Ian Fitzpatrick writes, collects and shares things here.
Some of these things have to do with brands, some of them have to do with buildings and places or machines or computers (which are, you know, machines, too). Each of them has to do with people, and the ways in which we respond to the stimuli around us.
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Yesterday was a sick day – nasal congestion on par with the iPad-induced streaming lockdown of a week ago. Today, I’m clearing both my inbox and my head to the backdrop of Múm’s Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy…
*****
Brands eager to gain a foothold in the online recruiting space ought to consider eschewing a strong Facebook presence – or so say a handful of Wharton seniors in this fascinating roundtable from Human Resource Executive Online. Says one:
It really takes away from the credibility of the firm, especially because we know Facebook so well — just the connotation that comes with it; it’s not necessarily this professional, reliable tool that you want to use.
Another key point made repeatedly within the article: Young, skilled employees have an innate desire to understand the role that their work plays in the larger objectives of their employer. A point which is, in my own experience, frequently overlooked.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Feb 03.10
Some thoughtful reading from this morning – time spent trying to wash from my mouth the bitter taste of ABC’s two-hour homage to Milton by way of Coppola-in-the-jungle ((I am referring, of course, to last evening’s LOST season premiere))…all to Aloe Blacc’s terrific Shine Through:
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Feb 02.10
Heavyset favorite Helge Tenno posits that we ought to re-examine the notion that more screens bearing more information represents progress, and instead look to methods that allow us to integrate our assembled data into physical objects. As I posted yesterday, there’s a bit of a theme going on here, notably from Ed Cotton and Faris Yakob (whose own conviction to this end is considerably longer-held). Helge posts some interesting examples – the Copenhagen Wheel demo ((As an aside, fans of Copenhagen Wheel project will want to check out this article from the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, suggesting a commercial future for electric bicycles.)) was new to me – and integrates some good thinking from Tim Brown of IDEO, as well.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Feb 02.10
Tuesday morning thoughts and readings collected against the backdrop of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s fantastic new album, IRM…I’m feeling rather progressive about my choice, given the relatively mundane musical selections made in Boston ((Seriously, the Beatles??)) these days, in comparison with those in, say, Barcelona.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Feb 01.10
Ed Cotton posits over on Influx Insights that a key theme of 2010 will be the intersection of digital and physical devices, a point I quite intended to make on last week’s BIMA panel on The Digital State ((but, in my glee, forgot)). The crux of his post is a recently announced partnership between personal platform of choice FourSquare and the Bravo Network, aimed at providing real-world promotions for viewers of the network’s programming. I can only imagine that check-ins from Kiehls are about to skyrocket.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Feb 01.10
Some found materials and reading collected while spending the weekend pondering the mind-numbing decline of Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics ((Truly a confounding title, no?)), who placed American Saturday Night by Brad Paisley atop his 2009 ballot for the Pazz and Jop poll. While I’ve little remaining appetite for further infographics, there’s likely an intrepid soul willing to take on the charting of Christgau’s decline in a format as easily-consumed as Paisley’s quasi-country-with-a-slice-of-the-21st-century pop. Until that day when The Village Voice takes a cue from Etsy and opens up its API, the Dean himself has made the data available.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Published Jan 06.10
In my Rogue Film School, which I just founded, I say–and not even as a provocation–that I prefer people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn’t mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Quotations Published Jan 05.10
The way it works now is that an engineer often does structure, an architect does skin, a space planner does interiors, and an industrial designer does product. It’s a nasty mess. The quality of life that it produces is also a nasty mess, and we all suffer. The problems are where those things rub up against one another.
Read the full post...Categorized as: People and Other People, Quotations Published Jan 04.10
I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do the better. But I don’t think that you can dispose of the constructive and inventive things that America is doing—and say oh we aren’t doing anything anymore and we are living off of what the poor Chinese do. It is more complicated than that.
Read the full post...Categorized as: People and Spaces, Quotations Published Dec 16.09
Ed Cotton posits that geography is becoming cool again, and I’m not certain that I disagree.
We can now tell where a plane is mid flight, we know how many miles we ran and if we are clever, we can map those miles, we can see exactly where photographs were taken and our cars can be effortlessly guided to our destination by satellites.
A great point. As we immerse ourselves in both maps of our creation (think Flickr), maps we need (think GoogleMaps), and an overwhelming volume of data that can be plotted in near-real-time about just about everything, a greater understanding of both where it is that we operate, and where we are in context of the world around us seems equally inevitable and appealing.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 16.09
Joi Ito posted this week his contribution on neoteny to Seth Godin’s free new e-book What Matters Now:
Read the full post...The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative. [...] It’s time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults.
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 15.09
Mitchell Whitelaw has a really intriguing post this week on the notion of combining data visualization with actual visceral exploration.
In the wake of the announcement from the UK Met Office that they will be making available data from more than 1000 globally-dispersed weather stations, Manuel Lima made something of a call to arms for the data and information visualization set:
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Dec 15.09
via Pruned, a Dutch endeavor called Waterpleinen – a now-commissioned set of public spaces that serve both as locales for community gathering/play and stormwater repositories. From the Waterpleinen site:
Most of the year the Watersquare will be dry. It is only during heavy rainfall that the square will be filled with water. Streams, brooklets and ponds will emerge, kids can play in and around the water. In winter it is even possible to skate on the ice! The rainwater of the Watersquare can also serve as a grey-water system for the surrounding houses.
