Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Damn straight. Get yourself down to the Design Museum for the last week of the Dieter Rams exhibition.

That being said, I do have some amazing projects on at the moment, and I will write more about them soon, when I’m putting off doing those amazing projects.

Matt Knight, The Disposable Memory Project, “Game Changers: Free” from The IPA on Vimeo.

He suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting– everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before–this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver–glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

I think the same is likely to happen with The Disposable Memory Project, which is already taking a fair amount of my personal time to curate. There is no doubt that this project is a long-term one, I expect it to run for a minimum of five years, by which time I may well be on other projects which need my time.

So, how to ensure that the DMP continues to exist and grow over the next five years with the possibility of me not being at the helm? Well, its all about the community!

When I originally threw together the blog suggesting the idea, I had planned on releasing cameras around London personally, making it a relatively small and managable idea – but when it grew from being London based to having a presence in almost 45 countries, with a handful of emails coming through every day – the management shifted into a more involved job. We have some wonderful people who are already helping out by acting as local representatives in countries who accept the cameras mailed to them to save on postage. The next step will be finding people who are happy to help out maintaining the site and project itself, performing updates on the blog and camera tracker so I don’t become a bottle neck.

The tools don’t currently exist to make it particularly easy to update the site (its all run off a database, but it doesn’t have an interface to update the cameras very easily, other than the excellent phpMyAdmin), so I’m very much focusing on creating those tools to allow others to help out in managing the site. I don’t ever want the site to become ‘automated’, allowing users to create their own codes and updates via the website as I think the personal touch is important in responding to people – but we can still automate much of the grunt work like uploading images, geotagging the updates, etc.

In any project, working out the shift of ownership from creator to community is a pretty important consideration once you start to get an amount of growth. Whilst you shouldn’t start out with this in mind, you might need to think about it earlier than when you’re at breaking point. Equally, don’t be afraid to relinquish control to members of your community who are advocates or offering help, as they’re just as eager to see the project succeed as you are. I know my efforts are usually better in helping create and drive projects, and direct the vision, rather than day to day detail. I don’t want to see the project stall because of my potential lack of time, so if that means “giving up” the project in some way, I’d rather that than neglecting it.

It is something often forgotten in commercial projects, that a project launching isn’t the end, but the start (unless you’re creating something broadcasty, rather than conversationy).

I don’t actually see it as ‘giving up’ the project at all, more of a graduation from a personal project to a community based one – which is the best thing in the world. Creating an engaged community is the hardest thing to achieve, but if you do manage it – you need to reward them for their support however you can, and I reckon ownership is a major part of that reward.

I was asked to talk last night about the Disposable Memory Project at an event held by the IPA in London. The videos of the talk should be online within the next week, but in the meantime, the slides are available here and on slideshare.

Update: Chris from Vizeum wrote about the event here for an overview of what was spoken about.

I was asked to speak at last night’s “An apple a day” talk, held by the D&AD at the Hoxton Pony. The speakers were asked to consider ‘what piece of technology has truly changed the way you work’. You can see my response in slideshow form over at Slideshare, and preceeding my ramblings were Alex from de-construct, Ranzie from Tonic, Flo from Dare, Clare from The Partners, and a handful of other people with really interesting perspectives on the question.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone pretty much had the same thing to say – remember the human element, interaction and connection within everything you do.

Someone sent me this newspaper clipping about The Visual Dictionary. We still get regular submissions and the database is just growing and growing. I’m going to try and pull together a team of people to do something with the content this year. It’s funny how old it feels now – especially as the images are quite small (it wouldn’t do print), and its all hosted on a server, rather than in a cloud, and it doesn’t use flickr APIs or any form of interconnection with any other services, but the content is still great, and concept is clearly still liked.

if you haven’t seen it before – check out www.thevisualdictionary.net

ps. i have no idea why people think its an american website.. it’s not! i’m english, and the site is internetional (sic)

W+K creative team Ida and Fabian have just completed a music video for music group ‘we have band’, using stop motion. Awesome video, but most interestingly, they’ve uploaded all the the stills from the stop motion to flickr. Will be interesting to see if people take these and create their own versions of the video.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jun/20/bandoftheday.culture

I think so often when dealing with world issues like famine, poverty, illiteracy – the problems is not being able to comprehend the scale of the situation. What does 1.2 billion people without clean drinking water actually mean? And the more intangible the issue, the less one feels able to do something about it. These infographics all use the idea of ‘If the world was a village of 100 people..’ to scale down the numbers and make the problems tangible. Great use of design to explain a problem. Next step: Simple tangible steps towards removing the problem.

Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo.

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Although I’m now working at Wieden + Kennedy London, I’m spending one day a week working for Yarned, a company I’ve started up which focuses on doing work for non-commercial projects and organisations. As part of this, working together with Maek, we’ve just launched the new site for Trekstock, raising money for the Teenage Cancer Trust through organising music events. Its a great organisation, and we were happy to provide what support we could through building their digital presence with the design skills of Maek.

Have a look at the site, and do what you can to help out.

Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.