_This edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair includes, for the first time, a space dedicated to video games. The move comes after new spaces for cinema and television rights, podcasts, comics or even literature for adults were added to the structure. What does it say about the actual status of the creation of culture and entertainment for kids and teenagers?

In theory, games and screens are not necessarily bad. Its all about how they have been used. Chess is a game but no parent would be worried if their child was obsessively playing chess. Likewise Wikipedia. If a child was on Wikipedia for hours at a time we would not want to limit their screen time. I think we have to be more critical about why we have this aversion to games and screens.

So why do we perceive games and screens to be bad? I wrote about this in my book ‘The History of Information’. If we look at our present situation from a historical perspective we have much more clarity about what is happening. The evolution of the internet, from an optimistic and empowering technology just a few years ago, to the dystopian tool of control it is today, was all predicted in the early 2000s by the media theorists that inspired my book. They were able to predict this with ease because it has happened so many times before in history. The evolution of early radio has many parallels with the early internet. It was pioneered by teenage hobbyists and was seen as a new way to share information and empower people. Its early enthusiasts came to it with an almost utopian zeal. 

As the technology evolved however, the tables turned. As soon as it was identified as a tool to influence public opinion, business and the state took control. In Europe radio broadcasting was state-regulated. It was largely through the radio that Fascists took political control across the continent in the 20s and 30s. The United States had a different system. Broadcasting was run by private companies rather than the state. This advertising-funded commercial model ultimately won-out, leading to the rise of consumerism that accelerated throughout the 20th century and exemplifies the modern world. 

The internet followed a very similar path. In the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s its disruptive power had democratising utopian elements. Bloggers were sharing subversive information, twitter helped expose suppressed information and led to social movements such as the #arabspring #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. But competition between platforms, like competition between radio stations, soon escalated. Smaller competitors were bought up or shut down. Today power is becoming ever more consolidated and the competition ever more fierce. The competition drives the platform to see engagement from its users and so more addictive or incendiary content is shown, it then gets more clicks and comments, and that is what creates the toxic environment we see today. Far from its beginnings as a utopian way to share information amongst peers, it is now seen as little more than an addictive waste of time. Adults have more self control than children but even we have difficulty in limiting our time online. For children it is extremely hazardous. 

Games have undergone different commercial pressures. They too have been used to influence public opinion. Like the film industry, the games industry has been subjected to public relations campaigns throughout its history. Many people are unaware that the US military has a propaganda arm that operates in Hollywood and the games industry. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’. The history of cinema and the history of gaming are both closely entwined with persuasion and propaganda. As I write about in my book, many of the early blockbusters in cinema were propaganda films produced by the British and American governments to recruit soldiers during WW1. This drive continues to the present with films such as James Bond, Top Gun and Black Hawk Down and games such as America’s Army and Call of Duty. Films and games are subsidised by US taxpayers to portray the military in a positive light. It is one of the reasons that many films and games involve guns, violence and military action.

Books, thankfully, have not been subject to the same commercial and persuasion pressures. In fact it is the contrary, bookstores and libraries are seen as spaces of resistance rather than of political messaging. And I think we all recognise their quiet power instinctively. Books have more to them than superficial engagement. They require imagination and so are not just consumption. They are, I always think, a kind of co-creation with the author. I believe that this is why we want to encourage children to read books and discourage screen time.

_Do you think the stories that literature tells to kids or the storytelling have changed in any way in the last years? Has the growing presence of screens in kids’ and teenagers’ daily life, with its offer of cinema, series or video games, affected it?

I have noticed that picture books have shorter texts in the last few decades. I’m not sure what is causing this. We have better and more affordable colour printing so our books are certainly more lavishly illustrated than they were a generation ago. I do think screens are having a huge effect on everyone. Children and teenagers especially. I worry that our lives and habits are being changed by screens in ways that are not always immediately apparent. Interactions are gamified and AI driven algorithms ensure that whatever video pops up first on our feed is the one that is most likely to lure us in. Reality itself feels more and more like an episode of the tv series Black Mirror. That is why I wrote my book ‘The History of Information’. I think we should all be paying much closer attention to what these technologies are doing.

_How do you normally conceive the stories for your books? Are you interested in other forms of storytelling apart from books?

Yes! I love coming up with ideas for books as well as other sorts of storytelling. Including apps. I am not at all against technology. I have also worked with augmented reality and virtual reality. My app ‘Hat Monkey’ was Apple App of the Month when it came out in 2014 and still gets thousands of downloads. My virtual reality experience Little Earth came out in 2017 and was one of the very first VR releases. I also created an augmented reality app that explored the solar system called ‘You Are Here’ for the Festival of Curiosity, a science festival in 2021. 

