Sam Hill | Design

Moved!

2010-08-19T15:18:00.005+01:00

This blog lives here now:

www.samhilldesign.com

Online Creative Communities: Lego

2010-07-04T23:07:00.016+01:00

Recently I've followed, with a fair amount of interest, the recent goings-on, chatter and hubbub of the online global (grown-up) Lego community.

If you've not experienced it yourself - it is, frankly, staggering. But there's a nice, concise TED talk by Hillel Cooperman that goes some way to explaining what it consists of (thanks @TomMoor for bringing it to my attention) and a good 'blocumentary' on Vimeo. As Hillel Explains, there are frequent conventions; a "grey-market" for bricks; niche, compatible, spin-off products; open-source third-party CAD programs; a programming language; networks; well-populated blogs... and beyond.

it goes without saying, such a community could never have grown-up without the medium of the internet.

But I'm particularly interested in the way people use the Flickr pools. Within thematic areas, large numbers of people of different levels of experience contribute photos of work on a regular basis. The strength of these groups is largely creditable to the careful structuring of Flickr, of course, but it's amazing to see people of all ages offer praise, comment and criticism with a level of maturity rarely seen in the anonymous, digital world (a point that @foe initially drew my attention to).

My favourite Flickr pool is undoubtedly Microspacetopia, in which the members design and build fictitious spaceships of varying scales (roughly analogous to the variations in naval craft - cruisers, destroyers, carriers, dreadnoughts etc.) using an absolute bare minimum of bricks. These conditions allow those with a modest collection of bricks (such as myself) to make sincere contributions, but let those with formidable imaginative clout and resources to stretch their greebly muscles. There are frequent homages to films, games and TV shows (Star Wars being the most prominent, obviously), but surprisingly many of the designs are highly original. Some people like to write verbose descriptions and lore to go with their models; some create factions and armies; colour schemes are adopted - They're creating their own collaborative, fictional universe, and it might as well happily sit alongside the Sci-Fi galaxies we're already familiar with.

[pic: Heavy Missile Cruiser - 'Horizon', by [soren]]

One of the most satisfying exchanges to observe in the community is the the comment "NPU". This stands for Nice Piece Use, and is declared, with highlighted marquee, when a fellow contemporary appreciates the novel use of an innocuous or obscure piece to represent something (like a satellite array or greeb) or allow for a new connection method (such as a hinge, or SNOT technique). Other comments might include an appreciation of colour combinations or a criticism of whether an element "works" in context.

Lately, in an effort to engage, I made my first -admittedly crude in comparison - contribution to a mech/robot flickr group:

...I also have a couple of micro-ships in progress I hope to submit soon.

As a footnote, I should mention (but won't elaborate on, here) that Lego elicits a complex mix of stigma amongst the Design community (myself included). The fact that this little project felt like something of a guilty indulgence, throws up some interesting discussion points - for another time - on the perceived appropriateness of some areas, or routes, of creative enquiry.

Incidental

2010-02-18T16:16:00.004Z

We were really pleased to find out recently that The Incidental had been nominated in the interaction category for Brit Insurance Designs Of The Year 2010, an exhibition of which is being hosted at the Design Museum until June 6th. The winners will be announced in March (but with category entries including the BBC iplayer and the Amazon Kindle 2, we're just happy to have been nominated).

Ad_synopsis

2010-01-23T17:46:00.005Z

I've started a little side project called "Advert Synopisis" on twitter.

Here are some examples:

Leathery punk rock Stooges frontman Iggy Pop golfs with rabid Spitting Image marionette of self. (product: insurance)3:11 PM Jan 16th from web
Sir Ian Botham, OBE, shrinks self in order to walk through shredded wheat. Checks for superflous ingredients by shouting (product: cereal)3:07 PM Jan 16th from web
Talking charicature CGI bulldog goes skiing with ironically popular Olympic ski jumper Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards. (Product: insurance)2:58 PM Jan 16th from web

Advent Calendar

2009-12-01T15:51:00.006Z

Last Christmas I did a series of thematic status updates on Facebook over advent. It was kind of stupid but I got quite a warm response. This year I thought I'd go for something a bit more tangible, and with a bit more scope for experimentation. My only restriction is that content needs to occupy a 400x400px iframe. This is also a chance for me to test my (puny) html/css/javascript skills and apply some of the concepts that I've been learning recently. The page isn't much, but I built it from scratch, and it does at least work. I'll be bolting bits on as I go along too (I'm also planning on some big overhauls in my web stuff from now through to the new year)

