Two weeks in one – last week had enough blogposts, what with launching the V&A Spelunker, the first public post about Rubato, and my yearnotes – so I thought I’d save any other news for this week.

Week 117 was spent getting the Spelunker, a project with George Oates at Good, Form & Spectacle, into the world. George wrote more about the project at the V&A site, and I wrote a little on Sketching and Engineering over at the GF&S Work Diary:

Early on in the process of making the V&A Spelunker – almost a few hours in – I said to George something along the lines of “I’m really trying to focus on sketching and not engineering right now“. We ended up discussing that comment at some length, and it’s sat with me throughout the project. And it’s what I wanted to think about a little now that the Spelunker is live.

More here.

Rubato is the project I’m working on with Richard Birkin, and I wrote about the first public material to come out of it here. After getting that post into the world, Richard ran a more intensive test with many devices over the weekend, which helped feed into the work for Week 118. The good news is that the code turned out to be surprisingly robust. That meant that my week was more focused on improvements and streamlining, rather than bugfixing, and I was able to be more responsive to Richard.

I spent a day or two in week 117 overhauling infovore.org, my personal site, and updating some of the front-end practice on it. It’s now both more legible and built a bit better, which made me happy.

I also took the opportunity to write up a piece of design I did about seven years ago, all about encouraging users to understand that their list of subscriptions is ephemeral. It came up in conversation at the hardware-ish coffee morning I attended on Thursday of week 118.

And finally, a good bit of news on a relatively unusual piece of work for me, provisional coded Periton: it looks like it’s going ahead. A few little days in February and March, from the sounds of things. Will keep you posted!

Back in the saddle, then – and still firming up work commitments for the beginning of the year, so do get in touch if you have what you think might be a Tom-shaped hole, be it prototyping, development, or bashing heads about design.