I think creativity and technology are one and the same, they go hand in hand. Art and science are the same. They are about imagination: looking at the world in a new way. I don’t follow any particular creative path to create my stories and ideas. Each book and project has its own journey. One book was inspired by watching crabs on a beach. Another book, Shh! We have a plan, was loosely based on one of my favourite cartoons as a child: Road Runner.

_This whole trend can be seen as a creative opportunity, an alliance to tell different, original, bigger stories in many different platform and formats. Also, being a bit more skeptical, it can be seen as an economical move, in order to fidelize the audience since childhood and squeeze them as far as possible. What’s your view?

I agree with both these takes. I myself am interested in presenting my work on all sorts of platforms: apps, AR, VR. Its very exciting to have these different canvases and each can bring different aspects of the work to light. At the same Im worried like many parents are about where tech is headed. Young people are the consumers and voters of the future. Which is why they are so heavily targeted. I believe it is urgent that we counteract this and make information available for young people that exposes media manipulation. That is what I am trying to do. But as well as providing books to counter the media I really thing we need as a society to reassess our whole approach to information technology. 

We need to build a system that incentivises valuable productive work. The way big tech firms make their money is not by creating new valuable services but by creating and gaming an unfair system. Social media companies encourage users to upload content for free and then sell that on for billions through advertising. We give them our valuable productive work for free and they sell it for billions. That is the system. This, no matter what way you look at it is not a fair deal. If someone had proposed this system at the outset nobody would have agreed to it. This absurd transaction has made them the richest companies in the world. Generative AI is doing exactly the same thing but goes even further. They are taking, without permission, our content: journalism, writing, art, illustration, music and using it, for commercial gain against the very creators they stole it from.

Big Tech and social media companies would argue that they are providing free services and people are free to not engage in social media and retain their content. But we cannot. The world today has shifted. It operates, whether we like it or not, through social media and AI. This is true whether you engage with it or not. If you want to engage with society today you will need to participate in it. But in doing so you are are doing it under these unfair rules. We have to remember: this can all be changed tomorrow if we want it to. We need to organise.

URGENT
If you want to participate in the government consultation you have only 2 days to act. 

It closes on the 25th.
The UK government is trying to change copyright law.
This affects all in the creative industries.

I wrote about my main concerns in a previous post two weeks ago.
But I wanted to add a few things I missed.


Some people in the comments seem confused about the nature of copyright.
The word ‘copyright’ itself is actually a little misleading, it terms of images ‘usage’ is a better way of thinking about it. I worked as a volunteer copyright advisor for the Association of Illustrators for five years. Image ‘usage’ is the key factor in copyright contracts, it is that that determines the fee that illustrators can expect to be paid. Small fees for short term usage, larger for longer terms. In some cases a client might want to own the copyright of an image entirely. This is called ‘buyout’. This allows the new copyright holder to alter the image if they like, since they hold the copyright to it they can do whatever they want. A copyright buyout can be a very significant sum for the illustrator.

Being able to use and reuse an image is effectively what the GenAI companies are doing. They are altering and using images and they are currently using them commercially, worldwide, for as long as they want. In that way it isn’t dissimilar to a copyright buyout. But they are doing this at an extraordinary scale. From a databank of more than 5 billion images. And for this they want to pay the artists nothing. When I think about this from the standpoint a copyright advisor it is just mind-boggling.


I asked the AI image generator MidJourney to create images in the style of one of my favourite graphic artists, Paul Rand. In seconds it came back with four impressive images that could at a glance might even pass for his original work. There were some odd things about them though, if you studied them closely. They had his colours, his shapes and even, in some of the images, his signature. When I looked closely at one of the signatures however it said ‘PARL RUNJ’ in his distinctive handwriting. 

Here is the thing: these images are not ‘inspired’ by the work of Paul Rand. They are copies of his work. They look the way they do because hundreds of Paul Rand’s copyrighted images were fed into a computer. True, the computer may have rearranged them and changed the spelling of his signature. But they are clearly using his work. They are using his work, without payment or permission, for commercial purposes. Under copyright law this is illegal.

I am not at all anti-tech. I would be only too happy to use any sort of technology if I believed I could make better work with it. I also just wrote a book about information technology that ends with Artificial Intelligence. It isn’t in anyway negative about technology. It also has a section in it about the history of copyright*. I am also keen to share skills and share how I make my art and have done many, many illustration and writing workshops. But I do that in order to help individuals, foster creativity and grow the industry. 

*Many people do not realise how central branding and copyright is to how society operates. This is not a fringe issue. For good or bad, 40% of the US economy is dependant on IP protections.

*I will post some of the copyright section of my book, hopefully tomorrow if I get time. Sorry I have been a bit slack. Follow me for more posts on this issue.

