A first stab at keeping week notes.

It was half term this week, so it was filled with a lot of running about with the children as well as work. This meant that I didn’t get into Central Saint Martins this week, though phone calls and shared emails with colleagues meant that some projects were progressed.

Monday was a day of experimenting with Little Printer quite a bit, and discovering a lot of components for possible future projects which I hope to blog about more next week. I was trying to get a useful Heresay feed running for the printer, which worked eventually, but needs a lot more work to be robust.

Tuesday I met up with Nathan, who was over from Boston and with Lily, Kate and Richard from impossible. A meeting of minds which is always a pleasure and one where I leave with notes on lots of ideas to follow up on.

Wednesday was a day of running workshops at DACS.

Thursday and Friday was down to Brighton, to work at the Lighthouse Studio. It has been so far a lot of bits and pieces, chatting about lots of ideas and scribbling down notes to follow up on as well as getting small things done to make everything else work.

I did go visit a big CCTV camera though

 

and people at the Lighthouse have been doing Surveillance Diaries.

I have finished reading ‘Ground Control’ by Anna Minton

and have been flicking through this small book on Critical Spatial Practice.

Both of which are feeding into my thoughts and ideas around ‘Emotional Infrastructure‘ and Critical Infrastructural Thinking. The latter is leading to a discussion about creating an open journal on the subject, so I started off a landscape review on the existing publications that either cover or fringe the topic.

I have been setting up and using a number of wikis and trying to get a single install that will deliver all the requirements from myself and various clients. I have used a number of commercial wiki solutions before but really want to get my head around MediaWiki properly and find a set of extensions that make it a rich experience for the audiences that I am presenting it to as a solution.

That said, there are lots of problems, hoops and work arounds to get things working how I would imagine it. It can be slightly confusing to a client when you describe the software as that which runs Wikipedia but the ‘out of box’ experience is not quite the same. Still I’m getting there and hope to have something useful in a number of cases.