You probably have already some ideas about what sustainability means in relationship to products. But what does sustainability mean for services? And how do you then design for that? That's what you'll find out in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Anna. This is a service design show, episode 173. Hi, my name is Mark van Tijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure? All to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and, yes, our planet. Our guest in this episode is Anna van der Tocht, who is the lead sustainability at Livework. Now, when I think about sustainability in relationship to physical products, things like reducing waste, net zero and circularity come to mind. From clothing to car manufacturers, it seems that every organization these days is aware of its responsibility to work towards a more sustainable future. But this awareness is much less apparent when it comes to services. What is your bank or insurance provider doing to make their services more sustainable? And I'm not talking here about reducing the number of pay performance that they use. Well, Anna has been exploring how we can bring sustainability as a core component into our service design process. For that, we first have to understand what the quote-unquote material properties are of the services that we're working with. So for instance, when you're designing a product, you might want to use a lighter material to reduce the energy required for transportation. But what does lightweight mean when it comes to services? Are there similar concepts? Spoiler alert, yes, there are. But as you'll hear, there are still many unknowns and unanswered questions. But that makes this topic so interesting. Now is really the time to start having this conversation in our community and with our clients. So if you stick around until the end of this episode, you'll have a much better idea of what sustainability means in the context of services, how we need to rethink our own practice to design these services, and how do you get your clients excited to invest in them? A lot of food for thought is coming up, so I hope you're ready because we're going to jump straight into the conversation with Anna van der Tocht. Welcome to the show, Anna. Thank you. Hi, Mark. Hi. It's always awkward to do these conversations in English when you're speaking to somebody from the Netherlands. It always takes a switch. Nice to have somebody again from this beautiful country. Anna, super excited to talk about the topic that hasn't been on the show a lot, but you have done a lot of thinking around. I think it will be very inspiring and thought-provoking maybe. But before we dive into that, could you maybe give a short introduction into who you are and what you do these days? Yes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks. I'm Anna van der Tocht. I work at Livwork Studio, the Rotterdam office. And I'm our lead sustainability. It's a relatively new role at Livwork. We've been having a lot of conversations over the last couple of years, especially during corona. This really fired away. And we all felt so passionate about climate change and about the planet and about preserving it so that it stays as diverse and beautiful as it is today. And yeah, we felt what is our role in that? What's the design's role in that? And at a certain point, we started building our thinking around that and we started to really make it actionable. Like what should service designers do? What how can they help out in our transformation to a more sustainable future? And yeah, that went really well and really hit off. And at a certain point, we thought, no, we should really take this seriously. So now I'm the first lead of sustainability, which basically means that I coordinate across our clients and projects to really introduce that fourth lens of sustainability to feasibility, desirability and viability and make sure that we update all our tools and our thinking so that it includes that and that we do more work that actively contributes to changing the world. Congratulations on that role and congratulations on sort of pushing this boundary. Now, this is already a very interesting teaser of what's coming up later. But Anna, we also have a sort of a lightning round five lighthearted questions to get to know you as a person next to the professional. Some new I've added some new questions today and you haven't prepared for them. No, just the first thing that comes to your mind. And yeah, well, we won't dive into them deeper. But are you ready? I am so ready. All right. What book or books are you reading? If any at this moment? I just bought the value of a wheel, I think it's called. But I haven't started reading it yet, but I heard very good reviews. It's it's about looking at the value of different things on earth. So it's very much connected to what I just spoke about. But I'm also just a normal human being that loves fiction. So I just finished a bit of fantasy books. And I'm reading a book that's called everything I know about partying, booze or whatever. And then it's ends with everything I know about love. So all directions, fiction, nonfiction. I love it all. Well, we'll add a reading list to the show notes. Anna, what's always in your fridge? What's always in my fridge? I think that would be some tahini. I really like making hummus and I really like tahini. I'm such a sucker for all Otolenghi foods. So definitely tahini. That's always there. Yeah. All right. If you could have a superpower, which superpower would you like to have? Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. It used to always be flying. I think like most people, but I recently changed it to being able to understand and speak all languages in the world. That would definitely be my superpower. I would love to go out and just be able to be curious and be able to really live in that curiosity by having the ability to speak all languages. Nice. Nice. This is a new one. What is your go to karaoke song? Yeah. I think it would be New York from Alicia Keys and well, the Alicia Keys version. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cool. And final question, which is a tradition here on the show. Do you recall the first time you heard or learned about service design? I don't recall the exact moment. I do know that it was somewhere during my master's in Delft strategic product design monsters. And it was it was immediately a moment that I thought, Oh, that's quite interesting because yeah, I was used to focusing on industrially produced products and not necessarily on services. And it really it really tickled something. I thought, Oh, that's that's quite interesting to look at it in a broader sense. And then it really caught my attention actually due to a television documentary, which most Dutch people might probably know it's vpro tegelicht. And it was all about this architect Thomas Rau that explained that product, more products should be offered as a service if we would want to shift to a more circular world. So that that was really when I thought, Whoa, services, we need to we need to do something with that. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Thank you for sharing and that background story. Let's transition into the topic of this episode. I, of course, sort of in our prep call and prep emails asked you like, what is the central team? And you summarized this as sustainable a sustainable service industry, right? Now, that sounds super interesting. And I would like to understand, first of all, where are we today as a service industry as in it's sort of the the topic maybe sort of implies that the current service industry isn't sustainable. How do you view that? What is your take? Oh, yeah. Good question. So maybe to define it a little bit, because I think what I'm what I think is important is that we're not talking about the product industry. Even products as a services are excluded from this realm, I would say so really like financial services, insurers, insurances, all the typical service services. So the service industries that they usually don't have a product that has a has very tangible materials going into it that has a very tangible energy use during either production or during use or during waste phase. So sustainability is very much seen as a material realm. So it's easier to see how that applies to product and manufacturing industries. And it's a little bit more difficult for service industries because they obviously they have offices as well. But that's not really their biggest impact. Their biggest impact is kind of how they have a lot of influence in the infrastructure of our world and not the physical infrastructure, but the less tangible infrastructure. So at a certain point, we started to think about what is sustainable insurance, for example, that was actually the trigger for us to start thinking about that. And we realized that currently there's a big focus on net zero across the board. So not only for service industries, but basically for everything. And when you look a little bit into the concept of net zero, it is a scientific concept that looks at basically takes one measurement as a proxy for how we're doing. It's not the only proxy. If you look into what climate scientists have been saying or have been looking at, they usually don't take it as the only proxy for how healthy our planet is. But for some reason, it really caught attention and it kind of got a lot of attention and pull and momentum. So we see a lot of companies pledging net zero, which is really good because it's awesome that companies are considering the planet at all. But net zero focuses very much on what the world shouldn't look like. So it focuses on a world without carbon. So it describes a quality that shouldn't be there. And whereas for manufacturing companies, there are also other concepts like circularity or regenerative that describe the desired state, that desired state doesn't really exist for the service industries. So when we start to think about what does a sustainable insurance look like, we realize, oh, there's so little defined. So that's kind of how we thought, oh, that's quite interesting that there's so little understanding of that. So we all get that there are manufacturers and they use materials and ingredients and they extract things from the earth. And then at some point they create waste. If we throw this stuff away and we want to reduce waste, we want to reduce the carbon footprint. I think with a bike manufacturer, a car manufacturer, anything that's like you said, a tangible product, we get that. But then we come to services and you mentioned insurance. I'd like to think of maybe an even more simple example like maybe a barber or a massage, something simple like that. How does sustainability play a role there? And I was thinking, okay, so what is, maybe what is waste in that environment? And I know you said it's not just about eliminating waste because that's just reducing what's already there and that's not per se describing a desired state. But maybe we can talk about both. Like first of all, is there waste in services? Is there waste in services? And if so, what is that? So I think this is already super difficult to answer. And already the examples that you said, like a barber versus insurance versus a bank versus public transport, they all have a very physical and material components, but they're vastly different. And yes, they all use energy that is probably either green or not. Yes, they all have obsolete products. So at a barber, you might think of the hair that drops on the ground or I don't know the plastic in which the hair products enter the salon. So yes, you could