The calendar is here

Stephen King Gigapan @ St. Pauls

2009-11-16T11:57:00.005Z

This is a GigaPan shot of St. Pauls Cathedral region of the north bank in London, taken from the roof of the Tate Modern (by Nathan Gallagher). If you zoom-in you should be able to spot about 25 people hidden amongst the landscape, holding large banners containing words. These words are from the last paragraph of Stephen Kings new novel Under The Dome and this event marked the end of an extensive real-life and online game of "hide and seek" for fans of Stephen looking to find clues into his latest work before the UK release (I also hid an extract on Unity's landing page)

Our responsibilities were to produce the banners (using our recently purcased vinyl cutter) and to make sure it would all work technically.

The brief was made interesting by a number of limiting factors - the magnifying power of the camera's lens; the length of banner that an individual could comfortably hold; material usage; getting permission from property owners; the periphery of the frame (i.e. how the photo would be cropped) and differences in scale: I wanted to be sure that the closest and furthest banners appeared to be the same size. - some rudimentary geometry was going to be required.

Using a sample shot provided by Nathan I was able to use the CITY OF LONDON sign west of the millenium bridge as a marker which - though out of reach - I measured up close in relative bricks (bricks= 60mm, mortar=10mm: x-height=170mm, effectively 640pt in Helvetica), and then used Google Earth to approximate the distance between the two points (~340m). I used photoshop to approximate that anything below 80% of this font-size risked becoming illegible. This gave me a distance-point size ratio that I could apply on any banner.

After checking round the office, the minimum span of most peoples outstretched arms seemed to be over 1.4m. By threading together aerial photos and cross-referencing a sample pic I was able to work-out which locations lay under the field-of-view triangle of the camera, then cropped this within the maximum radius that the shortest extract could lie within, whilst being large enough to read and yet remaining within a managable sized banner. This gave us our working space and helped identify which buildings we might want permission to use.

The extracts were arranged in longest-closest order (longer means smaller pt size if fixed width) and then they were placed on a map. The ratio was used to find out point size and then this was cut into the vinyl rolls. When cutting, the highest banners were doubled up with the shortest into vertical pairs to minimise on vinyl. The text was reversed out - white against black - because due to an optical effect this *should* make them easier to read.

This Project has a Flickr Set.

The gigapan has been featured this week on Wired and The Guardian.

Oscilloscope

2009-11-09T00:40:00.001Z

A Gould Advance OS 3300A oscilloscope.

Does it work? No. No it doesn't. Why would a physicist give me an expensive, fully functioning piece of lab equipment?

Lego

2009-11-05T21:49:00.004Z

One of the red-tops has been giving away Lego over the last week or so. After a cost-benefit analysis Stu and I decided it was worth the slight moral and environmental compromise and bought nearly every issue. I mixed the acquisitions with my small but growing collection (my little brother has all my old Lego now) and obviously had a couple of building sessions.

V&A Workshop

2009-10-26T21:33:00.005Z

We ran a little workshop at the V&A on Sunday with the V&A's youth forum CreateVoice. The focus was on branding, and we had just enough time for a discussion on the CreateVoice brand, a contextual look at what we think is interesting in contemporary brand-culture, a primer tutorial on CS4 and a bit of an explanation of our background and how we got into design. This was the first workshop that we've facilitated, but we've been asked to come back for a second session on the 21st of November which is available to forum members (membership is free and available to anyone aged 16-21).

Instead

2009-10-19T01:46:00.002+01:00

I found this little fella in a pile of 2p's in the corner of my room a few days ago.

It's from one of those fridge-magnet-poetry sets. I used to keep him in my wallet. If I owed someone money I would fish around for a bit, then explain apologetically "I haven't got the right change, can I give you this 'instead'?" They would laugh (the first time) and forget for the time being. I had to retire the diversionary gag in the end because - as you can see - the thing got covered in wallet-crud.

Periodic Desktop of the Elements

2009-10-05T10:00:00.016+01:00

The Periodic Desktop is a back-burner project I've had on the go for a while, and it's evolved a fair bit as I've lived with it - grouping, positioning and coding my most frequently used programs in various ways.

