Here's an ad from the eighties. It struck me how most of the stuff in our houses hasn't changed much in twenty / thirty years. And how the technology stuff has changed massively. Not an original thought, but this made it visible for me.
fat apps
We got a Wii Fit a while ago. It weighed us, asked us some questions and redrew our Miis. This is me. It was rather alarming. I think those of us who don't like looking at our own bodies develop great skills in avoiding them. We glance away from flickr or hide behind our hands. But something cartoony like this confronts us with how we probably look to the world.
My only successful effort at fitness ever was, not surprisingly, while I was working at Nike. It involved lots of nike+ing and only eating bacon. But I've put on 2 stone since then, so action needs to be taken. One thing I know about myself is that I work well with measurement, boxes that need ticking and new gadgets so I'm pinning some hope on continuing with the nike+, and adding these two:
They are PushupFu and Weightbot, apps for the iPod/iPhone. These things feel like the future to me. They're both brilliantly designed, focused and simple but with enough complexity to be interesting. They're not stripped back and minimal, they do a simple thing but they do it with oomph. There's fun in the details. You might call it playful utility. Splendid things.
And, I'll be tracking myself at daytum because a bit of semi-public display of failure is always motivating. But I'd love to go further than that, I'd love to a personal version of this, a page where I can stick all the daytum panels, and the nike+ widget, and other bits and bobs, and it would just make it look nice. Does that exist?
Anyway.
ideal home
Whenever talk at home turns to the perfect house Anne always mentions Bag End, Bilbo's house from Lord Of The Rings. And you can see her point, it'd be snug and comfortable and probably very sustainable. In fact, if we were still living in Oregon, I can see that we might have been tempted by a place at The Shire. Or end up with somewhere like this fantastic self-built Hobbit style-accommodation in Wales. Personally, as child, I fell in love with the idea of Mole End in The Wind In The Willows:
"directly facing them was Mole's little front door, with`Mole End' painted, in Gothic lettering, over the bell-pull at the side. Mole reached down a lantern from a nail on the wail and lit it, and the Rat, looking round him, saw that they were in a sort of fore-court. A garden-seat stood on one side of the door, and on the other a roller; for the Mole, who was a tidy animal when at home, could not stand having his ground kicked up by other animals into little runs that ended in earth-heaps. On the walls hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with brackets carrying plaster statuary -- Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy. Down on one side of the forecourt ran a skittle-alley, with benches along it and little wooden tables marked with rings that hinted at beer-mugs. In the middle was a small round pond containing gold-fish and surrounded by a cockle-shell border. Out of the centre of the pond rose a fanciful erection clothed in more cockle-shells and topped by a large silvered glass ball that reflected everything all wrong and had a very pleasing effect."
(Who wouldn't want a skittle alley in the house?)
But then, at Disneyland I think I spotted my ideal home - Goofy's House in Toon Town. I know it seems like a deliberately cute, cloyingly affected thing to say, but I just love how it looks. It's captured the essence of 'house' in that unique way that cartoons can do. I know I'm supposed to want to live in some sleek, clean Bauhasy machine for living, but I don't, I want to live somewhere that looks like this, with these sort of details. I want to live somewhere with a sense of humour.
I'm always surprised more architects and designers don't make more of the appeal of these kind of dimensions and aesthetics. They seem happy to use facades and cloaking devices for ordinary interiors but resist the lure of 5/8th's scale, forced perspectives, charm and silliness. I guess the lack of straight-lines doesn't make construction easy. Ikea do some kids furniture which looks a bit like this, and used to sell feet you could add to your tables and chairs, but that's about all I've ever seen. People love Port Merion, people love Disneyland, but no-one ever builds it. Send someone to York Minster and the first things they'll look for are the rude gargoyles.
We went to see Disney's Celebration a few years back, thinking it might be like a version of Toon Town you could live in, but it was more like Poundbury with more flags and more famous architects. There was no sense of fun, nothing playful about the architecture. Very thoughtful, very serious. But surely people are prepared to pay for fun in their houses. So much of these new urban designs are 'false' anyway, fake Georgian, fake thatch, I don't mind that particularly, people like that stuff, but wouldn't they like it more if the faking was done with more charm and humour. That'd be good.
the do lectures
I was lucky enough to go the Howies Little Big Voice lectures last year. It was a completely excellent thing. Great talking, splendid people and a fantastic location. They're doing something similar this September, they're calling it the Do Lectures and they're offering free places to people who write them a convincing and imaginative letter. If you're looking for inspiration about things to Do to change the way you work, or consume, or make, or live it'd be a great place to start. More information here.
twittermind
I twittered this twitter earlier:
Since the TwitterMind is being pestered anyway - anyone got any thoughts on the best mobile broadband dongle doodah deal?
