2011

Role: Principal / Designer / Writer

After the investigations into computer vision for the Lamps project, the studio became more curious about the possible aesthetic impacts of the technologies in years to come.

We started writing pieces on our blog such as ‘Sensor-Vernacular‘ and posting found media/objects that resonated with the themes.

Concurrently, our neighbouring studio RIG – especially James Bridle – had been documenting and developing a similar set of thoughts under the banner of ‘The New Aesthetic‘.

After posting a longer blog adapted from a talk of mine entitled ‘The Robot-Readable World‘, my colleague and friend Timo Arnall put together a lovely longish-form found footage piece of the same name.

In between client work, Timo and myself looked to extend the exploration into concept products and film – along with Jack Schulze and Andy Huntingdon on rapid-prototyping duties.

The resulting short project was called “Clocks For Robots” – speculative connected objects using dynamically-generated 2D barcodes as ‘line-of-sight’ unique keys to unlock place-based services. Their visual nature making them tangible and discoverable to humans / their robot companion species.

Because it relies on visual senses rather than the wobbly ‘hertzian‘ volumes of radio – we imagined it would create a crisper, more understandable mapping of software services to spaces.