Melinda and TEDx Host

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited along to the latest TEDx event in London. As we’re arranging our own TEDx event in October – TEDxNewSt – I was interested to see, first hand and up close, how they are run.

The event was held at the Science Museum in London and was the first event, of its kind, ever. The first session (95 mins) was broadcast live from New York. 82 events took place in 40 countries, simultaneously, around the world, all live-streaming the NY feed. Once NY had wrapped up the first session, each individual event got on with hosting their events independently with their local speakers live in the room. There was a group in Auckland (NZ) who were hosting their event at 03:30am in order to take part and as we live-streamed them in to say hello, we were told how their adverts for the event read “Pyjamas are optional, progress is not”. Nice. What was even nicer however was the fact that there were indeed people in their pyjamas in the room too.

The overarching theme of the event was about the future and how we can positively effect global issues such as eliminating polio, fighting malaria, reducing child mortality rates and empowering women.

The speakers on the live feed from NY were really engaging and inspiring. As the event was co-conceived by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda was one of the key speakers. Her talk was very insightful as she spoke about how development agencies and NGOs could learn a few tricks from Coca-Cola in how to reach the far corners of the earth and inspire people to want to purchase their products/lifestyles. Hans Rosling was also on stage with some very encouraging stats on child mortality rates, delivered in his own highly inimitable style.

Hans Rosling

Also Mechai Viravaidya (or Mr.Condom as he was fondly referred to) showed a presentation on his foundation’s innovative and, frankly, awe-inspiring methods of introducing condoms into the Thai communities. He is responsible for this post’s title as that was one of the first things he said in his talk and it’s really stuck in my mind.

Mechai Viravaidya

There were many, many other speakers involved in the entire event, all of which were rich with content and inspiration. I would urge you to watch the recording of the NY live-stream available on the website as it’s really compelling.

And if that whets your appetite for being inspired and wanting to do things better/differently then be sure to find out more about our upcoming TEDxNewSt event on October 15th.

Just seen the new Heinz Baked Bean 100 year anniversary can to be rolled out this October, which, as an avid fan, I think looks pretty smart. However, I can’t help but wonder why they thought that taking all their inspiration from the past was the way to go forward? Along with the Anchor Butter adverts, that mimic the ‘ghost signs’ from the late 19^th century, and the 1966 inspired England football kit, it feels like were going back in time.

I know there’s lots of nostalgia, pride and reassurance in using old designs (which now seems to be a rite of passage for successful food brands), but personally I’d have much rather seen what the can might look like in another 100 years. Made from space foil that can be put in the microwave straight onto my jacket potato, something at least a bit more entertaining! Are food brands always going to look to the past? And if they don’t, what might the future hold for even the humble baked bean can?

Wayne & Garth Spotted

Alongside the part of my phone that actually makes calls (the old fashioned bit), my Google Maps app is probably one of my most used. It’s become indispensable in the same way that being able to text once was. What would we do without it!

Modern spoils aside, the success of Google’s mapping technology may partly be down to its adaptiveness. As with all good web services, the Google Maps API has spawned a mass of location based mash-ups. Google, for example, recently partnered with We Are What We Do to create the wonderfully rich Historypin. It’s all too easy to forget about the history that surrounds us here at The Partners HQ, but a quick post code look up perfectly placed archived and geo-tagged photos from over 100 years ago. To refer to images like this in isolation is one thing, to see them in context and contrast with our modern surroundings (places we inhabit everyday without considering the past) can completely transform our sense of place. Today, Berg London announced Dimensions. Born out of a series of workshops with the BBC, this set of mash-ups forces us to reconsider our surroundings by overlaying historical, political, and environmental data on to our own neighbourhoods. With these filters and layers applied, mapping becomes less about wayfinding, and more about changing perceptions of our sense of place; both of our own locality, and of others’.

With Google’s Street View, the mental images and memories of our surroundings are at once put to test, and the sheer volume of imagery captured by Google’s roaming cars across the world must represent one of the most significant image archives in existence. It provides us with an almost complete panoramic view of the urban environment, albeit one recorded in 1/100th of a second. For the virtual tourist, or the freeze frame voyeur, street view offers a world of exploration like never before. Last year, Art Fag City bought together snapshots of some of the more weird and wonderful findings. Our treasured Daily Mail more recently got in on the act with the story of a seemingly dead girl laying in the street.

Thank god last year’s AR craze has seemed to have died down, when every brand seemed desperate to get a piece of the emperor’s new clothes. This highly ironic video summed it up perfectly. Why do something that could be much better achieved without the added layer of a webcam? Context, of course, is key. ART + COM showed that there were practical and meaningful applications for the technology when they bought dinosaurs out of their skeletons and bursting into life at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. And with dedicated hardware in gaming consoles, the opportunities still seem genuinely engaging. Oh to be a kid today!