say they services have waste. I think that's a very simple answer. So you could look at their carbon footprint. You could look at their material usage. You could look at their waste streams. So in a sense, that is exactly the same as products. But quite often services have an influence on how the world works. So if maybe the barber and the massage parlor are not the best examples for that, but public transport or financial institutions, they do have actually quite a big influence on how the world works, on how material can flow. And that happens almost at different abstraction levels, I would say. So with public transport or with transport infrastructure, you could say, oh, whether there is a way for me to go to Dublin without using a plane has a big influence to how much people use, how much people fly, and therefore has an influence on the material impact of the world. But for banks, that's even different, right? So where do banks invest? Are there ways for them to play an explicit role in what is successful and what is not? So it's quite interesting that they have this big influence on the material impact of the world without their office space or without their own waste to be the biggest component of that. If that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. And this makes it super complicated because this also goes, I think, for product manufacturer to which extent are you responsible for, I don't know, how the raw materials are extracted from the earth, like at some point. And I guess with a service provider, this also goes like, how far does your influence reach? Interesting questions, to be honest. Maybe another angle we can take at this is, again, the distinction between products and services with products, you sort of know what the, what is the word that I'm looking for, like the knobs are that you can dial, you can, like you can see. The leverage points. Yeah, well, you can see how and where your sort of raw materials are sourced from, if that's from a well-maintained source, like I've bought a jacket and there are tons of labels that fur or what is it, the goose feathers are sourced from a good place, like stuff like that. So those are knobs that you as a product designer can turn to be, I don't know, more sustainable. Yeah, have you found similar knobs that also apply to the service industry or is it so different in each sector that it's really hard to identify these, these leverage knobs, dials? I think they might be there. Like there are just like in products, there are patterns in services. There are also patterns. We can see how a shoe is very different from a coffee machine, but in some, but they also have similarities in how they are produced or used. And therefore you can see patterns in how you can maybe turn those knobs that you just mentioned. And my, I suspect that might be the same for services. At the same time, I do think that the service industries, they have a very different role in every, yeah, they own, they each have their own role. And that role is so powerful. They have such an influence on how things work in the world. So for example, yeah, I'm going to come back to the insurance example quite a lot because we thought, we thought about it a lot. So if, whereas a lot of people say, oh, our government should, should force us to do this or that or should force companies to think about sustainability. Actually insurers, they can, they are not government, but they have quite some pool in, they can just tell a business, we will not insure you unless you make sure that your facilities are flood proof, for example, because otherwise the risk is too high for us. So they actually do have a role that to play potentially in getting us to a more sustainable future. Obviously the whole service would change when they start more actively using that because the whole interaction between an insurance company and an insured business would radically change. So the service design would also change because all of a sudden, I don't know, you have to negotiate about how flood proof you should be in the areas where your facilities are. So there's all of a sudden a very different start of the service and this and this of the service design. So yeah, it's good to come back to this insurance example. And I'm just going to, out of curiosity, try to dig into the differences and maybe there aren't that many differences, maybe that might be what we explore here. But how is this different from a product manufacturer that says to their to its suppliers, like, I'm only going to use your raw materials if they, I don't know, if the animals that you use are treated well. So a product manufacturer like IKEA, like they have a lot of influence on sustainability, for instance. Yes. So if you're talking about their suppliers, yes. But if you're talking about their clients, not so much. And that's different. Because IKEA, if you buy, I don't know, IKEA couch, it will be quite weird if the person at checkout says you can only buy this couch if you promise to recycle it or if you promise to blah. Maybe that will happen in the future. Maybe we will come up with certain new business models in which that happens. But that radically changes the business model, probably from a product to a service. And I think that's where manufacturing companies are not changing the interaction with their customers radically yet. Some are, yes, if you think about sharing or leasing or those kind of things, that is yeah, that's different for service industries where from the start you're in this kind of services are kind of co created, right? It's like a co creative act between the service provider and the service customer. So you can see that that has a bigger impact. And that's a very good distinction that it's the relationship with the customer and not per se the suppliers. Because in a service, like you said, it's co created and there is no stock or stockpile. So yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense that there is a difference. And you can question if what the role is of a service provider towards its customers, like as a restaurant, or as a massage salon, or as an insurance, sure, can you sort of neglect or force your customers to a certain type of behavior or stimulate a certain type of behavior or attract a certain type of behavior, right? From your from the end consumer customer, that that's that's the whole thing here, right? Yeah, and I like the way you say it, like the fact that value is co created in a service means that if you want to make that value more sustainable, you for sure need to do that with your customers, where manufacturers can already do a lot, just create making sure that it is created with recycled materials, whatever without involving their customers in it. Obviously, there's a case for them enforcing their customers in it as well. But they have more control over the product that they send out than service providers do. Well, yes and no, because a service provider, like they have the full control because it's co created sort of in the moment. So you are always active and engaged as a service provider, while as a product company, you sell the product and then it's out of your hand. So you have no control over that. What do you feel it's currently missing in order to get toward this more sustainable vision on services? Yeah, so I think that's yeah, that's why I started with the net zero example. A net zero is about this material world. It's about less carbon. Whereas you see that in the examples that we already discussed that sustainability for service industries might also be about what role they take. So that's not material. That's about this immaterial element of how you help to restructure the world so the material elements can be more sustainable, if that makes sense. So for example, obviously also service providers should look at their own operation. They should also reduce the impact of their own offices. They should reduce the impact of their own travel, etc. So that's not what I'm talking about here. But they have this opportunity to have a bigger impact because they have a certain role in society. And that's not described at this moment. There's no desired state for their role in facilitating this transition to a more sustainable world. Whereas for manufacturing, that is a bit more described. It's about circularity, about regenerative thinking. So there is this future state that they can see if we will build towards that, then probably we are in a future state where we want to be, various for service industries that's less defined. You could say maybe it's as simple as they have to help facilitate the manufacturers of this world to become circular or regenerative. Maybe it's as simple as that, but maybe it's not. I don't know yet. For sure it is undefined at the moment. You've done a lot of thinking about this and have you found a reason, is there a good reason why this is still undefined? Because services, like it's not that they were invented yesterday, they've been around quite a long time. So you would think that people have already put some effort into creating a future state or a desired state. Why is it still lacking? Good question. Well, I think that climate scientists would probably say, well, it's not only lacking there, even though the desired state exists for the more material worlds. Companies are also not there yet. We're just very late. So you could say maybe it's just because we have been taking it too slow. Then I think the difficult thing for sustainability in general is that it's so interdisciplinary because it has to change across industries, across organizations. It's super difficult to understand how. Then it really started from this understanding of systems on earth, which was very much rooted in the material world, seeing how more carbon entered the atmosphere and how that is actually heating up. So that's a very material world. You can measure it. You can sometimes even see it. So as the whole thinking started in that material world, that's probably also why the thinking evolves faster there than in the immateriality of our society. And I do think that transition thinking, so I'm actually not sure what the field is called. But there's quite a lot of thinking about transitions and how you bring about transition and how transitions have taken place in the past. That is probably a first look into that more immaterial way of thinking or system thinking is another way of looking at it. But these are fields that, well, at least in the projects that we come across, haven't permeated the industry as much as circularity or regenerativity has done that in manufacturing. Super interesting.  The distinction with products is so helpful here, at least for me. And you mentioned that they do work materials. And then when you think about carbon, it makes a lot of sense. And I was thinking while you were sharing this, okay, so products are about carbon. What are services about? And services are, of course, about experiences, relationships. And is that maybe an area where we should take our sustainability thinking into? So I don't know. How do we experience nature? What is our connection to the outside world? I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. Yeah, I think that's wonderful thinking, actually. I think for sure this should be a part of it. We worked with a couple of car manufacturers looking into electrical vehicles. And it was quite interesting how we assume that the experience for driving a fueled car is the same as for an electric vehicle. Our assumption is actually that that experience is probably different. And if you design for it, it's even more different. If I would buy an electric car, I would want to know at what point I've, like if at certain point I drove enough kilometers with it so that the, that at that point, and my choice was indeed more sustainable than a car that uses fuel. I would want to know that. So that's a very explicit touch point that I think should be in there. I don't know if that is actually true for people that drive those, but I can imagine that there is an experimental bit of that. So that's a very explicit example of how the digital services or the whole services around a car should be different. But I do think that that experience in general might have to be different. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And well, maybe that's, that's the area where we have a lot of opportunity, as in, like, again, what are sustainable experiences or how do we, what does circularity mean for experiences? Or I don't know, what else? Just, yeah, sustainable. Super interesting. Now, you've, you work with tons of companies and you're sort of pioneering this, this idea, this concept. When you share this with them, what is that typical response? Well, I wouldn't share it exactly as we talked about it just now, because it feels very vague to them if I would do that. But for example, with insurers, we have talked about, okay, this is what will change for you for sure. Because insurers have, for example, also have risks in climate change. So we kind of, so when we share with them, we usually think about what is their mental framework. So for banks and insurers, they think a lot about risk and risk management.  Well, climate change actually has quite some risks, right? So that's usually then the starting point, thinking from their frame of reference and then reframing this topic from that same frame of reference. So to take that as an example, we all saw that the flooding in the Netherlands and in Germany and in Belgium cost a lot of damages and on quite a big scale. So they had, not only did that cost them a lot of money, but it was also operationally quite difficult to get all those people reimbursed and get all those businesses back up and running in a time frame that makes sense. So there's quite some struggles for them as well. And then especially insurers, they usually have quite a community history. So the origin of many insurers is a couple of farmers that collaborated because if one farmer's crop would fail, then the other would pitch in to keep that farmer alive. So they usually feel quite some social responsibility as well. So they see this risk, they see the social responsibility of making sure that people that live in areas where there's, that are more flooding prone, they should also be protected. So they see quite, there's quite some things that they see happening and that they care about either because it has financial consequences or because it clashes with their value system. And then we start to think about, okay, so if that is for sure their realm and they care about that, how might they change? How might the world of insurance change if they would want to do this more sustainably? And then for example, what I said before, can they negotiate with their customers? Hey, we do want to ensure you, but can you make sure that your house or your business is flood proof for floodings up to one meter high? I don't know. And by the way, can you also make sure that if you flood proof it that you then do that with sustainable materials. And then you see, okay, that's all of a sudden a different service because then you're looking together at the situation of this customer or business. So there's this whole assessment that wasn't there before. So all of a sudden their whole service would change. So that's usually how we kind of start the conversation and say, we think that this is happening for you for sure. If we do a first exploration of what that might mean for what your services would potentially change into, we can already see that that's very different and that people will not all of the sudden adopt that. And that's how we start the conversation. So we don't start a conversation with saying you lack a vision on sustainable services, because yeah, it won't get us anywhere. Yeah, of course, it makes this is the first rule of service design. Don't talk about service design. You talk about the things that matter to the company. And eventually in the end, it's money in a for profit company that matters and values like you said, the values that they have that they want to stay true to. But it opens up doors where they can see how being more sustainable actually helps their business model. So that's that's the opening you're looking for. Now, I like the example where you said an insurer can for instance have a negotiation with its customer about being flood proof and doing that in a way that does it harm nature or it's actually good to nature like, I don't know, increasing biodiversity. I'm just again, thinking out loud here. Do you have maybe a few more examples that you thought through that could be inspiring to paint the picture here? Yeah, so for insurance, we for sure thought about it most actively. But I can imagine that for either for example, we had a conversation with a net provider. So not the energy provider, but the company that or the, yeah, the organization that makes sure that there's an electric electricity network. They are also service provider because they make sure that if you start a business in the middle of nowhere, you have the right to say, they connect me to the energy network. But they have a big problem with the current state because because the network is changing in such a fast space. Many people are installing solar panels or things that weren't there before. And all of a sudden, the needs of a network in this one little area change radically because all of a sudden everybody has solar panels. So not only should it give out energy, but it should also take in energy and the amounts are over very different magnitudes. So that's just one example. And then also they have more fluctuating energy, right? So solar and wind energy, they are less consistent than our old energy sources. So they have this very physical problem. But it has impact on how they service their clients because they see, oh, wow, we want to service our clients. We want to make sure that everybody that wants energy has access to it. And at the same time, it's getting more and more difficult for us to provide that access. And up until now, they've been looking into mostly price dynamics to change this. So can you use price to influence when and how people use energy? But it isn't enough. So then all of a sudden there's a wonderful problem space that as a service designer, you can put your teeth in and think about, so how would that negotiation or that interaction with that customer change? How would that, how can you kind of co-create a system with your customers that makes it easier to balance those energy stocks? And how would, yeah, well, yeah, I can totally see how this access the service to be able to access the energy grid because that's what you're getting. You're getting that as a service and then you need a physical infrastructure. But that's not all we're talking about. So how would that conversation go? What changes? I don't, we don't need to have the solution here, but just like what could potentially change? What are some scenarios in how this conversation, this negotiation, this co-creation with customers could potentially change? Yeah, I don't have the answer for that. But I would love to do a project in which we go around all those different types of energy users and really understand, like we usually do in design research, right? Really understand what are their needs, what are their accessing needs? And can we, I don't know, are there, maybe we come up with personas, but different needs that have that that can be treated in a different way or behavioral archetypes? Maybe there's more that we can do in, maybe people don't need energy all the time they need it, but they do need to know upfront when they can and when they can't. I don't know, I think there's a lot that we haven't thought of yet. And I think every service designer listening can see how the design research for this challenge would be so, yeah, full of meat and so interesting. You, we haven't talked or addressed the idea or the notion that service design plays a role here. What do you feel is, is the role of the service design field and service design professionals in this whole conversation? Well, what I've always loved about service design is that it is a more than than a product design field or any of the other design fields, I would say it, it, it, it, it, it thinks about kind of our, we don't have physical materials to play with, we have the organization to play with. That's kind of our design material. So it has always been our role to kind of be a facilitator of a co-creation between all those different organizational departments and teams and bringing it together and make their whole world revolve around the customer. And I think that is so relevant in this space because having a ESG or sustainability team that thinks through all the, the whole carbon footprint of a company is not enough here. You need to actually change some ways that the world works. And so many different disciplines, so many different people need to be involved in that and need to co-create and need to use their expertise and, and together get to this desired state in which all those different teams, silos and kind of that they're all orchestrated to this new solution. And I think that is our superpower. Yes, we are super human centric and, and that is, I think what, what we pride ourselves the most with, but I think what we sometimes forget is that we are kind of the wonderful orchestrators of change. And I really think that, that we have a big role to use that skill here as well. If you think about this, what would help to accelerate the adoption of this way of thinking in our field? What is, maybe, what is holding us back? I don't know, I'm not sure if anything is holding us back, rather than just not knowing or thinking about this, but what could, what could help to accelerate the adoption of this forward lens? I think, I think what is holding us back is that we feel we are educated to talk about this, that we are afraid to contribute to greenwashing. And, but the interesting thing is that we are also no IT experts. We're also no HR experts. We are also no digital experts, we're no call center experts, but for some reason we're very comfortable to invite all those disciplines to our workshops. So I think we should be more comfortable to, to invite the sustainability experts to, to our workshops and to our processes.  