Randall Munroe's claim to fame is XKCD, a Web-comic devoted to geekery which has a rabid following. Today, he's scrapped the math jokes and dry wit for a massive infographic, illustrating all of the character interactions in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer.
The last two are visual jokes, but the first three are straight-up exhaustive catalogs of various plot turns and subplots. The X-axis is time; the groupings along the Y-axis denote who's interacting with whom. For example, here's a detail of the LOTR:
We'll give this ad-stunt top marks for annoyance and memorability. As Wired UK reports:
The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be
causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight
keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often,
which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the
flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land
and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What's more, the
zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its
rapid movement.
Maybe this has wings: Imagine ads for candy, affixed to honey bees. Or ads for mosquito repellent, affixed to mosquitos.
New York's new High Line park has become an instant classic of smart urban planning. But maybe its biggest influence is how it has gotten architects and planners to think about the unused infrastructure in their own cities. We've already seen, for example, the Bay Line. And now Gensler and 4240 Architecture have joined the fray with the HYDROGENerator, which would transform Chicago's abandoned Bloomingdale rail line into a greenhouse-cum-hydrogen generator.
The idea just won the Spark Award for International Design Excellence. HYDROGENerator would stretch along three miles of track, and provide 10 acres of year-round farmland. The hydrogen it creates would power schools.
According to Gensler:
...the greenhouse above produces food
while the hydrogen generator below creates electricity to split water
molecules into pure Hydrogen and Oxygen. This new fuel-cell energy will
be used to power nearby Chicago Public Schools, in turn helping the CPS
reverse its budget shortfall from last year which resulted in teacher
layoffs to offset rising utility bills. Simply put, Hydrogen =
Teachers. The excess Hydrogen will be sold to alternative fuel vehicles
at depots throughout the line.
As it produces this much needed food and energy, the Hydrogenerator
simultaneously releases oxygen as the by-product of photosynthesis and
hydrogen production, a truly sustainable loop.
Now obviously, all of this is a bit far off--we're still some ways away from solar power that could be economical to deploy at this scale, not to mention the hydrogen generator bit.
The project is intended to be something akin to old-school public works--serving as a civic benefit, sure, but also as a grand statement of public aspiration.
[Via Bustler, which has more pics and the full release]
Actually, you're talking Four-Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse levels of pain: You'd have failing crops across the world, massive droughts threatening half the world's population, half of all animals and plants dying off, cyclones, and metastasizing deserts. All of which are summarized in this massive infographic by Britain's Met Office. As the Guardianreports:
The color-coded rings on the map show exactly what areas might be affected by each of nine different effects, ranging from water-shortages to forest fires.
You'll notice that the rings are most heavily concentrated on the developing world. And that highlights the cruelest feature of global warming: Big countries like the U.S., Russia, and China are by far the worst carbon emitters. But they're not the countries who'll suffer the most in a warming world--the costs, in lives, will be borne most heavily by countries without the means to really change what's going on. If the tables were turned--if global warming struck hardest at home--you can bet the debate over carbon emissions would look far different than it does now.
Lexus just recently pulled the sheets off of its very first supercar, the Lexus LFA--and care was lavished on every single detail. (Given the $375,000 price tag, it better have been.) For example, the car's A-pillar is made from carbon fiber. But how do you construct such a delicate, twisting shape, with what amounts to strings, glued together? Answer: With a "rotary weaver"--one of only two in the world. AutoBlog snagged a video of it in action. You have to see it.
It's come to this: Ad agencies, in a push to get hip with the kids, lower their price points, and produce better ideas, seem to be piling onto the crowdsourcing bandwagon. But can crowdsourcing produce anything more than mediocre work?
Evangelists for the trend say that crowdsourcing opens the competitive field, to talent that would otherwise go overlooked. Typically, you offer a prize, open the gates, and let the best idea win. You get more ideas, so some of them are bound to be good, right?
The list of ad agencies trying their hand at this is growing: As The Timesreports, Bartle Bogle Hegarty of London is teaming with TalentHouse; some Crispin alums started Victors and Spoils; there's also Crowdspring and Genius Rocket. Hell, there's even Local Motors, which attempts to use thousands of designers, to create a modular car.which produces cars produced and refined by the crowd.
You can see why ad-pros would resent this idea: These contests usually don't compensate all the participants. For example, when Crispin tried to crowdsource the logo for Brammo, it blew up their faces, with a full-on designer revolt.
Most of these new crowdsourcing ventures think they have a way around this. Genius Roket, for example, is introducing something called Genius Rocket Select. The idea is to raise the award pots, and preselect the participants in a given pitch. That way, everyone can get paid. The rewards will rise as entrants make it to successive rounds. Winners might get something on the order of $15,000.
But can you really get great work this way? Isn't crowdsourcing just a low-cost route for those who simply can't afford an agency, and an outlet for those without the chops to win big accounts? There's definitely a market for that--but in that case, crowdsourcing is less about overturning the current ad-agency model, and more about serving clients overlooked by the system. I mean, do you really think that Nike is going to going to get their next great idea for $15,000? Isn't crowdsourcing always geared to a low-end buyer?
Mark Walsh, Genius Rocket's CEO, says he "violently disagrees," with that premise. He points out that Genius Rocket's pool includes many alumni and employees of brand-name agencies. He also argues that upfront hand-picking and higher payouts will foster better work than plain-jane crowdsourcing (which has usuallybeenverymediocre).
(Crowdsource proponents like to point out the success of Doritos's
Superbowl Ads. But the novelty of the process was the main appeal. If this
is what your ad agency gave you for a million dollars, you'd fire them.
In Crispin's crowdsourced competition for Brammo's logo, you'd be hard-pressed to find entries that aren't atrocious. The winner is professional looking, but its final form was also guided by Crispin. So much for crowdsourcing.)
Walsh does touch on a good point: Crowdsourcing is only as good as the people that participate. If clever people hung around looking for work via crowdsourced competitions, the results could be great. Perhaps some day they will, when ad-agency model collapses. But in my experience, they don't. Not yet.
I know lots of talented ad-industry people. None of them have to find clients this way. Crowdsourcing advocates would counter that there are plenty of geniuses out there, who just haven't been given a chance because they don't live in NYC/London/Paris/L.A. and don't go to the right parties. But that's the thing about top-tier talent: They tend to figure out a way to the top, regardless. They figure out how to make the right contacts and climb the ladder. By in large, that means getting in good with the right ad houses and not lurking around in competitions where the payoff is relatively low, given all the uncertainties.
Does anyone really think that crowdsourcing can produce the next iPhone? Probably not. Products and ideas like those are made possible by singular focus, and gobs of patience; it's not having a ton of ideas that matters, it's having the right idea and having the resources to invest in it. (And on that note, doesn't Local Motors's first crowd-sourced car kinda remind you of that Simpsons episode, where Homer Simpson designed a car with fins that could drive underwater and had a giant cup holder?)
That said, the ultimate goal isn't the iPhone--In Genius Rocket's case, it's simply to create viral videos, which are quirky enough to explode on their own, producing free Internet advertising.
So, maybe the more appropriate question is: Can crowdsourcing create the next Keyboard Cat? As Walsh says, "Creating ten viral videos, throwing them against a wall, and hoping for a 600,000-view event isn't what agencies are about."
But is it what crowdsoucing is about? And even if you do garner a mere 600,000 views, who says those are the customers you're after?
If this sort of small-bore crowdsourcing produces a vid with even 1/20th the views of "Chocolate Rain", anytime in the near future, I'll eat my hat.
Okay, bear with me for a second. Think of your IT guy--the one holed up in the mechanical closet, sweating next to all those blinking servers. The one who seems to only do any work when no one's around. Now imagine him in a 1950's monster movie. First scene: He's working late again, this time on Halloween night. He's busy devising something unspeakably gruesome. A flash of blue light--he's vaporized! In his place: Creeping monsters, made of ethernet cables, power cords, and drywall--the detritus of every office office park in the world. Run. For. Your. Life.
That's the best way I can describe the work of Matthias Manner, a young German sculptor who says that his work represents the world of technology, in a full-on battle against organic life. If you happen to be in Munich next week, you can check out these pieces in person, at Dina4Projekte.
It's a brave new world for product design: Increasingly, designers are encoding reams of data into the designs themselves, using 3-D modeling technology and rapid prototyping. Recently, there was a bracelet encoded with a year's worth of weather data. And next week, at the Bits 'n' Pieces exhibition, you'll be able to see a couch crafted from brain scans.
Lucas Maassen and Dries Verbruggen created the piece by scanning Maassen's brain for three seconds, as he thought of the word "comfort." The resulting 3-D object was then sent to a CNC-milling machine, which cut out the shape in foam. Finally, it was upholstered in warm grey felt--get it, like grey matter?
If you look closer at the sofa, it's actually what the scan looked like, over time: The X-axis shows the brain waves in hertz; the Y-axis shows the various waves, which were working simultaneously; the Z-axis is time, in milliseconds.
If you camp to get away form the trappings of high-style, modern life, Opera isn't for you. (Try the tent-jacket instead.)
But if you're the type that tucks your iPhone into your Prada parka before lacing up your boots, or if you you've considered a suburban teepee or a rolling or blow-up home, you'll probably also love this: A canvas camper designed to look like the famed Sydney Opera House. It's fitted in silky hardwoods, stainless steel, and leather.
The designer, Axel Enthoven, is billing it as "Your suite in nature," and "freedom in nature with 100 percent luxury"--in other words, something more akin to boutique hotel than a pup tent. Inside, it's got the appointments you'd expect of decent camper (and a bit more than your standard Philippe Starck hotel): With the push of a button, the camper assembly unfurls to reveal two beds, a toilet, hot and cold water, and a stove. There's also a wine cabinet, a heater, an espresso bar, and a teak veranda.
Enthoven--who also teaches at the famed design academy in Eindhoven, The Netherlands--a is currently putting the finishing touches on the first Operas, which will be shown off December 8th at the Design at Work trade fair in Kortrijk, Belgium. When put into production in 2010, they'll be made completey by hand in the Netherlands (of course).
If you've ever traveled abroad, then you know the terror that comes with ordering from a menu that you can't read. Will you accidentally order the deer penis, with a side of blanched tobacco leaves?
With a smartphone, you could use a translation dictionary to decipher each... and ... every ... word.... But it's such a pain that it's easy to skip it altogether, when pressured by a glowering waiter.
So here comes PicTranslator, a $.99 iPhone app that lets you take a picture, and then translate the foreign text in that picture (in all, there are 16 languages currently available):
After the fact, it's easy to wonder why this type of app hasn't existed before--but then again, perhaps the weakest links were processing power and cell-phone cameras. Better processers finally have the muscle to do image-to-text conversion--the sort you readily find in PDF readers--and better pics now provide the necessary resolution.
According to Eat Me Daily (ahem), there's still a couple of major bugs: You've got to have Internet access of some sort, and there's still a 10- to 60-second lag in the translation. But as iPhones/smartphones get larger memory stores, we're thinking this should become a totally offline app sometime soon.
