Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 social innovation. Edited by jérémy dumont, strategic planner in FRANCE

guide to creating Persona

 

 

Posted by Tony Fish

Happiness Encounter With Stefan Sagmeister In Philadelphia

Some of the PSFK team visited a new exhibition by design pioneer Stefan Sagmeister over the weekend. His new show at the ICA Philadelphia is a reflection on happiness, his pursuit of it and his learnings about the subject.

While the Happy Show features the culmination of years of work, Sagmeister’s art seems to be very connected with the current infographic design trend and also our curiosity of the quantified self. And while, he is neither a chart-maker nor a data-diarist like Nick Felton, he uses his skills of design to bring to life his thesis on happiness.

Some portions of the exhibit are interactive: A camera looked for smiles and when a museum goer stopped to grin through a picture frame, a sculpted ‘Step Up To It’ illuminated in several colors. Elsewhere visitors could wave their hands and play with a web with the words ‘Being Not Truthful Works Against Me’ projected on it.

A more analog interactive feature asked visitors to submit drawings of happiness (no smiley faces allowed!) — or to take an activity card and walk through the exhibit responding to suggestions on the card: these included walking with just one shoe or with your fly open.

Another exhibit wanted to measure how happy the audience was by asking visitors to take a gum-ball from a row of machines numbered one through to ten. These numbers stand for your relative level of happiness. As more visitors attend and take a ball, the level of each machine will be a kind of graph to show how happy people are (My 4 year old son Cy went straight for 10, I didn’t quite know what to pick).

Graphics on a corridor wall bring statistics and sociological theories to life. Sagmeister presented Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and various stats about life, salaries, sex and happiness.

It’s an impressive show and if you find yourself in the city of brotherly love, then the Samgemister Happy Show is a must

via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2012/04/sagmeister-show-philadelphia.html#ixzz1rdUoVy6m

How Coldcalling Deadmau5 On Twitter Earned One Artist His Big Break

by Greg Kumparak
on March 19, 2012

When I hear anyone talking about “the power of social media”, my brain immediately flips to thoughts of self-appointed gurus with uber-douche titles like “Twitter Ninja” or “Friendster Rockstar”. I can’t help it. It’s pretty much pavlovian at this point.

In this case, it really is a story of the power of social media — or really, how the Internet, a Twitter account, and a whole lot of skill and luck has earned one guy his big shot with one of the biggest artists in the world.

This past weekend, the hugely-popular electronica artist deadmau5 (pronounced “dead mouse”, not “dead-mow-5″) started working on a new track called “The Veldt”, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s 1950s short story of the same name.

Rather than locking himself away from the world for days to return with a new track in hand, however, deadmau5 introduced a bit of a twist to his workflow: he’d stream it all live. Every glorious minute of the process, from the sampling of the audio (including using the sound of him clapping on his own bare bum as one of the tracks) to the surprise attacks by his cat Professor Meowington (a cat with more Facebook fans than most bands), would be streamed to anyone who cared to watch.

As the track came together, deadmau5 mentioned that he’d need to start figuring out what to do for the vocal track soon — and that’s when things started to get really, really cool.

Having been watching the stream throughout and wishing he could be a part of it, up-and-coming house producer Chris James took the mention of vocals as a challenge. After tying together bits and pieces from the stream with working samples that had been released throughout the weekend, James came up with lyrics (also inspired by the short story) and began laying his tracks on top of deadmau5′ work.

He finished up, exported, and, on a whim, sent it off to deadmau5 via Twitter:

Chris James @ChrisJOffical

@deadmau5 did some unique shoegaze-ish vocals over "The Veldt" based on the story. Hope you enjoy soundcloud.com/chrisjamesoffi…

18 Mar 12

• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

and… nothing happened.

At least at first. Assuming that it was more of the same junk that people cold called him with all the time, deadmau5 mentioned the tweet but didn’t click through. After some assurance from the fans watching back at home that he should give it a listen, he loaded it up. The next tweet he sent:

Chris James @ChrisJOffical 18 Mar 12

@deadmau5 did some unique shoegaze-ish vocals over "The Veldt" based on the story. Hope you enjoy soundcloud.com/chrisjamesoffi…

deadmau5

• ✔

@deadmau5

@ChrisJOffical DUDE... YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???? god DAMN!