We're also no business experts, but we still make sure that our services are viable, right? So I think that is kind of a mindset shift that we are, have been starting to make, but where we're lacking behind, because we are a bit afraid of, of coming in too powerful, of, of saying things in spaces where, where we, we don't feel experts. But I, but I hope that this will change and that people, service designers would see, I don't have to know exactly how much carbon this service emits for me to still invite sustainability experts into the co-creation process and to create a sustainable service. I'm, I'm curious. So it's, it's maybe an imposter syndrome problem here, but I'm also curious. We have been selling the, the making services more human agenda for a while now. Like that's the thing we are, we're advocating for. We're saying we need to make businesses more human services need to be more around focused around people. That's already a very big challenge. And we've been pioneering that we've been evangelizing that and it, it took us a while up to till the moment that clients started to create that demand was created. At first it was no demand. We had to create demand is like with this sustainability thing. It's super important, but are we waiting right now for clients to come with the question to us and then we can act upon it. And doesn't maybe feel like it too, too big of a hassle or burden to now also start advocating for sustainable services next to more human services. I don't know. Is that, is how do you feel about that? Yeah, good question. I sometimes think of our work as kind of business is kind of looking at its own, its own operation, looking down at its own body. And then we invite them to look up and to look at their customer and to see their customer and then relate what they see there to what they see if they look at themselves. And I feel that this is almost like the next step in then saying maybe you should open up even more and not only look at the one right in front of you, which is your direct customer, but also at the world around that and invite that. But it does feel like that human centricity bit that we've been introducing is first step, a very good first step of inviting companies to look beyond their own realm. So yes, I do think that you're right. It took us a while to be recognized as experts for even doing this. It won't happen overnight that we're invited to also do that last bit. I think that that is completely correct. But I do think that we're seeing more and more that companies do feel this. So for example, a company that wants their products to be circular thinking, oh, but how do we then facilitate our customers to bring back their products? How do we then facilitate our customers to repair their products? Maybe we should do some service design for that. So that's kind of already the first step right into stretching from customer to more than customer to planet centricity, maybe even I like if somebody is listening to the podcast, they have missed the sort of the physical cues in your story. But I like going from looking down to looking up to looking wide. And I was in my mind I was going full circle on our conversation here because when we apply this way of thinking to our own practice, we as service design professionals are service providers, but we're not selling products. So what does sustainable service design look like? Or more sustainable service design look like? And one of the things could just be that we challenge ourselves to have this conversation with the clients that we work for. So are we inviting our clients to have a conversation about looking wide next to just looking up? And that could be a sign of a more sustainable service design practice. What do you think? Yeah, I think you're totally right. Yeah, like we come in and we say, oh, this is how we do blueprints. We have the customer at the top and underneath we have the operation and we have business. So we already have desirability viability and feasibility in our blueprints. But why don't we also say, and we add sustainability to it as well, they have never seen a blueprint before. They don't know which which layers it should have. I think it is partly about that. And it is also about being a bit more bold and saying, hey, there's quite some human challenges in transforming to sustainability. We know humans, we know organizations, maybe we have a role to play it might be a little bit less, it might be a little bit of a stretch for us to use those exact skills in areas where it's not a very clear start to end service. But still, it's human challenges that organizations have to cater for. That's kind of what we excel at. So I think it's both. Again, I feel like we're going full circle here because at the start you mentioned like thinking about the role service providers have. And again, we are service providers. So which role do we take on and addressing this topic is just one of the roles we already could very easily take on to to have this conversation. I want to sort of try to wrap up and head towards the end of our conversation. I'm sure that there are a lot of questions that are unanswered. But if you could pick one and sort of maybe invite somebody who's listening right now to think with us, like what is the big question that you would like the community to spend some mental effort on? I liked kind of two questions that came along in this episode. Like the one that you said, what does the sustainable experience look like? I think that's definitely one that I would like us to all think about. And then the second is inviting a bit of system thinking, which we already do because organizations are kind of small systems. And obviously system thinking is a bit of a bigger field. But kind of thinking about the sustainability doesn't only have this materiality. It is also making the world work differently. And then inviting people to think about that. How should it work differently? And what is the role of services in restructuring? How the world works? That's I think the two questions that I would love for everyone to think about and to share and to talk about together. Yeah, it will be awesome. And I invite the community to absolutely do so. And my sort of final question here is, if you would listen to this episode or somebody's listening to this episode and they made it all the way here, what is the one thing you hope that they will take out of this? One thing I hope that they will take out of this is that it's okay to think about it, that you're not greenwashing just by thinking about it and that it is scary to think about it. But that it's completely okay and that you can talk about it, make mistakes and think about how we can incorporate it in our world work. Thanks a lot for sharing this, Anna. Again, yeah, super interesting for me a lot of unexplored, uncharted territory, a lot of stupid questions to be asked, especially for Maya trying to understand what this could be and actively exploring and prototyping as we speak. So thank you for offering me the space to pick your brain here. And I hope that we'll hear a lot more about this topic in the coming months, years ahead. Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much for inviting me and for being comfortable with entering this confusing space. Have you come across examples of sustainable services we'd love to know? So please leave a comment down below. A huge thanks to Anna for coming on the show and sharing her perspective with us, especially considering that there are still so many unanswered questions. I hope that this got you excited to help shape the future of our practice. I've been sharing conversations with industry leaders like Anna here on this show every two weeks for over six years now. And I don't plan to stop anytime soon. So if you don't want to miss any of the future conversations, make sure you subscribe to the channel. My name is Mark van Tijn and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Keep making a positive impact and I hope to see you very soon in the next video.


Hi, I'm Niels Mönchelmeyer and together with you I want to talk about the second movement of Schubert's Apojoni Sonata. It's like a peaceful island and so beautiful and touching and it's also incredibly difficult to perform on stage because it's so slow and we need to move very slowly and carefully create an everlasting normal melody and if you think about the mood itself, it's actually not a standstill but it is always moving and the piano has always eight notes so always listen to the piano and have a feeling that within this pulsation of eight notes you move and move and move. I suggest you practice this in two different ways, once you play it much faster and then you play half tempo and focus that the movements are equally flowing as if you play fast so that you don't get stuck inside.


John Park's Workshop. John Park and some birds workshop because I had to shoe a bird out of here when I came in. I closed the door and heard some flapping, finch looking character just left. So goodbye little bird. In our chats, thanks for stopping by today. I'm going to let you know if you're looking for our chat, maybe you're over in Twitchland or Facebook and it looks a little quiet. Well, you might want to check out our Discord. That's it right there. You can go to adafru.it slash discord. You'll get an instant invite. And then you can look for the live broadcast chat channel over on the left side there. Kind of cut them off that you can see a whole bunch of different channels we have, including the live broadcast chat channel. And that's where people are hanging out. Also, we have people over in our YouTube chat. Keep an eye on that. Hey, Dave Odessa. Hey, our con-the-net, pronounce that. Greetings. And it was not a Christmas turkey yet, Dave Odessa. So what's happening today? We've got some cool stuff planned. By we, I mean me. I've got a coupon code for you that you can use to save 10% in the Adafruit store. I've got a recap of the product pick of the week. I've got a super cool, highly super cool, not to oversell it, but I think it's very, very exciting Circuit Python Parsec for you. And that'll tie into some stuff I want to do with the new camera board, the Memento camera board. We'll take a look at that. I'm just getting started with it, but I wanted to do some little code hack on it that I want to show you. And as I get to know that board more, I will be doing some fun little projects and guides with it. What else? I also will show you the kind of final PCB and enclosure for the fader wave project, which I'm going to be hopefully getting the guide finished this week, next couple days, later today and tomorrow, and should be published next week. So you'll be able to build one of those if you want. That will include ordering a PCB, though. So if you want to build one of those, you'll be ordering a PCB or five, usually that's the minimum, from JLCPCB or PCBWay or maybe Oshpark or, I don't know, maybe you want to fab one yourself, get some stinky chemicals out, etch it. That will be up to you, but I will be supplying the board files for that so you can make your own. All right, so let's get on with the coupon code I mentioned. So if you want to save 10% off today, until the end of the day, until midnight tonight, then head on over to Adafruit armed with that coupon code. Oh, look, yeah, so that one is out of stock right now, so you can't get that. But if you go to the main Adafruit site, click on products, you can hit the view all next to new products, see some stuff like this USB nugget. You want to get $6.90, just lopped right off the top of the price and get hacking with a little cool hacking board. It does ducky script kind of stuff. Check it out. There's the USB nugget. Or maybe you need a Flurk aluminum case for your Pi 5. Well, this coupon code will save you 10% no matter what you want to get in the Adafruit store. So GUI, G-O-O-E-Y, I think that's how you spell GUI, GUI. I'll get you 10% off today over in the Adafruit store. Let's see also, since I mentioned the store, I'll leave that coupon code up there. Andy Calaway says, shouldn't the coupon code be cheap, cheap? It should have been. I reacted quickly enough. One other thing I'll mention, let me bring back the Adafruit page here. If you just type in the word free after Adafruit.com slash free, that will tell you what kind of deals we've got going on right now with your purchases. So if you spend $99 or more, you're going to get a free PCB coaster with the Adafruit logo on it, lovely coaster. If you spend $149 or more, you'll get the coaster and a KB2040 board. It's an RP2040 chip in the Pro Micro format, perfect for macro pad, keyboard, game pad kinds of projects. So check that out. If you spend $149 or more, you're going to get that for free along with the coaster. If you spend $199 or more, you're going to get free shipping with UPS in these continental United States and the KB2040 and the coaster.  