Howells.

I wondered what Beep Show was up to at last year’s Brooklyn Beta. This was the result: a charming video which captures what the event is all about:

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These sorts of things don’t sit well with me because I worry that I’m not offering any new worthwhile opinions or content (versus it just being a self-promotional thing), but SAY Media kindly invited me to say a few things on their blog, Say Daily, mainly about siteInspire and general web design-y things.

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I just shared this video on Twitter, but wanted to capture it here too since I want to mark the beginning of end of humanity.

As Simon Whybray said, these are the last thing we’re going to see when humans perish…

In preparation for an upcoming trip to New York City, I’m contemplating seeing Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More for the third time.

Like the memory of a strange dream I can’t quite shake off, the experience keeps coming back to me. There are bits I didn’t understand, bits I completely missed, and nuances I want to explore again. It’s like watching Mulholland Drive twelve times and still picking up new pieces of the puzzle.

The first time I went, I went alone and a bit drunk (I went immediately after the 99% Conference, not because I’m a lonesome alcoholic…). The second time I went with a friend and I was very drunk. Sleep No More is best experienced somewhere in between: shore yourself up with a few glasses of wine, and if you go with a friend, just arrange to meet at the bar afterwards: the experience is intense enough without having to maintain contact with anyone.

I was also told by my pal Burks that there are secret places in the environment only a few people have found, including an additional floor. That’s a compelling reason enough to pay another visit to The McKittrick Hotel…

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David Carr in the NYT Mediacoder blog:

One night last week there was a late-night party at Sundance — one of many — this one hosted by an outfit that had helped finance 10 percent of the festival’s slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

Kickstarter as a new model movie studio is insanely exciting, and chimes with Paul Grahams call to Kill Hollywood.

Now if only Kickstarter can work out how to handle payments in the UK (which I believe is the only hurdle for a launch here)…

I’ve just spent a few hours in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The good and fun reasons for visiting a hospital are few, yet what strikes me as odd is that they use every environmental cue to remind you that you’re there not to have a pleasant time.

Sitting in the waiting room, I gazed around the walls. Every spare inch of every notice board was covered with information-heavy A4 notices that tended to be written in all-caps 48pt Times New Roman or Arial, about all sorts of things: from may kill you to the latest goings on at the hospital knitting club. Every notice was laminated, presumably due to MRSA preventative measure (or maybe to give it a “professional”, glossy sheen, I’m not sure). Then each was pinned haphazardly to the wall, or hung at some awkward angle.

(I’m guessing the nature of the content since no part of me wanted to tackle the information onslaught.)

On one notice board, two pairs of slightly shrivelled balloons were attached to its two top corners, creating disappointing quotation marks around a massive title (created using 700pt all-caps Arial letters printed and laminated on individual A4 sheets). I can’t remember what it said, but imagine four balloons framing the word, “Haemorrhoids” to get a sense of the awkwardness.

I took the snapshot above surreptitiously. It really bugged me that the “Blood Tests” sign is askew, and probably has been for as long as anyone could remember, yet would take a second standing on a chair to fix. Similar signs were strewn around the place without any thought for their clarity. (In fact I heard about four people walking beneath this sign ask how to get to the blood tests department. It was indeed to the left.)

The place is obviously spotlessly clean, yet stationary, magazines, and childrens’ toys are scattered everywhere. The magazines – issues from around the begining of last year – all seemed to have that very well thumbed page curl you find in cheap barbershops.

A simple clean-up and rationalisation of the space would require no additional money to solve, and barely any time. Just a little consideration of the environment from the hospital’s management in consultation with the staff and patients that occupy the space would turn a depressing, imposing space into a far more comforting and informative place to be.