I use my desktop PC* as a work-station and an entertainment centre, occasionally the latter when it should be the former. I've borrowed the metal/non-metal parameters from Mendeleyev's Periodic Table and tried to use the asymmetric distribution to create a digital space that encourages work over play.

I've also setup direct links to my most frequented sites and favourite blogs (Dezeen, BoingBoing, It's Nice That et al) in place of the Lanthanide and Actinide series.

Unfortunately the above .jpeg will only work properly on a Vista 1680 x 1050 px display, but if anyone expresses an interest I may adapt it for other resolutions or operating systems.

Below is a screenshot of the wallpaper in use. I've created a template for making quick custom icons in Photoshop based upon the Periodic Table 2-3 character standard (this required a "save as...">"_.ico" extension plug-in):

* Yes, that's right, I'm a designer and I use a PC.

We Have Moved

2009-09-29T15:14:00.004+01:00

We have moved offices with Unity and Chalk down the road to 5-13 Hatton Wall. It's a fantastically large, open plan operation. There has been some excited talk of an office-warming party. Stuart and I now have our own decently sized dedicated studio space which will really help us increase the scope of our projects.

Goodbye LDF09

2009-09-28T20:49:00.005+01:00

All done! This year's LDF had some great highlights (RCA at Designers Block, Tent Digital and The White Building @ The Dock). The word is that it was a better realised "festival" than the previous six, which is good news for Design in London.

For our part, The Incidental went well I thought, and though it was hard work we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

#incidental at London Design Festival

2009-09-18T22:28:00.012+01:00

We've just finished installing the space for the British Council and their publication The Incidental in time for the London Design Festival, which starts Saturday 18th. We're also going to be working in the space over the week until the 27th. The Incidental, if you don't already know, is "a community-generated website and news pamphlet created by and for the design community which offers opinion, reviews, news and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about."

We'll be running a similar operation to our space in Milan earlier in the summer (where we originally met The Incidental folks), helping facilitate dialogues in a temporary studio/workshop - though this time we'll be experimenting with a bit of technology to create a greater online-physical crossover.

If you're in London this week, come down to the space, say hello, have a cup of tea with us and join in. If you can't make it, follow the conversation on twitter, or check out my personal and the official flickr uploads, and of course, The Incidental website is the hub of it all - http://www.theincidental.org/

Pizza Express - Never Ending Song

2009-09-09T22:18:00.013+01:00

Stuart and I recently finished our work on Unity's latest campaign. The client are Pizza Express and the campaign is called The NeverEndingSong. Currently a "NeverEndingSongBus" is carrying jazz musicians from venue to venue across the country as they perform an uninterupted, twenty-four-seven-non-stop-music-marathon. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of the public to contemporary jazz and also Pizza Express' close relationship with the genre.

We helped Unity put the concept together, and also delivered some graphics for it, negotiating with brand stakeholders and such.

Below is the van. Actually, it's one of two. I'll update the photo with one in-situ if I can (ha, unfortunately for me, I'm not in-situ, you see)

Home-made Babybel

2009-09-08T21:42:00.004+01:00

Olly is doing something very interesting and experimental with hot, red wax. But when his back was turned I had a little play.

I've destroyed the ambience at dinner-parties and fancy gastropubs before by dicking about with hot wax on my fingers. It's great fun! Ow it's hot! Now it's numb! Other finger. Tap the table. Tap them together. Tap tap tap. Tee hee hee. Pulling the wax from under the finger nails. Looking at the empty little fingerprint negatives. Rolling the wax together into a little ball. Forcing it back into the flame so little black tectonics of carbon start to slake off. Maybe cut little grooves into the side so the wax pours out...I had a waiter in Greenwich confiscate one of those great big black candles from me about two years ago for doing that.

Anyway, this time I had ago at making my own mini wheel of cheese. Pics.

Black Box

2009-08-20T13:46:00.002+01:00

This arrived in the post this morning. It's one of those black boxes I've been hearing a lot about. This will be very convenient for any critically-led projects where I lack the technological rudiments. Yay!

Tea Is For Trouble

2009-08-13T19:50:00.019+01:00

Today we launched http://www.teamergency.com/, as part of a social-media campaign we've been working on with PR company Unity for Direct Line.

The site explores the British relationship with tea, specifically in a crisis. It includes a research paper conducted with City University and a dynamic map of tea-related tweets tying into a competition to win a bespoke tea blended especially by master tea-blender, Alex Probyn.

