This post’s overdue but I wanted to have some real news (and images) rather than pure speculation.

Following Brunel’s sale of the Runnymede Campus to Oracle back in May, Oracle appointed John Thompson & Partners as architects to explore options and develop a plan for what to do with the site. I was waiting for JTP to update the Runnymede Campus website, but as (at time of writing), the details haven’t gone on there yet, here’s a summary of what the vision/ideas/plans are, at least as presented to the public on Tuesday 16th October, in the Assembly Hall. In short: 150 residential houses/flats, 400 student rooms, and workshops / studios / labs space for businesses:

(It’s not clear whether the student union building would be kept. It’s still shown on JTP’s sketch of the campus, but there is no elaboration of what would be done with it. The Mews are listed buildings at present and I would expect JTP intends to keep these for residential use, though whether student or private tenants, I don’t know.)

Presumably all the above pictures, details and more will be on JTP’s Runnymede Campus website in the near future.

It’s clear that among the many other planning constraints (discussed further below), the amount of ‘affordable housing’ required by the local authority will to a large extent determine whether or not aspects such as the workshop space and student accommodation are viable. If the argument that restoring 400 student bedrooms at Runnymede will free up 400 affordable housing places in Englefield Green is accepted by the planners, then all well and good, but if not, then the campus might have to take a lot more housing, with all the resulting effects on traffic, noise, and so on. This would also mean that companies employing local people, such as Avco Systems, currently based in the Science Park, would have to move somewhere else in the area.

Overall, I was impressed by JTP’s approach and the way in which they seem to have recognised many of the important and interesting aspects of the site, and incorporated them into their vision of a new community, e.g.:

The illustrative vision seeks to build upon the history of the site and to utilise the assets of the existing quality buildings and landscape. Existing quality buildings will be retained and their setting enhanced. Existing quality trees will be retained and will become the focus for the creation of new spaces.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not somewhat cynical (so much is predicated on the affordable housing issue), but I’m willing to stay open-minded and I’d rather see positive, interesting plans for what to do with the place, such as those JTP showed, than simply allowing the place to deteriorate. It’s not going to be an educational establishment again, but I’m sure most of us would rather go back to see something worthwhile being done on the site - including space for workshops, studios and labs - than it having been completely cleared and 800 identikit houses built.

JTP also seem keen to recognise and understand the heritage of the site, and what sort of activities and personalities have shaped it, including the Brunel Design era as well as the days of the Royal Indian Engineering College, the Cheylesmore family, Cooper’s Hill Training College, and Shoreditch College. I spent an enjoyable two afternoons with JTP’s Nicola de Quincey and Eva Nickel and other interested members of the public, discussing the history of the site, and walking round examining the buildings.

There is the possibility of some sort of commemoration of the Brunel Design era as part of the new development, whether in the form of plaques explaining to new residents some of what went on at the site, or even (as John Thompson suggested) statues or a sculpture trail. I’ve agreed to get back to them with more details of significant achievements of Brunel Design at Runnymede, down even to the sort of research advances that were being made, as well as interesting alumni and so on, so if anyone has any suggestions, please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk).

The next community meeting at Runnymede, open to the public will be on Tuesday 20th November, 7.30 pm in Pillar Hall.

Background to JTP’s process

These sketches and plans were presented to the public at a meeting in the Assembly Hall on Tuesday 16th October, after a two-day ‘planning weekend’ on the 12th-13th October, where local residents (mostly from Englefield Green) and other interested parties (from businesses based in the former Brunel Science Park in the walled garden on Cooper’s Hill Lane, National Trust representatives, local councillors, and so on) were able to discuss with JTP their concerns, ideas and priorities for the site. The series of community meetings follows JTP’s usual method of “collaborative planning”.

What started on the Friday afternoon with a fairly confrontational atmosphere became more amenable as people felt their voices had been heard, but the main sticking point, initially at least, was simply that few could believe Oracle would have paid £46.5 million for the campus unless there was a specific plan in mind - and if so, what was it? As one resident put it: “Any business that lays out that sort of money without a solid business plan, return-on-investment calculations and fallback plan in place, isn’t going to last long.” The repeated reassurances from JTP’s John Thompson and Marcus Adams that “We haven’t got a plan” (exact quote) did seem somewhat unlikely, but in the hindsight of the rapidity with which the ‘draft vision’ was prepared (presented on the following Tuesday), it’s clear that while they may not have had a ‘plan’, they certainly had (and have) plenty of ideas about how they would make the most of the site’s opportunities, and the community consultation was intended to inform that, but not drive it.

it does genuinely seem that simply because of the many constraints (Green Belt, proximity of the Air Forces’ Memorial, landscape importance, tree protection, wildlife, C2 ‘residential insititution’ planning zoning, and most of all, continued need for (Holloway) student housing in Englefield Green), the process is not going to be as simple as Oracle doing whatever they want with the site. Green Belt requirements mean that nothing taller than existing structures can be built, and the ‘footprint’ of the existing buildings cannot be built outside (it can be moved, though). Targets in Surrey would suggest that anything between 25-40% of any development should be ‘affordable’ or ‘key worker’ housing - which does not include student accommodation - but as mentioned earlier, the argument might be made that by freeing up affordable housing in Englefield Green currently occupied by Holloway students, building new student accommodation at Runnymede would assist in providing affordable housing, if not actually on site.

John Thompson also made a couple of interesting comments during the meetings, which sought to allay fears and concerns felt by a number of people present:

There is certainly no intention to create a gated community on this site.

i.e. that the site will remain ‘open’ and accessible to visitors, especially given the intention to increase public access with walks across the golf course, viewpoints and so on.

This will be a managed site… there will be stringent covenants on what people can do.

i.e. that future residents of the site will only be (probably long) leaseholders: the site will remain as a single freehold unit, with a management company.

