cityofsound

Arup

Another bit of admin. After a couple of weeks of rapid-fire consultancy directly post-Monocle, I joined Arup as a senior consultant in their urban planning business across the Australasian region. A month in, and I'm enjoying it hugely. I'm particularly proud to be working for Arup, a company I've long admired for both their work and their approach to work.

For those that don't know, Arup are one of the world's largest multidisciplinary design firms: 10,000 strong across nearly 90 offices worldwide, comprising designers, engineers, planners, business consultants etc. Multidisciplinary working is at the heart of the firm, and the strong philosophical foundations are derived originally from the founder, Danish engineer and philosopher Ove Arup.

Their roll-call of buildings and built infrastructure is almost the stuff of legend. It's really impossible to list the projects - but a few personal highlights would be: Highpoint 1, Spa Green Estate, Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Seattle Public Library, Casa da Musica in Porto, CCTV and National Aquatic Centre in Beijing, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the Oresund Bridge, the Dongtan project outside Shanghai ... and many projects here in Sydney, from the small but perfectly formed Andrew Boy Charlton Pool to perhaps the greatest building of the 20th century, the Sydney Opera House.

I sit within the urban planning business here, and in a nutshell I'm responsible for figuring out how information and communications technologies (ICT) will shape future cities. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, but would include urban informatics and pervasive or ubiquitous computing, how to shape or 'landscape' informational services and products within the context of both masterplanning and urban design, the various relationships between data and built fabric, information visualisation and urban design, building new platforms and interfaces for urban design, changing design processes and the knock-on onto organisations (including our own), exploring how we can engender sustainable behaviour via feedback on behaviour, advising on urban policy for innovation and ICT, urban renewal via creative industries etc. etc.

I'm currently exploring a few ideas in particular, such as extrapolating and aggregating Building Information Modelling (BIM) techniques up to the city level - to form a kind of 'City Information Modelling' (CIM). Taken with the feedback from urban informatics, this could then extend the design process out over the true life-cycle of the project, including inhabited and adapted, which would mean a four-dimensional modelling process taking into account the living city, or a '4D Urbanism'. You'll note these concepts are still a bit slippery, to say the least.

Best of all, I get to try to do this in the context of real live urban development projects - which is a true test, with very real constraints, but the opportunity to really make a difference. (For a small portion of my time, I'm also working across some of our Foresight, Innovation and Incubation work with colleagues in London, particularly the Drivers of Change programme. No doubt, I'll also be doing some knowledge management and comms work from time-to-time, too.)

I'm hugely excited by the promise of all this. About 13 years after I started exploring the impact of ICT on cities and vice versa - with the Northern Quarter Network in Manchester, UK - I've come full circle. As ever, I'll try to share what I can here, in this semi-public sketchbook or journal, and now the dust is settling a bit I'll attempt to publish a little more regularly again. OK! Enough admin.

Jobs at Monocle

Please excuse the work-related post. Just a quick note that there are a couple of vacancies at Monocle at the moment, working across the magazine and website. Both jobs are based at our London HQ in Marylebone. Drop a line to the people named below:

Photo editor
Monocle is looking for an experienced photo editor for a nine-month contract starting in March. We are looking for someone who understands the style of the magazine and is happy to work with our existing team of photographers as well as finding new talent around the world. You will need to be able to commission everything from news to fashion and be willing to work irregular hours, including some weekends. This is a fast-paced, demanding and rewarding position. Send applications, including a CV, to Rose Percy at this email address: rp at monocle dot com. Closing date for applications is 14 January 2008.

Producer, Monocle Web
Commercially-orientated web producer required to continue the development of Monocle.com, with editorial responsibilities across the website, and particular responsibility for creating and procuring bespoke advertising and sponsorship opportunities, and with potential for syndicating Monocle's services onto mobile and television platforms. As ever, we're looking for innovative ideas, beyond simple sponsorship and banner advertising. This key role would entail developing such ideas, representing Monocle at pitches with clients, working alongside our advertising team, so commercially-orientated experience is a must. In-depth knowledge of both broadcast and new media industries is ideally required, with particular emphasis on emerging models for sponsorship and advertising. The successful candidate will have a passion for new media and share Monocle's mission to 'raise the bar' in terms of quality for online editorial. Send applications, including a a CV, to Dan Hill at this email address: dh at monocle dot com.

