Last year we worked on a Making Future Work commission from Broadway Nottingham and Arts Council England. We looked into Open Public Data in the East Midlands. We talked to data owners and compiled research (which we’re still compiling) with a view to making something with the data. We also wanted to help data owners see the value in opening their databases as well as artists, designers and developers see the potential for making new works and services out of them.

One dataset that we were successful in partially unlocking was the Arts Derbyshire membership database. This is a spreadsheet of artists, their practice and their location within the county. We were allowed to use the arts practice and location but not the name of the artist or organisation.

So, we made This Is Arts Derbyshire – a mapped visualisation of artists in the creative county.

It shows clusters of artists in a location. The more you zoom in, the more granular it becomes. You can browse by ‘Artist’ or ‘Organisation’ as well as by all the different practices that are registered.

There are a few interesting uses for this kind of thing that we can see already…

For one, it shows how creative the county is. In our experience working with people like the Creative Industries Network in Derby, the creative output of an area is intrinsic to its value – both in the appeal for people thinking about moving there and for the fiscal benefits of small businesses.

It can help people thinking about doing business there. The map can show a strong network or the lack of a service, depending on the business needs.

It can help local businesses find other businesses to work with nearby.

We’re interested to hear about other uses you can think of. Leave us a comment is you can think of anything.

We’re also interested in hearing from any other holders of data who would like to explore ways in which they can present their data like This Is Arts Derbyshire or our work on the Birmingham Civic Dashboard.

Time is a big part of the Mudlark studio. Barnes is all about the future — jetpacks and that — whilst Richard is obsessed with time travel (even running a micro-publishing imprint for it). I’m stuck in time, having spent too much of it reading recollections of events and being an amateur eschatologist.

MemCode, then. MemCode is the formal, launched, face of the project formerly known to us in the studio as ‘Memory Thing’. It came from a lunchtime conversation about not needing to experience something to actually experience it. Sometimes finding out about an event, getting excited about it and buying the ticket and putting it in your diary – sometimes that’s the most exciting part. Or even false memories (implanted, perhaps, by something collective like cliche or advertising) such as “sitting on the bleachers drinking Coke from a glass bottle”.

The idea of the thing is enough, you can imagine the experience.

Memory is a funny, unpredictable, brilliant thing, and so is imagination. MemCode is designed to play around with this. It’s a story-toy, and part of our infrequent series of scalable models, following on from SCVNGR at the V&A and Derby[2061]. In essence, MemCode is a sort of short-form publishing project, with a large dollop of fictional context for good measure. You may recognise MemCode as the memory preserving/sales agency from Derby[2061], which was developed in parallel.

The first bit of the story is now live. It’s the corporate website of MemCode Plc. It’s better if you go and read it in MemCode’s own words, but here’s the story in brief:

1. MemCode are compiling your digital memories and formatting them for the experience of others.
2. Memories are being tested by ‘Readers’, and created by ‘Writers’. You can be a Reader or Writer, or both. Just sign up to the mailing lists on each page.
3. The first Memory they have developed is about to be released.
4. It will be released by e-mail this month to people on the ‘Alpha Readers Mailing List’

There are so many influences and inspirations behind this project. Some are buried deeply (Krapp’s Last Tape, Assassin’s Creed, Philip K. Dick, Murakami, Dirty Projectors’ version of Damaged), and some have been cropping up even as late as last week (Imaginary Image Blog, My Earliest Memory, Facebook Timeline, ten years of 9/11 propaganda, Thinking In Tumblr, the 20th Anniversary of Nevermind).

MemCode isn’t designed for truth. It’s designed for evocation. So, I’ll stop here.

Soon, MemCode will release their first memory, and we’ll see what people make of it. Much like Derby[2061], we’re not really sure what this is, exactly. We’ve got our own ideas, but we’ll leave that until you’ve seen the ‘thing’.

