Recent content in Advanced Interaction on Ben Bashford - Advanced Interaction
“Daisy Bell” is the first song a computer ever sang, and the one HAL 9000 sings as it’s shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey. SAM only speaks text, it has no idea what a musical note is, so this reads the melody straight out of a MIDI file and sings it syllable by syllable, one note’s pitch and duration at a time.
I’m building a small LED matrix display running its own firmware, and flashing the board just to check whether an animation looked right was slow enough that I stopped doing it as often as I should. This runs the exact same menu and playback code as the real firmware, in the browser, against a real animations folder read straight from disk.
A browser replica of SAM, the 1982 Commodore 64 text-to-speech program. Type something, tune pitch, speed, mouth and throat, and it reads it back in that unmistakable cracked robot voice. Built on a vanilla JS port of the original engine.
Every function a device can perform is something your brain has to hold open as a possibility. 
 A short one about Jef Raskin, the Canon Cat, and why a device that only does one thing asks less of you than one that does everything. 
 Also: a language with only one variable, a phone that used to do one thing at a time, and the iPod again.
More money was supposed to buy better decisions. Mostly it buys the excuse to skip making one. 
 A short one about Seth Godin, Yahoo’s homepage, and why more resources should mean fewer decisions, not more products. 
 Also: a search box with nothing else on it, a company that said yes to everything, and the part of the job that doesn’t scale with funding.
An AI agent doesn’t care about your brand guidelines. It cares whether you’re useful. And how efficient. 
 User-centered design gets a new kind of user. Not a persona you write for a user, a system standing in the queue as one. 
 Also: screen readers, search spiders, and a word the web has been using since the nineties without noticing what it meant.
I wanted to know if the sea’s actually worth the drive before I get there. Air temp, wind, rain chance, water temp, waves, tide times, daylight and UV, air quality and pollen, live sewage status and last season’s water quality rating, for every beach on the Thanet coast, in one page, with a one-sentence verdict at the top so you don’t have to read the rest unless you want to.
I wrote about giving machines personality fifteen years before any of them could actually talk back. 
 Emoticomp again, this time asking what held up and what didn’t, now that every AI product on earth has a personality whether it wanted one or not. 
 Also: what I got right, what I got backwards, and the one thing I didn’t see coming at all.
I wanted to stop looking up “what’s A2 in Hz again” every time a synth only takes a frequency, not a note name. Pick a note off a full keyboard, get the Hz, the wavelength, the MIDI number, and an envelope timing table in six different ratios.
I kept doing the same maths by hand. BPM to milliseconds, milliseconds to Hz, for every delay, every reverb tail, every envelope stage. This does it instead.
I called it a system persona in 2011. Now I call it a CLAUDE.md file. 
 A short one. On rereading an old post and realising I already had the answer, over a decade before I needed it. 
 Also: what an object wants, and why an AI agent needs to know.
Technology has no inevitable trajectory. 
 Last of five, following on from An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence . What we didn’t imagine when we built the attention economy, what the same question means for the intention economy, and why the destructive path is always the easier one. 
 Also: a toddler who can infer what you meant to do, an installation at the Venice Biennale, and the…
Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product. 
 Fourth of five, following on from Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas . About what homogenisation does to trust, once every option looks and behaves the same, and why that makes leaving easy and staying meaningless. 
 Also: the same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town, enshittification, and why there’s…
Creativity is powered by friction. 
 Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod . About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say. 
 Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the…
I go for walks without my phone now. Just me and whatever I loaded before I left the house. 
 Second of five, following on from The Intention Economy . A short one, about what a deliberately limited piece of technology teaches you about choosing what you want, and a subway ad that stumbled onto the same idea by accident. 
 Also: a walk without a phone, a search that makes you remember the…
We didn’t lose our attention. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to. 
 First of five. This started as one post that tried to do too much. This one’s about ADHD, the attention economy, and the intention economy Doc Searls imagined in 2006, then what happened when the people running the attention economy noticed it. 
 Also: a misdiagnosed disorder, a search…
I wanted a quick way to sketch percussion patterns without hand-programming every ghost note in Bitwig. Now covers Latin, Arabic, African and Indian traditions, with a polymetric mode where instruments drift in and out of phase with each other. Generate variations, tweak them by hand, export straight to MIDI.
We didn’t lose our attention spans. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to. 
 A post about the attention economy, the intention economy we could have had, and what the distance between them has quietly done to creativity, trust, and the future we’re building. 
 Also: a reconditioned iPod, rocket boots for terrible ideas, and an ocean of artificial…
I was called a daydreamer at school. It wasn’t a compliment. 
 I think it’s the most important skill I have. And I feel it has atrophied.
My music WIP folder is a graveyard of jams and sketches with names like “asdfgh” and “New 33”. I never know what any of them are. I made this to help sort that out.
Two different strangers asked me the same question. I wasn’t ready for it either time. 
 A post about identity, creative practice, and the masks we wear to avoid answering things honestly. 
 Also: Supersonic festival, Halima Cassell’s ceramics, and a coffee shop conversation I’m glad I had.
Collecting all the Boomkat end of year charts in one convenient place. This is direct from my Obsidian vault, and in some ways is a thinly veiled SEO/AIO strategy to attract the kind of people I’d most like to be reading this blog. 
 “Find the others” as Timothy Leary said.
Testing how Claude Cowork can help me create a music player element in Hugo, so I can share my music experiments on this blog.
It’s been a while. Here’s where I’m at. 
 A long overdue check-in covering sobriety, why I’ve mostly fallen out of love with social media, and why I think the friction we’ve been so busy optimising away is often the best part. 
 Also: post-optimal objects, constraints, eating frogs, and a clock that tells the time in poetry.
When every interaction happens through plain text, it’s hard to get brand attributes across. Copywriting and tone of voice do some of the work. I wanted to know what else could.
My dear friend Ben Lowdon sent me an Instagram reel and I’ve gone down a rabbithole. 
 That happens a lot. This one is good though.
AKA Week One. 
 A big week. I no longer work at Critical Mass , and am taking a bit of a break to focus on my well-being while I plan what to do next.
New me, new website.

Designing, branding and launching Tyl by Natwest, the platform that allowed NatWest to re-enter the merchant acquiring space.
My brain started fizzing again. I hadn’t felt that in years. 
 An old post, brought in from Medium. About noticing the same energy that was around from 2010 to 2014, before the NDAs closed in, and what a Turner Prize-nominated artwork in Eastbourne had to do with getting it back. 
 Also: a Tumblr notebook, Discordia, and a clock that started all of this.
The best accessibility features don’t look like accessibility features. They just look like good design. 
 A short one, brought in from Medium. About a Nike shoe with a collapsible heel, and the case for building access in from the start instead of bolting it on at the end. 
 Also: the curb-cut effect, and why “well done, more of this” is basically the whole argument.
I used to break gear on purpose. 
 A short one, from 2015, brought in from Medium. About pushing music equipment past what it’s meant to do, and a habit I’ve let go slack since. 
 Also: an Amiga loading image files as audio, and the accidents that turned out brilliant.
Give a smart object a personality and people stop being afraid of it. Get the personality wrong and it’s worse than having none. 
 An old post, brought in from my old journal. From January 2011, before anyone said Internet of Things out loud. About giving connected objects character, and everything that can go wrong when you try. 
 Also: a rabbit that couldn’t read the news, a…