I’m just returning from an inspirational three days in Pilsen (Plzen) in the Czech Republic after taking part in a British Council project called the Urban Ideas Bakery.

First, some photos:

The idea behind these ‘bakeries’ is that it is an opportunity for a group of interesting people with a wide background and range of experiences to come to a city, and come up with ideas for ways to tackle particular issues that city might be facing and work with local people to see the ideas realised.

Pilsen is a city of 165,000 people and sits as the first major town on the Berounka river. It’s a beautiful place in many areas – there are well renovated 15th century buildings and the area by the river reminded me of the Norfolk Broads, even though it’s in a semi urban environment.

But one of the main issues that the city faces according to the local people we met is that while the city has these fantastic assets, the people who live there take them for granted and don’t make use of the public spaces as much as they could do. And with the city having the title of European City of Culture 2015 within its grasp ( it’s down to the last three ) we were asked to look at some short, medium and long term solutions to freeing up these amazing spaces and inspiring or encouraging them to be used.

So on day one we experienced the city at its best, arriving as we did during the Czech equivalent of Birmingham’s Arts Fest – a community organised free event of performance, art, theatre, music and so on.  Many roads were closed and the city was full of surreal and surprising culture clashes round every corner.

One minute it’s Gypsy beatboxing, the next a choral rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody… in the capital of Bohemia… by Bohemians. One minute breakdancing to nineties Ice T played not on vinyl but on latest laptop DJ software, the next Norwegian-inspired black metallist lookalikes playing what sounded like Reggae.

But it all seemed to be perfectly normal, so we accepted it at face value and the newly arrived “international bakers” got to know each other over an equally surreal dinner at a restaurant that was channelling the famous Meaning of Life Mr. Creosote restaurant scene mixed with faded-glory photographs from the thirties.

We had a diverse group – artists, designers, architects, academics, political policy experts, teachers, planners, trouble makers, students… and the following day we were set the challenge of how we might go about addressing this issue of the public space of the city.

In Czech language.

In retrospect it marks a lot of sense – despite English bring spoken by most of the people there, it would be quite rude to arrive in a city and expect the event to be run in a foreign language. So we had translators, earpieces and we had to navigate difficult and complex conversations with a certain level of mutual misunderstanding. I was impressed we didn’t get frustrated with it, and worked with the limitations.

We came up with some great ideas, many of which I’m sure won’t see the light of day, but here are a few of my favourites from my group. I was the only international baker round the table, so I put myself in the role of “hey, how about…” and trying to get everyone having ‘yes and…’ conversations. I fact – We had a few rules, but a ‘yes and…’ rule would probably trump the lot.

Here are a few of my favourites:

Skoda Drive-In

Pilsen is dominated by a large Skoda manufacturing plant. They don’t make cars, but parts for trams. It employed 20,000 people, many of whom are migrant workers from the countries. Pilsen also has a long love affair with American culture after the liberation by Patten, even naming one of it’s main steets after the USA.

So, we suggest organising a Drive In Movie night with a twist. All of the cars are examples of all of the different models of Skoda that have been made by the company and they are parked in rows in one of the main squares in front of a screen. People can walk up, buy a ticket, popcorn and a drink and watch one of the recent Oscar-winning Czech films from the comfort of the car. Simple, fun, and a talking point for years to come.

Rabbit Hutch Lights

I was sad to hear that the nickname for some of the housing areas on the outskirts of the city is “the rabbit hutches” – people living there work all day, just go home to sleep and many don’t have a feeling of pride about their local area.

Inspired by larger scale artworks some of us had seen in Berlin (?), we wanted to do something interesting using these stark brutalist tower blocks and create an animation in light of one of the disused ones. Space invaders, Tetris, the numbers 2015 being made up out of the pixellated grid of the windows… we were quite sure it would make for something interesting.

Other ones that emerged:

• A ferris wheel with a twist
• Barbigloo – barbecues in an igloo in winter

Maplzen

The bakery is always structured to offer short, medium an long- term solutions. And one idea that popped up in all four of the groups was “how about an interactive map?” – We were thinking of it as a psychogeographic online artwork collecting ideas, thoughts, emotions about the place. Others wanted a map that could visualize the potential of the river side, others still wanted to make a map that would store everyone’s opinions on how to regenerate the city or report problems a-la fixmystreet, and there was a more ambitious aim to somehow geolocate pretty much anything that anyone might want – kids activities, things to borrow, art closers.

Whilst I’m not sure that a map is going to solve all ills or to really help people find things they are looking for specifically (a blog does a good job here – hint!) I volunteered to create a quick web mashup of Google Maps with a simple database to store “stuff”.

That idea became mapilzn and we had it online in about 8hrs worth of work.

The source code, as usual is on github.

As @mikesten pointed out, what we’ve put together is a lightweight “locative notes” app that any city could now use for similar things. There were requests for videos/photos and so on which would be easy to add. But the issue here is – will people use it? For that it’s up to our local “bakers” and if they can keep up the momentum….

It sounds like cash won’t be the issue – the local council just committed to a nine percent annual spend on ‘culture’, but I’m not sure what that includes.

