Archive for June, 2007
This little Hobbit-hole, which is a real family home in Wales, was built to strict environmental guidelines about 3 years ago. The website for the building has some great shots of its construction, using local materials like found wood, stone, soil, bales of straw and much mud. I really admire a family that can let their imaginations go, and have the skills and guts to just dive in and change their lives so completely.
From the site: “You are looking at pictures of our family home in Wales. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).”
The project reminds me a little of an episode of Grand Designs that Shannon and I watched a few years ago, and that we found totally inspirational. The house that was featured was built by a woodsman in the New Forest in Sussex, completely by hand with help from friends. He is one of the few people who are allowed to live and work in this protected area. His business is making charcoal from fallen wood. We’re talking a simple life, literally living off the land, and spent mostly in tents ( before and until construction was completed). The house he built was made so simply, constructed from a-frames of tree trunks, filled out with straw bales and plastered then whitewashed. The results were stunning. Really inspirational. And the bitter irony (or beauty) of the home is that no one else will ever be allowed to live there. Planning permission allows only for him, and the house will have to be destroyed if he ever leaves or dies.
Thanks Hillel.
It feels a bit random, but GeoGreeting.com spells out your own, personal message using buildings that are shaped like letters and found on Google maps. Nicest part of the experience is that it finds the buildings as you type, and moves a map around to show their location.
Got to admire Google for installing all these solar panels on their roof. I love the site they’ve made that does a live track of how they’re performing.
“This installation is projected to produce enough electricity for approximately 1,000 California homes or 30% of Google’s peak electricity demand in our solar powered buildings at our Mountain View, CA headquarters.”
In this article on Spiked, Alex Taylor (who’s also in Socio-Digital Sytems) talks about privacy. He draws attention to how the current debate around this issue is so alarmist, focused primarily on the extremes of the invasion of personal liberties, and the dystopian future that envisages. The reality of privacy, though, is much more subtle then that:
“What I want to draw attention to is how the privacy versus openness debate around technology sets up extremes that feel removed from real-world experience. In reality, don’t we routinely move between these two apparent opposites, deciding in often unremarkable ways what we keep to ourselves and what we share? With this in mind, I think we would do well to reconsider our obsession with eliminating all the possible threats to our digital identities, thinking, instead, about how it is we manage ourselves and how, in our mobile futures, we might be enabled to go on doing so.”
Multi-touch is all the rage at the moment, but is something that Microsoft and members of the team I’m in have been looking at for quite a number of years. Steve Hodges, manager of the Sensors and Devices team in Cambridge, reveals a new technical approach to multi-touch in the video below. The key to this approach, which was develops in collaboration with the Socio-Digital Systems team, is using cheap off-the-shelf infra-red components attached to the back of a laptop screen to give multi-touch on a thin display, helping avoid some of the bulk of projection systems.
Microsoft Research laptop multi-touch
The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern gallery in London is my most favorite space in London. It’s huge, free to the public, and has been used very imaginatively and bravely by the museum.
Now Pentagram have put together an exhibition in the space called Global Cities. Haven’t been, but I am likely to, and if anyone is visiting the city in the near future I’d add it to your itinerary.
Last November Tim Regan and I traveled to Brussels for Innovation Day 2006. This event was originally started by Microsoft Research Cambridge as a forum to show the work that we do to a broad, primarily academic audience across Europe. A way of avoiding them all having to travel to the UK. It’s grown quite a bit, and now is as much an opportunity for Microsoft more generally to demonstrate its innovation credentials to European politicians and media. In addition to academics, the event now also hosts a few hundred MEPs and many members of the press.
Anyway, it was a great couple of days of showing 5 of our prototypes to a lot of people. Highlights for me were showing TimeMill and BubbleBoard to Bill Gates and Matti Vanhanen (the Prime Minister of Holland Finland), and then also to Janez Potocnik, the European Union Commisioner of Science and Technology.
30 years after dropping out of Harvard Bill gates goes back to get his degree. Although much of his commencement speech deals with the serious issues he’s attempting to tackle with his foundation, there are also quite a few lighthearted bits, like this: ”Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.”
Thanks Shannon.
follow me on Twitter