So this is your coupon code. Use that and get some free stuff.  Thank you, David Glaude, for reminding me. I didn't say that. I usually do. This is good on physical goods. You can use that coupon code for physical goods in the Adafruit store. You cannot use it for gift certificates, subscriptions or software. So only physical bits. Atoms. Buy some atoms. Have the atoms shipped to you and then you can use that coupon code. Thank you, David. All right. So Tuesdays, I have a show which is the product pick show and on it I like to grab something from the store, give you a massive discount. We usually stock, we stash 100 of them. The amazing new products team will stash 100 of these things off to the side. Travis, Jelly, thank you so much. And anyone else who's involved with that. And we then unleash the hounds, release the Kraken with usually a 50% off. No coupon code during that time. Just the prices dropped cut in half. And then I like to do a little demo of it, show you the ins and outs, maybe some projects that have been done with it. And this week I have a one minute recap of that. So check it out. There. That's my product pick of the week this week. It is the B&O 0559 Doff Absolute Orientation IMU breakout. This is the one you want. If your project involves trying to figure out where you're pointing something or maybe where you're pointing yourself. The fact that it does the sensor fusion, which is to say it takes the magnetometer, accelerometer gyro takes all of that and does the calculations, does the math to figure out where the heck is this thing pointed in 3D space. It's gonna use the direction I'm pointing as it's sort of relative starting point. So you can see, even though I'm not pointing at my monitor back there, I was able to get the orientation to work. That right there is my product pick of the week this week. It is the B&O 0559 Doff Absolute Orientation IMU breakout board. Bunch of people said they got some of those. So we're looking forward to seeing what kind of projects you're doing with them. What sort of compass-y, orientation-y, control-ery types of things you might use those for. Very cool sensor. Let's see. Yeah, I was showing off the pressure washer nozzle there. I'll pull things down. Showing off that pressure. What? Here, you can hold that. And that's gonna fall disastrously. You stay there, Lars. I was showing that, of course, and Todd came back with this gem right here. A little nod to pulp fiction. I shouldn't be pointing that at you. That's rude. Maybe I should have pointed it off to the side. But yeah, all done with that sensor. Super cool sensor. Okay. Next up, what have we got? Oh, let me get set up here. Lars, what's up? Because I have a demo I want to do in the Circuit Python parsec. Let me set up my phone for that. We're gonna use the phone, as well as a controller that focused for you. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Get ready for. Okay. Let's see if I've got this set up. I'm gonna just test a little. Okay. Yeah, we're good. Try to get that glare out of there. Okay. Here we go. Is that it? That is it. Okay. For the Circuit Python parsec today, I wanted to show you how to use micro OSC. This is a library for Circuit Python that Todd Kurt wrote. It's in the community bundle. And you can use it to interface over Wi-Fi with any device that can run an open sound controller OSC application. So OSC is sort of like MIDI, but a much more modern one uses 32 bit floats or 32 bit integers. And it has a whole bunch of other really cool features to it, including a lot of apps with these great UIs and you can build these UIs on your phone on your tablet on your computer. And we can connect wirelessly. You'll see this phone here is not plugged into anything. And my micro controller here is just getting power from the USB cable there. It's not not getting data. So it's a Wi Fi USB 32 or rather USB 32 chip. So let's show it in action. If you look at my repel down there, the little serial output, you'll see that if I adjust these faders right up here, I am getting output that is sent to the micro controller over Wi Fi and it's responding really quickly. And this can be all sorts of little dials and buttons and different pads and controllers. And all of that is working with one really simple elegant command in a library. So how does this work? First of all, I have my micro controller on my Wi Fi network. And then I have given it a server address that it's actually broadcasting that we can connect to. And then I have set up a couple of functions of what to do with let's say a fader or a toggle or a push button. So this is where you can say right now print things out. But in reality might have this controlling motors or servos or lights. And then we have this dispatch map, which is what tells different messages where to go basically which function are they going to use when they're when those messages come in. And here we're setting up the OSC server by giving the command micro OSC dot OSC server. And then we give it the socket pool UDP host and UDP port that we set before, as well as what dispatch map it's going to use. This is the default one, but you could have a different name if you wanted to. Then in the main loop, all we have to do is OSC underscore server dot poll. That's it. It's just checking for activity very frequently. So anytime activity comes in, that message is then sent through this dispatch map that says what are we going to do with it? Well, we'll send anything that's got this namespace one dash fader or this namespace one dash toggle and these are part of the really nice easy to work with aspects of OSC or these naming conventions that are used and then tell it what to do. So in this case, I have anything named fader is going to print out its value zero to one, as well as throw some asterisks on there like a little mini graph. But you can see we have a bunch of different types of controls. Here we can also have multiple pages. Here is a really neat x y controller. So you can see as I use that I'm getting messages very quickly transmitted over to the board of these two axes, the values on these two axes. And so you can see you can use this for all kinds of things. And the nice thing is there are multiple applications that use OSC. It's an open standard summer paid apps. This one's touch OSC, but you can also get some open source free ones as well and they all work. And it's a great way to interface over Wi Fi with your micro controller and build really nice UIs to control things. And so that is how you can use the micro OSC library inside of Circuit Python to use OSC surfaces to control your micro controller projects in Circuit Python. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. All right, so one thing I should mention that I didn't is if you want to use this just simply go to the community bundle, you can find that on the circuit Python.org page in the library section, or you can just simply use circup, which is the command line library install tool and just type in circup install micro OSC, that will get the appropriate version for your micro controllers version of Circuit Python and put that on there. So really easy to use. In fact, I will share also the GitHub URL in the chat here. Let me find my notes so you can check it out directly if you'd like to. And there is example code there, mine is just a slight variation on that that example code. So there it is in two chats there if you want. And I'll just put it I'm going to just paste it in here too in case anyone watching this later wants to know github.com slash Todd bot slash circuit Python underscore micro OSC watch the capitalization and then tree main and that will take you to this page right here. So there's the library in there some documentation down below and a nice bit of example code that'll get you started. You can by the way in the example I showed here I just am using my micro controller as the receiver, you can flip that so you could have your micro controller be the sender, it'll transmit OSC things. So if you wanted to build a UI of some kind and then send that over Wi Fi to a computer and then use that to control who knows what synthesizers typically but visuals as well. You can you can flip that around. So there's examples for using that in both directions. And you can also look into I think check real quick. I think you can use the demo app for free. I find it is it touch OSC? Yeah. Many people have implemented OSC this is one of the more robust implementations Hexler industries or Hexler.net. And so you can see that's the the app I was using the version one or mark one version of that on my phone. But there is a if you see this screenshot, this is it running on a desktop computer on a Mac in this case. And so you can do all your GUI building there which is great for for setting up complicated schemes with multiple pages color coding labels and so on you can you can do that on the computer as well and send from the computer to your microcontroller and I've tested those things out. They were great. That one you have like a limited trial. I don't know what the limitations on it are but at some point you should click license and buy it so you can unlock the features or just have it stop nagging you I forget what you this. So there you go a really cool implementation by Todd for circuit Python that just makes it super easy to work with. And if you look here, let me go back to my sublime text. You'll see this is page three. So you can see page one page two page three. Those messages are showing up down at the bottom. So this is a page one fader one page one fader two page one fader three. So it has a nice simple human readable hierarchy of the naming convention. And you can send things simultaneously. So you can see here I'm getting messages for x y one and x y two on page three there. Todd says over in the chat I love OSC been using it on and off for over a decade. Wow. Very cool. It was meant to take over for MIDI it never quite did that MIDI has hung on but they coexist and they coexist nicely. And there's a lot you can do in OSC to bridge over to MIDI things. So it can be a way to set things up, even though your final sort of leg of the trip might be a MIDI message you can you can start things with OSC if you like. All right. So let's let's move on next up. I'm gonna put this away for now but this will come back because I'm working on an implementation for the Memento camera that I want show you and work on a bit. But what I wanted to show you next is the I mentioned the fader wave.  What is this thing called? What are we using here discord? Where's discord? So I'd like to be able to see the chat. Nope. More helpful messages. There's live broadcast chat. There you are. So you'll notice me looking over to the side of the monitor that I have behind this main camera died today. So I can't see what is framed on camera. So I'll be looking off to the side. I have a second secondary review monitor over there. So what are we looking at here? Let's take a look at the evolution of this design here. So this was my original version one PCB and sorry, focus is going to be really tricky for me to get just right. That looks like it's possibly sharp. Let me know if it's not. So this is the first version of the PCB that I did. I was calling it wave shape fader back then. But it's the 16 slide potentiometers, the footprint for an itsy bitsy, we can use them for the RP 2040 here, they'll both do synth IO and send over the same two pins. That audio goes over here to this RC circuit, which I had wrong on the first version, I actually had had hooked up the capacitors at the wrong spot in here to do their job. It still works, but it's not filtering the way it should to a headphone output or a TRS 3.5 millimeter output. So since I owe right to there, that would be enough. But we want to have control. So we've got this footprints for 16 faders. We have the two eight bit analog to digital converters those of the ADS 7830 I have two of those on I square C, little OLED display, rotary encoder, and then the DAC if you want to output control voltage for something like a older synth analog synth modular synth, that'll be kind of a fun experimentation there. And also put a little reset button up there. So very little changed on version two. I fixed that little error that I had with the RC circuit filtering circuit there, resistor capacitor, so that's fixed. Also added on the more suggestion old jumper there that lets you just bypass that circuit if you want or you can cut a little trace in the left and right. This is stereo cut a little trace there and you can use or not use that RC circuit. So it'll go straight to the left right outputs, or it'll go through that RC circuit based on these tool jumpers here. And then I fixed, I think a couple of little silkscreen errors that I had. And I also added a bit of art to it and renamed it. So that's fader wave, even though I'm still saying version 0.2 name changed through my little workshop logo on there and I made a sine wave graphic to put back there. So that's the board cool JLCPCB black version there. Then at one point with the original I had put it all together. So you can see it there. And I also made a little case top for it. This one's just cut out of some luon. Is that what you call this stuff? I can't really call this stuff, but kind of like a particle board, thin particle board, Masonite. I remember what this is. Just had some scrap laying around that was the test one. I hand cut this here because I didn't realize that the jack for the control voltage there on the DAC output was standing as high as it is. So I just, it's one of the nice things about doing doing this in an easy to work material at first, you can kind of hack some things out. I think I needed more space for my USB jack. So I hacked that out on the band saw and then took took measurements of those and rebuilt it before laser cutting. And then this was the first version of that on the laser cutter. I used some of this LED acrylic just because I had a nice size scrap of it. Not actually the look I want. I don't really I'm not doing anything interesting with these LEDs. They're just some on LEDs and I didn't really want those shining through. So I went to some opaque material for the later version, which is you can see right here. I can zoom out there and focus a little and I can get rid of this paper. It might be it. Close. So this is a piece of opaque acrylic, which one of the nice things you can do with it is raster eyes. So it's just a very, very light instead of the vector cut which will cut holes and things. I've rasterized like little dot pattern, very, very tight dot pattern 500 or 400 dpi to put some graphics on here, just this word fader wave, some indication markings for where you are in the fader just makes it a little easier to get back to some positions there. Made those corrections for for the holes I needed. And then I also did a bottom plate, which again, I just used that same graphic that I put on the PCB. I can't remember. Did I flip it properly? Yeah, so those those kind of match up. They're not not an exact alignment. You can even if you want I like the way this looks. It's just it gives it this. This is literally just from the rasterization, the light burning by the laser gives it this kind of matte finish and it looks sort of a gray light gray white, you can put paint fill like acrylic paint and wipe it off with a squeegee and it'll bond and dry just to that very rough surface that the raster graphic has and comes clean off the top. So you can do a nice paint fill might go a little deeper than that to do it. But I think this was this was good the way it was. So that's the case. It just goes on with some little standoffs here. You could get by without the bottom. I think I didn't try to see what height we needed to get past for the little rubber feet to work. But let me just pull this off and show you. I think we probably have enough so you could forego that bottom you could go at all if you want to. Yeah, I think we don't really have anything very deep. So the PCB you could just put some screws through that directly into this standoff. And then put some little rubber bumper feet on it and keep the whole thing a little, little thinner. But I went ahead and made a base for it.  So I'll spare you from that. I also don't have anything set up. But thank you. Oh, some people were complimenting the case. Thank you. Like doing these laser cut things, you could also do a 3d printed case if you want, which I'll supply SVG file that will be a good starting point for doing a 3d case. Also, Liz is going to build a project I think using the same board, maybe more focused on sequencing or control voltage or both. And I would not be surprised if she or Noah design a 3d printed case for this thing as well, which would be cool, much more accessible than a laser cutter for most people, I think. But that is it. That's the project. So learn guide is coming together. I will have that out pretty soon. I think try to finish it in the next couple days and go through moderation and maybe have it out next week. So that's the fader wave. Another use for it. You could do MIDI with it. You could potentially put a ESP 32 chip. There's actually a backpack for the it wouldn't fit in here the way it is currently, but there's a backpack for this itsy bitsy that gives it ESP 32. I don't know which one is it as to airlift kind of capabilities. So you could do Wi-Fi that way, which means you could turn this into a OSC controller, a Wi-Fi OSC controller. I don't know about Wi-Fi MIDI. I don't know if we have a Wi-Fi MIDI library in circuit Python, or if you could do it in Arduino, maybe you could use the nrf 52, 840 and do Bluetooth stuff BLE MIDI. So this could be pretty versatile. That's kind of my hope with it is that people will come up with some neat uses for that as a controller. Also, just to you know, if you have like a video editing, photo, color grading or music software with levels, you can do USB stuff just plugged in directly work great. So that's the fader wave. That's the state of things on that. So let's see next up, let me move on over back here. Oh, my gosh, that's disturbing with Lars there. Just had the guy sometimes. Oh, that's interesting. Apparently, the memento camera went in stock during the show. So grab that grab that coupon right there. And if you are interested, back out a few pages, we have looks like 100 of them went in stock, we have 90 left. So if you want to go pick up a memento board, this is a good time to do it. I don't know if the the there's one accessory for it right now, which is the front plate. Yeah, this enclosure kit. This is not available yet. But the main board, which will do all the things that that I'm going to show you here today, that is available now. So that's fortuitous. Thanks for the tip there in the chat. Todd, appreciate that. So what is this thing? Let's let's take a look. So here you have it this is a point and shoot camera platform that is open source. And you can control it using circuit Python. So you can make it be what you want it to be. At its core, it is a I believe five megapixel camera sensor. Is that right? Yeah. Excuse me, five megapixel camera sensor. It's got the little tft for previews on it. See right there, I've got the little case kit on it as well, which is not available yet, including the neopixel ring front there. But there's a whole that little camera lens is looking through. And that's an autofocus camera lens, which is pretty wild. It has I believe a tiny motor. It's actually a motor controlled focus that physically moves the lens, I believe. And so you can you can do some autofocus stuff with it, which is pretty wild. And then we have an SD card built onto here. So a lot of the demo applications will write images to SD. And I just wanted to show you a little demo of it in action. And then my kind of first attempt at modifying the demo code here is to add OSC control so I can take a picture using my camera remotely, which is which is kind of exciting and fun. And there's a lot of settings on here that you could adjust to like picking different filters, probably the focal length, although it might only be that you can control calling the autofocus, I'm not sure about that one yet. Resolutions that you want to use. And then eventually, with those LEDs, if you want to do some interesting stuff with those dial in some colors using the OSC control could be fun. However, you also got a UI on there, right? We've got the little D pad and these extra buttons, little speaker for some feedback and the screen. So got a lot of on screen control that we can do. So what I want to do is let's get this stuff out of the way here. And let's go back. Let's just go to a down camera focused. Leave it right about there. Yeah, let's in fact, let's leave it right there. That's good.  I don't have a convenient lipo here. So I'm just going to run it off USB for now. So you can see here it is booting up. And it's ready to go. It has a live preview. So you can see if I put down there that's distinct. How did all the Lego mini figures leave the workspace? I don't know. There's a little wooden, wooden cube there get artsy. So there we go. See that. So we can use the left and right to go through and pick different settings. So nothing is lit up. I go right once. Now I can control the resolution. I think I hit select. And then I can go up and down. Maybe that select was unnecessary. And change what resolution photo we want to take. Let's take a 640 480. Normal mode, Solarize mode. See, sepia tone, bluish, greenish, reddish, black and white, inverted normal. And then we can also go and change the type of image we're file format we're going to save. So JPEG stop motion mode. There's a Gameboy mode, which is amazing. Has this dithered one bit image. Love that. GIF. And back to JPEG mode. The shutter button is right here. If I hold that, it will autofocus. And then if I press it a second time, snap, it just said just took a picture. So now we can, I don't know if you're supposed to be able to do this. I think you are. And it seems to work. I haven't corrupted the SD card yet. I'm pulling the SD card while that's live. And I'm just going to put it into a little SD card USB stick reader. Put that into my USB hub there. And I should be able to drag that image into Chrome. Let's see if that works. Just as an easy way to show it to you. So I'm just going to my finder, finding that SD card. And let's see where's the image I took? I have a bunch on here. Yes. Okay, that's it. And can you see that? Yes. Okay, so there's the there's the image I just took. Took. So that was just a 64480 pretty small image. But you can see it's very nicely focused on the top of the woodblock there. This is not your iPhone camera. This is not a super modern fancy high res camera. It is however a controllable through circuit Python hackers kind of camera. So I think it'll be