2014 was a strange year. I have a tendency to focus on what’s ahead and the things that I haven’t done, rather than reflect on the odd, unexpected and amazing things that happen. By taking a step back and listing them, it might show what I should do more or less of.
Hero worship
- Met Matthew Herbert about a project we were planning at work, I’m a big fan of his music.
- Briefly met someone who’s been a big influence
Talking and eventing
- My first time giving a talk at a conference. It was O’Reilly’s San Francisco and about our programmable radio experience toolkit in front of a couple of hundred people. A 4-star talk according to the 2 review we had!
- Spoke at Music Tech Fest in London, which was a cool conference
- Had a stand at Maker Faire in Newcastle showing the radio. Some adults but mostly childrens drawing their own radio postcards. Lots of them listen to CBeebies radio. Lots don’t know what a radio is.
- Had a stand at the London IOT Meetup: IOT Day Showcase. So busy, so hot.
- Had some ideas for R&D’s attendance for Mozilla Festival idea but was too busy to work on them. Libby created a full installation and I went along to help setup. Ended up writing some code to print out JSON and ASCIIfied images to Jasmine’s dot matrix printer. Accidentally got nominated for a major design award by association.
Working
- Prototyped a physical UI for the Radiodan radio and some of the very talented experts in R&D designed a PCB for it which we got fabricated in small numbers. My first taste of manufacturing.
- Spent a couple of days hacking on some creative ideas with two lovely sound artists Yann and Daniel.
- Small steps to be more exploratory when starting projects, heavily influenced by BERG and this excellent Houde and Hill paper. Doing some video-based desk research of existing technologies and interactions, creating small technical prototypes to explore libraries and technologies and using video to describe what we made.
- Hired Victor, a freelance product designer to make an open source case design for the radio. One that we could laser cut ourselves!
Visiting
- Visited California and took a bit of holiday. Yosemite is stunning.
- Visited Copenhagen for my 32nd birthday where everything and everyone is good looking and tasteful it seems. Fell in love with Hay.