pascal the bike

so I have my bike project... its a dark copper 1970's Peugeot track bike and is beautiful! watch this space as it goes fixie...

holiday!

As you may have noticed I've not been too active over the past few weeks. It's been mainly due to holidaying (sunny cornwall), job searching and the discovery of Twitter. Well, holidays are now over and happilly I have managed to find a job back in London tawn that I'm very excited to start. So I'm gonna be posting much more often from now, and have a couple of posts already planned for my last few weeks here in France (boo hoo)

Meanwhile for more random links + status updates about my lunch, head over to Twitter and follow me there!

the power of collaboration

Fantastic presentation on the idea of institutions v collaboration. Clay Shirky manages to see and articulate new media developments in a way I have seen no-one else manage. This is not only fascincating but pertinent. And where does it chime more than in the music industry today. When will the likes of EMI open their eyes.

Collaboration is certainly the way forward, that is clear now. However a big unanswered question still remains.... if we loose paid jobs in institutions for free, crowd sourced mass collaboration, how does the economy sustain itself. In other words, how do people earn money.... how do we make the web pay?

what's in a definition?

Just finished reading this fantastic summary/article on the on-going discussion around the definition (and indeed the very need for a definition) of service design and design thinking. It's basic conclusion is that to effectively sell design as a value adding service its vital and it important to aid non-designers to relate to and understans the field. Sometimes too much is written about design and not enough done:

the spiralling intellectual gymnastics that follow leads to ‘design thinking’ becoming esoteric or sounding overly ‘expert’ to novices or non-designers.

So instead of writing any more I command you to head over here and make up your own mind.

the social dance

Brilliant video via Core77. If you don't understand why social networks work and grow at such speed watch this video gem:

ecodazoo

Really interesting interaction and beautiful 3d pop-up books over at ecodazoo. Try playing with the flag at the base of the tree type structure... nice.

HobNox

I had my head pointed at an amazing web app by a friend today. Hobnox Audiotool is an impressive flash app that effortlessly reproduces a whole host of electronic music gear, pedals, mixers, drum machines etc. The result is a free virtual environment where you can play, create and record electronic music and whats more completely by-passes physical products. This, for me, is one of the most fascinating aspects here. Could this sort of virtual environment be a real strategy to reducing the abundance industrially produced products? and where else could this apply?

Whatever the implications are... this is a lovely piece of flash, and well worth a few lost minutes.