Posts tagged as teaching

Coming up for air.

What happened is: I lined up the Next Thing (as mentioned at the end of last quarter’s worknotes), and then it promptly proceeded to entirely consume my time and brain for the next quarter.

Which is good, from an income-and-labour perspective, but was somewhat to the detriment of the content strategy here, where I’d hoped to be able to write smaller, spikier pieces of content between the studio updates.

So a goal for this quarter: making sure I don’t let client work overwhelm the routines I’d like to establish.

What’s been going on for the past few months?

Google Research/Deepmind AIUX - prototyping and exploration

The previous Next Thing.

Just as the quarter was beginning, I lined up a short, intense prototyping project with the crew at AIUX that I’d previously worked with. They began the project within Google Research, but by mid-project had been reorganised into Google Deepmind.

This made almost no difference to our work, though it did make the “ooh” people make when you tell them who your current client is go up a semitone more than usual (before you tell them you can’t tell them anything else owing to confidentiality).

I spent a couple of months with a motley crew of internal and external folks, pulling together an interesting, full-stack working prototype. Designing interactions, poking technology to see what it feels like, working out how to communicate the new ideas that a piece of software makes possible.

I think all I can say about what we were up to is “stuff to do with vector embeddings”.

The stakeholder feedback at the end of the project was really enthusiastic, and there’s talk of further work on this brief. Very much the right project at the right time.

Creative Computing Institute - end of term

June marked the end of term at CCI, where I wrapped up my fifth year of teaching Sound and Image Processing to first year undergraduates - and which means shortly after I’ve breathed out from the end of class, I have to mark 31 portfolios. It’s a lot to get through, but I’m always surprised and delighted by the places some students will take me, and it’s those moments that keep me going as I work through reading and executing a lot of Processing.

When I tell people I’ve been marking, they often ask about the impact of ChatGPT on my results. All I can say is: yes, we are educating in the age of ChatGPT now. (Other LLMs are available; I’m using ChatGPT as shorthand for LLM chatbots you ask for answers).

We don’t have a problem with students using LLMs; they’re a tool like any other, and for students less confident in a second (or third+) language, or students newer to programming, they can be a confidence-booster. We ask students to cite them just like any other source. (I usually teach citation by suggesting you quote as little as possible, and then, if you are uncomfortable revealing the size of your quotation, perhaps that’s an indication for you to quote less.)

Despite this, I believe I had many students who used ChatGPT and didn’t cite it. You can’t prove it, but there’s a… vibe? Smell? It never feels like plagiarism or copying; it’s more like a number of students all sharing the same tutor, whose personal style and predilections keeps appearing in their work. The programming equivalent of delvish, perhaps. (I had lots of (int) style casting this year, for instance, which seemed like a tic given I’d never really introduced it, and Processing’s built-in int() function is probably more intuitive).

But there are also thoughtful uses of these tools. I’ve had students submit entire transcripts of their conversations with ChatGPT, for instance, which has been good: they showed they had the knowledge necessary to ask meaningful questions and build on them, and showed how they refined their own knowledge in the dialogue. I’ve also had students describe processes - one talked about submitting his code to ChatGPT and then asking how would you improve this? which is an interesting approach to virtual pairing/refactoring, and shows a good degree of insight - not to mention curiosity.

With marking done, I rounded out the year by going to the student festival, the end-of-year show of work. This was the second year where students I’d taught in their first undergraduate year were graduating. It was hugely enjoyable and rewarding to see how they have developed, and how they are expressing their ideas and interests in creative computation a few years down the line.

Lunar - hardware/software refinements

I’ve just kicked off a very short engagement with Lunar - some further refinements to the LED interaction tools work that we did. Some new hardware, and a revision to both firmware and browser tooling has made for a busy week back leaping between C++ and Typescript.

What’s next?

The next few months are coming into focus now. August looks a little less frantic, with some smaller projects slotting into the schedule alongside a deliberate amount of Slack, and there are rumblings of larger work in September that could keep me busy for several months.