Metafiltered

Welcome Metafilter readers, and thank you. If you're wondering where to start, here's a fully subjective top 20. A list of starting points: popular, recent, favourite or otherwise.

Alternatively, check the Postopolis! category, for a series of reports from the architecture and urbanism-orientated event I helped organise earlier this year at New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture.

1. Design. Architecture. Football
2. Two possible Google Earth extensions: time and sound
3. La Tonnara and the Chamber of Death; Arabian floating architecture in Sicily
4. The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture
6. Indiscreet music
7. The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia
8. Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona
9. Suspended at a junction in time: Australia, Silent Running, The Drowned World and the University of Queensland
10. Trenitalia, travel writing and total design
11. The city as destructive system: wildfires, Dresden and the case against urban sprawl
12. Movements in Modern Media
13. Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde [aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun]
14. Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality
15. Gangs Of New York, World-Building
16. New Musical Experiences
17. Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability
18. "China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795", Royal Academy, London
19. 'Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006' exhibition
20. 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno

There's a fuller list here, should you have any bandwidth left.

A birth, in 13 places

The bare facts are these: Oliver Kornel Hill, born 22.47 on 12 July, weighing in at 4.02 kilos and measuring 55cm. Mum and baby both doing well. Overjoyed is too feeble a word to describe the way we feel, and it's near impossible to comprehend, let alone describe, what it really means. So I won't even try.

Yet I have something to write about here. I feel I should, but I'm uncertain as to whether it fits. There's no editor, no paying readership, and no particular external constraints or raison d'être for City of Sound. Nothing I have to live up - or down - to. So what's fair game for the blog? Do I say anything about Oliver here? It's not exactly on-topic, but really, who cares about that? And yet, if I'd like this thing to, say, contribute to the advancement of knowledge even in some tiny way, my personal details will usually be persona non grata. I've lobbed this conundrum back and forth in my mind, like Nadal vs Nadal on clay courts, and admittedly on long sleep-deprived walks with Oliver, where there is little other obvious stimuli kicking around. What to do? Geoff Dyer, in his hilarious and brilliant 'Out of Sheer Rage', expresses this inconvenient problem best:

"There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose. It's easy to make choices when you have things hampering you - a job, kids' schools - but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable."

Intolerable. I'd long ago decided that City of Sound wouldn't have much 'personal editorial' on it. I don't particularly appreciate weblogs that do, and with the lighter social software of Facebook et al around, there are other places for that now. But of course, personality surfaces all the time. Indeed, trying to suppress it would be a little like trying to prevent a rising water table in the Midlands. My personality is evident in the curation of subject matter, and the way I write, no matter what. But I generally steer clear of personal details. it's not That Kind Of Blog.

If asked to define it, City of Sound is for the serious/playful, imagined/factual discussion of cities and places, architecture and design, one way or another. (Perhaps the most important aspect of that previous sentence is the "one way or another" part.) Given that, something occurs to me as a way of noting Oliver Kornel Hill's arrival on this planet.

People say - until it's ultimately tiresome and essentially robbed of meaning - that having a baby "changes everything". I'm not going to go into what that means to us - that's personal - but I thought I would write a little about how the places and spaces that were familiar to us had begun to warp and twist in entirely new ways, and how I experienced new, unfamiliar places as a result of the birth.

