I’m at home with a glass of red wine at my new desk. I’m writing these notes late. It’s already week 248.

Jack and Matt J were in Berlin briefly last week, on a media design consultancy gig. I’ll quote from The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan/Quentin Fiore (1967) for a second:

The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electronic circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. … When these ratios change, men change.

Media is both our environments and that which mediates us. Our cinema and our glasses.

Cinema… books, television, radio, circus, salons, telegraph and telephone: our media used to be hard to invent. They came along once a generation. But now what we call “new media” is really ten thousand new media. The question for a newspaper moving to new media, I mean really moving to new media, is not how to build a CMS blah blah delivery platform blah blah for the whatever. It’s what you want the equaliser settings to be, for social interaction, for immersion, for gameplay, highbrow/lowbrow, predilection to truth, emotional resonance, etc. We don’t just publish, we get to invent the medium into which we publish.

Super fun.

Also this time last week I got a pretty down-to-earth reminder about product innovation. Product innovation has its own path.

We’ve been having a tough time with Ashdown. That’s not fair. It has been a perfect response to the brief (our own brief) to present and contextualise information well. But it hasn’t become a product. I felt that most keenly when I presented the current private version to a Very Important Person about three weeks ago. And in that presentation, I had to do most of the talking. If you need to narrate a thing, it’s not a product.

A product tells you what to do. It fills you with motivation — you want to use it, and you know what you’ll get. And when you don’t get exactly that, you’ll be tickled and delighted. (If it’s a good product; frustrated otherwise.) A product markets itself. It can be described so people can tell other people about it. It has a voice, and an opinion about how the world should be. You know where its value is… and what the value exchange is. Inside an organisation, teams can rally behind a product. A product has meaning, and goals. Products can succeed. Or fail. Products tell you, the designer, how they should grow.

So with Ashdown we’ve had data and an area and a design direction… but no product (we’re intending to make a suite of products). And Matt Brown, who is leading the project day to day, has now found the product. It’s taken all kinds of approaches to get there. Tom Loosemore has been part of crits. Tom A has been making experiments with generative journalism. We’ve tried big wireframes and little sketches.

But on Monday last week Matt managed to crack it. We now have a single line motto for the product. We have a tone. And we have a map of the site where we can see what the user motivation is at every page. Clicking through will feel like a good joke being told. It has rhythm. And everything unfolds from there.

If you looked at the sketches, who knows whether you’d be able to tell that something’s changed. But I can tell you now that the week before I wasn’t sure what we were making, and in week 237 – with Matt’s page of post-it notes and pen drawings – I feel totally confident that it’s cracked. It’s a product now, it’ll tell us what it wants to be.

But it’s humbling, to get there only now, and to be honest none of this “product innovation” chatter counts until we also execute and get to market. So let’s see what happens this week, and I want for us to work much better at cracking the product thing (and continuing to crack it — product focus in a project has to be maintained every week, every week) in future work.

Oh there’s a bunch more to say.

Kendrick is making its way to launch. I wrote a short teaser blog post about it a few days ago, based on one of Matt B’s icons.

El Morro is halfway through. It’s the biggest project we’ve done, and it lasts only a little under two months. I can sketch out seven distinct parts. They meet like dominos. It’s like building a bridge from the middle. Last week and this week the various components started linking up.

Most of what I do now is have 20 minute chats with people designing and building various parts of El Morro. The chats are easy because the team is incredible. People want to know how to build their particular bit, so they grab the relevant other people and make decisions. If there’s a need for clarification or knowledge of the ultimate client ambitions, that’s when I get pulled in for one of those 20 minute chats.

What else.

Kari is producing, weekly, summaries of what everyone is up to this week and next, and a per-project status, in a sentence or three. These are invaluable. Also she’s moving to two days a week, and spending the extra day project managing some new product development. We’re terrible at letting NPD slip, and my hope is that it’ll really happen with some of our established client process applied to it.

