Kelly Goto stands on the stage at Brighton’s Dome, head down, staring at her palm, a perfect mimic of the modern smartphone user, and issues a simple challenge to the dConstruct audience: “Help people to stay upright.”

This is the pivotal moment at which digital design finds itself. After decades training people to gaze into ever more enchanting screens, it’s time for a shake-up, to re-engage with the world around us, once more to look each other in the eye. And it may not be a comfortable experience.

Kevin Slavin dares to ask a roomful of designers why we always look to optics to provide wonder and comfort. Why do we feel the need to mediate the world through a screen, to create (according to a beautiful if only half true story from World War II USA) an upside down backwards town? Why are we not more aware of the dangers that “things that serve the eye trick the eye”? Don’t we remember the beguiling Cottingley Fairies, who showed us long ago that we can’t believe everything we see?

In place of the uncanny valley marketing vision of augmented reality – “We’ll make it magic by putting stickers on everything” – Kevin argues for engagement through behaviour. Pixelated monochrome Tamagotchi inspired more devotion than max polygon count 3d graphics, not by looking real but by exhibiting real traits – being hungry, vulnerable, rewarded and sick. And Kevin should know the power of the invisible: he admits to being spooked by his own code when Crossroads’ Papa Bones swept through the Area/Code studio late one night.

Bryan Rieger and Stephanie Rieger challenge us to engage with the world by releasing stuff that’s not finished, because people prefer it that way. For me their case is marred by over-reliance on the “accelerating pace of change” trope (on which another post follows) but I reckon they have a point about the value of good enough.

As Matt Sheret eloquently puts it: “Hacks scratch the itches that contemporary product design hasn’t caught up with yet.” Time-traveller Matt talks us through the special qualities of things you can put in your pockets – from a Victorian watch to an RFID bike hire key. “RFID is a huge gift for interaction,” he says. I think this is because of its potential as a gap-closing technology that helps link the real world with its digital mirror image.

“Think about the spaces between the experiences you are creating,” says Kelly Goto: to make things that work in the world, we have to understand its people, their rituals and the way they live their lives.

Kars Alfrink makes his own attempt to do this: pointing out the dark side of gentrification. Our cities are divided in plain sight, sharing territory yet blind to each other, like the young Hackney couple enjoying a glass of wine while a tense gang stand-off plays out around them. How do designers get out of their bubble and contribute to a resilient society?

Respect for time and memory surely have a big role to play. Don Norman, in a slide-free talk rich with insight on the state of the user interface art – says we should design memories not experiences: “A memory is a form of augmented reality,” he posits.

And Frank Chimero, who always gives good metaphor, forever replaces my previous best image for our online history. From now of it’s not data exhaust, it’s “walking through snow”. Also Instapaper, Delorean.

Full marks to Frank for the most compelling account I’ve seen of “curation” as applied to web content. Until today I’ve seen “curation” online as a pale, twisted imitation of the real thing, as practiced in museums and art galleries. But Frank put his finger on the thing that makes for good curation – not just hit-and-run picking of stuff but making an educated second pass to transform a collection of objects into a meaningful narrative.

Craig Mod seems to be on similar territory. He talks about data as if it were a living herd, needing to be corraled, then as a field of dead artifacts, in need of “excavation”. What is the shape of the future book? Kilometres high, and chopped up into a million pieces, apparently.

Dan Hon has also dedicated his career to chopping up stories – having followed transmedia storytelling from web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond. There’s online storytelling the hard way (do it in 2001) and the seemingly easy (do it all on Twitter) though the common thread is good storytelling. Some platforms lend themselves to stories, others do not. Heello is a platform for pretending. Quora is not.

Curiously Dan and Frank both need the same tool for different purposes – something to break out of the blocky file-status-update-album-art tyranny of today’s web services into ways to tell more fluid stories. For Frank it’s about making stories from our real lives, for Dan its creating pretend lives from stories, but in essence both demand the same aesthetic. It’s an aesthetic whose time has come – one that’s authentic without being skeuomorphic. The real world is calling. It wants its designers back.