And yet, as Dyer later suggests in his study of D.H. Lawrence, all writing - particularly note-based writing, which this is -  is about yourself as much as a subject. And this is a good thing, at its best generating lightening flashes of insight on subject as well as self that the false objectivity of academia cannot approach. He relates Rebecca West's notes on Lawrence's penchant for writing about a place as soon as he got there, without even experiencing it:

"Fresh off the train: "tapping out an article on the state of Florence at that moment without knowing enough about it to make his views of real value'. Later she realised that 'he was writing about the state of his own soul at that moment, which ... he could render only in symbolic terms; and the city of Florence was as good a symbol as any other."

I can't promise any searing insights into "state of my soul", and I'm clearly no Lawrence, but these pieces, roaming around aspects of architecture, history, service design, loose definitions of London, contemporary prams, hospital wards and nurses uniforms, music and such-like, are certainly in response to Oliver's birth.

So this is the story of his birth, our birth, across the 13 or so places that define it for me. But it's a story of those places too, the buildings that shape them and the things that shape those buildings. As I began to see the familiar in new ways, I jotted down these notes. (Almost all of the accompanying photos are taken with my mobile phone, also due to new circumstances. Please excuse the low quality. But then again, if buildings don't look good on scratchy mobile phone pics, then they're probably not any good. The imageability of the buildings, as Kevin Lynch would have it, should come through.)

I realised half-way through that it's also a farewell to many of those places. We're leaving for Australia in late August, and so I'm increasingly aware that I'm walking around Bloomsbury for the last few times. So this is also a farewell to a patch of London where I've felt most at home, a place I know inside-out and barely at all.

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

Normal service will be resumed shortly

I'm in the middle of an intense bit of development at work – the beginnings of which will be revealed on Monocle.com within the next week or so – and so struggling to post here in the meantime.

But I'll shortly finish off my Postopolis! write-ups. A few more sessions and a summary to go. Thanks for all the kind words about the event, and the write-ups thus far. You can see all the Postopolis! blog entries here, plus the Flickr pool and YouTube videos are still good value.

If you're new to City of Sound, there are some selected posts here, including recent efforts on an attempt to combine Ballard, Australia, the University of Queensland, Silent Running and climate change, a review of the Colani show at the Design Museum, and what Geoff described as a "nice tuna post".

Back soon with more of the same.

In the meantime, here's an architectural competition in Russia - PermMuseumXXI:

"The Centre of Contemporary Architecture in Russia announces a two-stage open architecture competition (with international participation) for the most innovativearchitectural concept for a museum centre in the city of Perm in the Russian Federation (PermMuseumXXI)."

Jury includes Arata Isozak and Peter Zumthor. Go for it.

See also another in Columbus Ohio - Columbus ReWired:

"International Transit Design Competition. This IDEAS competition is intended to solicit innovative design solutions and dialogue about the possibilities for the role of public transportation in Columbus, OH focusing on the passenger facilities and transit modes that will re-connect citizens, renew neighborhoods and spark economic development."

And congrats to Sir Peter Cook. And to Russell for being Interesting2007.

Back shortly.

Vacancy now closed: Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast

UPDATE: Vacancy now closed.

Please excuse the work-related post, but we're hiring. Do pass this on to anyone/anywhere you think might be interested.

Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast
    
Monocle.com is the broadcast arm of Monocle, producing high-quality audio and video related to subjects covered in the magazine. The website, and corresponding mobile channels, aim to 'raise the bar' for internet-based video, both in terms of editorial and production values.
    
Monocle is looking for a highly motivated, skilled all-rounder to join our core team in London, helping with the creation of both the website and the new broadcast-led formats it carries.
    
Main responsibilities:

• Planning and executing the logistics of broadcasts, and broadcast acquisitions.
  
• Creation of audio/video material for Monocle.com and its related interactive channels.
  
• Editing and encoding of Monocle broadcast content.

Required experience: 

• Experience of creating and producing high quality audio-video material.
  
• Experience with Final Cut Pro, within a Mac-based digital video environment.
  
• Basic video production skills (handling cameras, mics etc.).
  
• Basic skills in Photoshop, Illustrator etc.
  
• An in-depth understanding of contemporary web content and internet-based and mobile platforms.
  
