Last night we spent the evening at Tine Bech’s + DCRC’s + PM Studio’s tracing light event.

The event was designed to carry out a public consultation using play. So, no never-ending online forms, questionnaires with leading questions and ratty ladies in the street. Basically, get a load of people together, tell them to think about what the space around means to them, then go out and draw it in fun light shapes. Which… was really fun!

Here’s some of team PM Studio’s pics from tracinglight.co.uk,

Smokers

Watershed cinema

It was also a pretty jammy’ night, a great chance to chat with great Bristol artists, business people & photographers. Never mind heading to the golf course for business, Thought Den do it next to the bar, create some art and do research on new media practices too. Bloody brilliant.

Here’s some more things other groups made, and to find out more, contact Tine Bech

The Essential 360 Storytelling Lab is the most advanced and comprehensive short courses in multi-platform media in the world and will be run by experienced cross-platform dramatists Rik Lander and Hazel Grian.

And it’s happening right now in the Pervasive Media Studio!

They’re broadcasting live from London’s National film School and all I can hear from our Thought Den hostdesk is lots of laughing, a very ‘Hazel’ presenter on the screen (she enjoys colourful bubbly characters) and lots of talk about Tweet games.

Wonderful, BBC take note! To learn a bit more from the PM Studio blog, http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/events/mon-22022010-1200am

Things seem to take longer these frosty-morning-creaky-limbed days. Apologies for the delay in posting, but finally we have some lovely videos to shout about.

The first is very exciting – we were commissioned by the BBC to run a workshop at the Pervasive Media Studio back in October. The brief was to give the hottest new BBC design recruits a taste of pervasive thinking. What better company to run the event than the den thinkers. It was a fun day with talks from the likes of Tom Melamed of Calvium, Luke Jerram and a stand-up brainstorm session on the PM’s monstrous and curving white board. Nick Johnston (Hatboy to most and many) kindly videoed and edited the highlights, so please plug in for 3 minutes of Thought Den magic…And Dan’s hair looks much better this time, eh!?

Another somewhat delayed announcement follows – the igfest 09 highlights reel is in! Geoff Taylor has been hard at it in the edit suite, Simon Johson has been on the phone to his copyright lawyers and I’ve been keeping interested parties happy with taster emails packed with images. But the wait is over, moving picture technology has triumped, gorge at will. What an awesome event it is. Roll on 2010.

igfest 09 from Igfest on Vimeo.

With seemingly the most popular tweet over the past few weeks revolving around spare Google Wave invites, you wouldn’t be the only one to anticipate a social media revolution behind the corner of the latest must have. However, I hope that its not just Thought Den who have been fairly let down by the much overhyped Google Wave…

• Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration

• “Within a Wave conversation users can communicate and work together with text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

What is a Wave?

A Wave is effectively just a group conversation like you are used to having within Skype or MSN. However with Wave, any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants into any part the process.

“A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” This is the most innovative part of Google Wave as no other application out there allows you to see a participants content update in real-time (IMO this is more of a selling point than the actual complete ‘Wave’)

The not so good bits

Although the only Thought Den experience of ‘Waving’ so far within has been between Rhys and Dan, within a much larger wave with dozens of employees i’m sure it would prove to be extremely hectic and confusing.

With the time taken for each user to understand the process of the Wave, and to build up an etiquette that will allow for a conversation that can take place in a more linear fashion, it seems at this point more beneficial to just have a conference call or use Skype chat. Although, with the product being open-source, i’m sure that there will be a plethora of apps released that are able to solve some of these initial problems.

Where could Thought Den benefit from Waving?

Sharing a PSD or Design in real-time between designers and developers, who could then discuss/edit/add to the design collaboratively become useful within the design community.

Furthermore, with a small number of users on a brainstorming exercise this approach could be more beneficial and structured than just passing around a long chain of emails with the latest versions of a document.

The real-time functionality (e.g collaborative zooming and positioning on maps) offers the most potential and will more than likely be a major player in future communication tools, although like most aspects of Wave, needs some tweaking.

Summary

Even though as of yet it hasn’t quite got the mix right, Google should be given brownie points for it’s attempt to provide a new slant on the modern format of social collaboration.

All in all however, the confusing complexity, steep learning curve and influx of functionality where simplicity is needed make for a generally unsatisfactory first experience. Due to the brand power of ‘Google’ there will be plenty of advocates that will prevent Wave’s demise; although for the time being it will create more of a ripple than a wave whilst everyone is still left wondering

‘What do I do with it’?

Probably, he’s gotta have something interesting to distract himself away from the endless chatter of his babbling twitter-bird buddy down the pub.

So Yes, he would. And right next to it, he would so have the app being built by Calvium, the new company whose launch-bash Thought Den were all invited to last night.

Thanks =)

They’re a Phoenix launching from the ashes of a global corporation and are utilising their 70 years of shared experience for “making tools for enabling others to build exciting mobile apps based on sensors and context”.

The party was ace, fuelled with flowing champagne, tasty pizza from the Firehouse Rottisere and lots of chatty people. Also, they ran a game (as Bristol igfesters would!). Where each attendee had to twit their thoughts on where they thought the word “Calvium” came from in history. Here are Thought Den’s entries,

@thoughtben

@dancourse

…which we didn’t quite win with, but check them all out at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23calviumroots

As for the future, we can’t wait to be BETA testing the platform of an application which is clearly going to be attracting some bigger attention.

tom talking

phil's intro

jo laughing

clare tweeting

clapping

Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”

Subtlemob site

The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.

And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”

Exciting week or what! Thought Den have a new employee Rhys, a Halloween surprise for everyone later this week, but also we’re trialling a new Bluetooth box with the Old Vic!

This project is in conjunction with the Bristol’s Old Vic and is aimed at enhancing peoples’ theatre experience, post-show.

thoughtden-bluetooth-box

Specifically we will be using it on Luci-Gorrell-Barnes piece, The Tragic and disturbing Tale of Little Lupin to pass out a phone wolf ring-tone to the attendees.

However, there’s even more exciting future potential for a few more ideas based with the theatre, especially since our RNCM piece.

Also, there’s the potential if you feel your event could do with a more pervasive edge to it.

Thought Den are very proud to have launched the new subtlemob 09 site. For those who don’t know what a subtlemob is yet (which could be most of us!), here’s what Duncan Speakman (the producer) has to say about them.

‘as if it were the last time’ invites you to take part in a secret event this November. You’ve seen the people freeze in train stations and the mass pillow fights, well this will be a more subtle experience.’

Thought Den were involved with the (more…)

There’s been a lot happening over here at Thought Den towers recently.

New offices, more desks, new work and most most most importantly (to Dan)… a new kick ass mofo of a cloud hosting server.

That’s right, as technical director, I care enough about servers to write a blog post about it. “Yaaaaawn” I hear you e-mail, “I don’t care, how much nippy’er your Drupal sites are, how much faster my flash game loads and how blindingly fast your web apps will be now. Big YAWN”.

Then that’s cool.

Just over the next week don’t ask me about the Rackspace cloud sites package we’ve got.

Rackspace Cloud Hosting

Rackspace Cloud Interface

– Excited geek Dan, over and out –

Almost 100 pics here of the festival we can’t stop talking about. We’ll be quiet now. But not before congratulating Team Rubber on their Bristol’s Biggest Player win!