen to read a receipt on the tube? Will I be able to take my printout anywhere further than my fridge door without it joining my sediment party in my handbag? It’ll be interesting to find out.

Adrian McEwan made some buttons for a fridge door that you can press when you need more milk, and then prints a shopping list.
Chris Adams made Little Printnik, a sort of ‘word of the day’ game to expand vocabulary.
Matt Webb made a Conway’s Game of Life that printed out a new iteration every day.
Delvin Hunt & Ben Firshman made cute little origami animals.

Paper is dead. It might seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget that anything you print is inherently in the past. Fine if you want to produce something that is immortal anyway, like a book, not so fine when you want to print the internet. Most live data publications that came out of the day were summary based ‘almanacs’ of the day or weeks events rather than notifications of time critical information.

Natalia Buckley & Linda Savik made Catgrindr, which prints out photos of cute cats near you.
Matt Biddulph. made Little Twitter Trends, a summary of what happened to people you follow on twitter.
James Wheare made an Exquisite Tweets style thing, so you can get a daily printout of interesting twitter conversations.
Simon Willison, Natalie Downe. & Tom Insam (aka team Lanyrd). made a little Lanyrd document, with maps and event times.
Tom Armatige made a Tower Bridge opening/closing times list, but with pictures and facts, like a little I-Spy book.

Thanks to Dan Williams for the list of the day’s projects.

You can read Alice Bartlett’s write up of the day on Berg Cloud

Abstract linguistic branding form Adidas, or ”The brand...

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 09:26:00 -0400

Abstract linguistic branding form Adidas, or ”The brand with 3 stripes”

Legalese for ‘anything with a stripe’ or simply a way of identifying yourself in places where your brand name might be unpronounceable or unknown?

Systematic systems in Clerkenwell. Self replicating systems will...

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 08:18:00 -0400

Systematic systems in Clerkenwell.

Self replicating systems will always have a point of compromise. Our legal systems are adaptive to precedent, what would happen if the expression of those legal systems, like road signs for example, were as adaptive?

Bio architecture. A natural grass amphitheater spotted not far...

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 08:12:35 -0400

Bio architecture. A natural grass amphitheater spotted not far from the London Olympic site. The ring of tall dark grass is created by the Fairy Ring fungus who’se underground network of roots produce a plant growth hormone called Gibberlin

Photo

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 07:28:14 -0400