The Neighbourhood Feed Archives for December 2011

It's December... there is a winter chill in the studio and the sweet smell of gluhwein permeates the Manchester atmosphere... it's time for Creative Sessions!

Though not specifically Christmas themed, the festive force was still strong as we took a peek at a whole range of treats including the white knuckle ride that is the Isle of Man TT and a fun Japanese musical toy called an Otamatone (think Stylophone minus Rolf Harris, plus cute character design).

Continuing along the musical theme we absorbed the eerie whale song of the Waterphone and saw what happens when Music meets Cliff Richard. We then took a detour on the London Bus until we arrived at this great collaborative illustration blog paying tribute to the 'masters'...

And if you like that then we'll leave you with a pictures-based game, after all  - what's Christmas without a bit of friendly competition!

So, back in October 2010, we moved into our new studio. We thought it would be a nice idea to launch our new digital home at the same time.

It wasn't quite ready when we moved, so we thought we'd put up a little holding page whilst we finished it off. There's no proof of this, but we're sure we can remember Ben saying "it’ll be ready in a couple of weeks, no problem.”

Then things got really busy. The projects were rolling in, and our own work never quite seemed to make it to the top of anyone's to-do list. The weeks turned into months, until the 'W' word became the elephant in the studio, and 12 months later we still, embarrassingly, had the same holding page.

Our friends at Music seem to have captured what may be a familiar process for many on their site. (Have a look at their list, and their beautiful work while you’re at it!)

A lot's changed for us in last year – we’ve settled into our new home, we’ve grown the team, and even our lovely studio illustration by Chris Gray has made way for one by Matt Saunders.

But, thankfully, we're now launching. We'd still call this site a work in progress, but in the words of Seth Godin - we need to ship!

Huge thanks to our regular collaborators Stuart Preece and Andrew Disley for their hard work and persistence!.

We hope you like it, let us know what you think!

Building worlds and story-telling are subjects close to our hearts at The Neighbourhood. Finding the most engaging way to communicate information, ideas, anecdotes, anything really.

There is good reason for this, humans are hard wired with imagination, making connections, embellishing, creating worlds and narratives of their own out of small pieces of information.

It explains why kids can become absorbed in a game with a cardboard box, why people 'discover' hidden meanings and conspiracies in album covers. It’s that innate search for context and meaning that made The DaVinci Code a worldwide best seller, even if the 'facts' are questionable. We all want to believe.

It was with interest that we stumbled upon this study by two psychologists in 1944 called 'An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour'. They played an abstract animation of simple geometric shapes interacting and asked people for their responses as to what they thought was happening.

Many people anthropomorphised the shapes, imbuing them with personality that wasn't outwardly expressed within the animation. Was the circle kind? Was the triangle aggressive? Further proof of how sophisticated human perceptions are in creating meaning.

Take a look and do the test yourself.

This weekend, Rob and Stu started an adventure into electronics and coding.

They enrolled on the Beginners guide to Arduino and Physical Computing at Madlabs in Manchester. During the class they explored and discussed many different ways of creating electronic prototypes that gather information and allow interesting user interaction methods.

They then set to work interpreting this data digitally with Processing and pushing it back out to Arduino to LEDs and motors, and are opening up a whole new world of DIY electronics, interaction design and rapid prototyping.

So, before long, we might be doing things like this, or this, or this….. or even this…..

Watch this space!

Organised by Mr Matt "how on earth does he fit all this stuff in" Booth and Northern Digitals, Jon and Ben were delighted to be invited to talk at BLAB, alongside one of our design heroes Airside.

Jon and Ben took the audience through a quick journey through some of their personal creative history which has led us to this point with The Neighbourhood today, and concluded with an exclusive screening of our Heston Blumenthal Sweet-Shop project.

Thankfully our ambitious plan to give all 200+ people in the audience wireless headphones to immerse themselves in the binaural sound design (courtesy of Zelig Sound) - seemed to come off!

Although the event was back in April, the talk's now been published on the Northern Digitals site here.

We all love secret peeks into the lives of the rich and famous, seeing how the other half live. We're not particularly avid followers of Hello magazine but this little peek into the house of one of our heroes Pixar legend John Lasseter certainly inspired us.

So what's his house like?

Model railways running from room to room (Wallace and Gromit inspired perhaps?) Check.

Secret rooms and hidden staircases? Check.

Water park in the back garden? Check.

Wardrobe of vintage Hawaiian shirts? Of course!

Looks like a fun place to live, although we did expect the architecture to be a bit more John Lautner perhaps!