He writes…

The Bauhaus Movement (1918-1933) was based on a German revival of a purer, honest design representation in architecture, art, typography and product design. Its philosophy celebrated an austere functionalism with little or no ornamentation. It advocated a use of industrial materials and inter-disciplinary methods and techniques. The  Bauhaus aesthetic and beliefs were influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture. Artists included Paul Klee, Wassilli Kandinsky, and Feininger. Architects and designers included Mies Van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Lazlso Moholy-Nagy and several others.

Rahul detects the emergence of a new Bauhaus trend in interaction design, typified by the innovative new Windows Phone 7 user interface. But in concluding he asks exactly the right question by pointing to the failings as well as the early promise of the Bauhaus brand of reductionism.

If the Bauhaus movement in the early part of last century failed to resonate with users… can we as designers prepare ourselves to meet the challenges ahead?

If you can bear the profuse ornamentation, I think it’s worth looking a couple of generations further back, to the roots of the movement against which Bauhaus was reacting.

John Ruskin hated classical strictures and mass production. He loved the changefulness that comes when anonymous workers are set free to express themselves through their craft. I think his Nature of Gothic makes a good model for the amazing variety of mobile, web-enabled media, savageness, redundance and all. You can have your IxD Bauhaus, but I’ll keep my Mobile Gothic.

A day in Helsinki with my wife and three lively sons included a visit to the Design Museum.

We enjoyed the permanent exhibition on the ground floor. It raised questions about what is designed and how. Also, what belongs in a design museum: Aalvar Aalto, kitchenware, ceramics, chairs, lots more chairs, and – being in Finland – Fiskars scissors and a Nokia Communicator, wooden prototypes and all. But none of these could be described as the best thing in the museum.

The sight of my boys fighting over the mouse of a virtual reality interactive of the Finnish Pavilion from the 1900 Paris World Fair definitely added an extra frisson when we moved upstairs to a whole floor filled with stunning and expensive Oiva Toikka glassware. Sensational, but still not the best.

For my money they saved the best design until last. (I mean this sincerely and not in any way to undermine the contents of this wonderful museum. I’d love to return with a little more time on my hands.)

Like many other museums and galleries the Design Museum gives visitors a sticker to show they’ve paid. Thus, outside other museums we see little clusters of discarded stickers, erupting like a disease on any available surface. Like this…

Or this…

Not so the immaculate doorstep of the Helsinki Design Museum. For just inside the doorway is a box, about the size of my smallest child. The box’s role in life is to attract coloured stickers. I say with some certainty that this was the single most interactive, participatory and engaging part of our family’s visit.

I have no idea who put the box there, whether they understood its true purpose beforehand or simply permitted it to remain once the practice emerged. I’ve seen the solution elsewhere. Maybe museum people swap tips like this at museums conferences.

Whatever the story, the originator of this solution is a true design genius. It’s simple, fun, human-centred, and it solves a social problem. Without a doubt it’s the kind of thing that belongs in a design museum.

There are lots of reasons to come along to Leeds Service Design Thinks on Tuesday 14 September. So many that it’s hard to know where to start.

I could begin with the chance to meet and chat with some of the smart and passionate service designers who made it to our first Service Design Drinks event back in June, and some more who’ll be joining us for the first time. It was a bit of a gamble to bring this format to Leeds, modelled on successful events in London, Glasgow and elsewhere, but it paid off handsomely. We discovered there’s lots going on already, and lots of interest in developing a northern community of interest around service design and design thinking.

But starting there would be to neglect the fact that on September 14 we’re giving you the chance to hear from Dr James Munro about his social enterprise, Patient Opinion, and the challenge of building better services in the NHS. James already presented his work at Service Design Thinks in London, and we know it’ll be of interest to many people working in the North. I’d give up my Tuesday evening just to hear from James.