These powerful big tech companies have no interest in fostering creativity. Or growing the industry. The opposite. They have knowingly stolen copyrighted material and now they are trying to change copyright so they can profit from us into the future. They have huge amounts of money behind them. If these lobbies succeed in convincing our government we will effectively be handing all the wealth created by the creative industries, hundreds of billions of pounds*, and giving it all straight to the tech industry. 

*Over 2.4 million people work in the creative industries in the UK and the industry is valued at more than 126 billion per year. Its value to society though has more to it than jobs and the money it adds to our economy. It is our entire culture: our music, our art, our literature.

According to some very dubious calculations AI** adoption apparently *could* grow the UK economy by 400 billion by 2030. This, it needs to be pointed out, is far less that the total actual contribution of the creative industries in that period. Plus, this is referring to AI in general, including its important medical and scientific applications not just the problematic GenAI which is all that concerns us here and would represent a very tiny fraction of this. 

What I have been talking about so far is monetary values. But this too is missing the point. Money may be the driving force behind many industries. But it is not the primary reason most people write and create art and films and do many of the other things we do. The creative industry is about expression rather than financial reward. Artistic expression is also protected under current copyright law. In my book, The History of Information, we used hundreds of original copyrighted images throughout history, from images pre-historic cave art all the way to modern day emojis. Some of these images had copyright conditions attached to them. For example the conditions attached to use one fascist propaganda poster in the book was that we explicitly made it clear in the description that it was propaganda. 

But this proposed copyright exception for GenAI would also necessarily strip this away. To give an example, as an artist I would never ever want to make an image that endorses far right symbols: nazi salutes, swastikas etc. But someone using GenAI could create images with my artwork in any way they choose. This argument from an ethical perspective is the thing that to me is most important in all this. And it is something that I have not seen written about anywhere in the consultation or elsewhere.


The nature of creativity is to question and so it is subversive. This means the creative class in society, artists, writers and others, are usually a thorn in the side of the ruling class. This is what a healthy democracy looks like. And it is precisely why we want to have free speech and a free press. But this proposed change in copyright law could jeopardise the source of income of these voices. Effectively silencing their dissent. This quote sums up the situation for me:
“The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth” Jeffowsky

I really do think this is a crucial moment, if this change in copyright law does go through it will be almost impossible to roll back. Please take action. 

Links in my bio. 
If you are reading this PLEASE GET INVOLVED:

1. EMAIL YOUR MP

2. SIGN THE STATEMENT

3. Please get the word out. WE HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME

If you are an author, journalist, translator, designer, illustrator, animator, photographer, artist, musician, or filmmaker you probably want to read this. The UK government is currently planning to change the copyright law and we have a very short window of opportunity to object

I am not at all against Artificial Intelligence. It is and will be an extraordinarily powerful tool in science and medicine and will certainly have limitless uses in all sorts of unimaginable ways. What I am talking about here is generative AI. Specifically generative AI platforms that are trained on unauthorised copyrighted images, text and video, which is all of them.

I asked the AI image generator MidJourney to create ‘a squirrel in the style of Chris Haughton’ At first it generated a photorealistic squirrel wearing my glasses. But after I clarified that I wanted images in my art style rather than my style of dress it came back with images that certainly had my colours, shapes and backgrounds. It looked like art I might draw on a bad day. But it was my work nonetheless. And that is the thing. It was my work.

I then asked ChatGPT to create a story in the style of Chris Haughton. It came back with language and content that was familiar about a lost animal. Again, it had been clearly referencing my stories. When I looked to see if my images were in the training set at ‘Have I been Trained?’ my images were everywhere, thousands of them. Many in duplicate. One of my images, a book cover, appears duplicated in the set at least 29 times. 

These AI tools were trained on hundreds of millions of images. And on billions of words. The content they used were created by countless artists, authors, translators and journalists. The UK government is arguing that ‘there is uncertainty about copyright’. But there is absolutely no uncertainty about copyright: AI companies took copyrighted images and texts, which in many cases took years to make, without asking, and have used them for commercial purposes. Under copyright law this is illegal.

The UK government is currently planning to change this. We have a very short window of opportunity to object, their deadline is the 25th February. The government is proposing to add an ‘exception’ to copyright law allowing AI developers to scrape your work from the internet and use for training AI and creators will need to manually ‘OPT-OUT’ of this exception. The problem with ‘opting out’ is it in practical terms completely impossible. Ed Newton-Rex very clearly summarises the impossibility of opt-out here

A situation where everyone who does valuable work is rewarded for it is a good economy. Creators who make valuable work will be remunerated for it and so are encouraged to do more, and everyone benefits from this. Many creators would be very happy for AIs to use their work if they got paid for it. Just like I am happy for my publisher to publish my books because they pay me for it. I would not be so happy if I created a picture book and it was published worldwide and the publisher became a billionaire and I got no money from it. That was pretty much the situation in the early 1700’s when copyright as we know it came in to force. That is why copyright exists. We realised we need it if we want a healthy publishing industry and we want quality books.