Background to the sale to Oracle

Talking further to a couple of people from Oracle, it seems that their winning bid for the campus (at least according to them) was in line with the market value and not by any emotional “Let’s outbid Holloway” stance. Royal Holloway’s bid was substantially less than Oracle’s, and this King Sturge article [PDF] notes that other losing bidders (presumably closer to Oracle’s in terms of value) included nursing and retirement home operators. Someone did make the point to me that Brunel, “as a charitable organisation” was legally required to accept the highest bid, and thus could not have sold the campus to Royal Holloway even if it had wanted to, but I don’t know enough about the intricacies of charity law to comment on this.

Certainly, though, had (for example) the Higher Education Funding Council for England assisted Holloway, or had Brunel’s attempt to become part of the University of London alongside Royal Holloway progressed further, I think we might have seen Runnymede remain in educational use. (Alternatively, of course, Brunel could have retained the site and used it for something worthwhile: I appreciate the revenue has enabled further expansion at Uxbridge, but the Uxbridge site’s fairly densely developed now as it is, and I’m not sure how Brunel will expand in the future.)

Relevant websites

In addition to JTP’s Runnymede Campus website, it’s also worth keeping an eye on the Residents’ Association’s Englefield Green Village Brunel Development blog and Councillor Daniel Hamilton’s blog for updates. John Williams and Jill Sandwell’s Shoreditch College website is also frequently updated with news and historical information and photos - it was very interesting to talk to John last week. Len Breen’s The Last Broadcast From Runnymede offers a perspective on Brunel’s internal politics. I also aim to continue this occasional series of posts on Runnymede, its history, and its future.

Now that I’m a student again, I’ve got access (via Athens) to a vastly increased amount of academic journals, papers and so on. Far more than I could have done ‘legitimately’ without that Athens login, aside from travelling from library to library to library. And while it’s good for me to have that login, right at this moment, the necessity for such a login is hardly good for society as a whole. As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

I think it’s fairly clear that open access is the way to go, and certainly where research has enjoyed any degree of public funding there should be no case otherwise. But even where research is freely or easily available, its impact, as a result of limited exposure, is often also very limited or nonexistent, even within academia.

This is surely an omnipresent worry/headache/frustration for many researchers, and the issue was brought home to me the other day. I was reading a (fairly academic) book, published in the UK in 2005, written by a design professor at a university about 50 miles from here, and found a comment, within a discussion of a particular issue, along the lines of “no research has been done on the issue of to what extent A relates to B in the field of C, but it is safe to assume D” and yet, in front of me on the desk, was a PhD thesis completed in 2003, at my university, addressing not only the exact issue specified, but also showing D to be incorrect. Now, a paper was written based on this thesis, and published in an engineering journal, and also presented at a conference, but it clearly escaped the notice of the author of the book.

Now, of course, this probably happens a thousand times a day in academia. It’s not an especially interesting example, and there may be many possible explanations, the book maybe having taken a long period to go from being researched to publication being somewhat likely. But assuming it didn’t, and assuming the book’s author, despite being, by all accounts, an ‘expert’ in his field, really was unaware of research going on not too far away, then there is a failure of communication. (In this case, there might also be the often self-imposed disconnect between the ‘design’ community, and the ‘engineering’ community: the assumption that research done in a different field is irrelevant or likely not to be understandable. That, perhaps, is another problem again.)

This type of communication failure is not necessarily entirely the fault of either side, but it is a problem, across all fields of knowledge and endeavour. So what’s the answer?

I don’t know, from that kind of distance, but closer up, I have a hunch that broad subject blog families, such as Scienceblogs, ‘research digest’ blogs such as the British Psychological Society’s, and individual blogs with a fairly wide scope, such as Mind Hacks (these latter two both examples from the same field) are going to become increasingly important mechanisms for disseminating research advances to both an academic and a wider audience. Whether the actual awareness of a particular new piece of research comes directly by a researcher reading the site, or by a colleague or friend-of-a-friend referring the researcher, the path from ignorance to awareness is (potentially) shorter and easier than before. It’s (potentially) less likely that anyone reasonably well-informed about a field will not have had an opportunity to learn about other research in the field, at least that which is either newly published or which somehow comes to the attention of the bloggers (so the bloggers’ filtering and discriminatory abilities are very important, in this sense).

Something I’m planning to do, on this blog, from now on, is to review useful or interesting academic papers or journal articles (or books, of course) I come across, from a variety of academic areas, which are relevant to the field of architectures of control, and design for behaviour change in general - shot through the lens of my PhD research focus, extracting pertinent arguments, quotes, following up references, and so on. I hope, in some small way, this will also bring particular areas of research to the attention of researchers from other disciplines, in the same way (for example) that Lawrence Lessig’s “code is law” concept made me think more about constraints and behaviour-shaping in product design in the first place.

From a practical point of view, this approach also seems like it might be a very useful way to document the process of getting to grips with the literature on a subject - helping immensely when it comes to putting together my actual literature review for the PhD - and allowing input (commentary, recommendations, suggestions) from a very diverse set of readers worldwide, in a way which the traditional ivory tower or even open-plan research office doesn’t, or can’t, at least during this stage of the research. While I’m sure there are plenty of other people who’ve had a similar idea (any links would be very interesting: I love seeing how other people structure their research), this approach seems quite excitingly fresh to me, imbuing the literature review process with a vibrancy and immediacy that simply wouldn’t have been as easy to do in the past.

9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

It was a great honour to be accepted, given the quality of the other blogs involved and the number that applied during the 24 hour ’submission window’. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on Lothian Road in Edinburgh having taken my laptop away on holiday purely to do the 9rules submission at the right time: some ‘recognition’ on this level meant a lot to me, and it still does.

