Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.

Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

Via Spime

Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?

What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?

An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.

Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.

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This then starts to make you think about what you could design either from a functional or aesthetic point of view.

Then from a personal point of view – what artifacts and objects do I have that I would never want to lose. Could I make a copy of an object – in essence save it’s memory. If you copied a family heirloom – a vase for example. Does this still pass on the memories associated with that object.

Could that object even be alive?

How I arrived at this point was when I saw the following image via the shapeways blog. It is an artistic exercise by a dutch design studio wieke somers to look at how products can be made with human ash.

If we put aside the notion of rapid protyping with human ash and use conventional materials – Can we copy objects and use it ‘ash or even ‘stone” as a texture to recreate that object.

Could handheld scanning be so cheap that you can scan anything?

Handheld scanning could soon be so mainstream that you could scan your cute puppy.

Image via flickr

And immortalise it forever…

Image via flickr

Is there a business model there? Unethical? Nonsensical? One people would use?

What if you could send the ‘data’ of your objects to someone as a gift and they take this into a the 3D printing equivalent of snappy snaps – 1hr later they have an object.

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Assemble your A-Team

I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.

We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.

I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.

1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.

Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.

So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.

The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.

Friendfeed is your friend

Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).

Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.

Collaboration – Living the idea

We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.

Sketches

The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.

This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.

The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.

Magnets

Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.

This led to another study in field lines.

Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.

This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.

So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.

Set the goalposts

The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.

So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…

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What struck me though was just how the ad resembled a certain italian plumbers adventures in the utterly brilliant ‘Super Mario Galaxy’. Probably a total coincidence but it was quite interesting to think there was some influence there. Check the pics.

Flickr Pool

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If you check out the official Monty Python youtube channel they reference this story in such a lovely way. It is witty and irreverant and the another example of a brand just letting go of copyright and reaping the financial benefits. They’ve nicely tagged up the videos to display links to amazon to buy the DVD thus earning an extra affiliate brucey bonus in the process – Very very simple and such an easy way to monetise their content.

As a treat – Here is a great moment.

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Happy 2008! Listen I haven’t posted in months because I’m renovating my lovely house and I’m knee deep in rubble.

More news soon.

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John Barry? Yes please.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI7PwpuurBI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0pQijRbW3Y

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