Category: Technology

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Conference Notes Technology

On Werewolf at FOO Camp 06…

I’m sure Tim actually gets quite annoyed by the amount of times that people ostensibly talk about FOO Camp but actually end up talking about Werewolf – a game that is played pretty much solidly throughout the Friday and Saturday nights by up to forty or fifty people at any given time. If he does, then it’s a shame, because I genuinely think that the Werewolf action is an absolutely necessary gelling agent for the whole event. There are a lot of people at FOO and geeks are not necessarily the most naturally gregarious of people. Speaking from personal experience, without Werewolf I’m not sure that I would have been able to get passed my inhibitions last year and actually talked to anyone at all. It’s not why you go to FOO, but it definitely makes the rest of the event more pleasurable and interesting.

This year’s Werewolf action was among the best I’ve ever experienced – playing with a new group people changes the dynamic dramatically – taking a couple of games before you start to get a sense of the people around you and when they’re feeling awkward or lying. It’s always easier with people you know well who haven’t played much. By way of an example, I cite Paul Hammond’s first stint as a Werewolf. He turned sort of purple and kept smiling all the way through. Very odd behaviour. Other players were more inscrutable, with Cal in particular ploughing his way through unsuspecting villagers with a great big grin on his face and a card around his neck reading ‘villager’.

If you’ve not played Werewolf, I’m not going to describe it for you – you can find much better representations on the web of the kind of game it is. I’m just going to thank Jane McGonigal, Danah Boyd, Chris DiBona and Artur Bergman for hosting the games, and particularly Danah and Artur for taking most of the strain this time, allowing Jane to actually play for a change. She’s written up a lot of the experience of FOO on her site: It’s Foo-tacular! and remains one of the most terrifyingly good Werewolf players I’ve ever competed against.

There’s no way on earth I’m going to remember the names of all the other awesome Werewolf players, but obvious kudos goes out to Sam Ruby, Michael Buffington, Rabble, Greg Stein, Julian Bleecker and Mike Migurski. I’d like to put out a special w00t to Suw Charman and Mark Shuttleworth for the fascinating / exhausting game on Saturday night and say finally that it was particularly good fun to actually get a chance to hang out with Erik Benson, who I think is now a full Werewolf convert and hopefully a solid new friend. Colleague Simon Willison also deserves a mention for being unusually but stunningly hopeless at the whole thing.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about or why this was so much fun and so worth talking about, then can I advise you to run to any environment where you get to play a few rounds with smart people. I believe there was one such place over the weekend at BarCamp. Hopefully this should mean that an appetite for more games will emerge in the UK, that we can start moving towards the creation of a local regular Werewolf event in the UK and that in the end we’ll all be able to participate in the proposed “World Series of Werewolf” – an idea that’s time has clearly come…

Categories
Conference Notes Technology

Some thoughts about FOO and elitism…

I’m going to try over the next few days to capture retrospectively my FOO experience in a little detail. I didn’t think I’d have enough time to do it, but it turns out that when you’re trying to avoid writing your talk for major conferences in the US there’s no end to what you can accomplish (as long as it’s not in any way related to the talk in question). So my flat’s almost completely clean, I’ve scanned in every photograph I own into Flickr, I’ve ordered food, and done lots of washing. I’ve caught up on a month of back e-mail. I’ve even cooked, for god’s sake, and I never do that. It makes sense that the weblog should get some much-needed attention in the process.

But before I get into the substance of the event I wanted to stick my oar in about some of the FOO elitism arguments that have been roaming around the Valley recently. I’m not going to comment on my personal beliefs on why Dave Winer was not invited – that’s between Tim and Dave – and in fact you can read some of Tim’s reasoning on Om Malik’s site that might give some clues, but I do think the whole thing is rather overblown and here’s why:

Everyone who attends FOO feels honoured to be there, but let’s be clear – invitation-only events happen all the time in the tech industry. There are more conferences and seminars happening in and around Silicon Valley than there are days in the year. And any individual or company is free to start their own event and invite whomsoever they choose. I went to a Microsoft Social Research Seminar earlier this year with a lot of the smartest people in that part of the industry and no-one batted an eyelid. If all events were invitation-only then I might have some more concerns, but they’re not. It’s never been easier to show off your great work in the industry and have it seen, nor to find places to show it off to people who will respond to it. I find it ridiculous that anyone can look across the valley to Sebastopol – past MIcrosoft, Apple, Google and Yahoo! – and somehow come to the conclusion that O’Reilly have their iron grasp on the creative direction of the Internet and are leveraging a couple of hundred person camping trip to cement it. I just don’t buy it – and as a consequence I’m pretty sure that the arguments that protesting FOO is about the misuse of power or influence or propriety or something are just bunk.