But that might give the impression that service design is only for public services and social enterprise. It’s not. We also have my Orange colleague Kathryn Grace presenting her work on retail customer experience. As a designer for a company called Everything Everwhere, Kathryn has a unique viewpoint over in-store experiences, large-scale e-commerce and e-care, and cutting-edge mobile applications. I know she’s passionate about making all these things work together to deliver a simple and engaging customer experience. Kathryn also deserves the credit for making this whole event happen in the first place. Tero and I have played supporting roles, but hers is the main drive and motivtation behind both “Drinks” and “Thinks”.

And if you’re still wavering, consider this. Not one, not two, but three amazing speakers! For we will also hear from Professor Guy Julier of Leeds Metropolitan University. When we set up SD Leeds we wanted to explore how service design approaches could make a positive difference to the place where we live and work. So Guy’s role in the Leeds Love It Share It community interest company is right up our street. He’ll tell us about “Margins within the city” a recent community development project.

There’s no end to the fascinating questions that arise when we consider these three topics together. When designing a service, where do you start? Who do you start with? And what kind of people and processes make a new service more likely to succeed? That’s why we’ve tag-lined the event “Starting Points”.

“Service Design Thinks Leeds 01 | Starting Points” is on Tuesday 14 September, from 6pm to 9pm, at a central Leeds venue to be confirmed. You can sign up now on Eventbrite, follow us on Twitter, or find out more about this and other similar events on servicedesigning.org.

Maybe it’ll be the start of something new.

First, though, listen to Norman, writing about ‘Millennials’ and Enterprise2.0 on his Futures Diagnosis blog:

The Millennial issue in the workplace has become symptomatic of the uncertainty of the ‘information age’ which exaggerates the novelty of the present at the expense of the past. This generational shift is regarded as unprecedented and a unique feature of our times. The workplace (and indeed, the world) is now divided into two periods: the past where everything remained the same with little change and the current moment with its constant change where change and disruption are incessant.

This rhetoric of unprecedented change is precisely that, rhetoric. What about the generational shift that occurred in the 1960s? The rise of the teenager in the post-War period was indeed unprecedented and had a huge impact on Western society. But did this result in the end of the enterprise as we know it? No, the exact opposite. It helped to forge the enterprise as we know it.

This is spot on. As I’ve argued before, what has changed in the last decade is the enterprise’s level awareness of stuff that has previously gone on behind its back.

Throughout the so-called “mass media” era, managers were encouraged to delude themselves that they had the attention of their employees and customers, who were in reality talking amongst themselves all along.

The web puts an end to the delusion. It acts like Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex:

… allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

Why is the web like this? Because of the convergence of communications, entertainment and commerce into a single seamless mass.

Once upon a time, television appeared to be an uncontested safe harbour for entertainment and commerce, the corporate-networked desktop PC a clearly bounded productivity tool. Sociability and communication happened out of sight and out of mind.

Now those things are collapsing in on each other. When commercial messages have to compete with pictures of your kids, cute kittens and plans for nights out, there is no contest. When employees openly use the same tools to converse with their peers as to conduct business it becomes clear at once that bonds of friendship are stronger than those of salaried fealty. When even the biggest brand is reduced to a fraction of one percent of searches on the web, it becomes just another microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.

These truths are not new, but the tools to discover them are.

Executives stepping out of the Vortex for the first time are understandably mind-blown. Realising quite how insignificant their businesses and products are in the lives of their consumers, they become easy prey to social media’s snake-oil salesforce, who promise to swell the ranks of their Twitter followers and guarantee instant Google gratification.

Maybe they’d do better to remember that they were young once, and that, as Adams wrote: “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Though standing in the living room just a few feet from a landline phone, I reached for the phone that is always with me, the shiny computer in my pocket, with wifi, a web browser and a touchscreen so slick it has to defend against my disgusting human fingers with a lipophobic coating.

