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DSC_0191, originally uploaded by Chris O’Shea.

Went to the second (my first) This Happened event on Tuesday 2nd October at Rich Mix, in East London.

They filled a much bigger venue than the first one (a room above the Griffin pub) with both London’s interaction/product design crossover-crowd, and some visiting luminaries as a result of the FOWA halo-effect.

Great talks included Karsten ‘Toxi‘ Schmidt on the epic data-guzzling interactive table that Moving Brands built for London College of Fashion, and Crispin Jones on crackling form taking us through the evolution of his ‘Tengu’ toy.

What I walked away from the event from though was the possible connection between the last three talks.

Not sure if this was deliberate on the part of the curators, but Dee Halligan’s talk on developing The Science of Spying exhibition (something I’ve had an insider view of through Foe’s work on that, and probably the best overview of it online is by Regine) connected with Rory Hamilton‘s presentation of the service design interventions Live|Work staged in The Baltic gallery, and Massimo Banzi‘s guided tour of the Arduino sketching-in-hardware revolution dovetailed nicely to me.

That is – centred around Rory’s lovely tales of getting the staff of the Baltic to re-engineer their environment (the ‘service safari’ he took them on was wonderful – especially the way he hacked a special cover full of guidance and prompts for disposable cameras to take with them) and the service they provide through rapid prototyping (I really loved his phrase: “Creating service-envy”), and thinking about Science Of’s need to create many interactive installations in one environment – wouldn’t there be a great application there of ‘sketching in hardware’ in rapidly developing fun and playful things for public spaces, that visitors could perhaps even participate in, for Arduino?