Canuckflack

Steve Heller, in AIGA:

… I cannot tolerate motivational speakers. Their imperious, self-bloated stagecraft is, for me, like listening to chalk screeching on a blackboard. Nonetheless, I know people who draw real inspiration from this twaddle. In fact, at a few conferences I’ve seen audiences become rapt in devotional attention as motivational gurus toss out bromides about how to achieve design nirvana …

Matthew Higgs asked 66 individuals and groups to identify their “seven wonders of the world” as part of a project with Book Works. Here are some of the responses that struck my fancy:

• Bjork
• Repulse Bay, Hong Kong
• Ian Curtis dancing
• The ‘Disappear Here’ billboard from Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero
• The park in Antonioni’s Blow-Up

You know how you’re sitting there, Blackberry, iPhone or smartphone in hand, when you live through a unique but compelling experience? The sort of funny, ironic, startling, refreshing or depressing moment that you just feel it necessary to share?

Or maybe you’re just bored – and you still feel like sharing?

Thanks to micro-blogging and the world of tiny little keyboards, this sort of event gets compressed into a curt, often ungainly 140 character shorthand.

And that means you have to drop adverbs, adjectives, descriptive phrases and ancillary thoughts, all the while hoping that your “followers” are sympatico, similarly culturally attuned, members of the same socio-economic tribe or equally ironic to understand the theory, the thought or the emotion behind your short transmission.

This is a very important point: speaking in very short fragments often forces you to refer to commonly known professional terms and cultural touchstones. That effectively blocks out people new to your community or those that hold a different point of view.

Even without these barriers, it’s really hard to build an effective (and coherent) counterargument in 140 characters.

What’s the happy medium? One Person Trend Stories. Three, four or even five paragraph posts that go beyond the obvious short descriptive sentence to build a proper (sarcastic or ironic) vignette.

• Enough is Enough! One Woman Takes a Stand Against Coffee Shops That Play Really Loud Music
• Testing her Patience: Aging Intellectual Defies Barnes & Noble Cashier
• iDoNotWant! Young Man Says “No, Thanks” to Latest Tech Toy

Honestly, I worry about having a Twitter message being taken out of context. My Twitter stream is populating my Google vanity searches, and many of the messages make no sense.

What about Plurk, I hear some of you wondering?

Umm. No. I’ve tried to work my way through some of those Plurkshops – both live and after the fact. The stream of consciousness commentary and non-sequential contributions really disrupt the flow and make it very hard to identify the wheat from the chaff.

If Twitter is like overhearing conversations on the subway, Plurk is a lot like summer day camp – everyone’s there for the same purpose, following the same activities schedule – but some are keeners, some are dopes and a lot are just trying to fit in with the crowd.

Back in university, there were two or three guys whose most prominent piece of furniture was a giant black performance speaker – the sort of three foot by five foot box normally carted around in the back of a Ford Econoline van, the sort of thing that needed a strong professional amp.

Usually, these guys didn’t even play an instrument or belong to a band – they had made a significant investment in audio equipment so that they could be “da man” when it came time to set up a house party.

“Jesus! Look at the size of that speaker! They’ll hear the music down the street! You da man!”

Made in Queens is the story of a group of young Trinidadian men who wheel around their Queens neighbourhood on BMX bikes – jacked to the max with those old school speakers and decks.

“In this age of obsessive video sharing and social networking, nearly every action is designed and packaged for public consumption. Especially with young people,” says co-director Joe Stevens. “The immed­iate charm of Nick and his crew is that they’re the exact opposite of all that. There is nothing calculated or self-conscious about who they are. They’re just a group of friends doing some­thing to challenge themselves and have some laughs. It’s a story which would have never come from kids who were born here.”

Here’s the trailer:

h/t Creative Review blog

[tags] Made in Queens, amps [/tags]

A former television repair centre, found on a backstreet here in Ottawa. The sign hangs over a roll-up steel door. This was personalized and convenient service, allowing you to drive your car or truck right into the service bay so your oversized television console could be brought in for repair with relatively little fuss.

The font choice is remarkably clean and modern for a business so obviously rooted in the 1960s and 1970s.

Let’s remember: when we used to talk about “portable TVs,” we meant bulky and heavy 13″ units, often with a built-in VCR. And rabbit ears.

Those units, as the sign notes, you could drag around to the side door yourself.

Over the past seven or eight years, it has become ridiculously easy to buy and set up a 42″ television – by yourself. I still remember a time when, as you were moving into a new house, you had to decide where the television was going to be placed – because it took two burly movers to put it in place, and it would never be moved again.

