We’ve had the camera dolly for a while now and it’s been really useful in film work, helping to achieve interesting cinematic results. We wanted to add a motor for longer time-lapse panning shots and eliminate any undesirable vibration. This was a good opportunity for us to tinker with motors, as well as explore the ferric chloride etching process for making circuit boards. The first test is below. Driving setup We took a 21.2W 156:1 geared DC motor which we’ve had on our shelf for a while and added a T5 timing pulley and belt combination. One of our aims (more)

More pictures here El Ultimo Grito’s workshop programme Pilots is an undertaking at the Stanley Pickering Gallery that explores new forms of design education. The imperative for this discussion is the changing role of education in an open-data society. If you can learn anything on youtube, what is the role of the educator? Though it’s harder to learn a critical practice with embedded social and system thinking on youtube, it is unclear how long this will remain true. Identifying what institutions and educators roles are now and in the future is key to retaining the viability of a formal education. (more)

Last Wednesday evening our EEG controlled mini helicopter became airborne. It’s a lot of fun, though it takes time to master the techniques of concentration and meditation for precise control. EEG Electroencephalography (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp. EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain.

At Boring conference this year, Roo Reynolds spoke about collecting things. Among the cabinet of curiosities one project particularly stood out, Peter Fletcher’s Sneeze Diary, ostensibly a record of every time he sneezes, but it is more than that, as he explains.

Recently we've talked a lot about how memory and place relate, in part following on from our thoughts on Memory, identity and the network. The discussion also formed a starting point for our Playable City submission. We have been exploring ways to let people create a new history of the city, to record and share the stories they have lived and are living. One inspiration was Austerlitz, Seabald's excellent novel where the titular protagonist unravels his forgotten past through travel.

We are excited to announce that our project Hello Lamp Post! has been selected for the Playable City Award. It’s a real surprise, we still can’t quite believe it. When we saw the quality of the shortlist, with work from so many names that we respect, we never imagined being chosen. We’re thrilled and can’t wait to get working. Big thanks to Tom and Gyorgyi for their work too. We’re also really grateful to the judges for their comments, some of which are below. Imogen Heap said: ‘I love this for its whispers on the street, guardians in dark corners, (more)

A while back I mentioned our theory-in-progress: that there are two kinds of design intervention that can improve the human experience. The first are designed ‘events’: finite moments in time, with their own contexts, during which things happen. Lots of people work in producing consumable experiential events, even if they don’t necessarily view them this way - certainly performers, game makers and interaction designers do; but also musicians, film-makers, artists, restaurateurs, etc. etc. The other intervention type, however, is a little bit trickier and much less common. These are transformations, or augmentations – finding constant, passive, sustainable ways of being. How do you squeeze more life out (more)

We’ve been looking at memory – specifically episodic memory - and it’s relationship with experience for a few months now. We’ve spoken with neuroscientists on the science of memory, and Ben has been working on several interventions around the subject. Earlier in the year I first proposed our so-called “Anti-Camera”, or “Scent-camera”. More recently we have come to call it The Proustian Camera (which seems to summarise our intentions most neatly). Ultimately, we hope to develop a device that provides an alternative to conventional cameras, by letting people ‘tag’ events and occasions with a scent, which they can later recreate to aid memory.   (more)

We’re very excited to announce we’ve been shortlisted for the Playable City Award 2013. The Playable City Award offers artists and creatives from across the world a unique opportunity to make something wonderful using creative technologies.

This year our advent calendar is called The Santa Scores. As the description says, it is the only advent-calendar tv-listings site that picks a film from that day, and then rates it for Christmasiness, against other films that are also on, but on different days.