We’ve had a furiously busy start to the year, with a round of workshops, mentoring and consultancy to supplement our usual project work.
We’re finishing up work on a series of museum interactives and games based around nuclear and sustainable energy for a client in Saudi Arabia.
Closer to home we’ve just finished the alpha version of a location-based game in which children’s drawings form the backdrop of the game. More on this soon - we wish we could talk about it now!
Back in February Fiddian was mentoring at another iDrops museum labs event, this time at the Science Museum. This was a three-day event designed to guide participants from the museums and cultural sectors to create ideas for improving audience access to collections.
Fiddian is currently in Cairo with the British Council, presenting and mentoring an another cultural innovation workshop. Participants come from countries as varied as Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, and each person has fascinating insights into how you keep pursuing cultural innovation, even during a revolution.
#LEGup (the London Educational Games meetup) continues to go from strength to strength, now with nearly 600 members. Recent events have focused on funding for edtech startups and ‘can we make a living from kids apps?’ Write up in the Guardian here.
We’ve also been busy behind the scenes with Makers’ Guild, redoing the website and starting a new programme of events for 2013. More information coming on this very soon!
Kirsten recently attended an @techwillsaveus introductory workshop on arduinos, along with her 14-year-old stepson. She reports back on what she discovered.
We’ve been busy this month, but somehow the major achievement feels like installing our big new desk in the new studio. Fiddian built it with his own paws, and painted it in classic Soda orange. We love it!
Recently, Fiddian travelled up to Salford to attend a workshop run by BBC R&D on what the BBC could be doing with internet of things. Having got a full house in the BBC bingo ice breaker, he then watched a ‘hacked dalek’ demo - which unfortunately had some teething troubles. After the intros it was on with the unconference: the first session was about examining protocols for IoT. Many candidates were discussed, including zeroconf and bonjour,which enables treating connected objects like objects in code.
We’ve recently moved studios to Erlang House on Blackfriars Road, where we now have room to spread out and build bigger stuff. As a result, a lot of Soda’s history has recently come out of storage, including this little gem.
Another month has flown by, and the new studio is now resembling a proper workspace: benches are assembled, tools are out and we have a kettle. We’ll worry about paltry matters like desks and computer space next month!
On 4th October, Kirsten attended the BBC Connected Studios event at Facebook and, after too many croissants, was inspired to come up with a face-recognition app idea to match the audience engagement brief. She teamed up with Steve Benford from Nottingham’s Mixed Reality lab, and together they pitched an idea to the BBC judges. A few weeks later we heard the idea had been selected as one of the ones to go through to the next stage - a two-day build studio in Media City, Salford. Jons and Kirsten (plus a team from Nottingham) are looking forward to heading up to Salford and mucking around with biometrics next week. More details soon!
Apart from assembling workbenches, Fiddian has been busy pitching for some interesting new projects, and attending the TSB IoT workshops and strategy meetings. We’re now looking to form partnerships for a collaborative IoT consortium, so if you are interested, get in touch with fiddian at soda dot co dot uk.
Fiddian and Daniel Charny have also been working towards a Brixton Tinkerspace, and held their first public meeting on 25th October. All the details here.
The London Educational Games Meetup (#LEGup) has moved to a great new space in Kings Cross, OneKX, and our Member Showcase there on 17th October was one of the biggest yet. New members always welcome!
Fiddian and Daniel Charny arranged a public meeting for anyone interested in contributing to a Brixton-based Tinkerspace (like a hackspace but less overtly geeky and more craft-friendly).
The turnout was amazing - somewhere between 35 and 40 people, with everyone keen to press ahead soon. There was some debate about whether to find a space as soon as possible, or to scope out the best kind of space first and search for that. In the meantime everyone agreed that regular meetups to share work and ideas were the best place to start, so another meeting will be held - probably at the Dogstar - in a couple of weeks’ time to share our crafting/3D-printing/arduino/electronics/hacking/etc projects.
If you want to know more or get involved, contact Fiddian and sign up to the Google group. The presentation from the first meeting is available here. We’ll be sending out a form soon for people to say how much they are willing to contribute for access to the space. Meanwhile, group member Tom Lynch has already spoken to Lambeth Council Arts Team, and they are advising on possible sources of funding.
The more momentum we build around this, the more likely it is to happen, so please join the group and come along to the next meetup!
Our super clever lead developer, Jons Jones-Morris has been creating some fun interactives with Kinect and Box2d.
