The Studio has been rife with fascinating objects lately. Last week, we met Silas Adekunle’ Mecha Monster and Robert Sephenson’s Roboceratops, Nikki Pugh’s heart in a jiffy bag and James and Athena’s mysterious culinary devices. Amid all this excitement, we announced our wonderful new Artists in Residence, who will be joining us next month.

Nikki has been developing a robotic thumping heart for her project, Colony. While testing in the Studio, Nikki put the heart in a jiffy bag, and handed it to people. Though silent, the jiffy bag felt alive, and as it was carried around the room, the beating heart sped up or slowed down depending on where it was in the room. If you don’t already know about Nikki’s project, she is creating landscape reactive creatures for people to carry around the city. Their hearts will beat faster or slower depending on how open the space is around them (how accurate their GPS measurements are) and whether they are near the other creatures in the group. In order to take care of their creatures, people will have to move through the city differently. Look here for some images of Nikki’s latest lasercut creature prototypes.

Last week, Studio resident and founder of Reach Robotics, Silas brought the latest prototype of his Mecha Monster to the Studio. Reach Robotics are developing a robotic gaming platform in the form of personalized robots with which they hope to initialize a new type of gaming that is more engaging, competitive and fun. While Silas was here, he was visited by roboticist Robert Stephenson, who brought in an amazing robotic Jurassic puppy, the Roboceratops…

Our new Graduate and New Talent residents, James and Athena have been embarking on their current project, Understory. We have been catching glimpses of their digital culinary experiments, in the form of air compressors and infrared sensors attached to spoons.

The council delivered some lamp post heads to the Studio last week, to be adapted by Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier for the Playable City Award winning commission, Shadowing. We have now scouted out all of the locations for Shadowing, which you will be able to seek out around the city when the project is launched alongside the Making the City Playable Conference in September. We have some amazing speakers lined up for the conference, including artists Paolo Cirio and Luke Jerram (the brains behind worldwide scattering of pianos, Play Me I’m Yours and May's Park and Slide in Bristol).

We are thrilled to announce that Run to Draw and Tom Marshman will be joining us as Artists in Residence next month. Run to Draw is a collaboration between illustrator Amelia Johnstone and product designer Peter Hathaway, who have made a unique scrolling sketchbook device, called Pheidippides, which allows Amelia to draw on Peter’s back while they run. They feel that imagination and ideas are invigorated through exercise, and exploring new surroundings. We have also awarded a Micro-residency to performance artist Tom Marshman. Tom will spend a couple of weeks with us at the Studio developing Move Over Darling, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) history project. Since 2010, Tom has worked with local communities to collect older LGBT people’s stories, from which he has created a moving performance walk. We are excited to have them around and see how their projects develop here.

Digital Arts Online wrote an article about finding your inner start-up: How creative agencies and design studios can develop their own digital products, services and apps. They mentioned Studio residents Strange Thoughts and Daredevil Project. Read it here.