But when I describe the things I design, people understand what I mean when I say I’m a designer. The things we design provide the context for what design is and can be.

Last week saw the announcement of the winner of the Design Museum’s annual Designs of the Year award. We had the enormous honour and good fortune to be nominated this year with the Postcard Player and whilst we didn’t win, it was amazing to be a part of it all because, by assembling a set of things that people can look at, touch, discuss and argue over, Designs of the Year becomes a way for people to think about what design means and why it’s important.

Like many, I was initially slightly skeptical of the idea of a design award spawning the breadth of design disciplines with an ultimate ‘winner’. But when we walked into the museum and wandered around the exhibits I started to see patterns and themes emerging: a desire to make a more open culture, a recognition that design can address great needs but that it can also be playful, in both approach and outcome, and a real blurring of the boundaries of digital across categories.

Taken together, the works provide a coherent, surprising, intriguing and maybe occasionally enraging reflection of what design means in 2013. We wanted to share our thoughts on some of the things that got us excited so me (PT), Scott (SM) and Martin (MS) each picked our favourite three pieces. So, in no particular order:

Photographer Jeroen Musch

Book Mountain – the lack of foresight by local authorities on libraries is pretty much a national (international?) outrage. The library as a centre of the local community has been denigrated to such a point where, as soon as the economic crisis took hold, libraries were first in the firing line, cut back and closed. Book Mountain, located in Spijkenisse, 25km from Rotterdam defies the perception of the dark and dusty relic inhabited by pensioners. Pitched as “a powerful advert for reading to the community” the building, designed by MVRDV in the Netherlands, includes 480m of shelving. The books become the architecture, the art and the décor, while natural light floods through the transparent roof. Hail Book Mountain! (SM)

Raspberry Pi – computing at school for me was a whirlwind of “this is how you consume expensive, closed source (generally Microsoft) software. The Pi goes someway to make coding accessible to school kids and I can’t wait to see what useful tools come from having computers available for £25 . It’s also been a fantastic story to follow over the last 12 months to see the boards come to life. They have also been really useful for a couple of innovation projects we’ve had in the studio. (MS)

Child ViSion Glasses – If there was anything in the show that demonstrated the principles of what I think makes design great it was these. They translated a technical innovation into a viable solution. What made it brilliant though was that it did this with the needs and desires of the kids driving the design. The result is glasses that are functional, fun and desirable. I want a pair. (PT)

The Shard – in the middle of the economic crisis, Irvine Sellar made this outstanding global landmark happen. At more than 1,000 ft high, with 72 floors, Renzo Piano’s bold glass statement is Europe’s tallest building. The Shard is one of the true architecture icons of this generation – stunning, and one that we were proud to work on, when we created the CG’s and film. (SM)

Free Universal Construction Kit – A collection of 3D files to allow you to connect together all of the toys and construction kits that you already have. Fantastic. We predict a new generation of 3 year old designers, architects, quantity surveyors and draftsmen if this kit has anything to do with it. (MS)

Candle in the Wind – LED’s like you’ve seen a thousand times before but with a beautiful physical form and a natural, incandescent flicker to them. A beautifully simple idea well executed. (MS)

Photographer Luke Hayes

Windows 8 – As it happened our postcard player was on display at the museum next to the Windows 8 phone, which was a little embarrassing as I spent a fair whack of the press preview bemoaning screen based interactions. But if we put all that to one side, given that touch screens are an inevitable part of life for the foreseeable future I’d much prefer them to eschew the pastiche of skeumorphism in favour of something, dare I say it, a little more Modern. Apple should take note -  for the first time in a while Microsoft looks like it’s leading rather than following.  (PT)

ColaLife’s AidPod – a wedge shaped container that sits between Coca Cola bottles, this incredibly ingenious solution uses the existing Coca Cola crate (which reaches most communities in the world) to distribute anti diarrhea kits. It could be used to distribute all sorts of essential medical and health medicines. Hard to beat. (SM)

Photographer Luke Hayes

Gov.uk – and so to the winner. This is a piece of design that makes me happy and proud to tell people I’m a designer, because this recognizes that great design should be at the core of everyday experiences and can enrich everybody’s lives. We should expect great design from our public services. But also it shows that to get it you need to appoint and trust great designers. Appointing Ben Terret was a remarkable and courageous move and the government’s faith and ambition in creating and supporting the Government Digital Services team has to be recognised. More importantly though, the single minded vision of the GDS, it’s brilliant and simple expression of what great design means and it’s desire to make public sector design not just as-good-as but better-than commercial design is a deserving winner of an award that asks questions of what design is and the value if creates. Have a look at the GDS Design Principles here and be inspired. (PT)

Agency partner David Zahle was giving a lecture at the Manchester Business School a few days ago, an event organised by RIBA.

