I’ve been involved in the Augmented Reality world over the last 12 months or so, with my own AR startup WorkSnug. AR is currently rather limited by being tethered to devices - WorkSnug works on the iPhone - But there are more ambitious projections for the technology. Are we witnessing the start of a revolution in how we interact with our environment? Perhaps. And perhaps it could get ugly. Check out this eye-opening film from Keiichi Matsuda. A brilliant vision? In his own words:

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

I’ve written a piece for BNET on loyalty at work.

I haven’t done much writing in recent months as WorkSnug has taken over my working life, but it’s nice to keep my eye in!

Check it out here

I’ve written another piece for silicon.com:

At the recent Workplace Trends conference, one speaker dared to ask: “Do we even need an office these days?” I thought I’d pick up this contentious ball and run with it.

What would happen if a large multi-national company, which I’ll call Company X, sold its real estate, dished out laptops and went completely mobile? Their new offices would be at homes and in connected ‘third places’, all around the city or town.

I’m only talking about knowledge workers here: those whose work could be done with a laptop and phone. If a worker actually makes something, it’s a fair bet Starbucks isn’t the ideal place to do it.

Let’s look at the issues…

You can read the article over here.

This summer I worked with Magic Lantern Productions, commissioned by NESTA, on a series of short films entitled Digital Britons. The idea was to explore what would have happened if the government had asked children to write its recent Digital Britain Report.

My role was to act as enfant provocateur, a job title I’ve just made up but which is so neat I’m grinning from ear to ear. I led different groups of children in discussion and debate on broad themes, and from there we had them decide the story they wanted to tell. It was great fun.

Here’s the first one we did: Thoughts on Creativity, with a group of children from Teddington School, on the edge of London.

My CD collection sits dusty and idle. It’s been lost beneath the immediate pleasures of iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, BitTorrent and my sainted iPhone. I haven’t played a single one of those CDs since I moved into my apartment nearly two years ago. A few weeks ago it crossed my mind to sell them – but the thought instantly gave way to a wave of conflicting emotions that I’m hoping now to piece together.

I bought my first CD player, a great big ghetto-blaster affair in black plastic, using money scraped together from paper rounds. My family’s kind myth - that I toiled morning and night for an entire summer - is only half-true. In fact I saved an approximation of the required sum, and got an additional cash-injection from my lovely, indulgent mum. I was 13 – This was 20 years ago.

I’d been told that CDs were unscratchable and was part of the first generation to prove otherwise. My first purchases (Mel & Kim, George Michael and other such nonsense) still sit on the shelf, incriminating but completely unplayable.

Within a couple of years I was buying the CDs that define my adolescence (The Smiths, The Beach Boys, The Stone Roses) the CDs of the teenage try-hard (Joy Division, Bob Dylan) and the CDs of those whose haircuts I liked (Suede, Blur). Back then I felt my purchases should be sure-footed – should stand-up to the critical scrutiny of my peers. Never-mind how I fared, I wonder if the scrutiny ever even arrived.

I enjoyed watching the pile grow, occasionally fluffing it with magazine give-aways and the stolen fruits of my brother’s better judgement. At 18 I headed to London and University, feeling that the tightly packed box of CDs was my most precious cargo. The dance from one student hovel to another was made bearable by the ritual of the CDs. Always first to be unpacked, I’d line them up on the windowsill. Here I am. This is who I am.

After graduation I got together with a lady I’d later marry. We merged collections, invested in a bookshelf and played at adulthood. This was the first time I’d absorbed someone else’s tastes. I was glad to discover The Cure and even lightened up sufficiently to enjoy the ephemeral charms of the singles chart. Belle & Sebastian made us both smile. We had several happy years and a couple of unhappy ones. As the relationship soured, my CD buying slowed. What new music I did acquire was downloaded illegally and I imagined the downloads as music in themselves – staccato bursts of zeros and ones. Somewhere along the line my CD collection dated - pinning me to a musical period that nobody mourns today. Britpop – white boys with guitars – had made me feel vital in the mid-nineties. Now it linked me with Tony Blair, cocaine excess and the truth that my teenage years were long gone.

My marriage broke-up and I moved house several times. Without stable bricks and mortar, my laptop became my comfort. It housed my diary, my photos and of course all of my music. Lugging my CDs about became a chore. Boxes containing several hundred are seriously heavy. Those boxes spent a year in the howling pathos of a self-storage depot (what terrible stories, thwarted ambitions, do those places hide?)

I’m in a stable relationship and home again now. Things are good. My CDs sit in retirement, at ankle level. My entire music collection, growing again in digital form, hides inside my phone. It follows me onto the tube and through London, competing against Facebook and Twitter for my idle time. I like it that way. It’s alive.

