The Wii Shit is a series of simple Arduino interaction experiments. This is the first, a gestural interface that favors the camp.

Just a bit of fun really, but as gestural interfaces become increasingly mainstream will they become intelligent enough to make this possible – to respond to subtleties in mood or mannerisms?

Someone with flamboyant or camp hand gestures searching itunes would receive a playlist suggestion including most of the Village People’s back catalogue. Alternatively a person in a bad mood with aggressive hand gestures would find themselves listening to a playlist of chill-out tracks.

Increasingly on the street and in offices we’re seeing recycling bins pop-up next to rubbish bins, with a primary goal to help the environment by saving energy.

But why hasn’t this principle been extended to our digital lives? Why don’t we recycle stuff to save energy. I’d like to see a recycling bin next to a trashcan on every dock. An application that allows designers, thinkers, animators, whoever, to instead of throwing unwanted logo designs, animation movements, or PowerPoint slides in the trash on their desktops, they could instead pop it in the recycling and share them under a creative commons license.

Your recycling would be dumped on a site that allows people to rummage around it to find their own treasure, saving time, effort and energy. People with the most followers would be those with the highest standards and thus the best rubbish.

It may sound a little idealistic and maybe it is, but people share ideas and work all the time online for a variety of reasons from gaining the respect of their peers, through to landing a new job. And those people do it with things they don’t class as trash, so why not make it easier for people to share unwanted items online?

Just a thought anyway…

A recent trip to the Natural History Museum reminded me of this so I thought I’d stick it up here. The brief was from Isobel to create a campaign for the Natural History Museum and breathe new life into the exhibits.

‘Supernaturals’ was the idea, a nostalgic nod to heated the schoolyard debates that started with the question… ‘who d’ya think would win in a fight out of…’

Press ads were to appear as comic book style big fight posters, with museum goers able to collect trump cards of the exhibits and continue the fun online with social beat ‘em up games played in Bebo and Facebook.

Reed Elsevier design information solutions for professionals, from innovating workflow in hospitals and helping doctors save lives, right through to publishing some of the most respected journals and digital content on the planet. Unfortunately poor user experience and confused brand messaging meant the corporate site wasn’t reflecting this. A review was needed but budgets were tight as Reed felt the brunt of the downturn.

The Solution

Working in an agile way with Content and Code, we prioritised key user tasks – the approach was minimal changes with maximum effect. A review of IA and brand messaging on key pages helped communicate what is an incredibly complex business simply and effectively. Keeping the basic grid and layout the same, we halved the number of web parts, redesigning them with maximum flexibility in mind to give a consistent user experience. We fine tuned the navigation adding a mega drop-down and finally gave the CSS a lick of paint, and there you have it a website to do Reed justice.

In this case its using a feed from BBC news. It scans the feed for words associated with good, bad and sad news, calculates a value and changes 4 pin LED a different colour, red is bad, blue sad and green is good. Its a kind of data visualisation using light.

It’s my first little arduino / processing making adventure – pretty basic I know but watch this space…

2010 the year of the comeback, well at least for Heaven 17 anyway, they’re performing their Penthouse and Pavements album for the first time at various shows around Europe. The show is to be part gig, part multimedia exhibition with some pretty amazing creative folks doing a song each including – Malcolm Garret, Ian Anderson, Chris Bird (UVA), Ben Tomlinson (POKE), Jason Bruges and… err…me?

I chose ‘Song with No Name’, a pretty eerie number about some guy living with regrets of years gone by. Focusing on the ‘Can’t sleep’ lyric, I used UV paint activated by a strobe and synced-it to the beat. The result was a bit of Nightmare ; )

More info on the tour and other people involved  here

So we came up with the Issue Tracker – a real time search application that aggregates ongoing conversations around E.ON’s material issues. It searches the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, ranking the most talked about issues and displaying the most recent. Let’s say you we’re interested in an article on Renewable energy published on the Guardian, you can use the Issue Tracker to see what other people thought about it even if there comments were posted on Twitter or Facebook. Alternatively you could use it find for the most talked about blog posts right now on ‘clean coal’, view them at the source and use the issue tracker banner to navigate back to the application. It also allows E.ON to respond to what’s being talked about and gives a break-down of where the conversations are happening. It’s a good way for E.ON to show  they’re listening while they are busy formulating their social media strategy.

At a time when the demand for energy is on the increase, the threat of climate change has never been greater. Renewable sources of energy aren’t reliable and they’re expensive, especially
for 1000’s of families who can’t afford their energy bills to get any bigger.
What would you choose? Affordability? Reliability? Or low carbon energy? Something’s got to give – E.ON call it the ‘Energy Trilemma’.

We did a big old pitch back in late 2008 with the core idea focused on how to engage stakeholders and customers in the energy debate. Now we’re well into 2010 and E.ON have become on of salterbaxter’s largest clients. We’re continuing to work with them to advise them on sustainability strategy and creative digital work in all shapes and sizes as they continue to tackle the energy ‘Trilemma’. The left shows some of the work we delivered for them in 2009 along with the Talking Energy site lead by GU, DLKW and MediaComm.

Who’s got, or at least had a New Years resolution, come on hands up? Aren’t they great? Begin the New Year with a renewed sense of optimism and excitement at the chance for self improved, a better you for 2010! Only it doesn’t quite work like that does it? February arrives and you realise that any good intentions are a distant memory. That’s why this year I refrained from any grand gestures on New Years Eve in favour of Beta.

Why beta?

Beta versions of software are released for everyone to use, for their makers to get feedback, to tweak and to test. The beta bit is acknowledgement by the developers who release these versions that things are always changing. This constant state of evolution means nothing can ever really be finished – there is always room for improvement.

Beta Everything

With this is mind beta more that a label to slap on a new website in user testing. It’s a way of life, a mindset that can only lead to things to be… well better. In the past couple of years brands, products, services and stuffy organisations have been forced into Beta by social media, forced to listen to customer feed back or feel the consequences. Even The Whitehouse entered into a new cycle of Beta as of last year, with enough of Americans everywhere recognising ‘change is good’ to get behind Obama. But what about everthing else? A beta government? Beta train companies? A beta education system? Beta manners? Beta the Daily Mail? Beta banking system? Beta Tesco sandwiches?

Beta me

I reckon’ everything would benefit from being a bit beta and if more things were we’d all be a lot happier. So I’m going to start with me. That means throwing myself into a constant search for better and embracing change with open arms. It means evaluating and revaluating, not being precious, welcoming a constant stream of criticism from all angles and banishing egos and any trace of arrogance. Not easy – but well worth it me thinks.

2010 is the year I get better at Beta.

Europeana is an amazing project, it’s aim is to digitise Europe’s entire cultural heritage. Institutions including British Library the Louvre and Rijksmuseum have contributed everything from books, paintings, videos, manuscripts and more to the portal – Amazing content all in one place and accessible to everyone. We were tasked with creating the brand and vision for the portal, along with the interface design and style-guide.

Brand idea

Think Culture was the brand idea, a rallying cry to anyone who’ll listen that Europeana is the place for new thoughts, ideas and inspiration. The brand consisted of a number of elements that could be applied to the portals content to create a visually eclectic brand that celebrates the diversity of Europe’s cultural heritage.