Another thing I’ve heard expressed is some concern that FOO is some kind of power-brokering Web 2.0 dark-masterplan dominance play, but I can only say that in my experience it’s quite the opposite – the value in FOO is not in bringing together the powerful in order to assert control, but in the cross-pollination of disciplines. It’s about meeting people who are talking about brain imaging and hacking, seeing the robots playing football, listening to the sociologists and chatting to the people who grow diamonds in their cellars and are trying to build tricorders. It’s about stepping out of your worldview for a minute and seeing a larger picture. Confounding yourself. That’s why there are ten talks going on at any given time and why some of them get barely one person attending them – because it’s an event based on multiple voices rather than establishing a consensus. I think anyone who came to the event looking to assume their rightful place in the cadre of the dark cabal running Web 2.0 would be more than a little disappointed by the general lack of interest in playing that particular game. Unless I went to the wrong sessions, of course. Which is quite plausible. FOO seems to me an oddly and beautifully innocent event. I’m sure people do business there, but it does generally seem to be more about genuine enthusiasm and excitement about technology than these larger questions of politics.

But still the charge remains that it’s the same old group of people who wander in and out of the event each year, and I’m afraid I don’t buy that either. I was lucky enough to go last year – my first and I thought at the time plausibly my last opportunity – but this year was completely different. There were something like three times as many people at the event this year, which means necessarily a couple of hundred new people were there. If that doesn’t convince you, then maybe you’d be convinced by Tim’s assertion that one model they were considering for next year would include none of the people present this time. I don’t don’t know if they’d make such a severe change – and I’m obviously deeply hoping that I get invited again next year – but there does generally seem to be a committment in O’Reilly to find a way to bring in lots of exciting new people. Again, I don’t buy that it’s the old guard. And I’m unconvinced by the idea that only the powerful and influential get invited. I’m pretty sure Jeff Bezos would still be there if that was the rule, but that wouldn’t explain why they let me in.

No, FOO is a great experience but a necessarily limited one – and what people should be thinking is how can they learn from it to create a variety of other events, private or public, invitation-only or free-for-all that keep a vibrant culture moving forward. The Bar Camp people – for all their initial hostility to FOO – have actually stolen many of its best elements and made it their own – ad hoc and fully open gatherings of creative nerds. It’s a different experience but it’s an exciting and complementary one. I just wish more people had followed their lead.

Categories
Ethics Technology

A quick disclaimer…

In keeping with my piece on Ethical Weblogging a few days I should declare that Nokia have sent me a piece of hardware to play with that they’re looking to get geek feedback upon. I’m not going to be talking about the product on this site unless it becomes completely enmeshed with my life, but anyway, that’s full disclosure and you can come to your own conclusions about any subsequent posts I should make about the company. The post on Ethical Weblogging that I made the other day was in fact a direct result of being approached by Nokia for feedback and trying to work out what the appropriate response would be. Hopefully this is open and fair enough to be honourable.

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Technology

Why I'm looking forward to Leopard…

I’ve been letting last week’s WWDC settle in my brain and have been thinking through the various features both announced and alleged. I’m not particularly overwhelmed by the whole thing, but there’s enough evolutionary change to keep me comfortable as far as I can see. I’ll be buying it as usual, and no doubt there’ll be some kind of London-based nerd install party, probably around Matt Webb‘s house which I’m already looking forward to.

Weirdly the thing that I found myself most excited about in the keynote however wasn’t Time Machine or the new Mail.app with ‘to do’ integration (drool) or the new multiple desktop managers. It was the new version of iChat. And it’s not because of the ludicrous video backgrounds that I’m sure we’ll all be using even as we sniff at them (useful for people who are cheating on their spouses, I imagine).