Like Skindividual, this has been another brilliant job to work on - bringing so many design disciplines together (brand, print, digital, product, illustration, interaction etc.) into a holistic outcome has made this kind of project you hope to get over and over. An excellent team effort all round, but must give a special mention to our developer Jono Brain for getting knee-deep into the Google Map and Twitter APIs to pull this out of the bag, and for being a thoroughly helpful guy.

The Tea:

The Tea_robot:

Interactive Kebab Furniture

2009-08-06T23:55:00.012+01:00

This is great. At Lion's Fried Chicken, Brockley (an otherwise innocuous kebab house) is a table. With complete honesty and sincerity, it is one of my favourite tables of the year.

The interesting thing is, I'm quite certian it's a freakish and accidental one-off - an inadvertant piece of design interaction. There are about 4 or 5 cheap metal tables with grey-pink, laminated tops. But something has gone wrong with one of them. Somehow, the seal on the laminate has been breached or permeated and underneath are trapped 3 discrete 'substances'.

The first are air bubbles, which looks like white, amoebic blobs. The second is yellow and oil based. I wouldn't like to guess what this is, but we are, afterall, in a kebab shop. The third is the water-based pink colouring that gave the table it's original, unexeptional appearance - except now the oil has forced the ink down into the edges. This concentrated liquid is now a garish hot-pink colour. The overall result is a responsive panel of colour and form that can be manipulated with a firmly-applied thumb or fist, but will then ultimately leech back into its original state.

It's great fun after a few jars and a quarter-pounder.

V&A Crypt Consolidation Project

2009-07-26T02:19:00.019+01:00

At the beginning of this year I took a part-time job working in the underground crypts of the National Art Library at the V&A. Whilst organising the books we came across some real gems. I've uploaded a Flickr Photoset of my favourites. I'd strongly recommend anyone to use the place as a resource if they haven't already, it's an amazing institution.

click here for the rest...

Ants!

2009-07-14T13:35:00.007+01:00

Housemate Olly uncovered an ant's nest in our garden. Larvae everywhere. Managed to take a few pictures before the workers could carry them away. Which was pretty quickly.

Defrost

2009-06-25T20:09:00.004+01:00

It’s quite important when designing an icon – an essential class of visual communication – to produce something that is easily and instantly comprehendible. It is necessary to understand and refer to an existing canon of typologies, signs and symbols – acknowledging time is a factor and exploiting a mental shorthand to deliver the message. To achieve this one might draw comparisons or visual simile.

So….presumably when Tesco were designing graphics for their chocolate gateaux, they thought the best way of conveying the message “it is necessary for you to remove this product from the freezer well in advance of eating” was by drawing an analogy between the mildly souring experience of eating a cake not entirely unthawed, and the global crisis of irreversible and disastrous climate change. Good work! I hope they went home early after that brainstorm. Of course, now it makes perfect sense to choose one of the most heart-rending (and overused) images of global warming: a doomed polar bear stranded on a dislodged chunk of it’s dwindling habitat.

At least the bear is smiling. Maybe it’s subliminal. Supermarkets are supposed to be malevolent and unstoppable forces for evil aren’t they? Like Zorg Industries? Perhaps they want us to think of cheap consumer products every time we see a natural disaster on the television. They could use a picture of a wrecked tanker to sell treacle: “directions for use: pour over pancakes in much the same way that this corrosive petrochemical has caked over this turtle breeding ground” or try “4 blade razors – decimate your own Brazilian rainforest”.

If I was ‘in charge’ I would adopt this hilarious symbol below to instruct purchasers to “pre-heat oven to 200 degrees”. Underneath I’d write “(That’s about as hot as a child’s arm on fire)*”:

[*- sorry, that's an outright lie. In an oxygen-rich environment a child's arm would most likely burn at around 1200 - 1500˚C .]

Gun Face

2009-06-25T14:24:00.002+01:00

Skindividual

2009-06-23T23:08:00.006+01:00

Working with Hellounity, on behalf of the Skin Cancer UK: SunSmart campaign, we* recently finished designing the website for Skindividual.co.uk. It was a brilliant project to work on!

Skindividual promises to reward whoever can invite the most friends to join their guestlist the opportunity for them and their entire social network to win a private gig, starring Ladhawke, the Bombay Bicycle Club and The New York Pony Club.

