Get Shouty

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam.

… freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

– from “The Poet’s Obligation” Pablo Neruda

The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, an interplay between the artificial and the organic. This piece is a study of complex behaviors in sound and motion, examining the creation and degeneration of patterns.

I love that it’s cardboard and dime store electronics. I love the shadows. I like that you can walk around it, get inside it and that the sound changes depending on where you stand. It’s remarkably simple but it gives you a contemplation of complexity.

And it sounds like rain.

The best video you will watch all day, no doubt.
And if that’s not diverting enough there’s hours of awesomness to be had on Flickr with Lunchbreath

British designer Samuel Wilkinson and product design company Hulger, have won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2011 for their stunning redesign of the low energy light bulb.

Low-energy light bulbs have never been regarded as a stylish product but the Plumen addresses this by creating an aesthetic bulb which works just like any low-energy bulb. Announced yesterday at the Design Museum, Stephen Bayley, the 2011 Jury Chair said of the winning entry ‘The Plumen light bulb is a good example of the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well, bringing a small measure of delight to an everyday product.’

Hell yeah- that’s a mantra:

Do an ordinary thing done extraordinarily well,

Bring a small measure of delight the everyday

This Kinetic Typography project was created by Jacob Gilbreath from the dialogue of Conan O’Brien’s final episode of The Tonight Show on NBC. In this farewell address, he describes his feelings towards the situation at hand, promoting positivity and humor, hard work and kindness.

Lovely message, relevant to us all from Sebastián Baptista

We are starting the new year with some new projects, new goals and new challenges.
Whatever you do, always try to be the best you can be. Spread the word.

Good luck!

It’s funny how we can only associate growing with pain. Take a couple of minutes to watch Jesse Rosten‘s lovely piece above. Maybe if we all took things a little more slowly…..

Philosophy helps. From Thinking Aloud:

Philosophy, as the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell puts it, is the education of grownups.

It is my view that philosophy must form part of the life of a culture. It must engage the public and influence how a culture converses with itself, understands itself, talks to other cultures and seeks to understand them. It has been enormously gratifying to see this pursuit flourishing in today’s agora — the virtual one — confronting, engaging and even embracing the fluid, ambiguous and frenetic nature of the electronic public realm.

But more importantly, this paragraph reminds me of meals around my family table growing up:

… philosophy is a shared activity, it is dialogue. And dialogue is not the simple exchange of opinions, where I have my faith, my politics and my God and you have yours. That is parallel monologue. One of the goals of dialogue is to have our opinions rationally challenged in such a way that we might change our minds. True dialogue is changing one’s mind.

And growing.

I hope you’re sharing something lovely with people you care about today.

Tim Minchin’s stunning performance of his beat poem ‘Storm’ Eloquently and wittily honouring reason, science and life appreciation and debunking homeopathy, psychics, alternative medicine, religion etc.

Love Tim Minchin. Love.

Sometimes questions are better than facts:

“The most important maxim for data analysis to heed, and one which many statisticians seem to have shunned, is this: Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise”
Tukey

So apparently, our psychological state allows us to see only what we want/need/feel to see at a particular time.

I’ve checked this out...

On Friday I saw: naked, lust, crush,

Today I see : secrets, malice, rage, deed

What do you see?

Dan Cobley is a Marketing Director at Google, who found his first love in physics. He recently spoke at TED about how some of the key principles of physics also offer insights and lessons to the less scientific discipline of marketing:

• Newton’s Law states that force = mass x acceleration. In layman’s terms, a large item requires a larger force in order to change direction. Similarly, in the realm of brands, it’s generally safe to say that the larger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. This is why a company like Arthur Andersen needed to spin off Accenture, or why L’Oreal might need both L’Oreal and Lancome, or why Coca-Cola may need Nestea and Gold Peak. A larger company may need smaller brands within its portfolio in order to allow them to act ’smaller’ – even if they’re owned by a corporate behemoth.
• Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that it’s impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state (i.e., the position and the momentum) of a particle because the act of measuring it changes it. In the marketing realm, the same can be said of consumers – the act of observing them changes their behavior. Anyone that has been involved with marketing research – and the ubiquitous focus group – will recognize that there is oftentimes a wide gap between stated intent and actual behavior. For example, participants in an ethnography or focus group may overstate their healthy dining choices. Yet the continually high sales of fast-food restaurants proves this is not always the case.
• The scientific method states that you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation; you can only disprove it. You may be able to gather more data that will strengthen your hypothesis, but you cannot unequivocally prove it. However, it can only take one observation to disprove a theory. The parallel to marketing is that one incident – like an oil spill, a recall, or public relations snafu – can undermine your brand indefinitely, even after years or decades of investment in building and maintaining that brand image. The lesson? Avoid these ‘accidents’ and take actions that are true to the image you’ve fostered.
• The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy – a measure of disorder of a system – will always increase. The same is true of marketing. In the not-s0-distant past, one message controlled by one marketing manager could define a brand. Today, the increasingly fragmented media landscape – and particularly digital media – has facilitated a brand becoming dispersed, and sometimes even chaotic. Consumers can actually take a stake in your brand message, make it their own and change or build upon it (sometimes for better – others, for worse). This distribution of energy from a single source to many ultimately democratizes your brand, putting it closer to consumers. The lesson? Your brand cannot be controlled – it can be built, shared and supported – but it cannot be fully controlled if you want to involve consumers in the exchange, and become part of their culture.

Looking outside of one’s own discipline can provide fresh perspective to a challenge, or inspiration for a more creative approach and solution. The combination of physics and marketing certainly sounds more relevant than we’d initially think.

via PSFK

TED Blog: “What physics taught me about marketing: Dan Cobley on TED.com”

For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.

(via swissmiss)

I also enjoy following Angry Paul Rand on twitter

That scary, panicked feeling when you start a project and just have a blank page? That’s graphic design Viagra

Spec work is like going to a strip club; you get all excited, but it almost never pays off in the end.

You are a designer. If a client just wants someone who can push a mouse around, they can get a fucking cat.

thanks Charles

Journalist and designer, David McCandless (who also blogs about infographics), and infamous graphic designer of our times, Neville Brody bash out a debate on over design vs information design.

…well worth the time.

The Creative Beast has a downloadable PDF workbook. Get one, print it, and draw all over. Enjoy! http://betsystreeter.blogspot.com/p/us8.html

Whether it’s a baby’s heartbeat or subway traffic in Singapore, all complex activity results in data. How can you give humanity to data? By visualizing it through coders and designers — the pioneers of a new art form can do it.

Ogilvy’s Create or Else presents the code artists http://motiontheory.com