I’m learning a lot about my own process, talking Kari through what I believe is needed. Project initiation docs, briefing packs, milestones… all of this sounded like so much hot air until I saw I bumped up against what it was all helping with. I mean, when you know what you have to write down at the beginning of a project to help a team work together and keep on time and on budget and to allow room for the design to blossom and find the way, what else do you call it but a project initiation document?

I’m talking about process, which is a sure sign that I should wrap up and head to bed.

What I noted down to talk about in week 247 were a few old lessons I’d been relearning. What products are, how I use project management. I wanted also to say a few words about tuning and about documentation. I haven’t got t those.

But really when I think back over last week I think about how strange everything feels. I’m not used to the scale. I’m not used to the systems in these sketches. I mean roughly, but not fully. I’m watching a team of 8 bring a thing to life and I’ve no idea how it works, the path from individual action, I mean the tap of the finger that types the curly bracket, that somehow manifests and becomes the breathtaking beauty and correctness that I want to see, I mean how does that even occur; do you need to be dreaming of heaven while you type a subroutine because I doubt it, yet if not that, if that’s not the way beauty happens in software, then what? We plan projects we have full confidence in but there’s a moment because we’ve never done this project before at 3am where you wake up and go, Hang on, really? (And if we all didn’t do that, I’d be worried, so ok.)

So there’s an opposite of deja vu which is in action all the time, a feeling that, whatever it is, it should be familiar, but it’s not at all, and for me this strangeness creates both a risk aversion and then an overcompensating overconfidence, and I alternate between then, ultimately averaging out but only after talking and sketching a lot with Jack and Matt, and what’s left is a residual strangeness to the whole world. Gosh the walls are white. Gosh the sky is blue. Gosh it’s 2010 and here we are, this is the studio we create and this is the work we do, and aren’t we lucky, we work hard and the work is good, and maybe those adjectives are a good a way as any to sum up week 247: Strange. Lucky. Hard. Good.

One year of HDL development!  That went fast: two world tours, countless visits to friends on 5 continents, 3 studio briefings and some heavy logistical lifting. Where we are now (with 6 months to go) is a testament to the hard work of our team and the personal and institutional investment of our partners. Thank you!

But we are just getting started. Our work will become more visible in the coming weeks as we build a greater web presence, publish case studies and host our studios. To this end, Sitra’s Boston office was in full-scale knowledge creation mode this week. With great sadness, Bryan left Helsinki’s epic winter and flew to Boston to join me for the first week of a three week case writing push.

Why dump all that carbon just to write a couple dozen pages?*  The short answer is that we needed to build a “bubble.”  The bubble is a magical space of extreme efficiency, supreme cognition and canny recollection.  Once in the bubble, the complex work of creating documents that have real, lasting value is a little easier.  With notebooks and the standard array of corporate innovation tools in hand—and the supportive environment of the bubble—we revisited our first three cases to try and better understand what happened in the projects, where design was instrumental, and why they reflect strategic design.

The breadth of the case study project is exciting: from positioning cities as strategic reserves and short cuts to equity, to design as a targeted risk mitigation tool in healthcare environments, to revaluing waste as a resource in a way that can realign the interests of citizens and their government, consumption habits and the environment.   Each case provides evidence of how work at a discrete scale can have impact at much larger scales.  When the bigger, often highly conflicted fields of play are understood not only as being inextricable from the discrete focus of a project, but also that they themselves are open to adaptive intervention by a skilled design team and supportive client, then the work of strategic design is being done.

The HDL and Low2No projects have necessitated new ways of working for our team.  The cases are no exception.  Our particular challenge this week was to rebuild the story of the projects both in terms of their chronology, and also the scales at which they operated.  In some cases, the scalar question was obvious to those involved in the project, in others, large scale impacts became apparent to us as external, neutral observers.  For instance, the redesign of a medical device had a clear impact on surgical pathway efficiency, and thus the hospital’s orthopedic business model (each surgeon could do roughly 3 more knee replacements per week).   What was less clear, but equally important is the potential for a more accurate and easier to use medical device to change the way a hospital manages risk.

