One of the major tensions I find with WordPress is between the benefits of an upgrade (which may be invisible to the user) and the downsides of a load of plugins suddenly malfunctioning. When you have many plugins activated, and have designed the blog around the functionality some of them provide, the cascade of failures and odd effects which occur with an upgrade can be quite a lot of hassle; I wonder to what extent this tension controls (holds back) the rate at which bloggers do upgrade, and hence allows security holes to persist. Still, I guess I can always get a refund if I don’t like it.

Some bloggers seem to be permanently in the right state of mind to rattle off insightful, quality posts every day or couple of days. I’m not one of those people; I should probably try and even out the bursts and lulls a bit by scheduling some posts to appear, in advance, but that always feels a bit like cheating.

Aside from all of the above, in the last two months I’ve gone on holiday, had my Reliant Scimitar very nearly written off by a BT Openworld van driving into the back of me at a roundabout, negotiated with BT to get a fair price for compensation, got the car back and (slowly) got it legal again, if not pretty yet, got an allotment with my girlfriend, built a shed, dealt with a failing hard drive, been stung by fuel prices and taken the plunge to get started on the electric car project at last (but with a Reliant Fox rather than a Bond Minicar – for the first project at least), acquired said Fox, replaced the alternator to enable driving to work each day, spent too long experimenting with a GP2X F200 and continued refining and developing the DwI Method towards being testable. Fixing and getting back to the blog properly was frequently close to the top of my priority list, but that priority list was frequently knocked over and scattered across the floor by other problems which required immediate resolution.

The critical path is all over the place. I realise I need a better system for organising myself to blog consistently and frequently, and deal with all the enquiries and comments I get, and am working to try and achieve that. The stream of very kind and helpful suggestions and links that readers have sent me over the last few weeks really does demonstrate that people enjoy the site – which is a fantastic motivation in itself. I will do better!

P.S. The ultra-brief paper for Persuasive 2008, Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb], is now available in a self-archived preprint version. It will appear in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.

I also thought it was worth uploading the short proposal which helped me get accepted to the doctoral consortium which precedes the conference – Design for Sustainable Behaviour [PDF, 124kb]. This is a summary of the PhD project so far, although the text explains the work specifically in the ‘Persuasive Technology’ context appropriate to the conference.

While it hasn’t often come across on this blog, due to most of the focus being on architectures of control, I am, both personally and professionally, very interested in lightweight transport – its design, use and potential.

‘Lightweight transport’, by my reckoning, includes anything where the intention is to transport people or goods from one place to another ‘efficiently’ – in truth, I’ve always been interested in all forms of transport (and the industrial-business complexes behind its development and manufacture) but the engineer in me is most excited by innovative ways of using as little as possible to achieve as much as possible, and in most cases, this comes down to a ‘lightweight’ mindset.

As a designer, I’ve been lucky to be involved with a few lightweight transport projects for Sir Clive Sinclair, including some work on the A-Bike (the world’s lightest, smallest folding adult bicycle) under Daka‘s Alex Kalogroulis, and currently further development work in this vein with Ben Wilson. While at Daka I also gained some experience with the Sinclair WDU wheelchair assistance unit, which inspired me to experiment with my own series of larger wheelchair drive systems, learning, practically, a bit about electric motors along the way, and becoming increasingly convinced of their potential (no pun intended).

But I’ve never tackled anything car-sized. I’ve researched and written about Reliant, one of the world’s most significant lightweight motor vehicle innovators, but have never actually designed or built something of this size. (Certainly, I’ve thought about, and sketched plenty, since I was in primary school.)

A stepping-stone towards this would be to modify (and improve, by some definition) an existing vehicle, and various factors, in combination, have inspired me to envisage tackling an electric conversion of a Bond Minicar, also (perhaps) giving it a full-length roll-back roof to produce a kind of convertible pick-up, with the batteries under the floor – to produce something like that shown in my sketch above.

The project is a very tentative idea at present, but in the next few months I hope to elaborate on what it will involve, what the technical problems are, and how I aim to go about solving them – along with an explanation of my rationale, before actually proceeding (or not). Briefly: if I can do this well, I will end up with one of the most practical vehicles possible for the near future: an ultra-manoeuvrable, ultra-light, tax-exempt, Congestion Charge-exempt, corrosion-resistant electric utility vehicle costing just pennies to run and great fun to drive.