* - Stuart Bannocks & I.

*UPDATE* - The gig was brilliant!

“People called Romanes, they go the house”?

2009-05-31T16:56:00.001+01:00

This graffiti has cropped up in the village where I grew up – Southwell in Nottinghamshire. My old school was demolished for a controversial housing project, but an old Roman villa was found underneath so the build has been suspended. A lot of the town is quite impressed to have latin speaking rebels, but I think it’s more likely they’ve seen The Life Of Brian. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8 )

Lego Jolly Roger

2009-05-29T14:54:00.001+01:00

Milan 2009

2009-05-05T17:58:00.009+01:00

Back from Milan 2009, where we exhibited the Goldsmiths' design process at the Salone Satellite: building the space from found materials, then organising events and tools to encourage discourse, debate and creative interaction.

Had a fantastic time. We kept a record of our exploits whilst we were out there, as well as a flickr and twitter feed.

Carboard Armour, Picadilly Circus

2009-04-05T18:10:00.003+01:00

Building the Risk Facilitator: Flickr Photoset

2009-04-05T15:37:00.004+01:00

[edit: April Fool] (Bloody Typical) Another Damning Example of “Broken Britain”

2009-04-01T21:05:00.004+01:00

** This was an April-Fool post; I'm not really a miserable, ranting misanthrope **

This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. I hate to use the phrase “political correctness gone mad” but I think this really is a legitimate case.

In line with the redevelopment for the 2012 Olympic Games, TFL have just unveiled plans “to rebrand what is currently the Metropolitan line as the Neopolitan line… a term synonymous with European culture and grandeur"(http://www.tfl.gov.uk/neopolitan_line_announced.htm). WTF?? As if it wasn’t a big enough hassle getting into work with the amount of work going on, and a massive drain on resources getting ready for the olympics, we’re going to have to endure months of delays for pointless “re-generation” – decorating stations in “tasteful chocolate hues”! and why? To give the bureaucrats in Brussels a sense of smug self-satisfaction? Fucking waste of time if you ask me.

Launch Arcology (Sim City 2000)

2009-03-25T14:58:00.002Z

Are Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington the 2009 Red Noses? No, no they are not.

2009-03-12T18:27:00.001Z

I would be very suprised if nobody else has noticed the uncanny resemblence this years Comic Relief noses have with the worlds best selling podcast trio: Gervais et al. And yet, as far as publicity so far has shown, they’re not supposed to be them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCpZqVHxHx0). Perhaps some kind of deal broke down at the last moment?

Pixel MP5

2009-03-06T23:43:00.001Z

I would probably agree that Pixel-Art has had it's day, but there is something very theraputic about blocking in all those colours with the pencil tool.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Chaka Khan

2009-02-11T21:27:00.005Z

I could try and justify this as an experiment in video editing but it's really just a bit of mindless fun. This is a mash-up between Chaka Khan's I Feel For You and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Snowman

2009-02-03T05:09:00.001Z

Silly Snowman, If we let you in then you'd melt!

Fifteen Second Film Competition

2009-02-01T19:06:00.001Z

My entry for the an as-yet-unnamed film-making competition with Stuart Bannocks and Kasper Pincis . The two requirements were that the film be 1) themed around the word "Obtuse", 2) No longer than 15 seconds.

La Braderie De L'Art

2008-12-19T21:14:00.004Z

Stuart, Oli and I were invited to attend Le Braderie De L'Art (as were our good friends Oi Studio & WeMake), a 24-hour straight design-and-make festival in Lille, in the Nord-Pas de Calais region of France.

We systematically disassembled and re-represented found objects. This performance-process was designed to aid the viewer in changing their perceptions towards common, day-to-day "magic-box" electronic and mechanical objects.

Deconstructing, recording and re-organising the components of an archaic Nintendo Entertainment System:

We also stamped several hundred on-demand badge-postcard objects for visitors to the Braderie, using damaged and abandoned books.

Bat Out Of Helvetica

2008-12-11T23:37:00.002Z

Nowhere/Now/Here

2008-11-10T20:43:00.007Z

My Experience Value work will soon be on show as part of the cinema program at the Nowhere/Now/Here exhibition, curated by El Ultimo Grito and hosted by The LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain .

The concepts that lie behind the piece - my exploration into the value found by taking risks and generating exposures - can also be found here (re-formatted for web).