I have a small weakness when it comes to online presence…

Since joining twitter probably 1-1.5 years ago I ha ent really defined whether I wanted to use it for personal or professional conduct. I regularly ‘RT’ captivating and inspirational news and design based articles, from which I have mustered the bulk of my comparitively minute following. The flip side of the communicational coin is my social usage.

A good friend of man recently posted an image of himself , which is infinitely commendable. My Twitter response was “Good man but fuck that”. A less than celebratory tribute to his efforts.

Now, I’ve given blood before and due to my innate anxiety disorder it was far from a comfortable experience. What my. Comment really meant to say was “Well done old pal you’ve done a great thing. I wish I had the mental capacity to give again”. Instead all I did was potentially embarrass myself in an infinitely public forum. I don’t see this as a career defining mistake, more of a lesson learned for the future.

In the simplest form of a conclusion it’s time to ditch the persona of an irreverent social networker and become a professional protagonist of the quality creation and distribution of debate and information. I hope the new year will bring insightful comments and straighter edge to my. Immunisation. Whether this is achieved by simply curbing the obscenities or creating a separate ‘professional’ account , who knows. Let’s be honest who cares!? Everything I do will be gearing towards me securing that elusive dream job in the creative sector!

Good evening
Oli

It is the new year and I am going to write more insightful posts… Just not right now because I am watching How It’s Made HD at my folks’ and it’s 1 in the morning!

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset…

Bar the occasional re-attachment of a button here and there, I haven’t touched a sewing needle, sheet of fabric, or roll of thread since pre-GCSE, Secondary School Textiles class!  I mean not at all.  And even then hemmed in to those breeze-block, fuzzy-felt fanatic havens I never listened.  I never listened, I never did the homework or any work for that matter.  I thought it was a girl’s class for the creation of female-oriented wares and for learning skills that I would likely never use **.  I do remember learning how to complete a running stitch through the dead skin at the ends of my fingers but in hindsight,that was obviously a stolid attempt to critically appraise the efficacy of my child Tetanus inoculation.  Turns out it was pretty good!

So what relevance does this have?  Well, on commencing my Design & Tech teaching experience at Ringmer Community College, Brighton, I was immediately faced with having to teach a classroom full of year 8 students how to sew the perfect ‘Blanket Stitch’.  What the f**k was a blanket stitch I thought!?  With a quick crash-course from our supervising teacher I ventured out onto the floor and failed miserably.  I was so incompetent!  I woke up to the fact that schools don’t teach you this stuff for giggles.  During the same class I learned that soldiers in the great wars used to occupy their time in the trenches by blanket stitching their bed clothes to stop them fraying; a much more productive use of spare time than striving for that third star on Angry Birds!

This, and the impetus evoked by the top button of a very expensive coat falling off, gave me something close to an appreciation of textiles skills and fine, hand crafted wares.  Also an appreciation for the ability to sew a button, of course (Thanks to Google for providing tuition!)  I have also become incredibly anti-consumerist in the last year of my life.  I had a long period of miserable unemployment when I graduated and had to learn to live without anything but the essentials and you know what, I was actually happy, really really happy with my bare minimum.  This has continued long into my current well-paid employment. Also, studying just what goes into the products we consume and of course, seeing what comes back out at the end; I simply hate being a part of the whole cycle.  I’ve recently revisited Vance Packard’s collection (check out ‘The Waste Makers’ and ‘The Hidden Persuaders’) and was a grateful recipient of Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s ‘Cradle to Cradle’, the scariest yet most hopeful book I’ve ever read.  Discovery Channel’s ‘How It’s Made’ used to be both my awe inspiring wake up and therapeutic bed-time story while I was a student.  Now it fills me with dread and contempt for both serial consumers and manufacturers alike.  Bottom line is, if we could all make our own products, like many many people already do, both our macro and micro communities would be very different places to those we inhabit today.  We can’t make phones and PCs and cars but everything else is well within our grasp with a small investment of funds and a large (but hopefully decreasing with experience) deposit of time and patience.

Enough of my thoughts on the failure of my own schooling and the consumerist economic model…

I made a bag.  I designed a bag and bought fabric and webbing and some tools and rooted through my kitchen drawer to locate my old trusty sewing needle (which was probably so far from appropriate for the job it would give a haberdasher a bloody stroke!) and then I made an honest, sturdy, and relatively evenly balanced messenger bag!  It was pain in the arse and has given me permanent cramped claw-like hands but my God was it worth it!  I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day but I’m so, so proud of it and have held it in a position of reverence ever since its completion on Thursday 1st December 2011.  It has followed me around the house, lay in every room I occupy and tonight (2nd December 2011) I was caught red-handed by my tolerant and forbearing partner wearing it around the house just for the sake of wearing it.  Nothing inside but lint and loose stitches.