Of course mobile and augmented technologies are a match made in heaven. Amsterdam’s Layar first launched on Android some years ago now, but the potential still seems to be slowly unfolding, and marketers are quicker now to spot an opportunity. While The Rolling Stone’s take on the Layar app for their Exile On Main Street album may have been overly literal, it’s interesting to think how we can begin to engage an audience not just online, but in the real world too. Over in Japan, where adoption of new technologies is often quicker than anywhere else, the Sekai Camera app spawned an ‘Air tagging‘ phenomenon. Surely it’s just a matter of time before this spreads. Let’s just hope users can learn to leave data behind that actually enriches our surroundings, and resist the kind of comments you’re likely to find in a shoreditch pub toilet.

Yesterday I received a notification from Google informing me I was now being tracked by Latitude. I’d opted in for this some time ago, only to be disappointed to find very few of my friends had shared my enthusiasm. Sharing your location with Google (search now factors in your location) is one thing, sharing it with your friends, it seems, is another.

The social aspect of location awareness is, however growing fast. And while Foursquare’s success may be in part down to its reward schemes and gaming aspects (ultimately, its competitive nature), the check-in concept now seems to be spreading beyond the merely physical, with more & more start ups like Gomiso allowing us to ‘check-in’ to movies and tv shows. It’s yet another way of allowing us digital natives to define ourselves not just by where we hang out, but also by what we consume. In 2010, privacy, and personal space appear outdated concepts, while the commodification of the personal reigns supreme.

If anyone can popularise the concept of location in the social space, it’s Facebook. Sure enough, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed rumours that Facebook will soon be adding location to its services. Facebook might just show Google how it should be done here. Friends & followers, are you with me?

Having just returned from holiday I am all a glow, not with a tan unfortunately but rather with the greyish saggy hue of someone who has spent endless hours throughout the night feeding their addiction of game-playing on their iPhone.

My name is Helen, and I am an addict. There, I said it. I am 100% totally, utterly, head-over-heels addicted to Angry Birds app on the iPhone. Fortunately, this blossoming addiction has prompted me to write part 2 of the App Attack series, appropriately starting the list with …can you guess?…

1. ANGRY BIRDS!
I can’t begin to tell you how addictive this game is. On my holiday I’m sure I managed to convince my friends that there was something desperately wrong with me as I would constantly say I was just popping for a ‘lie down’ whilst disappearing off into my room to get a quick, dirty fix of my latest addiction, Angry Birds. The flight home saw me all-consumed in the game to the extent that I almost bit the hostess on the arm when told to turn off my phone for take off and landing. Basically the premise is some nasty pigs have stolen the eggs of a variety group of birds (all with different ‘skills’) and then hidden themselves within (increasingly impenetrable) fortresses. Your task is to catapult the birds at the fortresses in order to kill the pigs. Yes, it really is that simple, but, oh my, it’s SO addictive. I almost, for the greater good, want to warn you off, but you must, you REALLY must give it a go.

2. iQuarium
For those out there who, like me, can’t actually be trusted with a living animal/fish/plant to take care of, there’s now a (relatively guilt-free) way of owning a goldfish without the all the mess of having to sift its lifeless body out of it’s bowl and flush it down the loo when you’ve failed to feed/clean it for 2 weeks (or bury it in a pizza box as we ceremoniously did in our house one year. Poor wee Del-Boy, RIP). Like a modern, more sophisticated looking Tamagotchi , once you’ve downloaded the app you then log on once a day to play with, and feed, your pet fish. The more times you remember to look after your fish, the more points you collect and then the more accessories for your fish-tank you can purchase (in exchange for points, not cash). Be careful though as a couple of days of neglect (as I’ve already discovered) will leave your fish listless and grumpy, and it will eventually die if not cared for. Gulp.

3. Tweetdeck
Without doubt, in my mind, the clear winner in the competition for iPhone based Twitter applications. Tweetdeck on the iPhone is now the very first and very last thing I do in my day. The ability to have the columns in the Tweetdeck app is what puts it in clear lead of the competition, as with the desktop based software you can easily perform searches, filter out your mentions, direct messages and people you follow into a more manageable format. The slide and scroll function on the iPhone makes it even easier to navingate. Simplicity and functionality at its best, but I’m sure you all know that already.

4. RjDj
I must admit I haven’t actually played with this one properly yet. My colleague, Sam G, swears that it’s the best app out there but I have yet to spend the necessary time getting to know it (I keep having to tend to my flatlining goldfish). The principle is based on gathering the sounds around you and turning them into ambient music that is then fed to your earholes via your headphones. If you are a fan of this then please do leave a comment and share any great recordings you’ve made.

5. Talking Carl
Sublime and unapologetically simple, Talking Carl is just an absolute must-have on your iPhone. Upon discovering this app I immediately downloaded it with the intention of amusing my young nieces and nephews with it on our next meeting, however, since then I have spent a good portion of time playing with it on the sofa, rolling around in fits of childish giggles. Talking Carl is a speech altering software. It doesn’t have multi-platforms, it doesn’t particularly do anything clever, but it is incredibly cute and incredibly funny. If you have children (or, like me, a base-line humour) then you have to get this app.

