Thursday - A Trip Into London

Yesterday, I agreed to meet up with a pal for a swift half after he'd finished work. I took the opportunity to go to the Design Museum before we met up.

I'd been before a few years ago. The exhibition they are featuring is called "The Future Is Here" and is about the impact of new digital manufacturing, including 3D printing (yes!).

It's interesting how decentralised everything is becoming, mostly due to the Open Source movement, and there are a few micro-factories opening up, notably Assemble & Join near Waterloo. There's even a site where you can download the plans for a house, at WikiHouse, CNC it out of plywood and build it yourself. The founder of the project gave a TED talk explaining the philosophy behind the project:

It's all fascinating stuff.

There are also a couple of other exhibitions there as well, including one called "United Micro Kingdoms". It's a sort of re-imagined U.K. composed of four smaller countries, each with it's own political and social philosophy taken to extremes. While there, I noticed these books by the Sternberg Press, called the Solution Series:

This one has a list of parallel Scotlands, each weirder than the last.

I took my leave and walked up the South Bank, past Tower Bridge:

across the river at Charing Cross and then up to Covent Garden where we met up at The Salibury. We drank and chatted, eventually ending up at The Lamb and Flag:

which is a very busy pub, although we found seats inside. He has also left the firm we both worked for and has found himself a comfortable little contract, merging two systems together after a company takover. Ironically, at some point he's going to be working with the old firm, so that's going to be fun for him!