And, almost instantly, got these answers:
T-mobile good for unlimited and throws in free wifi access
the three one looks the cheapest setup and monthly, depends how much data you need http://snipurl.com/22uen
T-Mobile seem to be offering free use of wifi hotspots into the deal, but i don't know exactly what that means in practice
probably now Vodafone, now they've reduced to £15. I'm stuck with T-mobile. "3" cheaper, but coverage issues
I was wondering about dongley-doodah too, but was reluctant for the 18 mo x 15 squids, so went iPhone. In my book v.gd. move
Thanks everyone. Good old internet.
4 x 4 meme thing
Iain tagged me with this 4 x 4 meme thing. Which is exciting. Since I'm always too scared to look at my inbound links I never normally notice when I've been tagged, but this time I was actually in the room when he did it, so there's no escaping.
Four Jobs I've Had
Paper-Round. My paper-round was perhaps the job I've enjoyed most. I loved getting up early. And my parents were kind enough to buy me a Sony Stowaway (later to be known as the Walkman). This meant I could do my paper-round while listening to Pink Floyd and singing along incredibly loud in a not properly broken voice. Must have sounded awful. But these were early Walkman days and we hadn't learned to moderate our public headphone singing yet. And no-one I met on the round knew what a Walkman was. A few of the neighbours thought it was some kind of hearing aid and made their sympathies known to my mother.
Bassist. Sometimes Drummer. Not sure if this counts as a job, but it earned me the most money before I got a proper job. This was in a folky band called Dungeon Ghyll that used to play for barn dances and ceilidh's all over Derbyshire. Mostly for Young Farmers dos. Accordian. Guitar. Fiddle. Bass and Snare Drum. We occasionally rocked.
PhotoLab. I spent one summer working in a photo-developing lab. I was completely unskilled so all I did was cut the negatives up, match them up with the right prints and put them in the envelope. We'd often lost a print here or there so had a spare stock of misc pictures to chuck in the envelope instead. There were only ever two sorts of picture that anyone took - three old ladies on a sofa with a cake and a huge expanse of sky with a tiny, tiny plane right in the middle.
Dealer Account Guy. My first proper job was administering the advertising programme for all the Fiat dealers across the UK. We had to make sure the dealers (who made their own ads) didn't infringe any of Fiat's advertising regulations. I remember when the Fiat Tipo won European Car Of The Year a dealer in the West Midlands managed to run an ad suggesting that the Fiat Typo had won European Car Of The Week.
Four Shows I DVR
I don't DVR shows really. (What does DVR stand for?) I occasionally buy DVDs for plane journeys and I record quite a lot via EyeTV. But if I did, I'd be DVRing:
QI It's silly and funny and clever. I can see how it might also look smug and annoying but I don't care.
Ben 10 Smart, energetic animated telly for kids. We can all watch this together.
Sports Night One of the few shows I've got on DVD and sometimes just get out and watch. This is pre-West Wing Aaron Sorkin, much of the same cast but compressed into 30 minute chunks. Incredibly sharp and funny. (Also could be seen as smug and annoying. There's a theme here isn't there?)
Scrapheap Challenge. There should be more engineering on the telly.
Four Places I've Been
I'm not much of a traveler. I've been to lots of places on business but tended not to pay that much attention. Bad I know. But, mostly, as soon as I get somewhere, I want to come home. Before we ever lived in the States, Anne and I used to go on long driving holidays there. All over the place. My four favourite places (apart from Portland) were:
Freeport - our first ever trip to The States. Three weeks driving around New England. And we happened upon Freeport and the LL Bean flagship store. I was obsessed with anything that boasted a 'state of the art pocket system' (still am), so this was a bit of a geekout.
San Luis Obispo - another driving holiday, up the West Coast from LA to Portland before interviewing at w+k, took us to San Luis Obispo. I think this is where we decided we'd like to live in the US sometime. Not sure why really. It was warm enough for sandals, there was a good bookshop and good coffee. That's probably enough. Like to go back here sometime.
Huntsville - we spent a few days here. Brilliant place. Any city with a space shuttle on its crest has got to be good. And it's only a couple of hundred miles from Dollywood, so we had a trip there too. Best day out ever. That whole area - the Smoky Mountains and the Tennessee Valley - is fascinating. I think we started off on the Blue Ridge Parkway and ended up heading into Alabama, I remember how exciting the road was, but the chronology and geography of the holiday is a blur.
Cooperstown - after three weeks being hypnotised by the rhythms and sounds of baseball commentary, all crackly and remote on the AM radio, we had to go and see the Baseball Hall Of Fame. But we really liked Cooperstown itelf. We splashed out on a slightly fancier motel and spent and evening in rocking chairs on the porch. I seem to remember it was next to a lake and I was reading The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch.
Four Music Artists I'm Listening To Now
Well, according to Last.fm my Top Four Artists this week are:
Moondog (recommended over coffee by Ben)
Stars Of The Lid (found via the sidebar on Dan's blog)
Moodyman (found via a twitter from Matt)
Bang On A Can (via The Rest Is Noise and reminded by this).
That's mostly because I can never get my iPod to scrobble properly and therefore only reflects the stuff I've been listening to while working. (A whole category of music which has emerged during the last 20 years as more and more workers have huddled over computers with headphones on. It's music that provides a mental sniper's pad but doesn't especially intrude.)