No, the reason I got so excited was the ability to screenshare – for me to find someone on my iChat buddy list and basically give them control of my computer:

For some reason Steve didn’t talk around this feature during the keynote, but I almost can’t describe how useful this is going to be – and why? I can’t really need to explain! To help my parents with Tech Support! I persuaded them to buy a Mac at the beginning of the year (they got the last of the iBooks, which is almost a shame now the MacBooks are out) and they love it, and they’ve only had a couple of very minor problems, but being able to walk them through things they’ve done wrong, or fix problems that have freaked them out is going to be completely awesome. Another reason why the Mac is moving from being the computer for designers, through being the computer for designers and technologists through to being the computer for pretty much everyone and their families. Lovely job.

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Technology

Dash Clipping – why wait for Leopard?

I’d normally have linklogged this except it’s quite sweet and I thought I’d slap up a picture to illustrate the first use I’ve found for it – Dash Clipping is a little OSX Dashboard widget that does exactly the same thing as the widget Steve Jobs announced the other day at WWDC – you can crop a part of a live website and turn it into a component of your dashboard, updating when the page changes. I’ve taken the top story off BBC News in this example:

It’s not the most beautiful of applications but it seems pretty solid so far. Worth a look, certainly. Suggestions for other applications very much solicited.

Categories
Net Culture Politics Technology

Protect your bits with the Open Rights Group…

Tell you what – you go on holiday for a couple of weeks and the e-mail that piles up… Sheesh, I’ll be ploughing through this lot for weeks. Earlier today I think I managed to get up to a rate of replying to around ten serious e-mails per hour, but now people are bloody replying to the earlier ones, so now I’m struggling to break-even. And given that I’ve got another five hundred to plough through, I could be here quite a while. Sigh. And this is after I’ve got rid of all the bloody spam and mailing list stuff.

Anyway, one of the more interesting e-mails I’ve received was from Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group – a progressive digital rights organisation that I’m on the advisory board of. The whole thing came about because of Danny O’Brien’s pledgebank proposal during which a thousand people pledged to donate five pounds a month to support an organisation that could fight for digital rights in the UK. Unfortunately – several months down the line – there’s still a bit of a shortfall between the people who said they’d donate and those that actually have. Hence a new project – to get another five hundred people to sign-up and donate. That five hundred, along with the current supporters, will become known as the Founding 1000, and will be able to stand up proudly and say that they were working to change the digital rights landscape in the UK.

I’ve already started encouraging the crew at Barbelith to sign-up, and now I’m going to ask you lot to stand up and be counted as well. You can get badges for the ORG on this blog post: Protect your bits. Support ORG or you can just leap straight in and start supporting ORG. You won’t regret getting involved, however peripherally. It’s a really good bunch of people trying to move the culture in a really positive direction, but they need funding and volunteers to really start having an impact. You can help.

Support the Open Rights Group

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Business Navigation Net Culture Radio & Music Social Software Technology Television

Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield?

Today it was announced that the BBC’s New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned – for example, Simon Nelson who was the ‘controller’ of the part of the BBC that I used to work for (BBC Radio and Music) reported equally to Jenny Abramsky (in charge of the BBC’s radio and music operations) and to Ashley Highfield (in charge of the BBC’s New Media Operations). Ashley himself had pretty much direct control over a centralised part of the organisation known internally as New Media Central.

After working at the BBC for a few years, it seems to me that this structure was a sort of clumsy compromise that had a lot of problems but a lot of benefits. I wasn’t in the right positions to see the whole picture but there seemed to be organisational and communication problems with such a layout, and a certain splitting of resources. But on the other hand – and this is a big other hand – increasingly the divisions between ‘new media’ stuff and content creation were able to blur, creating new opportunities for each to support the other which couldn’t help but be a good thing.

The other thing which almost seemed to me to be a good thing – sort of by accident – was that it created an environment where parallel parts of the BBC could operate independently and in a rather more agile fashion. More specifically still, it meant that certain parts of the organisation with a kind of critical mass of smart and clued-up people could really thrive and generate their own culture and goals and get things done, even as others weren’t doing so well. It may be just because I worked there or Stockholm syndrome but I rather think that BBC Radio and Music was one of those places, and despite the fact that a bunch of my favourite people have since moved on, I think it probably still is.

Having said that not all parts of the organisation were similarly dynamic, despite the often amazing number of talented people working within them – specifically, in my opinion, Central New Media under the direct management of Ashley Highfield.