Meanwhile there’s admin to be done, and some plates to keep spinning, as well as making sure I return to some Process Notes here. And so: onwards!

A quarter has passed since the last worknotes; now’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve been up to.

Lunar Energy

Two pieces of work this quarter with the Design team at Lunar. I wrapped up the project mentioned at the end of 2023 in January, as I’d expected. A second project emerged in March, exploring generative/systemic graphic and motion design, and that wrapped that up this week. There should be things I can point at and say more about very soon.

Creative Computing Institute

It’s spring break currently - the gap between the second and third terms - at CCI. I wrapped the first half of the first year undergrad class I teach; I’m back in early April for the summer term, when we’ll be looking first at audio, and then at particle systems. I particularly enjoy the latter - it’s such a rich and fun topic to play with in code.

Work with Acts Not Facts

A small project with Matt W over at Acts Not Facts, which there’s not much to say about right now, but had some good in-room collaboration. Oh, and his AI Clock - Poem/1 - that I’d previously done some firmware work on - hit its goal on Kickstarter (and then some - 117% funded), which is excellent news, and means that will be getting into the world.

Ongoing consulting

Technical/strategy consulting with the very early-stage startup I’m advising continued; just this week I’ve been helping them get a prototype of a core concept up and running, so that they can evaluate and test it with real users.

I also had a catch-up about a games project I’d been lightly advising on; they’ve got funding, which means there’s some thinking/consulting/plotting - and maybe prototyping - to come in the next quarter.

Content strategy for this site

One of the outcomes of some recent coaching with Andrew Lovett-Baron was overhauling how I communicate a bit; trying to build up a cadence of content here again. Weeknotes served me well for so long, but they are had to maintain in fallow periods, or in long periods of NDA’d work. So they fell by the wayside a bit.

I’ve decided to try to move to a more programmed set of formats: regular-ish (eg, quarterly) Worknotes that describe recent output and projects; Process Notes that talk about studio practice and process, not necessarily focused on a recent project, but as a way of demonstrating my own practice and approach; and writing about One Thing from time to time, as a way of sharing insight and critique - as well as the kinds of things that interest me as a designer/technologist.

So far: I think it’s going OK?

Spending time with peers

I’ve spent a bunch of Q1 2024 just taking time to catch up with peers and colleagues to compare notes on… this and that. That’s been, as usual, restorative. I’m writing this to remind myself - and you, reader - that it’s worth expending the effort on. As a sole practitioner, it’s worth spending time maintaining the collaborative/conversational/social aspects of work that just aren’t there when you’re on your own most days. Q1 was a good period to recharge in.

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What’s on the horizon for the coming months: wrapping this term of teaching; beginning consulting on the above games project; some ongoing hardware prototyping/exploration; lining up the Next Thing. Onwards.

What happened was: I meant to write about the end of 2021 before a big project in 2022 kicked off. And instead, 2022 came around, the project kicked off hard and whoosh it’s now the Spring.

I have been quiet here, but busy at work. And so, here we are.

What’s been going on?

Wrekin wrapped up in the autumn, as expected. I completed my final pieces of documentation, and handed them over. Recently, I’ve been doing a small amount of handover and advisory work with their new lead developer as they push through the next phase of the project. I’m excited to see where they’ll take it.

The small media project I mentioned last time came to fruition. Codenamed Hergest, it was a proof-of-concept to explore if a product idea was achievable - and feasible - within a web browser. Rather than prototype the whole product, I focused on the single most important part of the experience - which was also the single most complex part of the product, and the make-or-break for if the product was feasible. We got to a point where it looked like it would be possible, and I could frame what it’d need to take forward - to “paint the rest of the owl“, as I described it to the client.

Hergest covered a fun technology stack: an app-like UI in the browser, using a reactive web framework; on-demand audio rendering using Google Cloud Run; loading media from disk without sending it across the network thanks to the File API; and working with Tone.js for audio functionality in the browser. It’s remarkable what you can do in the browser these days, especially in contexts where such rich behaviour is appropriate. In a few weeks of prototyping we got to an end-to-end test that could be evaluated with users, to understand demand and needs without spending any more than necessary.

