Aghillo

In the spirit of playfulness, DIY culture and ‘Making do’ I wondered last night what I could do with Eric Morecambe and his statue on Morecambe’s sea front. The joy that this statue brings to people is a wonder to see by the way – there’s always smiles and laughter around him. What to do though? Well, he’s sat out on the sea front 24 hours a day / 365 days a year so he clearly sees a lot of weather. So the obvious thing to do is let him have his say about it – find a suitable weather API (after playing with wunderground and google, I finally settled on yahoo), parse the weather data into a string, use the weather condition codes to generate comments, then send Eric’s thoughts on their way to the world via an automated tweet twice a day. Quite a fun thing to do with just an API, some PHP and a cron job. Feel free to follow Eric’s weather at www.twitter.com/ericsstatue

I woke early this morning, so played a little. This is a FireCube example provided in the the Processing environment. It all looks fun – providing rapid prototyping and production of images, animation and  interactions. I wrote a shortcode for inserting a processing sketch into this wordpress blog to make life a little easier in the future. Processing is aimed at  artists, designers, researchers and hobbyists who want to ‘sketch’ out their ideas. It also provides the same environment as Wiring and so fits well with developing Arduino projects. Go play!

A response to a digital play brief aimed at teenagers and attempts to subvert mass consumerism. Teenagers want to both belong and to sit outside. As Quentin Crisp said – “the young always have the same problem – how to rebel and how to conform at the same time”. They want to distinguish themselves from the crowd, experiment with self-identity and develop new values for a new generation. What is the world’s current obsession? What do we seem most concerned about? It’s clearly economic growth. And our response to this? It seems we need to consume more products. Consume more products, keep buying, keep, in that dreadful phrase, ‘economically active’. What a marvellous opportunity to rebel – almost perfect! Simply stop buying so much stuff. Stop buying stuff. Stop it. Be proud of it and celebrate it.

The koppla bracelet (named after the Swedish for connect) symbolises this rebellion. A commitment to the five values of be active, connect, take notice, learn and give is rewarded through seeing your bracelet turn from its original colour through to pristine crystal. A symbolic transformation that connects you with a new way of living. Commit to these values and you will see a change in your life and it will be made visible to others through the koppla bracelet. It becomes a symbolic totem for a generation. The bracelet is not just symbolic, but functional as well. It incorporates a range of technologies to sense your location, sense your activities, provide communication and provide physical feedback.

These technologies are used as part of its first service offering, launched in connection with events surrounding the Cultural Olympiad. The koppla bracelet provides connection to the community of wearers and access to a special kind of music service. A service that reflects the five core values and enhances a musical experience – we give digital music a home, geo-locate it and make it only possible to listen to it when you’re actually in the location. Artists can decide to locate their music on a beach, on a mountain, anywhere where they think will enhance the musical experience and make it special again. Finally, we provide access to the koppla bracelet and technologies to 3^rd party service providers to enable wider development of digital play services that embody the five values of be active, connect, take notice, learn and give.