18 Mar 12

• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

deadmau5 moved to make Chris’ vocals a part of the official track almost immediately, pausing only to listen to Chris’ vocalized mix a few more times.

Within minutes, he had Chris on the phone. Within hours, deadmau5 had pulled his manager and Chris together on speakerphone — while still live on the stream — to work out the finer details (“I need a second verse; also, can you do 3 stereo stems, with effects on a separate track?”).

One viewer managed to capture the big moment of discovery (Heads up for the folks at work: there’s swearin’ aplenty in here):

For the curious, a number of fans have ripped unfinished renditions of the The Veldt from the stream (complete with Chris’ vocal track beginning around 2 and a half minutes in) and put them up on Youtube, albeit with all the background noise and limited fidelity inherent to ripping audio from a live stream:

Regardless of how you feel about electronic music or even this specific song, you’ve gotta admit: how this all went down is fairly incredible. Armed with nothing but a fistful of talent and a Twitter account, a mostly-unheard-of artist has managed to get his work incorporated into a track by a Grammy-nominated king of his industry. The Internet is wonderful.

[Thanks for the heads up on all of this, Thomas!]

10 Tools for Creating Great Info-Graphics

1. http://creately.com/- a great tool for creating online diagrams.

2.http://mind42.com- the best tool for mind mapping I’ve found. Create them yourself, edit and share with in groups and more.

3. http://www.tagxedo.com/- create word cloud based info-graphics

4. http://visual.ly/- create visually appealing info-graphics and share what you have already created with everyone.

5. http://www.gapminder.org/- Explore the world’s most important trends.

6. http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/- create visualizations and data sets using a variety of options.

7. https://cacoo.com/- create diagrams online with real time collaboration.

8. http://www.mindomo.com/- mind mapping made easy

9. http://charts.hohli.com- create a variety of online charts

10. http://www.sacmeq.org/statplanet/- a visual data and map making application

Have you used any of these? If so, which is your favorite?

My Best Thing screening at PS1 in New York

My Best Thing screening in Los Angeles

http://www.francesstark.com/wp/news/ 

Marc Foxx Gallery is very happy to present this new work
currently on view in ILLUMInations at the Venice Biennale

My Best Thing
by Frances Stark

Friday June 17,  2011,   6–9 pm

We will begin screening the video in the main gallery at 7 pm.
The video is approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes

Beer, wine and snacks will be served from 6–7 pm

This will coincide with the opening of our summer exhibition

Please direct any questions or definite RSVP’s to gallery@marcfoxx.com

MARC FOXX
6150 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA  90048
Tel 323 857 5571
Fax 323 857 5573
www.marcfoxx.com

Posted in exhibitions | Tagged Marc Foxx Gallery, My Best Thing, Venice Biennale | Leave a comment

I’VE HAD IT AND A HALFPosted on April 14, 2011 by admin

“What will say, finally, when you have seen the whole of all the parts as well as the parts of all the parts?”*

 

 

FRANCES STARK PERFORMS I’VE HAD IT AND A HALF

Due to the adult themes of some of the material contained in this afternoon’s program, this performance may not be suitable for all audiences.

Last summer Frances Stark staged a performance at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen entitled I’ve Had it and I’ve also Had it, which reworked a musical that debuted there in 1951. In the original “I’ve Had It!” a bellhop loses his girlfriend to a critically acclaimed composer, who is in town working on a new commissioned piece. To win her back he exposes the pretentious composer as a fraud by demonstrating, for a room full of critics, that the new composition is actually a familiar pop song, played backward. Stark’s performance I’ve Had it and a Half is an epilogue for that piece, as well as a prologue for her a new theatrical production (commissioned by Performa) which will debut in New York City in the fall.

In conjunction with the exhibition All of this and nothing

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.

Parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00pm.

Hammer Museum

*Witold Gombrowicz

Be part of this year’s Mishmash Music/Video/Remix competition. Create your own short story, video art or music video using a mix of high res video, stills and music from Getty Images.

Be part of this year’s Mishmash Music/Video/Remix competition. Create your own short story, video art or music video using a mix of high res video, stills and music from Getty Images. There are great prizes up for grabs and it’s great exposure for your work.

gettyimages.com/mishmash

Mishmash 2012 Trailer from Getty Images on Vimeo.

#mishmashremix Check out this quirky Mishmash music video The Snip by top London A/V producers Hexstatic

 

creative commons a fight for creativity "We realize there’s an inherent conflict between innovative digital culture and archaic copyright laws"

 

http://creativecommons.org/culture

Our goal at Creative Commons is to increase cultural creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available to the public for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing. We realize there’s an inherent conflict between innovative digital culture and archaic copyright laws. Our licenses help bridge that conflict so that the Internet can reach its full potential.

We support the culture of the commons both on a user level and an institutional level.

 Nine Inch Nails Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, a collection of 36 new instrumental tracks that are available to the world under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. As Trent Reznor of NIN said on release, “This music arrived unexpectedly as the result of an experiment. The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as… something…The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we’re able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed – from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download.”
	Wikipedia Wikipedia migrated its licensing structure from the GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The world’s largest and most cited collaborative encyclopedia made this move via a community vote and for good reason. By changing to a CC BY-SA license, Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) allows content to legally flow in and out of the site with ease, enabling one of the great cultural resources of the digital revolution to legally interact with an endless array of similar cultural institutions.
	flickr flickr was one of the first major online communities to incorporate Creative Commons licensing options into its user interface, giving photographers around the world the easy ability to share photos on terms of their choosing. As the Flickr community grew, so did the number of CC-licensed images — currently there are well over 100 million on the site — establishing Flickr as the Web’s single largest source of CC-licensed content. Flickr’s services have grown to include a CC image portal and advanced CC search features, making the site one of world’s most useful resources for discovering creativity that is available for free and legal sharing, use, and remixing
	Google Google has utilized CC licenses in a variety of instances throughout their digital services. Either by enabling CC-search capabilities through their main search engine, image search engine, and book search engine, or by allowing users to CC license their own content in Picasa, Google Knol, and documentation at Google Code. YouTube, which is Google-owned, has also used CC-licenses in their audio-swap program, allowing users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar-sounding CC-licensed tracks, as well as enabling CC-licensing for select institutions.
	Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was one of the first major cultural institutions to utilize CC licensing, releasing their classical music podcast The Concert under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license in September of 2006. By allowing the free sharing and re-distribution of their podcast, the Museum has been able to reach a wide ranging audience with The Concert seeing over one million downloads from over 116 different countries, creating a positive promotional tool for the museum and its classical music program.
	Amsterdam Historical Museum In March 2010, The Amsterdam Historical Museum (WAAG) released its complete collection online under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license, allowing the free redistribution and reuse of the collection for noncommercial purposes. This was the first time in the museum’s history that its collection has been available to the public. The collection contains over 70,000 objects dating back to the Middle Ages and is updated on a bi-weekly basis.
	National September 11th Memorial Museum In December of 2008, the National September 11th Memorial Museum launched its Artist Registry, allowing the public the ability to add their 9/11 inspired works to the museum’s collection. The museum allowed users to designate a CC license while uploading, encouraging community submissions in a progressive and socially responsible fashion.

User-Generated Culture

Whether you’re a photographer, writer, filmmaker, or DJ, our licenses can help make your work part of the commons. The Internet is a multiplier of cultural innovation. Creative Commons copyright licenses make it easier for individual creators of culture to express themselves and to identify the freedoms they want their creativity to carry on the Internet.

We support user-generated culture in three key ways.

