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…
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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.
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 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 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 08.09
In a post this week on the ongoing problems of subscription music services, Anthony Volodkin aptly summarizes the perilous landscape of the space from a user’s perspective:
Read the full post...So [instead] they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Brands Published Oct 27.09
There exists no shortage of naysayers regarding this particular tech (especially on the video’s YouTube page). The notion of reading electrical impulses transmitted by eye movement for gesture control has long been a future tech darling, dating back to (at least) the era of Firefox (the Clint Eastwood film, not the Mozilla browser).
Clearly, there are abundant opportunities to bring a mature version of this technology to market in interesting ways. I’ll spare you the tedium of enumerating them.
What came to mind immediately, though, was a seemingly lower-tech problem (for which eyeball gestures might well be overkill), namely: How can we apply online following behavior to offline entities?
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 26.09
Folks were much agog this week as the above video made the rounds – first at New Scientist, and subsequently picked up over at Beyond the Beyond and elsewhere.
Lost in some the dialogue was that both the video and the discussion surrounding it focused not on ’seeing through walls’, as implied by the title, but rather around corners. This is, to be sure, a semantic point – and one that does little to diminish the wow factor of seeing around corners via augmented reality. Still, I was drawn in by the promise of X-Ray-Spex – not, of course, the folks who brought us the seminal ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours’, but rather the idea of peering through the myriad walls that stand between us and those things we covet (or might covet, if only we could see them).
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Spaces Published Oct 26.09
I’ve been ruminating all weekend on this video, created by the good folks at Moving Brands. In summary: they found that a white paper on ‘Living Brands’ dated quickly, as is the nature of such documents. Rather than republish the document in a new iteration, they decided to employ augmented reality as a means of updating the document in real time. Essentially, anyone who has purchased the publication will find that the document is truly evergreen.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Brands Published Oct 21.09
A few days back, I tripped across a brilliant idea called Thounds, best-described via the video below:
For those of you without the requisite patience for video viewing, Thounds is a social platform for the recording and sharing of musical snippets, which can be added-to collaboratively by other users within the network.
This is not a terrifically [...]
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Other People Published Oct 20.09 Read the full post...
Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 16.09
Project Natal Xbox 360 Announcement:
“When the Wii entered our lives and living rooms, it completely transformed gaming into a rich and more social experience. Project Natal is another revolutionary development to the gaming industry. It starts to break down the barriers between generations (even more so than the Wii), and between gaming and entertainment.”
via Nicola Davies
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 14.09
#garden is a piece that investigates the social media impulse. Several potted plants are set up in the exhibition space, rigged with electronic sensors and a water pump. Based on sensor data, the #garden will communicate its mood nightly via Twitter, a social media “microblogging” platform. Twitter users can give the #garden water by responding to its posts.
via Vimeo
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Information Published Oct 13.09
Funny how meaningless the graphic above has become, and how quickly.
Read the full post...Categorized as: Notes on Things Seen, People and Devices Published Oct 12.09
I think that the training from traditional businesses causes people to focus on minimizing the downside instead of single-mindedly focusing on the upside. However, in a venture investment, the MOST you will lose is the money you have invested. Getting 1 million of the 5 million that you invested back from a liquidation is not nearly as important as making sure you’re in the next big hit and that the investments that have potential achieve their potential and find their acquirers and partners.
via Joi Ito’s Weblog
Read the full post...Categorized as: Ephemera, Notes on Things Seen
A frequently-updated, chaffe-free collection of design goodness.
A blog from Khoi Vinh, the Design Director of NYTimes.com, and a great source for design and engagement conversation.
The official website for Cabinet Magazine – a quarterly devoted to a liberal interpretation of the arts and the ways in which we engage them.
Bobby Solomon’s fantastic blog covers all manner of design-related significa – from gallery shows and events to the latest found creations. Updated with great frequency and dedication.
A blog from the magazine of the same name, devoted to the study of objects – and the relationships of those objects to the people who use and engage them. Always intriguing.