Lou Downe

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 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.

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.

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.

I’ve been spending a lot 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 behavioural structures we create for the survival of ‘civilisation’, and they’re bloody fascinating.

Last Saturday I attended a practice hackday for BERG’s Little Printer. Thirty 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.

Nat 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.

 

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’s underground network of roots produce a plant growth hormone called Gibberlin

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?

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?

It’s not that I disagree with “Design Thinking”.

I like thinking.

It’s just that I don’t think design has a monopoly on it.

You’d be hard pushed to find a person who doesn’t use ‘thinking’ to solve a problem. The trouble with thinking though, is that it’s got a bad rep. It’s something we do when we’re stuck, bored or worried.

In business we prefer words like ‘insight’, ‘learning’ and ‘KPI’ that imply we know how to solve a problem before we start. This is rarely the case, so we’ve given thinking a new name to help us legitimize this period of uncertainly as part of a process – Design Thinking.

The problem is that this process comes with a caveat – you have to be a ‘Designer’ to use it.

Like any industry, design doesn’t just want to change the world – it wants to get there before anyone else. In order to do this it has needed to differentiate the kind of thinking a designer can do from the kind of thinking an economist, annalist or a CEO might do.

Thankfully though, ideas rarely respect the boundaries we give them, and design thinking is reaching a level of popularity where elements of this ‘approved uncertainly’ are being incorporated elsewhere. And not a moment too soon.

If we want to change the world, we all need to take part.