13.2.20 Lièvre, Pluviôse, 228; Speculative design is still a thing and Warhammer is great.

What if Our World is Their Heaven?

I got around to pulling together the video from 'What if Our World is Their Heaven?' and uploaded it to Vimeo. I also stuck up some images and the text we used in the brief up on the Haunted Machines site. The whole workshop was based around the 'automated production and dissemination of images'; a phrase which, if you've spoken to me in the last month, you would have heard me use a lot. The talk here introduces some of the key ideas of the area and identifies some existing weak signals and indicators that could be used by the students to kick off their thinking.

Coming up

There's a quite a lot going on this month. Not least of which I'm doing a lot of actual teaching which is why this is a day late. I spent a while trying to pull together a Blender workshop for Eevee on Saturday but really couldn't find a way to make it do what I wanted it to do and do it in a way which was easily teachable. It's definitely really promising but at the moment there's just too many hoops to go through for an 'intro to Blender' class. 

Other than that is a bunch of speculative design stuff. I'm teaching MA Service Design students tomorrow with the old Critical Exploits and thanks to my old friend and colleague Radha Mistry have found myself on the jury for the Core 77 design awards for speculative design. The submission are open now until the end of March I think. It'll be interesting to see what people are playing with in the field. I suppose it's a field now.

On 28th February Natalie and I are presenting at Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision, an event put together by Joel McKim. Honestly I'm not 100% on what we're talking about yet but we've titled it 'What if Our World was Their Heaven?' again.

Channel recommendation – Warhammer and climate change

So I suppose the commonality about my viewing habits is I like watching people build things. Not in a Grand Designs way but in a really grounded craft-based way. The algorithm has pushed me recently into miniature painting which is very enjoyable to watch mostly for the remarkable amount of skill involved. Anyway, I came across Goobertown Hobbies and really like it. The guy has a good pace and voice in talking about what he's doing. However, about half way through he completely switches, turns out he's a biochemist and he wants to use his platform to engage people in talking about climate change. He talks in this one about becoming confident in who you are and what you believe – in his case that he likes Warhammer (which he was 'closeted' about for a long time) and is really concerned about the lack of public engagement with climate change. It's just a really lovely, non-aggressive, non-ranty way of calling for openness, honesty and meaningful conversation. Loved it. 

Ok. In the words of Mr Buckles: I love you. BYYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

19.6.19 Seigle, Mesidor, 227

There's too much on and I haven't had time to gather my thoughts. The exhibition for the design school at LCC opens this evening. It's the first time I haven't been directly involved and that makes me a bit sad. I'm an artist; I like to work with my hands and I get precious little opportunity to do so. It may well be for the best because the show looks incredible, it seems to get better every year so perhaps I should continue to withdraw from getting involved. I won't get to spend much time at the opening unfortunately. I've got a Big Thing first thing tomorrow morning that I've been preparing for all week (and still feel unprepared for) so I need a clear, sober head and a good night's sleep.

If you've been following me on the socials you might have noticed a lot more bicycle-related content. That's largely because I remembered that it used to be my great passion before I diverted too much into video games. Consequently I decided to refresh this passion by going on a bunch of long rides and documenting them and then blowing out on a new bike which I'm going to spend the weekend building. This means I've been watching bike films again so here's a quick:

Channel recommendation

Phil Gaimon used to be a professional cyclist and then retired but didn't turn out to be very good at retirement so now he has a YouTube channel where he talks about the bits of cycling and cycling culture that are fun and not ultra competitive. He has a dry sense of humour and an inquisitive mind which are basically my favourite two qualities in a person. Enjoy.

Instagrammin

I've been playing around with Instagram for documentation of things and getting more comfortable with showing bits of my life like the bike stuff. I used to find the need to update everyone about what you're doing intrusive and unwarranted but I guess we all have free will and I've learnt a lot by watching and listening to how other people do stuff so perhaps there's something to be learnt for others. Restarting this blog was a product of that. Perhaps this is more of me missing the front line of design and education.

Mostly it's resulted in some good conversations with people, there's always some 'friends' who'll be a bit obstinate for the sake of it but that's why we play around with things I suppose.

Right, back to the exhibition.