Tinker it now!

We’ve had the very great pleasure of finishing a lovely piece of work for St Paul’s School for Boys for their 500th anniversary last weekend. Their very prestigious establishment has several technology departments who work on electronics, motors, and other great design and technology related projects. We were asked to come up with an installation that would communicate the power of all these technologies and the internet to a crowd mainly composed of parents, students and benefactors of the school. Thus the Centograph was born.

The Centograph is a physical representation of virtual information, uses today’s technologies to encourage viewers to reflect on the past.

When you enter a search term into the computer, Centograph queries the Google News Archive for a list of related news articles over the past 100 years. The archive returns a timeline of articles sorted according to date. The bars on the graph then change height to display a histogram of the relative number of news articles for each decade.

This allows you to view the ‘shape’ of the past century in relation to different topics—from progression in computing technology to times of war and peace to changing sources of energy, to name a few possibilities.

We additionally hooked up all searches made to Twitter which produced a really interesting feed.

This installation is now a permanent asset to the ICT department of St Paul’s so if you go and visit, be sure to try it out!

VIDEO COMING SOON!

++ Systemic interactive architecture project made by Ecologic studio with the technical details on Nick Puckett’s research blog

++ Free OpenFrameworks workshop in June in London, we organised one last year and it was great!

++ New kid on the block, Seaweed studio design lovely interactive works and teach kids about Arduino!

++ Wireless power meter using an Arduino…in an Instructable!

Had a fabulous time last week at Thinking Digital in Gateshead. The quality of the speakers and the event was extremely high (the expression “TED of the UK” was mentioned quite a lot) and the organisers were fantastic. My favorite talks include Ben Hammersley, Really Interesting Group, Chandler Burr, Matt Mason and Caleb Chung. Some pretty pics on my fickr stream in case you’re interested.

I was asked to give a quick 15 minute talk as part of the University day and spoke about the future for innovation, business and industry of the current interest in Arduino. Enjoy!

If you’re in France and don’t know what Arduino is, I was interviewed about it by the lovely people at InternetAct.net as a preview to my talk at LIFT France this June. Enjoy!

I presented our work with Hop at last night’s Edinburgh edition of the interaction design-centric thishappened events. Marvelously organised by Michelle Kasprzak, Chris Speed and Chris Hand the location was lovely and the crowd very engaged. It was great to discover the work of some fantastic people as well, if you get a chance, do check them out. My slides below!

There’s a saying in French: “En mai, fais ce qu’il te plait” which more or less translates into “In May, do what you want”. We’re keeping ourselves busy at Tinker.it! and travelling quite a bit in the next month.

We’re also actively seeking new opportunities for autumn, so if you’re at these events and want to find out how we can work with your or your organisation, come and talk to us about it!

Today: I’ll be speaking at This Happened 2 in Edinburgh.

7th: I’ll be presenting some of our work and sell items from it’s online shop Tinker Tools at the Slade Technology Fayre in London.

9th: Nick Weldin will be running a short talk and intro to Arduino as part of the Yahoo! Hackday in Covent Garden.

13th: I’ll be speaking at Thinking Digital in Newcastle.

29th: Nick Weldin will be running a one day Introduction to Arduino at the Leeds Web Festival.