Back from a busy weekend at the V&A village fete where Digit hosted their stall ‘Beat the Banker’. Luckily we dodged the downpours and eventually the sun came out for a summer’s evening on the friday and a scorching saturday. Never seen so many people desperate to chuck a sponge at a bankers face. Big thanks to Richie for being in the stocks both days. More pictures here.

It’s that time of year again and thankfully the V&A have invited us back for what is looking like THE LAST VILLAGE FETE. For those of you who don’t know the village fete is an annual event at the V&A co-ordinated by Scarlet Projects and hosted in the V&A museum’s garden. Design companies, students and artists unite in creating a mix of stalls loosely themed on the traditional English village fete There’s always a tombola, a dj called Barry and loads of fun stalls where you can buy custom made stuff, make something of your own or play a game and possibly win some prizes. It’s been running for 10 years now so this one is probably going to be the last …. or so we are told.

Anyway this year the theme is centred around the ‘current ‘crunch’ mood’ and this week we started work on our stall ‘Beat the Banker’. The plan with this is to create a giant steady hand game in the shape of a share prices graph. Participants will then have to carefully manouvere their metal handed umbrellas from one side to the other without touching the electronically charged copper pipe.  Time is important and a leaderboard will be on hand to show the fastest contestants of the day. Getting on to the leader board wins you a prize.. a handful of (chocolate) money. Maybe the photos will make more sense…. (see below). I’ll stick more up as development progresses. The village fete takes place next friday (24th) evening and saturday (25th) daytime so if your around west london and fancy checking it out then come down and have a go.

Visited the New Designers show last night at the Business Design Centre.  Some great work on show especially from Dundee University’s Product Design course.  Check out below.

Displacement Engine – Jasmine Cox

“A Displacement Engine is a compass that always points home, but allows the user to toggle the route and drift off-course, a new way of exploring your environment. A way of getting you out of a dull disappointing and repetitive routine.”

Doorbell – Mike Skene

“Made up of 13 hand tuned aluminium chimes housed in a sycamore frame, the Doorbells contemporary design and appealing sound is a welcome change to the standard functions of a doorbell.”

More projects to come….

Visited the RCA over the weekend to check out the grad shows from Design Interactions and Design Products. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the Design Interactions course drove me nuts. I read what little explaination there was and was still left confused. Why do they have to make it so complicated…. ? surely the whole point of interaction is that it’s easy to interact with. The Product and Furniture design improved my visit with projects that didn’t leave you squinting at the small print. I particularly liked Merel Karhof’s wind powered knitting machine and Il-Gu Cha’s radio for the blind and whiteboard clock that wipes the clock face clean as time passes. See pics below.

A few of us at Digit were lucky enough to get a place on the FREE london openframworks workshop at UCL last weekend. If you don’t know already OpenFrameworks is a C++ library that you can use to build your on screen and off screen ideas. It’s particularly useful for any kind of motion tracking and includes OpenCV libraries. Anyway this is the area that I wanted to learn more about and hoped that 2 days of this >>>

would quickly lead me to this >>>

Ha! maybe I need a little more practice first. Thanks again to everyone who helped organize the workshop.

Work above is body paint by Mehmet Akten.

On the friday we visited the Cube Gallery which showcased the other exhibitors in the Futuresonic Festival. Really lovely musical hanging plants which made music when you touched them. I’m guessing they used the water in the plant as a capacitance sensor but when I asked the artist she insisted it was the plant’s natural energy flowing through the leaves … electrical energy right? Anyway it was really nice and the plants made a great interface to play with. Another project was Usman Haque’s Natural Fuse. Quite a complex idea but my general understanding of this is that it looked at the idea of creating an online network that connected to real physical plants. Everyone involved has a responsibilty to the network and people’s plants suffered or prospered depending on everyone’s input… Not sure if that’s correct but I do really like the idea of a social responsibility to an online network (might try and involve this in our next R+D project) ….. anyway that description might be completley wrong so maybe check out the website for a proper insight.

We also managed to catch a presentation by RCA design product students who had collaborated with Yamaha to create an exhibition of unusual and innovative interfaces for making music. Projects included knitting music patterns, a ceramic bowl xylophone, an echo chair, d.i.y paper records and a musical mac. Videos of the projects and more info can be found here.

Inbetween exhibiting bob the lamp I managed to sneak in to a few of the conference talks and was glad I did as there was some brilliant speakers. Saw some great talks especially from Usman Haque, who talked about his recent project Pachube, Christian Nold and his new local currency for Bijilmer, the Bijlmer Euro, Stefan Agamanolis and his projects at Distance Lab, and Aaron Koblin’s data visualisation that included his awesome Radiohead video. There were also some really interesting panel discussions one of which was the Identity and Trust Panel, chaired by Stowe Boyd which looked at social networks, our trust and distrust in using them and what could we expect from them in the future. Very heated and animated discussion from everyone on the panel and really interesting to listen to. Trying to find a video on the net of this but no luck so far.

Bob has been away on holiday to the lovely rainy city of Manchester. A bit of a shock to the system from his normal hangout overlooking the truman brewery in sunny spitalfields …(yeah right). This excursion was actually part of the Futuresonic Conference and Exhibtion where Bob was exhibited for the length of the festival. He met and chatted to many people and hopefully spread the word about the great projects that are produced here at Digit’s R+D Lab. Many thanks to the Futuresonic organisers for having us and making us feel welcome.

The hot and sunny weather in Lisbon made it very difficult to go and sit in a dark room all day but this is what I did, and despite the fact there was no air con…. I did manage to stay put long enough to see some good work. Offf was not exactly what I expected, much more focused on motion graphics and design as opposed to technology or interaction design… (hmm maybe I should have read the website better before I went) but I did see some cool stuff and with Lisbon as the festival’s location, you can’t complain.

My favourite work was actually the most low-tech. Stefan Sagmeister’s talk was amazing, especially his giant sentances. Spelling out words in copper coins flowing out of a bank or creating letters with bananas that could only be seen as the bananas ripened and the colour of the fruit changed. His work although not techy targeted interaction in a different way often looking at how the work would evolve with time (like the bananas) or would change depending on human interaction (the coins lying outside the bank gradually disapeared into passing people’s pockets). I also love the compass coffee table he made for himself. It featured a display of compasses underneath a sheet glass, when certain cups with magnectic bottoms were placed on the table all the compasses would point in their direction. I’m gonna make myself one… one day.

Another great speaker was PES who’s vibrant stop-frame animation films use everyday objects in unexpected ways. Check out his website for examples. Really imaginative creations and visually stunning…. so much patience though… makes me twitch to think how long some of those shots took to create…. ahhhhh.

After working into the small hours of last night, several litres of coke and a spot of last minute soldering, we have finally moved the Roast restaurant installation into Borough Market!

The installation was inspired by the British seasonal food cooked up in the restaurant, and over the period of an hour cycles through a full year of farm produce. It interacts with movement from passers by as the countryside scenes transform from spring through to winter. This triggers events including snow in winter, leaves to fall off the trees in autumn, and tiny crawling ants in the tree scene. It also features a lazy farmer who ‘s identity will remain a closely guarded secret…

As time goes on, we can add in new assets to allow the installation to evolve with the seasonally changing menu of Roast. And maybe a robin for Christmas time too. We’ve yet to see it the daytime, but we’re hoping to take more pictures soon! Here’s some snaps from the build: