Having moved to the UK a couple years ago I’ve always been fascinated with the history you can find around London (and really anywhere in the UK) just anywhere on the side of the street. Even mundane things like post boxes and phone booths (so called ’street furniture’) are rich in design history (not just through the association with the monarchy) and can tell you a lot about your neighbourhood. Cypher-spotting is a fun activity for tourists and locals alike to discover the history of these objects. Just by identifying the monarch associated with the symbol on a post-box you can roughly know when it was put up. Combine that with the unique shapes and forms that post-boxes have evolved into over the last 150 years and you can learn a lot just by looking a bit closer. That’s why I was so excited to use FieldDay (https://field.day) to create a bespoke experience to make it easier to decipher this history. We’ve collected a custom dataset of tens of thousands of samples of postboxes and cyphers around the UK, created a custom machine learning model and a simple SwiftUI app around it all in less than a week. It’s a pretty niche application for machine learning but maybe some of you in the UK (or visiting the UK) will have fun with it. ✌️

Decypher

🇬🇧📮 Discover British design history with your camera.

🇬🇧📮 Discover British design history with your camera.