aspire to enquire

Place Hunter

I love looking through the visual diary of Yvan Rodic, of Face Hunter fame. Aside from featuring snapshots of the beautiful people he meets around the world, he captures moments, objects and places in thoughtful and often quite poignant ways.

Photo-by-Ivan-Rodic
Photo by Ivan Rodic from London, February 19th, 2010

Every day I cycle past the Airline Passenger's Commission, or what ever it's called, but I never really stop to appreciate the side façade on Kemble Street. Architecturally, it seems to suggest American airstream, Swiss modernism and 1970s sci-fi all at the same time, whilst also being an intriguing sculptural shape.

Often I'm too busy looking at the Richard Wilson sculpture 'Square the Block' on the other side of Kingsway, but it's a reminder to always take time to stop, look around and re-evaluate the everyday. It can be amazing.

I first heard of FaceHunter when I was interning at i-D in 2007, we were running a feature on fashion bloggers. He seemed nice in emails, you should check out the visual diary. There's a book out now, too.

Posted in Architecture, Interesting finds, Respect, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)

a living model city

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

I love this video. It takes my love of Sim City and Transport Tycoon, adds in a real life New York City, stop-motion photography, and mixes it all in the always fascinating tilt-shift camera technique. Awesome.

Posted in Interesting finds, Lyddle End 2050 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sleeveface for buildings

I've been loving life in Brixton since September, with the exception of a vast, fenced-off open building site that's blighted my road-crossing the whole time. Windrush Square finally 'opened' this weekend and I popped along to see what was happening.

I met the Brixton Society, a local archival and activist charity who document the area's past and keep an eye on current developments. Having spotted a little thing on SwissMiss the other day, and catching something over someone's shoulder on the Metro last week, I couldn't resist picking up some of the old photographs that the Society have republished, and having a go at a bit of 'then and now' style action myself. For a first timer, the results aren't too bad:

The Ritzy Cinema then and now

I even managed to get the grey sky tones to match! ;)

Atlantic Avenue

This one's not so good - think I may have needed to be in the middle of the road.

I think it's a really good way to connect with your area - we're mostly used to seeing these kind of pictures in books or on walls, but when we take them out into the community and almost look through a window like this, it's powerful.

Also, while I was taking the Ritzy one, I had a nice chat with a passer by about the pictures and the idea. Community smile points all round.

Posted in Architecture, Interesting finds | Permalink | Comments (0)

An event you should come to

Oh. Me and Alison have gone and got involved in organising another big event.

It's a fundraiser for a farm near Bath, called Jamie's Farm (no relation). You should have a look at the fantastic work they do with young people and then come to our event on March 19th; the Jamie's Farm Spring Fling

Posted in campaigning for good | Permalink | Comments (0)

Location on the internet

Big map pin - Aram Bartholl image by Aram Bartholl

Some people find it a little scary, but I'm quite into the way location is being used in a lot of new apps at the moment. I have my foursquare account, I track my cycling to work through runkeeper, I keep track of my travels through dopplr, and I can find a wifi spot in London using Free Wifi London.

A lot of these things are very successful because they play to the strengths of a mobile device - the immediacy, the spontaneity and the kind of content that their small screens are suited to. It's generally contextual information which helps you interact better with the real-life space around you, which lots of smart post-digital types talk about a lot.

We built some location-based functionality into MyMP, the MP iPhone app I worked on, to enable constituents to see what their MP had (or had not) been doing in their local area. In version 2, we'll probably be making a much bigger deal of this.

Can any of this location-based learning transfer back on to the traditional internet? Most websites access information that is relevant more broadly than to a user's specific location, but there must be a lot of cases where it would be quite cool to tailor the content more locally.

I'm not really talking about things like iGoogle and BBC homepages, which use your postcode to bring up local info. That's nice, but you have to ask the sites to do it.

What if you checked out a charity campaign site and the front page used your IP address in some way to bring up a list of local campaign events you could get involved with?

I think that would be quite cool.

Posted in campaigning for good, Ideas, Websites that should exist | Permalink | Comments (0)

Challenges ahead

Working on MyMP has been a really interesting experience for me. Not just because it's been a real opportunity to re-evaluate how MPs communicate with their constituents, but also in terms of my own development: It's a project that completely plays to my own interests of using design thinking to further develop communities, and it's been a chance to learn a lot about a medium that was completely new to me and many other people at PublicZone. Everyone's a winner.

But speaking to Members, and their staff, and people who work in Parliamentary communications, I still feel very aware of how new I am to everything. On one hand, I'm a bit embarrassed to be completely baffled when people tell me how 'we need to make sure people know the difference between parliament and government' or 'this kind of communication can't come from that budget', and I'm starting to understand all that stuff. Especially in the light of the ongoing expenses mess.