The Riverside

In the medium term a team of more planning-oriented people decided to put a plan together to demonstrate the possibility of what the city’s riverside areas could be. There’re lots of similarities to Newcastle – iron bridges, brownfield sites to reclaim and the potential here is huge go create amazing public areas by the river.

We presented all of our ideas in public in the evening of the second day and again al lunch on the third. The deputy mayor particularly liked our ideas about the riverside but it looks like there some long running issues behind it that will take time to resolve.  The map idea went well and it looks like our prototype might lead to something in future too.

There are more ideas that I haven’t added – I just want to get this up online, and I’m very tired after all the mental exercise!

For me this was a really inspiring few days that was hard work and good fun in equal measure but best of all I now have a handful of new friends from all over Europe.

I hope that in time we will see one or two of our ideas turn into real things and good luck to Pilsen in the Capital of Culture bid.

I’ve been invited over by the British Council to Pilsen in the Czech Republic for an Urban Ideas Bakery.

We’re looking at some of the issues the city faces – transport and public spaces being the ones that have emerged as the main ones – and finding short, medium and long-term solutions. Which means I’ll probably end up doing a quick web mashup or two prototyping some ideas.

There’s a Posterous where we’re putting our ideas – videos, photos, text; a liveblog and a facebook group (not that I really hang out there much any more!).

So far – a very inspiring project!

Today I did a quick pattern for my mum to use as a design motif for her Joined Up Languages conference that she’s running. Here it is:

I tried to find the smallest possible rectangle which would represent a single tesselation of the pattern and this is it. Now I’m wondering about what you could do with generative synthesis of patterns in the vein of Escher’s Metamorphosis work:

I dipped back into that world today and I’m really quite surprised at how easy it is to do things like this:

I used Structure Synth and Sunflow (both open source) to do this, with a little post-processing in Photoshop.

There are a bunch of other tools I’m looking to get back into and/or try out:

• Processing – pretty much the winning generative art tool. Requires Java. I did some stuff with this for the Big Picture a few years back.
• Processing.js – a javascript version of Processing for doing things like Algorithm Ink in a browser (not IE, though).
• Nodebox – a Python generative environment.

For some great examples of what you can do, there’s Flickr, openprocessing.org and Generator.X, which shows what this stuff looks like as an output from a 3D printer.

(Watch in HD if you have bandwidth)

Filmdash is an annual 48-hour film-making challenge where participants plan, script, shoot, edit and upload a film based on a theme and an individual brief to include certain lines of dialogue and a prop.

Last year I did a music video, but this year with the them of “Happiness”, I thought I’d do something a little different. Here’s “Grandma’s House”, which was exactly that – a trip to see my parents with the little ones.

I surprised a few people on Twitter on my birthday when I spent the evening doing this illustration for my kids.

It got me thinking that maybe most people have me down as one type of person when I think of myself as another. So anyway – I should probably start updating this site with some of the stuff I’ve been up to over the years and not really told anyone about, so this might be the first of a few ‘you might not know I do this kind of thing’ posts.

I’m blowing this up really big for the landing in our house.

“Raaargh!” said the little one while she was helping add the stars.

Introducing Pat, au ultra-lightweight Ruby gem for postcode->geolocation in the UK.

It’s easy to install:

sudo gem install pat

And easy to use. (Try it from the command-line with irb -r rubygems -r pat)

postcode = Pat.get(“SW1A 2TT”)

postcode["geo"]["lat"]
=> “51.502308″
postcode["geo"]["lng"]
=> “-0.124345″

Source code for Pat here.

I hope someone finds it useful.

Well, here’s a web application that does just that. It’s “beta” at the moment (took me 4hrs on a sunday night) and will be improving over the next few days:

It’s called Debillitated.

Here’s a screengrab:

I’ve posted the source code (which is a bit messy in places), and there are links at the bottom of the site to all of the tools I used to build it and get it online. Make your own!

I’m fundamentally against all of our internet connections being ’sniffed’ by our internet providers for potential copyright infringement, and against the government having any ability to disconnect people or to block websites.

The sudden arrival of Clause 18 without discussion in the Lords is the main problem. It allows web censorship at a government level by enabling them to force ISPs to block certain ‘locations’ (too many questions on what a ‘location’ might be).

This is censorship of the internet and is not a power that a UK government should wield in my opinion. Why is it okay to disconnect someone on suspicion of ‘copyright theft’ but not being discussed for far more serious crimes, for instance? What will happen when our local cafes can no longer offer free wifi, or a family member breaks the rules and shuts the internet account for the whole family? And why is okay for ‘rights holders’ to force expensive court costs onto people who are accused of filesharing without proof. Faced with thousands in costs many people will just roll over. The result – corporate censorship of dissenting voices. Wikileaks.org will be its first
casualty.

I’m encouraging everyone I know to write to their MPs to ask for a proper debate on this important issue – so far it’s only been through
the Lords (the non elected bit), and is currently going to be pushed through under ‘wash up’ on Tuesday without _any_ debate by our elected representatives.

So yes – I’m against the entire bill being put through in its current state because it is flawed and an irresponsible abuse of process to
push it through in the least democratic way possible by a government in its final throes.

Shame on them for treating all of us who understand how the internet works with such distain.