tantramar

January Monthnote

Weeknotes didn't really work for me. I think Monthnotes will.

Thought
I spent a bit of time thinking about the near now and the atemporality of digital, or perhaps more like rounding up my thinking on it as it's been bouncing around for a while. I've written a post I'll pop out in a few days.

The other time is being sucked away while I mull over the problems of designing Ubicomp platforms, which is for work.

I accepted a full time job in the Fjord New York studio. So in a month or two I'm moving to America. This is also sucking my thinking time with thoughts like what the hell am I going to do with my giant steel eagle.

Worked
I've been freelancing at Fjord working on the early stages of a connected car prototype and doing some Ubicomp thinking for a behemoth EU initiative thing that's underway.

Listened
Chromatics released an extended vesion of their last LP which was nice of them. Minimal Wave released not one but two Metronomes albums in a nice bundle. A few great EG records compilations ended up in my shopping bags too. Also because I am an idiot I only just got around to cracking ino the great Emeralds LP. Those clever Dirtbombs recorded a cool album of classic Techno covers. Much of this did or will make it onto the podcast. I squeezed out 4 little podcast in total this month.

Watched
I ate up the first and second season of Bored To Death, Ted Danson is great in it! Kooky New York based amusements. A slow month for art. I only saw the Doug Foster show at Lazarides, which is a particualrily good one. Will try harder next month.

Read
Stephen Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From
Yoshitomo Nara - Nobodys Fool
Karel Martens - Printed Matter
Max Bill - Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt
Drainspotting
The Ivy Look

Week Note 12 - New Job

These notes aren't weekly. Anyway.

Annoucement. Today is my last day working at Fjord. I've been with the agency for 2.5 years and had no intention of leaving until someone offered me something bright and shiny which I couldn't pass up. So I've been working my notice for 2 months now.

This year has been a whirlwind. I've worked in all five of our offices (New York, London, Berlin, Madrid and Helsinki) boarded around 40 flights and spent 140 days out of the country. While no big record, I'm not doing it again in a hurry!

I will be based in London working for a mobile start up as head of design. I don't really know what I can say yet so I won't say anything. But I'm sure I will soon.

Week Note 11

I haven't written week notes in ages, I'm not sure why, partly perhaps because it gets frustrating not being able to talk about work. Maybe that will change….

One thing happened recently was a nice little wake up call. My work seemed to get progressively easier in the last year or so. And so I think somewhere along the line I got more complacent.

A few things on my plate right now are pretty tough and I approached them in the normal way only to find I wasn't cutting it and this was a touch scary. As if I was in 3rd gear and needed to double clutch to 5th.

I'm now attempting to move faster and it all seems ok again but little wake up calls like this are good to get. They remind you that no one is right all the time, you should never stop questioning yourself, challenging yourself and trying to break your designs and ideas.

Be humble.

Week Note 10

London all week

Ah week notes. I might have missed a week, no one complained which speaks volumes. I do wonder if these intrigue anyone but me, or perhaps even me...

Anyhow, all my travel plans look to be sabotaged by a large hill in Iceland right now, so I'm around for while. My projects are getting very interesting. One involves fixing the internet, making sense of all the data and one involves re-inventing 'the commercial voice'. Yeah, that doesn't mean anything does it...

I do have trouble writing these things, I can't talk about any clients or projects and then when we finish work we often can't say we made them. Something wrong somewhere.

I feel like I'll say something somewhere and I'll see someone lingering at the end of my street, lighting a cigarette under a street lamp and then awake at night to find some masked figures standing over me. Or maybe that's something else...

I like what Russell did, he published his pictures. I didn't think of that.

One thing I realised this week that might be of interest was that as a service designer you learn to think in a certain way. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Then the other day I got a left-field brief and my first pass had service design stamped on it in big fat letters. This scared me and now I have to try again and press escape on my thinking.

Without knowing it, I had creatively tied my hands behind my back.

Week Note 9

San Francisco and London

I love SF, it's a great town. I was half working and half on holiday there which suited me pretty well. Sad to come back to London... but nice to return and catch up with what I've missed.

Lots of reading around connected cities this week and attempting to solve the internet in a day. One of these activities is going well, the other more slowly!

Week Note 8

Montreal and San Jose

Dived from the tail of my brief holiday back into the thick of it at Where 2.0 (the O'Reilly conference). I've had my paws in some location aware services at work for a while now but I thought I might be out of my depth (technically) for some of it, but luckily it wasn't too bad and the kind people explained the long words to me.

The mapping field however is very niche and damn complicated, far more than I had given it credit for really. Anyway, I met some great people in big hotels holding over priced drinks and learned a few things here and there.

I expect I'll write something at some point...

The secret to traveling this much is to have peoples spread around that you can call on and ease the stress of endlessly moving. I see clear as day now why Matt and Matt set up Dopplr...

Enjoying the Beach House album and the Joanna Newsom album muchly as my train currently rolls into San Francisco...

Week Note 6

Austin and New York

I left the smell of BBQ overworked silicon chips at SXSW for the good living and low buildings of Brooklyn. I swear, I don't know better city living than Brooklyn. The weather in New york was better than Austin, incredibly, and I found myself tempted by, or rather drinking Margaritas every 20 minutes. Design goes well with Tequila.

I'm here working partially for the New York office and partially doing other stuff. The next work stop is the west coast and a Stamen meeting in San Francisco as well as the Where 2.0 conference. I hoping things will be a bit calmer.