Lowfell has slipped a little, which is on me: there was some issues with UPS shipping, and then pre-existing commitments managed to steal a lot of my energy. I’m hoping to resolve this in the coming weeks, but I did at least get a second prototype shipped and a 1.0 firmware built and signed off.

There was more teaching. I returned to be industry lead for the Hyper Island part-time MA, and spent some good days with an international crew delivering some lectures and coaching them on their briefs - this time, a particularly interesting brief delivered by Springer Nature. The students really got stuck in to the world of scientific publishing; a shame we were still delivering remotely, but not much else could be done there. I also am teaching at CCI again, delivering Sound and Image Processing for first year Creative Computing undergrads for one morning a week, through to the summer.

Finally, in Q1 I kicked off a three month project working with Normally. A team of three of us worked on a challenging and intense public sector brief. Gathering data, performing interviews, sketching, and prototyping; we spent 12 busy weeks exploring and thinking, and I was personally really pleased where the final end-to-end prototype we shipped - as well as the accompanying thought and strategy - ended up. It was great working with Ivo and Sara, as well as spending time in the wider Normally studio, and perhaps our paths will cross again. It was a great start to the year, but pretty intense, and so I didn’t have much time outside it for reflection.

What’s up next?

Two existing projects need wrapping: firstly, finishing up term at CCI and marking some student portfolios, and also wrapping up Lowfell.

Secondly, I’m going to spend the summer working with the same crew inside Google Research that I worked on Easington with, on a interesting internal web project. Not a lot to be said there, but it’ll keep me busy until the autumn, and I’m looking forward to working with that gang again.

And so, as ever: onwards.

It’s autumn. What’s been going on since I last wrote?

Teaching at UAL-CCI

I wrapped up a term of teaching a single module at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute.

Sound and Image Processing is a module about using code to generate and manipulate images, video, and sound. The explanation I use in the first week is: we’re not learning how to operate Photoshop, we’re learning how to write Photoshop.

The course worked its way up the ladder of abstraction, starting with the representation of a single coloured pixel, through to how images are just arrays of pixels (and video, similarly, just a sequence of those arrays). We covered manipulating those arrays simply - with greyscale filtering - and then more procedural methods such as greyscale dithering and convolution filters. We could then apply this approach to sound, too, starting by building a sound wave, sample-by-sample, and then looking at higher-level manipulations of that sound wave to make instruments and effects. Finally, having already looked at raster graphics, we looked at maniuplating vector-graphics in real time to produce animation, particle systems, and behaviour, culminating in implenenting Craig Reynolds’ Boids and creature-like simulation.

This was quite demanding: it was my first time teaching this material, which meant that before I could teach it to anybody else, I had to teach it to myself in enough depth to be confident tackling questions beyond the core material, and to be able to explain and clarify those basics. Perhaps that’s a lack of confidence showing - a kind of perfectionism as a way of hedging against coming up blank - but as the term went on, I relaxed into it, and found a good balance between preparation, delivery, and the collaborative process of teaching and learning.

And, of course, it was almost all taught entirely remotely. The students did admirably given that awkward restriction - some of them may only have been coding for a single term prior - and they delivered a great range of work in their portfolios. I’ve said yes to teaching the course again next year; whilst I greatly enjoy my commercial work, teaching aligns strongly with my values, and it’s a rewarding way to spend a small amount of time each week.

Ilkley

Ilkley has continued to run on for the spring and summer. Last I wrote, I’d just received the first Ilkley prototype board. Six months later, there have now been several more prototypes - three versions of the ‘brain’ board, and two of the upper control board. The second brain revision is the one we’re sticking with for now - the third was a misfire, and really, a reach beyond the needs of the project. By contrast, the control board was fine first time; the second version of was primarily about fitting the components in an enclosure better.

