A talk presented to the D&AD 'An Apple A Day' event at the Hoxton Pony on June 16, 2009 - on the topic of which piece of technology has changed the way you work.

1. Matthew Knight
Talking at ‘An Apple A Day’ for D&AD
June 16, 2009
http://webponce.com/appleaday
Hello
My name is Matthew Knight, and I’d like to start with the end credits.
During in the making of this presentation, the following things also occured

2. As you can see, I’m an expert procrastinator, and technology provides me with all of the tools to further my skills in this area.

3. Sixteen Cups of Coffee
Three Wikipedia Edits
Two Seesmic Updates
Three Audioboo Posts
GeoTagging of Thirty Flickr images
Tidying my Bedroom
800 articles read in Google Reader
Recording my cat play with string on my Flip
Installation and fiddling around with three PHP frameworks
Watching thirty ‘keyboard cat’ videos
Sending two postino postcards
Three blog posts
Friended six people on flickr
Reading two articles on ‘Getting Things Done’
Sent three real postcards on postcrossing
You-tubing to find a video about a balloon connected to the internet
Writing two tweets about failing to find a video about a balloon connected to
the internet
Sixty tweets about something completely random
Ten tweets about not having finished writing this presentation yet.
Watching the iPhone 3GS video again
Installed Qik on my other mobile phone
Walked around the office, whilst Qikking from said mobile phone
Watching the Google Wave video again
Registering my Facebook username URL
Tweaking the HTML on three of my websites
Reading two articles on the psychology of Deadlines
Adding about twenty images to dropular
Viewing about two hundred images on dropular
Seeing how many of the images were also on ffffound
Searched twitter to see how many references of twitpocolypse
Followed random clicks through a series of blogs about
neuroscience, not understanding any of them
Making my cat record an audioboo
Uploading 50 images to project I curate
Wireframing the homepage for a charity website I help out with
Writing some brief guidelines for digital projects for the charity
Playing around with about five different AR examples.
I even mowed the lawn
As you can see, I’m an expert procrastinator, and technology provides me with all of the tools to further my skills in this area.

4. Just googling on the word ‘webponce’ - which is my username is pretty much all of the applications I use online shows just how many distractions i’m signed up for. A massive part of my job
as as Technical Creative is to play around with these things, to get my head around the hundreds of new platforms and ways of communicating online to see how they can support or deliver
the ideas we have at Wieden + Kennedy, but I’m going to go out on a limb, and say the one piece of technology which has truly revolutionized the way I work is at quite the other end of the
spectrum:

5. IBM 26 on/off switch by Marcin Wichary
Used under a CC License, Sourced from Flickr
The humble off switch.
Some times, getting things done means walking away from the computer and going back to basics, and making real connections with real things and people in the meatspace.

6. This is mudtub by Tom Gerhardt, which is a truly human interface. With lots of talk around multitouch and AR and minority report type interfaces, this is really playful and whilst it might not
have applications in the design studio -

7. putting a smile on someone’s face is a much better objective than building a website in my books.

8. My next favourite thing in the real world from recent weeks is Tweenbots - a lovely project by Kacie Kinzer at ITP NYU. These little robots had no intelligence, just a motor, a sweet smile and
a flag with the instruction ‘help me get to ...’ and a location. People who encountered the tweenbot, would give it a helping hand if the robot was going in the wrong direction, and not a single
person kicked it, or set fire to it, everyone just helped it on its way.

9. http://www.davidhorvitz.com/
David Horvitz is a daily inspiration to hundreds of people, only partly due to his almost daily posting of pure ideas for people to go and do.

10. here are a couple from his latest 2009 project. thoroughly offline and thoroughly simple, but creating connections between distributed groups of people online and off.

11. http://www.reallyinterestinggroup.com/
tofhwoti.html
A great deal of digital content and thinking is spilling out in the real world, such as ‘Things my Friends have Written on the Internet’ edited The Really Interesting Group,

12. a collection of digital articles, typeset and printed into a wonderful newspaper;

13. http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2009/03/instapaper-analogue-edition
Currently offline :(
similarly this is a printed version of a users’ instapaper account, and rather than reading it all online, he print, bound and created a lovely typeset book.

14. Along a similar vein, recently launched iPhone app Postino allows you to take any image from your iPhone and turn it into a real world postcard, sent to anywhere in the world. here’s one i
sent myself, and i’ve also just sent a number these to people via the postcrossing website, which connects people who send snailmail postcards to each other at random.

15. http://dawdlr.tumblr.com/
Which links to another project also by Russell Davies of the Really Interesting Group - dawdlr, a delightfully slow version of twitter, where people can say roughly what they’re doing round
about now on the back of a postcard and send it via the mail to Dawdlr, who publish the results every three months. Very untwitter.

16. http://disposablememoryproject.org
This in turn inspired one of my own projects - the disposable memory project, where we’re leaving disposable cameras around the world, currently 150 in 40 countries, and over time as
people find them, take photos and send them back, we’re developing the images and sharing the stories.

17. Another physical creation, but this time, much more connected to the internets, is Paris by Tim Schwartz, who has taken a very analogue and steam punk approach to infographics and data
visualisation. This simple device takes a feed from online, and displays whether Paris Hilton, or Paris France is being talked about more. Tim has also done another similar piece which, using
references to the word ‘war’, insurgent, terror and a few other terms, he has scraped these words from the New York Times archives since the start of the last century to the present date, with
the meters showing the word counts as the calendar ticks forward. There a real explicit feeling about illustrating figures over time, as it helps give context. Many of these kind of projects have
been enabled by Arduino, which is helping bring digital thinking to real things.

19. Cheers!
TWITTER
@webponce
WORK
http://wklondon.com
PLAY
http://webponce.com
So, in the spirit of switching off, I’m going to finish now, and propose a thoroughly offline beer.
Thankyou.