I listen to my music on shuffle when I’m feeling nostalgic. It takes me on a random walk around my late twenties, early teens, experimental downloads, mislabelled tracks and incongruous rubbish of unknown origin (who the hell is Mario Winans? How did his warbling slip into my collection?)

Of course this all happened to my parents too. I remember the piles of records on my Dad’s handmade shelving. The olds were in their thirties – as I am now – when they’d periodically blast out Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones or the shrieking of the McGarrigle sisters. The exuberant noise, much louder than the TV could ever be, hinted that that they hadn’t always been the solid, dependable rocks I imagined them to be. Everything was ten or twenty years old. My three brothers and I wondered if perhaps they’d been busy. Today I’ve discovered the pleasure of sharing musical tastes with my parents. I have Morrissey with my Dad, Rufus Wainwright with my Mum.

They still have their records and of course I’ll be keeping my CDs. They’ll soon leave the shelves, resting awhile under the bed on their slow journey to an attic I don’t yet have.

I have a fantasy that my children will one day pick through them with absolute irreverence. They can loudly reject it all, while quietly co-opting a couple for their own collections, as the process starts over.

My latest article for Silicon.com.

There’s a new type of tech geek emerging. They have proved their mettle in collaborative ‘hackspaces’, display a tenacious commitment to innovation and, if the business world is ready to open up, they may soon be solving the weightiest challenges of corporate IT.

Read the whole piece here.

I count myself very lucky to work at The Hub Kings Cross in London. Amongst the many wonders of the place are the regular art installations. One of those was ‘Circumrotation’ by Andrew Pok. They cut it down today, but I just about caught it in this film earlier in the week. The quality isn’t great, it’s just from my phone. You can probably see, it was a load of shoes hanging from the ceiling. It epitomised the “well, I could have done that” view of installation and modern art and I absolutely loved it.

Even better in my view, it was inspired by the Oliver James book Affluenza, my favourite ever non-fiction book. Affluenza is “the painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more”, and the book charts the contagion as it continues its global rampage, bringing depression and sub-depression distress - What James calls “The Worried Well”. Affluenza caught me at a low point in my life and described a good proportion of the absurd and pointless pursuits that had brought me there. As a result I changed career, taking a leap into full-time research and writing which confounded my bank manager, but put me back on an even keel.

Writing can be lonely, so I joined up at The Hub, a cooperative office for social entrepreneurs. Which is how last week I came to be stood below Andrew Pok’s suspended shoes.

In his own words:

‘Circumrotation’ consists a constellation of shoes hanging overhead in a large circle to explore a sense of ‘trapped’ in human living conditions. The idea of a circle has a meaning of infinite in an Eastern context. In the West, it can be related to religious paintings in Byzantium and Middle Ages periods that depict spirituality. The piece is hung approximately six-and-a-half foots above the floor where it provides a rare moment for the viewer to observe the bottoms of the shoes. The worn areas under the shoes suggest the trace of footwork and a journey of our life that indicates time. On one hand, the piece embodies the life of many who live in endless pursuit of power, wealth, or possession. They suffer from imprisoning themselves in competitions, making comparison, and in fear of falling behind; unaware that they trapped in the circle of no beginning and no end, no sense of first and last. On the other hand, it may also be seen as portraying life revolves in causality, what goes round comes around. People and things are interconnected and co-arising as suggested in the teaching of ‘Oneness’ in Eastern philosophy

I was on the judging panel for the Silicon Agenda Setters 2009 award. We met as a judging panel a few weeks ago, each bringing a long list of nominees, and debating it through. It was all quite fun and I really enjoyed meeting the other panelists (none of whom I’d met before).

Sadly, Steve Jobs won. But of course correctly, Steve Jobs won. It would be silly to suggest that the people running Apple, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc, aren’t running the whole tech show. However the list gets much more interesting lower down, and I’m pleased that a bunch of my own suggestions made it in: Amongst others, I’m claiming credit for introducing Stephen Fry, Vivek Kundra (Obama’s tech czar), Deron Beale (the Freecycle guy - Oooh I’m just so subversive) and Martha Lane Fox. In the interests of full disclosure I should also say that there were several people discussed that I’d never heard of, but who clearly deserved a place on the list. The lesson learned is that I need to get out more…

Check out the list

So I’m a writer at heart. Really. But I’m excited to announce that I have a sideline about to launch - An Augmented Reality application I’ve developed for the iPhone 3GS. It connects mobile workers to the nearest and best places to work in the city. It’s like sci-fi and it’s free. Check out our short film:

From the Here & There horizonless projection project in Manhattan, this part technology, part superpower way of looking at maps is really fascinating:

Here & There is a project by BERG exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They’re intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.

Now check out the film:

Here & There in Manhattan from schulze on Vimeo.