Some Links:

MemCode

Alpha Reader’s Mailing List

Submit A Memory

Throughout the summer we’ve been playing with existing locative platforms. A lot of the time we get asked by clients to build them something using location, but a lot of the time it’s either just too damn expensive for the project, or would take away from the project by being tacked on to an otherwise nice tight package. Frustrated by the cost of new development, we decided to spend time messing around with what’s already out there. Even though we don’t like them so much, we started playing with QR codes to create contextual portals of interactivity, rather than strictly GPS-enabled gubbins. These were cheap, quick, easy like digital sketches. We tried out SCVNGR in a museum (in the V&A!).

Two of my favourite things are stories and time-travel. Everyone at Mudlark knows this. I like the layer that historical knowledge can apply to the everyday. It’s what Augmented Reality endeavours to do. Sometimes you don’t need apps, and sometimes you do. There are a few out there that have tackled history, so we thought we’d have a go at the future.

It started with Derby Train Station. I think we were just testing to see if Foursquare would let you make something up. It did. So we made an alternate version of the train station “location”. It was some time in the future, when a Monorail (the first sign of the future) arrives in town, and Toby started adding ‘tips’ about Memory Ports in the carriages (this set ended up setting the tone for the whole of the project).

On the next trip out of town, I checked into the future Derby Monorail Station on Foursquare instead of the present day version. The ‘Tip’, rather than a commercial for something around me, felt more like a story. It felt like a nugget of another layer. It made me want to find more. Add to that a healthy dose of Pat Cadigan and Philip K. Dick and the next thing you know there’s a spreadsheet and collaborative Google Map open and we’re barn-storming what Derby will be like in fifty years.

A bit of time and a fair bit of thinking later, and it’s ready to road test. Fifty locations scattered around Derby city-centre and Darley Abbey (where our studio is) exploring what the city might be like in fifty years’ time. There’s a story in it to find. In fact there are a few. There’s the story of new industry, of civilian life in a new culture changed by it, the story of buildings being repurposed, of politics, of clock-making and time. All told by a female guide from the future.

Luckily, Foursquare have just released ‘Lists’, providing us with an easy way to share the whole story with users. Click here for that. We’re also making a Wiki for all the bits of story we’ve invented, and hope to add more to it if people add nuggets of their own to the locations.

Greg’s still on the fence about this project. He keeps asking me what ‘it’ is. So, for Greg:

It’s an experiment to find out the following:

Can you tell a story on Foursquare?
Will users engage with it?
Will Foursquare and it’s user base let you mess with the program?
How does it square up as the surface layer of a deeper story (tested out on the Wiki but possibly transferable to long-form print)?
Is it just me being me, or can checking in to things that aren’t there feel like the future (or past)?

It’s right on time to be something for a load of southerners to play with when they come to Derbyshire this week to immerse themselves in old industry at our Laptops & Looms three-day event, where we visit the historical heart of the Industrial Revolution, sitting in silk mills pondering the future.

The Birmingham Civic Dashboard maps, times and categorises the requests or “contacts” – calls, visits, website enquiries and emails – that come in to Birmingham Council every day, through its Customer Relations Management Centre. The Dashboard went live 6th October 2011.

Users can explore the Dashboard by location, category and time, drilling in to what is effectively a living heatmap of the conversation between the residents and officers of Britain’s largest local authority.

Each coloured spot on the map represents one contact. Its colour indicates where in the council – which unit – the contact has been sent to.

Users can zoom in to the map to see where the contacts come from – plotted down to the first three letters of their post codes – or click on a list of the city’s ten constituencies and the four wards within each constituency. Some contacts have no location associated with them – categorised as “not assigned”.

Users can also examine which of Birmingham Council’s nine main service units was sent the contacts featured the your map view, and, by clicking on a unit in the left-hand column, see the sub-units – most of which have their own sub-units.

The Dashboard updates every 24 hours, adding to the searchable archive of contacts. On the Contacts per Hour graph, a line for each main unit plots the volume of contacts against time of day, refinable along with location and category.

The dashboard also expresses trends, the relative activity of different service units, volumes of contacts within categories and a sample “ticker” of recent contacts.