Mercedes Benz may produce marvelous vehicles, but their internal corporate videos are really quite horrible.

Someone, somewhere, said “This is EXACTLY what I was looking for!”

A workable solution to information overload, or simply insane? Information Aesthetics tells us about a novel approach to categorizing and classifying books in a large collection, based on a very imaginative book sleeve and an index based on a gradient of colours.

As a person who is genetically predisposed to wander in the stacks of libraries and bookstores, pulling books and pamphlets from shelves in a quest for something novel, informative or simply startling, I can sympathize with the desire for a more orderly and intuitive classification system.

Unfortunately, this classification system presents a fundamental conflict: it attempts to provide a simple visual cue to a very complex problem.

Let’s remember, there are still two camps of book classification: the Dewey die hards versus the Library of Congress obsessives.

And each breaks the classification problem down into a complex combination of letters and numbers.

The designer’s goal (explanation here) seems to have been to free the details of classification from the confined space of the shelf and the poor design of the contemporary library sticker:

“Notice that the book’s cover loses it’s importance in the library, it is squashed between this book and that book. Not to be confused with a book store, this is a well organized storage space. It is the spine that one look’s for and it is the call number label that allows one to find. With so much pressure on the call number label, I found it to be tiny and inconsistent, appearing to be slapped on carelessly.

Now imagine a wall of books, it appears to be quite disorganized in terms of the book’s information, a mismach a textures, typefaces and colours. The information inevitably gets lost within itself. I Initially wanted to cover the books individually with a standard removable sleeve that I would design displaying all of the book’s information in a clean, efficient and legible manner; however, it took about 30 seconds in the encyclopedia section to feel how boring and unbearable this solution would make one’s library experience.

The trickiest part was realizing that having the same template for every book did not ease one’s book search, but rather cause the book to completely to disappear within the others, making it impossible to see or stand out. All signs of curiosity vanish.”

An appealing design concept, but one that raises the colour of the sleeve above all the other qualities of the book:

• the age of the binding
• the texture of the title on the spine
• the style of binding
• the book size
• the juxtaposition of similarly bound books (perhaps in a series, or by the same publisher)

With this system, design overpowers the atmosphere and idiosyncracy of the library: the sense of exploration and possibility for chance discovery is replaced by a dominating colour scheme and an eagerness to impose consistency and conformity. Fashion over content, acceptable behaviour over eccentricity.

Isn’t that what we have librarians for?

Imagine yourself driving along, singing along to some horrific AC song like:

• El DeBarge’s “Who’s Johnny”
• “Electric Youth” by Debbie Gibson
• “Ears of Tin” by Jethro Tull
• “She’s Gone” by Hall and Oates

Have you ever turned, at that very moment, and realized that one if not more people are staring at you?

Well, behold the majestic combination of wonderful/shocking music the guys at Popdose have lined up in the latest post of Bottom Feeders – the ass end of the 80s.

I took this picture because I thought the sign was funny: then I noticed the extreme contrast between the marketing promise and the industrial waste lying around it. The adult toy store, obviously, is undergoing renovation.

But some of that industrial detritus isn’t related to the construction.

Let’s assume you work for a government body that is deeply involved in highly contentious issues – issues that are very interesting (and frustrating) to communities both online and offline. Let’s also assume that your organization has very little chance of changing the fundamental policies and procedures that frame these issues in the public’s eyes.

In other words, you’re largely a punching bag, buffeted by public opinion, proposals and criticism from activists and civil society groups, and general incredulity from the public. Is it worth developing a proactive social media program? It’s always worthwhile to put passive social media measures into place – extensive monitoring of the conversations and debates taking place online, the measurement of shifting opinion and perception among your various communities, perhaps some element of limited participation in comment fields and on discussion boards.

But is it worth the effort to launch a blog or similar long term initiative if your comment fields will get filled with criticism, claims that your social media work is simply parroting or reinforcing your traditional media work, or growing references to critical reports, video clips and commentary that undermines the very point you were trying to make (see this post from the Transportation Safety Administration blog post where they try to explain the relatively small numbers of people actually stopped by no-fly lists)?

What if your efforts to keep comment fields relevant and abuse-free means you effectively build in discontinuity into your so-called “conversation”? Take, for example, the purgatory established for non-serious comments on the UK Identity and Passport Service consultation blog, mylifemyid.org? Or the cutting criticism found at the foot of the launch posting for the same site?