1. We generate copyright licenses that anyone can adopt. The License Chooser tool helps you choose a copyright license that’s right for you based on how you want your work to be used and where. Anyone can obtain a license and embed it into their web site. It’s really that easy.
2. We partner with cultural sharing platforms like Wikipedia, Flickr, and blip.tv to provide their users with the option of licensing their works with Creative Commons copyright licenses. By embedding Creative Commons licenses right into these systems, we can help users create and share their work on a large scale.
3. We work with technology companies like Google and Yahoo! to make commons content easier to discover. Having tools is one thing, but they aren’t useful if people can’t find them.

Institutional Culture

The role of individuals in the cultural commons is growing, but a huge amount of our cultural heritage still resides within institutions. We work with museums, galleries, libraries, digital archives, and other cultural organizations to bring Creative Commons licenses into their infrastructures to manage their materials and make them more widely available.

Creative Commons is about building infrastructure for a new kind of culture  — one that is both a folk culture, and wildly more sophisticated than anything before it.

Have your own CC-licensed project to share with the world? Add it to our Case Study Wiki.

Magical Nihilism, Cognitive Cities and a Mary Poppins World during the Copenhagen Design Week

Andreea Hirica / Design Thinking Network

 Photo Credits:  Nicolai Perjesi

 

What happens when one designs an interaction between these four brains in the same room in one of the most empathic cities in the world? An interdisciplinary time space “metamatterzoom” (Dan Hill) journey with design merging multiple disciplines to address current global challenges such as: social paradigm shifts, NPD, service and market innovation and eventually the future of mankind. 

Dan Hill, Matt Jones, Matt Cottam, Karsten Schmidt

Photo Credits:  Nicolai Perjesi

The journey’s starting point: Copenhagen Design Week, at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, as the Danish design is never aesthetic only, but about improvement, upcycling, prototyping and iterating; a continuous “back and forth journey zooming beyond and into the (dark) matter” (Dan Hill).

 

 Interdisciplinary computation design

How does design get to connect software, linguistics, mathematics and philosophy? According to Karsten Schmidt, the interdisciplinary design draws inspiration into the design processes from different disciplines for each project; this helps designers keep themselves inspired from life itself in order to push the leading edge of thought and creation and not limit themselves to the design world trying to come up with something new from that place. Computation design is one area which makes the most out of this type of interdisciplinarity simply because the computer gets to decode, analyze and unfold the processes and patterns behind different sources of inspiration. Computation design creates digital virtual processes and models of processes to actually solve real design challenges and tasks. By working with codes to develop new design processes, designers get to stop thinking about objects (regardless of their nature: biological, physical, synthetic, etc) and start to acknowledge that any object is based on an operation, set of processes which caused that object to begin with. Being able to decode patterns or generate new ones through computation design solves another current challenge: transforming complexity into simplicity; and also meets the challenge the other way around: uses the simultaneous interaction of multiple simple processes to generate complexity.

 

toxiclibs showreel 2010 from postspectacular on Vimeo.

 

 

 

For Karsten Schmidt, each product developed this way is becoming an open source to be taken further, enhanced and supported into expanding the field of interdisciplinary design. At it’s core, open source means being free of limitations, free to continuously make modifications and share them; through this, open source means continuously generating new patterns and processes.

When designers start thinking about technology not as an object, but as a process, they become aware that technology is not something we buy in a shop and play with it, but moreover something we all shape and take part in. Or as François Lenfant highlighted during the “What Keeps you Up at Night: how can design help?” conference: “we can innovate in new technologies or we can innovate in the way we use and behave with technology”

Even though in the business world automation has usually been associated with jobs loss, nowadays it can only mean an enhancement of our core, unique, human abilities. Or as IFTF confirms: “machines don’t just replace what we do, they change the nature of what we do: by extending our capabilities, they set new expectations for what’s possible and create new performance standards and needs.

(…) Over the next decade, while machines will replace humans in some tasks, they’ll also amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before. We’ll enter into a new kind of partnership with these machines—one that will shine light on the unique comparative advantages of humans: thinking, creativity, spontaneity, adaptability, and improvisation.”