fun for creating different kinds of projects, PIR sensor, things that'll take photos of birds, those kinds of projects that you want to have a little small, inexpensive camera setup that you can then hack to do what you want. So let's take a look at what the code looks like for what it's doing right now. So I'm going to go over here, guy right there. And I'm going to just open the code.py file, you're the only one in here. Yes, good. Okay, so this is actually the slightly modified version. What you'll see here are Jeff Epler's sample code. Right here importing time bit tools, display, gifio, numpy, py camera, that's the big one right there, that library takes care of a lot. Then some of this is me adding in some of the micro SC stuff. So I have a settings.toml file with my Wi Fi on there. The UDP host address of this thing because this is a ESP 32, S2, I believe is is S2 or S3. S3, ESP 32 S3. So this, grab my code again. This is now transmitting its little Wi Fi host so that I can connect to it from the OSC app on my phone. Same as before. These are my little handlers. So I've got a toggle handler. I've got a fader handler, those are the same as before and they're not really doing anything. They're just printing. But then I created this one here, the push handler. So there's there's momentary buttons in OSC and they show up as the name page or tab. So slash one slash push zero or push one, I can't remember if they start on one, I think push one, push two, push three, push four. So that would be for push buttons. So that actually kind of start to mimic what physical controls we have there are. I am just to make it work and keep it easy. I'm just saying let's look at anything that's on page one with the name push. And I think any of them, yeah, I'm not filtering. So any any of those push buttons will do the same thing. So I'm saying if it is something that's called a push button, then we're going to do exactly what the shutter control does in Jeff's example code when you're in sort of the normal JPEG mode, which is supposed to make a little beep on the speaker. And then it's going to display that message on screen, it's going to capture a JPEG, it's going to put you back in the live preview mode. And then it's going to try to save that to the SD card. So that's all the OSC stuff there. And then here we go, here's the main juice right there, pi cam equals it through pi camera dot pi camera. He's initializing the autofocus. And I believe that has specific settings for the camera that is available here. And that's part of the library as well. And then there's some setup here for things like doing the different modes like onion skinning versus GIF versus JPEG. We've got a little debouncer for the keys. And what else is of note? SD card setup. And then going through the different filters and things like that. So with it set up like this, I'm going to grab that SD card back out of my computer and hopefully not corrupt it because it just yanked it unceremoniously. Plug it in. It says mounting SD card when you plug it in, it says SD okay, so that's good. And now, what I'll do is reopen that OSC app. And in the OSC app settings, I'm going to specify this host address which happens to be one prior to that feather that I was using for the original demo. So this is 571921681.57. That is it. These reports that it's using both for sending and receiving. That's all good. So now if we go to page one, these are the momentary push right here. This should, let's get a new, let's take a picture of, did I touch it? There you go snap. So it just took the picture there. And I don't think I don't think we have a way of reviewing images on here, but I could be wrong, I've spent like really maybe 20 minutes with it so far. So it's a lot, I a lot, I don't know. But pretty cool. So that means that this thing would work remotely using, I should have just taken a picture. Let's find out if it did. Who knows what I was pointing at. I'm going to grab that SD card and handy dandy USB SD card reader to Chrome here, that SD card. Hey great. Oh my gosh, the quality of this photo. It's kind of pointing off at a light. But look, there I am. So that was triggered with the thing, probably should have used autofocus as well. So that would be something I have to set up, which I haven't yet in the OSC. So that is the first hack, my Mezzo hack, but really cool gizmo. I'm looking forward to setting up the lights on there, controlling those for things like effects or a flash or bracketed color coding kinds of images, get up to some wacky stuff with 3D maybe. So that's the idea there. Actually this might make for kind of an interesting stereoscopic camera setup. If you had two of these, you might be able to get them to talk to each other to make yourself some nice stereo images. Yeah, that's totally my new profile picture. That's definitely going up everywhere. Good idea. Thank you, Andy. So let's see. I think that's it. So let me know if you got any questions over in the chats. I'll mention again, we've got a coupon code today GUI, just because I was doing these kind of GUI things. That's why I came up with it. But if you use that coupon code, you'll get 10% off in the store today.  That's really fortuitous that that right there is is available. Let's see how many we have left. Let's let's refresh 83. Okay, yeah, we got them. They're not they're not impossible to get. So maybe go grab one of those if you're interested and save 10% off that'll slice $3 and 50 cents roughly off of the price there. So almost just a $30 purchase. Why not? That is gonna do it for me and Lars there. This is been John Park's workshop, Radio Fruit Industries. Thank you all so much for stopping by and I will see you soon. We've got I believe a deep dive possibly with Scott or Tim tomorrow. I'm not sure. I can't remember if Scott was available or not. It can it can change. But that is Friday. There may be a deep dive with Tim on Saturday. We have a another probably pick of the week coming on Tuesday Wednesday will be 3d Hangouts in the morning show and tell Ask an engineer and then Thursday will be looping back around here. So thank you everyone for stopping by. I appreciate you and I will see you next time. Bye bye.


In our video about genomic instability as a hallmark of aging, we said that DNA repair mechanisms deserve a video of their own. So, let's dig into that now. How exactly does DNA get repaired, and how does that relate to aging? Welcome to X10, your one-stop YouTube show for all things life extension. Learn the science, keep up with new research, and live longer and healthier. If you want to know whenever we release a new video, subscribe below and press the bell icon and select All Notifications. The first thing to know is that DNA can get damaged in a variety of ways, and so, of course, there are different repair mechanisms for the different types of damage. For example, a single nucleotide base, a single letter in the DNA, could be damaged. In a process known as base excision repair, a suite of proteins recognize the trouble, snip out the problematic base, and sometimes also a bit of DNA around it, and then copy the correct sequence from the other strand. There's also a proofreading system called DNA mismatch repair to detect and correct mistakes that happen during replication, such as an addition or deletion or the wrong base being put in. But rather than listing all the different types of DNA damage and how they get repaired, let's focus on a couple that were the topic of a recent paper about DNA damage and aging. The researchers started from the general understanding that DNA repair seems to affect lifespan, and then they tried to find out which repair mechanisms might be important. They used 18 rodent species with maximum life spans ranging from four years, mice and hamsters, to 32 years, naked mole rats. They designed experiments to measure the efficiency of two DNA repair mechanisms, nucleotide excision repair, NER, and double strand break repair, DSB. The idea was to see if the efficiency of either system correlated with the lifespan of different species. They didn't find a link between NER and lifespan. That makes sense because NER repair is a type of DNA damage that's mainly caused by UV light, so there isn't really a reason to expect it to be involved in age-related decline. In keeping with that idea, the study showed that NER efficiency does correlate with how much sunlight exposure a species gets. The DSB mechanism can be further subdivided into two repair pathways. The efficiency of both pathways correlated with maximum lifespan, meaning that species with better DSB repair systems tend to live longer. The researchers didn't stop there. They went on to look at a gene that regulates both DSB pathways, SIRT-6, a member of our old friend, the Sirtuin family. When they increased the expression of SIRT-6 in mice, the mice had more efficient DSB repair and lived longer than usual. They even managed to figure out exactly which part of the protein encoded by SIRT-6 was affecting DSB repair. In a pretty amazing experiment, they showed how important this segment is for longevity. They engineered a version of mouse SIRT-6 to include the DSB segment from the beaver version. They also made a beaver SIRT-6 that had the mouse segment. Then they introduced either one of the engineered versions or the original versions into fruit flies and measured their lifespan. All of the introduced SIRT-6 genes increased the fruit flies lifespan because they ended up with higher SIRT-6 than normal. But the beaver version and the mouse with beaver segment version increased it the most. So this study didn't just show that DSB affects lifespan and NER doesn't. It identified the exact segment of a specific gene that increases DSB efficiency and thus lifespan. There are doubtless other genes that also affect DSB as well as other DNA repair mechanisms involved in aging. But it's still an important discovery. In the long run, it might be possible to find or create drugs to tweak SIRT-6 and increase DSB efficiency to delay or prevent age-related decline from DNA damage. And even if that doesn't happen, this is pretty cool science. Thanks for watching. If you've got any questions about DNA repair, post a comment and we'll do our best to answer. And don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to keep up with X10. Finally, thanks to the Lifespan Heroes who make our work possible. If you want to be part of promoting and supporting longevity research, head to lifespan.io slash hero and make a pledge.


Phoenix Express 2015 kicks off in Tunis, Tunisia. The exercise is one of four U.S.-Africa commands sponsored regional express series maritime exercises facilitated by U.S. Naval Forces Europe Africa, U.S. Sixth Fleet. 11 other Mediterranean partners were participating in a naval exercise at sea that will help enhance interoperability and maritime domain awareness. It's especially important in light of all the threats that we see around the theater nowadays. Phoenix Express takes place on land and sea with 12 countries participating. They will be tested in areas including illegal immigration, piracy, and countering weapons of mass destruction. Participating forces will also work together on search and rescue scenarios where vessels capsize or are in distress. Interoperability between all the different nations is what we're focusing on, how we do things to ensure and improve the security of the Mediterranean. The exercise looks to strengthen regional cooperation, information sharing, and maritime domain awareness to improve economic and maritime security throughout the region. Petty Officer Matt Wright, Tunis, Tunisia.


