NOTES

As part of this year's Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth's Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game.

Bumper crop is an android game I’ve just started working on with Dr Misha Myers as part of the Play to Grow project: “exploring and testing the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India.”

This is a Raspberry Pi running a Racket Servlet (with the Mongoose 2000 data sync server) serving a webpage to the tablet. The neat thing is that it's running on solar power - a day of gloomy winter Cornish light (not even outside) charging the on board battery results in over an hour of running time. This includes the ad-hoc wifi transmitter, which is presumably the main power drain as …

Here's a prototype recipe notebook for open sauces. At this point it's primarily a test of a drag/drop interface to make it possible for anyone to make the recipe graphs we explored visualising in October. I'm testing it with the recipes designed for FoAM's recent Smoke and Vapour event.

Yesterday was the first test of the full DORIS marine mapping system I'm developing with Amber Teacher and David Hodgson at Exeter University. We went out on a fishing boat from Mylor harbour for a 5 hour trip along the Cornish coast. It's a quiet season for lobsters at the moment, so this was an opportunity to practice the sampling without too much pressure. Researcher Charlie Ellis was working …

Doris is a new project that has emerged from the development of Borrowed Scenery's Zizim app, repurposed into a scientific research tool in collaboration with the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at Exeter University and Helsinki University. Doris – named after the sea nymph in Greek mythology – will be used for mapping lobster catches on fishing boats so researchers working at the National Lobster Hatchery …

Some examples of graphs that scientists have created and published using Hapstar, all these images were taken from the papers that cite our publication, with links to them below.

A mycorrhiza is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.

Some serious connecting work going on with borrowed scenery for joining physical and imaginary worlds together. A new Boskoi database is up and running, giving us a place to put all kinds of story elements and plants found in the city. Boskoi uses the Ushahidi platform, which provides an API the game is now using to pull all items tagged in the map (which can come from the Android app …

Hapstar has achieved some popularity in the genetics community, the paper has currently racked up 13 citations, including one for it's use to create a figure for a Nature paper. This version addresses some requests from users, including the ability to save graphs midway though balancing. This means it's easier to run them for long periods of time. 

Last weekend it was the annual FoAM gathering to discuss long term ideas, some self reflection and consideration of external perceptions. We were guided on this mission by Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga, members of FoAM and founders of Natural Innovation. They decided to trial a new method on us all, Lego Serious Play. Now, I'm a bit battle hardened when it comes to alternative business management strategies …