• Good understanding of international current affairs, business, culture, design, as covered in Monocle.
  
• Languages an advantage.

Reporting to Director of Web & Broadcast (that's me), and working as part of Monocle's core team at our London HQ in Marylebone.
     
All applications and enquiries to dh [at] monocle [dot] com. Thanks.

Monocle

As 2006 draws to a close, I'll just take a moment to mention and acknowledge a fairly major change of circumstances for me (one of many I could add, all good.) As of February 2007, I'll be leaving the BBC and starting as Director of Web and Broadcast at Monocle.

Here's the concept, taken from the pre-launch Monocle website:

"We believe it's time for a new, global, European-based media brand. With a keen focus, strong reporting, sharp wit and more classic approach to design, we’ve dubbed our venture Monocle. At the core there's a monthly magazine delivering the most original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design. Alongside, there's a web-based broadcast component covering the same areas through a variety of bulletins, mini-documentaries and talk formats. Focused on informing and entertaining an international audience of disillusioned readers, listeners and viewers, it is our intention to create a community of the most interested and interesting people in the world."

"Edited out of London, Monocle is staffed by a team pulled from the world's leading news outlets, magazines and broadcasters. Conceived by Wallpaper* founder and Financial Times columnist Tyler Brûlé, the launch team calls on some of his old alumni and new talent from The Independent, the BBC, branches of Condé Nast and a host of other news outlets. Versed in politics, popular culture, business affairs, media, architecture and design, the editorial team will cover the world from its London hub and dedicated bureaux in Tokyo, Zürich and New York. Monocle will be driven by offering original, never-before-seen content to an audience of well-heeled, intelligent opinion leaders around the world."

So I'll be in charge of that "web-based broadcast component", helping create innovative, distinctive web and broadcast companions to the magazine, which aim to have all the quality, confidence and professionalism of that print incarnation of Monocle, whilst taking advantage of their own inherent strengths. I've seen the magazine emerge over the last few months and believe me, it's going to be really bloody good. Seeing magazine professionals in action is somewhat awe-inspiring - you realise that the last hundred years or so of development has honed that process to both fine art and streamlined technique - and we'll have to be quick out of the blocks in early February to start creating a suitable array of digital cohorts.

If you're familiar with cityofsound, you'll note that the broad content offering covers a great range of personal interests, from architecture and design through cities and culture via business and current affairs. If plans develop in the right directions throughout 2007, I hope to be contributing content as well as orchestrating the infrastructure, particularly focusing on Oceania, but that's another story ... First steps involve thinking through how magazines, broadcast and web can play off each other in creative, harmonious and meaningful fashion. Initially that will mean a fair bit of wireframing in Omnigraffle, whilst sketching idents for the short-form documentaries we'll be commissioning and working out a production schedule ... Wish me luck. It's going to be fascinating, and I'm very excited about the chance to help create a ground-breaking product of such quality and distinction.

I will of course miss the BBC hugely, especially the team I've built up over the five years I've been there. I'm proud of the good work we've accomplished and I'll miss every one of the good people I've had the privilege of working with. One could always achieve more, but I see the platforms emerging, the thinking changing positively, and some imaginative, progressive strategies in place, being implemented by some great people. More on all that to follow, but I think the old place is in pretty good shape, and I wish it all the best.

But there's always a time to move on. Queries to do with the new project should be mailed to dh [at] monocle dot com; stuff for the blog is still via the email address in the right-hand column.

Starters for ten

I had to pull together a list of relevant cityofsound posts the other day, and subsequently thought it might make i) a useful introductory index for new readers, and ii) a cheap blog post. 

So below, some popular or defining posts at cityofsound. They all tend to gravitate towards recurring themes of cities, architecture, design, media and culture - often colliding in the same post, say on the imagined connections between travel writing and design, or football and architecture - but here's an attempt at filing them discretely nonetheless.