Many of the buildings presented to the six-strong Uniform contingent (seated in their prime seats, wine glasses in tow) had similar metamorphic themes; An apartment building that was an artificial mountain set in the flat Denmark landscape, with an image of Everest punctured into a façade using varying sized ventilation holes as pixels. And then there was a maritime museum relocated to a disused dry dock, giving the building the form of a ship. But most evocative of this attitude of pipey-ness was the redevelopment of the envelope of an energy plant in central Copenhagen into a ski slope which blows smoke rings out of the top.

BIG describe their approach to the design process as ‘Hedonistic Sustainability’. It’s about putting the prolonged enjoyment of life at the centre – a noble concept that has failed many before (see modernists telling us how to live our lives!). BIG differs by being humble and devoted to function for the individual and the group.

BIG twist and turn the traditional modernist shoebox inside out to form loops and knots that allow all to see the view. Everyone gets to access courtyards and gardens, creating proper communal spaces. The result of this absolute dedication to form following is some of the most novel and groundbreaking architecture produced so far this century.

You begin to sense me falling into the cultish following of the BIG brand. It’s true, so join me and read the great BIG bible, ‘Yes is more!’ an architectural graphic novel. Everything that needs to be known to understand the BIG philosophy; which could, and should, be applied wider to all forms of creativity.

I’m looking forward to the future BIG seems to promise, a return to childhood dreams of flying cars buzzing around, and architecture that’s not unlike the world of George Jetson, but a little more practical.

We’ve always used the concept behind the Postcard Player as a platform for iterative prototyping and the last 12 months has seen us roll out several editions of the device with a range of interactions and content.

We built the first demo for a specific purpose – to test the concept, and get it in the hands of users for immediate feedback. Exhibiting at Inspace 2012, and showing it to crowds at SXSW 2012 gave us a good understanding of what people liked about it, and what we had to improve to allow it to evolve.

The next version, the mighty internet enabled player was rolled out in record time when we were invited to exhibit at a Fieldguide exhibition in the London Design Festival. At the time we had a batch of Raspberry Pi’s in the studio and were keen to explore what we could do with paper interacting with online data.

Physical bookmarks to audio content seemed to be a natural progression and there was something nice about each time the card was played the content being updated in real time with other metrics, such as most listened to today.

So we hacked together a new concept for the player, allowing a user to stream popular online music services with an abstract set of postcards that left you guessing at what the content was. It was fairly well received and people loved the idea that a piece of paper was making things happen on the internet. However it lacked the immediacy of the first player, and the personal connection with the music. One of the key reasons the original idea was developed is that it celebrated the artwork of the album, and connects you physically with the playing track.

So for the Design Museum, we had to work out how to engage a casual museum visitor who will have hundreds of other cool items competing for their attention by bringing together the elements that worked from the two previous players. Enter the aptly named Postcard Player v3.

It’s a different beast, stronger, faster, a little bigger, but at its core, the same prototype that got us nominated in the first place. We’re back to meaningful interactions with specific artists, we’re referencing iconic speaker grills with a nod to dieter rams and reinforcing the function that the paper represents – to make noise with a physical button press.

We’ve simplified the player itself, more functional but less showy, it becomes a plinth for the artwork of the bright cards and melts into the background as an object that fulfils a very specific purpose in a considered way. The cards are produced with 540 gsm Colorplan by GF Smith, making them much harder to bend or fold and easier to locate in the slot. The porous, uncoated texture of the stock gives them a very analog handmade feel.

The player is made from an assembly of frost black acrylic and powder coated steel, more resistant to taking a beating and less likely to show the hundreds of finger prints from continual use. The speaker grill slot pattern on the top face has been removed making it more intuitive where to put the card and the clamping mechanism is more efficient.

Massive thanks to Bare Conductive who supplied us with many tubs of their wonderful conductive ink , and to GF Smith who helped us out by supplying sheets and sheets of lovely duplexed Colorplan. The exhibition runs from March 20 to July 7. If you’re in London check it out and let us know what you think @uniformtweets.

We’ve already had some good feedback, and coverage, including the Wall Street Journal, Creative Review and Despoke magazine.

I began hunting for new inspiration.

Delta House in Aarhus, Denmark

A work colleague Neil spotted Danish photographer Adam Mork. His photography is awesome. Minimalist, true to the architecture he shoots and he’s brilliant at capturing the mood, with beautiful composition, creating nice, striking angles. In the future all CG images should look like Adam Mork’s photography!… well, perhaps some.

