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…
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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.
Published on February 5, 2010 11:44 am.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: employees, graph, optimization, ralph lauren, visualization, wharton
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:
Published on February 3, 2010 3:45 pm.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: conversation, crowdsourcing, customer demand, designers, economics, education, evolution, institutions, narratives, redesign process, restraints
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.
Published on February 2, 2010 2:53 pm.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: architecture, designers, electric bicycles, exhibition, experiments, mobile device, open platform, personal data, signage
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.
Published on February 2, 2010 10:44 am.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: architecture, charlotte gainsbourg, end of days, institutions, iphone, joi ito, parlor game, satellites
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.
Published on February 1, 2010 12:57 pm.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: consumer behavior, journalism, new york times, partnership, personal platform, retort
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.
Published on February 1, 2010 7:00 am.
Filed under: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen Tags: charles platt, infographics, journalism, knowledge, love affair, paper airplane, robert christgau, roland barthes, teaching, Twitter
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.
Published on January 6, 2010 7:30 am.
Filed under: Ephemera, Quotations Tags: pura vida, quality of life, werner herzog
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.
Published on January 5, 2010 7:30 am.
Filed under: People and Other People, Quotations Tags: architecture, bruce mau, conceptualization, engineer
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.
Published on January 4, 2010 8:11 am.
Filed under: People and Spaces, Quotations Tags: diverse city, james howard kunstler, jane jacobs, metropolis magazine
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.
Published on December 16, 2009 12:57 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: everyday objects, geography, maps, playgrounds, sampling points, visualizations
Joi Ito posted this week his contribution on neoteny to Seth Godin’s free new e-book What Matters Now:
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.
Published on December 16, 2009 12:20 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: adults, games, joi ito, neoteny, play, russell davies
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:
Published on December 15, 2009 3:05 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Tags: data visualisation, graph, landscape, space data
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 [...]
Published on December 15, 2009 1:02 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Spaces Tags: play, public spaces, rainfall, repositories
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 [...]
Published on December 15, 2009 11:09 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Other People Tags: clusters, models, network behavior
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 [...]
Published on December 15, 2009 10:49 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Other People Tags: Facebook, history of friendship, social networks, utopian vision
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 [...]
Published on December 15, 2009 10:28 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Brands Tags: brands, creative destruction, fallow field, farming
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? [...]
Published on December 15, 2009 12:00 am.
Filed under: Links, People and Spaces Tags: donald shoup, parking meters, sensors
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 [...]
Published on December 14, 2009 11:41 pm.
Filed under: Links, People and Spaces Tags: iphone, translation, urban exploration
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.
Published on December 14, 2009 6:24 pm.
Filed under: Notes on Things Seen, People and Brands Tags: brand, incremental change, iterative, rise of china, Transformation
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 [...]
Published on December 14, 2009 1:26 pm.
Filed under: Ephemera, Links Tags: aesthetics, games, manipulation, parallel paths