The firmware has been more stable, largely being fine out of the gate. The ongoing work was primarily about finesse, rather than wholesale replacement, so I’m pleased with that.

As I write, I’ve just packaged up five prototypes to send to Matt in New York, which wraps up the end of this phase of my work on the project. The device works end-to-end, and is ready to be played with by test users. I look forward to hearing about his results.

Wrekin

In the summer I began a new piece of work that we’ll call Wrekin, working with a very early-stage startup on building a functioning “experience prototype” to validate their product idea with real users.

This was very much a prototype in the mould described in Props and Prototypes. Some of the prototype had to be 100% working, as we wanted to evaluate certain ideas in a real implementation, to see if the technology was up to scratch, and if users liked it. One other key idea was, though core to the product, largely proven: a ‘known known’. Wwe could get away - for now - with a “stunt double” version of the idea. And then a few more pieces of the prototype were, whilst functioning, only for the experience test; they’d be thrown away in due course.

Over the course of a couple of 2-3 week phases, I built out a feasibility study, that then turned into a deployed prototype, and shipped that to the client for them to test. It’s been a fun project - some interesting boundaries of what you can do with realtime video and WebRTC - and I’ve continued to work with the client on planning future technology strategy, and, if all comes to plan, turning the experience prototype into an end-to-end one that demonstrates all pieces of the puzzle.

It’s also been a project where work on features and design concepts has directly informed future strategy. Not just thinking about what’s possible, or what is desirable, but also understanding the value of build-versus-buy for certain functionality, and for starting to explore the “what-ifs” - the unknown unknowns - that emerged as we work.

I’m continuing to advise the Wrekin team, and may be working with them a little more in the coming months.

Lowfell

Finally, Lowfell. this is another hardware project: a commission for a custom MIDI controller for an LA-based media composer, who works in film, games, and TV.

The controller itself has few features. A few people I’ve shown it to were a little underwhelmed! But the brief for the project was never about complexity.

What client wanted, really, was an axe - a “daily driver”. Something sturdy, beautiful, and not drowning in features: that just did what they need it. They were going to be looking at this thing every day, for eight or more hours a day. They didn’t need RGB lights or tons of features they weren’t going to use; just the things they did want, in an elegant and suitably-sized unit. It’s the same reason we spend a lot on a chair, or a monitor, or an expensive keyboard (or on good tools, or good shoes): you use them a lot, and it’s worth investing.

Also, they didn’t want just one: they wanted one for each setup in their studio space, making it easy to move between workstations and to keep going.

The project began slowly. We did lots of conversation just exploring the idea, and I sent some paper mockups as PDFs over email to give the client a feel for what the size of the unit would be. Once we were happy with the unit, I built a first version, with fully working electronics, and a prototype enclosure that used PCB substrate - coated fiberglass - for the panels, with the sides of the case produced on my 3D printer.

This was enough for us to evaluate functionality and features. I made sure it was trivial to update the firmware on the unit, so I could send over fixes as necessary. (In this case, because we’re using the UF2 bootloader, updating the firmware just requires holding a button on as the controller is connected; this mounts a disk on your computer desktop, to which a new firmware file can be dragged).

Whilst the client evaluated the project, I started work on final casings: using higher-quality printed nylon for the sides, and moving to bead-blasted anodized aluminium for the upper and lower panels. The result is weighty, minimal, and beautiful, and I’m looking forward to sharing more when the project is complete.

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Wrekin was my main focus this summer. Ilkley and Lowfell wrapped around it quite well: the rhythm of hardware is bursty, with prototypes and design work alternating with the weeks of waiting for fabrication to come back to me with the things I can’t make myself.

What there’s not been a lot of, of course, is writing. It has fallen out of my process a little. Not deliberately; perhaps just as a byproduct of The Times, coupled with several products that were either challenging to share news on in progress, or in the case of ones with NDAs, impossible.

