Kinlet

Service Touchpoints and the Uncanny Valley

jmkd — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:15:36 +0000

Great presentation from my old RCA tutor Rory Hamilton on some useful references in service design.

Art & Artists

jmkd — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 22:01:06 +0000

So here’s the URL for Tate’s new collection site, Art & Artists: http://beta.tate.org.uk/art

And here’s a link to the paper about some of the challenges faced during development:

http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/papers/art_artists

The Future of Art

jmkd — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 21:00:49 +0000

The Future of Art from KS12 on Vimeo. Brilliantly put together by the team from Emergence Collective. This is altermodernism in practice, as described in theory by Ncholas Bourriard below.

Behind the scenes of the Google Art Project

jmkd — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:33:04 +0000

Reposted from my blog at Tate

The version of Street View technology used in the galleries involved an extremely high tech and rather silly-looking trolley. It was to be pushed around the rooms at a particular speed and on a peculiar route, and seemed to me to be a marvellous combination of garden-shed and cutting-edge.

Battery change. At 23 kilos each they were not fun to carry around

The trolley was not simple. It had lasers and cameras and GPS and all sorts. You could not stand in its view, for fear of being captured. Yet it could see you, left right, up down, back and forth and everywhere in between. So it must be operated by a squirrel (a trained man with a perfectly shaped back) who hides in its visual wake and guides it through the rooms.

On the bat's back I do fly

Then you have to be completely out of sight. Which is interesting when you are trying to oversee the logistics of the operation. And in an empty museum at 2am you begin to think that this rule of not seeing what is going on provides perfect cover for some daring and complex ploy to steal a masterpiece. And that must be what the lasers and cameras and GPS are for.

The best way to monitor progress was on our security cameras

The team worked diligently charting their peculiar route through each gallery, trying not to slow down in front of paintings they liked, while I scurried about moving stepladders and other bits that might look as if people actually worked in the museum after hours (they do).

It not only knew where it was, it knew where it had been (blue lines) and where people where hiding (green dots)

The cyber-trolley’s all-seeing eye captured me at one point as I attempted to dip out of view, and of course I am secretly delighted to be immortalised albeit with a blob for a head.

Yours truly fails to evade the all-seeing eye

Here’s a glimpse of the end result:

Aside from Tate Britain, my favourite virtual gallery has to be The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Use the floorplan and go have a look!

Work vs Meetings

jmkd — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:29:17 +0000

A day filled with meetings can be exasperating, but is far from a day wasted.

There are those who think an hour spent in a meeting is an hour spent somehow not working, but for me this suggests a lack of intention to be productive in the first place. And we all think we know a good meeting when we’re in one: a chair whips through a realistic agenda in good time, participants engage in relevant issues based on prior research, and a set of accomplishable action points are allocated.

But. But.

Sometimes the most useful meetings happen accidentally, and most informally. They happen in the corridor in only 2 minutes, with better arranged prior engagements dragging each attendee off. They happen under the influence of laughter, they happen while drifting off from a dry PowerPoint, they happen from frustration and disagreement.

This is because the best practice of office work is so often about good and influential decision making.

It’s not about bricklaying, it’s about architecture.

It’s not about knuckling down to complete the 500th row of the spreadsheet, it’s about always keeping open the possibility of a better way, perhaps realised by row 180. When under the influence of laughter, or frustration, or a daydream, or when in the corridor forced to focus 2 minutes of opportunistic energy on a single goal, good decisions can be made and a better way can be found. Always.

This is the space in which lateral thinking occurs, so it is the space in which architecture emerges. Good design – and in this I include service design, strategic thinking and development methodologies – solves problems better than brute force every time. This is why small teams can achieve more, it’s why people love Apple, why insight trumps facts and why we shouldn’t fret over meetings, however well or badly arranged.

Meetings are work, and in them we can often find better answers than when alone.

The A-Z of Google Instant

jmkd — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:42:18 +0000

With Google Instant comes a new hierarchy of search: that of which result is first for each letter of the alphabet.

This is a pretty special position to have, so here is the full A-Z list on launch day in the UK

A is for Argos

B is for BBC

C is for Currys

D is for Debenhams

E is for eBay

F is for Facebook

G is for Google Maps

H is for Hotmail

I is for ITV

J is for John Lewis

K is for KLM

L is for Lotto

M is for MSN

N is for Next

O is for O2

P is for PayPal

Q is for QVC

R is for rightmove

S is for Sky

T is for Tesco

U is for utube

V is for Virgin

W is for Weather

X is for xBox

Y is for YouTube

Z is for Zara

Welcome

jmkd — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:57:58 +0000

The project site of James Davis, featuring a mix of personal and professional work.

View Selected Projects