April 2017
I'm very proud to announce that Cove has been added, amongst 20 other health apps, to the new NHS app library. In partnership with NHS England and mHabitat as part of the Digital Development Lab, we have received funding to evaluate Cove for approval by the NHS later in the year.
With Cove, you can capture your mood or express how you feel by making music and storing it in a personal journal. Cove has been designed as a tool for young people who have experienced bereavement or loss, but adults may find it equally useful to express and capture a mood or emotion. We are using an evidence-based, human-centred design approach to build an app which encourages self-expression during difficult periods of life, which we believe can improve emotional and mental health over time.
We have partnered with clinicians from Imperial College London and the charity Child Bereavement UK to evaluate Cove as part of the Digital Development Lab for NHS England. By adding Cove as a digital support tool for young people experiencing bereavement, we believe we can help support young people to cope better with their experiences. In conjunction with professional therapy, is the goal of Cove to empower young people to self-express and grow from their experiences.
Read more about our announcement on the Humane Engineering website. You can download Cove on the iOS app store.
February 2017
2017 marks a busy year for my work around end-of-life care. I'll be talking more about the work we do at the Helix Centre and my own research throughout the year at more conferences and symposia.
On the 7th February I was speaking in conversation with Cassie Robinson – who is director of strategy and research at Doteveryone amongst other things – at Ctrl Group, who hold regular m-health meet ups. You can read more about the event here.
With more people are beginning to engage with the reality of death and dying. In a 2013 Age UK survey 70% of people questioned were comfortable with talking about death. Yet less than one third have discussed their wishes about their end of life with someone else.
Design has a role to play in helping people to express their needs and wants for palliative care, and also in facilitating the delivery of these products and services. In this talk, Cassie and I discuss and explain our experiences in engaging with the people, organisations and systems involved in end of life care, and the challenges and opportunities they faced when designing products and services for these contexts.
October 2016
Published this month, is the tenth book in the Common Intellectual series for Copy Press: Ha-Ha Crystal by Chris Fite-Wassilak.
Written with ease and adventure, the essays within Ha-Ha Crystal have the reader moving from tetrahedrons, through comic books to the architecture of John Portman and the films of Jacques Tati. As a host of things are put into contact with each other, thought takes shape and becomes crystalline.
You can buy Ha-Ha Crystal and the rest of the Copy Press books from all good bookstores including Foyles, Hive and Waterstones.
June 2016
On June 24th, we opened an exhibition presenting the final work of students on the MA Information Design Lab led by myself and Marco Ferrari.
The lab was established as an ongoing, real-time data-visualisation attempt to track and explain the global financial crisis that many analysts predicted for 2016. Its purpose was to better understand the broader network of causes and implications in which every financial turmoil unfolds, providing context to economic reports, and looking at the socio-political framework of news stories. From a design perspective, the intention was to develop new ways for visualizing financial news, in order to move from the rather bi-dimensional language of bar and pie charts, into a richer territory made of maps, cartograms, illustrations, diagrams.
Twenty students were divided into seven groups, each of them covering a specific topic. They closely followed the news, in order to understand these issues through investigating patterns, data, forecasts and reports, so they could track the shifts in the financial global landscape from the perspective of these particular areas.
A complete and more extensive introduction to the issues of the course can be found on Github and an written overview of the course over on Medium.
May 2016
I'm incredibly happy to announce I've been commissioned to design the first major monograph on Turner Prize–nominated Glasgow artist Jim Lambie.
This long-awaited volume surveys the career of Glasgow-based contemporary sculptor Jim Lambie. From his distinctive floor works, striped from wall to wall with vibrant electrical tape, to his paint-soaked mattresses, Lambie adroitly sculpts humor and pathos from the clutter of modern life. Working with items immediately at hand, as well as those sourced in secondhand and hardware stores, he resurrects record decks, speakers, clothing, accessories, doors, and mirrors to form sculptural elements in larger compositions.
Lambie prioritizes sensory pleasure over intellectual response. He selects materials that are familiar and have a strong personal resonance, so that they offer a way into the work as well as a springboard to a psychological space beyond. This volume not only serves as a definitive mid-career survey but also as a major reframing of the artist’s work. Lambie’s practice has long been understood through the lens of punk and rock music, a frequent theme of his works’ titles. Here the artist and new essays instead trace his approach to the rich material histories he mines and the scrappy, resourceful spirit of his hometown, Glasgow.
