We went with our lovely Lactofree client Louise and a bunch of the other agencies to go and see our new Lactofree work in action on the tube today.

It was a little bit like herding sheep whilst avoiding the busy morning commuters but it was well worth it. The work looks very bright and cheery.

We then visited the Lactofree sampling van, which is currently making its way around London handing
out delicious breakfast porridge and milky lattes to passers by.

You can't fail to spot it.

The iWatch. No-one
knows much. It’s an Apple product rumoured to be in development, made of curved
glass designed to fit around the wrist.

It sounds cool in a
Napoleon Dynamite sort of way; chic and geek in equal measure. Central to chatter on the subject is the
pervasive question of whether it will actually be made; Apple’s continued silence on
the issue of the iWatch has driven various tech-bloggers giddy with the sweet
smell of conspiracy. 

What's more interesting is its direct link to Science
Fiction. Watch out, it gets a bit nerdy from here on out.
The device will apparently name and describe objects at which it is pointed.
This is a tricorder, not a timepiece.

You could look at the iWatch as part of a slow trickle of technology conceived at the
final frontiers of space-y genre lit. Similar examples abound. Another supposed
Apple product in the pipeline – the iGlasses
– purports to record what you see, edit out the bad stuff, and replay it, see
Minority Report and the Matrix for more details. There’s even a nifty working prototype of a
hover-car flying about
out there.

The fields of
fantasy-technology and real-technology seem destined for cross-pollination. This
piece takes the position that Science actually uses sci-fi to test out ideas,
as a kind of virtual lab. Simpler is the notion that a few kids watch Star Wars
and grow up into product developers with a burning desire to make a robot-hand
that actually
feels things.

Its interesting to think of sci-fi as ‘the manual of the possible’. That the genre has a kind of mapping function –
sketching the contours of the land, the limits of what we can think up – which then challenges us fill in the gaps with actual
stuff. It’s cool and it lends credibility to a big swathe of nerd culture
that is too-easily overlooked.

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)