Last: April 2004
Next: June 2004
May 20, 2004
move
A brief snapshot of my poorly documented life.
Tomorrow I go to the Isle of Mull for a week. No mobiles, no Internet, just my birthday, a bottle of whisky, and reruns of Balamory. The most perfectly, or most stupidly, timed holiday.
For on the 31st, I move to another country - Finland, in fact. Not sure if I can say precisely what I'll be doing yet - more after I start. I finished at Orange last week, and I've spent the remaining time, well, packing, and saying goodbye to people. It's normally hard to say goodbye to one person, but to do it en masse has been really difficult. You're all obligated to come and visit me in Helsinki.
London has also been a bit of an interaction designer whirlwind, with Molly, Anne and Fabio all flying in. Great to see Molly again, and really happy to finally meet Anne and Fabio.
See you on the other side.
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May 16, 2004
12 routes from Foyles to Tate Modern
walking (choice of bridge)
Golden Jubilee Bridges (left)
+ probably quickest, goes past South Bank Centre
- touristy/busy, should still be called Hungerford Bridge
CXR / past Leicester Sq. tube / William VI St / Adelaide St / cross briskly into Villiers St / detour into the Arches / up escalator / u-turn into unnamed floating walkway / Golden Jubilee bridge (left) / take left-hand staircase / the Queens Walk / Jubilee Walkway
Waterloo Bridge
+ best two-way view of all bridges, past Magma bookshop and Fopp
* goes through Covent Garden
- slightly further, best route is wiggly
CXR / Cambridge Circus / Earlham St / Seven Dials / Earlham St / Shelton St / Endel St / Bow St / Wellington St / Lancaster Place / Waterloo Bridge / down appropriate stairs (you can detour onto the National Theatre if a sunny day) / the Queens Walk / Jubilee Walkway
variation
CXR / Cambridge Circus / West St / St Martin's Lane / Long Lane / (St James St / Covent Garden Market) / Bow St / Wellington St / Lancaster Place / Waterloo Bridge / down appropriate stairs / the Queens Walk / Jubilee Walkway
Blackfriars Bridge
+ view of South Bank, south facing (sunny)
- longer, Embankment pretty boring
CXR / past Leicester Sq. tube / William VI St / Adelaide St / cross briskly into Villiers St / (Victoria Embankment Gardens) / Embankment / Blackfriars Bridge / Jubilee Walkway
bus
Northern route
CXR north/ New Oxford St / bus (8 25 242) / alight Cheapside / New Change / left at Heeltap & Bumper / Old Change Ct / Millennium Bridge
Southern route (generally quicker)
CXR / Cambridge Circus / West St / St Martin's Lane / Long Lane / (St James St / Covent Garden Market) / Bow St / Catherine St / Aldwych / bus (11 15 23 76 172) / alight by St Pauls (Ludgate Hill) / Millennium Bridge
tourist route
CXR / Cambridge Circus / West St / St Martin's Lane / Long Lane / (St James St / Covent Garden Market) / Bow St / Catherine St / bus (RV1) / alight Tate Modern (currently alight Southwark St stop 2 / Sumner St)
tube
central line (best)
CXR north / Tott Ct Rd station / Central Line east / St Pauls station / New Change / left at Heeltap & Bumper / Old Change Ct / Millennium Bridge
northern line
CXR north / Tott Ct Rd station / Northern Line south / Waterloo station (South Bank exit) / Sutton Walk / Concert Hall Approach / Queen's Walk / Jubilee Walkway
variation (quicker, backstreets (less interesting?))
CXR north / Tott Ct Rd station / Northern Line south / Waterloo station (Jubilee Line exit) / Sandell St / Cornwall Rd / Roupell St / Meymott St / Columbo St / Burrell St / Hopton St
pointless variation (normal tourist route)
CXR south / Leicester Sq station / Northern Line south / Waterloo station / Jubilee Line east / Southwark station / Union St / Great Suffolk St / Sumner St / Holland St
taxi
"Tate Modern, please"
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May 04, 2004
more archigram
Dear Warren, you remember getting high on poles? Parking meter, time pole; Totem poles, vertical myths; Boy Scout poles and their badges could be electric memory tiles for swapping; perhaps a pole hybrid a time-memory-data-totem, self destructing? Remembering David.
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flaneury
Yes, I'm behind too. Not exactly a mental block, but a post I've wanted to write that would not be written. So I'm distracting myself with a few photos from my recent soujourns. I've been lucky enough to have some wandering time in 5 cities (hey, there was work in between, honest).
I've recently given a couple of talks - a quick braindump at a locative media workshop in Manchester (provocatively titled 'the forgotten role of humans in collaborative cartography' , which ended up being more about the non-code issues facing such projects), and a talk at the risome conference about intangibility, which I really really will manage to write up soon.
I'm working slowly through Malcolm McCullough's Digital Ground, a book I've been waiting for since September 2002, when I saw McCullough talk at Doors of Perception. I'm only 50 pages in, but I already think this is my next big influential book, after Norman's The Invisible Computer. It's about people's relation to space and place, and how this is affected by the digital and invisible. If you're at all interested in maps, place, or interaction design, you need this book. You'll find yourself underlining things and scrawling in the margin "yes! oh god YES!". He cites with ease, people I'm familiar with, and fresh blood, and massages these together into clear thought (whereas Norman's Emotional Design disappointly just cobbled together Internet references).
Oh, and Norman, if you want to see your household robot vision, go see the mindblowing Archigram show - they did buildings as robots in the 60s.
