Earlier this week I was at Screens, a Toronto conference by FITC billed as “one of the only events in the world designed for developers of all platforms of screen content.”. I followed my usual conference technique of seeking out the off beat and out of the ordinary. That approach led me to the audience of a Ben Fry presentation at an FITC conference in 2007. That was my first exposure to Processing coding and the surrounding community of people doing creative things with tech which sent me off on my current trajectory.

Screens provided several great sessions in the hard to define creative tech vein that excites me. Greg Hermanovic and Markus Heckmann of Derivative gave a presentation on projection mapping flavoured work built with their incredible Touch Designer tool building tool.

Touch Designer is beyond my capabilities to clearly describe. But you can see it in action in some great projects to get a sense. Dev Harlan creates sculptural objects and augments them with mesmerising layers of light and shape.

Alva Noto used Touch Designer to create great visuals as part of his live show, Unitxt, where the interface used to control the visuals and the projected visuals themselves are the same thing.

Another fun presentation was from Peter Nitsch of Teehan+Lax on the first 6 months of their +labs project to explore and frame the “physical internet” within the lab. The labs have a three person team mandated to do pure exploration (no client work). The goal is to help the agency staff and clients understand what’s possible in the exciting world of proliferating modular and powerful technologies.

+labs are doing some cool things with RFID, NFC and AR and many other technological acronyms searching for the creative applications they deserve.

These presentations and a few other signals boosted sense of optimism I’ve been nurturing for a while. It’s about something happening in an unnamed and ill-defined endeavour to use technology in human-focused, physical and creative ways to do things we don’t yet understand. Or from a more cynical angle, quoting the agency Trapeze, “”digital”, for the foreseeable future, will be stuck between the nobility of innovation and the banality of advertising”. I’m hoping for a reasonable ratio of nobility to banality.

If you liked this you might also like:

• My post-eyeo festival optimism on creative technology.
• A more detailed look at the opportunities of weapons-grade tech we can re-purpose for good and fun.
• The guest posts I did for FITC that go into much more detail the sessions of Peter Nitsch, Derivative and others.

The Peripherals Initiative was a Toronto experiment to see what happens when you put together indie game creators and hardware hackers and give them a parts budget, organisational support and a brief to create something new that mixes video gaming and hardware hacking in an interesting way.

I teamed up with Alexander Martin (AKA Droqen), a great local indie game creator. Right from the start (just a couple of months ago) we were fixated on doing something fun using an analog control panel with buttons and knobs and jacks that click and clack in a satisfyingly non-touchscreen kind of way.

What we built was new take on a Space Invaders style game where you control a little ship on its mission to blast through waves of hideous alien baddies. All of the player’s control is through a custom console with screens, switches, patch cables and knobs. There are lots more photos over here.

As with any genuinely new project we had to blast through waves of baddies of our own (“how the hell can we make this work?”, “why did I ever agree give up sanity and sleep for this?”, “which one of the 700 models of rotary switch in this catalogue do we need?). The results more than paid for those stresses though. We are really pleased with what we created and, most importantly, people who played Analog Defender seemed to enjoy and appreciate it.

So, from our point of view, the experiment’s results were positive. We ended up with a cool thing that we created and people enjoy (and that’s pretty much my reason for doing this stuff). On top of the immediate tangible result of the things that were built I expect the new connections between the Toronto game and hardware hacker communities will spin in interesting directions in the future.

Today I came across the (provocatively named) group Technology Will Save Us. They’re launching a physical space in East London designed to allow people to connect to technology as something they can be designed and shaped by ordinary people. In their own words:

Bethany says: ‘I believe technology plays a huge role in all of our lives and we know so little about how to fix it, how to make things with it and how to be more creative with it’. Daniel further explains, ‘We see a more creative world where people can get the skills and support to be more resourceful with technology and begin to solve their own problems and invent new uses – become producers not just consumers of technology’.

This is an idea I’m super-excited about. Much of my professional life is made possible because of an incredible upheaval in technology. This upheaval has seen really powerful technologies becoming accessible to hobbyists and enthusiasts where they used to be exclusively the domain of boffins with huge budgets. Think of laser cutting, microcontrollers, 3D printing, mobile computing, wearable electronics… The list continues on and on and on and we’re only seeing the first steps in experimentation what becomes possible in this world.

On the same theme I’m reminded of a great Ignite presentation by Mark Argo from Aesthetec in Toronto. He talks about the possibility for a near future world where you can visit a local craftsperson who customises gadgets to you personal, one-off requirements. I highly recommend the video, it’s just 6 minutes long and a fun watch.

