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A picture of George Oates

George Oates

Designer, founder of Good, Form & Spectacle

in designer, mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm George Oates, and I'm a designer. I run my own design company in London called Good, Form & Spectacle, which makes interesting R&D and design projects for museums, libraries and archives. I'm also the co-founder of new edtech startup called Museum in a Box, which is designed to help get connected museum objects into classrooms across the world.

What hardware do you use?

I have a 13-inch early 2015 MacBook Pro and the iPhone 5S I bought at the same time. I have also painted a nice shiny whiteboard on the wall at our office in Bloomsbury, which is almost my favourite type of hardware. We're dabbling with Raspberry Pi and all that stuff too with Museum in a Box, which is new territory for me.

And what software?

Mostly all web stuff these days: Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, WordPress, Sketch, Dropbox, Pixelmator, BBEdit, Transmit, MS Office (mostly for contracts and other people's spreadsheets), Amazon Music, Safari and Chrome, Keynote, and the old favourite, Notes, which I use to keep all my meeting notes.

On a personal note, Citymapper has literally changed my life for the better since I moved to London. I can't imagine getting around this massive city without it. Seriously, it's the best, most useful software I've used in 10 years.

Incidentally, I'm very interested in the challenge of digital archiving, so this list of various web services makes me nervous if I consider how I might represent these heady early days of G,F&S in, say, 20 years. My laptop previous to this one died the other day and I got a scary OS X setup thing I'd never seen before. The slow decline begins!

What would be your dream setup?

I'm pretty close to it, I think, or at least I'm enough of a luddite not to care too much about the bleeding edge and have the newest stuff. At this stage in my career, I'm doing more writing (proposals, pitches, blogs) than other work, so mostly find myself in some kind of text editor. I also really enjoy collaborating with people who are mature and skilled, and also have super hawt setups themselves.