This object of my design and creation will hold my affection for a minimum of 2 weeks, which these days is so much longer than any mass manufactured object.  I made it, it’s mine, its seams are literally dripping with my blood and sweat (no tears) and I love it like a little tweed wool and silk-lined child.

So let’s see it then….!

I’m not going to pour over every little detail.  I’ll let the images explain just how badly implemented some of the work is, and how perfectly finished other areas have miraculously transpired to be.  This project has transcended my own expectations of any manual ‘girl’ skills I thought I had and incredibly heartwarmingly, those of the people around me that have heard no end of my witterings of tweed and webbing over the last 6 weeks since I first had the inclination to begin.

Just to round up:  I’m always designing something and now I no longer have free access to my university’s resistant materials workshop I never get to make models anymore.  I never get the chance to bring my concepts to life.  I thought to myself ‘what can I design, refine, make and test and all from the comfort of my own front room, and with my existing tools’.  A bag, of course, and it’s turned out better than I ever could have imagined.  I’m now addicted and already thinking about number 2; anyone got a spare sewing machine?

Thanks!

Oli

**Of course, directly I left school I regretted every wasted minute!

Hi all!

Just a quick one to say I’ve cleared out a load of old junk as I came to the realisation I’d rather display the projects that I like and speak about me, rather than cluttered images of everything I’ve ever done. I’ve added a little snippet about my DAR project, which is still my absolute favourite of all time almost 6 years on!  Have a peek!

HI!

Just a few sketches relating to my latest self-project, the making of a fine, hand-stitched, tweed wool messenger bag.  My God I hope it turns out a cracker, but judging by my ‘F’ grade in pre-GCSE textiles it’s not looking hopeful.

STITCHING STARTS SATURDAY!!!

‘Gaj’, of course, being Channel 5′s ‘Gadget Show’ slang for their namesake…

I have a perfectly good laptop with a perfectly good keyboard but being a Mac geek, wanting some high class Gaj and being a beneficiary of conspicuously consumed objects made me buy an Apple wireless keyboard.  I did this shortly after graduating from university along side a large 22″ Dell monitor enabling me to set up my cosy little home-design office.  In retrospect, what was the point, really?  It’s ok; it looks snazzy on my desk and means I can sit here writing blog posts while leaning back in my chair, feet up on the desk with the beautifully manufactured, bluetooth connected slab of aluminium resting on my thighs.  Looking like a perfect idiot.

However blissful and liberating this experience may be in a sort of narcissistic, self-indulgent way, it is only facilitated by constant care and diligence:

The keyboard runs on batteries (AA for those who demand detail).  What’s so wrong with that?  Batteries die, and die very quickly in bluetooth equipped products.  How much can a bit of typing here and there feasibly drain three AAs in the space of week!?  Maybe it’s my fault for being a tight arse and buying Kodak cells, which may as well come with the disclaimer “These batteries contain NO electrically charged materials and will NOT power your Mac keyboard“.  But this is beside the point:  Duty of care is needed to stop the alpha-numeric (-and helpful little controlly buttons) melting into a heap of smoldering Alu and lead acid on (and probably through) my nice Ikea desk.

If I leave the batteries in for any period longer than 24 hours they invariably leak inside the battery drum.  When I first noticed this happen I unscrewed the neat little end cap to be confronted with a vile smell of chemicals and a face full of a fine powder that I can only assume is a blend of arsenic and cyanide.  Anyone who knows me will know that I have issues with anxiety and hypochondria.  Thinking I have arsenic and cyanide in my face, in my mouth no less, sends me on a week long cerebral binge of death.  I honestly thought that unless I scrubbed my face with a scouring pad laced with the most powerful soap in the house (which I did) then I would quickly become disfigured and eventually pass painfully away into the bowels of Mac-user hell.  There were also all kinds of gels and goos that took me a good week of scraping and vinegaring to remove from the tight cylinder; these bothered me a little less.

Apple, it seems, so often strive for a seamless and ethereal symbiosis between man and machine and to their credit they often achieve it.  In my case however the symbiotic relationship has been cleverly transposed into a futile dictatorship in which I am enslaved by a bloody keyboard.  I feel the need to justify a purchase by utilising it until the day it literally turns to dust in my hands.  This keyboard still functions perfectly but only given the diligence, routine removal and replacement of batteries, toothpicking of dirt from within it’s various cavities, and placing of it on a solid silver pedestal of Gaj!

I hate this keyboard for all it has done to me and the hours of my life (and vinegar, and cloths, and batteries) it has consumed but I am forever stagnating in a fetid puddle of awe of its magnificent typiness and will never let it go, even when my fingers are burned with battery acid and Bluetooth has been long since replaced with a technology that actually does something useful!