But: a decent six months. Up next is, I hope, shipping a final version of Lowfell, some more software development for Wrekin, and a potential small new web-based media project on the horizon. I’m on the lookout for future projects, though, and always enjoy catching up or meeting new people, so if you think you’ve got a project suited to the skills or processes I write about here, do drop me a line.

It’s the middle of February, 2021. What’s going on since I last wrote, and what’s coming up next?

Wrapping up at CaptionHub

My stint at CaptionHub got extended a little, and I finally wrapped in the middle of February, last week. Everything went as well as I could have hoped on the overhaul of some fundamental parts of the codebase that I was working on.

I’m pleased with the decisions we made. It was good to review all the work with the team and agree that, yes, those decisions we took our time over and drew so many diagrams of were sensible ones, and it had been worth investing the time at the point in the process. We added more complexity in one location, but managed to remove it from several others, and I enjoyed the points where code became easier to re-use simply because we had standardised an interface.

A pleasure to be back writing Ruby, too; not just for its familiarity, but for just how it is constantly such an expressive language to work in and to write. And, of course, a pleasure to work with such a sharp and thoughtful development team.

Working with Extraordinary Facility

I started working with Matt at Extraordinary Facility around the end of January. Let’s call this project Ilkley for now. It’s years since I worked with Matt at BERG, and I was excited for the opportunity to work with him again. I enjoy his eye, taste, and process as a designer so much. You should definitely check out his recently published Seeing CO₂ prototype for an example of his approach.

Ilkley is a physical product prototype. I’m taking a prototype that existed between hardware and computer software, and shrinking it into a dedicated box: porting all the code to run on a microcontroller, building the user interface, adding necessary extra hardware to make it entirely standalone… and then designing custom circuit boards to fit into an enclosure. That means: firmware, a bit of EE, some CAD, and then iterating software to get it feeling right. Leaping back and forth between the digital and physical, and code, electronics, and atoms; from pens and paper to alt-tabbing between code editors, KiCad, and Fusion 360. It’s been highly enjoyable so far.

I’ve appreciated the way Matt is laser-focused on the outcomes he’s looking for. The existing prototypes were the design work; this phase is entirely about bringing that design to life. Implementation, feasibility, and building a roadmap for the future. Until he can get more people to use it, it’s not worth us spending time altering anything else. We still go off on diversions and discussions, of course, as we chat things over, but they’ll get gently parked before they jump their place in the queue. It’s great to still have those discussions, though!

Our first tranche of work investigated whether what Matt hoped for was possible. The answer was an emphatic yes, and by the end of it, we’d gone from a large breadboard and tangle of jumper wires on my desk to a small, custom “bench prototype” PCB. Nothing that could fit into a box yet, but something I could reliably send Matt (in New York) to evaluate and test. (Which in itself helped me prototype the answers to “_how do we best ship prototypes across the Atlantic_”).

I also could then start prototyping other submodule circuits on breadboards, experimenting with them whilst not worrying about the main electronics, which were ‘frozen’ thanks to having a fixed design.

One top tip from this process: something that helped enormously was continuously maintaining an up-to-date schematic of the breadboard prototype as I worked on it. As I built the tangly prototype on my workbench, I also drew it up in KiCad, altering it whenever wiring changed, or resistor values were altered. The tangle got more complex as time went on, but this didn’t matter, because there was always a map of it available in the ECAD tool. When we were happy with the prototype I’d been demoing on video calls, it was easy to start the work to turn it into a PCB because I already had the schematic. I didn’t need to start deciphering the knot of wires; I could just put them to one side and move straight onto board layout.

I did exactly the same for the small submodules as I built them; those schematics would then be ready to use again for the first ‘full’ prototype.

Progress has been really good, and I’m going to start a second phase of work soon, to take the various sub modules and bench-sized prototype, and start turning it into an entirely self-contained object. That’s going to run over the next couple of months, I’d imagine, with some gaps to get things fabricated and pull things together.

Teaching at UAL CCI

Having wrapped at CaptionHub, and with at least one client project moving on, I’m also going to be teaching an undergraduate course at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute - the Sound and Image Processing module for students in the first year of their BSc. One afternoon a week, for the next three months.

