Portugal! A brief vacation at the Algarve, then a few weeks of working from Lisbon. These work-remotely stints have become a beloved tradition: Stepping away from the day-to-day allows to think a bit more deeply about big picture, to explore new ideas, to do a lot more input-output. It’s great and I highly recommend it. In this case the trip spawned a new version of our ebook Understanding the Connected Home, among other things.
A few more days in Lisbon, then back to Berlin for a few days to catch a breath and host a workshop, then on to Rotterdam & Amsterdam on a ThingsCon mission before it’s onward to London for The Good Home.
Concretely…
Dearsouvenir: Issue number two is out. Themed #TGIF! it’s all about weekend trips. You’ll find it in your Dearsouvenir Magazine app or here. It’s available in German and English, with just about 350 pages each, so dig right in! Meanwhile, I’ve been shopping – ahem: researching – souvenirs in Lisbon for future editions.
Understanding the Connected Home: While in Lisbon, Michelle and I revised our collection of essays on the implications of connected homes. The new, extended version is almost done. Keep an eye on our Twitter accounts for the final announcements. (If you’re particularly brave, you can take a look at our drafts over on Gitbook – we are, after all, writing this in public.) Personally I’d recommend giving us another few weeks as this new version will be more substantial (current wordcount: 25K) and fully restructured: It’s a major upgrade.
ThingsCon: More local /events coming in every week. We’re planning a retreat for the local community leads and other key stakeholders, set up a mailing list for local organizers, and are generally getting a little more organized and structured around local events. Also, I will be speaking at ThingsCon Salon Amsterdam on June 10th.
The Good Home: We’ve been having discussions with large UK companies around potential collaborations, and are working out where our next installment of the Good Home will live during London Design Festival (LDF) this fall.
Ignite Berlin: The Ignite network is bringing Ignite to Mozilla’s developer conference View Source – both in Seattle and Berlin. We’re very happy to help make that happen! More soon (esp. details and a CfP) over on IgniteBerlin.com.
Upcoming
IoT Design Process Patterns: As part of Dries de Roeck’s research into design processes and patterns we’ll be hosting a workshop in Berlin early next week. It looks like we might have one or two more seats (June 7th; pending), so if you have launched an IoT product or are currently designing an IoT product, take a look at this description and ping me quickly if you think you should be part of this group.
ThingsCon Salon Antwerp, alluringly titled “Ethics & IoT – Dance like nobody’s watching”, brings both me and Michelle to Antwerp with side trips to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. A big thank you to the ThingsCon Amsterdam team (Dries, Marcel, Iskander, Monique). So many things around IoT, ethics and ThingsCon to discuss!
Then off to London for a Good Home workshop with some large UK companies to see what the potential is for rolling out some of our ideas to a larger public.
After that, Scotland for a Mozilla Open IoT gathering hosted by the lovely Jon Rogers of Dundee University at the beautiful tiny village of Anstruther, Scotland.
Looking forward to packed June – looks like it’s going to be fun!