To help discover new perspectives such as this, Bryan and I “invented” an organized brain dump methodology that attempted to capture key elements of the case according to the 3 main structural components of each case study.

In the coming week, Bryan and I will return to Helsinki for more time in the bubble.  We will add depth and formality to our case outlines and prepare them for publishing this month.  Meanwhile, the rest of the team is hard at work as our studios and the September event draw near.

*We do buy carbon offsets for our airline travel…

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

A good week, i think, but this is late posted. Product dev churns onwards, I’m up to other projects too so those took priority this week a bit.

It’s simple wireframing of standardised ‘bricks’ (chunks of content, navigation elements, components, plugins, widgets, whatever) to use on a wide range of websites built using Wordpress. Not dull exactly, but just stuff that needs doing.

On Thursday I attended the Music 4.5 conference, which was a mashup of music biz and tech startups. Full coverage here. It was really good, decent line up and well organised. Techcrunch had a Pitch segment there, which was interesting.

One startup in particular caught my eye, Decibel who are aiming to create a metadata service, offering much more depth than the standard Gracenote artist/genre/year/album dataset. A big undertaking, but properly researched, maintained and API’d could be extremely useful to build advanced discovery services and connective tissue for music content.

Short weeknote this time around.

I’m back from the holidays to a fast week. We are learning new right and wrong challenging ways of doing things from various requirements our projects are bringing us. An example of a challenge is to organize management structure so that decision making takes 3 days and the work must be done in 2. I’m getting a feeling these things are going to be in a presentation/study/blog post one day.

Speaking of presentations, I gave a presentation about Urban Screens in a Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 event by Forum Virium. The point of the presentation was to show some ideas that came about during our research on earlier project dealing with street level touch screens. You can see the presentation in the previous post. The research involved pretty much everybody in the company some time ago. Sami & Sauli helped me narrow the data to a concise presentation.

The hiring process is still going on but a first decision has already been made about an internship. Some people realized they might not have the work experience for a full designer position yet, but applied for an internship instead. That’s clever.

One of these clever people will join us on the 22nd. More about that then. The actual Designer title is currently a battle of suitability between just few finalists. We’d love to get all of them.

On the work front everybody’s quite busy but excited about new projects at the same time. Matti, Sami, Petri, Aki, Sauli, Panu & Ilkka: I need to call you out, you’re doing a good job all of you! And our freelancers, thanks for being so pro.

Until next week, fellow humans.

Busy. Busy, busy, busy. Brain very occupied. I’m daydreaming less—and that’s big trouble for a writer! Do I need to set aside a block of time for daydreaming? Can it even work that way?

I’m typing this from a plane. My tweets this week are going to be 100% geotagged photos; you should follow along, because I think it’s going to be weird/fun.

Coming tonight or tomorrow: the first of the Annabel Scheme remix projects! Yep, it’s Emily Cooper’s renderings—and they are beautiful.

Have just realized that, given my aforementioned tweet experiment, I will be unable to tweet about the renderings this week. Hmm. You’re going to have to help me get the word out.

This Friday I’ll be in Austin for a few days of SXSW Interactive; drop me a line if you’ll be there, too.

(Note to weeknote aggregators: you’ll probably want to take me off your list, as these are increasingly tenuous approximations of the weeknote genre.)

Related posts:

1. Week 1561
2. Week 1565
3. Week 1566

A busy week, and a trend that looks set to continue for the next fortnight at least.

The main part of the week has been spent working on the set-top box project - so far mostly building hardware and installing Linux, followed by lots of fighting with device drivers in an attempt to make it talk out of the TV outputs rather than just to a monitor. As a result the office is resembling a bit of a computer graveyard with machines in assorted states of construction, and as I type, one of the machines is sat in the corner chugging through a Windows install to let me double-check that the hardware is at least functioning.