I am fascinated by people’s relationships with artifacts and how the designs and identities of their makers can so irreversibly encroach on the personality and identity of an individual, so much so that they become enfeebled by such a banal object as a damned computer keyboard. I would like all who read this post to see if they can relate this to their possessions, think about why relationships with manufactured objects might have grown and changed in the way they have, and let me know!  Let me know I’m not crazy!

I have issues…

Just have a look at the image below.  Yes, that is indeed a 2.5mm deep groove on the forward facing quadrant of my PS3 controller joystick, and the dust of the plastic slowly grinding down.  I am by no means a hardcore gamer; I don’t go out and procure all the latest titles as soon as they arrive and I certainly don’t watch people’s multiplayer killstreak videos on youtube.

However, in spite of this I must put in some serious hours on the machine to have caused this damage.  Checking on the ‘Barracks’ screen of Modern Warefare 2 I am told that I have played over nine days straight online.  Excuses: I was unemployed for almost a year and hey, at least I’m getting my money’s worth.

But is there a slightly more pertinent point of discussion to be had?  The Sony Playstation joy pad has stood the test of time, barely altering in design over the three generations of the Playstation console, first released in 1994 in Japan.  I have no doubt that it will be regarded as a design classic of the 20th/21st century, and many users I’m sure would be devastated to see it go.  These are users who also spend enough time grappling this classic to experience the same wear and tear (and build up of epithelial tissue) as I have.  The joypad has not advanced a great deal but the technology of the games they control has, exponentially so.

The advancements in storytelling, rendering engines and other core forces in a computer game have enabled us to create worlds away from reality so realistic and engaging that we are drawn in and lose all concept of time and subsequent responsibility.  Any young man or woman with an inkling of a power/ninja/sniper fantasy will consciously gravitate towards upcoming titles like Battelfield 3, whose visuals, dynamic environments and deservedly award-winning audio serve to create a sometimes preferable and often far more stimulating alternative to real life.

[Battlefield 3, Gameplay Screenshot - Source: http://www.pcgames.de, 2011]

Such realism and captivating intensity of gameplay highly exaggerates how addictive these staple games become.  Players are given a myriad gaming options (campaigns, online multiplayer, co-op etc..) and so naturally spend so much more time than most people would expect, and that most non-gameophiles could begin to justify.  The addictiveness of games, it seems, has now irreversibly surpassed the technology of the hardware and its material assembly.  Although all products are built with obsolescence in mind, with a thoroughly considered and  deliberately integrated shelf life, did anyone really think at the drafting stage that wear and tear of this magnitude would ever occur?  Furthermore, if this is what over a week of online capturing of flags and cooperative deathmatches does to a solid piece of engineered plastic, what the hell must it be doing to us…?

On a positive note, the groove in the joystick is on the front so at least I know I spend the majority of my time moving forward!

Amidst countless other pieces that I have recently given new life in my now nearing completion portfolio site, I have renewed ‘Jobeez’.

This is one of my all time favourite non-projects.  Ironically it was used as an excuse not to look for jobs in my 357 days of consecutive unemployment [bar temping at Halfords.  That wasn't employment it was sacrilegious self-harm mixed with woefully blatant infiltration of a disgusting example of the Great British retailer.]

http://olisparrow.co.uk/work_print_jobeez.html

I will eventually post a bit more information on the design and the concept but there’s enough there now to sink your teeth into.

Ja

I’ve added around half of the full content for the website.  Lots more work still to some in the near future + some brand new projects on their way!

http://olisparrow.co.uk/work.html

Just what the sport, and the city, needed!

On Saturday 8th October 2011 I attended the Red Bull Streetlight Sessions event in Manchester city centre.  Big names in  the sport of Trials Martyn Ashton and Danny MacAskill put together a street course in conjunction with the guys at the ever present energy drink giant.

Not only were barrels of fire wood ablaze providing warmth and atmosphere, a huge sound system with TVs and projectors playing extreme sports videos on loop, and hundreds of spectators braving the notoriously unrelenting North-West climate, but the entire event was hosted on a half-baked construction site.  On the one hand this has left my trusty steed a black, gritty wreck, but on the other it was the stuff of dreams for most seasoned riders as well as an incredible spectacle for the visitors less au fait with the sport.

This event was a huge success with something for everyone [including the obligatory Red Bull-flowing-like-water] and it would be a detriment to the sport of Trials if it weren’t to happen again next year, and in more cities across the country.  It’s not every day you see a top athlete pulling a 360° spin up, yes up, onto the first floor of a building where one day in the future a young metropolitan couple will be watching ‘Made in Chelsea’ on thier 42″ Plasma!