Marketing and social history is awash with well-known, well-loved brands that are now defunct. This is certainly the case in British engineering, with conglomerates such as Vickers, GEC, Ferranti, English Electric and Plessey woven into our collective history.

One of these brands has made a bold comeback. Plessey Semiconductors launched in 2010, producing high-technology components from two plants in the south west. We chatted with Group Marketing Manager Derek Rye about the rebirth of the Plessey brand.

However many screens you consider the future to consist of, the fact is that we are now consuming content in more places. That content is exhibited by more and more devices, of varying screen size.

Certain subgenres may not feel "up to the job" of this multi-screen age. Psychological drama, with its requirement to portray the intricate, delicate subtleties of humanity, suggests a more formal environment. Screenwriter and lecturer John Foster feels that this fragmented future is an exciting challenge rather than a limiting hindrance.

2011 seems to be the year where 3D printing really took off. Flexible, quick, and increasingly affordable, it has become a manufacturing and prototyping technique that is now a realistic option to designers and manufacturers, with 3D printshops springing up as a result.

London's Aram Gallery is celebrating the growth of 3D printing by opening an exhibition which focuses on work created and produced with a 3D printer. Called Send to Print / Print to Send, the exhibition showcases work by notable designers and organisations, as well as including examples of the role that 3D printing plays in the design process, particularly in prototyping.

In a gallery is a massive, almost overwhelming, box with an inviting little door. Stepping into this room gives the guest the ability to control nature – to move liquid simply through controlling sounds that the liquid "hears". While this may seem to be the preserve of science and fiction – if not science fiction – it isn't. The room holds Suguru Goto's work Cymatics.

Cymatics is an installation which plays carefully with nature. While this play is overtly natural, the way in which nature is manipulated in the work, through a computer, is highly covert.

Marcus Brown has developed, and played, many fictional characters over the years – and has set many of them free in digital space. His most famous piece, The Kaiser's Toilet, features Marcus, an Englishman now based in Munich, waxing lyrical while sitting on the loo at home.

His new project is The Inanimates, which takes his work in individual characters and applies it to a new idea for him – a pop group. The Inanimates will lead online lives like many of Brown's other characters, but The Inanimates will also develop a product – a concept album, in the style of the great 80s groups whose worlds were contexualised by the east-west nuclear arms race.

We caught up with Marcus to ask him about his new project.

As devices decrease in size yet increase in complexity, they need to exchange more data. This creates a problem in terms of both devices and networks, because the way in which data has historically been sent and received between them has been designed for much larger systems. You don't want a UPS van each time you're sending a birthday card. In this space, enter the MQTT protocol.

As we know from mainstream Hollywood cinema, it's easy to rely on computer-generated tricks and techniques to enrapture an audience – no matter how young or old. The increasing sophistication of studios such as Pixar in developing feature-length animation has been a story of technical, as much as creative, development. However, the enduring properties of story, character, and narrative structure are omnipresent, and producing great work with beautiful, creative visuals doesn't necessarily result in the desire to create an all-out sensory extravaganza. When story and character are at the fore of the creative process, the role of the computer becomes one that supports, that realises the idea, rather than one that helps to generate the idea in the first place.

Grant Orchard is perhaps best known for his series of films, Love Sport. They featuring, as Orchard puts it, "... simple graphic shapes that bounce around a lot and do all things sporty." It is, of course, a lovely understatement; Love Sport is a frantic, energetic exploration of sport which evokes Len Lye in its kinetic colourplay.

As interconnected digital media increasingly gives us a lens with which to view the world, it should come as no surprise in terms of where its tentacles go next. Having taken – and shaken – the music and film industries, it's now working its way through publishing, with the lens itself moving from a chunky white box to a curved aluminium tablet. Art may be next on its list of markets to disrupt, if not conquer.

With that in mind comes s[edition], a new platform to collect digital versions of works from leading contemporary artists. It provides a means of "digital collecting" - a way to securely store artworks in digital form, and to display them through an image viewer, a video player, or through a bespoke iOS app. The collection available at launch is from nine artists, and comprises of work made especially for s[edition], as well as some re-purposed for the medium.

In the age where attention is currency, grand, epic works have to fight for everything that they can get. Where Internet-based digital media and platforms allow for the staging of expensive (or at least expensive-looking) work in a way that circumvents the costly issues of distribution, they face an issue of maintaining viewing times when the viewer paradigm for "big, interactive stuff" is largely focused on the Xbox or PS3.

Dawid Marcinkowski is up for the challenge. The director of Sufferrosa, an extraordinary piece of big interactive fiction to which the player moves through the world in the first person, aiming to discover the real story behind the disappearance of Rosa Braun. Taking elements from computer gaming, film noir, Godardian iconography and the contemporary perceptions around aging, it is a work which, in every sense, spans many levels.

There's power in the status update. That atomised, ephemeral piece of content can move markets, politics, and people. It has contributed to massive social change; it has contributed to the creation, and closure, of massive businesses; and it has fundamentally changed the relationship between the self and others.

The spontaneity of the status update does not lessen its power to create tremendous emotional impact. When brevity is the order of the day, something said in less than 200 characters can be shocking, jolting, and harsh. Whatever is written in a status update, it is part of the self, the body politic; it can possess emotional currency that has as much lasting value as the longest book.

This currency is celebrated in an exhibition recently held by Mandatory Thinking – a duo, made up of Rishi Dastidar and Matt Busher - at the Her House Gallery in Hoxton, London. Entitled Self Portrait Postcards, it displays 1000 of Dastidar's Facebook updates as colourful A5 postcards. The result is a mosaic of experiences captured in short form.