The fans asked for verticality and oh boy did we get it. What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and Undying Games recently revealed the inner workings of the jungle in their upcoming 3rd person MOBA ethereal Clash of Souls. This was a great showcase of what their map will be like, as you may have noticed the lanes in ethereal are unlike any other MOBA, 3rd person or otherwise. The map is cracked into three separate lanes at three different altitudes allowing you to rotate via jumping off the edge of one lane and landing on the other or taking a portal from a lower lane to one of the upper side lanes or simply flying up to the lane if you've chosen one of the flying myths from the Sky Slayer class. Today we'll be following Malaya, a Reaper class assassin myth as she traverses the jungle. This is a very early pre-affabilled of the game so there are some features planned for the game that aren't yet implemented. For example, Reaper class myths will have the ability to scale any terrain you see in the finished product, however that functionality isn't available in the current build. First we'll talk about the three major objectives on the map starting with the Wyverns or Wyverns if that's how you want to say it. These objectives are located on the two side lanes with one representing ice and the other being fire.  The slow duration and efficacy is dependent on what level the Wyvern is when it was defeated with three possible levels. You also get a team wide buff to your physical and magic armor. Whichever team takes the third level Wyvern gets the buff permanently. Undying wants this to be a comeback mechanic however I see this ending up being more of a snowballer. We'll have to see once the game releases how things work out and if this permanent buff remains a thing. The other Wyvern is fire. Defeating this guy gives you the same physical armor buff but also provides a magical damage dot on all of your basic attacks and abilities for 2.5 minutes. Just like the Ice Wyvern the buff is increased with the Wyverns level and becomes permanent for whichever team takes it the third time. Furthermore if you take both Wyverns at the third level the permanent buff is doubled. I personally see this getting out of hand really fast and I don't think this mechanic will survive testing but we'll see. The final major buff is Atropos. This is the boss of the game situated on the middle lowest lane which is known as Void lane. Killing this big fella buffs your minions with extra speed and stats for 2.5 minutes. This is meant to eventually be a three phase encounter with Atropos getting harder to kill each time. However we'll only see his ultimate final form for the alpha. I'm not sure how jack your minions will get from the Atropos buff. However it's going to need to be super effective to entice any team to attempt to take Atropos over one of the Wyverns. Especially Ice Wyvern that slow buff seems bonkers. Now for the minor buffs. There are four in total with a purple, green, red and blue buff. These buffs will drop on the ground and must be picked up after defeating the Guardian so no cheeky snipes. If you want to steal a buff you're going to have to commit. The first buff is Purple buff. This buff is located on Void lane which is the middle lane and is meant to be used by supports. If you have a mask equipped which is the special support item then this buff will activate when you use the active ability associated with your mask and restore 15% health and mana in an area around you. This is dropped down to 8% if you're in combat. This buff if you have a mask lasts for 3 minutes which is 30 seconds longer than any other buff in the game. You can still take this buff if you're not a support however it'll only last one minute and instead of giving you a heal it gives an 8% damage boost. I'm glad to see them put a support oriented buff into the game however I don't think this will actually be taken by supports until late game. Judging by mask active cooldowns you would only get one usage out of this as a support and an 8% damage boost for your jungler will be far more effective early game. It's also located in the Void lane and after discussing things with my friend and content creator jelly knees we believe duo lane will probably go to the ice lane in order to secure the ice wyvern so it doesn't make much sense for the support to roam over to void lane for a buff they can only use once. Next up is the green buff this one seems to be jungle oriented and gives you a shield for up to 15% of your max health that regenerates when you've been out of combat for 10 seconds. This buff is going to be beast for early game ganks or just give it to your tank for the late game engagements. Blue buff is located in the ice lane and I think we'll probably end up going to the support far more often than the purple buff. Blue buff is pretty standard mana regen and cooldown reduction for 2 and a half minutes. I think I could get more use out of that as a support than the 15% heal. Red buff is located in the fire lane and gives you health regen when out of combat and also includes a stacking damage buff that I don't quite understand. Seems like a good buff for the solo laner which further cements our theory that the duo will go ice, solo will go fire and your mage will go void lane with 2 junglers, one roaming ground based jungler and the other being a sky slayer flying around to clear camps and look for targets of opportunity. I don't know if I mentioned this yet but ethereal will be 6v6 instead of 5v5. There are a few other buffs scattered around for example the old paragon green buff is what they're using for the asset but it's just kind of this big chunky dude. He just gives extra gold and XP whenever you kill him. There are also these trolls off to the side. We were told that killing the trolls gives a rotation advantage so I think that means more portals through the upper lanes but I'm not entirely sure and they didn't clarify and they're not going to. Something else they mentioned was that the jungle camps closer to lane would have fewer minions possibly giving laneer something to do when their minions are pushed too far forward to safely farm. While I wasn't very happy with the reveal stream itself, check out our podcast enter the ether if you want to hear my thoughts on that. I did enjoy getting a look at the map and jungle minions. Is there room for improvement? Of course. The game certainly doesn't look perfect but for a pre alpha it's pretty damn good. Undying needs to put their time into removing bugs, implementing promised features, and improving character animations. This was by far the best look we've got at the game however it'd be nice to see the weather effects implemented, the class passives, and some real combat. If you want to learn more about ethereal check out the links in the description below, check out my channel for more ethereal content, or check out Jell and Ease for all the videos he's done. If you enjoyed the video please hit that like button and subscribe but for now this is the mango signing off you guys have a good one.


Wouldn't you love to just be standing right there on the lawn? OK, that's the whole point. That's what Beershot was doing. That's what he was doing. That's why they went on traveling shows to encourage people to go out west. So you got it. In fact, the way the curators hung this with this curtain here is meant to kind of hint at that history and that Beershot painted these giant landscapes and he would tour with them. And he keeps them behind the curtain and he would pay admission. And then he would whip back the curtain. But how does Beershot accomplish what we just talked about? How does he make you want to step into this landscape and just say, wow, size? That's a huge picture. It's not just a picture. You're like, hey, I'm going to buy it. It's like a peaceful window. Peaceful? How does he create this idea of peacefulness, though? The deer, the calm water, the calm water walls, the lime, the lime. The softness of the whole picture. It's almost alluding kind of heaven and angels right where all the top of the mountain and the clouds are. I mean, you kind of would think you'd see this in a church or whatever in church is supposed to be one of the most peaceful places. And everything goes up. All the trees go up. The mountains go up. Everything is pointing up. Things that you notice, the specific details you're pointing out, like how still the water is and how the deer, they're there. They're not spooked, right? There's nothing coming up behind them. And this kind of, some people call it the godly light kind of peeking through. What role does God play in this period of American history? Why might he have a part of this landscape? Or why might he? Manifest us. God wants us to go there. God wants us to go there. Where was it painted? Yeah. Look at the label over here. When was it, guys? 1868. 1868. 1868. In Nevada. Yes, it's called the mountains here in Nevada. So it's California in 1868. So again, why might we paint this in 1868? It's after the Civil War. Right, it's after the Civil War. It's a calming. Well, it's supposed to be calming because what's really going on between the South and the North still, I mean, the destruction is not calm at all. Yes. And isn't that the U of the United States? It's an escape. It's an escape for a long time. Yes. Yes. But it's also the U of the Transcontinental Railroad that's finished. But it's funny that you don't see any of that, right? You don't see that modernity, advancement, civilization has no place here, is still this ideal. And I think it's going to what you're saying is that the Civil War ripped up the East Coast. If you look, if you search our website for Civil War photographs, we have plenty. You see just destroyed landscapes. And when you think, you just walked down the hallway past Niagara and all these sort of new Eden-y paintings. We sort of saw ourselves as the new world, new opportunity. And the Civil War maybe destroyed that image a little bit. And so the East Coast loses its shininess. And we start looking out here for our peace and our majesty and our hope. Go ahead. It's like a staircase almost. It goes up there and then goes on and then takes you into it. Yeah, make sure your eye goes all the way back there.


UK's Jubilee Bank holiday may nudge economy into a contraction. The Bank holiday to celebrate Queen Elizabeth the second 70 years on the throne may tip the UK economy into contraction but growth into subsequent months will save it from a recession. The day off on Thursday to mark the Jubilee will shave a half-percentage point off gross domestic product in the second quarter, according to an estimate by Bloomberg Economics based on previous holidays. That, along with reduced output from the healthcare sector as the government's coronavirus test and trace program winds down, would be the UK economy will shrink 0.4% in the quarter in the by-forecast by economist Dan Hansen. The lost output from offices and factories closing for the day would likely accrue to the following months, preventing the economy from shrinking from two consecutive quarters. The estimate highlights Britain's bumpy recovery from coronavirus lockdowns. While output surged strongly after restaurants and bars were allowed to reopen, consumer confidence has plunged in recent months with a surge in energy bills and taxes. That an inflation at a 40-year high threatens to drag the economy into stagnation or even an outright decline. Chancellor of the ex-checker Rishi Sunak's announcement last week of £15 billion, $19 billion, of extra support for households will cushion the blow. There is also a risk that people take an additional one or two days leave to complement the long weekend. Sylvia D'Angelo, senior economist at Federated Hermes Ltd., said that hangover effect may give rise to further output losses. At least, that's the hope of Jeanne Staszniowska, 30, a solicitor whose wedding plans were a pandemic casualty in 2020 and 2021. She finally plans to tie the knot on Friday, June 3. Thursday is our set-up day so it's great that it's a bank holiday because no one will have to take annual leave to help us out, she said. Everyone will be very hungover on both the Monday and the Tuesday. Hansen estimates the economy will grow 0.3% in the third quarter, meaning the UK will avoid two quarters of negative growth. Campaigners led by Brendan Cox, co-founder of the Together Coalition, have called on the government to make the bank holiday an annual fixture. D'Angelo said that other European countries already have more national holidays than the UK so the comparative loss of output would be minimal. Extra time off can help people to have clearer minds so in the bigger picture, this could have economic benefits, she said.