This is Daniel. Together with Matt, we are building Inanimate - devices and a platform to transform any room into an agentic environment. 

First time here? Welcome! Thanks for subscribing to Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.

Here’s what’s been happening since the last note.

This created some excitement in the lab.

Ben Brown - of the MS Copilot team - has vibe coded a wristwatch using Inanimate! 🤯

He bought a programmable Waveshare ESP32 “watch” dev kit ($50 on Amazon), set up the Inanimate Resident sandbox, and then wrote some behaviour using our Claude Code skill.

We absolutely love how Ben created a menu to swap between the different watch faces.

We believe the devices in our lives shouldn’t be limited by the imagination of their creators. You should be free to remake how they look and work, making them personal to you. Just like Ben did.

Our work continues with Alex, Julie, and the team at Approach.

We’re deep into industrial design strategy. We are exploring new classes of objects that emerge from this new era of AI.

And then, well, we start to make some. 

Meeting videographers (thanks for all the intros), migrating domains (hopefully the newsletter doesn’t break!), modelling price, getting ready to move office, thinking about the form of egg timers, and considering the very nature of Manchesterism.  

This is Matt. Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

I feel like tiny cityscapes have a vibe of their own.

They can represent feelings, data and enormous, autonomous complexity — all on a tabletop.

So I’ve been collecting pics to explore the aesthetic…

Little cities as representational art?

Cityframes sells square, 3D printed miniatures of iconic locations in 200 different cities.

You can place them or coffee tables (or, which I really like) hang them on your wall.

Remember Micro Machines? Tiny toy cars.

Back in the 1980s you could get these Travel City playsets: each playset unfolded into a square city location and you could clip them together.

Now I’ve always been a fan of doll’s houses (here’s a blog post on the topic) and there’s an element of that hand-cranked “simulation” play.

But also the modular city playsets together are a wonderful combination of constrained (it’s a garage; it’s a quarry) and expressive: you fit them together however you want.

You should totally download and play Townscaper.

It’s a toy city-builder where you choose where to build/delete structures — and the game itself decides how they look and link together.

Put structures in a circle and they become houses around a park. Link towers in the air and you get soaring bridges.

It’s always beautiful.

Townscaper is available on iPhone, Android, PC and VR.

Back in 2010, design studio ustwo created Pixel City, a theme for the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 (that was how phones were named in those days).

The city was alive!

Very little remains of this work except for ancient phone manuals where you can find out how it worked:

It’s so gorgeous.

This is my own work (from a few years back) and not nearly as good as ustwo’s phone theme… but there is something about representing the phone home screen as a tiny 3D landscape that I would love to pursue someday.

You can get miniature city scenes for your home, not just your phone.

Rolife DIY Book Nook Kits are buildable scenes that sit between books on your bookshelves.

Isn’t it just so clever to use the format of a book as a home for this scene?

And doesn’t the little lamp make you think it should be alive, like the Pixel City phone theme from 2010?

You don’t need to have an exact model to evoke “city-ness”.

David Umemoto of NO-BU-RU studio creates beautiful concrete sculptures with stairways and arches that bring architectural vibes without replicating buildings.

While we’re appreciating cities and scale, a short-out to BoltBlue’s VFX of a future London for The Peripheral — and I am still gutted we didn’t get season 2.

Look at those wild statues towering over the cityscape! I think the idea is that they are post-apocalyptic carbon scrubbers sequestering CO2 from the sky by printing themselves into existence.

Here’s a short featurette on YouTube about the world-building of The Peripheral.

Let’s wrap this reference check with a video of strange cities made by Ethan Mollick using Midjourney.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

Daniel & Matt