: Chris Haycock

Following the example of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Argentinian center will remove 40 thousand billboards (approx. 60% of all billboards) that have been ruled to infract on the city’s code.

The agreement was reached between the city government and a committee of advertising associations.

In September 2006, Sao Paolo initiated a similar effort, which was documented by photographer Tony de Marco and his Sao Paulo No Logo project.

Source: Treehugger

With the name Andy Uprock popping up in my RSS feed this morning, of course I had to investigate further. Right away I recognized the article. Spawned from early childhood sports, when everyone used to cram their plastic cup at a respective spot in a chainlink fence, Andy Uprock has taken it much further, and has created fence installations worldwide.

Not to worry, the cups used during the Cuprocking, are recycled.

There are many ways to track the current presidential election, but this site has rendered over 500 websites into one ever-changing visualization map. The sources are quite evenly distributed to not lean heavily left or right.

Check out where the blogosphere seems to be leaning at Presidential Watch 08.

Source: PSFK

Data visualizations galore: Visual Complexity

Leading the new school of Detroit techno and electronic music in general, Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International has surged into the forefront internationally thanks to personal favorites like Matthew Dear and Dabrye. Established in 1999 by Sam Valenti IV, the label has recently released an Adult Swim comp as well as experienced growing success with its Spectral Sound sub-label geared more for the dance surfaces.

My good friend Travis Kirschbaum along with Adam Fox at Current TV recently produced this pod, which focuses on the Ghostly phenomenon

Good job TK and Adam! I’m looking forward to the next pod from Great Lakes trip, a look at the Underground Resistance label.

Ghosts of Techno on Current.com

Visit the Ghostly International website

Download the Ghostly Swim album for free

From space, the surface of the earth has some visual surprises, some of which don’t look very naturally developed. Of these, one can argue that they are not. In the case of the deforestation of Bolivia, or the red dots of Garden City, Kansas, this is very much the case.

“This image of the once vast carpet of rainforest in the Amazon basin is reminiscent of the cubist masters. Fanning out from the large blocks of land cleared by ranchers and loggers radiate arrangements of fields and farms, the remaining healthy vegetation appearing in bright red.”

“Home to the largest zoological facility in Kansas, Garden City is known for its depiction in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.The croplands surrounding the city are irrigated by a vast underground aquifer, creating bands of bright red healthy vegetation that dot the image.”

View more images at EnvironmentalGraffiti.com

It seems Adidas has found a new use for Nano-Engraving (which is basically a microscopic engraving method). New Zealand’s All Blacks team is the first case study.

Some habits are hard to break, although the effort to break them may lead to new habits, which in result, could lead to new creativity. The brain becomes conditioned and finds safety in a habit. This “safety” is what the brain has become “familiar” with. If we consciously develop new habits, the path to this habit creates new brain cells and shifts our trains of thought significantly.

“HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try - the more we step outside our comfort zone - the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.”

Read the full article
Source: NY Times
by Janet Rae-Dupree

Pre-experience design refers to what some advertisers work to convey before the product is in the consumers hands. It is usually communicated through advertising, giving the potential user of a product the sense of how the product can benefit them. Over time, there has been some key examples, and in some of these cases, they’ve changed certain product realms completely.

Russell Davies recent essay points out a few of these examples. First noted, George Eastman’s complete simplification of the photographic process:

“One of the stories at the heart of the presentation was about the way George Eastman reinvented photography with Kodak by massively simplifying the photographic process (as far as the customer was concerned). Unlike the messy and complicated procedure that had gone before would-be photographers only had to “Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter)”. Mr Merholz is completely right about the way Eastman achieved so much by conceiving of what he was doing as a service rather than a product. Brilliant stuff. And an example to learn from.
But I think it’s also worth looking at the way Eastman used advertising as ‘pre-experience design’.

The slogan Eastman adopted was ‘You Push The Button, We Do The Rest”. Which is pithy, persuasive and memorable but not, on the face of it, true. As described above, the process was rather more complicated than that.  But it got to the essence of the simplicity involved and, significantly, by altering expecations about how the experience was going to be, made it feel simpler than it actually was. (I imagine, I’m guessing here.)”

The Apple iPhone certainly changed the communications market, just as Apple has generally adjusted the emotions related to other products in the past (portable music / iPod, computing in general). Beyond the how to pinch, how to point, how to check email, how to answer a call sequence communicated in the early commercials, there is something more subtle in these ads that should be pointed out:

“Other phone manufacturers will tell you that doing the stuff you need on their phone is objectively, measurably just as quick as on an iPhone, but that people report the iPhone is quicker. I suspect quite a lot of that is because the music on the ads makes the pace the iPhone moves at just feel right.  The ads are a component in the experience, they provide an implicit soundtrack to your experience.

Reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational made me think about this all over again. He tells of a number of experiments which illustrate the effect expectations have on experiences. Coffee served with fancy condiment dispensers nearby is reported as tasting better than the same coffee served next to tatty condiments. The price you pay for a drug alters it’s efficacy. If you want people to enjoy the wine you serve you’re better off investing in elegant glasses than decent wine. This is not new news. This is just how the brain works. Our feelings, our ‘experience of experiences’ is shaped by our expectations and it would sensible, if we’re trying to create great experiences, that we align the expectations to help the case we want to make.”

Should we expect to see more examples of pre-experience design surface moving into the future. It makes sense that this would be the case, but, corporate processes are very difficult to break.

Read Russell Davies full essay here.

Compilation of Apple iPhone ads can be seen here.

(source PSFK)

Cognitive Surplus: “the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we’re just shaking off now”

“So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

Read the entire article.

Source: BoingBoing