Week 110, and as I returned to GMT, I returned to work.

For a couple of days this week, I worked with George Oates of Good, Form & Spectacle on spelunking a large-ish cultural dataset. The goal was to see what we could prototype in a short period of work – see what was within the data – and also to see what it’d be like working together. It was a fun few days, and we got to an interesting place: a single, interesting interactive visualisation, alongside some broader ‘faceted’ views of the dataset to help us explore it. A nice piece of work, and fun teamwork.

I also kicked off Rubato/Burton, a collaboration with Richard Birkin on building a synchronized visualiser for music, funded by Sound and Music. Richard’s great fun to work with, and the first couple of days on it made great foundations. Firstly, I started writing the foundations of the backend in Node and socket.io; then, porting Richard’s initial work and visualisations over to it.

We had a good early prototype by the end of the week, although one that was going to need considerable iteration in week 111 to support many different songs, and changing songs in a set. Rubato’s the sort of project that requires me to just move one step at a time, though, completing a phase before iterating on it, and so it felt like a good starting point.

I also built Richard a foot controller for it: a couple of momentary footswitches hooked up to a Teensy pretending to be a HID controller. I spent a pleasant morning in the workshop, soldering, drilling, writing some C and packaging this in an aluminium housing, and filmed the lot as part of our documentation.

And, alongside all the code, and design, there was also admin to be done: finalising the 2013-2014 tax return with my accountant.

I’ve got enough to be working on to the end of the calendar year, but I’m looking for work from January 2015. So if you’re interested in working together, or have a project that you think might be a good fit for me, drop me a line. Things I’m particularly interested in: exploring and visualising data; communicating data that through interaction design; projects at early stages that need a prototype, or alpha, or their ideas exploring; connected objects. The sort objects described in weeknotes and projects should give you an idea. And if you’re not sure – why not ask anyway?