🌍🍉✊

Cycles: 20260608-20260711

📆 Published:

Cycles: my no-pressure weeknotes. Future Shock.

If the recent heatwaves hasn’t given you a Future Shock then I don’t know what will.

Gardening

Organic

A recent change in my work cycle has unlocked Friday as a day of leisure. As tempting as it is to do nothing, I want to put the time to good use on something that I’m passionate and hopefully make some impact. I’m calling it Biodiversity Friday.

Here’s a few things on my list already:

  • Cycle to a site of biodiversity; Knepp Estate, Wakehust or a RSPB reserve
  • Rejoin the Steps Collective
  • Volunteering at Lewes Japanese fruit and veg farm Nama Yasai
  • Donate some of my time to People’s Park for Nature or the Lewes Library of Things
  • Plan the Malling Hive and community garden project

While these are all a possibility, I’m starting with my own garden and neighbouring villages.

My good friend Helen invited me to Southease to watch as the local barn owl chicks being weighed and ringed.

There was talk of returning the next day to help build some bee hive frames and do a spot of husbandry. Twenty four hours later and I was back assembling the wooden frames and fixing the rectangles of honeycomb shaped wax. Then to my utter delight, suited up in a beekeeping suit, Helen and I installed the newly assembled frames into the super. There’s even talk of installing my own hive there one day which I’m really excited about.

With constant watering the garden is looking pretty good. The cat mint has utterly collapsed and the next generation of shoots are claiming their space. I’m astonished the pond hasn’t been fully evaporated over the last few weeks. The duck weed is as thick as ever which I assume is creating a barrier of protection for the water and everything living within it.

Although I was late again, the seedlings have grown well and the slugs and snails have yet to claim any victims. The tomato plants are doing equally well and it looks like we’ll have a bumper crop this year. They’re all sorts of shapes and sizes but still green. The ragwort is in full bloom like an early explosion of fireworks and is very popular with the Lewes Malling Down betterfly and moth species. The cinnabar moth caterpillars are back too in their Beetlejuice inspired pyjamas.

I ended the week before last by attending the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s Wilder Ouse Conference at Lewes town hall. It was a great chance to meet some likeminded people and hear about some of the local and neighbouring projects. It was during the most intense heat wave so I managed until lunchtime before heading home for some respite and extra cold hydration.

It’s that time of year again when a new screech fills the sky. Our annual visiting peregrine falcon pair and fledgelings have made the occasional feeding stop at the top of the nearby mobile phone mast. I’ve also managed to upgrade my BirdNetPi installation to BirdNet-Go on a spare Raspberry Pi. the next project is to build a custom low-latency microphone for better quality recordings and as it can also identify bats, which we have regularly in the garden, I’ll likely be splashing out for special microphone. Citizen science FTW! I’m really intersted in monitoring air and noise quality amongst other things.

Digital

One of my teams is wrapping up a piece of discovery and moving onto a new problem space. In the other we’ve analysing the results of a short round of research and preparing to share back our findings.

During the design and testing phase we were faced with a decision: launch sooner to release value to customer but compromise on a couple of minor things or wait and release a fully ideal experience.

We had a relatively confident hypothesis of what customer’s mental models are but as we were testing with customer’s I included a Kano Model survey to firm up our confidence.

The results weren’t quite as expected. Not what they responded with but how they understood the question. It was a good reminder that what we take for granted as a backstage process isn’t necessarily something a customer will notice or consider.

Myself and a few other members of the design and research team have been creating a short two minute video case study to share at next week’s all hands. I’ve really enjoyed the storytelling challenge of the timeframe constraint and video format. I’ve been meaning to write up a case study of this particular piece of work and I even think I might pitch it to the folks at Clearleft for the upcoming research conference in 2027.

I officially launched season one, episode one of Presento Bento, a storytelling practice group. It was a smaller group than the pilot but Nat’s presentation restored my faith in humanity and got my hyped for my new favourite no-ball sport. I laughed, I even shed a couple of tears. I made badged for the folks who attended as a way of showing my appreciation for taking part in my experiment.

Some other highlights:

  • I was asked to join a half-day workshop to represent the last domain I was working in last year. It was really nice to join as a participant and ideate some possible futures for our customers.
  • I attended a full day of MRS training. Despite the heat, I remained engaged throughout, perhaps due to the facilitator’s examples taken from their time living in Japan.

(Bi)cycles

I’ve also been working on a different type of frame over these three weeks: a very silly 90s cargo bike build.

I thought it’d be road-ready by now but the combination of bike standards confusion, silly mistakes and slow postage has meant I don’t have a MVP to ride. It’s been a really fun process to work on something physical and fully customised.

Since all of my tools were out I took the opportunity to convert my 1x11 drop-bar monster-cross to single speed. I was instantly reminded how much I love single speed bikes; the immediate drop in read-end weight, the connection with the bike and topology of the terrain, and the pure beauty of the design authentic. I’m looking forward to getting out on it for a proper ride over the South Downs soon.

Rollup

A few interesting content I’ve bookmarked or consumed.

Like this post? Share it