Current projects
Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It's customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home. Olinda was commissioned by BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D, and designed and built by S&W.
Highlights
Availabot is our own product and part of a broader investigation into presence, mass customisation, and web technologies embodied as physical objects.
In Personalisation (including Metal Phone), with Nokia, we developed experimental prototypes to explore personalisation in mobile phones. Metal Phone points to new applications of customisation through a provocative machine.
Recent work
Other projects online are:
- Our involvement in BBC 2.0 helped the BBC with strategy development and communication in their web offering overhaul.
- 2D Slideshow and Inductive Truck are both small research projects with which we explore different aspects of interaction design.
- Continuous Partial Attention informed Nokia's design strategy with research and a product prototype discussing the demands of communication.
- Lab-Grown Meat briefly explored the future cultural consequences of artificial meat.
We also provide web, social software, and architecture consultancy and contracting. Our clients include the BBC (above), Ning, Mobbu and TimeBank (developing their Social Software Primer).
Speaking and other output
We ran a teaching day at Goldsmiths College, London, as part of an MA group's Fictional Futures brief. The presentation from the beginning of that day is online:
Matt has spoken at a number of conferences, often discussing S&W projects. Some recent presentations:
- Movement, Web Directions North (closing keynote), February 2008.
- The Experience Stack, d.construct, September 2007.
- Products Are People Too, reboot 9.0 (closing keynote), June 2007.
- Thoughts on 3C Products, XTech (closing keynote), May 2007.
- From Pixels to Plastic, O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 2007.
- The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, Yahoo!, other Bay Area companies, and an Adaptive Path-hosted public event, January 2007.
- App After App, or, A zoology of next year's web applications, Barcamp London and Eurofoo 06, September 2006.
- Iterative architecture (built on an internet of things), Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit, July 2006.
- Engaging Technology, We Love Technology, July 2006.
- Making Senses, reboot8, June 2006.
- Assumptions, Attention and Affordances (based on Mind Hacks), BBC Digital Futures, February 2006.
- The 3 Steps: The History of Physics and the Future of Computing, reboot7, June 2005.
- Glancing: I'm OK, You're OK, O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, February 2004.
Matt runs the short fiction site, Masochuticon and the online connections game Dirk.
Together, Jack and Matt post on the company blog Pulse Laser.
Previous experience
Jack is an experienced graphic and interaction designer, teaching typography on the Graphic Design degree at Central Saint Martins for two years, working on original illustrated maps, and designing the book Type & Typography 2nd Edition. Web projects include Public Lettering in collaboration with Phil Baines and Animate for Finetake on behalf of Channel 4 (case study). In 2000, Jack worked on information and interaction design for MamJam (case study), one of the earliest location-based SMS products. More recent projects involve him working with electronics, fabrication and manufacturing, 3D and the web.
Matt has previously written for O'Reilly, spoken at conferences, and created online web toys at home while architecting web systems and managing developers at work. He codes for the web, and on the desktop when necessary. While at the BBC his group developed projects such as Phonetags, and instigated the BBC's involvement in podcasting.