And the site’s got a lot of new readers through 9rules: the start of every new post appeared, within a couple of hours, in both the ‘Design‘ and ‘Technology‘ feeds on the 9rules site, and a lot of people clicked through to read the full things, and then (often) stayed to read other posts. Equally, I found some truly amazing new blogs and interesting voices through perusing other members’ feeds: there is a wealth of passionate talent and opinion out there, and 9rules’ members never failed to impress. To a large extent I was a passive consumer of what 9rules brought me; I didn’t get involved with the ‘my.9r‘ social networking feature of the site, nor write any ‘Notes‘ (if I’m going to write something intelligent, I’ll write it on the blog, was my reasoning, but I certainly read a number of interesting discussions in the Notes section, and enjoyed doing so).

However, 9rules is changing its membership policy (compare the current ‘About’ page) and yesterday I received an email from 9rules’ Tyme White indicating that, effectively, any members who don’t participate in the community aspects of the site are no longer welcome:

Members spoke out about their displeasure concerning members that they never interact with and never hear from, yet all member entries carry the same weight on 9rules, which is not fair. After talking it out in Clubhouse, we made participating either in the private member area or my.9rules a requirement, part of the membership agreement… If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you, decline the agreement (or do not respond), remove the leaf from your site and we will remove your site from displaying on 9rules. If you agree but don’t have the time to interact or don’t feel you should (or don’t want to), the participation will become a chore, something you didn’t want to do in the first place. It just won’t work in the long-term so it would be best to decline now…

Let me be clear – participation in either the new member area or my.9rules is required for all members, requested by members.

I understand what she’s saying, and I’m not going to argue - but it’s a shame: forced participation would certainly “become a chore” and I’m not going to agree to commit to anything along those lines (I wonder how the level of participation will be measured or assessed?), so this site will be leaving 9rules, sadly, in due course.

Taking a broader view, in internet terms, 9rules’ move - to more of a ‘walled garden’, turned in on itself - seems very much at odds with the increased openness which has driven the dramatic growth of, say, Facebook. Perhaps 9rules wants ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’, but defining ‘quality’ as ‘frequency of participation’ seems to be rather arbitrarily quantitative, if that makes sense. I’m not sure there’s actually any correlation between time spent on interactive banter within a closed community, and creating worthwhile blog content that people want to read: it would seem that time spent on one precludes spending time on the other.

I hope some of the readers who originally found this site through 9rules will continue to read it (the RSS/Atom feed links are in the sidebar on the right), and I thank 9rules for the extra exposure it gave this site during my time as a member.

After a month of lifting and shifting boxes, frantic cleaning, driving lots of different vehicles, and dealing with bureaucracy, I’ve now moved house and started my PhD at Brunel; with broadband now set up, and enough space to sit with a laptop amid the not-yet-unpacked boxes, I’ll hopefully be able to get back to regular blogging. Many thanks to everyone who’s sent examples and comments in the interim.

I now both live and work in semi-Brutalist structures; it’ll be interesting to see what effect that architectural influence has.

The generally poor performance of this site over the past couple of months (database queries timing out leading to blank pages or internal Wordpress error messages) has been frustrating and I will be moving hosts at some point in due course. There may be some redesign or at least restructuring of certain parts of the site too, as already the PhD has made me think somewhat more analytically about how to classify and explain methods of control and ‘design for behaviour change’.

I haven’t posted on the blog in the last week, mainly due to being very busy with work - I’ve unexpectedly been back at Tangerine in London (left) helping out with research into future product segmentation in the mobile phone market, alongside work for an important long-standing client, while also being in the midst of moving to a new flat and sorting out everything that goes with that. Oh, and the PhD starts sometime in the next few weeks.

But I’ve had some great e-mails, comments and suggestions from readers (for which many thanks), so I hope within the next few days to get back to blogging and replying.

Please bear with me.

One of the things that I’m often asked, mainly by design students intrigued by the idea of working for themselves once they graduate, is just how to go about doing it: how to raise your profile, and find the right projects to take on. Having really only been marginally successful in this area, I decided to interview Ben Wilson, with whom I’ve worked on a couple of projects, and who’s achieved a great deal working for himself in this field. Ben’s blog, along with his brothers, is a great photostream-style travelogue of interesting products, vehicles, graphic design, places and influences.

Left: The Tilting Trike in arm-propelled mode. Right: The Downlow Lowrider

DL: What are some of your highest profile projects?

BW: I’ve done lots of different projects - I think I’m probably best known for the work I’ve done in transportation and especially in bicycles and bicycle-related design.

A project that won some awards was the Tilting Trike which started off as a project at the Royal College of Art and then was taken on as a research project within the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre. That won a few awards and got quite well known. Before that, I was known as ‘Bicycle Ben’ and people thought that was, sort of, all that I did. About nine or ten years ago, I designed a low-rider recumbent bicycle - at the time, that attracted a lot of attention and press, so I was very well known for that. But since then, I’ve gone on to work in lots of different areas - interior, product, industrial design.

I think another project that’s quite well known - well, sometimes it’s not accredited to me so much but I was very much involved from the concept all the way through to production - is the Manfrotto FigRig, developed and patented worldwide and manufactured by Manfrotto. There’s that product and there’s the work I’ve done with flat-pack furniture - the Chairfix. I suppose they’re the highest profile projects, but they’re by no means all the projects that I’ve done. They’re the ones that stick out.

Left: The Tilting Trike in foot-pedalled mode. Right: The Manfrotto FigRig, with Mike Figgis

You’ve certainly been involved with a lot of projects. I suppose other young designers, thinking they’d like to go into business for themselves, would be especially interested in how you got started doing this. What made you want to go down the path of working for yourself as opposed to, say, taking a ‘normal’ design job?

Probably because I couldn’t get a job in product design. I’ve always had a reasonable entrepreneurial streak within me - I think that probably stems from my parents. They were both self-employed, they were both designers, so I was immersed within a kind of very creative family and household. But also, seeing the way they acted and talked on the phone and worked - I think there was that, too. It kind of stemmed from trying to get experience, finding it very difficult to get experience, and especially experience that I wanted to gain.

