In December ‘08 I was asked to be an ‘embedded reporter’ for the Royal college of art MA Design Interactions 'Tribal Futures' project, sponsored by Vodafone.

Working alongside Matt Jones, Onkar Kular and Tony Dunne, my duties included attending talks and tutorials in order to populate the Tribal Futures research blog that was used as a shared communication channel between all students of the MA course and members of the Vodafone UX team in London and Dusseldorf.

The 4 week project asked the students to consider the implications the emergent changes in communications technology will have on group behaviour. To identify or create a group and propose design interventions to support, subvert and celebrate tribal connections.

A presentation given to the 1st and 2nd years of MA Design Interactions at the RCA about my Post RCA adventures since 2007. A great opportunity for reflecting on my past and deciding on my future.

Recent collaborative work to create five 'ad-hoc' book boxes with Tim Parsons for the Airmail exhibition at the GOODD gallery space in Glasgow.

Lightness can be seen as a state of being & thinking as well as a physical quality of material. The book Adhocism by Charles Jencks & Nathan Silver published in 1970s presents a treatise on lightness through the re-use of what is around us. The book boxes express the philosophy of the contents of the book they contain.

Airmail presents twelve new products that deal with lightness in everyday objects. Open from 29 May - 28 June, show open to public, (28 May, private view)

The latest in tourist holidaying is the "Holiday at the Airport ". There is no longer the need to actually leave the country but to enjoy the experience of being at the airport about to leave for a fantasy trip abroad.Similar to the theme park experience, at the end of the security queue you receive a photo of your xray baggage and footage of you and your friends/family queuing with fear and excitement.

You receive photos of the people you meet, the places you loiter, the food you consume at the many vending and fast food chains.You relish the moment you find that your flight is delayed and the electricity in the airport has failed. The moments you share with strangers will never be replaced, they are unique and you savor every angry word, stressed and confused face. You audio record the moment the airport representatives fob you off and the budget airlines blame each other...

This is the new 'Holiday At the Airport", just as Ballard might have depicted.

What if you could create a self-reflective diary that made use of our everyday thoughts to provoke us in such a way that you were able to change your future actions?

Inspired by the abundance of self-help books, self-discovery personality tests and psychometric questionnaires, the Microtrend Diary is a mirror of your daily actions and emotions that reveal provocative ways to alter your future actions.

This personalised diary, is printed to order based on a set of preliminary personality questions. As the owner makes a daily record of their actions, a unique set of provocative aide memoirs are revealed under a perforated flap that suggest changing your behaviour in certain ways for the following day.

‘The Microtrend Diary’ was generated during my final year on the MA Design Interactions course in 2007 and recently developed this 2nd prototype. I am currently looking to develop this further with some initial user testing and then publish a small batch for distribution.

In collaboration with the Product Design and Textile Design Departments at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Bas Kools and I set up an interdisciplinary design team of ten dedicated design students and graduates and facilitated a four day workshop on the MOME university campus.

The aim of this project was to inspire, generate and develop new healthy living based services and improvements to the city of Budaörs by collaborating with local designers, local residents
and the city council. The goal of the project is to design and facilitate services that will enable people to integrate healthy living into their daily lives. By bringing together local designers and local residents we created a local think-tank to focus on helping cities improve their public services, with a focus on healthy living.

A 2 day workshop for the 4th year BA Product Design students at GSA to explore how design can be used to generate alternative futures and frame debates around the psychological social, cultural and ethical consequences of technology, in particular cloud computing,

With the use of a range of protagonists collected from a selection of newspaper articles, students were asked to use their design skills to not specifically solve problems but imagine how these protagonists would use cloud computing to satisfy their desires. How might they use cloud computing for propaganda? gang membership? money laundering? blagging for benefits? vigilantism?

Applications and scenarios included; gang territory virtual tagging indicators , veilbook app for burka wearers, the ministry of facial distribution for deceased dictators, utopian mormon clouds, stolen goods ebay, scientologist sponsored criminal database, story generators for blaggers, pigeon spys, mormon virtual wives...

Last year in collaboration with Tom Wynne-Morgan, James King and Daisy GInsberg, we set up the AlterFutures meetup.

The AlterFutures initiative is a bimonthly meetup for speculative design projects that question received expectations of the future and propose compelling alternatives.

We know that there are a small number of people thinking and working in this way and quite a few of them are in London. We want to gather together and create an opportunity to share and critique work in progress, start new projects and collaborations and get a discussion going.

In collaboration with Marei Wollersberger, our project for the Future of Vienna competition entitled ‘CitizenEvolution’ has been chosen to be exhibited at MAKVienna. One scenario describes how adapting rooftops in Vienna will enable individuals to generate energy by extracting filtered bio gases from pigeon poo.

Our work was recently posted on the Austrian newspaper website called Kurier: “Project Vienna – A Design Strategy – Designstrategien für die Zukunft Wiens | kurier.at

“Marei Wollersberger and Jessica Charlesworth propose 4 hypothetical scenarios, that create new social structures and dynamics in the city through new interactions and usage of existing resources. For example the pigeonry of the new generation: the consumer generates energy by extracting filtered bio gases from pigeon shit directly on his rooftop.”

Last month I participated in a 2 day conference, The Future of Persuasion, as part of the Technology Horizons program at the IFTF. The conference used a variety of formats and methods to enable participants, clients of IFTF, to experience the emerging theories and behaviours that will shape the development of persuasive technologies over the next few years.

I helped design & develop an experiential scenario experience at the conference that embodied the persuasive strategies of the future. Alongside the magnificent Jake Dunagan (Institute For The Future) Stuart Candy (Long Now Foundation) and Sarah Kornfeld, we developed Survival Horizon: 6 super-empowered persuasive practices: Self-meditation, Fight The Eschaton, Awe It Forward, Close The Gap, Light A Candle, Game Your Optimism.

These 6 Super-Empowered persuasive practices were created by natron baxter for GEAS (Global Extinction Awareness System) to extend and maximize the power of individuals to influence the course of change—to create a survivable and desirable future, fight against the end of humanity and stop the extinction of the earth in 2042 and extend our survival horizon.

The Citizen Evolution exhibit has now been installed at the MAK, the first project for the Wollersberger & Charlesworth collaboration.

The exhibit is one of three winning projects of the Project Vienna - How to react to a city? competion launched by departure and the MAKVienna in January 2010.

The exhibiton runs until the 30th September and can be found in the MAKDesign Space at the entrance to the MAK VIenna on RingStrasse, Vienna

Highlights from a two-week holiday to Japan with a focus on interactions, interfaces, electronic devices, cultural phenomena, paper making, kimono dyeing, sakura and hanami.