Design practice

• Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability (A summary of thinking around adaptive design and hackability, and the relationship between architecture and interaction design.)   
• Adaptation, personalisation and self-centred design (A chapter from a report for the UK Government on the relationship between user research and prototyping cultures)
• How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust? (On whether we can build trust through indicating the equivalent of physical wear and tear into interfaces)
• "How the computer can help the designer", New Scientist, 1964 (Some scans from the mid-60s on the potential of the computer as design tool)
• The New Rationalism (Early post on a design approach exemplified by Naota Fukasawa)
• Design. Architecture. Football (Imagined overlaps in approach between Dutch Total Football, architecture and design practice)
• Starflyer (and service), Schiphol (and soccer), Stansted (and signage) (On service design in airlines, signage in airports, and another overlap between football systems and Schiphol airport)
• Trenitalia, travel writing and total design (Imagined overlap between observing cultures and places in travel writing and design practice)
• Insanely great, or just good enough? (A piece for Icon/Core77 on the shortcomings in the iPod design around adaptation)

Media

• Movements in Modern Media (Presentation on managing the contradictions in designing modern media events and programmes of activity; metaphors suggesting strategies for success in an out-of-control environment)
• Why 'Lost' is genuinely new media (On the new strategies for media suggested by the US TV programme 'Lost')
• Ripples, or "The Social Life of a Broadcast" (How to represent broadcast media in a new media environment)
• Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde [aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun] (Review of the Guardian redesign, compared with other contemporary newspaper and magazine design)
• Work: quick review of 2005 at the BBC (Round-up of a year's work at the coal face of BBC new media and radio services)
• On podcasting itself (How podcasting relates to broadcasting and its qualities as media)
• The Fall and Rise of the Magazine Cover? (Design of magazine covers, via Esquire and The Economist and featuring scans of The Independent's Talk of the Town supplement)
• iPods and the wireless (Re-connecting with contextual information around music, via a suggested mini-projector peripheral for the iPod)

Games

• Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality (Grand Theft Auto's simulation of Los Angeles, mapped onto photographs of the real city, via Michael Mann's Collateral, Los Angeles Plays Itself, City of Quartz and others)
• Modeling urban behaviour amidst networked ultraviolence (Early review of Grand Theft Auto and creating a sense of the city)
• Gangs Of New York, World-Building (Creating worlds in games and film, via Scorcese and GTA, again)

Music

• New Musical Experiences (Lengthy presentation on the current state of music experiences, in context of history of recorded music experience, and issues around metadata, cover art, interfaces and so on)
• Designing for shuffling (On interfaces optimised for shuffling as a way of listening, drawing from record decks)
• How Devices Learn (How to build products, specifically for music, which learn from user behaviour)
• Bad Metadata Is Killing Music (The importance of metadata in keeping music, specialist and otherwise, relevant)
• Music's Rich Facets (The different angles and relationships involved in browsing around music)

Architecture

• Two possible Google Earth extensions: time and sound (Suggesting the ability to scroll time backwards in Google Earth, and listen in to the sound of the earth)
• The Smithsons and adaptive architecture (Legendary British architects and modular adaptation)
• Flora, fauna, pixels and paper (Paper architecture, urban:rural interplay and the virtual New York generated in 'King Kong')
• Tales of two cities imagined in music: Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine (On imagining cities via music and sound)