His Kinect virtual puppetry application allows players to represent themselves on screen as puppets which they can manipulate in real time. User-generated representations of bodies, heads and limbs can be used to create an avatar which players then manipulate by interacting with the Kinect system. The body elements can be scanned hand drawings, photographs or a graphical image like this example using Meccano (NB: this video is work in progress, and the final version will look a lot more polished).
Reflections on 18 months of organising a 3D printing cooperative
In Spring 2011, Fiddian put out a call to see if anyone would be interested in buying shares in a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic 3D printer. He quickly received a lot of interest, and a few weeks later, with ten people on board, we ordered the Makerbot.
While we waited, we hit our first snag: most of the ten paid their share, but a few people changed their minds and dropped out, meaning that Soda ended up owning more than a tenth share in the printer. If you’re considering starting a similar cooperative and cost is an issue, make sure you get the money before you send the order.
Within a couple of weeks the Makerbot arrived, and we organised a few sessions for building it. With help from two other members of the group it took us around 40 person hours to build it.
The first test runs were really exciting, although a lot of time was spent getting to grips with the software. We found the free Tinkercad software had the shallowest learning curve, along with Autodesk 123D and SketchUp whereas Rhino (free Mac beta version) was really complex. Fiddian took some training courses at London Met to get up to speed with Rhino, but if you’re looking to get started more cheaply and easily, Tinkercad does the job.
After some very lively early sessions, interest waned slightly. We put this down to several factors:
people having very busy schedules and not being able to make all the monthly meet ups;
the fact that there were quite a few people in the group meant that no one really felt entitled to use the Makerbot (it was also situated at the Soda studio, so not always accessible);
the length of time it takes to print an object is a factor, limiting the number of objects we could print in any one session. Frequently the first object would have issues and need to be re-printed, which made it unfeasible for more than one person to achieve anything in a two-hour session.
materials - we had limited success with PLA which we would rather use
Replacing the ABP (Automated Build Platform) with a solid bed will be next tweak. The belt wrinkles and TBH you cannot leave it on its own to churn out loads of models so the ABP’s a bit redundant.
Lately interest has picked up again. We’ve let the Bot out of the studio, and Paul Harter, one of the cooperative members is taking it to the 3D print show later this month. He has created the brilliant ‘Printcraft’ which enables you to make 3D models within Minecraft and print them out. Paul is showing off printcraft using the Thing-O-Matic at the 3D Print Show this October. A wonderful way to get young folk into 3D printing.
The printer co-operative was in large part the inspiration for Fiddian to form the Markers’ Guild
The printer will probably go on a school visit after that.
What we’ve learned:
- get the money from each member upfront
- don’t make your cooperative too large
- share knowledge about what works and what doesn’t
- spend lots of time on your design before going to print
- if you’re buying a 3D printer, members will probably need to take turns having it in their own space, in order to really get best use out of it. A shared group calendar can really help with this.
After a quiet and restful August, September has kept us manically busy.
At the start of the month we visited the Olympic Park to see our LED sculptures in situ (see pic). They looked great, with the LEDs displaying very brightly despite the intense sunlight. It was also lovely to see visitors interacting with them, even if some people were simply using them to get some much needed shade!
Fiddian was part of the judging panel at the TSB’s IC tomorrow event and has also been in Belgium at #museumlabs as part of a British delegation presenting to and mentoring delegates from Belgium’s cultural sector, who are interested in digital arts.
Kirsten and new co-organiser Martha were delighted by the quality of the speakers and the massive turnout at September’s #LEGup event on educational technology for mobile.
The Truce Arts project is culminating this month on 21st September with the Peace One Day celebrations. The event is about working towards a day of ceasefire and non-violence - the Global Truce 2012 campaign.The organisers are hoping that this will be the largest global reduction of violence ever recorded on one day – and the largest ever gathering of individuals in the name of peace.
Finally, Soda Towers is moving. After several happy years in our shared studios in Lower Marsh, we’re taking on a larger, self-contained studio in Blackfriars, where we’ll be able to embark on bigger and more complex projects. In the meantime, there’s lots of flooring, painting and cleaning to be done…
It’s been a frantically busy summer, with most of our time taken up by projects for Stratford Sports Day (AKA The Capital of England, in the year between 2011 and 2013).
Fiddian has been testing his electronics skills to the limit by creating a series of sculptural LED totems, which are running some of Julian’s clever software to display beautiful patterns of light.