The book will be published in April 2017 by Skira Rizzoli, with The Modern Institute and Sadie Coles.
February 2016
Marco Ferrari and I opened our 3rd Information Design Lab at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Italy this month. Given the increasing importance of economical data and the financial landscape over our lives—and under the influence of the looming crisis that may happen later this year—we decided to set up the lab as an ongoing, real-time data-visualisation workshop with the ambition to track and explain through this evolving crisis. The students will be divided into ten groups, each of them covering a specific and relevant sub-topic (i.e.: “Real estate”, “US student loan debt”, “Insurance”, “China slowdown”...) Their task will be to understand these issues and track the shifts in the financial global landscape from the perspective of these particular areas. They will produce every week a bulletin, using data to progressively monitor the news as they evolve. At the end, every group will design an additional special report on their specific topic, expanding the knowledge acquired during the course.
November 2015
Announcing the release of Cove!
Cove is Humane Engineering’s first product, a music-making app designed to help young people express themselves in a meaningful way. It was created to support young people through life’s most difficult moments, and promote music as a unique form of self-expression.
Read about Cove in an exclusive article for Wired
Learn more about Cove's development here
Download Cove for iOS
August 2015
Very happy to announce I've joined the team at the HELIX Centre, to work on their end-of-life projects. The HELIX Centre is a collaboration between the Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, and is a unique design studio situated inside St Mary's Hospital in London, that responds quickly to complex healthcare issues, turning ideas into prototype products, processes and services.
Read more at helixcentre.com
June 2015
I have co-founded a new company, Humane Engineering with Alex Rothera. We were successful in our application for funding, and have been accepted by the Bethnal Green Ventures to develop our research project Flutter, into a commercial product. It will be called Cove, and it will be a music-maker app to help people - in particular adolescents - who have experienced grief or loss, to express themselves through music. It will be released to the public in September 2015 for iOS.
You can read more about the company at humaneengineering.com
The 2014 Museum of Future Government Services has been named professional winner of the Speculative Concepts category in the 2015 Core 77 Design Awards.
The jury noted, "This was a unanimous decision. This goes back to the idea of projects that are speculative and do deal with the imagination, but also have real world implications. This to us was a super exciting kind of avenue for where speculative design can really make an impact on the world."
I led the art direction and visual design for Fabrica, working closely with experience designers Tellart.
To read more about the project, check out the Design Award website here.
April 2015
Waiting for the Gods is an experimental docufiction written and directed by Natalie Welsh and Alessandro Bertelle, and produced by Fabrica.
Nestled in the Swiss mountains lies Jungfrau Park, the monumental embodiment of Erich von Däniken’s Ancient Alien Theory. Däniken is the controversial author of 55 books that question the history of mankind and the influence of extra-terrestrials on the world’s ancient mysteries. Although Däniken’s enigmatic character lends itself to criticism easily his theories have gained worldwide recognition. The park visualises an alternative history that asks its visitors, what do they really believe in.
Title design by Ivor Williams. Title score by Legowelt.
With my colleagues at Tellart, we worked with Wieden + Kennedy for Russian Airline, S7. Launching their incredible Imagination Station in Moscow on 3rd April.
Members of the public were invited by S7 to imagine their dream holiday destination. Using nothing more than the power of their mind, they were asked to navigate a plane across the globe to their dream location. With concentration and skill, visitors who successfully guided their plane to their destination were rewarded with free return tickets to that holiday spot.
February 2015
Pleased to announce that I've joined the Man & Wellbeing programme at the Design Academy Eindhoven, working with some incredible people, helping the next generation of designers use design to improve society's wellbeing.
The 2015 Museum of Future Government Services, a vision of how advanced technologies can transform government services for the better, is a three day immersive experience featured at the Government Summit in Dubai. From augmented reality to robots and artificial intelligence, the Museum is meant to inspire and educate, highlighting a positive vision of a future that includes governments and society working together to create a more hopeful world.
The 2015 Museum of Future Government Services is a project by the Prime Minister’s Office of the UAE directed by Tellart with an international team of top design studios including Specular, SOFTlab, Bompas & Parr, Octo, Idee und Klang, and Future Cities Catapult. The onsite build and installation was done by Tellart in collaboration with Publicis Live, Neumann & Müller, and Projex.