What’s the real question when considering your options? Is your organization ready to take a beating in the name of consultation, openness and conversation? After all, if your daily business is to argue the benefits of an unpopular policy or program, do you have the tools, the staff or even the operational flexibility to reflect and absorb any of the criticism or constructive commentary you are sure to receive as part of a social media campaign?

Or should your approach to social media be more self serving? Forget all those promises of access, change, conversation, progress and participative government touted by aspirational and inspirational social media consultants – why not just create a blog and accompanying campaign as part of an effort to engage your critics on as many battlefields as possible?

After all, you can’t rebut the argument if you don’t even have a ticket to the debate.

In some cases, it may be useful for a government organization to create a blog and implement other social media tactics to argue their side – even if the readers and commenters will have no hope of effecting any change AT ALL.

The key, as always, is use the tool effectively and understand the terrain upon which you have chosen to engage your enemy. It’s go big or go home. It’s time to break out of your institutional language, your ingrained reticence to confront opposition and your dependence upon senior administrators to speak on behalf of the organization. That’s probably why the TSA blog recently called out all its lurkers – the large majority of the 4000 unique readers per week* that the TSA blog receives – to submit questions to be answered in coming weeks.

It’s almost the Rocky School of Social Media (trademark pending) – when faced with overwhelming odds, continue to engage your opponent, seek out their weak spots, and hope that the more supportive members of the general public help push you through to the end. Paint the benefits of your issue in the most positive light possible, and simply be seen engaging your detractors.

After all, if they’re going to criticize you anyway, why not draw them to a site where you control the colour scheme and the blogroll?

*there’s a metric for you – compare your uniques and comment traffic to that of the TSA blog, which is undoubtedly a lightning rod for criticism on public policy issues.

*cross-posted from sosaidthe.org*

[tags] govt 2.0, egovernment, corporate blog, government blog [/tags]

• Want to see how the New York Times designed the GUI for their new iPhone app – in about 200 words? Felix Sockwell sheds some light.
• Slinkachu is the artist behind Little People – A Tiny Street Art Project that poses miniature people, furniture, vehicles and features in real-life streetscapes. He also prepared a piece for a gallery show in Stavanger, Norway that featured the gruesome and indiscriminate death of a 10 mm high businessman. Oh, is there no miniature God????
• Somehow, Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg are discussing the act of observation when they intertwine observation, design and Repo Man.

“… In fact, in Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton’s character makes a comment about this very phenomenon—something like, “You’re thinking about a plate o’ shrimp, and then suddenly someone’ll say ‘plate o’ shrimp’ out of the blue….” And of course, through the whole movie, signs for “plate o’ shrimp” are everywhere. …” (AIGA)

• Al Gore may know how many napkins you take, but Chuck Norris will make sure you never sneeze again.

You’ve been there. You’ve got a small budget but you want big impact for your next team building exercise. You need a motivational speaker that will make a big impression and possibly knock their socks off.

Well, do I have a deal for you.

“… King Kong Bundy, the 400-pound behemoth known for once breaking a midget wrestler’s back. Flying Bundy in and putting him up at the La Quinta will cost $1,600 …” (Cleveland Scene)

Of course, that cost is just to fly the man in to make a celebrity appearance a minor league wrestling event in Ohio. The speech might be extra.

On a personal note, King Kong Bundy and Hulk Hogan were the two wrestlers I always chose when playing the stand-up arcade game Wrestlemania. And, for your viewing pleasure, the Bundy/Hogan cage match from Wrestlemania 2 (with the added pleasure of over-the-top colour from Jesse “the body” Ventura.

[tags] King Kong Bundy, team building, teambuilding, motivational speaker, speaker [/tags]

The latest ad from Discovery Networks: the world is awesome.

h/t @ryananderson

Daycare facilities for 5000 – children, that is. 350 employees. Grammy Award winners in the choir.

That’s how Joel Osteen draws tens of thousands to the converted Compaq Center for his weekly sermons. But the key is heartfelt customer commitment to the product.

” … [Joel Osteen] believes, resolutely, in the value of the product he is crafting in his office on those quiet mornings. “Very rarely will you find a company that produces a widget where everyone is mentally and spiritually into producing a better widget,” Osteen says. “There’s a purpose behind what we’re doing. We believe in our widget. We’re doing more than giving people a good time or a better toothbrush, because it’s hard to put in your heart and soul and sacrifice so much to make a better toothbrush.” … ” (Portfolio)

[tags] marketing, church marketing, superchurch, evangelism [/tags]