O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

Jonathan Ive on Mac Design

Chingford-born Apple designer Jonathan Ive on Mac Design and Unibody MacBook manufacture:

Via Leftsetz Letter

Matt Webb at Reboot - Macroscopes and 100 Hours

I always find Matt Webb's talks inspiring. Matt, as many of you will know, is one of the two eponymous founders of Schultz and Webb design studio, and he wrote Mind Hacks for O'Reilly along with Tom Stafford.

Matt recently spoke at Reboot in Denmark. Within his talk he discussed the notion of a macroscope:

I’d say this focusing is an important component of what, another designer, John Thackara calls a macroscope.

A macroscope? Thackara says,

“A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.”

Scientists have microscopes. Astronomers and peeping toms have telescopes. Designers, in order to see the very big, in order to see culture, which is much bigger than any one of us personally, have macroscopes.

The way I think of a macroscope is as something that shows you where you are, and where you are within something much bigger—simultaneously, so you can comprehend something much vaster than you suddenly in a human way, at a human scale, in the heart.

That was the interesting bit. The inspiring bit came at the end:

So I say our decisions about culture at large, about the question of how to spend our 100 million hours, I say these are rooted in personal ability to wield the tools of production. And as we said, 100 hours practice would get you a really long way.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Via Russell Davies

R&DTV - Tech Interviews from the BBC R&D

The BBC R&D have just launched R&DTV. George Wright says:

Today we launch a new trial aimed at exploring new ways to create, edit and distribute online video. It's called R&DTV. We've done this in collaboration with colleagues in BBC Backstage, part of BBC R&D.

 It's a pilot show, designed to be sharable, remixable and redistributable. It's released under a Creative Commons Attribution (Non-Commercial) licence, and looks at interesting tech stories inside and outside the BBC. The first episode features Nicholas Negroponte (talking about the OLPC project), Kevin Rose from digg.com, Graham Thomas from BBC Research and Ant Miller / George Auckland from the BBC discussing the BBC Micro. Hemmy Cho and Rain Ashford were the producers

To quote from the FTP site -'R&DTV is a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable BBC developers, project experts and experts from around the world.

Ignite UK North Video - Dean Vipond - Perfection in Design

Next up in the Ignite UK North video series we have Dean Vipond of Dean Vipond Brand & Interaction Design. Dean spoke on the evening about Perfection in Design:

Subject to Change by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Peter Merholz

Subject to Change by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer, David Verba, Todd Wilkens and Peter Merholz:

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can--and should--use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

O'Reilly Digital Media have a podcast interview with Schauer, Verba and Merholz, speaking with Derrick Story:

Or download the mp3. You can also subscribe to the Inside Digital Media Podcast Series via iTunes.

Buy Subject to Change with a 40% discount via the UK Shopping Cart by using the code OR153.

Future of Web Design Returns to London!

Future of Web Design
April 17-18, 2008
Kensington Town Hall, London

Join the industry's leading and most inspirational designers for some class A inspiration and practical advice.

Putting the 'design' back into web design, FOWD brings you a packed day of sessions on the entire design process - from inspiration to build, project management and evolution. We also have a live Photoshop tennis session, where top designers create from scratch on the stage.

Our prestigious speaker list includes:

- Patrick McNeil (DesignMeltdown.com)
- Andy Clarke (stuffandnonsense.co.uk)
- Steve Pearce (Poke)
- Andy Budd (ClearLeft)
- Larissa Meek (AgencyNet)
- Jon Hicks (hicksdesign.com)
- Jina Bolton (jinabolton.com)
- Paul Farnell (Litmus)
- Daniel Burka (Pownce.com)
- Hannah Donovan (Last.fm)
- Miguel Ripoll (Cesser Digital)

For the full on FOWD experience, the one day conference is followed by a day of workshops where you can learn from the best of the best in an intimate classroom environment. Tickets to the workshops are limited and sold out fast at the last FOWD, so don't delay.

64 Studio 2.0 Released

Daniel James writes:

64 Studio is a GNU/Linux distribution tailor-made for digital content creation, including audio, video, graphics and publishing tools. A remix of Debian, it comes in both AMD64/Intel64 and 32-bit flavours, to run on nearly all PC hardware. We've just announced our second major release.

64 Studio 2.0 is designed to retain compatibility with Debian Etch, to create a long-lived and stable creative desktop. We combine the stability and quality of Etch with a specialised real-time preemption kernel and the latest creative tools demanded by multimedia artists. Our tweaks to Debian include simplified installation and default settings which help get production underway quickly. It's our target that users should be able to get from a blank hard disc to a fully hardware-optimised and usable creative desktop in just half an hour.

Rather than a fork of Debian, our package improvements are returned directly to Debian Sid, and our releases are built from Debian sources. We have also uploaded new multimedia packages to Debian, which are now available to all users of Debian and Debian-derived distributions.

DVD-R ISO images for amd64 and i386 are available here:

http://www.64studio.com/download

Codex Seraphinianus

It's not quite our core subject area - in fact I can't imagine its anyone's core subject area - but it would have been remiss not to point to a great post on Pete Ashton's blog about Codex Seraphinianus, a rare and beautiful book written in an alien language with weird yet magnificent illustrations. The author, Luigi Serafini, an Italian architect, wrote the Codex in the late-seventies, and by all accounts it has been bobbing about the counter-culture since then. The full 356 pages of the book on flickr, plus a bunch of links on Pete's site.

Swiss Robot Bricklayers

Monocle has an enjoyable short video about robot bricklayers in Switzerland:

The Gantenbein Winery, in Fläsch, Switzerland has been the prototype for an entirely new approach to bricklaying: using modified industrial robots.

Traditionally, the promise of industrial robots has been that they would replace the human workforce. But these projects, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, demonstrate a different result: architects are free to create designs and patterns of a precision that simply could not be achieved by hand.

Monocle spoke to Professors Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, who have been collaborating on the project with partners Keller AG, about what it means for both building and buildings, and the industry's initial reaction to a prospective army of robot builders.

Prof. Fabio Gramazio and Prof. Matthias Kohler are heads of the Architecture and Digital Fabrication laboratory at ETH Zürich. Architects of Gantenbein Winery: Valentin Bearth and Andrea Deplazes.

Matt Webb's Presentation at ETech

Mind Hacks co-author Matt Webb has posted the slides of his 2007 ETech presentation, along with a transcript of his talk. The presentation is called From Pixels to Plastic and is a companion piece to his Yahoo! talk The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design. From the presentation's Abstract:

Things of solid material and electronics are getting easier and cheaper to sculpt and manufacture. The maker culture shares its expertise in ever-broadening communities. Rapid prototyping machines and software are allowing small, agile companies to apply their iterative methodologies to physical objects. Stuff itself is getting smart and social, with emerging standard components for networking, and new paradigms for interaction. Even the business model is there: folks have been paying for plastic longer than pixels.

As the internet sensibility hits the stuff in our homes, our product world is undergoing a massive transformation. But once there, what will we build?

From slide 22:

Anglepoise lamp as cat!