Why teach? I’m not an academic, and don’t plan to become a full time researcher or lecturer. But I’m dovetailing a small amount of teaching around my client work over the past few years - Hyper Island, the IOC, and now this.

A few answers spring to mind.

Firstly, it’s a bit about the shape of the “industry” I work within. I’m a consultant and freelancer. How do I develop talent, or share my knowledge with others? I can’t do it with the other employees of my company of one. Sharing my knowledge with students and learners through teaching engagements is one way I can. Many of my peers who are located more within the Design community integrate teaching into part of their practice well, and whilst I often use the word ‘design’ to describe a lot of my work, ‘technology’ is also an important part of my practice - and ways of integrating teaching into technical practice is something I perhaps don’t see as much of. So I’m going to see how it goes.

Secondly, I find it a great way to cast a lens at my own practice. Nothing forces you to re-evaluate your own work, approaches, or knowledge, than having to explain or discuss ideas with others. Is it selfish to say that? I don’t think so; more just to reinforce that you can’t help but learn things yourself by going through the process of teaching.

And perhaps most importantly - I learn from all the students I teach. This is in part a reflected version of the previous point - yes, I learn by looking at my own understanding and reflecting on it… but I also learn from listening and sharing with others. Students and learners at all levels bring new perspectives, expertise, experience, and ways of understanding to the table, and I (along with the rest of the group) get to share in that with them.

All of which I value. So, an opportunity arose, to think about images and sound from first principles, and ways of exploring and explaining that. I said yes.

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Which all feels like a good slate for now: prototyping design products; teaching about the landscape of code; a little slack between all that for reflection and personal development and work, which (at the end of a year that was already busy before being A Bit Much on top of it all) is much needed.

Onwards.

In the second half of 2019, I worked on a project I called Longridge. This project was to write three online courses in a series called An Introduction to Coding And Design, for a programme of courses from the Institute of Coding launching in 2020. I worked with both Futurelearn - the MOOC they’re hosted upon - and the University of Leeds to write and deliver the courses.

Those courses are now live at Futurelearn, as of the 27th January 2020!

The courses are designed as two-week introductions to topics around programming and design for beginners interested in getting into technology, perhaps as a career.

I’ve written up the project in much more detail here; you can read my summary of the work here. I cover some of the reasoning behind the syllabus, the choice of topics, and the delivery. And, most importantly, I thank the collaborators who worked with me throughout the process, and collaborated on the courses.

Find out more.

And we’re back in 2020, with the first full week of the year being Week 367.

I did a small amount of work on Hallin, getting things shipshape for the client demo that was moved to the beginning of Week 368. Most things were in place, though I spent a few hours making one slight improvement to better reflect the existing domain model in the work I was doing.

Some of my time was taken up with typical beginning-of-year admin.

I spent a pleasant afternoon building a toy for myself in SparkAR. Spark turns out to be a highly pleasant development environment, and simple results can be worked up surprisingly quickly. Node-based programming environments aren’t always my favourite, but they make a lot of sense of things involving realtime video or pipelines, and I soon settled into Spark’s mental model.

By the end of the week, I’d sent the toy off for review. Of course, I immediately found a serious number of UX improvements to make the moment I’d hit submit. So I imagine a 1.1 release will be submitted fairly soon after, and that’ll be the one I release for people to play with.

Really, though, the big work this week was preparing for the second weekend of teaching on the MA course with Hyper Island, and then delivering those classes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A few talks, including one that’s a crash course in cryptography, that goes on to use that knowledge to better evaluate blockchain (and cryptocurrency, with a brief digression into What Money Is). This is always a hard one: really, it’s about critically evaluating technology by refusing to be told that something is too complicated to describe clearly. Lots of good questions and analysis from the students, and it led nicely into a wonderful session (as ever) from Wesley Goately on critical thinking around AI and related technologies. That seemed to go really well too.