I entered the number (because, yes, this computer also makes calls!) and was greeted by a man from the Nineteen Eighties. This is going to be a breeze, I thought smugly. I’m a confident 24-hour e-banking consumer. I laugh in the face of paper bills. I sweep administrative trivia into the gaps of my a busy lifestyle.

“Now,” demands Nineneen Eighties Man, “using the keypad on your phone, enter your 16-digit card number followed by the hash key”.

The keypad on my phone? The keypad on my phone? My phone has a camera, a compass and an accelerometer. It tells the weather to save me the strain of looking out of the window. It has no need of a keypad!

So I tapped the bit of the screen that invokes a grid of numbers and began typing the 16-digit number from the front of the card. I stumbled and hit the back button. But Nineteen Eighties Man couldn’t hear the back button. In fact he told me to try again, then hung up on me!

I redialled and tried again. It struck me that my phone is great at correcting text as I slide across its surface, but cannot really help me when it comes to random numbers. I failed again and started to worry that if I didn’t get this right soon I’d be holding a useless lump of plastic (“committed to a PVC-free future” though my bank professes to be).

So I put away my phone of first choice and decided to battle the bank with a weapon they’d understand: a dusty DECT portable with big rubbery buttons and not much screen. “The keypad on your phone,” now I have your number Nineteen Eighties Man! Job done.

What did I learn?

Well first, for the banks, that when it comes to these little interactions, there will very soon be a mass of consumers out there for whom a mobile web interface is far more usable than an IVR one. If I have to enter a 16-digit number, let me do it in a form that has some foregiveness and doesn’t just hold me to the first number I press. Or even better, could I send you a photo of my card, or snap a 2d barcode sticker on it to show I’ve got it?

And for me, in being forced to switch between a touchscreen and keypad, I learned that entering anything, numbers, words, on a touchscreen is a fuzzier experience that requires more active looking, than the definite pressing of buttons from muscle memory. Even if you know vaguely where on the screen they virtual buttons are, and get tactile feedback after pressing them, the eyes still have a bigger role to play.

And that set me thinking. We’re about to see a change in people’s physical behaviour – from phone-clamped-to-side-of-head, to head-down-looking-at-phone. This isn’t just important to those of us who work on mobile media. It’s a big deal for anyone who offers services over the phone. It’s going to mean rethinking lots of things, because in a few more years people may not have that dusty DECT phone as backup.

It’s a fascinating story which, I think, explains why short-run, nichepaper projects such as Newspaper Club are so deliciously disruptive.

After all there have always been easier formats for getting messages out to people. For decades there was the mimeograph, then the photocopier, and desktop publishing, books, leaflets, A4 newsletters and “vanity-published” books. Rarely did the newspaper form get a look-in on anything other than, well, news.

To understand why that is, we should consider the trade-offs. This involves a graph, with no numbers, but stay with me, please.

For simplicity, let’s imagine there are two costs: the variable cost of the raw material – paper – and the fixed cost of the presses and equipment needed to print on it. My chart shows two scenarios for those combined costs depending on the volume of copies required.

The green line is a traditional short-run desktop publishing set-up. The barrier to entry is low – maybe just a few hundred pounds for a PC and an inkjet or laser printer. Or a visit to a local copyshop. And since every instance is created afresh using tiny dots of ink, it makes no difference if every page you print is unique.

The downside? Start cranking out the pages and the costs go up steeply. You can’t print onto just any paper: it’s 80 GSM minimum, and specially coated or the printer goes on strike, flashing rude messages in LED Morse code. It’s painfully slow, and don’t even get me started on the replacement ink cartridges.

It’s a low fixed cost, high variable cost model.

The red line is mass production. Picture a state-of-the-art web offset printing plant, of the kind TV journalists are forced to stand before as penance every time a newspaper beats them to a major story. Traditionally running a job in one of those will set you back thousands before you print a single copy. But once underway it can rapidly churn out passable results from giant rolls of dead-cheap paper – high fixed cost, low variable cost.