It’s a remarkable concept for mixed-use space (see these diagrams). The below video conveys the idea even better (and yet-still-better if you happen to speak Dutch).
Link: Waterpleinen on Pruned
Categorized as: Links, People and Spaces Published Dec 15.09
via Johnnie Moore, Jack Ricchiuto on potential new models for change in social network behavior:
The possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.
Ricchiuto makes these comments in regard to a post on which he collaborated on Network Weaving, exploring the evolution of introduction in social networks:
When we make introductions, and close triangles, we are not doing it to merely create new connections. Network weavers usually have a goal in mind when connecting two new people — a project, a mentorship, a future collaboration.
Fascinating stuff.
Link: Transformational Change in Social Networks on Jack/Zen
Categorized as: Links, People and Other People Published Dec 15.09
via PSFK comes this astounding telling of the history of friendship by William Deresiewicz of The Chronicle of Higher Education, through the lens of contemporary social networks. There’s a lot to digest (and like) here, but this nugget rang true for me:
And so we return to Facebook. With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004—the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook’s very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they’re not in the same place, or, rather, they’re not my friends. They’re simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
The article makes the point that these networks define a utopian vision of friendship that lies far afield of traditional (and historical) notions of the same. Great great reading, to be certain.
Link: Faux Friendship on The Chronicle of Higher Education
Categorized as: Links, People and Other People Published Dec 15.09
An interesting post last week over at Idea Sandbox on the concept of fallow field farming, and whether brands ought to explore a methodology that halts short-term growth to allow operations/markets to replenish:
What about the notion of letting the business rest for a season to allow it to rejuvenate? Instead of aggressively building new stores or launching new products – why not let that part of the business go fallow?
It’s an interesting notion – a distant cousin of creative destruction. Worth a read, given some free time.
Link: Farming Lesson to Save Your Brand on Idea Sandbox
Categorized as: Links, People and Brands Published Dec 15.09
GOOD has a blurb today on a pilot program in San Francisco that is utilizing wireless parking meters equipped with sensors that can identify vacant and occupied spaces. Here’s the demo:
I wonder what Donald Shoup would have to say about this. Could these sensors drive the kind of elastic-pricing parking policy that Dr. Shoup espouses? From a 2008 interview on the TransLib blog:
So long as cities continue to require ample off-street parking at every site, people will never be weaned from expecting free parking. And unless cities begin to charge performance-based prices for curb parking, reducing or eliminating off-street parking requirements will not be politically possible. So I would argue that getting the price of curb parking right is a precondition to weaning people away from expecting free parking everywhere. Therefore, I would also argue that Parking Benefit Districts with revenue return to finance added local public services will create the political demand for more sensible parking prices.
Link: Wireless Parking on GOOD
Categorized as: Links, People and Spaces Published Dec 14.09
via CScout, another great utility designed to enable, among other things, urban exploration.
PicTranslator is a point & shoot app for the iPhone that promises to translate signage and other text content from 20+ foreign languages into English. Check out the demo below:
While I can imagine all manner of applications for the app, the ability to explore unfamiliar spaces with the ability to rapidly orient and guide oneself is chief among them. Very cool stuff.
Link: Point & Shoot Foreign Language Translator on CScout
Categorized as: Links, People and Spaces Published Dec 14.09
We’re suckers for rapid, identifiable transformation. It drives investment. It drives news cycles. It drives Twitter.
Calculated, unidentifiable transformation is a much murkier proposition (which is, perhaps, why the changes in China scare the hell out of so many Westerners). It’s also a big part of the reason for the collective impatience with President Obama – who promised change (but did not promise that it would be instantly recognizable).
I’ve noted frequently here, and in a particularly robust conversation with Gareth Kay, that there exists tremendous inherent value for brands in mundane, incremental change that reveals itself only through the larger transformations it enables. Consider the massively incremental transformations at HP as outlined by Carly Fiorina some years ago or the slow evolution of IBM into a services provider.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Brands Published Dec 14.09
Greg Smith over at Vague Terrain has a terrific writeup on a new installation at the Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, entitled PLAYLIST:
The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show will demonstrate that the retrogaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time, retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools, softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies, platforms and communities.
Looks fascinating. While I doubt very much that I’ll make it to Spain for the exhibit, I offer it up to those who might.
Link: Playlist: Playing Games, Music, Art on Vague Terrain
Categorized as: Ephemera, Links
Posts by Dave Brown, founder of the company of the same name, focused on creative efforts for entities of all types.
A blog devoted to near field studies – the interactions between people, objects and mobile devices.
A blog from Khoi Vinh, the Design Director of NYTimes.com, and a great source for design and engagement conversation.
The official website for Metropolis Magazine – a comprehensive source of architectural, industrial and creative design and thought.
Adam Ferrier, psychologist and partner at Naked Communications, posts here on the relationships between the human condition and the brands we engage. At equal turns fascinating and provocative.
A frequently-updated, chaffe-free collection of design goodness.
Iain Tait, of UK’s Poke, collects all manner of digital and advertising ephemera here. No, he does not have Google Wave invites.
A blog written by Christian Verschaeren of Emakina, with a focus on trends in consumer engagement via (but not limited to) advertising. Hysterical in tone, sublimely detailed at times.
Zach Hoeken and Bre Pettis run this blog, dedicated to the sharing of designs for original digital and physical devices and products, with a strong focus on digital fabrication and prototyping.
Angie Waller posts here about both her own completed works and works-in-progress, and similar explorations by others. Gems abound.