There’s a fascinating thread here, of taking the newly affordable and accessible technology and placing it in a storefront  where all kinds of people can approach and understand the exciting stuff that’s possible. Turning the tech that’s now the domain of nerds into a solution for real people’s needs. This reminds me also of the great 826 Valencia in San Francisco where a pirate supply store (no kidding) fronts an exciting (and free) creative literacy tutoring space for kids.

So, if anyone’s got a storefront open in Toronto and wondering what to do with it…

Back at the end of June I went to the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis. It was brilliant! I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of cohesive description of my experience. No luck so far but I can’t let another month roll without at least noting the experience.

The festival featured an almost overwhelming line-up of people who I admire for doing very cool stuff. They mostly fell into two rough categories of data viz folks and (much tougher to describe) art/installation/physical computing/robotics/interactive spaces people.

The speakers were great but it was the crowd that made the event for me (there was really no distinction between speakers and crowd which was great). The space was peopled with ~400 people who really love this stuff (whatever this stuff is exactly) and were excited to talk about it. I struck up great conversations with wind data scientists, geneticists, hospital IT guys, artists, ad agency people and I’m not really the striking up conversation type. It was so easy at Eyeo though because almost without exception everyone there really wanted to be there.

That’s it really. I was there and it was great. It really helped re-excite me about the future of the kind of stuff Media Lab Toronto is experimenting with and was just a whole lot of fun.

Some random notes over here.

Here’s another summary of a session I liveblogged at this year’s FITC, Ubicomp Done Small, Cheap, Simple by Joshua Noble who’s currently studying at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark.

Joshua introduced his talk by saying that “Building interactive spaces and devices that communicate with spaces is not really all that difficult.” and explained his interest in this area came from having lived in many different places with the realisations that “many of us aren’t too connected to our streets and buildings and I’m curious what we as technologists can make these things more meaningful and real”. Keep reading →

I was lucky enough to be invited to the FITC conference here in Toronto as a live blogger. Something I quickly learned about live blogging is that you don’t actually get much chance to absorb what’s going on as you’re too busy trying to capture it. So I thought I’d try digesting some of the what I heard and making more thoughtful posts out of it. Here’s the first:

Narratives in New Spaces described as “a panel that will explore how technology is acting as a catalyst to richer, immersive stories in both art and commercial spaces.” The panel was moderated by Dave Girolami and featured Steve Di Lorenzo, Tali Krakowsky and Theo Watson – all of whom work on some very cool interactive/immersive stuff. Keep reading →

This is a super-rough hardware sketch of what a mechanical Twitter feed might look like. I’ve been playing with ideas around combining digital projection with mechanical motion and this is a prototype to test some of the ideas. Keep reading →

As part of my exploration of what it means to be a Creative Technologist I’ll be looking at examples that I consider great products of Creative Technology.

I came across a new mobile app, MyVoice, today (via Siobhan O’Flynn). The app is designed to help people with health problems that impede verbal communication to ‘speak’ more easily.

One group this is aimed at is stroke victims who have reduced command of speech. A use that particularly struck me as my Great Aunt Peg, one of the kindest and sharpest people I’ve known, suffered a stroke which hit her speech hard. She was still as sharp and funny as ever after her stroke but for her to speak her thoughts was a huge struggle. Keep reading →

More and more I’m recognising a tension in the type of work I do. The tension is between the interactive, physical, spatial work I think is ‘best’ and the work that’s commercially supportable (often by the advertising and marketing industries). Sometimes the two coincide, with the best work being commercial work too, but often they don’t. Why?

For me the best tangible interactive work is centred on the person experiencing it (I’ll use the term user despite its problems). The best work creates a strong, direct connection with the user. Maybe the work allows the user to create something interesting or express themselves or simply to have an novel and enjoyable experience. Keep reading →

For years I’ve struggled when trying to describe what exactly it is that I do. My work with Media Lab Toronto over the past five or so years pulls from many areas. I write computer code but I’m not a coder. I connect to online media but I’m (thankfully) not a social media guru. I draw from the world of art but I’m not an artist. I use electronics and mechanics but I’m not an engineer. So what exactly am I?

It seems that Creative Technologist may be the best yet description of what I do. Mark Avnet puts it this way:

Creative Technologists understand the business of advertising, marketing, and branding, take a creative, strategic and people-centric view of how to connect people and brands, and understand the kinds of mediating technologies that can best be used to make those engaging experiences where the connection happens.

In the last year or two the Creative Technologist role seems to be gaining currency particularly in the advertising world with its drive to convey messages in new and novel ways. Keep reading →