The situation that the UK government is proposing is the opposite of that. They are proposing AI can use our images without paying us. Millions of creative people doing work which is then taken for free by a handful of companies. Over 2.4 million people work in the creative industries in the UK. A handful of companies, mostly from the US not the UK, have trained their AIs on billions of works made by these creators for free. The value of their AI is only as good as the works they are trained on. Their value is our value. Yet we get paid nothing.

This is yet another example of the larger picture of the world today. In 2000, when Google launched their advertising model, AdWords, they were transformed from a cash-strapped student startup into one of the richest companies in the world. All of the other platforms naturally followed this model. But this meant that these companies had morphed from open platforms for sharing, to extractive surveillance tools that work against us. 

Everyone that uses services like Google or social media is giving away their personal information for free. This information is sold by Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and the other Big Tech platforms for billions of dollars. We give the data for free to Big Tech and they sell it for billions. That is the system. This, no matter what way you look at it, is not a fair deal. If someone had proposed this system at the start nobody would have agreed to it. 

Big Tech’s power is truly extraordinary. Some have put it as much as 99% of spending on digital ads goes to either Google or Meta/Facebook. At $1.2 trillion these two companies are worth more, than every single newspaper and publisher in the world put together.* This puts them in an very, very powerful position. 

Naturally, they want this unequal system to continue. That is why they are today they are some of the largest donors to the US, UK and other governments. Governments are becoming corporatised by Big Tech. We saw in January how Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other Big Tech figures attended Donald Trump’s inauguration together. They were there because they were all amongst Trump’s largest donors. 

The UK has a very similar pattern of political corruption. Usually Labour’s largest donations are from the Unions but Keir Starmer’s government has seen an increase in corporate donations, mostly from Big Tech, which has weakened the Union’s strength. Labour has also appointed several big tech insiders to advisory roles. For instance, Microsoft UK’s CEO, Clare Barclay, now leads the government’s Industrial Strategy Advisory Council. Lord Vallance, a former scientific adviser and executive at Google-owned Isomorphic Labs, was appointed as Science Minister, raising concerns about AI regulation and copyright laws.

We need to urgently examine this. These extractive corporations are now working hand in hand with government. It is this that is causing the increasingly rightward shift around the globe. Unless this is not tackled it will only move further rightward. We have seen this happen before. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extractive corporations and government also worked in unison. 

Armies captured territories, legal instruments were set in place, and extractive and exploitative corporations followed. These Imperial projects grew and grew until they reached their pinnacle with fascism. As Mussolini himself said “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” 

The collusion of Big Tech with government is strikingly similar to how these colonial projects operated. It is all about extraction and exploitation. This is not a matter of artists and people in the cultural sector worried about their livelihoods, it is a matter that should be of utmost concern to us all.

If this change in copyright law does go through it will be almost impossible to roll back. Please share.

I was drawn into this debate thanks to the brilliant Association of Illustrators. They are the closest thing illustrators have to a union. They are currently fighting alongside representatives from all the creative fields, authors, film-makers, journalist, musicians across Britain to stop this change. Thank you Derek Brazell for the the phone calls and messages and help with crafting this text. Thanks too to Momoko Abe, Ged Adamson and Simona Ciraolo for their activism around this.

If you are reading this PLEASE GET INVOLVED:

1. EMAIL YOUR MP

2. SIGN THE STATEMENT

3. Please get the word out. WE HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME

…………..

Much of the text and statistics here are from my book The History of Information

*Statistics are from ‘Carl Miller- The Death of the Gods’ 

If you want to hear more on this topic you can hear myself and Carl in conversation in the INTELLIGENCE SQUARED podcast. There is an episode where we discuss some of the issues i wrote about here.

I was at Cheltenham literary festival over the weekend. On Sunday, after my own event, I went to Elif Shafak’s evening talk. During the talk she kept returning to how much she enjoys these events, with live audience questions and debates that are long enough to allow answers with nuance and depth. That they are the antithesis of the knee-jerk sound bites and click-bait headlines in our media. She went as far as call these types of festival events our “last democratic spaces”. It was such an inspiring event, Elif is one of the most thoughtful and eloquent speakers I have ever listened to. And on this issue in particular I could not agree more.