Mainly, though, the weekend focused on the students finishing up their pitches to deliver to the client on Saturday night, and they all delivered excellent, interesting, and varied outcomes. As ever, I greatly enjoyed myself: I don’t just get the chance to think about the ideas and content I’m delivering, but also I get to learn from my students: seeing how they engage, watching what examples they bring to the table, as well as how they merge their learning with their own professional practice and workplaces. They’re always a diverse, international crew, and so my perspectives are always widened. And I’m always learning about how to convey and express ideas: what sorts of coaching and information people best respond to, how to find ways to help them come to solutions for themselves. Hugely satisfying and rewarding, as ever.

The card that says ‘yearnotes‘ is still in my TODO column. I hope I can get those out the door soon.

Head down on Longridge this week.

I wrestled with a script for an animation early in the week, and just couldn’t get it to anywhere I was happy with. I clearly need to zoom back out a level, and reminder myself what work this video is doing. Then I can work out what I want to show in it. I have a feeling the trick is, for what I want it to convey, to say far less. There’s a follow-up piece of text that I can go into further detail if I want to.

Another four-minute script went a little better, so that’s in review now.

Otherwise, I’ve mainly been thinking about production tasks: finding interview subjects, performing pre-interviews, writing them up as quasi-scripts for the production crew.

I’m fortunate that I learned a bit about this during making Future Speak, where Kirsty - the excellent producer - ran a lot of these. “Pre-interviews” are where the interview subject gets phoned up ahead of the ‘real’ interview… and we discuss what we’re going to ask them. This does a few useful things. Firstly, it prepares them for the questions they’ll definitely get asked; for documentary-type work, there’s nothing to be gained by anyone being surprised. Secondly, it allows us to help the interviewee frame their responses in the way we’d like - we can tell them a bit about what our target audience might or might not know, or ask them to be prepared to explain particular things in more detail. Finally, it also allows us to be surprised. When somebody says something interesting or exciting - great! We can dive deeper and add it into our script. Or if an expert in a field offers a better way of framing something than I might have asked - let’s put that in, too.

I take notes in writing, but ask if I can record them, just in case I miss anything or want to return to them. Piezo proves invaluable in that regard. There are lots of ways of recording audio from apps - such as VOIP calls or hangouts - but I’ve found Piezo to be reliable and remarkably simple; no messing with routing, just click some buttons and hit record. Really useful to have.

Several interviewees all lined up and prepped, and a pile of short scripts drafted. Week 349 should see me sorting out the final interviews and submitting final scripts.

But with Dent benched for a little while, that was my week.

As expected, the past couple of weeks have been really intense: Monday and Tuesday up in Manchester, teaching the Digital Technologies module up at Hyper Island, before three days at Bulb back in London.

Teaching has gone well. Lots of content delivery up-front in the first week – skewed that way perhaps more so than was ideal, owing to time. As well as my usual lectures on Innovation & Trends (picking apart how technological trends are perceived and the major ones that have really underpinned the past decade) and AI (“How Computers (Don’t) Think”, a favourite of mine) I ran an afternoon workshop on programming.

I’m always wary of teaching programming and coding – especially in short periods of time. It can be really unsatisfying to deal with syntax errors or tooling issues early on when you have a very limited window; I’d rather spend that time usefully learning something. So what I did was focus on the feel and practice of programming. We used Google’s Blockly visual language, and, having learned a little about it, focused on its visual interpretation of Logo.

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of Seymour Papert and his team’s work on Logo. It’s such a smartly designed domain-specific tool – but it also manages to take us on some useful journeys. By using it with the visual Blockly language in a browser, we avoid needing development environments or having ugly syntax errors. My idea then was to anchor what was happening in the Logo world back to programming practice. To that end: we learn about algorithms, and iteration, and variables and function (nouns and verbs) – before going into problems that require more conceptual modelling. Logo even gets you to debugging and ultimately refactoring quite nicely – going from describing individual turtle movements into abstracting them into verbs like SQUARE, or HOUSE, and then improving those to take sizing as a variable. You go on a useful journey without having to do too much tooling.