Mudlark designed and built the BCD for Digital Birmingham after a successful application to NESTA’S Make It Local programme. This was designed to encourage local authorities and local digital media companies to work together in exploring innovative use of open public data, creating innovative user centred applications and digital services for their local communities and promoting further collaboration and innovation within local authorities.

Website: www.civicdashboard.org.uk

We were asked to develop an exhibition, speaker programme, and present our thoughts on the future of digital at The Thailand Creative & Design Centre. TCDC is an amazing resource centre set up to provide Thais with easy access to design inspiration, encouraging entrepreneurs and creative thinking.

Playing with a 500m2 space, we wanted to look at the UK heritage over the last 40 years of UK game development, have a playable area of current UK talent and show a number of  up-and-coming  Thai developers and 3D artists. For the exhibition of current UK talent, it was important to us to show indie games (Chime, Hohokum), mobile innovations (Papa Sangre) and University digital design showreels (Abertay, Newport, Teesside), as well as small number of large publisher offerings.

We worked with Ian Livingstone at Eidos, Hugo Sands at Passion Pictures, as well as the teams of the British Council in the UK and Thailand.

Our one is about Redundant Systems and, by association, open data. Rather than doing a hacking project, we wanted to do something that was the start of something else. The start of myriad things in fact.

We work with data quite a lot. From our game Chromaroma that uses people’s Oyster Card data to make travel into a fun and imaginative experience, to the soon to be launched Birmingham Civic Dashboard. A few of us at Mudlark reside in the East Midlands and it’s a small cause of frustration that (seemingly at least) no work is going on in the region to work with civic data in the ways that London, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester are doing. After seeing what good can come of open data, we want it here and we want it now. So the first part of our project is a Scouting Mission to find out:

a) what data is out there in our region
b) who owns that data
c) is anyone doing anything with it
d) if not, why not
e) what can the East Midlands learn from other forging forward with open public data

The next bit, after collating all the research together into something useful and browseable, will be to speak to developers, designers, data wranglers and artists to brainstorm what could be done with the data that exists and is available.

The outcome of the whole project will be, if all goes to plan, a comprehensive guide to civic and derived data in the East Midlands, where it is, who’s got it, how to ask for it, and what you might do with it.

We’re really excited about speaking to people in the region and introducing them to thinking behind and the benefits inherent in open public data, as well as working with Broadway, QUAD, iShed and everyone else involved.

Armed with a spreadsheet, a telephone, and a flask of weak lemon drink…we’re off!

Chromaroma is a game that shows you your movements and location as you swipe your Oyster Card in and out of the Tube.

It connects communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport.

The game is currently in development backed by 4IP and Screen West Midlands.

Starting out to explore the world and future world of game design as Game Design London in 2006, the conference spread its wings to the wider world of everything and became Playful in 2008, relocating to the inspirational Conway Hall.

In our work at Mudlark we’re constantly reading, working with, hearing about and recommending to our clients people who are pushing the boundaries of new media, philosophy, philanthropy, research, and theories on anything from why Lego is brilliant, to exploring social problems through The Sims (all via computational matchboxes, graphs, robots and why we really buy fancy wrist watches).

Each year we work with a different designer on the identity of Playful, and get them to recycle and adapt the work of the previous year’s branding. Previous ‘iterations’ of Playful visuals have been created by the masterful hands of POKE London and Rex Box.

We’re really proud of Playful, because, apart from making it for ourselves (to see a line-up of speakers that we’d really want to see), other people like it too, and that these people turn out to be as awesome as the people we booked to take the stage. Each October we end up surrounded by the type of people who in their own ways are changing the world which makes Playful not just a project but an education and inspiration to us.

Website: thisisplayful.com

We’ve built on the Indie Games Arcade and Show & Yell, and through them found a massively supportive network of UK indie developers.

Mudlark worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company to develop a new platform to explore Shakespeare’s place in a culture of cross-platform media consumption.

After a series of workshops with the RSC, we worked with the organisation to recognise the great potential for extending its work into digital platforms, enabling the company to reach out to a generation of young people who have grown up using technology intuitively as part of their everyday lives.

