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| sneedle flipsock |
26 november 2004: the steamroller of branding |
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In the new Robert Zemeckis film, "The Polar Express", Chris Van Allsburg’s "dreamy illustrations are animated by way of a new three-dimensional CGI technology called 'performance capture.' Chris van Allsburg's site has examples of his beautiful black-and-white drawings, information about his books and (for the true fans) a treasure hunt. (Flash and sound) (thanks, Tania) Pixar's witty, demented parody of celebrity hero-worship, "The Incredibles", doesn't use performance capture. Instead, says Jessica Helfand, "What’s incredible about The Incredibles is the art of design capture... special effects are only half the battle and, at Pixar, they’re the second half... at Pixar, the play’s the thing." In The Steamroller of Branding, Nick Bell "mounts a provocative attack on the encroachment of branding into the world of culture, where museums and performing arts centers increasingly present themselves using the same visual tactics as major corporations and consumer goods companies." He identifies two types of designer, the "agents of neutrality" who are complicit in the sell-out and the "aesthetes of style" who resist. Branding the British university: a market researcher's report on how universities market themselves. The 'branding' disease continues to spread: "When the vocabulary of a nation's foreign policy is the vocabulary of branding, then it is, in fact, selling Uncle Ben's Rice. This transaction, with the vocabulary of the supermarket counter, is not how I envision my country speaking to the rest of the world." Every consultant needs a Venn diagram. The web designer's lament: "I would RTFM if there was an FM to FR." Open source products and coding standards need better documentation. There's a danger in making interfaces too simple: we could forget how to think for ourselves, or miss important nuances. Faceted navigation helps users to easily find what they’re looking for, while also helping you manage large collections of information. Faceted navigation organises information in multiple dimensions: for example, it allows you to search for an expert by facets like name, project, company or date, or by some combination of those facets, selected in any sequence. It's a surprisingly efficient way of organising information: in info-management speak, "Four facets of 10 nodes each have the same discriminatory power as one taxonomy of 10,000 nodes." Griffith University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis gave a speech at Melbourne University this week (full text is available as a PDF). He says the Dawkins era of single-tier higher education is coming to an end and "are on the threshold of radical change." Three things will significantly change the Australian university sector over the next few years:
"National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes," a report by Gus Guthrie, discusses how to let private companies provide education in Australia. It was released earlier this month by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, with indications that private providers will be able to start enrolling students sooner rather than later. Former education minister John Dawkins agrees with Davis's proposal that some universities should be allowed to focus on teaching without the research obligation. The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne has ranked Australia's 39 universities against six broad measures of 'international standing'. "The Australian" newspaper is delighted, and says 'useful rankings are here to stay'. Part of the delight comes from the credibility a newspaper gains from trumpeting such rankings, not to mention the possible PR spinoffs for The Oz's line of "Good Unviersities Guide" publications. RMIT University has sacked its chief finance officer, and predicts up to 50 non-academic staff will be made redundant. Too many unread items in your mailbox? Get organised, and you'll feel much more relaxed. "A government agency unveils its new logo. A geometric abstraction, it intrigues some but baffles many. Eventually, the inevitable question: my tax money paid for this?" The popularity of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" arises from a collective "desire for a kind of meaningfulness to life that is missing for most of us... Through this novel we express our fundamental disgust with our institutionalised lives, and we suggest shocking things that we might previously have imagined were unsayable." As a child, Richard Dawkins never cared for science or the natural world--until he encountered Hugh Lofting's "Dr Doolittle". Stephen Jay Gould credited a museum exhibition of Tyrannosaurus rex for his entry to the world of palaeontology. We all tell our own creation myths about the things that matter in our lives. The Museum of Modern Art set out to "celebrate the shaping machine, the template, the big production run... All were parts in the great symphony of a new culture, the total Gesamtkunstwerk (phew) whose very existence proved the uniqueness of Modernity... And now that we have no living figures analogous to Picasso or Matisse, and the heroic (not to say pious) legends of modernist creativity have receded into the storybook past, can the idea of 'modern art' be maintained in a museum's name?" "The daemons of the monotheisms are essentially self-less. They have more authority than mere 'messengers', but a marginal kind of autonomy. Above all, they have no long-term relationships, no contract, no covenant, no faith. They are metaphysical butterflies, essentially promiscuous." A national US study finds only about 11 per cent of full-time students say they spend more than 25 hours per week preparing for classes--the amount of time academics say is necessary to succeed at university. About 40 per cent of students say they earn mostly A's, with 41 per cent reporting that they earn mostly B's. "Scientific research, like other cooperative endeavors, requires trust to flourish," says Caroline Whitbeck, and trust depends on how you behave towards others as well as how well you do your work. "Scientists should be concerned with being both good people (ethically concerned and involved citizens) and good scientific investigators (proficient investigators who do good science)." Even the most profound accounts of World War I "can leave one feeling drained and confused. Something about the horror of the event--its sheer bloated repulsiveness--produces a cognitive impasse, a scrambling of mental circuits... We can't think too hard about what the war was because to do so is also to think ahead: toward our own dissolution. The corpse in the mud... is always one's own." Think of any piece of music you know and 'play' it in your head. Where in the brain is the music playing? What is it doing to you? A digital atlas of New York City shows population, ancestry, income, adult education levels, household types and commuter behavior. It sounds easy... but do you really know how to fold a t-shirt neatly? Click the picture to see a demonstration of how to do it in three seconds. Beware the dodgy excuse, the fudging of truth: words are "our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us." (via JOHO the Blog) The dao of web design: "Now is the time for the medium of the web to outgrow its origins in the printed page. Not to abandon so much wisdom and experience, but to also chart its own course, where appropriate. The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all. The journey begins by letting go of control..." (thanks, Yun-Joo) Web development mistakes, and how to avoid or fix them: span-mania, non-semantic markup, bad forms, old-skool HTML... (thanks, Yun-Joo) Wow, those computer engineering students at University of South Australia get to do all the cool projects. Real-life Quake, anyone? 26 November 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
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subscribe, contribute or comment by e-mailing flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/ |