You’ll have heard a lot of announcements coming out from his part of the organisation over the last few years, but surprisingly few of them have amounted to much. They all made headlines at the time, but they’ve all rather disappeared. Do you know what happened to the grand plans of the Creative Archive or the iMP? They were both being talked about in press releases in 2003, but the status of the iMP now appears to be a closed content trial and the Creative Archive has amounted to nothing more than a truncated Creative Commons license used by several orders of magnitude less people and a few hunded short clips of BBC programmes. Highfield’s most recent speeches from May this year are still talking about these projects, with him showing mock-ups of potential prototypes for the iMP replacement the ‘iPlayer’ that could be the result of a collaboration with Microsoft. Are you impressed by this progress? I’m not.

And then there’s BBC Backstage – a noble attempt to get BBC APIs and feeds out in public. What state is that in a couple of years down the line? Look at it pretty closely – despite all the talk at conferences around the world – and it still amounts to little more than a clumsy mailing list and a few RSS feeds – themselves mainly coming from BBC News and BBC Sport. There’s nothing here that’s even vaguely persuasive compared to Yahoo!, Amazon or Google. Flickr – a company that I don’t think got into double figures of staff before acquisition – has more public APIs than the BBC, who have roughly five thousand times as many staff! This is what – two years after its inception? Even the BBC Programme Catalogue that came out of this part of the organisation a while back has gone into a review phase (do a search to see the message) without any committment or indication when it’s going to be fully opened up.

I’m sure – in fact I know – that there are regulatory frameworks that get in the way of the BBC getting this stuff out in public, but these long lacunae go apparently unnoticed and unremarked – there’s an initial announcement that makes the press and then no follow-up. If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!

And that’s just the past. This is a man who decides to embrace social software and the wisdom of crowds in 2006 – clearly waiting for Rupert Murdoch to buy MySpace and show the self-appointed R&D lab of the UK new media industry the way. His joy for this space is expressed in lines like, “The ‘Share’ philosophy is at the heart of bbc.co.uk 2.0 … your own thoughts, your own blogs and your own home videos. It allows you to create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, which is ironic given that earlier last year he stated in Ariel that he didn’t read any weblogs because he wasn’t interested in the opinions of self-opinionated blowhards. This is a man who apparently coined the term, Martini Media and thinks that expressing your future strategy through smug references to 1970s Leonard Rossiter-based adverts is a surefire way to move the ecology forward. This is a man described by the Guardian in its Media 100 for 2006 as follows:

Exactly how much the impetus for such initiatives stem from Highfield, and how much from the director general, was the source of some debate among the panel.

“Ashley Highfield is among the most important technology executives working in the UK today,” said one panellist. “Yes, but talk about being in the right place at the right time,” said another. “Mark Thompson should be credited with the vision, not him.”

This is a man – bluntly – whose only contact with Web 2.0 that I can find is a pretty humiliating set of pictures on Flickr of him on a private jet and ogling at half-naked dancing girls. (Note: This set of pictures has now been taken down).

So it is, I’m afraid, with a bit of a heavy heart that I can report that the restructuring of the BBC is going to result in a much larger role for Ashley Highfield within the organisation – managing (according to the Guardian, and I’d take this with a pinch of salt) up to 4,000 people throughout the organisation. All the new media functions that have currently been distributed will now it seems be directly under his auspices, and presumably more under his influence than those of the programme makers and pockets of brilliant people around the organisation. I don’t know enough about the nature of the restructuring to know whether it’s a good or a bad thing at a more general level, but it’s pretty bloody clear to me that it’s an ominous move.

Which is what makes me so surprised when people outside the organisation talk about how scared they are of the huge moves that the BBC can make on the internet, because the truth is that for the most part – with a bunch of limited exceptions – these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors – the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international – get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting. I want the BBC to succeed. I want it to get stronger – I think it’s a valuable organisation to have in the world and I think it sits perfectly well alongside the mix of start-ups and corporates that’s emerging on the internet. And it’s for precisely this reason that I’m concerned about these moves.

Who’s afraid of Ashley Highfield? I am, and you should be too.