Here's a Karsten Schmidt example illustrating what human uniqueness can do with the machine: “a code enabled digital installation of endless animations responding to an ever-changing soundtrack. The bespoke generative design did, and still could, spawn unique audio-visual films every day, FOREVER.”

 

Forever at the Victoria & Albert Museum from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

 

 

Mary Poppins and the shifted paradigm game: Poppinscom

“Imagine Mary Poppins isn’t a witch but a techno witch: a time traveler who just came back from the future with sufficiently advanced technology to make a spoon full of sugar go down. If you watch Mary Poppins without pretending that is magic, but thinking that it’s technology it simply has completely different complexity” (Matt Jones).

  

In Matt’s Poppinscom world, the tape measure can be a flexible device backed on to a super google, gathering and mapping social networking sentiment data from this enormous database (the facebooks and twitters of the Poppinscom world) which afterwards 3D prints the results live, on demand.

Photo Credits: Matt Jones

“What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world” Matt Jones

As the computation revolution made it incredibly cheap to put intelligence in every small thing we use and while most of us take this it for granted in 99% of the cases, what happens when we will have to accommodate our lives not only to living with robots but even designing things which are both relevant (aesthetic, attractive) to humans and robots as well?

According to Matt Jones, there is already a weird set of relations developing between us and these things that may be products, are being built, designed and at the same time have autonomous behavior: are they products, peers, companions, slaves? How do they explore and open a completely different set of human behavior in our relationship with machines (designed objects)? How much can we make things human: projecting human qualities, features into designed things (objects)?

How does this change our behavior? How does that position us as beings?

“As machines augment and replace humans in various tasks, their largest impact may be less obvious: their presence among us will change not only how we see ourselves, but also how we see things around us through their eyes. (…) The combination of humans partnering with machines and using superior strategies opens up new worlds for exploration.” (IFTF ) Or as Dan Hill would ask: “how do we extend the capabilities of people through cognitive cities and urban informatics?”

 

Designing for the in-between

Since Kevin Kelly is already on the search for the Internet Intelligence, interdisciplinary interactive designers like Matt are also wondering and setting the stage for what would mean to design products, service, experiences which would be comprehensible and aesthetically attractive for the in-between world: both humans as well as artificial intelligence. How would life feel when living in the middle: in between the senses of both systems and having to be decodable and attractive for both.

 Photo Credits: Matt Jones

 

Kinetic urban behavior

While Matt Jones is firing up imagination with concepts like adding human qualities to designed cyber companions, Dan Hill brings a kinetic urban behavior example of projecting empathic, human qualities into cities and city objects: The Lonely Traffic Light (a student project by Silje Johansen, the University of Sydney). “An existing traffic light was electronically augmented to enable it to ‘interact’ with its users, even appearing to express emotions to waiting pedestrians. Small proximity sensors recorded the requests from pedestrians to cross the street (i.e. when users pressed the green light request button), and the exact states of the traffic lights themselves (i.e. captured by a light sensor attached in front of the green pedestrian light). In addition, a rudimentary form of artificially intelligent personality was implemented through a rule-based behavior algorithm. The output mechanism of the traffic light consisted of text-to-speech messages which were emitted by a hidden, miniature speaker, as well as two real-time Twitter streams (e.g. http://twitter.com/lonelylight ); this revealed the objective actual state of the traffic light and its emotional response about its current situation (e.g. lonely, bored, stressed, all based on the sequence and time stamp of past events). The in-situ implementation of this project proved the potential for making existing urban furniture more interactive or responsive by simple augmentation, in particular as a way to provoke discussion or encourage contemplation of passers-by.“ (Source: Dan Hill and Andrew Vande Moere – Research through Design in the Context of Teaching Urban Computing).

One of the main purposes of cities data mapping is understanding our relationship with the urban environment and the systems around us in more detail, together with making us aware of such relationships, all the way to altering or training your behavior by interacting at a more intimate level with the urban ecosystem.

 

LonelyLight (2009) from Silje Johansen on Vimeo.

