Over recent weeks, I have noticed docking stations for the London Transport Cycle Hire scheme popping up all over the place. Coverage in central London is impressive – there’s 400-odd such docking stations in total, ready to serve 6,000 bekes across the capital. The pricing for the scheme is aimed at journeys less than 30 minutes so, once you’ve paid the daily access charge, the first half an hour’s rental is free and you can make as many 30-minute trips between docking stations as you like without paying any more (provided a bike is available, of course). If you want to make longer journeys between docking stations, the costs can mount up to £50 for the day but, given you could cycle from one end of the docking station zone to the other in less than 30 minutes, it really is an unlikely and easily avoided situation.

So the only snag is bike availability in peak times – I’ll be very interested to see how this scheme takes off.
I’m certainly signing up. If I’m ever caught out without my trusty Birdy folding bike, I know how I’ll be getting about!

Thanks to cyclehireapp.com for the map visualisations of bike docking locations data from TFL – the  bike rental map on the London transport site doesn’t (yet) work!

How lovely are these park stories published by Royal Parks? There’s one for each on London’s Royal Parks, and there perfect for a quick read in your lunch hour. The covers designs have a lovely paper cut feel to them. They would be a bargin at £2 each, if i didn’t feel compelled to buy the whole set! There’s some readings coming up in each of the parks.

I’ve been knitting oyster card holders (on the tube, of course, nothing like poking a banker in the ribs with your knitting needles in the morning).

I met up with some old school friends this weekend, to have a go at a Shoot London Event at Tate modern. Each team was given four phrases to represent in a photo. Then after a looooooong wait, they were stitched together to make a modern day Hansel and Gretel story. These are some of our photos and some of my favorites. We all got together to spell the final frame.

We went along to my favorite This Happened so far last night. Great venue in the bfi and some wonderful projects on show. Thought i’d share my highlights:

Glassworks (who offered me work experience back in the day, which i turned down, like a chump) showed their experimental project,
HeartWorks. Designed as a learning tool for students, Heartworks is a very accurate simulation of preforming and reading ultrasounds on the heart.
The team talked about the process they went through to model such a complex internal organ, and how the project may be changing the business that usually produces CG graphic for Film and TV. I think it’s pretty amazing that this team have been allowed to go off and do some thing totally experimental and so utterly different from the company’s main offering.

My highlight, however, was definatly michael cross and his scarily lowfi machine that allows you to walk on water. He igorned the fact that walking on water is impossible, and went and made it anyway. The result is beautiful, scary and rather brilliant.

We had our first munchies breakfast this morning, with a little group of folk from harvest. The brief was simple, just chat about our creative ideas and eat some grub.

We did both.

This week conversation focused mostly on oyster cards and oyster card holders. Why are they so ugly? How come you only ever see ikea ads on them? Why do they fall apart? Why wont TFL let us hack them?

I also showed off my knitted oyster card holder i just finished. Plus, I’ve got a breakfast challenge planned for next week…

This weeks harvest breakfast, we all discovered a little bit about the basics of character design, and saw how we can make something with a lot of character out of simple shapes.

In other words, we made a mess with some glue then ate. Is there a better way to start a day?

Over the past 5-8 years the trend has been for companies to move services online in order to reduce costs streamline business processes and attract wider audiences. Is it time that online and in-store met in the middle of the road?

Moneysupermarket.com may have started this movement with their interactive shop window on Oxford Street at Christmas time. The window allowed shoppers to quickly and easily compare prices between stores whilst shopping.

With a little bit of creative thinking there could be bundles of opportunities for online services to appear on the high street:

• Design, save, share and compare your own bathroom/kitchen/living room within the furniture department of a department store
• Use mash-up technology to find products and stock counts when in-store
• Save gondola space in entertainment stores by using the online catalogue to browse music before buying the physical products
• Make more of the valuable space taken up by fitting rooms and reduce the annoying fitting room queues by using photo sharing sites to try on clothes and makeup

Both Tesco and Argos do a good job of blending their online experience with in-store due to their ‘order online and pick up in-store’ offering… but there is still the opportunity to take retail to the next ‘interactive’ level.

I'm now the proud owner of a pair of huge knitting needles, from wool 'n' boats
I'm completely in love with them. They come up to my shoulders and lead to several interesting conversations with strangers at the bar and bus stop last night.

My first giant knitting attempt at fabrications produced this

Its a kind of collar / wrap thingy. Ok, not sure when or where exactly I (or anyone else for that matter) would wear such a thing, but knitting with strips of fabric (in this case lace) is an absolute revelation to me.

As is casting on this way

Rather than this way


This is the sort of thing that is very exciting for my inner knitting geek.

For some big knitting inspiration, check out:
Sebastian Schönheit's massive knitted rope fabric

Just a quick note about the exciting things people spoke about at This Happened on Friday night.

This time around we were tucked away in the corner of the Tim Walker exhibition - (photos of multicoloured kittens and this really cool giant glove) at the Design Museum, which was good because we could see and hear everything.

Yuri Suzuki spoke about scalextric style record player, from his latest project "physical value of sound". A little car with a needle on the underside followed a track made from recycled vinyl cut at 45 degree angles.



He combined the elements of two toys to create something that had a great tactile and playful quality. Would be great to see this taken further, with one car on vocals, one on drums etc. I think it would be great in-store in a trendy record shop or something. I liked the fact that he showed the last minute breakthroughs and the fact that they finally got it working about 4 days before the show!


Dominic Harris from Cinimod Studio spoke about making a UFO that flew over the Polish city of Gdansk.



Essentially a giant plate shaped thing dangling from a terrifyingly vintage helicopter covered in LED's, the Gdansk UFO is a surreal and wondrous thing. To me it looks pretty magical. Apparently YouTubers agree, as many seem to think its a hoax!