Here lies Bricolage Grotesque, a cultural and typographical Frankenstein’s monster. A free and open source variable font with British and French influence. Take it apart and build it again.

🎧 6/6 While developing Orbit, I've been introduced to dozens of new artists, and it's become my go-to for fresh tunes when “the algorithm” feels stale. I’m excited to hear what other music fans think!

5/6 ⏳ You can sample any number of tracks, but you can only reveal 5 tracks a day. This isn’t to limit discovery but to value your time and make each track count. Find what you like, then listen on your preferred streaming service and get on with your day.

4/6 📀 Instead of getting recommendations, you can make decisions based on what you hear and what you fancy right now, charting your way across the stars and revealing the tracks you want to save.

3/6 🎶 You start with 10 samples, each representing a different space in the collection. There's no metadata visible, so choose what's closest to what you want and you’ll get tracks in the same ballpark, each a potential doorway to a different sub-genre.

2/6 🌌 @bbcintroducing plays hundreds of new tracks from unsigned artists each week. We take last month’s batch and organise them by affinity according to 8 indicators based on the track itself — it doesn’t matter what you or others have listened to or skipped.

1/6 🎵 @BBCRD wanted to create a music discovery service without personalised algorithms, so we made Orbit in collaboration with @bbcintroducing

The @BBCRD team have been researching how to engender social connection in remote workspaces. Here's a quick run through of their latest findings, using videos of their @liveblocks-based collaborative working environment, Colab 👇

5/5 We'd really like to see these patterns in use so if you're a team thinking of using them, get in touch!

4/5 Our initial findings showed sharing a digital space improves the feeling of togetherness. However we had introduce what we call "shared history" to make this work asynchronously. It's inspired by how offices work and you can read more on the website

3/5 Second, both our prototypes are open-source so you can check out how we've implemented our own recommendations https://t.co/0pLQILDLPf (but you might want to use @tldraw instead). Working with @livekitted and @liveblocks was great and we could focus on testing the patterns.

2/5 First, we've updated the website with our new insights and included a creative exercise we use at @BBCRD to come up with new concepts

Last year we at @BBCRD worked on Remote Interaction Guidelines and made a game to test our patterns. We've now made a collaborative working environment for teams using @liveblocks & @livekitted and learnt a few things about asynchronous togetherness... 1/5🧵

Tom’s contributions to @readvisions always hit the right notes so a novel is a real treat!

As if one video release today was not enough, you can now watch the recording of our ‘Women in Type – Leverhulme Trust & University of Reading research project’ lecture with @BriarMade @ratwoman @alicesavoie @MathieuLoutre Fiona Ross and Martha Scotford: https://t.co/J4l45sIeMj

In a future where distributed teams are the norm and people are scattered but yearning for closeness, I really hope these recommendations can help bridge the remote gap. Have a read, have a play, and let me know what you think.

From this, we created guidelines and designed a set of prototypes showing how these patterns can be applied outside of games. Find out more on Remote Interaction Guidelines section of the website.

We developed a prototype game which applied various patterns from board games and tested with people to see their impact. We've made the code open source so you can download it and run it yourself.

Board games have two things we think are useful: rules and a board. Rules can enhance the flow of interaction when social cues are otherwise distorted and a board creates a shared space which links all the players.

Inspired by board games, @BBCRD researched how to design better remote multiplayer applications over the last two years. I'm so pleased to finally be able to share our paper & code. Check the website https://t.co/lWnoBBK2e4 or read this short thread ⬇️