Week Notes — Week 1
So I’ve been doing a lot of personal development work recently, especially thanks to the Personal Development Kit from Methodkit, which I can’t recommend enough.
I will be publishing a future post on Methodkit for personal development off the back of a workshop we have in planning with Ola, the founder of the company as part of the next Near Now Fellowship.
One of the things that has come up from generally being in a reflective mood is strategies to embed reflection & writing into my weekly workflow and so I’ve decided to adopt Berg’s much loved week notes model.
This means that each Friday I will publish loosely coupled thoughts, completed & uncompleted tasks, web trawls, listens, links, watches, pictures from travels & notes from the week here.
Sometimes I might push posts up to the new Week Notes from Near Now publication but often these will be personal updates.
If you’ve read this far, maybe you are the audience. Hello, thanks for sticking with me. I’d hope that these week notes over time might turn into new conversations so please feedback, comments and leave notes.
So introductions over, here are somethings that have happened this week.
unMonastery, who I’ve been working with for around the last 12 months through and with Near Now Fellow Ben Vickers recently returned from the First Global unMonastery Summit at Transmediale.
Shortly after, an update came from unMonastery Athens on Greece’s innate hacker sensibilities and their newly found neighbours.
It makes for an interesting read about a country that is deep in transition and exploring new commons and open source approaches to governance & civic infrastructure.
By way of example the post references SatNOGs, developed out of Athens Hackerspace, an open source and networked satellite ground stations project that simultaneously sets out to improve global satellite communications infrastructure and democratise access with open and affordable tools.
On Wednesday, I hosted the first in a series of webinars with Near Now Fellows in the lead up to the deadline for the applications for our current call for Near Now Fellowship 2015–2016.
This first one was with Dejan Mitrovic founder of design education startup Kidesign, who we’ve supported through product development to create design curriculum kit Kideville, inspiring kids to become designers, architects and engineers through 3D printing.
I’m so proud to see these kits to be going into production and already adopted by schools after it’s launch at the Bett Show earlier this year.
Technical glitches aside, it felt like a positive and real way to open up the Fellowship experience to be more legible for would-be applicants. I’m looking forward the next two with Ben Vickers and Harry Sanderson respectively.
In early May, Broadway plays host to Hack24, a 24 coding competition to build awesome things from humble beginnings; it should be lots of fun. The first round of tickets get released today!
On Wednesday I had a surprise visit from my good friend Mark Selby, a great product and interaction designer, currently based up in Edinburgh in the Design Informatics programme at The University of Edinburgh and is working on this research project.
It’s a great project that is beginning to take shape, you can read more about the project here: http://learningenergysystems.net
A lot of the outcomes from the Learning Energy Systems research are cute and playful connected devices, so we naturally got chatting about prototyping methodologies for connected hardware but also more standard interface digital products.
I’d recently discovered Marvel App which is one of the best tools I’ve seen for quickly creating compelling experience sketches. They have a great smartphone app too for paper prototyping.
Last week, I stumbled across the the IDEO Futures podcast a great series of interviews and conversations through IDEO’s venture incubator; and this week I actually listened to it. It’s really great and so now subscribed. One emerging technologies that is getting a lot of chatter at the minute is Blockchain, the same tech that powers Bitcoin.
IDEO Futures spun out their annual Makeathon session focussing on the future of trust & transactions; one of the behavioural dynamics of the blockchain.
It reminded me of Vinay Gupta’s session from the unMonastery Global Summit at Transmediale, on blockchain and the Ethereum Project. Like many of the emerging blockchain ventures, Ethereum are essentially working on next generation web-technologies.
Ethereum is building an entirely distributed architecture for the web; so that the server, database, client and content all operate on the blockchain. This means that the Ethereum stack is natively encrypted and as Vinay described a ‘feral’ technology.
His session is well worth a listen if you want a deeper technical and broader cultural analysis of blockchain. Also they are looking for developers, if you’re into that kind of thing.
And you should also read this essay from Joi Ito Director of MIT Media Lab.
Mapbox did something pretty remarkable and launched their new Landsat-live view which is as near close to a live satellite imagery feed as you can get.
The view over Nottingham, was well…
Go explore Mapbox’s Landsat-Live view.
Today was also of course a solar eclipse, which it turns out working in a cinema you can be pretty prepared for. Gordie one of our technicians grabbed the header film from an old 35mm print which worked as a pretty decent black film.
We were out on the terrace, eating Jaffa cakes and waiting for apocalyptic skies which never came but it was a day I’m especially glad not to live in London.
Week Notes 1, done.