Mid-week saw me out of the office helping the guys at Tinker.it deliver an intensive day-long hardware hacking workshop. It was a full-on day, starting at quarter-to-eight, but every team had some kind of functioning hardware and software demo by the end, with many also feeding data into or out of Twitter. I also got to meet a collection of Tinker.it's other hardware hacking "friends" and they were all great to work alongside. Hopefully our paths will cross again in the future.

The train journeys to and from London gave me opportunity to work on the slides for a talk I gave on Thursday evening, although searching Flickr over an intermittent 3G connection isn't something I'd recommend. As a result, some of Thursday day was given over to slide preparation as well, and all seemed to go well at Ignite Liverpool; an event I'd helped pull together in addition to kicking off the talks. My slides and some thoughts are over on my personal blog and I even got my name in the local paper (although as usual, Bubblino upstaged me by getting his picture in too).

Hello.  I’m writing this on Saturday morning and my brunch is waiting, so I’m going to be brief (I’m hungry).

Frankie and Andrew were busy on three projects this week, one client piece and three pitches. Both proposals are really exciting, and I can hope they come off because they’ve put so much effort into them.  We’ll here about one on Monday, one probably by Tuesday, and the other is a longer burn. It’s an interesting, if stressful, time, with projects awaiting awaiting sign off and some about to go into production.

I spent two days this week planning on Folksy, our sister business.  Folksy has got to the stage now where it’s ready for the next stage of development; it’s proved it’s a viable business.  So Anne and I got together to plan out a schedule of work.  The work is all doable, the next thing we need to do is work out how to resource the work. This is where business development gets interesting, as we could frontload the work and look for external funding (something we’ve resisted until now) or we could do the work as and when we can afford to from the (growing) revenue streams.  I think we know which one is preferable and we’ll be deciding on that and scheduling the work, soon.  One thing that did come out of that meeting is an urgent need for more support staff, so if you know of anyone interested in making things, who is familiar with online community environments and has at least one day a week spare then do get in touch.  I also booked my ticket to LIFT10 after mulling over the conference calendar.  I’m thinking of running a workshop around designing for objects, or possibly the ‘fuzziness’ of time and space in design, both of which are thoughtstreams I’ve been reading around.

Rob continued to get Muddy, our in house term extraction and text mining service, up to speed with the latest release of dbpedia and create a more efficient server side architecture where we don’t actually require our own triple store.  We want to run a text mining workshop in the not too distant future, partly because of the knowledge we have around the subject, and also to start to explore some of the interesting datasets that organisations hold.  There seemed quite a bit of interest in doing this from the Guardian folk when we met them at the LinkedData meetup last week, so it might be a partner event. Rob is going to start planning that and it’s likely it’ll be platform agnostic and we’ll cover off a variety of different approaches and, crucially, the kinds of interesting things you can do.

Office banter this week revolved around:

• local news business models and the flawed assumptions around the classified ad model (for a proposal we’re developing) and other potential models
• the success of our friends at the newspaper club, winning the graphics category in the Designs of the Year award
• OCRing radio to do interesting text mining stuff, not dissimilar to this idea
• dashboards vs. activity streams
• the rise of the real time indexing and how to represent this activity
• our love for the Google Voice concept
• our greater love for traditional folk renditions of old Russian / Balkan tunes

A busy week. I was due to continue working on the project I previously code-named Project Humphrey but that was delayed by a couple of days. So the start of the week I continued at BERG on their El Morro project, bringing a technical specification up to date.

Wednesday to Friday I started work on the next phase of Project Humphrey at Somethin’ Else — I spent a week wireframing the project’s website last month and I’ll be spending chunks of the next couple of months doing the front-end development.

Although that was my day job, I was back to BERG in the evenings to get the PHP thing I was working on in Week 349 up to date with the new spec. BERG are busy folk at the moment, so the office was always busy into the evening.

On top of that, I’ve been trying to keep up with Pepys by preparing the diary entries in the office before work. It’s easier to do there, with a big monitor, and I’m trying to avoid doing it at home on weekends. But, with lots of work on at the moment, there’s no other time than early mornings. Up betimes, indeed.