I think if you included vinyl and iPod listening then, this week, you'd have to make it The Portico Quartet, Jellyfish , Trouble Funk and, after Friday night, more and more DJ Yoda.
And now, I have to tag four other people: how about Ben, Dan, Dan and Stefan. That lot'll be interesting.
cashless
It's going isn't it? Real money. It's on its way out. Slowly, but surely. Maybe we should document its disappearance.
rodchenko
Ben and I are trying to compile a list - 100 Obvious Marketing/Digital Things To Do (Which Not Everyone Does). This is on the list; if you're doing anything with photography - do something with flickr. It's not ground-breaking, people have done it before. But it doesn't stop it being a good, worthwhile idea. Well done Ben.
guerrilla gift
Richard and his Guerrilla Gardener's have made another batch of lavender pillows from lavender illicitly grown on neglected public land. They're good things, in support of a good cause, with an interesting story. Good holiday gift.
topsecrethowiesproject
Earlier this year I went down to the Little Big Voice lectures that Howies put on and talked about using the internet to do communications and get your message out etc. While I was there Dave revealed that they were going to be opening a shop in Carnaby Street this Autumn and asked if I could think of any digital/community stuff that they could do with the shop. I immediately said No. But that I suspected I could rope in someone who could.
So I managed to get Matt Jones involved (because he's also a Howies fan) and we sat and tried to think of some stuff.
We wanted to do something that would connect Cardigan Bay with Carnaby Street (because we didn't want the shop to become this detached island in the middle of globalyouthbrandness). We wanted it to be something that Howies fans/customers could contribute to. We wanted it to be visually interesting, since it was supposed to sit in the shop and get people to come in. And we wanted it to reflect the way Howies looks, and the way they look at the world. (So, although we were supposed to be doing something 'digital', it didn't seem right to involve loads of screens, and we didn't want to make something that was too 'energy gratuitous')
So we came up with a thing that we've been calling the flickrometer, inspired, very hugely by Schulze and Webb's social printer. But sillier.
The simple version of the idea is this: there's a flickr pool where people put pictures that connect to Howies somehow. Canoe or bike trips they've been on. Great mud of our time. Good ideas for tshirts. You know the kind of thing. The folk in Cardigan Bay can contribute, everyone can contribute. And then, periodically, a clever software brain goes and grabs one of those images and makes a unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated postcard out of it. That postcard gets given to customers to treasure or to post, or it's used as part of the display in the store. Well, you can imagine uses for postcards. And, of course, you can also imagine, once you've got a postcard printing brain connected to images on the web, all kinds of interesting projects you could do with surfcams and the like. We'll get to those in a later post.
The only big problem with that idea is it doesn't look very exciting. It's basically a printer. So, if it was going to work as 'retail theatre' we needed to give it some extra Heath Robinson / Tim Hunkin. So we envisaged a contraption that would deliver the postcards with the mechanical ballet of the breakfast machine in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (designed by Roland Emett).
We talked that through with the Howies folk and they said that sounds good, do that.
Which is where Matt came up with his complete masterstroke - he suggested getting Henry Holland in to actually build the thing. And Henry is a complete ruddy genius. A proper boffin who can do the clever software stuff and the improvised contraption-y building bit. He's taking it from a fanciful idea into something really rather lovely.
(Design by Mime photo by Matt)
This is the inside of the Howies store (before they made it look nice) looking out. Ade, in the middle, is standing where the doors are. Either side are big glass windows. The plan is that the printer will sit on the right (where Henry is). It'll periodically switch itself on and disgorge a postcard which will be elevated by means to be determined but currently believed to involve old bike chains and a reclaimed washing machine motor to the ceiling where it will be deposited onto old Hornby railway tracks and will slide down, over the door, to the window on the other side.
Gravity will continue it's work and slip the postcard onto a rollercoaster Henry's constructed from the chassis's of unwanted Matchbox cars, Hornby carriages and plumbing supplies, where it will spiral merrily down until arriving with a little 'ding' in an old letter-tray. Hopefully causing surprise and delight to all. That is, the plan. And it was only a plan until Henry built a prototype and showed us this video, which is genius:
Howies work-in-progress from blackbeltjones on Vimeo.
(That's Henry and his brother in action)
I really think it's going to work. You can see more work in progress pictures here.
Which brings me to the reason for this post, which is mainly so Ade or someone at Howies can point to it with their blog. So they don't have to try and explain what we're up to.
Because, over there, they're going to be asking people to start putting pictures in the flickr pool. If they'd like to. That's here.
And, secondly, since we're struggling to come up with a proper name for the thing, they're going to be asking for suggestions, and, I think setting up a special email address for that. So, as soon as they've written their post I'll link to that. But someone had to go first in the mutual linkage. So, that's what this is.
We're also wrestling with issues about printers, postcards and stock at the moment so we might come back to you with questions about those at some point, because I know there are some experienced postcard technicians out there.
Anyway, that's the plan right now. More news soon.