I nearly hit irregular, I’m a day after my usual posting. But this is weeknote 005. I have a quasi-rule in my head that after 6pm Monday, I’ve missed it. So we still regular folks.
Earth Percent/Sing Wild Seeds Project
TL:DR Stuart Candy wrote about the early project here.
I finished the edit of footage from the project. It took way longer than I anticipated. I spent one evening until 10pm, super locked in. Now for the grade, but I’ve asked a friend (for a wee fee) to do that for me so I can prioritise my time.
Something I realised is that after sitting watching and re-watching and re-watching footage from our experiments in public is how much more I learned through this as opposed to just recalling my memories. When I ran Snook, early days we used to do lots of filming and audio recording of our research (where appropriate) and then analyse for insights to inform our designs. I feel like this more deep ethnographic leaning practice has evaporated quite a bit from more recent user research practice I’ve witnessed. (Enter stage right A/B test, would you buy our product, 97% of the 7 people we tested with said yes. I digress)
I’ve mulled over how I was directly taught and my early education was moulded by a social scientist with ethnographic / anthropological readings on the regular offer.
Going back through the footage I observed so many behaviours and insightful learnings for a future stage of productising the experiments of this project into something I had missed in my write up. Lesson learned there for really embedding time to fawn over research captures.
Narrative Consulting
I caught up with the client this week, I’m supporting someone with a bit of narrative framing on their wrap up communications from their project prototyping services in the public sector. It was nice to join dots and figure out we have a similar approach to working. I’m bringing back my ‘What if…’ cards as I recognised a key part that is needed is to get people in the workshop I’m running this week to think differently about how to communicate learnings from the work.
It’s funny that old commoditized term design thinking. To be honest, I just studied design, I was never that bothered about naming different practices/approaches but as I got older and more experienced teaching people what a ‘design-led’ approach might entail I recognised, it was rather different to the waterfall, PRINCE II ™, let’s get lean and GANT our way through the future approach.
I always interpreted it as using form to think through ideas, prod them, speculate on them, even if the final ‘thing’ didn’t have a physical form per say and was more of a direction. By bringing form to a concept, idea, strategic intent, we make in order to interrogate ideas. Form making brings us a language beyond words. This is really similar to how we should be doing speculative design rather than just AI prompts (more on that in what I read this week).
Making and bringing form to ideas to interrogate and speculate. That’s my jam.
With all that brief mulling in mind, I reworked the cards I made for a futures group session at Loch Lomond into a Good Service branded pack and added a few more prompts. Some are really form based, more are, hmm, let’s think about this from a different direction. Pleased with how they turned out. So thus, we shall ‘design think’, or something like that.
Good Services
Got the newsletter out and all the 2025 courses. That took LONGER than we thought and positive nods go to Lou for setting up all the courses for booking.
Rebooked our podcast, felt good looking after ourselves. Scheduled rough outline for several trips to U.S/Canada, Tokyo and maybes Australia in first quarter of 2025.
Booked a 2 week pre-xmas design sprint. We’re reviewing and refreshing the courses and migrating away from Eventbrite booking. It’s clunky, fees all over the place but you know a real lesson in let’s keep using it before jumping ship to a new platform so we can get our courses out.
Film
We smashed another application. Well Reece my producer did for Don’t Say Gay but it took me longer than I thought to re-write a 4000 character synopsis into 2000 and make it more personal.
Graded some old footage for new promo stills whilst we still make the film.
Fingers crossed.
Renovations
Smashed some lime wash painting in some rooms. Preparing for month of painting hell, where a crack squad is coming to do the bits we just don’t have time to do. This involved the hidden labour of decorating and renovating which is moving boxes and stuff from one room to another.
Listened
Mum does the washing, Joshua Idehen (fun)
LLYN PERIS, Biblio (Tranquil bliss)
Diminuendo, Daniel Avery (Kind of track that would of been on the b-side to Trainspotting 2 or something)
Read
I suppose it’s a gift but it’s not a good one – Tobias Revell posted a great blogpost. Now I’ve been secretly following the high and lows of a guy just trying to get blender to export some animations. Possible popcorn enough (tl:dr, he rendered) but I really enjoyed his blog on the process. In particular this;
"I know that generative AI image-making has become a popular speculative design tool but I’m pretty sure it’s not actual design. When you put in a prompt to for ‘a future retrofit commercial office where people are living in apartments and spending their days trading in high finance derivatives around a massive table’ you’re not actually designing anything. I suppose you’re actually asking the machine to elicit your own head-cannon from a cultural median for you. Sure that thing has probably never existed before but you’re not really making anything, just skewing a graph."
I really need to write something about this whole large tech sector at some point, have notes, should write
Nature Data Sharing Initiative
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? – Nic Mulvaney on LLMs and search. Most interested in the thinking of new business models for new technologies.
Watched
Ibelin: Enjoyed this sort of multi-format approach set in a virtual RPG. The love of the gaming community really touched me for Ibelin, aka Mats Steen
Far too many videos on Polyend tracker + and Zoom H6 but readers, I purchased some central hubs for my music setup
Moved
Readers we have a problem.
I have not moved again but I went to a physio.
I need to go and get an XRAY, so pretty frustrated everything stopped in it’s tracks. I had hit running again with gusto but the left foot is not at all happy. Need to check for stress fracture.