 

 

Information as “fabric” and the new soft city

“As digital materials get to fuse with physical fabrics, cities and buildings in themselves become more like an interactive product, a piece of industrial design or a piece of interaction design, rather than just a piece of architecture”, explains Dan Hill introducing the question:

How does information itself work as a material? (a new material within the cities along with steel, glass and concrete).

In this Post-occupancy evaluation and visualization of public wi-fi case study Dan Hill enjoys exploring visualization of the wi-fi service which runs throughout the Infozone and Knowledge Walk areas of the State Library of Queensland by mapping the wi-fi network as an accessorizing layer winding around the library like a live ecosystem symbiotically connected with the building itself. Together with interesting ways of visualizing the use of wi-fi mapped onto use of space and new ways of discerning spatial usage patterns by exploring how the variability of wi-fi maps onto the informal use of space, Dan Hill is also confirming some of the bright architects’ hunches and visions of libraries as the new cathedrals of our century (Francine Houben, while working on the Birmingham library). “The free public wi-fi within the State Library of Queensland transforms the usage of space completely and it even changes the way the library thinks of itself.” (Dan Hill). The library’s space is being used 23 hours a day and has become more active, with at least 10 people around almost all the time; besides the existence of a guardian, the place it’s safe in itself anyway due to the typology of users: they never had any issue in two years, no one has ever stolen their laptops, not even the flip flops they get to take off around 6 am. Very often people are going in groups and to meet friends; most of them have Internet at home, but they deliberately come to the library to use the wi-fi because the space inspires them. The users Dan Hill encountered are legal consultants, photographers uploading their photos, or artists using the library as their studio.

 

Wi-fi mapping of its peacks and weaknesses in signal to give people a tangible sense of how the wi-fi would look like if it were a physical shape.

“Muti-sensory interaction design now merges with architecture, planning and an urbanism informed by a gentle ambient drizzle of everyday data - and so a new soft city is being created, alive once again to the touch of its citizens.“ the Interaction Design Association

 

 

 

"Think Human"

As one of the strongest European design tradition cultures, “Danish design is starting to mix and combine the industrial design with the digital design” (Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's Head of Design) so which better place to gather together the grey matter of these four brains and fire it up into envisioning life on Earth as (un)usual, then having them bringing into a broader perspective the Copenhagen Design Week’s central theme “Think Human”?

Think humanized technology, think life in between and through the eyes of the machine, think empathic cities, think a technology enabled kind of magic.

The Design Thinking Behind This Year’s Cannes Lions

By Andreea Hirica

Original post: The Design Thinking Network

Photo: The Inspiration Room

Design Thinking signs started to appear behind the Cannes Lions creatives this year resulting into some human centered, life improving, problem solving  works. Unlike the usual adland creative thinking that sparks from the brand’s universe, product's features, consumer’s culture or cultural artifacts, the Design Thinking inspiration will always spring from the core of a human approach in order to solve an existing problem, to seize an opportunity or both (see HBR ‘s report). This is the type of Design Thinking inspiration which is most likely to lead to innovations such as: category shift, opening up of new markets, market growth, NPDs (see OECD’s The Oslo Manual page 49)  and more importantly, improving people’s lives by bringing leaps of progress upon us.

Here are some of the creative works from this year’s Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in which (deliberately or not) Design Thinking played an important role through: Opening up new markets by turning a traditional product with a very old fashion audience into an "iconic" one: The Holy Bible. Creating art out of people’s “daily” activities. Designing an artistic anthropological review from the Coat Era to the QR Code days. Or a case study of Value Co–creation and Value in Use : the Pay with a Tweet campaign: "what began as a promotion became a whole new way to trade content online" a whole new way to generate value.

The most spectacular Design Thinking problems solved this year, however, didn’t come from the Design class, but from categories such: Media, Activation, Direct. As one of the chapters with the highest need to re-invent itself, Media had some of the most meaningful Design Thinking works: Media solving problems and improving people's lives. It's people not news anymore at the heart of good media.  The changing the game and shifting the category type of media. As well as our daily life as the media.