I'm not designing anything right now or even really thinking about designing anything which feels a bit strange, almost like a holiday, but alas I have other tasks at hand.

I need to write something about the location war, opps sorry, presence war raging in the start-up community for the company blog which I shall knock out over the weekend. Then there's some iPad proposal writing which is as easy as falling off a log now. Otherwise things are rosy.

Week Note 5

London and Austin

Everything was insane in the lead up to SXSW, mainly because there are so many other objectives after Austin for me than simply the festival.

I can barely remember what happened this last week. One thing has struck me of late though, and it's about these weeknotes, or perhaps only in part. I half wonder how boring they are for everyone to read, or rather not read. But generally I feel a lot of the personality and emotion in blogging seems to be slowly leaking out in the constant need for facts, nuggets of wisdom and permanently increasing genius, to maintain readership and I don't know... maybe status.

One very noticeable thing is how beautifully open writing week notes has become for me and the others. Here's a nice example from Matt Webb of Berg London recently.

Look: it’s been a great week. Exciting, actually, now I think about it, but it’s late and late makes me reflective. I have no worries about the studio. But I wanted to get at how mentally occupying this kind of enterprise is. I am certain that Jack nor Matt think any less about the studio than this. (I know it; every morning they effortlessly resolve concerns I’d only just realised I had.) Nor anyone who writes weeknotes.

the first rule of weeknotes is?

damn.

Week Note 4

Berlin and London this week

Nice to be back in Berlin. Managed to get some more time Kreuzberg, which was good.

Working with a large German company opened up some intriguing possibilities to play with complicated data, hard but intriguing. I pointed out the potential value and the very significant ingenuity that would be required. Well I opened my mouth, and now it's my problem, sorry, challenge. This one is going to take some considerable time sitting in coffee shops staring out of windows to get ideas.

That chewed up most of my week really, that and some really fun public service brainstorming with the German team.

Also had some really intriguing thoughts around the differences between play and practice which I shall probably write more rubbish about later on...

I think maybe my highlight was my Chubby Checker psyche LP showing up, which is as crazy as expected.

This week begins the marathon US trip

Week Note 3

In Madrid all week

Nothing sucks the life out of you, like grey days and rain and that's what Madrid has been serving me up this week. Lucky me. Of course I've been blamed by everyone for bringing them more rain than they've ever seen! And now I've also been blamed for Helsinki's persistent winter by the team there. So I'm know known to some, as the weather demon! Charming.

Anyway...

Working with a Spanish telco this week mainly preparing for a big workshop which was today and tomorrow. So far so good, people seem pleased, but it's late  I'm tired and I need to re-work tomorrow's schedule based on today's output. Humpf.

Nice bunch to work with though... these Spanish folk

Some good progress on our internal Fjord program which seems to be extremely popular with the troops. Well, who wouldn't want to go paddling in Kayaks in remote Greenland for free?

Generally a good week, the Spanish Fjord office are an amazing bunch of people. I almost feel afraid to open my mouth for fear of mockery, but only almost.

Meanwhile the crazy ping pong event I have myself knee deep in continues to loom large on the ever closer horizon. Gulp. Another eyes bigger than stomach moment when I agreed to do that!

I fear Mondays presentation to a huge German multinational will be challenging. I feel slightly under prepared. Thankfully I have a great wingman (woman) on my side. But I worry she's saying the same thing...

Week Note 2

In London all week

Slight novelty being back in London. The thing I'm really noticing staying in other places is the really short work commute. My journey to work was much more pleasant in Berlin, Helsinki and Amsterdam and I expect Madrid to be the same next week. London is big and messy.

Anyway.

While this week has hardly been downtime, I certainly had more time to reflect than usual. The job I'm doing this year has me slightly confused as I'm making it up as I go and while I have complete autonomy, it's slightly unfamiliar territory compared to the direct responsibilities of the previous year.

I read Hugh McLeod's book Ignore Everybody yesterday and I think his mantra in regards to grabbing the power perhaps along with Dan Pink's ideas about Mastery and Purpose have put me back on course.

Or at least for now...

I also decided to put my money (literally) where my mouth is in regards to the flaws of extrinsic motivators for creative tasks. Someone has to be the guinea-pig right? I think that's my job

I'm at the Story conference today which I'm very much looking forward to.

Brushing up on my Spanish for next week when I get airdropped in to solve what seems like an unsolvable task for a telco. Well, at least it should be a bit warmer...

Week Note 1

Berlin All week

• Germans don't cross the street until the lights change. Apparently because they are 'the rules'.
• Simple design and function is the only way forward for mass use. Why do so many not understand this? Thankfully some do.
• Spent a lot of time around a group of Germans who are speaking English for my benefit. Feel guilty.
• Finally find something I want to track in Daytum; emotional state, wonder how soon this depresses me and I stop.
• Diner with Olof (CEO) was intriguing. I mainly subjected him to the pitfalls and evidence against motivators for creative professions. I bet he loved it!
• Some of my white label work went down well, felt quite good. But it's one thing not getting thanked, it's another not even getting acknowledged.
• There is so little traffic on the roads here. Where do all the cars go, I mean really?
• Struggled this week balancing my need for design perfection and the time an animator had for the job. I think I'm mostly happy but it's funny how the little things I see that drive me crazy others don't see.
• This is a great city, they have good beer, I wonder if I should move here.