But in some ways, I don't want to lose my initial confusion. We were able to scope and architect MyMP off the back of the way we thought that the public would want to connect with their representatives, not the other way around. Once you start to think in that way, it becomes a lot simpler to do some quite interesting things with the kind of content you're displaying, and with the way you're displaying it. All it needs is a little trust on all sides that ultimately everyone's trying to do the same thing.

When we launched today in Parliament, I became more sure of that.

I just hope that we can capitalise on the great press we've been getting recently and make this a service that all MPs will be able to use.

Posted in campaigning for good, Design, Political ranting | Permalink | Comments (2)

Half

Just found out about Because Studio from Kate Andrews' Blog. Some really nice work on their website for a number of social causes, which is always good. I also particularly like this identity project for SewSew.

SewSew identity by Because Studio

What really caught my eye though, were some posters they've made. I've literally last week furnished my Brixton flat with the beautiful Here and There Project posters, Monocle's Perfect City Block, my Authority posters, and a rather lovely tube map that I think is from the early 50s. But if I had any more walls, I would definitely be getting these!

Optimism / Pessimism by Because Studio

Posted in Interesting finds, Respect | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Third and the Seventh

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Saw this video on my cousin Josh's blog. I can't pretend to know anything about computer animation, but it's a very beautiful film. I find myself appreciating the textures of objects because I know they've been generated artificially. It would be interesting to do that in a real-world setting.

The artist's description:

"A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal."

Posted in Interesting finds, Respect | Permalink | Comments (0)

Teenage Clicks

Picture of a girl with a Pentax camera by Nirrimi
picture by Nirrimi

I wrote a long-winded post the other day about what might have spurred the recent rise of young photographers. But reading the post again today, I realise that all I really wanted to do was share the awesome photographers I've come across recently, who happen to all be younger than photographers usually are when you see their work.

2 girls on a bed - photo by Olivia Bee
picture by Olivia Bee

picture by Eleanor Hardwick

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Designing mobile democracy

I've been meaning to write more about the iPhone app I've been working on whilst here at PublicZone.

Well, it went live a few weeks ago (http://tinyurl.com/mymp-app), and we're officially launching it in Parliament in just over a week, so I thought now would be a good time to talk through some of the thinking behind it. It's an app called MyMP, a way for constituents to contact and keep up-to-date with their MP whilst on-the-move.

Before we got to the visual design stage, we spent a lot of time profiling the different potential users of the app; what they would want to do, where they would be, and how they would make their way to and through the app.

It became obvious fairly early on, as it should with most mobile apps, that MyMP should not just be a representation of the MPs regular website in mini form. There were certain key things that we found lots of our profiles needing to do in common, which were all tied to being in a specific location or at a 'point of annoyance' i.e at the point where usually you'd humph "I'm going to write a letter". So version one of the app is mainly designed around that.

The home screen of MyMP configured for Derek Wyatt MP

You'll also notice the 'Discussions / Derek wants your view' section (Derek Wyatt MP has been working with us for this pilot version of the app) - this was partly a requirement of Derek's and also an ambition of ours to open up the weekly business of the House, by allowing MPs to post short summaries and comments of topical issues, and allow constituents to vote and add their own comments. Users can also chose to 'watch' certain discussions and put them at the top of their lists of discussions.

The 'Discussions' screen of MyMP app

The main complaint we're getting in the app store reviews we have, is that the app only currently works for one MP. But we've built in a clever little mechanism that works with the TheyWorkForYou postcode finder, to find someone's actual constituency MP, and serve up their email so that anyone in the UK can still use this app to contact their MP in the first instance.

We all felt this was really important, because although we hope that all MPs will be able to use the app in future, we knew that for the time being there would be a lot of people who didn't live in the Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency. We wanted them to at least get some use from the app.

The one minor mistake I feel we made in the planning stage was to underestimate the power of local mapping. MyMP was never going to be a political campaigning tool, it was always set up to be a "what are you doing / what are you going to do about X" tool, so local mapping makes perfect sense. For me, our 'In My Area' section is the greatest sucess of the app, and I hope we can develop it more in version 2.

The 'In My Area' section of the MyMP app
By the way, these are preview screen shots and there are some discrepancies between them and the finished version. I hope I found the visual balance I talked about in a previous post. The idea with the red bits, obviously, is that they'd change depending on the political background of the MP using the app.

You should download it yourself! The app store link is http://tinyurl.com/mymp-app

I'm really pleased to have worked on this project, it may actually be the first mobile application released by a sitting politician, which would be cool. The only challenge for us now is to make it sustainable and expandable - in the light of the expenses row and the subsequent (stupid!) withdrawal of members' communications allowances, it will be hard and inefficient to roll this out one MP at a time. I really hope we can find a solution that will allow the app to reach its full potential in future.

Find out more about the MyMP app for Derek Wyatt from the iTunes store

Posted in campaigning for good, Design, life update, Political ranting | Permalink | Comments (2)