Categories
Technology

On playing with my Holux GPS unit…

I have a new toy. It wasn’t enormously cheap and it basically looks like a little box with three lights on it that pulse in interesting ways, but it is extremely exciting and cool. It is a Holux GPSlém 236 GPS blob – recipient of a glowing 99% review over on pocketgpsworld.com. Here is a picture of the extravagant little beauty:

And what does it do? It communicates with satellites to pinpoint your location in the world to within a dozen feet or so and presents it as long and lat coordinates. That’s about it. But the possibilities are sort of endless, and more importantly they’re now available for pretty much any of us to easily hack around and build things with. They’re completely within the range of real humans, pretty reliable and nice and easy to set up.

I got mine working straight out of the box. I literally plugged it into the mains, turned it on and told my phone to pair with it. And it did so with no problems whatsoever. I have Zonetags installed on my phone already for quick photo uploads to Flickr, so I went to its options and told it to start using GPS and pretty much immediately it was detailing where I was in the world, which direction I was moving in and at what speed. Two minutes later I’d taken my first geotagged photo, and ten minutes later when we got back to the office, I could see it plotted on a map. It was all tremendously exciting.

I know I’m sort of late to the game on this stuff, but I’m already thinking around the various things you could do in connecting up GPS things with weblogs and other nerdy extravagances. There’s an enormous culture of people working in this area that could really do with being surfaced and popularised and maybe this little tiny, relatively cheap and easy to set-up little device is the thing that makes that really start to happen? Biddulph’s already shown me a few neat things including a simple app that turns your journeys into .kml files that you can just plug into Google and of course there’s all the neat stuff that Open Street Map have been doing (See Tom Carden and Steve Coast’s Awesome visualisations). But really there’s no limit.

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Hack Day Technology

On EU Hack Day…

Yesterday, many of the engineering teams around Yahoo! Europe got together for EU Hack Day, and Simon and I collaborated on a little fun something around Flickr and ritual humiliation which we were quite proud of, and here’s the consequence:

The whole thing was highly entertaining, a little bit Eurovision and we’re all looking forward to the next one, but I have to be honest – this post is really just about showing off the glass trophy and pointing out to Cal that his little cups are really a little bit lame. So sad.

Categories
Design Net Culture Technology

The RCA Summer Show 2006…

Once a year the RCA Summer Show opens its doors – showing over six weeks off all the incredible creative work that its students have created across all their disciplines. The show comes in four main parts, three of which have already come and gone – so if you’re interested in scultpure, fashion and most of the fine arts, then I’m afraid you’ve missed out. But the fourth session – the one that I’m most interested in – just started yesterday and runs until next Sunday. If you’re in London over that time and are even vaguely interested in the future, in design or whatever, then I can’t recommend it enough. It covers a whole bunch of disciplines including animation, architecture, communication art & design, conservation, curating contemporary art, design products, fashion, history of design, industrial design, engineering, interaction design, textiles and vehicle design. I’ve emboldened the disciplines that I got rather over-excited about this year. The Interaction Design course is sort of the equivalent of the ITP course that Clay Shirky is involved with and which gets a lot of play in the US at conferences. The UK crew don’t seem as well connected. Maybe we can change that.

Anyway, I thought I’d write a post in which I talked about some of the things I spotted this year which I thought were the most interesting or exciting. To be honest, I’m mostly interested in things with clear real-world applicability, but every so often something that looks more like an art object gets me excited. If you’re interested in the first batch, there’s a fair amount at the show which could be productised and brought to market pretty quickly, and if you’ve got some spare cash, I’d really recommend throwing it at the people concerned as soon as possible. But before we get ahead of ourselves:

Very disappointing, and I’m afraid to say in a couple of places – normally (but not universally) with the permission of the designer or creative person concerned – I have slightly transgressed. If I couldn’t get permission then for the most part I’ve wandered over to their sites to get imagery and background information or scanned in information that they put out for people to take away. Unfortunately not all of them have good websites full of information, which is where I’ve gone off the rails a bit. A good proportion in fact have nothing but an e-mail address or a registration page on the web – even though the web address is on all of their cards. Quite bad form that. Very disappointing. Case in point – stand up and apologise to the group, Larissa Nowicki who made some very awesome things, none of which I can point to. But I can point to:

Availabot by Jack Schulze: Quick conflict of interest declaration – Jack Schulze is a friend and co-runs Schulze & Webb with Matt Webb, long-time blog-friend and ex-BBC partner. Point being, I may be biased – but this seems really neat to me. Availabot is a tiny representation of one of your friends that spends most of its life flat on its back but stands vigorously to attention when your friends appear on IM. They’ve written a bit about some of the nicest features on their site:

“Availabot stores the IM details of the friend it represents in the puppet itself. That means you can buy a few, load them with your own IM screenname and service, and give them out like business cards to your closest contacts.”