And, by default, I suppose: I created this object, the low-rider bicycle. I’d sold one before I graduated, so I realised there was a market for it. I technically could manufacture them - I made it myself, I prototyped it and made it myself so that was me, that’s what I had to promote myself, so in that respect, I could say “Can you make it? Yes I can”. There wasn’t one day when I said “Let’s start Ben Wilson Design”.

Then I went back to college, but even when I was doing my MA at the Royal College of Art, I was always doing a little bit here and a bit there - freelance and bits and pieces.

That’s interesting how you ‘fell’ into working for yourself like that. But a lot of your projects seem to have led on to others - you’ve come to the attention of someone because of one project, or a company has thought “That’s good; we’ll get him to do something.” Would you say that’s an important way of finding new work, as a freelancer?

Definitely. I’d say the stepping-stone effect is in everything. Every project that I do is gearing me up for the next. The research, or the techniques, will be used in something that’s done later on. So, yes. It gets infuriating when people - a bit like the category ‘Bike Ben’ - just expect me to do bikes. I love doing bikes but to a certain extent, that’s not all I want to do all the time. But just like in anything, if someone becomes a kind of specialist… say I needed some upholstered furniture, it would be good for me to talk to some people who have quite a lot of experience doing that, because I’d be halving the time by learning from their experience. So, always that’s the way. You tend to become specialist; although I haven’t tried to become a master of anything, hopefully I’ve build up good experience in many different areas.

FIXED, Ben’s exhibition in London’s Design Museum Tank focuses on fixed-gear bikes

So how have you gone about getting known? You’ve got some very high profile attention from, the Design Museum, the British Council, and so on. Did this come about through you approaching them, or through them approaching you, or a mixture?

A mixture. But I think predominantly it’s the snowball effect. You start off with one thing - take my bicycle. Through my brother, there was a space available in Farringdon where I could show the bicycle, in an area where there were a lot of publishing houses. It gained some press attention, and once one article comes out in the press - just like if something goes on a blog - it spirals, and it spider-webs, and it goes out everywhere. And I think that’s an interesting side of how ideas get spread.

So it’s worth doing that? It’s worth young designers making the effort to get their projects out there so that people see them.

Very much so. I’m a really strong believer in getting stuff out - to the extent where I’m asked by some companies to do pure brand work, looking at developing their brands for them, which I find very interesting. I’ve worked for different ad agencies - you might see that as very different to my other design, but it’s not really, it’s all creative output and it’s a mindset of how you think. It’s important to promote yourself and be as creative with how you market your identity, who you are and what you want to say about yourself. I don’t show at Milan: it’s mainly because I haven’t really been asked to. If someone wanted to fund me to do something for Milan, I would.

Take London Design Week, coming up soon. As far as I know, I’m not showing anything. It’s not necessarily out of choice - although it’s a great time and place to show your work, it’s also a saturated market. There could be better times to show work, for different audiences as well. That’s nothing against the idea - I have had exhibitions at that time, but I think it’s about taking opportunities when they come, and utilising them.

You do a lot of self-directed projects as well, don’t you - your own projects alongside work that clients have asked you to do? Would you say it’s definitely worth a freelancer trying to do that?

Absolutely. Aside from the potential revenue if the project’s successful, it’s keeping your mind active on new challenges. There’s that impetus that shows through in college or university projects - why you’re interested in something, why you want to investigate it - but then when you leave, many people almost drift into often mind-numbing design work. I know and probably you too know people who are in the creative industries but find it really difficult to rekindle the excitement they used to have about design. But even work for clients may feed into something that I can use on one of my own projects.

Chairfix is a good example of a self-initiated project. It came about because I was fed up with building bicycles because of the time that they took, and I wanted to exploit a process [CNC technology], and within that, I developed an object, and then wanted to show it to the public. So I organised my first show, up in the West End at Aram, and got a really good response, and from that I launched that product. I sold a considerable amount of them, and made a significant financial gain - I don’t want to talk about figures but I think taking responsibility and full ownership of a product yourself does mean that you don’t have to deal with poor royalties. You don’t have to sell so much of something to claw back some of the R & D that you put in. What it taught me as well - it makes you business savvy, it makes you go into negotiations, it makes you into discuss things with clients on a different basis.

A number of graphically customised versions of Chairfix were made available at the launch, including this by Ben’s brother Oscar

That’s something a lot of young designers have no experience of, and haven’t been taught. It’s difficult to get that kind of knowledge unless you actually do it practically yourself, with an actual business.

Very much so. And also - say you do have some experience within a consultancy and are starting to do some work for yourself. The jump is from working with big corporate companies, dealing with big contracts with big money, to that middle ground. Even if you’re not employing ten people, your turnover needs to be a reasonable amount just to keep your head above water. A global brand is not going to pay me [as a self-employed designer] as much as they would an established design studio with huge overheads. But they’re buying a different sort of thing. I think you have to make sure that you place yourself correctly within that market.

So what would your advice be to a young designer, perhaps, just starting out from university or from college, or still there maybe, with this dream of working for him or herself? Is there any simple advice you could give, other than “Just get on with it, just do it”?

You’ve got to do it. If that’s what you really want you’ve got to think a lot about that dream, because it takes over your life, it’s incredibly hard work, but it’s incredibly rewarding. Those are the realities of being self-employed. That aside, you need to think about who you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it on your own, and how you’re going to brand that, how people are going to perceive what you’re showing. The opportunities are really good - it’s a lot easier now than when I started off. Like going to a photocopy shop and sending information in the post - things are different now, you can send an e-mail and hit so many different people.