Yet this is the NHS. As wonderful an institution as it is, trying to implement simple changes in the environment would have to be referred to tens of levels of bureaucracy, and probably require some input from an expensive external management or design consultancy. The environment doesn’t need to be “designed”, in the same way you don’t need to design a space to call a home a home. Nor does it need any strategic input or thought; just commonsense. Perhaps all that is required is to imbue the staff responsible for various departments with a sense of pride, ownership and empowerment that presumably has been beaten out of them by the NHS behemoth.

Of course I’m extrapolating from just a few experiences of a handful of hospitals, but fundamentally it’s sad that these tiny problems seem hopelessly simple to solve.

I have just returned home after returning the keys to the manager of the office I occupied in Clerkenwell for all of last year.

It was in a very charming former clock factory, now called Clerkenwell Workshops. It was full of charming little companies, from television production studios, to the HQ of a betting website, with a sprinkle of graphic design studios in there for good measure. There was plenty of exposed brickwork, and wooden floors. The Clerkenwell Kitchen (which is needless to say, charming) was situated there: a place that – to Alex Nelson’s surprise – only served organic cola (I had no idea there was such a thing).

All very nice. But recently I decided to let the lease lapse, and end my tenancy. Here’s why:

When I started the lease on the office in December 2010, I had an awful lot of projects on the go. Suddenly I felt I was struggling to cope without needing to hire some designers and developers full time, and as such I needed a space to call my own. The studio was small-ish – about 270sq/ft – but could fit about 5 people comfortably: a perfect place to grow into slowly.

But as the weeks and months progressed, my ability to juggle projects and get work done helped by awesome – remote – freelancers increased. As suddenly as I thought I needed a physical space for the studio, I dreaded the idea of hiring, bringing with it the pressure of responsibility, National Insurance contributions, and keeping track of sick days.

The idea of running a traditional studio was now as appealing as my various, old roles in corporate-dom. I’d lose the time I had to learn and develop, and to keep my hand in all the projects I execute. I’d have to take on projects I didn’t find interesting to maintain overhead (and I should say, keeping a studio in Clerkenwell isn’t cheap…).

So clearly the best course of action was to share the space with the awesome people I have been lucky to work with. Rik Lomas, Al Monk, Gemma Leigh, Severin Furneaux and Lawrence Brown all worked from the studio at various points during the year.

Co-working Spaces

Whilst sharing the space was fun, fundamentally the space wasn’t designed to be – and could never be – “a co-working space”. But with that term thrown around so often it’s often tricky to pin down what it means.

The mighty Studiomates in DUMBO is what I consider a co-working space. Everything else that markets itself as a co-working space, don’t come close.

Studiomates is a community led by Tina and her gang of fun, inclusive, cross-discipline creatives and do-ers. It is the too-ing and fro-ing of interesting people doing interesting things that makes the place so exciting. The space itself (as enormous and cool as it is) becomes relegated and invisible.

It’s this community that is missing from the self-styled co-working spaces that have popped up in New York and London over recent years. With some notable exceptions (New Work City, for instance), the community – or even simply, the “feeling” – is missing. A sea of reproduction Eames furniture and carefully designed desks doesn’t make a successful co-working venue; it’s the community that uses and underpins the space.

I’m not dismissing the usefulness of such places. After moving from my office I signed up with the excellent Club Workspace (in the basement of Clerkenwell Workshops), but I see it more as a drop-in center where I can use the wifi and drink as much of the free coffee as my nerves can handle. Sadly, the furtive whispers of the huddled people in each corner of the space isn’t enough for me to spend all my day there.

So let’s create a co-working space!

Actually, no, let’s not.

I’ve learnt that co-working spaces are organic things that can’t be started like an engine. The conditions under which a successful co-working space can thrive have to be right. The balance of people, projects, want and will all have to be tended first. That’s what Tina has worked on for years.

Further, the economics of setting such a space in London can be tricky. Recently, Ben Stott and I briefly looked at some numbers. A Central-ish location in London can be staggeringly expensive, and that’s before the Vitsœ shelving installation is taken into account. Without guaranteed sublets, the investment required suddenly looks a touch vertiginous.