Photo credits: Coloribus       

Two trends have been unanimously spotted at the festival this year:  Technology and “Emerging markets”. Thus a relevant design thinking case study comes from such a country. A case study of national branding through deliberately co-creating the patriotic sentiment.

 

It’s been long since a brand managed to have an impact on the cultural collective conscience in such an authentic way and really start a national sentiment shift. There’s  still a long way to go for Romania’s rebranding (especially among Romanians), but ROM  was a smart brave step: a case study of national innovation out of Need: a Romanians' need to completely replace the lenses through which their national value perception was being formed). Not for being my childhood chocolate, but ROM has been addressing some of the most important cultural socio-economic hotspots: low national pride, brain drain, declining economic situation. Using reversed psychology in a relevant and funny way by mirroring people’s daily behavior, ROM triggered awareness on all the national values that people were taking for granted. ROM’s design thinking approach has set a precedent for Romanians and for other emerging markets inhabitants facing similar problems.

Besides this year’s campaigns, here are also the most important Cannes Lions Design Thinking concepts, reinforcing once again the melting boundaries between disciplines with the Design Thinking processes drawing inspiration out of the various experiences of our daily lives:

• Democratizing the fire of creativity by bringing it among mortals: anyone can and should be creative  living creativity as a verb, a daily real life inspiration.  Which easily leads to democratizing success: any brand can be successful, not only the the highest media spending ones as during the old fashion days.
• Emerging Markets .
  
• Cultural design thinking: “designing forward to solve geopolitical tensions and stalemates” rather than: “they’re the bad guys, we must bomb them”.
• Interdisciplinary: check out the way Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam sees planning: by planners who aren’t planners, together with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s approach to interdisciplinarity: “some of the most futuristic businesses come from people who are unconstrained by what’s already there.” 
• UX design and  beyond: from Advertising to UX design (slide 25).
• Entrepreneurship: agencies acting like tech start-ups, reinforced by John Hegarty’s vision for the future of the ad business: "own the product, act like an investor".
  
• Qualitative peace vs fast peace (especially in innovation): check out what being the third vs being the first can mean for the tech industry. And indeed, innovation is important but not at the cost of the UX.
  
The Human purpose of a brand (slide 82). As best brands were not born to be most profitable but to make life better (slide 5), some of the most meaningful human centered brands are celebrated by the annual Act Responsible exhibition.

• People: in this Cannes Lions influencer data visualization people come on the sixth place in conversation, “right after” #cannes and #lions
•  
• And finally, the core and holistic Design Thinking’s human centered approach in humanizing the web.

As the economy has been transitioning from the industrial era through the services revolution, advertising will hopefully keep shifting from addressing target groups to solving real problems, supporting communities and sustainably improving our lives.

 

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects

July 24–November 7, 2011

MEMBER PREVIEWS START JULY 20

Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor

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Talk to Me explores the communication between people and things. All objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance. In some cases, objects like cell phones and computers exist to provide us with access to complex systems and networks, behaving as gateways and interpreters. Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers help us develop and improvise the dialogue.

The exhibition focuses on objects that involve a direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, visualization design, and communication devices, and on projects that establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users. Examples range from a few iconic products of the late 1960s to several projects currently in development—including computer and machine interfaces, websites, video games, devices and tools, furniture and physical products, and extending to installations and whole environments.

The Department of Architecture and Design is documenting the process of organizing Talk to Me from its early stages through its opening in July 2011 and beyond via an online journal. The site features projects we are currently studying and some we have already selected, along with relevant references and feedback and suggestions from designers and writers. Since we always cast our nets very wide and count on suggestions and opinions from the design community, this step comes very naturally. Besides, communication is what this exhibition is all about. Visit the online journal at MoMA.org/talktome.

---

Organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Kate Carmody, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.




The exhibition is made possible by Hyundai Card Company.

Additional support is provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc. and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2011, 9:30 a.m.

Thursday, July 21, 2011, 9:30 a.m.

Friday, July 22, 2011, 9:30 a.m.

Saturday, July 23, 2011, 9:30 a.m.