Again something that I found and was amazed by a while back: Young C. Park, a retired dentist from Hawii, who turned his hand to making model airplanes.  His hobby obviously got a bit out of control, but the results are quite spectacular.  As my colleage Robin at the Design Hub said jokingly ‘do you think he has a girlfriend?’.  More info here.

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to post a link to this but sometimes things get left out.

When Digital cameras first featured a ‘video mode’ button no one really took it seriously.  By common consent a Digital Camera was only ever going to be a poor imitation of a proper video camera.  Things have moved on though, and the creative possibilities derived from having more control of your lense – something intrinsic to DSLRs – are only now being realised.  It’s exciting because it’s now possible to carry one machine that will take amazing photos and video.  For those of us looking to travel light to far flung corners of the world and record what we find, it’s nothing short of a revolution.   Maybe one day I’ll be able to afford one!

Here’s a video by the camp4collective shooting with Canon’s 7D…

“As It Happens” from camp4 collective on Vimeo.

One of my key reasons for writing a blog is to inspire me to keep reaching out, finding and sharing work which I consider to be ’super creative’.  It doesn’t really matter to me what form it takes –  more often than not the really creative stuff defys classification.  Great things often get overlooked by the masses, simply because it’s difficult to see past the glut of mediocre productions on the TV and poor commentary on the creative world in most newspapers.  But the new revolution in connectivity means that the channels through which creative work is distributed are wider and further reaching than ever before.  Mass media is dieing – all-be-it slowly – and being replaced by something much more personal.

So this is an opportunity to share great things.  As an musical instrument maker that’s attempting to break new ground I can stand back and applaud people doing similar things in other fields.  With that in mind I’m posting this recent mix recorded by Magnetic Man (skream, Artwork and Benga) for BBC radio.  Challenging? For sure.  Creative? Definitely. Fantastic? I’d say so.  You might need some big speakers though!  >> listen

One of several books I finished reading recently is Scott Belsky’s ‘Making Ideas Happen’.  It introduces some ideas at odds with conventional thinking on turning your ideas into reality.  Highly recommended reading for Creatives.

I had signed up to the idea before I bought the book but, even so, Wikinomics written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, is a fascinating read.   They suggest that the new culture of mass collaboration will re-order the power base of the world, and as large a claim as it, I actually believe them.

It is all underpinned by the way in which technology now allows individuals to communicate to each other en-mass, not just one or two at a time like a telephone conversation, or like a dozen people at a meeting for example.  The result is that people organise themselves into massive communities with considerable power, enough to undermine the gargantuan corporate companies that have assimilated tremendous power in recent decades.   Thank god is all I can say!  - if you’ve ever seen the Pixar film Wal-E then you can probably see where all that was heading!

There are examples of how the power base is shifting already: In the record industry peer to peer sharing transformed the industry, recorded companies like Sony, Time Warner and EMI were brought to their knees because millions of people decided to work together, and in the process the power shifted from the corporate, to the listener and the musician.  Wikipedia has revolutionised publishing, and Opensource software projects like Linux or Wordpress (this website is a Wordpress website hosted on Linux servers) are both taking lumps out of the corporate giants like Microsoft and Apple.  And this is really just the start of it…

So I’ve been working on a project to create a chromatic whistle for roughly six years.  It’s a typically long and protracted process for designing a musical instrument, but like so many of the things I’ve been involved with in the last few years, it might be taking longer than expected but it is actually turning out better than expected.  The instrument, which is likely to be called a ‘Toob’, is based on a new key system which leaves the initial tone hole layout and architecture of the whistle in tact – making it easy for musicians to adopt.  At the moment, it exists as a working prototype (it works, but it looks rubbish!), but there are still a few challenges to be faced in terms of the making and refinement.

Until now I’ve kept the design ‘under my hat’ so-to-speak – this is certainly the ‘traditional’ way of approaching innovation – show somebody your ideas and they will steal them!  But watching the effect that several big companies with this approach are having, and the recent emergence of collaborative working methods like open source, has caused me to think that there’s a huge amount to be gained from throwing the gates open, documenting our progress, and inviting feedback – so we can harness the expertise of the music community to make the best possible musical instrument we can.  It’s an approach which will stand in complete contrast to the ‘romantic’ vision of a instrument maker, shut away, tirelessly working to perfect their ‘masterpiece’.

In addition to myself, designer Brian Loudon (http://loud1design.co.uk) will be collaborating on the project and it’ll be introduced in more detail and documented on the mk blog.  It offers the opportunity for anyone to get involved with the design and testing of a next generation musical instrument.  I for one am excited by what we might come up with.