You really have to go for it. I’ll never forget one phone conversation - at this time I was working out of my bedroom in my parents’ house - and someone phoned up saying “Can I speak to the managing director of Downlow Cycle Co?” (that’s sort of the title I went under). My mum answered the phone, not pretneding to be my secretary, but said “Yes, I shall just get him for you,” and it was someone enquiring about a really big order. I remember thinking, do I say “Well I’m just a small man in a bedroom, begging, borrowing and stealing to build these bikes,” or do I walk? Maybe he wants to think I’m a big business? I never ever lied, but neither did I tell him that I wasn’t running a multi-million pound corporation. So I think in that repsect, you have to think on your feet.

Also, you have to take opportunities as they come. Be confident and look at the possibilites in lots of different ways. It’s about both running with opportunity, and making your own. People say “Ooh, you’re a lucky person in life”. Certain people say that to me. But I think often, you make your own luck to a large degree. There are always opportunities. There are shops in London that are vacant. If you wanted to rent one for a year it would be a fortune, but if you wanted it for two weeks, you could probably cut a deal with a savvy landlord. There’s certain things like that, that really can work. I think you have to be creative with your own identity, your branding and how you get known as you have to be with the actual products, whatever you’re designing.

That’s some very good advice there, from someone who’s put it into practice very successfully. Thank you very much Ben.

Ben Wilson Design | Wilson Brothers’ Blog

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.

Creative technologist David Bausola, of Zero Influence, tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award, “because of the dedication given to liberating freedom from the design of engagement”, which was very kind.

Here goes, then, 5 Blogs That Make Me Think:

Future Perfect (Jan Chipchase)
It’s the combination of travelogue, stream-of-consciousness photographs and, most importantly, the questions he asks, which make Jan’s blog so thought-provoking.

Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
For being almost the lone voice of scientific journalism in the mainstream UK news media, and for tirelessly exposing the wilful deceit of millions by quack ‘health practitioners’.

Copyrighteous (Benjamin Mako Hill)
Along with his blog, Mako’s vast involvement with so much in free software and free culture are both inspiring (this especially so) and have an intense clarity of principle.

Musings & Meanderings (Vera Bass)
Vera’s thoughts and reflections encompass such a wide scope of themes and ideas; whenever I read, I’m reminded of just how our often narrow field categorisations can limit our ability to learn from others.

Paul Graham
Not really a blogger, but one of the most interesting writers/essayists on technology, business and the way people do things. Paul’s articles really do make me think.

Of course there are many, many more than these 5, and I feel bad for not including them. But, to practise what I’ve just preached, consider this type of arbitrary ‘choose 5′ exercise one of the ’second type’ of judgements.

Eight random facts about myself

Thanks to designer-surfer David George for tagging me with this. As Jack Yan said earlier this year, though, I’m not going to tag more people; if you want to feel tagged, consider yourself tagged:

I don’t know about this tagging, and from what I read… people are getting a bit wary of it. So I won’t pass the tag. Instead, if you want to play, feel free to record on your own blogs your [eight] things.

I did have what I thought was quite a clever list of eight facts but there was a Wordpress error when I submitted the post, so I’ve had to go back to an unfinished version of this post. So here, very briefly, are some facts:

1/2/3/4. I have embarrassingly many unfinished projects, from British Petrol Stations: Design & Branding History to further development of the Precision Glue Gun, to GrafSpray (’stencil T-shirts that come with the stencil’) to Severn Beach, a novel about multi-level marketing, get-rich-quick schemes, and escape. As Alex Moulton said, “One is capable of pursuing two main avenues of research simultaneously, but no more”.

5/6/7. I’m currently typing this listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Before that, it was the Slits’ version of the same track. Next, it will be Danny Baker’s show on BBC London.

8. Later this afternoon, I will be walking down to the River Thames to test a modified radio-controlled prototype product for a client.

Hope that’s adequate: it’s not deep or heartfelt, but I’m flagging from all this tagging.

*Though I’m a little uncomfortable with this usage of the term meme in this way, as ideas spreading - partially at least - through a sense of obligation to the previous tagger do not really seem to be memes in the sense I’ve always understood it.

**Not really!

This post is the start of a series that will only be of interest to a few readers, but it’s about a subject that means a lot to me, and about a place which, in one way or another, has had an impact on design, and design education, in the UK and beyond. Brunel University has just sold its Runnymede campus to Oracle Residential, part of the Epsom-based Oracle Group, a property and investment company.

Oracle’s announcement on its website, under ‘Latest acquisitions’ (it’s Flash-based and unlinkable) is a little more detailed than Brunel’s rather terse statement - even if it skirts the issue of what they’re going to do with the place - and at least recognises some of what’s interesting about it:

Acting on behalf of oversees investors, Oracle Residential are pleased to confirm the acquisition of the Brunel University Runnymede Campus for £46.5m. Situated on the outskirts of Egham town centre, the 67 acres of mature parkland and woods is currently occupied by Royal Holloway, University of London for student accommodation. The site currently contains around 350,000 sq ft of buildings, some of which are listed.

With far reaching views of Windsor Castle, the site has extensive grounds which include an Area of Landscape Importance, Ancient Woodland and a Site of Nature Conservation Importance - all of which will need to be protected in any development proposals for the site.

Regional Director Scott Hammond believes that the site’s significance in terms of nature conservation and historical importance means that any proposals would need to be of a highly sensitive nature; “once occupation of the building is secured in September, we will begin the process of restoring some of the dilapidated and unsightly buildings, and seek to enhance the Green Belt nature of the site”.

King Sturge acted for the University in the disposal of the site.

I was a student at Runnymede from 2000-4, and a member of the last graduating year to be based there. Runnymede - once the Royal Indian Engineering College, and later Shoreditch College - was Brunel’s design school: a self-contained, single-subject campus out on its own, on top of Cooper’s Hill, Englefield Green - the first piece of high ground to the west of central London, with views over Heathrow and the Staines Reservoirs as well as Windsor Castle, Magna Carta Island and the Thames. It was a very interesting place to be a student, in many ways: there was enforced isolation, but we could call it ‘hothousing’; there was clearly never much money for buying new equipment, but there was a pride in using what was there to produce astonishing results; there was a lot of stress, but also proof of the total miscibility of work and play. And indeed workshop and kitchen, swarf and carpet, spray-booth and corridor, daytime and nighttime.