Such Tweet Sorrow was a five-week long retelling of Romeo & Juliet played out on Twitter and other online social platforms, reaching a global audience of thousands and recieving coverage all over the world. Real actors played the star-crossed lovers and their four cohorts Tybalt, Mercutio, Lawrence Friar, and ‘Nurse’ Jess.

The audience were able to engage with the characters via ‘@’ messaging them on Twitter, or finding them elsewhere on the web. For example, Romeo’s XBox gamertag was discovered and people queued to speak to him (or shoot him in a Call of Duty deathmatch).

Where this Twitter-play differed from other similar attempts at using the micro-blogging medium as a storytelling platform was in its narrative structure. Celebrated online storyteller Tim Wright and playwright Bethan Marlow collaborated on a story ‘grid’ where the character’s lives were mapped out over the five weeks. There was no direct use of Shakespeare’s words. No “wherefore art thou @romeo”. The characters tweeted as normal people would do. Juliet’s tweets were quick and often, her elder sister ‘Nurse’ Jess’ more mature and reflective.

Provocative and experimental, the production was a huge success. Mudlark are currently developing new ideas for cross-media storytelling.

Such Tweet Sorrow was a Mudlark production made possible by Channel 4 and The Royal Shakespeare Company.

Links:

BBC Coverage
The Guardian
Channel 4

As the player takes a walk, their journey is mapped by GPS and a heart rate monitor. The goal is to maintain optimum heart rate and explore as far as they can, in order to score points. The player creates a landscape that appears on the mobile phone screen, as they walk. If the player’s heart rate goes too low or too high the landscape on the mobile phone becomes arid desert or turns to wild forest, in optimum range the landscape blossoms.

The networked game lets players view the journey’s other players have made, on their mobile phone screen, when they cross paths. They score bonus points by following these paths, stealing territories from each other and collecting objects and messages left for them in the game. The game connects to an online map where players can review, replay and download journeys.

Heartland Video on YouTube

The game had to get the message of healthy eating over to kids without being worthy, as it would have been ignored, so we built it directly into the game.  Snackdash is a platform clone where the player can eat all the bad food he/she likes, but it will jsut slow them down.  By making healthy food choices the player will speed through the level.  Of course a little exercise and press ups will always fit the flab too.

“Ironically a game that promotes possibly one of the most difficult messages to communicate to children became one of the fastest spreading viral games in history. Focus groups have proven that a majority of the kids playing the game appreciated these messages and said they took them on board.”

Play it here

Unique visits to date (Sept 09) : 73.4 million plays.

In 2008 and 2009 the Indie Games Arcade found a home at the huge Eurogamer Expo during the London Games Festival, and attracted thousands of people to, until then, very little known games. In 2009, with increased support from Eurogamer, the games on show at our Indie Games Arcade frequently made the favorites list of visitors.

As well as being a way for us to share the games we like with a wider public, the Indie Games Arcade is also important as being a small but important step in the growth and stimulation of an artistic economy that is capable of not only entertaining, but forging new paths in game design and taking risks that mainstream development projects simply won’t take.

Website: Indie Games Arcade

Love City is an SMS mobile phone and web game played over several different locations, bringing players together through sending messages of love.

The aim of the game is to move about in the real world to locations that are mapped onto the game world of Love City. Players score points by sending messages to players who share locations with them in the game world.  Players create offspring, create bonds and allegiances, and are set tasks which helps to build the virtual Love City.

Each player acts as an agent for their real location.  Consequently, Love City is a game about individual and community achievement.  The game can be played on their phones, on the web and link into large screens where the messages and game play is revealed in each of the real locations.

Love City is one of a series of games designed by Mudlark for mobile devices based around massively multi-player online gaming. The games involve multi-player network gaming, they are location based and encourage players to play indoors and outdoors. Making Life Playable.  The game was originally launched across 3 cities (Nottingham, Leicester and Derby) on Valentines Day 2007.