Cities, places, buildings

• The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia (A somewhat epic post on my delight/shock at experiencing the physical and natural aspects of Australia, drawing from historical accounts on experiencing the New World, plus Robert Hughes)
• Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona (How aspects of Barcelona adapt and develop, as flexible, responsive urban form)
• Urbis: Imagining The Modern City - And A New Kind Of Museum (My work on the 'Imagining the modern city' exhibit within the Urbis museum, Manchester)
• The theft of Bedford Square Close to the madding crowd (on St. Giles, London) (Photos of an incident outside Centre Point lead to a discussion on the history of the St. Giles district)
• Bleak House Without A Foggy Day In London Town (Discussing the TV adaptation of Dickens' Bleak House and Victorian London)
• Savile Row and tailoring urban fabric (Evisu's arrival in Savile Row and the changing nature of cultural industries in that street)
• Daily Express building, Fleet Street (A tour of the spectacular art deco entrance/exterior of the Daily Express, with reference to Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop')
• Swiss Cottage Library, London (London Open House enables a visit to the restored Basil Spence English modernist masterpiece)
• Frank Gehry's MIT Stata Center, Cambridge Mass. (A 'review' of Gehry's Stata Center at MIT)
• Senate House, University of London (Photo-tour of Charles Holden's Senate House building, with reference to George Orwell)
• New Islington, New Hope (Photo-tour of the New Islington development in Manchester)
• Brunswick Centre, London (The redeveloped brutalist housing complex in Bloomsbury)
• Koolhaas/Balmond/Arup Serpentine Pavilion, 2006 (Quick review of the 2006 Serpentine Pavilion)
• Boston/Cambridge Diary (Various articles on Boston and Cambridge, USA, with historical detail)
• Shanghai Diary (Please note: the Shanghai diaries were written for this blog by Justin O'Connor)

Policy

• Design Thinkbelt (Possible future of the Design Museum in London)
• Industrial Policy for Creativity (In response to George Cox's report on creativity in British industry)

Reviews

• Jonathan Raban at London Review Bookshop (Raban gives a reading from his novel 'Waxwings' and discusses his writing in general)
• Stephen Gill and photographing the everyday invisible (Photography by Stephen Gill)
• Barbican: This Was Tomorrow (Exhibition about the history of the Barbican estate, London)
• New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York (A book which retraces the steps of Berenice Abbott's legendary street photography collection, 'Changing New York')
• But Beautiful, by Geoff Dyer (Jazz, photography, history and fictional biography)
• Archigram, Design Museum, London (Exhibition on the influential '60s British architects)
• The city as exhibition (The 'Art Deco' exhibition at the V&A, London, and how exhibitions could integrate or dissolve into the city itself)
• "China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795", Royal Academy, London (Art and craft from the Qing dynasty emperors)
• Modernism is abroad, generally
• (On the buzz around the 'Modernism' exhibition at the V&A)
• HyperCard RIP (Reflecting on influential, discontinued Apple software)
• 'Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006' exhibition, The Barbican, London (Radical or utopian city and architectural visions)

South and North

A quick update. I'm just back from a blissful month in Australia, and having spent last weekend uploading the thousand or so photos to Flickr (Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Stradbroke Island) I'm now left with the challenge of facing down thousands of words in half-formed notes. Essentially, I found Australia enchanting indeed and hope to find numerous ways of saying that shortly.

I also found it fairly liberating to be essentially offline for a month, only immersing myself in Robert Hughes's imperious The Fatal Shore (one of the greatest books I've ever read), the new Peter Carey and the previous, as well as his entry in Bloomsbury's excellent The Writer and the City series, 30 Days in Sydney: A wildly distorted account.

I should mention a few random things I did chance across over the last month: Adam Richardson's new blog and particularly his useful and elegant contribution to the adaptive architecture/'unfinished' theme: Emilio Ambasz and the Poetry of the Unfinished; I did occasionally head online to clear increasingly ridiculous amounts of trackback spam from this blog, so I'm now turning trackbacks off; check The Necks gig on the new ABC (Australian) show 'Set' (related: the lovely new album by The Catholics, Gondola); see also a free version of SketchUp; and finally, as they say, official announcements of some of the strategic work I've had my head down on for most of the last year at the BBC, not least the 'Beyond Broadcast' project within the BBC's Creative Future initiative, and now working on design and navigation for iPlayer and BBC 2.0. More to follow there, I would imagine. But next up, now I'm back in the frozen North, a few more words about adaptation, architecture and Australia.

And with that, I hope I've kickstarted the blog again.

Away...

... for a week or so, on long-overdue holiday, in Spain. Back soon.