Matt Webb

Pulling random books and browsing.For instance: I recently took a deep dive into human/AI interactions and ended up creating a software sketch of AI NPCs on a multiplayer whiteboard. Here’s the writeup.It was surprisingly hard to get into, and I couldn’t - to begin with - come to terms with the “voice” of the NPC. How smart should these virtual users be? Should they speak to you? Should they do many things, or one? Is it ok to give them instructions? The breakthrough was a piece of work by the architecture practice Ant Farm who designed a dolphin embassy in 1974. Dolphins are super smart like humans but definitely not human. Like AI, right? So to break the block, I started by sketching a dolphin embassy on my canvas. All my NPCs were dolphins. That gave me the constraint I needed to get to a working experience prototype, then I could kick away the metaphor scaffolding and design something that made sense instead. I’ve still got the old sketches around someone.

That spot in the middle of the shelves? That’s where my old e-ink clock was, the one I put poems on to tell the time with ChatGPT. I was sat in the sofa off to the side (not seen) just laughing at it.That’s enough, that’s what I look for in any work. Something that makes me feel something new. I don’t believe you can work your way towards a new experience. You unearth it, glimpse an edge of it. Then all the work is digging it up and polishing it and framing it and so on.It is hilarious to have a clock that tells the time with a new poem every minute, every day, composed by ChatGPT. It is profound, weird, sometimes bizarrely appropriate… I end up over time with a really visceral intuition of what AI is good at and what it isn’t good at. It’s not intelligence, not at all, but it’s also not like the computers we’re used to, it’s a step change from that. So I enjoy that encounter.But it makes me laugh. So I want a beautifully designed one on my bookshelves. And the most straightforward way to get one is to persuade 1,000 other people that they want one too.

I could say it’s the number of skills involved. I’m grateful that London has such an awesome hardware scene and I get to collaborate with folks like Approach Studio and Tom Armitage.I could say that it’s the number of moving parts and that every part brings a new constraint: firmware, servers, component cost and availability, shape and size, power, markets and margins, the economics of sustainability, the right partners…But really the most challenging aspect is attachment. My studio is Acts Not Facts and though I hope to grow it, it’s just begun. And bringing connected hardware into the world as a one person studio is very unlikely. It’s a long process, you can’t push it. You chip forward, chip forward, chip forward. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. In any long project, you develop emotional attachment. You want it. Yet at any given moment, it probably won’t happen.How do you maintain looseness in the face of that want and fear? How do you keep soft hands and an open ear to possibilities and suggestions? It’s hard!So it sounds counterintuitive but I worked hard to cultivate high passion, low attachment and sense of humour during the development of Poem/1. I think that comes across in the Kickstarter campaign! And if the campaign succeeds (I hope it does) I will be able to relax a little because the path forward will be clear.