The difference is in the paper.  Newsprint is thin, it tears easily, it isn’t even white, more like a greyish colour, and the ink comes off on your hands. Amazingly all that is a price worth paying in return for cheapness at large scale, as is the huge cost of the specialised equipment needed to print onto it.

The dotted line marks the point at which those models cross over, where you’re printing so many copies, or printing so often, that cheap paper beats cheap hardware. To the right of that dotted line newsprint makes financial sense – which is why daily and weekly news comes to us on newsprint while monthly glossies and direct mailshots don’t.

But this is where economics meets emotion. As the most efficient medium for a certain class of messages, newsprint has acquired its own unique affordances, special qualities that suggest how we are to interact with it. There’s a powerful tension in the affordances of newsprint that combines importance with urgency.

“My message is so big,” newsprint says, “that it must be conveyed to you by means of a massive, multi-million pound printing press.” It has weight, it has authority.

Yet it is never ponderous, because the paper is impermanent. It is easily crumpled and ripped: “I won’t be here for long, you’d better read me while you can.”

Thus newspapers demand our immediate attention in ways that mere books, for all their refinement and beauty, never can. Set aside a book and you can return to it tomorrow. Cast aside a newspaper and it will be recycled, or used as fish-and-chip wrapping.

To create a newspaper is to tell the reader, “I made this really big difficult thing, even though I know you’re going to throw it away. And I will do the same again tomorrow. That’s how much I love you.”

These affordances are deeply engrained. A newspaper that’s printed on stock that’s too thick, or too white, feels wrong – like a counterfeit banknote.

And that’s why a short-run newspaper is such a wonderful thing. It shouldn’t exist and so just by being there it draws us in. Technology may shift the red line on my chart downwards, but our expectations lag behind the changing economics. In the gap between economics and emotion, hyperlocal, niche interest and even friends-and-family papers are set to surprise us.

Passing peasants were doubtless discouraged from picking up a chisel to hack at the nearest stone, but Gothic buildings like York Minster and Strasbourg Cathedral were certainly the work of many hands, over many generations – not generations of software but generations of people. They were in very public beta for longer than Google News.

And so in chronicling the exciting changes we’re about to see in the mobile user experience it seems appropriate to turn to John Ruskin, Victorian art critic, social theorist, and owner of a magnificent beard.

As the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, Ruskin must now be counted great-granddaddy of the Maker Faire. He spent much of his life railing passionately against mechanisation and industrialisation built on classical principles, and for a sense of humanity and imperfection that he nostalgicly saw embodied in Gothic architecture.

What has this to do with iPhones, Nokias, Androids and WinMos? I think it’s this: the mobile user experience has, hitherto, been top-down, governed by repetitive strictures, managed and manageable by a technocratic elite. But classical perfectionism is unsustainable, and must soon give way to a more vibrant gloriously chaotic Gothic.

The fragile, beautiful iPhone stands like 14th Century Venice on the cusp of this change. Barbarians from the Internet are at the gate.

In The Nature of Gothic, Ruskin defines and prioritises six characteristics of Gothic, belonging both to the building and the builder:

Come with me now to the heights of fancy, as we apply each of Ruskin’s Gothic elements to the language of the mobile user experience.

1. Savageness

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.”

The craftsman as hero is a consistent motif in Ruskin’s artistic and social theories. To him, mechanisation and division of labour dehumanise workers, enslaving them to execute exactly the specifications of others. The only way to recapture the humanity in labour is to put the designer back in touch with the tools of the craft and to unleash the creativity of the maker.

To Ruskin this liberation was a Christian duty, and the anonymous medieval stone mason was the archetype: working under general direction on a piece of the whole, but free to add his own flourishes, faults and foibles. The resulting imperfections are not just a price worth paying but a joy to behold, the mark of humanity in the work.

