Thursday, 19 August 2010
Sunday, 4 July 2010
Online Creative Communities: Lego
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.
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.
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Incidental
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).
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Advent Calendar
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
Monday, 16 November 2009
Stephen King Gigapan @ St. Pauls
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)
Monday, 9 November 2009
Oscilloscope
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?
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Lego
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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.
Monday, 26 October 2009
V&A Workshop
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).
Monday, 19 October 2009
Instead
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.
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