Ever since Jobs and Co. created the iPhone, there has been intense speculation that Apple were going to re-invent the Newton, with all kind of rumours about what the device would be and what it would be capable of.

For those of you that have been living in a bunker, the iPad is what Apple describes as a bridge between the world of the smartphone and the laptop — a third ‘mobile’ space that sits between the two. Indeed, at first glance, the iPad looks nothing more than a giant iPhone — it features the same glass multi-touch display (albeit a huge one at 9 1/2 inches), the same buttons – it can even run the same applications.

So many are wondering, well, what’s the difference; “Why do I need one of these shiny new toys when I have an iPhone and a laptop?… I was expecting an all-singing and dancing device that could read my thoughts and intiate command for me on the impulse of a brain wave! …This isn’t the JesusPad I wanted!” Yes, many of these points are true. But what people are forgetting to remember is that content is king, and just like the iPhone and the iPod before it, if the content is good, (in the case of the iPod; huge libaries of mp3′s versus a cd, and the iPhone with the app store full of entertainment and usefulness), then it will be a must-have product.

So let’s look at the killer app, and with a screen this size, it has to be publishing — anything from books to newspapers and magazines. Both Sony and Amazon (with the Kindle) have made significant inroads in to this new area with eBook readers: devices that are like carrying whole libaries in the space of a paperback. But these devices look a generation old compared to the user experience of the iPad – gimicky it may look, but simply turning and flicking a page on the iPad instantly feels more real. The printed book is all good and well, but it’s in the magazine and newspaper area where this product will excel. Take a look at this digital version of the Sports Illustrated magazine and try to say to yourself that you’d rather have a traditional magazine:

It’s been forecast for many years that the ‘death of print’ cometh. Maybe with the iPad and devices like it, we’re at the beginning to this new era. This fuzing of new-media and traditional print publishing into a new and interactive form is going to be exciting for both consumers and designers alike, hopefully reigniting what is a shrinking industry. Take a look at this concept video for a product called Mag+ by Bonnier R&D and their digital design partners BERG – it shows off the potential experience for what a product like the iPad can deliver:

No doubt the iPad will open the flood gates to millions of copycat tablet computers, all hoping to do the same thing. Will I be getting one? Well, I’ve always said; never buy the first gen of any Apple product; but if content as rich as this comes out, I might have to change my mind.

Pictures by Matt Knight of W+K

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a D&AD pub night held at the Hoxton Pony, called: An Apple A Day: Technology in design.

The D&AD pub nights are informal presentations by designers to designers, based around a particular topic, and are always lively, slightly drunken, and filled with debate. The brief was to talk about a piece of technology that changed your life. I decided to take a slightly unusual angle on this and talk about a totally unsexy, unloved technology: the intranet. Yes that’s right, I talked about a piece of technology that is even LESS SEXY THAN POWERPOINT.

I used the daggy intranet as a way to tie in a variety of exciting brand engagement projects we’ve been doing for Deloitte. If anyone is interested in more info about the content of my talk please email me and I’ll create another post.

I was pretty nervous when I turned up, and was relieved to see that there were only a couple of hundred people there, as well as stage lights and cameras set up to record the event… (!!!) Overall it was a really interesting night with some great speakers from agencies such as Wieden+Kennedy, De-construct, Tonic and Dare.

Despite my nervousness in the lead up to the event, I ended up thoroughly enjoying the experience and would recommend other designers get involved in the D&AD education activities.

I’ll make another post once the videos from the night are posted up online.

So you might have heard of and seen one of these Yamaha TENORI-ON machines (in fact Nathan blogged about Little Boot’s rendition of Hot Chip’s Ready for the floor a while back now) the new instrument that mixes musical beats and lightshow into one neat product, but have you actually had the chance to play on one? Seeming they cost just shy of £900, I’m guessing that you haven’t and that you probably won’t be able to afford one either. But fear not, André Michelle has created this cool flash version called ToneMatrix that you can tap away on to your hearts content. Ace. Check it out!

Check it out: google.co.uk/maps

A cool app just appeared on the iPhone App store: WTF – or to give its full name – What The Font – is a free app that replicates the functionality of the website (of the same name) that can work out what a typeface is, just from looking at a couple of characters. It means that you can take a photo of any poster, magazine or advert that you happen to be going past and find out what the typeface is. Ace! 

But does it work? Well, there are a couple of limitations: firstly, WTF only accesses the library of fonts on the MyFonts website, so anything obscure or from smaller type foundries will probably not be on there. Secondly, the iPhone camera isn’t auto-focusing, so getting sharp images of type is a little tricky. But hey, it’s free — you aren’t going to see me complaining!

Download the app from the iTunes app store here.  

Paul Johnson writes about how the Western car industry suffered because of the designers’ need to over-engineer, compared to the Japanese way of designing things from the user’s point of view.

Lovely quote from Schumacher (EF not Michael): “Any intelligent fool can invent further complications but it takes genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”

Read some more at here.