I believe that this is the delight of the web. After several decades of increasing professionalisation, specialisation and stratification in software development, the web offers a set of tools – HTML, Javascript, the browser – that are simple yet powerful enough for anyone to wield the chisel. That is not to say that we don’t need master masons to think bigger and work finer than the rest of us. Those chisels in the wrong hands can still result in atrocious user experiences.

But simple, ubiquitous development tools are what makes the web what it is, LOLCats and all. Those tools, if they’re not already here, are coming soon to a mobile phone near you, empowering many more people – savages or not – to create their own experiences. I think John Ruskin would be rolling his own widgets.

2. Changefulness

“I have already enforced the allowing independent operation to the inferior workman, simply as a duty to him, and as enobling the architecture by rendering it more Christian. We have now to consider what reward we obtain for the performance of this duty, namely, the perpetual variety of every feature of the building.”

“Changefulness” is a word to conjure with, a tension embodied: a state, of being full of change; a state of being, full of change.

Look up at the bosses that stud the ceiling of a medieval cathedral. Each performs the same structural and decorative functions as part of the building. But no two are the same. The more you look the more they repay your gaze with detail. The bosses change across space and time. When the roof of the South Transept of York Minster burned down in a fire the Church was inspired to crowd-source replacements.

For bosses, think icons. No not those icons. These icons – designed by different hands, stacked and restacked by the actions of users, they bring change and changefulness to the mobile user interface. Vision Mobile even predicts a feudal system on your idle screen. It doesn’t have to be icons; other forms will evolve but the changefulness, the capability of perpetual novelty, marks out the interface as Gothic.

Classical design cannot do this. It has repetition but never change. Classical has elegant forced symmetry that makes sense in the design review but not in the usability lab. Creativity is reserved for centrepieces where it is crippled with the fear of failure. At Robert Adam’s Nostell Priory, near Wakefield, blank lumps of stone jut out of a perfect Palladian facade. In two hundred years, no one has had the guts to make a mark. Now the National Trust owns Nostell Priory in perpetuity, perhaps they could do us an oak leaf, or a QR code or something? It wouldn’t happen to a Goth.

3. Naturalism

“… so soon as the workman is left free to represent what subjects he chooses, he must look to the nature that is around him for material, and will endeavour to represent it as he sees it, with more or less accuracy according to the skill he possesses, and with much play of fancy, but with small respect for the law.”

For Ruskin this was all about foliage – how the textbook representations of nature in Roman capitals lacked lightness, truth and life and how the Gothic sculptor “could not help liking the true leaves better”.

While the mobile user experience may sometimes bring representations of nature to us, I think its more important role is in being with us in the natural world, augmenting not replacing reality. This is a very different role for the internet-enabled mobile device compared to the internet-enabled PC.

And with this role of enhancing nature, the mobile acquires affordances that make it a part of the natural world. It knows where it is, and which way up it is. It responds to our gestures. Its user interface has gravity and bounce that the technocrats would deem irrelevant but that the user finds delightful.

4. Grotesqueness

“The tendancy to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images, is a universal instinct of the Gothic imagination.”

Leave the HTC Touch HD‘s weather app running on a rainy day and the screen mists with droplets. Then wipers appear to clear them away.

Turn up the volume of BBC iPlayer. Like Nigel St Hubbins’ amp, it goes up to 11.

Mobile experience is going to be fun to make and fun to use. Sometime crude, sometimes ugly, but often surprising and delightful.

5. Rigidity

“… I mean not merely stable, but active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance, which makes the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved, and the stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending, and is as much seen in the quivering of the lance as in the glittering of the icicle.”

Ruskin compares the Egyptian and Greek buildings which stand “by their own mass, one stone passively incumbent on another” with limb-like Gothic vaults and traceries under “an elastic tension and communication of force from part to part.”

