[In case you missed it, this short piece appeared in Design Week on the 6th of January.]

In the spirit of Alan Kay, who said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, here are my ’predictions’ for 2011.

As you may know if you follow Cogapp on twitter, each Thursday we all pile into a local pub and learn craft skills from our very knowledgeable colleagues! So far we’ve had four-week introductions to knitting, drawing and origami courtesy of Joe, Eleanor and Martin.

Two weeks ago our interactive installations for the Magnificent Maps Exhibition were unveiled at the British Library. It was a project that Cogapp felt particularly proud of and thoroughly enjoyed working on. To mark the occasion, it seemed only right that our Cake Thursday was dedicated to a show’n’tell of the Magnificent Maps Project. What made this event even more momentous wasn't just that it fell on the day of the general election but also the fact it was the final of the great Cogapp bake-off, a highly anticipated event that would determine Cogapp’s most superior treat maker and a title earning both respect and a little resentfulness in the Cogapp studio. 

Sunday the 18th of April sees the inaugural Brighton Marathon. Three of Cogapp's permanent employees will be in their running shoes for the 9:00 am start and hoping to complete the 26.2 miles in time for lunch. Our runners give their reasons below and you may spot a few sponsorship links so please do sign up to donate.

Yesterday we attended the invaluable Wired Sussex Media Jobs and Skills Fair. Rather than telling you what it's about, I'll allow the good folks at Wired Sussex to do it for me: "As well as recruiting companies there were also media course providers exhibiting; and in addition to the exhibitors there were separate sessions for students and recent graduates, for freelancers, and for more senior candidates.". We ourselves weren't actually there recruiting for any positions in  particular, rather we were just in the Made in Brighton section to chat to attendees and support Wired Sussex and local students.
 
We took along the hideous face munging software to attract the curious to our stall. This sparked a broad spectrum of emotions, ranging from a horrified student who (understandably) couldn't cope with having my face, to a very impressed charismatic man who was poking his tongue out at the screen and making odd noises. Andy had the fortune of munging his face with the Mayoress, which I don't think many people can lay claim to.

“And the award for the best Offline: Kiosk, Installation or On-Site Application goes to” …you could cut the tension with a knife… “Cogapp and their interactives for the Great North Museum!” Cue cries of joy, surges of adrenalin, and all round jubilation.

On Thursday 19 November we were proud to take home a British Interactive Media Association Award from the ceremony at Camden’s KOKO. Having started way back in the digital olden days of 1984, the BIMAs are one of the oldest and most renowned awards of their kind - so it goes without saying that our shiny new trophy is standing with pride amidst its brethren in the office. Its also by far the most dangerous trophy we’ve received - made of stainless steel and slightly reminiscent of a Klingon bat'leth.

Now that I've got your attention, it's time for a rundown of musings from the corridors of Cogapp in our latest and greatest Internal Digest. Aside from the surfing dog above from Tristan, here's what else has been captivating the collective Cogapp mind of late:

Joe dug deep into the back-end of Google Maps, scouring miles of code and a nigh on infinite amount of pictures to find the deeply hidden algorithm that reveals how Google Street View works according to Google Japan:

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program. Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun. Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.