I know that to a large extent, I fell in love with the location before I really ‘got’ the course; the Open Day I attended, in June 1999, was sunny and beautiful, and the whole place struck me (and still strikes me) as one of the most perfect places in south-east England: a hilltop idyll with Elizabethan oak trees and Victorian parkland, yet close enough to the lure of London. Certainly many of the student halls of residence were decaying, but no more so than many, many others. The Royal Holloway students living there at present are right to complain about the place not being up to what they had been led to expect, but from what my girlfriend tells me of some of the (now demolished) halls at Holloway, Runnymede wasn’t that bad.

Of course it is much, much too late now to dwell on the decision to move the Design department to Uxbridge - one of the seemingly few concrete [sic.] decisions made about Runnymede during Brunel’s 27-year tenure of the site, since absorbing Shoreditch College in 1980. The department is merged into the School of Engineering & Design, it’s a very different set-up, they’ve taken me on to do a PhD, and I’m very pleased about that.

As for Runnymede - even in the early 1990s (gleaned from reading old documents in the library) there were proposals for selling the campus to various other organisations, such as an independent schools’ association (to use as an HQ), and in the last few years, suggested uses included temporary housing for Heathrow Terminal 5 workers, a new ‘Brunel Academy’ for underprivileged inner-city teenagers, a conference centre, a permanent expansion for Royal Holloway (both teaching and accommodation), and an administrative HQ for Brunel itself, away from the construction-site hubbub of Uxbridge. But in the end, it came down to this: sale to a property company, just as Brunel did with its (equally historic) Osterley and Twickenham. I don’t know (yet) what Oracle’s plans are: I do know that Englefield Green has a lot of executive homes and apartments already and surely doesn’t need too many more.

This is the first in a series of posts looking at some of the history of the Runnymede campus, both long past and recent, the plans for the site as they become clearer, and how it will all affect the local area. I intend to do some research in that vein, and report back semi-regularly. In the meantime, some photos of the campus: from ‘Hostler’ (2001), part 1; part 2; and some of my own, from 2004, in no real order.

Scott Adams (via Seth Godin):

I think writer’s block is when you say to yourself, “I could write something, but it wouldn’t be good enough.” There’s no such thing as a complete inability to write a sentence.

He’s right, of course: it’s the fear of failure, of incompetence, or the fear of being perceived as incompetent, which stops so much useful work being done. If it’s sub-standard, will it actually drive readers/customers away? John S Rhodes has an interesting take on the issue.

Best get on with it, then.

Jeremy Schnitker of SoloGig News has also interviewed me about freelance work - bless him, he makes me sound a lot more successful than I really am! SoloGig News is a great site with some fascinating interviews and other information for independent practitioners - as described on the site, “news you can use for the ever-growing freelance set.”

A note about the future

For the last couple of months, alongside some hectic work for clients, I’ve been putting together a proposal for postgraduate (i.e. PhD) research which involves both environmentally sensitive design and architectures of control. Nothing is certain at this stage but as soon as there’s something to report, I will of course blog the details. This could be a very exciting direction in which to head; there may be, indeed, a major road ahead.

*Note that the blockquotes in the original post have been removed without being replaced by any other formatting, so some of the quotes appear as if they’re part of my prose. Also, I’m not Steffen Jahn (if only I were…), nor in fact, Dan Stockton, but those are minor quibbles!

In part 1 of ‘What I’ve learned so far…’ I looked mostly at being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ and the idea of ‘Wexelblat’s scheduling algorithm’ (or the ‘good, fast, cheap: pick two’ theory) as it applies to a young freelancer starting out. There were some very insightful comments which are also well worth reading.

Before starting on Part 2, I feel I should apologise for the relative dearth of posts recently. This seems to be a recurring pattern, although this time it’s actually resulting in some people unsubscribing in Bloglines… The reason is primarily that I’ve had a series of projects which have taken a lot out of me, time-, sanity- and confidence-wise. I can’t really explain too much at this point, but referring to Client Breeds 6, 7, 8 and 11 as explained at the excellent FreelanceSwitch should give some hints! Suffice to say, I hope never to make the same series of mistakes again. A later part of this series will be my own take on the ‘Client Breeds’ idea and managing different clients’ expectations, but for the moment, on with Part 2:

The Portfolio Dip

When you’re at university, college, or working on design in your spare time, the rate at which you add new work to your portfolio can be equal to the rate you do the work. If you do three projects in the final year of your degree, you can add three projects. But when you start doing ‘real’ projects for companies, they’re likely to be confidential, at least until they reach production (if they even go this far), so you can’t show anyone. This applies, of course, to designers working full-time for a company as well as freelancers, but is more importnat for freelancers. (Incidentally, a friend of mine whom I’d classify as an extremely successful freelancer, suggests that only 1 out 10 potential products developed for clients are ever likely to reach mass production, and he makes that clear to the clients as he goes, which is something I’ve been far too reticent about doing.)

Back to the point: the confidentiality requirements mean that - superficially at least - your portfolio starts to look a bit stale (e.g. this). The rate of new work added drops sharply, and this can certainly have an effect on your own confidence quite apart from - we might expect - not being so persuasive to potential clients. (If you’re also, sensibly, weeding out some of the older projects of which you’re not quite so proud - too studenty, too weak - then as well as the size of the portfolio decreasing, the period it covers may also decrease to a narrow focus around, say, the final two years of your degree. And the rate of work added actually goes negative.) Roughly, you might end up with something like this:

If the most recent stuff you can show them is a student project, or even a speculative competition entry hacked together in your spare time (if any), then they may well treat you like a student or a speculative chancer rather than a professional designer. What they expect to pay you could also be in accordance with this.

