Posts Tagged ‘experiments’
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Robotify.me – what Labs are making next, and why.
26th April 12
Posted in makings
Author: James Mitchell, Strategist, BBH & BBH Labs
Every once in a while at Labs, we like, no, need to get our hands dirty. Oily, even. We like to make stuff that we can learn from – learn from the making of and learn from the interactions with. Robotify.me is one such experiment. And unlike most of our output, we’re going to share its whole gestation with you. Partly because we’re too excited not to, partly because we want you to shape the product.
Product? Yes. With robotify.me, we want to put a personal digital robot into the hands of every person who wants one.
Of all the companions you could make, why a robot? Why not a plant, an animal, even a pet rock? Because of the line robots walk (or fly), between the artificial and the human. They are not alive, but in the way the act we try to give them life. And this has bearing on the other half of the project.
Since our first aol email addresses, our first Second Life avatars, our geocities and myspace profiles, our first (and second) anonymous twitter accounts and our weavrs, we’ve been talking about the difference between a person, and an online persona. Is there one? We hope robotify will tell us, because the other trick is this: the characteristics and features of your robot will be determined entirely and exclusively by your social network data. So if you post lots of pictures on instagram, your robot might grow a telephoto lens in its belly. If you click lots of odd links, you might develop tank tracks – negotiating rough digital terrain, you see.
That’s the simplest version. Gradually we want to progress to a version with a robot that changes and grows as you do – a living marker of your data journey. We’re even hoping that, over time, robots will be able to interact. Robosociety, if you will. But that’s the nature of the agile process we’re using – aside from the vision, there are lots of assumptions layered on top of each other, and we’d like a willing army of beta pioneers to help slice through these assumptions and get to the robotify.me that you want.
At the same time, we’d like to experiment with a slightly altered way of communicating – so for the 50s radio-style version of the Robotify story, just slip on some headphones and click play.
Hang on. You said something about beta users?
Yes, labs reader. That’s you. We’re making the beta right now – signup at http://signup.robotify.me. If there’s anything you want to see, anything you’ve always wanted to know about your social data, or anything else you think we should look at, let us know below…
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Tech interns, we need you.
28th October 11
Authors: Gabor Szalatnyai (Creative Technology) & James Mitchell (Strategy), BBH London & BBH Labs
Here at Labs, we make a lot of stuff for other people and brands, but, now and then, we like to build experiments – additional stuff we love so much, we take extra time and pull late nights to see it done. We do this because sometimes, we want to test a theory, because we want to test our capabilities, and because we want to make something cool.
With one very special project, we’re ready to begin the making and we’re going to spend the next three months doing just that. Which is why we we’d like some inspirational new talent to come and intern with us in London to help out. We are embarking on a project with Rails and MongoDB on the backend and HTML5 on the front. We would expect you to have previous projects using these, and if you are confident with CoffeeScript, Sass and Javascript game engines (craftyjs, gameQuery, renderEngine,) you’ll enjoy the coding even more. We are managing source code with git on GitHub, so prepare your branching and merging skills too!
But this role is about more than the build. We’ll work iteratively on this, so we’ll be testing and learning as we go. This means you’ll be working with the team to prototype, test, bend and break – modifying and bettering the experiment at every stage. We’ll expect you to have a major impact on the idea itself. You’ll have the freedom to implement any technical solution that solves the problem, to work with the entire team to make sure the thing doesn’t just happen, but happens better.
Why work with us? Because we hope you’ll agree the project is cool, the team is a diverse and interesting one, and the use of data is, as far as we know, something that’s never been tried before. And, at the end of it all, you’ll get to put your name against something very special.
To apply, please send a nice message (with your GitHub username and/or some work) to **labs.intern@bartleboglehegarty.com**, and we’ll have a chat about what we’re trying to build. If you have any more questions, drop them in the comments. Thanks!
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