Delta House is in Aarhus, Denmark. I wanted to make it as near to Mork’s amazing photography as possible.

I started off being obsessed with the building and the lines, until at the last minute I thought about the cars. And then I became obsessed with them.

As 3D designers, cars are rarely tackled. Clients can often feel they distract from their designs and are often time consuming getting them up to standard. I wanted to take the challenge head on. When placing a 3D car so close to the camera it has to look plausible. There’s no middle ground. It makes it feel lived in, real, rather than a Scandinavian holiday home that’s rarely used!

It made sense to use Peter Guthrie’s HDRI skies. He has a great range of lighting moods on offer. Overall, I was pretty pleased with the end results.

See some of my other work for Mayfair Chambers below, which I did with the Uniform team. We reckon they’re some of our finest interiors!

Mayfair Chambers living room

Mayfair Chambers bathroom

Mayfair Chambers bedroom

The Postcard Player is a prototype that demonstrates how Paper Electronics could allow people to experience and interact with digital music in a more engaging way. It’s not a solution to a problem; it’s part of a discussion about how physical interactions can enrich our engagement with digital media.

It was inspired by a love of rummaging through vinyl in dusty shops and half held memories of analogue audio cassettes. People can put a postcard into the player and press printed buttons on it to hear a piece of music. The cards are printed using conductive ink made by Bare Conductive and have no electronic components in them. When they are put in the player they act like switches that tell it what tracks to play.

The experience is more like holding a record sleeve rather than swiping a phone screen, with the experience or browsing through postcards analogous to that of browsing through a record collection. The Postcard Player becomes a pedestal for the postcard, creating a glanceable indication of what’s playing and celebrating the artwork accompanying the music.

Back in February 2012, we took the player to SXSW.

We worked with the multi-talented artist, designer & musician Tommy Perman from FOUND to translate his sleeve artwork into a set of postcards that play the singles released from their Factorycraft Album.

Postcard Player - the original concept

For Fence Records we created a set of samplers that give people the chance to listen to a selection of artists from the indie label, featuring photographs from local photographer Keny Drew.

In September we were invited by Fieldguide to show a new version of the Player at 4 Cromwell Place, an exhibition curated by international design consultant Jane Withers for the Brompton Design District as part of the London Design Festival.

Postcard Player - Cloud version

This version was slightly different – it used a Raspberry Pi to connect to the Internet, which meant that the postcards become like a physical version of a digital bookmark! Placing one card in the player will play live radio; another will play the most popular tracks on SoundCloud and so on. We tried to express this through abstract images of waves, clouds and record grooves that carried a suggestion of what the service may deliver.

Postcard Player on tour at the London Design Festival

Over the last few years we’ve committed a lot of time and energy to rethink how we can engage with people in new ways through technology. Our current screen-based interfaces are reductive – a singular way to experience a vast variety of media and information, we don’t think the future will be neat like this. Paper Apps are forerunners to a maximalist internet, where we can pick and choose the kind of interactions we want to have with data, services and each other and the objects that will deliver these.

Combining paper, conductive inks and traditional print processes with open source digital tools like Arduino and Raspberry Pi creates a powerful, accessible platform to experiment and offers an enormous opportunity to redefine and craft the medium through which we engage with digital data. By doing so we can make bespoke, more personal Internet experiences.

It’s fantastic to have been nominated alongside some of our favourite pieces of recent design like The Free Universal Construction Kit, random international’s Rain Room and the amazing Raspberry Pi, and it’s great to know that people like what we’re doing!  Rest assured we’ve got some amazing projects on the go for 2013 that we’re looking forward to sharing soon!

Our very own Nick Howe had spent weeks crafting his speech of course, but had to be satisfied with a wave to the packed audience. Hold those thoughts Nick!

We were pleased with the trophy because it’s been a rather good year. We’ve started working with two of the world’s biggest companies on major consumer brands, although we can’t name names yet or we’d have to kill you afterwards.

MiNetwork MD Richard Draycott presents the awards

We’ve grown our work with Shop Direct and Blue Inc, and continue to work with the good folk at Peel Holdings on creating the Wirral Waters brand. We’re growing the team and having lots of fun on the way.

2012 also saw us demo our #paperapps projects at SXSW in Austin, Texas, which then went on to both Future Everything and the London Design Festival. We even had a mention on NASA’s blog.

It sets us up for an incredible start to 2013, with more, big news to follow in January. Keep tabs on our progress @uniformtweets, and spread the news.

