Don’t Panic (2009) by Johnny Kelly, photographed by Linda Brownlee
It’s Nice That is a talented team of publishing inspiring work from across the creative sphere. They run a monthly talk, each event hosted by a guest speaker who brings two friends to showcase recent projects or thoughts.
It’s Nice That is a talented team publishing inspiring work from across the creative sphere. They run a monthly talk, each event hosted by a guest speaker who brings two friends to showcase recent projects or thoughts.
This month’s event was hosted by Johnny Kelly from Nexus Productions, he creates fantastic stop-motion animations, often from hand-cut paper models. He also gives a very funny talk.
Next up was David McFarline, a graphic designer at Spin, who showcased some lovely book/magazine/exhibition designs that you very well may have seen in the last year. Subtle asides about designer issues like ‘special’ colour tints made his discussion two of a pair.
Finally, Marco Bohr, a talented photographer in his own right launched into an amazing analysis of Japanese post-bubble ‘girl’ photography and the work of Nagashima Yurie in particular.
]]>Here’s one reason why newspapers are headed for the history books. This image of a outdated delivery system says it in the gut.
Thanks for the image grab Newsnight.
]]>This talk by Jeff Veen maps out some of the key challenges facing designers creating interaces to complex data.
Veen has been responsible for some of the benchmark data visualisations of recent years, including Google analytics and more recently Wikirank.
The video is worth a watch, if only because he is as good as is word with regards to visualisation, it’s a great presentation.
He begins with some historical examples, arguing that designers have know for a long time how to bring data alive. These principles have driven powerful visualisations:
He then argues that the web is different, it’s interactive, it’s about enabling people to find their own stories. In other words, you’re not designing charts, but chart applications.
People supply their own data - the music they’re listening to, what they’ve been doing with their time, their bio-feedback from running with a Nike+ or heart rate monitor.
So now, what designers are trying to do is create tools to find stories themselves, give people ways of navigating through the data itself, and provide filters to allow users to clarify their story.
He cites the New York Times’ Casualties of War as a particularly successful example of this.
So data visualisation with the user in charge has evolved:
A very useful set of principles. It left me thinking about an important dimension - the reader/user’s responsibility.
How has this changed in the move from static to interactive? How have the literacy requirements of reading changed in the move to using?
Thanks to Gareth for the link.
]]>The most interesting point is probably that Nova sees semantic as a movement to put meaning in the data rather than in apps in order to make it machine-readable. He argues that this need for increasing data linkage for machines will make the web infrastructurally more open.
]]>Still Human, Still Here - the underground world of destitute asylum seekers
Abbie Trayler-Smith
HOST Gallery
1 Honduras Street
London EC1Y 0TH
18 March – 4 April 2009
The shocking, hidden lives of refused asylum seekers whose bids for sanctuary have been rejected by the British government are revealed in a new exhibition commissioned by Panos Pictures.
Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed men and women who have fled torture and persecution in troubled states including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe. They had hoped to find sanctuary in the UK but instead are enduring a new kind of torment - destitution.
Alain from DR Congo
Still Human Still Here: The underground world of refused and destitute asylum seekers is launched in association with the Still Human Still Here coalition of human rights organisations including Amnesty International and the Refugee Council, which is campaigning for an end to destitution for refused asylum seekers.
The exhibition runs at HOST Gallery from 18 March to 4 April.
]]>Photographer Richard Nicholson has published a series documenting soon-to-be-gone darkrooms in London’s professional labs.
These lovingly preserved spaces were the cornerstone of the photographic industry before every photographer became a Photoshop operator, in the process losing something of the art, magic and sociality of the industry.
Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, which chronicled the excesses of 1980’s Wall Street, charts the rise and fall of mortgage backed securities.
Lewis tells the story of derivatives through the growing apocalyptic vision of a small hedge-fund which foresaw it all and profited massively.
I’m a big fan of anything that explains powerful and opaque financial forces through the workings of dead-end sub-prime sales conferences. A closer look at the belly of this beast is hard to find.
]]>Great archived clip of the Computer Chronicles circa 1997 discussing Hotmail in it’s pre-Microsoft startup days.
]]>Edward Burtynsky
Quarries
8 January - 2 February 2008
“Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale colour photographs document the many facets of nature as it is transformed through human industry. Exquisitely detailed and exactly rendered, Burtynsky’s images strike an intricate balance between a sombre reportage and a powerfully seductive aesthetic. His various series, including shipbreaking yards, urban mines, quarries and industrial refineries, reflect the dilemma between man’s desire for prosperity, and the suffering we exact on the environment.