As a first run of a new workshop, it was alright – it’s a little longer than I realised, and it’s appropriate to spend a good while on the first few training runs to get everyone up to the same level. But hopefully some insight emerged, and it’s certainly something I’d like to revisit.

We also got a brief from our client in the first week, and much of my time in the second week was spent coaching the teams on their responses, helping them focus their discovery and ideation phases. In week 325 I’ll be doing some more coaching and then visiting their client to watch their final pitches.

Back in London, Highrigg entailed a moderate amount of coding and refactoring, a decent number of (useful and/or interesting) meetings, prepping a short talk for an offsite workshop, an excellent day workshopping with a good number of colleagues, and beginning to write that workshop up. Hopefully I’ll finish that delivery in week 325.

And that was it. A circuit board arrived for build-up, but I’m not going to have space to do that til at least week 326. In the meantime, it can sit on my desk, tantalizing me.

I’m running a course called Designing Circuit Boards in central London in October.

Maybe you’ve looked at a tangle of jumper wires on a breadboard and wondered how to take your electronics project beyond that point. Perhaps you’ve got an installation made out of lots of Arduinos, shields, and breakout boards and you’d like to make it more reliable and easier to reproduce. Or if you’ve got a prototype on your desk that you’d like to take the first stages of manufacturing: this masterclass will give you the tools to embark on that process.

Over four evening sessions (about 90-120 minutes each), we’ll take a project on a breadboard and learn how to design and fabricate a two-layer printed circuit board for it. This is a pragmatic course: it doesn’t presume any knowledge of CAD software, or any formal electronics training. We’ll be learning techniques and approaches, not just how to drive a piece of software.

The course is what I’d call intermediate-level. Some very basic experience of electronics – perhaps some tinkering with microcontroller projects (eg Arduino) on breadboards – is about the level of experience you need to enter. Maybe you’ve made complete projects or installations out of such technology. But I’m assuming that most people will have no experience of circuit board design.

We’ll be using Autodesk EAGLE as our primary tool, because it’s cross-platform, well-supported by the maker community, and free for our purposes.

You can find out more and sign up at the Somerset House website.

And if you’ve got any questions, you can email me.

I spent Monday and Tuesday in Manchester, where I was speaking at FutureEverything. The talk seemed to go well, and the rest of the conference was very good indeed: lots of great talks and great people all in one space. I got home late, and quite tired, on Tuesday, but it had been a great couple of days.

After FutureEverything, it was a relatively quiet week.

I spent Wednesday afternoon helping a music charity I work with a little learning how to podcast. Or rather: helping them set things up so they could. That meant running over how to capture live recordings, setting up a Dropbox workflow where I could help them edit things, how to publish to WordPress, and how we could post content to iTunes as well. I’m going to continue this as a small side-project over the next few months, helping them with production and the technical aspects of publishing, but we covered a lot of ground and they were enthusiastic.

Friday was spent mentoring at the ODI’s Open Data in Practice course. This was my third ODIP course, and as ever, it was great to help the delegates bring some of the ideas to life on the final day, as well as to help them with their understanding of and ideas around Open Data.

Week 77 brought a very hectic March to an end. April should be more peaceful: a couple of workshops, but time also to take some personal days, and focus on the project where I’m the client that have been neglected. I’m looking forward to those.

The majority of the week was spent on Haddington, focusing on some particularly gnarly Javascript for rich front-end interactions, working with Dean on confirming what various interactions should feel and work like, and meeting up with the editorial team to discuss requirements for writers.

On Friday, I spent a day at the ODI, acting as a mentor on the last day of their Open Data in Practice course. I spoke to the participants throughout the final day – which is largely dedicated to ‘making’. In particular, I helped a few of the groups with their work, discussing appropriate object design, and assisting with some CartoDB prototyping. The presentations at the end of the day were great, and it was as ever, always interesting to see how different people learn and think.