I’m totally loving this, and just wish wifi tech was further along so that you could have them littered unwired all across your home. At the moment they use a USB connection, which is still pretty sweet. I would certainly buy a few, even though they’d be even more awesome if they were able to store a short message in the person’s voice when they activated. You may recognise that the availabot in question here is a representation of Matt Jones:

Jack had another project on display at the event – an appliance that allows you to melt and reform the case of a mobile phone using eutactic metals. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s a beautiful piece of engineering:

Natural Deselection by Tim Simpson: I absolutely loved this idea – three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime:

I wish I could show you something of his other project Subversive Sightseeing which took a kind of augmented reality approach to the most public of tourist traps – the public telescope. He’d taken this coin-operated telescope and replaced the actual view with a digital image. As you panned across in either direction with the telescope, the image changed too – making it appear like your view was uninterrupted. Except that then he animated various fantastic events over the view – like Big Ben erupting into flame – which would draw you out of reality and into fantasy. Glorious bit of art humour. And nothing to show for it online. It’s as if it didn’t happen.

Singing Sock Puppets by Matthew Brown: Absolutely my favourite of the whole event – tiny glove puppets that look a bit gormless that sing in isotonic scales to jazz records, with the user choosing the pitch by how open the mouth is. It sounds dumb, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with a sock and some electronics in years. There’s some great stuff on Irvinebrown.com about this project, including a whole part of his portfolio dedicated to the singing puppet project complete with links to videos of prototypes: Durrel Bishop (1.5mb) and Brigitte Lelievre (2.3mb). He’s already been linked to by We Make Money Not Art, which is probably a good sign. Here’s a picture of Simon looking slightly over-playful with a puppet:

Bonsai Tree by Jennifer Chan: Bloody lovely this – it’s sort of a cube of rapidly manufacturable and easy to craft plastic material that you can take home and massively personalise to your whim. I imagine that some people would produce absolutely beautiful shapes, while others would product crap, but the concept alone is extremely beautiful. There’s more information about this project on jenniferchan.com – although unfortunately it’s all skanky frames so I can’t actually link to the specific project in question. This picture is from that site:

Liquid Orange by Graeme Davies: At the event I saw a whole bunch of videos of the experimental design work that went on around this concept, but I didn’t actually get to see the thing in action. The concept is really simple – something that you stick inside an orange that liquifies it from the inside giving you the freshest of orange juice with limited washing up:

Flying Fish Bowl and Bin Bag Bear by Shay Alkalay: Shay’s another one of the design crew who is poorly represented online, keeping his work hidden from the largest constituency of interested people in the world. And it’s a shame, because meeting him at the event he seemed a little more nervous than some of other designers but actually extrememly talented. The fish bowl was extraordinary and actually mentally challenging – a transparent ring-shaped object like a donut full of water attached to the wall rotates very slowly. It’s only about a third full of water, and industrial buildings cast in white plastic slowly move through the water, blowing bubbles aerating it. One side of the ring swells out a fair amount so that when the water reaches that point, the water level drops, meaning a gap in the inside of the ring that looks like it would cause all the water to pour out, just narrowly clips by without a problem. I found this completely fascinating – you sit there wondering about whether the fish is experiencing this as a pleasant experience and start thinking about cats sticking their paws in. An object that makes you try and contextualise it and think around it.

But it was his other project that I got completely excited about, and wish was in the world. And it’s easiest just to show you than to explain:

Anyway, there’s a bunch of other things I wish I could show you – including the 11 walking sticks that Jonathan Legge created out of random sticks of Hazel found in the forest, to Gen Suzuki’s extraordinarily simple but beautiful ‘oblique’ vases and chairs. Unfortunately none of these people had information on their sites that I could reference or nick. Definitely worth looking out for them though! In the meantime, all of this and more can be seen at the RCA until Sunday – and I’d be fascinated to hear what you lot liked or didn’t like about the event. I can recommend some of the shapes in the automotive design section. They’re extraordinary.