Our work on the Truce Arts project is ongoing. Fiddian has been working with groups of animation students at Middlesex University and media students in the Headstarters group to create digital artworks around the theme of Olympics Truce. Mary, our new intern, has been working on the social media aspect of Truce, and helping us to gather public submissions to the project. You can see the results here and here.*
The hugely successful V&A British Design show closed a few days ago, and we’ve had some amazing feedback on our work. The team from Media Molecule all took a day out to see our Little Big Planet exhibit, Sony also visited from their Liverpool offices to see Wipeout, and Fiddian was interviewed by Square Enix about his design for the Tomb Raider exhibit. The show is now going on tour.
Kirsten has begun some research for a London university on improving links between edtech startups and academia. If you’re interested in taking part, send her an email.
Fiddian has been busy at various events, including Technology: Disruption and Convergence at City Hall. Brain-straining IoT strategies with the TSB in a two-day residential workshop in Loughborough. Doing similar stuff for the Connected Digital Economy Catapult has been challenging and fun. He’s also busy making plans for Makers Guild, which we’ll get around to blogging about soon.
*The animated gif illustrating this post is part of the Truce work, and was created by Andon, an Animation Student at Middlesex University.
Sodaplay is an online suite of learning products from Soda, a London-based creative agency established in 1996.
Sodaplay’s best-known creation is Sodaconstructor, an online construction kit for building animated models. Sodaconstructor was originally created by Soda’s then R&D director and digital visionary Ed Burton. It has no set goals; instead users experiment with forms and physics, learning by doing and learning by example, gradually honing their skills until they can build incredibly complex and beautiful models.
In 2001, Sodaconstructor won the BAFTA Interactive Arts award for its experimental and innovative approach to play. Eleven years later and Constructor continues to be wildly popular. Many users have stayed with it since its inception and new model-builders are joining all the time, each contributing to a database of nearly one million models. As of 2012, Soda has been working to repurpose Sodaconstructor for the iOS platform, and we currently have a working prototype for this purpose. We are actively seeking funding to develop the prototype to the next level.
Other products in the Sodaplay stable include Moovl, a sandbox tool which allows users to create simple animated drawings which embody the laws of physics. Moovl takes the constructionist play philosophy of Sodaconstructor and makes it accessible to a much younger audience by transforming an activity that children already find natural and pleasurable: drawing.
Moovl’s interface transforms drawings with life-like simulated dynamics and programmable behaviours. This transformation places drawing in a highly motivating self-directed feedback process of cause and effect, experiment and discovery.
As of April 2012, Soda have been working in partnership with a major educational publisher to export Moovl to the iPad. Early testing with the prototype have proved very successful, with Moovl working perfectly with the iPad’s multi-touch interface. We anticipate releasing the Moovl app in early 2013.
Sodaplay also includes the application Sodarace, which takes user-generated Sodaconstructor models and pits them in a race against models created using the best artificial intelligence alogrithms: in effect, pitting man against machine. We anticipate a new version of Sodarace will follow shortly after the redevelopment of Sodaconstructor.
More information at: soda.co.uk/categories/sodaplay
Contact: kirsten at soda dot co dot uk
We’ve been working with the folks at A New Direction and Creative Intelligence Agency to work with young people to make digital artwork around the theme of Olympic Truce.
We’re also running the social media campaign for the project, which kicked off with the website launch. Graphic Design by Sunil Pawar of Slingshot London and web design by Garry Hill of Magnetised.
You can see some of the other collaborations between artists and young people at:
Our most recent event was ‘Making sound’ at the V&A, where we gained an insight into the explorations of makers in the production of instruments and forms of sound.
Fiddian was delighted to be invited by the Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group to contribute to a discussion entitled Design and Tech City: Local Skills and Young People.
Our Board Games Special proved to be a popular and inspiring event. As a primarily digital games maker, I found the focus on board and card games very interesting, and the discussions around how they do and don’t differ quite useful.
Kirsten organised and hosted another meetup for London’s educational apps developers at the Centre for Creative Collaboration. February’s focus was on ‘strategies for success’ in the battlezone that is the educational software market.
Fiddian was invited by the team at body>data>space to discuss artificial intelligence and the future of work and place in advance of the Robots and Avatars exhibition at FACT Liverpool.
Fiddian curated and chaired the Interactive Architecture conference at London Metropolitan University in October 2010.