Design of Understanding 2013

Max Gadney put on another fine show - I like its breadth. My notes:

Chrome Web Lab at the Science Museum (2012) looks as if it has insanely high production values, an obvious labour of love. Planning physical consumables at scale, trading off privacy against personalisation-in-public and immediacy.
The staff swipe cards that can be used to turn the robots off and on again: very clever to make the most common ops job much easier (and probably fun), removing an irritation for the staff.
analogue sensors plugged into a mobile's headphone jack - pragmatic (early 2000s?)

Needing to start with good questions to get good analysis. Make things more visual and more manipulable (showing connections, relevance, compressing data etc).
Presumably also: if the underlying data isn't accurate, making it more visual is at best unhelpful (GIGO) or at worst deslusional, ie reading tea leaves without realising it.
Does data/information ever less understandable as it gets more visual?

Phil Gyford, the single main Phil

(I did a drawing of Phil that's so poor I cannot show it to anyone, it shames me. This one is much better than mine.) Phil talked about the 10-year Pepys Diary project.
On committing for a long period of time, Quotes Stewart Brand from How Buildings Learn: "A building isn't something you finish, a building is something you start" (perhaps the verb in "building" is always darting around from behind the noun)
He's re-committing and re-running it for another 10 years. The biggest job seems to have been rewriting the technology platform it runs on (how does that map to Brand's Site/Structure/Skin/Services/Space model? Something like this?)
In 2050, the histories will summarise the 2000s-2015 internet period as "Gyford's Diary of Samuel Pepys and Wikifacegoogle". The rest of us will be dust. Hail Gyford!

His talk is online. On the notebook in The English Patient: "Above all it’s an emblem of its owner. [...] it’s the Patient’s life, and he forgets his life and has to find it again. He finds it in the pages of his notebook. [...] His notes become who he is."
"But I also want these [Shepherd's own] notes to be beautiful. I want them to express my own journey towards understanding the knowledge they contain. And perhaps most of all – I want this collection of notes to somehow express something about me as well as about the work I’m doing."
Tools should meet our desire for personal grain, but must they deliver on our romantic nostalgia?

Brief and interesting intro to planning and agencies, and how they might reconceive their role and activity, sharing risk with partners, adopting more of a venture funding model
ie Ad:ventures

All excellent.

rodcorp