At 8am the following morning, before I left Cheltenham, I went, out of curiosity, to ‘Breakfast with The Times’. An early morning event to discuss the news with Sunday Times editor Ben Taylor, Chief Political Editor Tim Shipman, and Literary Editor Laura Hackett. Both Ben and Tim have had previously held editor positions at the Daily Mail. Their discussions about the days headlines kept coming back to name dropping dinners with politicians and thigh-slapping anecdotes about their visits to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm. By the way the audience was guffawing it was clear this was a very different crowd to the literary events I was at the night before. But it soon turned to serious discussion, because this was Sunday morning 7th Oct, the anniversary of the 7th October attacks and marking a year of Israel’s genocide. The talk that dominated, however, were discussions framed around ‘antisemitism’ and ‘hate marches’. Even the literary editor, Laura Hackett, added to this. She told us she was baffled when she heard that some of her Jewish friends were attending these marches. I dont have a recording of this part but I believe the exact sentence said was “Imagine the mental gymnastics that are needed for a jewish person to join an anti-jewish march”. Mental gymnastics indeed.  

But then at the Q&A at the end I got the chance to ask a question. I stood up and described my horror at watching baby’s bodies being pulled out of rubble again and again almost daily for a year. And my disgust every time I look at the news stands. Not just the Times and Sunday Times but all of the British press for their shameful coverage. Then I read out, as an example, the Times’ own mealy-mouthed embarrassment of a headline that marked the month anniversary of the attacks: ”Israeli’s marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died.” I was heckled by Tim by this point but i managed to ask Ben, the Sunday Times editor, how can you write a headline like this and sleep at night? Ben’s response was, in fairness, more generous than I was expecting. But he left, I think, two elephants standing in the room. He said “even the BBC who are impartial” “are getting a huge amount of push-back on this issue”. First of all I dont think anyone with their hand on their heart could ever argue that the BBC is impartial on this issue. But what is interesting in this response is his implied admission that he is not being impartial. It’s not news that the Times is a conservative newspaper, but shouldn’t his paper be at least attempting to present the truth with some degree of impartiality? Is The Times and Sunday Times are still considered newspapers of record? This, straight out of the mouth of its editor-in-chief I think answers this. He then went on to say that the headline needed to be worded in this way because “Israel closed the border to journalists and so they have no way of knowing and have to rely on reports”. Which begs another question which surely any good editor would ask themselves when faced with such an extraordinary situation. Do you think it’s fine that British tax payers are arming a state that is indiscriminately bombing a region where no journalist is even allowed to enter? Is this ok? What sort of democracy is this? I dont know Ben. Shouldn’t this have been your headline? Why didn’t you lead with that? 

Which brings me back to literary festivals. Because, rather worryingly in my opinion, The Times and The Sunday Times are the sponsors of the Cheltenham festival. Like Elif Shafak, I am very grateful to literary festivals and agree that these are essential democratic spaces. So perhaps we should consider carefully the transaction involved in a sponsorship deal. Sponsoring an event is more than getting your logo widely seen on pamphlets and banners. It has the potential to shape the events and frame the questions. I am very grateful that I was invited to the festival this year, to talk about a book about disinformation of all things, so I am certainly not complaining.  Cheltenham is a fantastic festival. As are the others I regularly go to. And they are so, so very needed. But the potential for conflict of interest is clear. Why else would a sponsor like The Times want to sponsor an event like this? Our public discussions are already being framed by the questions these newspapers choose to pose, culture wars, migrants, terrorism, hate marches. Does this mean they also want to be suggesting the speakers for our festivals? Or choosing the subjects to be debated at events? Where are the debates about inequality? unregulated tax havens? corporate power? the corrupt arms industry that is undermining our democracies? These topics are simply not discussed.
There has been controversy recently over festival sponsorship. Festivals have a tough time just surviving, and many will argue that they need sponsors. Media sponsors in particular are important to bring public to events. But like everything else, this always comes back to a transaction. This is something I discuss in my book but I really think we need to have these discussions more widely. Because this, I argue, is one of the key things causing the deterioration of our public discourse. With very worrying implications for our democracy. We need to take a step back and look at how our information is presented to us. If our public discussions only come to us through a filter of advertising, sponsorship, and large media companies, then we have a problem. 

I have been writing and illustrating picture books for the very young for the last 14 years. But actually i began working on this book 17 years ago. Long before I began work on my first picture book.

The idea came in 2006. UC Berkeley had announced that year they were putting all their undergraduate lectures online for free. They were the first university in the world to do this. I began to listen to some of them, psychology and philosophy and others but one course title stood out as I scrolled through: THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION. 

