Your [Chris Vallance's] generation really understood the computers, and today’s generation know they’re just a tool, and don’t really get to grips with them… When I was starting in business, and when I was a child, electronics was a huge hobby, and you could buy components on the street and make all sort of things, and people did. But that also has all passed; it’s almost forgotten.

It’s true, of course, that there are still plenty of hobbyist-makers out there, including in disciplines that just weren’t open before, and if anything, initiatives such as Make and Instructables – and indeed the whole free software and open source movements – have helped raise the profile of making, hacking, modding and other democratic innovation. It’s no secret that Clive himself is a proponent of Linux and open source in general for future low-cost computing, as is mentioned briefly in the interview, and the impact of the ZX series in children’s bedrooms (together with BBC Micros at school) was, to some extent, a fantastic constructionist success for a generation in Britain.

But is Clive right? How many schoolkids nowadays make their own radios or burglar alarms or write their own games? When they do, is it a result of enlightened parents or self-directed inquisitiveness? Or are we guilty of applying our own measures of ‘engagement’ with technology? After all, you’re reading something published using Wordpress, which was started by a teenager. Personally, I’m extremely optimistic that the future will lead to much greater technological democratisation, and hope to work, wherever possible, to contribute to achieving that.

I’ve worked for Clive, as a designer/engineer, on and off, for a number of years, and it’s pleasing to have an intelligent media interview with him that doesn’t simply regurgitate and chortle over the C5, but instead tries to tap his vision and thoughts on technical society and its future.

Silicon Dreams

Incidentally, Clive’s 1984 speech to the US Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, mentioned in the interview, is extremely interesting – quite apart from the almost Randian style of some of it – as much as for the mixture of what we might now see as mundanities among the far-sighted vision as for the prophetic clarity, with talk of guided 200mph maglev cars and the colonisation of the galaxy alongside the development of a cellular phone network and companion robots for the elderly. Of course, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Talk of information technology may be misleading. It is true that one of the features of the coming years is a dramatic fall, perhaps by a factor of 100, in the cost of publishing as video disc technology replaces paper and this may be as significant as the invention of the written word and Caxton’s introduction of movable type.

Talk of information technology confuses an issue – it is used to mean people handling information rather than handling machines and there is little that is fundamental in this. The real revolution which is just starting is one of intelligence. Electronics is replacing man’s mind, just as steam replaced man’s muscle but the replacement of the slight intelligence employed on the production line is only the start.

And then there is this, which seems to predict electronic tagging of offenders:

Consider, for example, the imprisonment of offenders. Unless conducted with a biblical sense of retribution, this procedure attempts to reduce crime by deterrence and containment. It is, though, very expensive and the rate of recidivism lends little support to its curative properties.

Given a national telephone computer net such as I have described briefly, an alternative appears. Less than physically dangerous criminals could be fitted with tiny transporters so that their whereabouts, to a high degree of precision, could he monitored and recorded constantly. Should this raise fears of an Orwellian society we could offer miscreants the alternative of imprisonment. I am confident of the general preference.

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.