The articulation of the parts of the mobile user experience is a key to its success, which is why we talk a lot about flow, about seamless user experience, but it often sounds vapid. Ruskin reminds us that there should be angles, there should be tension and change as we move from one mode to another. In the previous era of mobile design we tended to smoothe over the gaps by applying surface decoration over blocks “passively incumbent” on one another. In the Gothic era the parts must work together under stress, vaulting the user towards the achievement of their goals.

6. Redundance

“The years of his life passed away before his task was accomplished; but generation suceeded generation with unwearied enthusiasm, and the cathedral front was at last lost in the tapestry of its traceries, like a rock among the thickets and herbage of spring.”

“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple,” writes Ruskin. To him, simplicity is an imposition, an insistence by the building and builder that they and they alone know the truth and demand our attention. Gothic’s mass of decorative accumulation is a sign of its life and its humility.

… which encapsulates this final feature of the Mobile Gothic user experience, a profusion of content, services and possibilities which make the infrastructure melt away. I think this is the quality, above all, that has been missing from the early phases of mobile. Too often simplicity was achieved by taking stuff away to leave just a narrow, comprehensible range of options. The coming mobile internet, and the iPhone with its apps for this and apps for that, promise empowerment by the opposite route: making everything imaginable intuitively possible.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but the chisels are there for the taking. Mobile Gothic. It’s the future.

Here in the heart of the world’s first industrial nation, it’s not unusual to see old places learn to serve new purposes in response to peoples’ changing needs. As traditional manufacturing has moved offshore, countless mills, factories and warehouses have been regenerated as offices, retail, flats and hotels. At Salt’s Mill, Bradford, you can find art and electronics under one roof.

Yet Temple Works stands out from the crowd for so many reasons. At first sight there’s the weighty Egyptian facade, modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu, looming incongruously over edge-of-town Holbeck. Inside, you can appreciate the sheer scale of the place; once it was reputedly the largest room in the world. And in its stripped-out state the innovative construction is easily visible. The sun streams in through 66 65 circular skylights.

Scratch the surface for something still more fascinating: in two distinct incarnations Temple Works tells the story of the past 160 years of working life, and with a third it poses tantilising questions about where we go next.

Temple Works 1.0 was a flax spinning mill, built by John Marshall, just as British manufacturing powered into the Victorian Age. Marshall’s first mills had been functional red-brick boxes constructed rapidly to house the innovative spinning frames that made his fortune. Joseph Bonomi’s stone facade signalled a new confidence, authority and permanence.

Despite his political opponents’ accusations of abuse of child-labour in his mills, Marshall was regarded as one of the most liberal factory owners of his time. In his factories, overseers were not allowed to use corporal punishment on the workers. Younger children were encouraged to attend day school, and older children were given free education on Monday afternoons.

Marshalls ceased production there in 1886, but the textile use continued, moving up the value chain from spinning to clothing manufacture for James Rhodes and Co. This was Britain as a maker of things, the Workshop of the World.

Temple Works 2.0 was the northern distribution depot of Kay’s, the mail-order catalogue. After the Second World War the historic manufacturing sectors were undercut by industrialisation elsewhere in the globe, where people could produce at lower costs and in greater variety. Now Brits wanted a piece of America’s consumer revolution, and Kay’s were ready to oblige. Think of 1950s catalogue shopping as the e-commerce of its day, and Kay’s as Amazon.com.

Just imagine Temple Works’ vast single-storey open space filled with clothing and consumer goods ready for dispatch to home-shoppers across Northern England. Kay’s is well within living memory, and in parts the mill is much as the warehouse people left it when they moved out five years ago. The regeneration plans entail the demolition of an unloved 1950s extension, but I really hope the new uses will connect as much with this era as with the distant rattle of Marshall’s spinning frames.

Temple Works 3.0? What does post-industrial, post-consumerist Britain look like? The days when we defined ourselves by our industrial production have long gone, though the making of things could yet stage a comeback. It would be great to see products stamped with “Temple Works” again. It’s unlikely to be mass production on John Marshall’s scale, so we’ll have to make up what’s lacking in quantity with quality in handmades and one-offs.