Equally, even if the early freelance jobs you take on do reach production quickly, or can be shown without a confidentiality worry, they’re not necessarily going to be especially impressive. For example, I’m grateful for getting the job of making new signage (below) for a local sandwich shop, to the client’s design, but putting this into a portfolio primarily focusing on more technically innovative work may well dilute its appeal to certain prospective clients.

All of the above reinforces something very important. Industrial experience during a degree - ideally a summer internship or an actual sandwich year placement - can be extremely valuable, especially if some of what you worked on has reached production by the time you graduate or start your freelance career. In effect, this work can help ‘plug’ the portfolio gap, with real-life, commercially viable products which may even be familiar to potential clients already. While choosing a sandwich course makes your degree longer - and that year’s wages may be very low - with the right choice of company and some hard work, you may have an asset which makes your portfolio work stand out above others’.

Bit of a design-related plug: London designer/maker Ben Wilson (with whom I’m currently working on a project for Sir Clive Sinclair) and his brothers, Oscar and Luke, have just launched their own collaborative photo blog, which I helped set up using Wordpress.com, a mildly modified Sandbox theme and automatic email-to-blog (via Flickr) to allow the simplest method of photoblogging I could think of.

Between them the Wilson brothers take a lot of great photos of interesting and inspirational design, places, vehicles and people, as well as chronicling their own projects, and I think the blog’s going to get quite a bit of attention. The blog’s starting with a look at the building of a one-off bike commissioned by Nike (shown above), with some extraordinary detailing (cut leather decals and intricate stainless steel lugs).

This is the first in a series of essays where I’ll try to look at some of the realities of working freelance in this field; I hope these will be interesting and possibly useful to others contemplating this kind of work. Please note, these are only my own musings and ramblings, written mostly on train journeys across North London, and I might look back on them with embarrassment and disagreement.

At the moment, I’m a freelance designer/engineer/maker. What that means is hard to define. There are no obvious boundaries: I’ve said ‘Yes’ to almost every project, mostly out of necessity but partly out of trying to determine what I’m any good at. In practice that means that in the last year-and-a-bit I’ve worked on some diverse stuff, from developing ultra-lightweight bikes to designing novelty packaging, from researching multinationals’ brand architectures to doing toothed belt calculations for gearboxes. I’ve tested radio-controlled things in the Thames looking across at Windsor Castle, and grappled with CSS while sitting in an abandoned factory in Dalston. I’ve hand-lettered sandwich shop menu blackboards and sprayed T-shirts with the logo of a new telemetry spin-out company. There’s mechanical engineering in there, some graphics, some electronics, prototype building, even copywriting.

What it’s shown me is that a jack-of-all-trades is not necessarily master of none, but unlikely to be any more than master of some, few in fact. And the main reasons for that — so far as I can tell — are time and money.

Time

If every project is different, you pretty much have to start by spending time simply finding out what you’re doing, what the precedents are in that field, what important things you need to know, even what equipment you’ll need to do the job properly. Some clients tend to assume that anyone ‘technical’ can fix (or indeed design) absolutely anything involving engineering materials, electronics, computers, etc, and while to some extent I don’t think that’s untrue, given experience, it’s probably not the best policy always to say ‘I’ll give it a go’. But you do need to test your limits before you can know them.

Back to the point: if you have to spend a significant amount of time on each project learning about the field, each project is going to take you longer than it would for someone who already knows what’s what. And you will make mistakes, of course.

Money

What the above implies is that, as it’s going to take you longer, you’re going to have to work out how to charge. Should the client pay for your learning process? How fair is that?

One point of view would say that no, you’ve created an (intangible) asset for yourself, and the client should only pay for your time once you know what you’re doing. The other point of view says that acquisition of knowledge is a prerequisite of being able to deliver what the client wants. Just as you charge for the acquisition of materials, so should you charge for the acquisition of knowledge. I think the answer probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s difficult for a freelance person — reliant on a sporadic income anyway — to ‘write off’ days as ‘knowledge acquisition’. If you have zero income (and maybe some expenditure) for those days, then you’re going to have to budget for that somehow, and that’s something that’s difficult to plan.

A second major point regarding money is that, well, the client wants to spend as little as possible. Why has he/she/it employed you, a freelance individual with (probably) few facilities other than your brain and your hands, rather than a ‘proper’ design consultancy? Unless the client genuinely thinks you are wonderful, or are likely to come up with stunning insights or innovation which someone else wouldn’t, the reason is probably because you’re cheap, or the client thinks you’ll be cheap (’Because you’re young, and have lower overheads, right?’).

Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm

But — the client also wants you to be good. So you have to be good and cheap. And on a smaller budget, and with less expertise and experience to call on than an established consultancy. How are you going to do it?

When I was working for a couple of weeks at a well-known design consultancy in London, two experienced freelance designers, David Baird and Simon May were also working on (more important aspects of) the same project. One morning, one of them (I can’t remember if it was David or Simon) drew out on his sketchpad, this diagram…

…and said ‘You can have 2 out of 3. It’s either good and fast (and not cheap), good and cheap (and not fast) or fast and cheap (and not good). That’s what I try to tell clients.’

This stuck with me at the back of my mind; I’ve since found out it’s (sometimes) attributed as Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm (presumably after Richard Wexelblat?), though also apparently an ‘old designer’s adage’ (Jason Kottke) and an ‘old Hollywood maxim‘. The impossible triangle used to illustrate it here is cleverer than what I’ve drawn above, but the principle is the same. (As with so many principles and maxims popularised through software development, it also seems to apply very well to design and physical product development.)