Next week I’m continuing with Humphrey, and probably squeezing in more on El Morro, and then I’m off to Austin for SXSW. Which means I’ll need to get ahead of Pepys even more than usual, which probably means spending much of Sunday at the office. Busy busy.

Is it march already? Time flies.

I’m on my way to Amsterdam again. Around 10 hours earlier, I was in a train in the opposite direction, coming back from Visible Cities #02. This turned out to be an evening well spent. Some nice examples of AR projects were shown but in particular Ole Bouman of the NAi’s perspective on the changes architecture will go through under the pressure of new technologies was enlightening. He came across as both critical and knowledgeable, passionate about the field with a solid grounding in its history. Inspiring. Finally spending an evening in TrouwAmsterdam – eating a burger and drinking a beer in the space where printing presses used to run – was another plus.

I’m at Layar a lot this week again. Still can’t tell you too much about what’s going on there. But it continues to be both a challenging and fun engagement, so that’s good.

Apart from this, I spent a day brainstorming new game concepts for one of the Netherlands’s big lotteries, with which they’re hoping to reach a younger generation. It’s always a challenge to immerse oneself in a new context that fast, but it went well. Lots of nice ideas came up and the workshop was facilitated in a tight manner. Participating in these things always results in useful insights for when I run my own sessions.

I do feel slightly exhausted from all this, not in the least because what should have been a two hour review of proposals on monday morning with my students turned into a three-and-a-half hour marathon session. They’ve had to submit their graduation project proposals now, so I’ll soon sit down and do a final assessment of them. Then they’re good to go.

And so will I.

And we’re back in Helsinki again, after yet another extended roadtrip — this one to Wellington, New Zealand for the Webstock conference, with stops at Singapore (on the way down) and Hong Kong (coming back).

It was a genuinely necessary trip, on a lot of levels. For almost two solid weeks, we soaked up Southern Hemisphere summer, ate foods it’s all but impossible to get in Finland in any season, and basked in the extraordinary generosity of the event’s hosts and participants. We also found, once again, that we were able to ship Tokyo Blues orders from the road.

But the real revelation was the response to Systems/Layers, our “walkshop” on the experience of urban space in the era of networked informatics. The feedback we got was so positive that we’re determined to do it again both here in Helsinki, and later on in New York and anywhere else we can mount it; not coincidentally, it was also a rich source of ideas for future Do initiatives.

The method, to the degree there was one, was pretty simple, and drew heavily on a similarly-themed walkabout developed by Martin Brynskov for the NordiCHI conference in Lund a couple of years back. We basically walked around the Cuba Street district of Wellington for an hour and a half with eyes wide open, looking very carefully for all of the sites in the streetscape where information is being gathered up by a networked system, or drawn back off such a system and displayed or acted upon. (You can see Nigel Parker’s video of the walkshop here and check out participants’ visual responses here.)

Then we returned to a command post we’d previously set up and provided with a map of the area, to plot our findings and consider what we’d seen in the light of a couple of fundamental questions: who owns this data? How might one get access to it? What kind of interface might be involved? Whose interests does it tend to support, or undermine? To a person, the participants all said it had raised their consciousness regarding the present-day, real-world effects of networked informatics on urban life, and we learned more about the texture of Wellington than I’d have wagered it was possible to discover in 90 minutes. Superthanks to Tom Beard for helping to plan and run the event, and endless gratitude to Mike, Natasha, Keith, Ben, and everyone else who helps to make Webstock what it is: you’ve really got something special going on. (Xtra bonus shout-out to Dr. Anne Galloway and the Snapper guys.)

Our next challenge is going to be figuring out how to do this as a regular, repeatable event, and to produce documentation (perhaps along the lines of the wonderful things Candy and James are doing with Civic Center) that helps people further unpack the dense urban systems they live in, around and between. In the meantime, we’ve got a couple more weeks yet of winter to trudge through, so wish us luck. : . )