Hello, I'm Duncan.
Mostly I have been making strange things 🤔
I like to work with AI, digital habitables, empathetic companions, passive experiences and creative communities. Phew.
I'm a maker, technologist, creative, entrepreneur, digital (art) therapist, designer and so on.
And I'm trying to thread the needle between initiating meaningful work for large audiences, creating art that moves people, and getting paid.
Currently I'm freelancing CPTO at Serco, CTO at Liberal Democrats, Tech Director at Analog Folk, Head of Digital at the Moon Festival, Tech Lead at the V&A.
Things I have experienced
2019
LondonJoined Analog Folk as Technical Director, Marketing and Innovation, to work on clients including Nando's, Coke, BT and TikTok with a brief to uncover opportunities and grow our engagements. Analog Folk were named Campaign Magazine Global Digital Innovation Agency of the year.
2018
LondonCreated Maylo as a way to understand the disabilities of AI, rather than admiring its advancements. By training a TensorFlow model with a dataset of environmental audio, I gave Maylo an AI hearing assistant and asked her to sketch what she heard in the room with her. Not surprisingly, the results were telling.
2017
LondonLaunched a pirate radio station run entirely by robots. The weak AIs browsed the web for interesting stories, mined the HTML semantically to extract the content, and used text-to-speech APIs to create two radio hosts who broadcast a daily schedule of upbeat and serious stories, including a Thought For The Day segment each morning
2017
Kings College, LondonTook part in a judging panel for the Kings Cultural Challenge, nominating winners and selecting one student each year to intern at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
2016
OnlineForked the internet to create a version that only worked on Kindle browsers, because no-one had forked the internet but plenty of people were getting tired of the ads, tracking, privacy risks
2016
Victoria & Albert Museum, LondonSpotted a Tech Lead job advertised at the V&A and threw my hat in the ring without expecting much, got the job and happily spent a few years running tech teams in the worlds "leading museum of art and design".
2016
DerbyDesigned a robot songbird that generates its own birdsong and sings throughout the day, preferring sunrise and sunset, and created a physcial bird and cage to house the AI. Ara became the first of my digital companions, and was featured in the AI edition of Creative Review, and appeared as part of an AI exhibtion at the Derby QUAD
2015
LondonTook over as the interim CEO of Somewhere.com and moved the business from Berlin to London, placing the startup much closer to our clients, and kick-starting a new SaaS product developed with those customers
2015
LondonRecorded an interview for the Challenger Project right in the midst of the no-sleep-all-stress rollercoaster phase of startup life.
2013
Amman, JordanRan digital mentoring sessions as part of the Mediterranean branch of the Media Business School program. Almost all of the students wanted advice on using Facebook to promote their films, and almost all of the films were based on their experiences of the recent Arab Spring. I struggled badly to find the relevance in the digital work when faced with multiple stories of how students coped with loss of their friends, family and children.
2012
BerlinAfter pitching a time-travelling/parallel world style careers guidance video game to Channel 4, I expanded on the idea, bringing in key people, ultimately leading to the launch of Somewhere.com
2012
Dublin, IrelandArrived with a suitcase of socks, LEDs, magnets and googly eyes to take part in the first ever Dublin Maker Faire. Together with Leila Johnston we created sock puppets, toys, and magical stories for a wild and happy crowd of visitors.
2012
Ronda, SpainTaught a class of masters film students on the nascent opportunities provided by digital. Spent time with the students and reinforced my learnings around the difficulties finding work as a young person, especially during the widespread European economic recession
2009
San FranciscoPMOG: The Nethernet, was nominated for MMO of the Year by The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, but lost out to the World of Warcraft behemoth
2008
San FranciscoCo-founded an innovative startup alongside Justin Hall and Merci Grace. The Nethernet was a passively multiplayer online game that turned the entire internet into a playful space. Sadly, Farmville came along and people played that instead
1991
LondonWrote three novels and signed a book contract with a small publishing house, which was promptly taken over with all new writers contracts suspended