Richard Banks has written a blog post explaining a bit about ‘Technology Heirlooms’ and some of the research he and others at MSRC, are conducting into it. It’s quite a difficult subject to explain – at least for me anyway – but this is a great introduction.

It’s good stuff – very interesting and I’d say, very important.

Here it is.

Its finished! More photos in this flickr set.

Rather pleased with it. Sounds fantastic too, much better than expected.

CTS wiring kit, with short shaft 500k pots, and orange drop tone caps.

Irongear Alchemist 90 pickups. They’re humbucker sized p90′s, but they only come in chrome so I had to spray them gold, not sure how long that will last though!
They just sound amazing, especially with some decent wiring.

Explorer

Took the opportunity to change the machine heads and bridge/stop-tail on my Epiphone (Korina I think, not sure as it was second hand) Explorer too. The old stock gold ones were replaced by chrome Wilkinson locking tuners. No idea why they used the gold ones in the first place, the chrome is much better on an explorer.

Replaced the bridge with a chrome one, but couldn’t remove the original sockets from the guitar, they weren’t gonna budge.

Its a viewer for montaging your photos over real space, therefore associating personal memories with mundane ‘Non-Places’ in order to create richer everday experiences. In theory anyway.

[flickr video=3420865331]

It uses a miniature digital photo frame, I just hijacked the buttons and changed their interaction a bit.

There’s a knob on the side attached to a cam through a bearing. Every half turn the cam triggers a tact switch (below) connected to the lcd viewers ‘next’ button and changes the photo.

Next I just need to remove the LCD’s backlight so that you can see through it and out of the devices viewfinder lens.

Hey guys,

Came across the Howies’ Hand-me-Downs range during research for a project I’m doing.

I’m taking a different direction, so I think its OK to talk about. Besides, I’m not going to say anything that isn’t common knowledge, just making a note of something that I think is important.

Anyway, whatever you think of the clothes themselves, the label in the image above sums up why I think this is interesting. Objects rarely have stories associated with them anymore., and despite seeming, at first, quite simplistic and possibly a little naive, I actually think they’ve come up with a nice approach.

Although this line of thinking is nothing new, they have addressed something that I think is extremely important- the story behind the object. Although such things already exist in the form of blogs, wiki’s, review sites and forums, something about this just feels a little more subtle and a little more personal, despite being less ‘useful’. Possibly because the stories are implied rather than explicit. There’s room for your memory to do it’s thing and to indulge in a bit of reminiscence on your own terms.

I love the idea that the lable in the jacket has space for the names of three different owners, they’re reminders not descriptions, lines with plenty of reading space between them.

How does this affect your obligations towards the garment? Imagine if those previous owners were, say a parent and grandparent; how does that affect how you treat the artefact? Maybe you’d be happy to repair it rather that replace it. The process of making, using and remaking something collaboratively over generations is nothing new either, but it has faded into obscurity somewhat.

Stories are important and, in my opinion, finding ways of enabling the opportunity for the creation of stories around an object is a worthy area for investigation, but there’s also something very enticing about the slowness encouraged by these things.

There are some more interesting thoughts on this in Russel Davies’ post ‘From Product to Project’, the title of which sums it up perfectly.