I contacted the lecturers, Paul Duguid and Geoff Nunberg. They very kindly gave me their reading lists and helped edit the material. Geoff sadly passed away in 2020 and the book is dedicated to him. I think we have managed to make a degree course, the history of media, accessible for 10 year olds. I didn’t cut out any of the key concepts. I think we made a 3rd level media course accessible by making it visual.

The other thing that struck me the most is that this history is connected so closely to the history of graphic design, visual communication and media studies: all the subjects that I had studied. The history of information and the history of visual communication are the same history. So it makes sense to tell the story visually, something I am well-positioned to do. Immediately I knew I wanted to make a book. A history of graphics told through graphics.

The history of information follows history of information technology: IT. Computers, internet and AI. But it is does this by taking a very wide view of information technologies. Drawing is an information technology. Writing is an information technology. All communication is. And in fact there is actually a very clear line of evolution from cave paintings all the way to AI. Drawing evolved into writing, to print and mass media, social media. All are information. And AI simply harvests this and repackages it.

The interesting thing is information technologies are all of course also disinformation technologies. So there is always this undercurrent across all of this. Around 1500 just after print was invented we saw stories about witches, today we see a rise in fake news. When you see how the media has been used and controlled throughout history, you can start to understand more clearly how it is controlled today.

‘Well Done, Mummy Penguin’ comes out on October the 6th, its my 7th book. 

As usual, I thought I would put up a few early sketches here and write a little about how the idea came about. Before I had the idea for this book I was working on a project about a big, bad wolf. The wolf was absolutely awful, a real pantomime baddie. Annoying all the animals in the forest. That part was funny.  But I was having trouble making the ending work. He needed to come to a sticky end but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Anyway… this went on for quite a few months. It was working but not working so it was a bit frustrating. As usual.

Then, one evening, I watched a David Attenborough documentary. I think it was an oldish one. It was over lockdown. And a scene came on with penguins battling to get back home in very rough conditions and I thought… wait a minute… this is a great story. Exactly as it is. I immediately took out my sketchbook and drew out a few images. 

I thought it would be good if a baby and parent were watching the other parent trying to desperately get back home. It was going to be a dad to begin with, I think that was how it was in the documentary, it went something like this:

I sent it to my editor Deirdre. She urged me to drop the big bad wolf idea and work on this instead. So I did. I was very happy about doing this new story, I had done an animation about climate change a few years ago set in Antarctica and I liked the setting and always intended to do more on that.

It was working ok. The only problem for me was the story was that it had to cut back and forth between the dad and the pair at home. We had to be careful because although we adults can follow a story like that without even thinking about it a very, very young child will not get it. We dont realise how unintuitive those sorts of edits are.  Young children need a very clear continuity to be able to follow the story. It’s probably not quite as simple as some of my other books but I think we managed to make it clear enough. 

I didn’t like the way it was presenting the dad as going out to sea while the mum stayed at home so I swapped the genders around. The gender swap was interesting though. When the joke was on a disastrous dad it all seemed funny, but when it’s a disastrous mum it’s somehow not very funny at all, its actually quite alarming. There has been a conversation about how dads get praised for doing the bare minimum while mums often do the work day in and day out without credit. This gender reversal really seemed to underline it. Credit where credit is due.

I started doing some character sketches in colour to figure out the penguins… 

After that I went as usual to papercut.

I played around with some textures for the splashes like I did with the wave scene in little crab. And because it was really fun to do.

There was going to be some snow in it too but it seemed to distracting in the end.

I really enjoyed doing the water. The reflections and the smoothness… to me that is the most beautiful thing about those  Antarctic landscapes. 

Here are some finished pages. In all of my books I hide a squirrel. See if you can spot her.

I wanted to do a poster that would come with the book. I made a poster for the climate change animation and it was popular with schools. (You can print your own here) I like thinking of these sorts of ideas but I rarely get to do them because they are a bit unusual or because of cost or distribution issues. Last year myself and Deirdre (my editor at Walker) were doing a lot of walking around outside, still in semi-lockdown mode. We always have a little look in the nice independent bookshops as we pass. Then one day we struck on an idea. We could do a poster that comes with the book but they are only given to independent bookstores. It’s a nice way to give independent bookshops something back.

Well Done, Mummy Penguin comes out in these european languages (and Japanese and others) on Oct 6th. Hope you like it!  If you enjoyed this post you might like the posts I have done about my other books here

I’ve been working and thinking on and off about this project for the last eight years, so I’m very excited to be able to finally share with you some of my work from this.

Since 2013, myself and another illustrator have been working on a scale model of the solar system.  I was working on a book about scale at the time which zooms from a tiny mouse all the way out to the planets and the stars and a conversation was had  wondering if any scale model solar systems had been made. The models on google all looked quite uninspiring and it was decided to make one ourselves.