As we’ve seen, the client wants a project to be good and cheap. Hence, if Wexelblat is true, it’ll be slow, even if some of that slowness is accounted for by knowledge acquisition, and mistakes. But if you’re charging for that time, you’re incurring costs in the process, which tends to counter the ‘cheap’ aspect of the project. So, there’s an inherent difficulty with applying Wexelblat to jobs with a significant learning curve. If your costs are proportional to the time you spend, you can’t be cheap without also being fast, and bad (since you possibly don’t even know what you’re doing). For the inexperienced, cheap and fast and bad is possible, but good implies not fast and not so cheap unless — as we considered earlier — you’re willing/able to write off your learning time.

Reality

If the above sounds negative, I don’t mean it to. It’s exciting working on new things and building up expertise, but when clients’ primary reason for choosing you in the first place may be cheapness, you’re going to have something of a difficult compromise and balancing act on your hands, just in terms of scheduling your work and budget, let alone the specific challenges of the project in question. It might mean that your definition of ‘1 day’s work’ slowly seeps into becoming ‘7.30 am to 2 am’ just in order to get everything done in the same number of days you promised, and for the same cost. That’s fun for a while, but gets pretty tiring for those around you even before you get fed up.

An implication of all that is that to be competing on price alone can be a stressful game, especially when having to do so simply to get enough work means that you have a lot of learning to do for every project. It’s something of a positive feedback loop, a vicious circle. But, if you can build up enough experience in a particular field, and are able to use knowledge acquired (or problems solved) on a previous project, you have the start of something more edifying. You may still be able to compete on price, but you can now be cheap, faster and better, since you know what you’re doing. And, slowly, gradually, you might even be able to specialise in a certain field, no longer jack-of-all-trades, but actually mastering something.

Apologies for the lack of posts for the last week-and-a-bit; I’ve been very busy with projects (design, research, building prototypes, testing, etc) for a number of clients and, as always, things take longer than you expect. I said before that I didn’t want to write posts on here when my mind is elsewhere (it tends to show), hence I haven’t, but many thanks to everyone who’s been in touch with suggestions and comments.

Above: Part of a recent project; can’t tell you what it is, but this prototype used plenty of Dymo tape labels. The production version won’t!

As a flipside, perhaps, to the quote on precedents from a couple of weeks ago:

If there is something really cool, and you can’t understand why somebody hasn’t done it before, it’s because you haven’t done it yourself.

(From Lion Kimbro’s fascinating How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think.)

The way I interpret that is that every previous person who has come up with the idea has been dissuaded by the same thought, viz. ‘Why hasn’t anyone done that before?’ and thus this is the problem.

When you come up with an idea, whether as a designer, engineer, scientist, thinker, writer, programmer, educator, anything, two of the biggest objections you’ll face are:

a) I bet that’s not original. Therefore, it’s no good.
b) Why hasn’t anyone done that before? It can’t be any good.

But in an abstract sense, we shouldn’t be put off by the existence or non-existence of precedents. It can be useful to learn from others’ success (and failures), of course, but independent thought and development (even if unknowingly following others’ work) so often seem to be at the heart of genuine progress.

Image: ‘The Briton’ door closer, from an era when it was considered worth branding and having pride in the design of a product such as this.

It is remarkable… how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born.

From a post by Vera Bass, ‘Teaching requires learning’, 6th November 2006.

Many people have probably also said this, but that’s the point, pretty much.

A few minutes ago I was playing a track in Winamp, with Gmail open in an Opera window, and on refreshing Gmail, the Google ‘web clip’ at the top of the inbox display contained the same phrase, ‘jet stream’, as the track.

Is that merely a coincidence, or does Gmail monitor what music is being played by a user? I don’t have Google Desktop or Toolbar or any of that installed.

Most of the posts look at ‘architectures of control‘ designed into products, systems and environments, which seek to force the user to behave in a certain way. It’s something of a broad concept, embodying aspects of computer science, interaction design, architecture, psychology, politics, marketing, economics and counterculture alongside product design and engineering; pretty soon I hope to have a ‘Top 10′ post which might make some of this clear through stand-out examples, but for the moment, please do take a look through the archives or some of the tags in the sidebar to get a flavour of the subject. Your involvement, suggestions, comments, and so on are very welcome and a big part of how I get ideas for posts.

There are also a few posts about other aspects of design, technology, the internet, society and the environment - not many so far, but I’ll be doing a lot more of these in 2007.

About me - my name’s Dan Lockton, and I’m a freelance designer / engineer / maker / writer / researcher from England. Many of the projects I work on relate to mobility and lightweight transport, but I’m interested in the relationships between technology (of all kinds) and society generally, and hoping to develop my work in this field. (My main website and portfolio need a bit of updating, at time of writing.)

Personally, the year has also been interesting and productive: I’ve gradually established myself as a freelance designer/engineer, worked for some fascinating clients on great projects, won an award, filed a patent application, met (and corresponded with) some fantastic people, and start 2007 with an especially intriguing design project in hand and more on the horizon.

I’ve also learned a lot about working on your own, and the discipline needed to be productive when you have no boss looking over your shoulder all day. A few years ago I told myself that “two projects at once” is the limit of what I can realistically handle (concentrate on one, and when you reach an impasse, you can switch to the other, and vice versa), but I tried to break that rule too often this year, hence the slow progress of projects such as British Petrol Stations and The Unquiet Survivor. (There will be progress in 2007, but no amount of Getting Things Done will actually increase the number of productive hours in the day.)

Going back to the ‘architectures of control’ research, I’ve spoken twice at Speakers’ Corner about the subject (at Copyfighters’ events - see photo below), and have just submitted a detailed book proposal to a major technology publisher. And, to top off a great year of progress with the blog, it has just been accepted into the 9rules network, a vibrant community of blogs on many subjects. As this blog’s coverage and diversity expands, I hope I can live up to readers’ expectations.

Finally I should thank my girlfriend Harriet, flatmate Adam and my family for supporting and helping me progress in 2006.

Best wishes for 2007

Dan Lockton

I don’t always look like this! Image from the “London Copyfighters” group on Flickr.