Hey Everyone,
This is Daniel. Together with Matt and a growing group of partisans, we are building Inanimate - a consumer electronics company for the AI Era.
This is Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.
Previously…
Here’s what’s happening in The Lab.
WORKS in Progress
This week, we posted our first episode of WORKS in Progress - our video diary about shipping WORKS and building a consumer electronics company for the AI era.
WORKS are how we find out what it’s actually like to live with agents. They are a limited release of Promptable Products - physical devices that understand intention and do what you mean.
We’re shipping four (maybe five) different device types for the home office this Autumn/Fall. All WORKS use our natural UI and run on the Inanimate platform.
Rather than disappear into stealth and emerge with a pristine launch, we’re being “uncomfortably open.” We’ll share the process, experiments and lessons as we build - with a new episode every Tuesday until WORKS is out in the world. Wish us luck!
What’s Happening
All people (and agents) on the team are focussed on shipping WORKS.
DFP (design for production) is signed-off. Details are figured out so the devices can be made reliably, repeatedly, and affordably at scale.
Natural interface development continues into the final 20% as we improve reliability.
v1 PCB’s have arrived and are being checked for errors and used to iterate pre-loaded use cases.
Arc - our more expressive internal app platform - is being rolled onto prototype devices. The agent named it Arc. Maybe we’ll keep the name.
Experimenting with Astra + Blender using our WORKS schematics as inputs.
Posting lots of video which means reviewing, editing, captioning, designing, writing, and all the content creator tradecraft. I wrote about it here.
Operations - disabling phantom bank feeds in Xero, using Claude to reconcile transactions, and filing VAT returns. Rock and roll.
Give Us a Call
We have a phone line now - a necessary step in setting up our new Shopify store.
So give me a call and say hello: +44 (0)20 8064 3377.
I’d especially love to hear your childhood stories about consumer electronics: pivotal Christmas presents, tinkering with parents, or coveted gadgets in the school playground.
What else?
Two readers of Lab Notes stopped by for a coffee - lovely to see you Russell Davies and Ben Terrett.
Yes, and…
Matt is taking over this section this week. Here’s what I’ve been looking at this week.
A desk is a machine for working
What is a desk? And how has it changed?
I ran across this 1876 catalogue from the Wooten Desk Company full of wonderful desks that integrate a writing surface, storage for stationery, and a filing cabinet for correspondence and coupons, and more.
Wooton Desk
Core77 has pictures and more.
Efficient!
But the nature of work changes over the years
Look at this Herman Miller desk from 1952 (below).
Herman Miller Action Desk
No built-in filing cabinet. The wooden cover at the back folds up to display working materials. It’s a desk for paper that you play like a piano.
This desk comes from the “Action Office” system which (a novelty!) considered the posture of the worker. What we now call ergonomics.
Herman Miller: The Office Documented, a survey of 70 years of research and literature.
Then came computers
When the personal computer was invented by Douglas Engelbart’s research group (as demo’ed in 1968) they also invented the mouse, and separated the keyboard from the screen for the first time… which meant they needed a whole new kind of office chair.
The Engelbart Chair
No desk: it’s a modified Eames chair with a tray for the keyboard and new mouse (yes they also invented the mouse pad).
Hey, who designed that chair? Jack Kelley, a designer at Herman Miller.
Quartz has the background on Engelbart, Jack Kelley, and the chair.
A desk is a place to manage flows
In an office, a single desk is one of many.
In 1958 in Germany, the consultancy Quickborner made open plan offices natural and human with the concept of “office landscaping” or Bürolandschaft.
Open Plan Office
(Pic from What is Bürolandschaft?)
Office landscaping is built around teams and the movement of people and information between desks. Collaboration.
What is a desk today?
Maybe a desk is somewhere you visit occasionally: the Mac Mini is plugged in running your agents, and you just check in from time to time.
Maybe a desk is nothing but a screen and a mic (voice is a great way to work with agents): I see photos of desks where a tall, thin microphone is in the centre, and people mutter into them. But a mic doesn’t provide the sense of locking in and isolation that a keyboard does…
Maybe what you come to your desk for is privacy, focus, and communion with the computer…
Computer Hood
That’s Computer Hood by Joe Malia from 2007.
The desk accessories of the future will reflect the way we work, what we work with, and how we collaborate.
Let’s wrap
You know the first video played on MTV, 1 August 1981?
Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles.
MTV, what an incredible era.
(Link not showing? Watch on YouTube here.)
The title this week was taken from the first line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - “The sky above the port was the colo[u]r of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Hope you’re having a great week.