So with that said – and while day-dreaming of the perfect collaborative space in which sees stuff happening – I’m looking forward to gate-crash various spaces, studios, and offices over the next few months. Hopefully along the way I’ll meet and work with the people who’ll one day help make it happen.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new website that I have been working on with my girlfriend Cecilia.

Cecilia is an insanely good cook, and The Whole Food Diary chronicles her culinary exploits through a series of articles and recipes. The focus is on cooking with whole/raw ingredients with as little processing as possible. And while the blog is principally vegetarian, I can guarantee that – as a carnivore – every recipe is as satisfying as you could ever hope for.

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I’m pretty thrilled to see that Eli Rousso launched NYPD, after telling me about it one evening last October.

With digital product designers a horribly scarce commodity in New York (and indeed, every major city), NYPD aims to be a finely curated list of the people involved with the most interesting product design in the city. And as far as I am aware, it will be the start of a series of meet-ups.

It’d be great to start something similar in London, but right now I fear it would be a very small list…

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In my opinion, Facebook is one of the most beautiful and refined products across all platforms from the website to the iPhone app. Yet I barely spend an hour a week on it.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to understand why that is, and it boils down to two points:

• There is no presentational delineation between intrinsically, and extrinsically, shared content
• Timeline works beautifully for beautifully curated content

When I started using Facebook, I loved the fact that all the content on it was about my friends. Very simply and quickly, I could discover what they were up to, what they planned to do, or what they thought about stuff. The kinds of conversations that I had on the site were akin to the kind of conversations I might have in a pub.

In a pub, you talk about things that affect you, other people, or about things. The discussions and dialog you have is intrinsic sharing – sharing and discussing things that are very personal to you.

What you wouldn’t do is turn up to the pub with a bunch of DVDs, maybe some magazines, yesterday’s newspaper, and your Xbox. You also probably wouldn’t be standing there listening to Spotify on your iPhone. That’d just be rude.

You then wouldn’t start handing these items out to other random people in the pub, often in total silence.

All this stuff is very extrinsic to you. While you may feel that the a movie was great, it doesn’t really “define” who you are; you liking a particular news article is interesting, but doesn’t really say a great deal about you. All this stuff is extrinsic to you as an individual.

But for me this is what Facebook has become. Sure, you can still hold the sort of conversations and exchanges you could have a few years ago, but suddenly this is surrounded by a messy pile of impersonal, quite meaningless stuff. My Facebook feed is littered with videos, music, links and assorted random stuff, such that the interesting intrinsic, personal content is hidden.

I’d love Facebook to explore how to make the separation between intrinsic and extrinsic sharing clear and compelling.

Path, for instance, is the pinnacle of intrinsic sharing. You can’t share any content that isn’t directly related to you as an individual. Twitter is the pinnacle of extrinsic sharing, in that it works for sharing, yet few choose Twitter to be the place where they expose very personal content.

I’m not saying that Facebook isn’t the place to share good content – it is – but it could easily occupy that awkward space in the middle, balancing the nature of content shared by your friends so you can easily find out a) what your friends are doing and feeling, and b) what content is interesting or fun. But Timeline – which is perfect for conveying personal content in a compelling way – breaks down when random articles and funny videos are brought added to the chronology.

When Facebook announced Timeline, the example mockups were stunning: carefully curated profiles with stunning imagery. It’s purpose – to capture and present personal memories in a beautiful way – was instantly obvious. On go live, my own profile and that of plenty of others looked like a mess. Flippant, throw-away remarks that I don’t care to remember sit oddly alongside a holiday photo album, which in turn sits next to a YouTube video.

What I’d love to see is what happens if the Timeline presented the personal content people choose to share, but then associated to this is a dossier or self-curated magazine about the things I find interesting: the music, movies, events, articles, and other content that surround my life but which don’t constitute it.