After a whole week of sunshine, it seems as if summer has finally arrived! Last week the Studio played host to a very exciting UltraHaptics workshop, and our wonderful residents were as busy as ever working on some brilliant projects…

Last Friday Good For Nothing kicked off in the Studio for a weekend of rapid social innovation. It brought together Bristol’s wonderful community of designers and makers, who spent the weekend helping out some great causes; Bristol Pound, Playing Out and Home Turf Lettings. The weekend was a fantastic success and will hopefully be the first of many! You can find out how to get involved and join the Good for Nothing community here.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Verity helped to host an UltraHaptics workshop. A fantastic group of creative technologists, artists and makers worked with Bristol University Interaction and Graphics department to test out their very latest research into UltraHaptics. They spent the time getting hands on with the kit and designing new potential applications for this emerging technology that allows you to receive tactile feedback in mid-air. Nicola documented the workshop and will be posting a blog next week so make sure you watch out for it.

Joanie from AntiVJ moved into the edit suite this week to work on production for Mail, Maps and Motion. He’s just started rendering so if you’ve got lots of computers lying around he’d be very happy to take them off your hands! There’s still some tickets left for the event here, but you will have to move quickly as over 1,800 have already been snapped up.

Tim and Rik have been working on Fruitface; a truth or dare application that takes place over multiple phones. They are currently setting some dates for user testing so we’ll keep you updated about how to get involved. Tim has also been busy producing a workshop on the African Digital Moving Image for Afrika Eye which is being held at Watershed in November.

nu desine have secured funding this week to facilitate the production of their new electronic musical instrument the AlphaSphere. You can check out an awesome video of the AlphaSphere in action here or pre-order one here.

Members of the DCRC Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley celebrated the released of their co-edited issue of the journal Culture Machine concerning the various ways we might examine the commodification of our capacities for attention. Culture Machine is an open access humanities journal so anyone can access the articles for free here. This theme issue was developed from the Paying Attention conference that took place in 2010.  

On Friday lunchtime we were joined by the wonderful team behind PUSH ME a commission for The Space, so look out for the write-up later this week.