Month: June 2010

Humor

Google Stories One Letter at a Time

By Delphine Hirasuna |


A clever bit of collaborative advertising between Google and Pixar, the latest Google search story video was timed to the release of “Toy Story 3” and features the familiar voices of Andy’s toys. It runs just one-minute long and is devoid of any fancy animation. A mini-preview of the next “Toy Story,” the video introduces us to key characters and hints at the plot and happy outcome.

Google search stories originally started out as a series of online videos about the product and its users. One search story, “Parisian Love,” got so many hits during the first three months that it played on YouTube that the company decided to break its rule about not running TV ads and aired it on the 2010 Super Bowl. What’s brilliant about the Google search stories are their utter simplicity and charm. The “searchers” always remain faceless and anonymous, yet their stories unfold through letters clicked into the search box, forming words that reveal tales of romance, adventure travel, job changes, health concerns, and personal passions. Viewers become voyeurs to the searchers’ life, yearnings, paranoia, interests, peccadilloes, and wild imagination, following their logic to delightful conclusions. “Every quest is its own story,” claims Google’s YouTube channel, which invites visitors to create their own search story. Actually, that is something we do everyday, often unaware of how much that says about where we are coming from.

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Product Design

E-Mook: Buy the Mook to Get the Gift

By Delphine Hirasuna |

The e-mook has become all the rage in Japan. An enhanced version of a mook (cross between a magazine and a book), the e-mook, published by Takarajimasha, expands the hybrid concept a step further by including a premium gift inserted in a box attached to every mook. Typically focused on a single trendy fashion label, e-mooks are brand specific, containing articles about the designer, manufacturing process, celebrity customers and a catalog of the latest collection.

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Product Design

Moleskine for e-Book Notetakers

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Corporate anthropologists who observe consumer behavior watch out for “workarounds” — solutions that people rig up to overcome shortcomings in the design of a product. These are typically one-off designs that are sometimes ingeniously clever and sometimes humorously strange and barely workable.

In coming up with a Moleskine cover for an Amazon Kindle e-book, Moleskine admits it eavesdropped online when bloggers posted workaround suggestions or wrote wistfully of the satisfaction they got when jotting notes on paper.

“The very idea of this new cover came from ‘notebook hackers,’ who create their own custom-made accessories weaving together paper pages and digital tools,” Moleskine says on its website. “Throughout the web, hundreds of communities and discussions can be found where such Moleskine ‘hackers’ publish their own invention.”

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Illustration

RSA Animate: Moving Motivation

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Teachers often write important points on a whiteboard to emphasize things they want students to remember. This is even better.

The Royal Society of Art (RSA) in London has collaborated with illustrator Andrew Park to animate talks given at RSA. This video takes an excerpt from Daniel H. Pink’s lecture on “Drive: The Truth About What Motivates Us” and visually brings Pink’s key points to life. In addition to “Drive,” Pink is the author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” — both recommended reading.

Yes, this video is long (10 minutes), but Pink, as always, has thought-provoking things to say, and Park’s sketches are fun and fascinating to view.

Public Art Programs

Art Exhibit for the Birds

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Placing manmade installation art in a national park seems counterintuitive since national parks were established to preserve and protect wildlife habitat. But the 1,491-acre Presidio is unlike any other national park. Set in San Francisco’s tony residential area, it overlooks the Golden Gate entrance into the Bay, the reason why it served as a military outpost for 219 years (successively under Spain, Mexico and U.S. rule) until Congress closed the army base in 1994 and made it into a national park. Today, the Presidio is a mix of forested hiking trails and historic buildings converted to other uses, including the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Its proximity to urban surroundings has also resulted in some interesting collaborations. In 2009, For-Site Foundation (a nonprofit dedicated to the presentation of art about place) in partnership with the Presidio Trust invited 25 designers, artists and architects worldwide to propose custom-designed habitat for the wildlife living in the park. From there, 11 concepts were chosen for a site-based art exhibition called “Presidio Habitats: For the Place, Of the Place.”

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