Maz & Kilgore

Hello. We're Maz Kessler and Robby Kilgore. These posts reflect our work, present and past. The home page is devoted mainly to Maz’s current work in global health and communications – you can find Robby’s updates on his page.

While developing the campaign for mothers, we kept coming back to the question “Why is public awareness currently so low?”, and more specifically, “Why don’t women everywhere know about this issue?” There is clearly a vast and powerful global community ready to be mobilized on behalf of mothers – a worldwide constituency of women, mothers and grandmothers. Women in high-income countries have the potential to play a similar role to the part played by US AIDS activists who directly supported grassroots African advocacy and helped mobilize massive US funding for ARV treatment. There is general agreement that huge untapped reservoirs of public support exist for mothers – they just need to be mobilized. Yet for the last 20 years “Josephine Public” has been almost entirely missing from the maternal advocacy landscape.

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For all those interested in what’s happening with mobile phones and development, advocacy and global poverty, two reports are very interesting. The first was written by Sally-Jean Shackleton of Women’s Net in South Africa and commissioned by UNICEF. It’s titled Rapid Assessment of Cell Phones for Development and aims to provide baseline data that will inform a strategy to launch a new generation of cell phone technologies to address underdevelopment and in particular HIV/AIDS as a development issue.

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“The standard recommendation to a woman who needs medical attention is, ‘Go to the hospital’ - but in rural parts of India there are so few doctors that this is like telling her, ‘Do nothing.’ We decided to follow Gandhi’s message to go to the villages. Instead of waiting for people to come to us, we found a way to take the care to the people.”  Abhay Bang, SEARCH

This image shows us the harsh reality of how more than 50% of mothers still give birth in low-income countries - in the home, far from hospitals, medicines and trained professionals .

Why? These women often live in remote and inaccessible rural areas. And even if health facilities and trained professionals are within reach, many women confront insurmountable cultural and religious obstacles in accessing that healthcare and inevitably give birth at home.  Plus, their governments face significant economic challenges, made worse by the exodus of trained medical staff to rich countries.
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In some of the world’s poorest countries, women still die in pregnancy and childbirth at what is essentially the same rate as the Middle Ages. Nature gave us odds of around 15 to 1 of successfully making it through pregnancy and childbirth without any medical help or modern advances in hygiene, and women in the poorest countries still face this terrifyingly high risk TODAY when entering each pregnancy. Read the rest of this entry »

A team is coming together to create a new public mobilization campaign for maternal survival. The goals of the campaign are to mobilize women worldwide and provide a clear and credible “ask” supporting life-saving interventions that can be implemented now. We’re incredibly excited to get this effort rolling, and have just begun the first stages of planning.

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Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to consult on user experience and interface design for a number of companies in the software world. Read the rest of this entry »

Our studio and live work in the music business 1983-1995

LAURIE ANDERSON
Strange Angels

keyboards, programming

ERIC CLAPTON
Journeyman

keyboards, programming

STEVE WINWOOD
Back In The High Life | Roll With It

keyboards, programming

TOM WAITS
Rain Dogs

keyboards

MADONNA
“Borderline” | Who’s That Girl-”24 Hours”

keyboards, songwriting, programming

PAUL McCARTNEY
Give My Regards to Broad Street

keyboards

THE BRECKER BROTHERS
Return Of The | Out Of The Loop

producers, songwriting, keyboards

JAMES TAYLOR
Never Die Young | October Road

keyboards, programming

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ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK? - Nickelodeon
composer, music video

CHRIS CROSS - Showtime / ITV
composer, theme music, incidental cues

WORKING GIRL - 20th Century Fox
incidental cues, synth programming

WHO’S THAT GIRL? - Miramax
songwriting, sound track album

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Beginning in 1995, Maz and I worked as Creative Directors of the Social Interface Group at Microsoft. We had been working under Karen Fries and Barry Linnett on an application codenamed Utopia back in ‘93. They had assembled a team of programmers and artists to work on a radical new interface inspired by the emerging body of research into so called “social interfaces”. Much of this landmark research was performed by Stanford professors, Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an incarnation of a graphic interface for creating and controlling probability-based ambient audio soundscapes. Click here or on the image to try it out.

WHAT IS THIS?
This is a set of 8 rack units. Each one contains a preset bank with a handful of sounds. You can trigger them as a “single shot”, by pressing the play button. A sound will loop indefinitely when the “Loop” mode button is selected.

RANDOM TRIGGERS
On the left hand side of each unit is a “random trigger generator”. Clicking the button marked RND engages the random trigger for that channel. The frequency knob controls the “rate” at which new random numbers are generated. That is, every time the LED goes on or off, a random number between 0-100 is generated.

If the random number is less than the value of “Amount” then the sound will play. The “Prob” knob adjusts the “amount of probability” or the threshold below which the random number will trigger the sound.

It’s best to test each sound by just playing it once with the play button. Some sounds are quite long. These long sounds are best triggered with either a very slow rate of chance or with a low probability of occurring.

MASTER: NEW, LOAD & SAVE
I’ve added the ability to save configurations for the full rack of eight units. You could tweak an existing patch and click “Save” and it will be updated. Tweak an existing patch but type in a new name is equivalent to “Save As”.