Born in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1955, Burtynsky graduated from Ryerson Polytechnical University in Toronto with a B.A. in Photographic Arts. He was awarded the inaugural TED Prize in 2004, honouring individuals who raise awareness of life in a global context to inspire positive change. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in August 2006, a centrepiece of Canada’s Honours System, which recognises a lifetime of outstanding achievement. Burtynsky’s photographs are included in the collections of fifteen major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the V&A in London.”
http://www.flowerseast.com/FE/Artists_Originals.asp?Artist=BURTYNSKY
Text from Flowers East
Images from Edward Burtynsky
“purpose is a free and independent webzine, dedicated to the presentation of photographic work”
“The subjects explored are broad and relevant: “chronicles of the ordinary”, “Africa seen by its photographers”, “environment”, “social body”, “memory”, “margins and frontiers”, “childhood"…
purpose is a meeting-place for known and unknown artists who wish to compare and contrast their visions of the world.
Accompanied by an original soundtrack created by composers with varied perspectives, each issue is also a multimedia experience.
The concept and editing of purpose are realized by Paul Demare (art director), Gilles Raynaldy (photographer), founders of the webmag, and Francesca Alberti (art historian).”
]]>Paul Shaw writes in the AIGA about the history of typography on the New York subway system and particularly why Helvetica has rightly or wrongly come to be regarded as it’s exclusive font.
What emerges is a fascinating account of the process of standardisation in complex public systems.
These attempts began with unsolicited attempts by graphic designers in the 50’s to propose the standardisation of information. It was only later that Helvetica came to represent the face of that standardisation.
George Salomon, Appleton, Parsons & Co, “Out of the Labyrinth: A plea and a plan for improved passenger information in the New York subways.”
The (2006?) IDEO team is Alan South, Head of Service Innovation; Mat Hunter, Head of Consumer Experience Design; Ingelise Nielsen, Head of Marketing Communications and Brand consultant Alice Huang. The 2006 interview highlights a number of useful insights about their approach to working with clients and the role of the agency within client organisations.
One thing that stuck out for me is the idea of “open-source innovation” which seemed to apply to the philosophy in IDEO of teaching clients to work the way they do and trusting that the agency will be needed for truly sticky problems and greater strategic value.
Another was their strong case for ‘generative research’. They argue forcefully for qualitative research as inspirational. They highlight the need for analysis and design interpretation to bring insights to life as ideas. And they argue for partnership, not combat, with quantitative data. Mat Hunter summarises these positions as possibility and risk. He says, “The point is that our intuitive thinking, our qualitative approach is very good for imagining new possibilities, but managing risks you must bring in analysis, statistics and data.”
Ekaterina and her company have a number of other interesting publications available at their website, their organisation operates in Russia and Asia.
]]>In a recent blog post, Nokia’s Jan Chipchase raises the issue of “tour bus ethnography” - short, sharp excursions into foreign cultures, with little time to decompress before moving on to the next one.
Image: A snapshot of today in Western European (liberal media!) culture.
In this post he deals primarily with some of his techniques for managing life on the road, through a kind of “mental scaffolding” for comprehending where you are (taking photos of local papers) and managing data through a very specific process and dedicated person.
The post seems to implicitly raise other issues though. He notes that in a 100 interview tour of the States, the first 4/5 days produce the most valuable insights. This is the pragmatic side of the argument. Get in, get out, keep moving. You never know the truth anyway so what counts is having a clear idea of where “truths” came from. The scaffolding is what counts, not the detail.
The other side is that the tour bus is like a moving armchair, carrying our 19th century study with all it’s preconceptions with us. Admittedly it’s a different set of preconceptions that I’m talking about here.
Somewhere in the middle lies a compromise. In the end, it hinges on the framing of ‘the field’. Concerned exclusively with the field inhabited by users of general practitioners in a particular town, your terms of reference hinge on that town and more depth is desirable. The issues are local and therefore specific, and time may be required to uncover them. If your frame of reference swings to the wider issues of medical services infrastructure, then looking at ‘instances’ of GP use can be enlightening, alongside ‘instances’ from other aspects of that eco-system. Within this eco-system perspective, it can feel like an unrealistic luxury to spend too much time in a single instance.
There’s something of Sennett’s critique of potential man in this debate. And something of a nostalgia for when the world was seen simply enough to spend a year mythologising remote cultures.
Here in the thick of it, Chipchase’s scaffolding techniques and images of traffic flows, feel like the reality of the never more global world that we inhabit and it’s perhaps a different, rather than inauthentic anthropology.
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