Everyone is welcome to pop by and see how things tick at Uniform. We’ll have recent work on show, friendly staff to chat with visitors about current projects and a sneak peak into our innovation lab showing some of our latest work that is usually under wraps!  The only thing missing will be our Sweet Tweet cuckoo clock, which is on secondment to Camp & Furnace for Designival itself!

And don’t forget that Uniform will be hosting a masterclass on Friday from 1pm- 2pm at Camp & Furnace. We’ll be exploring the internet of things and offer a practical introduction to arduino, but bring your own lap top!

Look forward to seeing you Thursday.

More than 350 people turned up at St George’s Hall, with young creatives mixing with some of the movers and shakers of the North West scene. It felt right and people loved it.

SomeOne's pictograms for London 2012

Four years on, we’re now hosting Designival, the biggest design festival in the North, alongside our friends at Smiling Wolf and Black & Ginger. Over the two days of November 22 and 23 we’ll be combining the serious side of masterclasses and portfolio surgeries, with networking and socialising, incredible speakers, a one-off architour by RIBA, an evening event by BLAB at Leaf, and an incredible after party at our favourite venue, Camp and Furnace, with Mercy.

We’ve got the support of Liverpool Vision and ACME, who appreciate the value it brings in reinforcing the city’s creative reputation. And RBS have just signed up as a corporate partner.

Not only have we gone one step further, with an international speaker – flying in Lance Wyman, the legendary designer behind the 68 Olympics brand – but we have an impressive line-up, including London-based brand specialist Simon Manchipp of SomeOne, who worked on the London 2012 pictograms, illustrator James Jarvis, whose clients include Converse and Disney, and the designer behind this years Liverpool Biennial identity Sarah de Bont, who offers a fascinatingly structured research based approach to graphic design.

Pensive Sphere by James Jarvis.

Some of the best agencies in Liverpool are on board, including Milky Tea and Apposing, Bolland & Lowe and Liquid.

This will be our biggest and best event so far. Make sure you’re there, and come and share a brown bear beer while you’re at it. Get your tickets here!

It’s separated into workshops, lectures, exhibitions, readings, with some installations and a bit of socialising (sorry, ‘networking’). This year’s festival has a carnival twist, with the hub of the event (upstairs in the Playhouse) being transformed into a circus-like tent.  This was a great opportunity for us. We were excited to be involved in producing this year’s guide and were delighted to have scope to do something a little different.

The circo theme was an important influencer in the design. It was equally important to make sure the guide would appeal to a variety of audiences. Inspired by old circus posters, the combination of wood-cut illustrations with a mix of old, letterpress typography gave the guide its carnivalesque feel. We printed single colour on a lightweight, purple stock which meant steering it away from the garish colours, typically associated with the circo style, giving it a more modern twist. The festival runs for the rest of the week so make sure you head over to the Playhouse to check it out.

This involves two days locked away from sunlight with six projectors and 100 geeky artists discussing the numerous alternate ways of re-creating life!

Hosted by the excellent SOA studio, the event consisted of six key talks, each with massively differing workflows, styles and completely fresh approaches to architectural visualisation.

Alfa Smyrna of Pixela, ‘the Queen of CGI’ as our host Gianpiero put it, kicked off the event with her wonderfully clean, highly detailed photo-realistic style. She would break scenes down, starting from the overall lighting and texturing to individual bolts on each piece of furniture. The level of detail was awesome.

And then there was Adam Hotovy from Vyonx. Hotovy is an artist in the true sense. It’s all about stylised concept art. It’s fast and furious, using the bare bones of CGI and heavily relying on matte painting and colourisation. Artistic freedom is essential! (Along with an incredible knowledge of photoshop). I’m not afraid to say that Hotovy is my CGI man-crush.

Tomek Miksa from Downtown takes a similar approach to Hotovy relying heavily on post-production techniques to blend style and colour to tell a story with each image.

There was plenty to take in, including the ever-consistent Ronen Bekerman, who gave us some brilliant (and rather exclusive) geek tips.

And of course, there was Peter Guthrie. The lord of the dance in CG circles, Guthrie once again blew the room away with his purely 3D approach, creating stunning architectural shots that we have adorned on various blogs. Praise the man!

It stoked the fire in my belly and gave a real insight from Bahrain to Mexico on what challenges everyone is facing and the restrictions in different territories. Did you know that in Switzerland they’re not allowed to work overtime (ahem…)?

Great work comes out of passion! And so, after two days behind closed doors, scribbling notes, we ventured out into the real world to enjoy the amazing Venice Architecture Biennial. If you need some inspiration, watch the film; ‘Torre David Gran Horizonte’ from Venezuela. It’s the story of a failed development which has become a vertical slum. Incredible stuff.