We have more stuff than ever before, but it’s no longer fashionable to define ourselves by what we buy. Leeds’ carefully cultivated image as the shopping capital of the North already looks anachronistic. As well as things, we will spin experiences, authentically anchored in time and place, but also shareable as multimedia, cast out upon the net and even as lights into the sky. For the first time in its life, Temple Works will be open to the public on a regular basis: people in, instead of goods out.

It’s encouraging that despite (because of?) the economic climate the people behind the scheme to turn Temple Works into a major cultural venue are connecting with all interested parties to make this a reality as soon as possible. The overall scheme will take many months, but some parts of the building could be usable within weeks. Coming soon – Temple Works 3.0 Alpha!

Thing 1 – Season’s greetings from friends and former colleagues at Common Agency, in the form of Snowballed - and yes, I know it’s a Flash gimmick from a design agency, but stay with me, please. What makes Snowballed stand out from the crowd is the way it’s controlled using your PC’s video camera. As Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud pop up and hurl snowballs at you (no really), the object is to dodge them just by moving about. Squint carefully at the image below and my face is visible direct from my laptop’s webcam.

Move left, and the snowman moves left, move right, and you get the idea.

Now I know this interface isn’t brand new – take Eyetoy for example. What is different is that this just works on any PC with a webcam and Flash installed – no specialist kit required. When HP specced my laptop with a camera built-in, I guess they were thinking of video calling or whatever. I’ve never used my laptop for video calling, but now I have used it to dodge snowballs thrown by dead white men with beards.

Thing 2 – hacking the Wiimote’s built-in IR camera to make  FriiSpray – Open source Infra-red graffiti. From the project site:

FriiSpray is a project thought up by three heads in the North of England, based at the Innovation North co-working space in the Old Broadcasting House, Leeds. The project is based around the Wiimote Whiteboard software, built by Johnny Chung Lee – have a look at his stuff here. We thought that it would be a great idea to take this interface between the Wiimote and the computer and adapt it to allow people to create digital, or virtual grafitti as an interactive media installation.

It’s a fun experience to take round events, and the team already have one booking. They’ll also be presenting the work at the forthcoming O’Reilly Ignite event in Leeds. Again, a great hack of cheaply obtainable stuff to do something wholly different from the original purpose.

Incidentally, Friispray also made me aware of a bit of misdirection by Nintendo: the Wii comes with a “sensor bar” which sits by the TV and interacts with the Wiimote. But the sensor bar, does not sense, it emits two points of infra red light, which the remote senses with its IR camera. At Stuart Childs‘ suggestion I tried pointing the Wiimote at other IR light sources, and it works. I wonder at what point in the product design and marketing process, it was decided that it would be easier to explain this as doing the opposite to how it actually works?

Thing 2.5 - Crayon Physics Deluxe, just because it made me smile and now I can’t wait to test it out on my children. Crayon Physics works a treat on a Tablet PC, and I’ve also seen good reviews by users of Wacom graphics tablets and the like.  In its own words it is:

a 2D physics puzzle / sandbox game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

Draw stuff with a pen on a computer screen and they come to life. Brilliant! Video demo here.

Here comes the science bit.

I think in the future using a mouse will feel a bit like painting with your fist. Typing on a keyboard may have more longevity, but is still not so many steps removed in sophistication from writing a ransom note by pasting cutout newspaper letters onto a sheet of paper. Gestural interfaces have been around for a while, and are slowing making headway into mobile devices as well.

What marks out the stuff I’m writing about here is how accessible and natural it can be. Got a webcam? You’ve got motion control. Got £20 for a Wiimote? You’ve got an IR camera. There are so many ways to control our computers, and I sense that this year is the year that some of them will go mainstream. I’ll be grinning from ear to ear.