In 2017, I released ‘Little Earth’ a virtual reality app that explores earth and a the solar system. After I finished that I was keen to start work on the collaboration. I named the project ‘You Are Here’ and began figuring out the sizes. If the solar system is 8km long (the sun to Neptune’s average orbit) the earth is still only 22.8mm, the size of a marble. It seemed to me that the best home for this would be a pedestrianised city location with a very long, straight line of sight. I was thinking of London and New York but no locations really stood out. I thought of the Poolbeg lighthouse in Dublin, it’s a lighthouse at the end of a 1.5km pier that goes straight out to sea. The pier follows the south quay of the river Liffey inland and goes straight through the centre of the city. All a straight line. To start me off I visualised it here so that then we could pitch it to potential funders and festivals. I still think this is one of the best locations for it.

8km version (10.6km if including pluto)

Looking from the sun towards all the planets and towards Dublin city centre

The view from earth towards the sun

The view from earth towards the outer planets

Jupiter (at the start of Poolbeg pier)

Saturn (next to the Pigeon House chimneys)

Uranus (next to the O2)

Neptune (Dublin city centre/Millenium bridge)

Pluto (in the war memorial garden)

Detail of a 4mm Pluto!

related statistics

 I ended up making seven different versions of these PDFs in different locations and with different plinths…

The other advantage to this is that Dublin bay itself is semi-circular bowl. To the north, Howth head arcs around. To the west and south are the Dublin mountains and Killiney Hill . The very centre of the bay is Poolbeg lighthouse. From all these surrounding hills and mountains, which are popular walks for Dubliners, Poolbeg lighthouse and the south wall are clearly visible. And of course the lighthouse can be seen all across the bay at night. It’s easy to imagine the size of the solar system mapped onto the city. If the earth is the size of a small marble, the solar system would be bigger than the whole city of Dublin.

Photo thanks to Felix Morelli @iofelix

*note the rising sun is the same size as the sun model  when viewed from the earth

The pier is facing east so as the sun rises from the sea at dawn it would appear exactly the same size as the 2.5m globe when it is viewed from the model of the earth.

I really liked these statistics I calculated to go with a 23mm marble earth:

• The speed of light at this scale would be the same speed as a very slow walk, light takes 4hours 15mins to get from the sun to Neptune …which probably would be roughly the time you might walk the 8km distance with children. 
  
• At the same scale the next nearest star to us (Alpha Centauri) is 80,000 km away, around  twice the circumference of the world.
  
• Betelgeuse, which is the orangey star in Orion (his left shoulder) and is one of the brightest stars in the sky, would be more than a kilometre across. 
  

Only by experiencing these things physically in space can we really begin to understand these unimaginable scales.

Richard Seabrooke was brought on board to help produce it. Myself and Richard walked the Poolbeg pier on a freezing, windy day in March 2018.

We together spoke to the Science Gallery in Dublin and The Festival of Curiosity, CBI and others. One issue with the Poolbeg location was that the route crossed a number of different Dublin city council regions. As a compromise it was suggested that we should do it in the Phoenix Park instead. That way only one permission would be needed. I went back to the drawing board and mapped it to Chesterfield avenue, a perfectly straight 2km of road through the park.   I proposed to make it in conjunction with Newgrange in Ireland too because theres a nice Irish/Astronomy connection. I had a chat with Hay Festival and Edinburgh Festival. I even sent it to NASA. They said they couldn’t fund it but kindly offered help in other ways and put us in touch with the Goddard solar system division. I’m so grateful for all the people who have put their time and input into this.

It’s such a nice idea I think. It’s a way to get people out and walk and provides a beautiful, free day out in any city. It a relatively simple thing to make and I  think that it can really set children’s imaginations soaring. Every city could have one, I was living in Madrid at this time so of course I also thought to visualise it there. The bank of the Manzanares river has recently been landscaped and there is a running track and playgrounds and cycle lanes along the entire length of it, this park ends at the Matadero, an enormous cultural space. The sun and inner planets could all sit within the Matadero while the outer planets could run the length of the Manzanares. I visualised it here too and was pitching our project to everyone I could think of in Madrid too.

THE AR APP

As I mentioned, I’d been working on a VR project, Little Earth the previous year. VR is an incredible medium but its almost too immersive. You lose all bearings and sense of reality and so scale and distance is not something you could show with VR. I had spent the day plotting the solar system along the river and that evening I went for a walk in the same area… I looked down at google maps to get my bearings… and saw the very same map I had been looking at all day. I had an idea! Augmented reality could work really well with the project! It would add a completely different dimension to the project. Seeing the planets mapped to the map is what makes it tangible.

The signage and interactivity would need to be limited on the plinths and the planets at this scale are mostly small marbles so an augmented reality app could provide something interactive and exciting. There could be unique animations that encourage children to walk the full length and visit each planet. I emailed my collaborators the next morning and they really liked the idea. I then spoke to my app maker friend, Egmont at Red Rabbit. He suggested that animations within the app could be ‘unlocked’ at each planet. It would be nice to have informative, interactive animations and something novel to explore at each point in the walk. Perhaps these ‘unlocked’ animations could remain in the app afterwards as a reward. If all the planets were not visited on the day out, it would be a reason to return and unlock the other planets. I love this idea. I know if I was a young child I would have got really excited about something like this.

I imagined the app would maybe have two modes. 

Streetmap mode:

The first mode would be a street map of Dublin that operates a little like Google maps and shows you where on the route the next planet is. You could also play around with it, the distance from Earth to Neptune is 4.3 billion kms which doesn’t mean too much to anyone. However when viewed through this app it would tell you the driving time, walking time and speed of light times. It’s a thousand year drive, an eight thousand year walk or four hours at the speed of light.

Space mode:

The second mode would be the planet mode where you are travelling through space. The planet mode would say ‘Welcome to Jupiter/Earth/Mars’ and show facts about the planet and a sped up animation of it spinning to see how long its days are and its moons. The atmosphere, temperature and the probes that have orbited or landed there. It would be inside this mode that I would imagine you could unlock the planets by visiting them. 

For the design of the plinths, one of my main concerns was vandalism. I grew up in Dublin and I couldn’t imagine this thing surviving one night without being covered in graffiti or all the planets disappearing. Especially Uranus. We tried to design it with as little surface faces as possible. I roped in my landscape architect friend, Rowan D’arcy to help. It also seemed to me that the plinths should be as simple as possible in order to focus attention on the planets themselves. The problem is the planets are absolutely tiny, most are invisible from a hundred metres away. They need signage to be seen from a distance. A spotlight would also be good so that they are visible at night much like they are to us in the night sky.

I was quite happy with my solution here to have a single downward arrow for each planet that would also house a downward spotlight. It cannot be climbed and the whole construction has a no bigger footprint than a lamp post. That way they can function from a distance in day and night. And if we do each planet with a different colour we can identify them from even the greatest distance. In order to avoid the huge cost of digging up 8km of road we would put a solar panel all the way along the vertical post. That should provide enough power for the LED bulb and the trigger for the AR proximity sensor.

I asked another friend of mine,  Alex Kaiser at different to create these visualisations:

A version of this project is now launching.  It is being funded by the UK Government, as part of the Brexit Festival. I had no part in the submission and am I’m not too happy about this. However it does give me the opportunity to share my own work here and so hopefully bring my own version of this to life. 

I’d love to bring my version of this to other cities. Especially Dublin. I think theres so much potential for projects like this one especially in conjunction with augmented reality. Myself and Rowan have found some exciting leads already. Please get in touch or share this if you know of a place or institution that could help create it. We’d love to make it happen. 

…………

To me, this idea is all about the power of illustration. As a young child I loved to read science fact books. I remember reading one that compared the size of planets and their distance. If the sun is the size of a beach ball, then Earth is the size of a pea a hundred yards away, Jupiter is a grapefruit a mile away and so on and Pluto is a speck of sand 3 miles away. I probably wouldn’t have known what that really meant but my Dad had explained it to me. That means if the sun is a large beachball at our front gate, then earth is a pea at the bend in our road, Jupiter is a grapefruit at the Ballinclea Y-junction, and Pluto is a speck of sand in Dun Laoghaire. I may not have really been able to understand what 3 miles is but I knew how far Dun Laoghaire was and how big a speck of sand is. My Dad brought it home to me.  I realise now how lucky I was to have things explained to me like that.

That thought made such an impression on me. I remember sitting in the back of the car on subsequent trips to Dun Laoghaire, picking out all the landmarks and imagining being in a spaceship flying past grapefruit Jupiter. And the vertigo of imagining a tiny speck of sand floating in space when I was in Dun Laoghaire with Mum doing the shopping. To me, thats the power of illustration. It’s a tool to visualise something abstract so that it becomes vivid in the mind.

I can’t wait to have these solar systems made. In the meantime I made this printable scale model.  It can be used in the same way and isn’t too different from the one that inspired me as a child. You can download it here. Print it out on A4 paper and it will be the correct scale for a 4km model. I thought it could be an interesting activity to do with children. You could map the planets to the surroundings they are familiar with. You could take a walk and draw the planets on the ground with chalk using the sheet as a size template. Or maybe you could bring it to a beach or park and find the right sized stones and place them along a 4km track. Send me pictures and please let me know if you have other ideas with this.