• Redefining the Art of Smart Living – Ajman Uptown
  A concept inspired in French style one of a kind in Ahman
  Best location on Emirated Road.
  (Ajman, is the smallest in all the seven emirates with an area of only 161 square miles)
• Great Gig in the Sea – Pink Floyd Themed Cruise to the Bahamas
  Great Gig in the Sea is the first Pink Floyd themed concert cruise to the Bahamas. The cruise will allow Pink Floyd fans to combine sun and sea with an amazing concert experience. This one-of a kind voyage will feature the music of Think Floyd USA: The American Pink Floyd Show, and will celebrate material from Pink Floyd’s earliest days through the present.

• A conversation between friends: director Werner Herzog and tightrope artist Philippe Petit
  PP: Film is a lying media.
  WH: It’s beautiful to invent. And truth is not found in facts per se. In Philippe’s case, there’s a deeper truth in what he’s doing–an ecstasy of truth. And he’s discovering, of course, walking in the sky, in the clouds, means a form of ecstasy–a quintessential metaphor of an ecstatic moment. There’s a truth in it that we can somehow function beyond our limitations. He can walk in the skies.
  PP: Truth deserves more than being factually recorded.
  WH: We have to be cautious when we use this term “truth”–let’s touch this only with a pair of pliers. Not even a mathematician or a philosopher could give you a real definition of it.

We’ve seen coffee cup sleeves used to carry advertisements:

Last month, there was a sleeve around my copy of Metropolis magazine. Is advertising in the magazine no longer effective?

What’s next?

Banded bird, © Dan Soltzberg 2008

Previously: Forced Engagement

My latest interactions column, Living in the Overlap, has just been published. I riff on the relevance of pop culture, the spaces between disciplines and the importance of resisting the urge to label and categorize everything neatly.

Here’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t tried: Project Runway, High School Musical, American Pie movies, robot wars, molecular gastronomy, Halo 3, Dancing With the Stars, Frisky Dingo, sudoku, biopics, House, Desperate Housewives, Portishead, Fifty Cent, Dane Cook, The Da Vinci Code, The Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones, Augusten Burroughs, and Mitch Albom. I’m mildly curious about some; intensely disinterested about others. A lot of it might make a “sophisticated” individual uncomfortable. But my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories, and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know a little bit about all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• NYT Op-Ed on expertise, perception, and trickery
  The volunteers knew the taste of strawberries perfectly well. That was the problem. The associations that came with the word “strawberry” overwhelmed the taste of chocolate. Every trickster’s hope, says Jim Steinmeyer, who designs illusions for magicians, is “finding smart people who bring a lot to the table – cultural experience, shared expectations, preconceptions. The more they bring, the more there is to work with, and the easier it is to get the audience to make allowances – to reach the ‘right’ conclusion and unwittingly participate in the deception.”
• Entrepreneurs Find Ways to Make Technology Work With Jewish Sabbath
  Yet another article on kosher technology
  “But Zomet has invented Sabbath-friendly wheelchairs, sound systems and elevators that stop on each floor, and developed a Shabbat scooter with Michigan-based Amigo Mobility International.”

Although Clippy was reported dead in early 2007, his cousin Ibbi (a feminized toilet seat?) has stepped forward to head up the so-helpful-you-want-to-throttle-it department.

It’s amusing to see a despised and unsuccessful software feature egregiously ripped off. Why did someone think this was a good idea?

• Why The Audrey Gadget Flopped : NPR
  “After tons of testing and research, The Audrey, a kitchen computer designed for women, promised to be the next big thing. It flopped. Alex Cohen talks with Don Fotsch, co-creator of The Audrey about why the device failed.”
  Utterly content-free; they talk about how great Audrey is and simply blame the bubble bursting for the failure. It was the economy, it wasn’t us. I’d like to see a better analysis. Anyone got one?

In our recent AIGA Gain article about noticing, we relate how the process of noticing once and then noticing again is a way to find patterns and uncover themes.

During my recent trip to the UK, I took this picture of a discarded banana peel.

I didn’t notice other bananas, but someone else did and they’ve started the London Bananas Project, a fantastic archive of banana peels in the London public space.

When I arrived I noticed something straight away: there’s a lot of banana skins around.

I see them everywhere. They’re languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they’re fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay. I don’t know how or why they caught my attention, but within a week of being in London I couldn’t get my mind off these banana skins. Where were they coming from? Who was eating all these bananas and leaving the skins around? Why was it always bananas I was seeing, and not, say, oranges? Was it a sign? Was there something sinister going on? Apparently these little hazards were a covert operation going completely unnoticed; everyone I asked about it said that they had never noticed anything of the sort and looked at me as if I was nuts.

That’s a great description of the power of noticing (even if it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s still a great set of muscles to keep flexing).

Here’s bananas in Bangalore:

See also: Street Mattress

• Transcript of Frontline: The Merchants of Cool
  Douglas Rushkoff’s 2001 PBS special that journeys into the world of the marketers of popular culture to teenagers
• Transcript of Frontline: The Persuaders
  Douglas Rushkoff’s 2004 PBS special about “What’s going on in the world of today’s marketers and advertisers? What are the new and surprising methods they’re using to decipher who we are and what we want? And where is this taking us?”
• Tricking People into Doing the Right Thing
  I don’t agree with the term “tricking” in the headline of the article, but some interesting examples of persuasion around social issues (teen pregnancy, smoking, messy urination, etc.)
• Bell Labs gets out of the fundamental physics research game
  Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software. The idea is to align the research work in the Lab closer to areas that the parent company is focusing on, says Peter Benedict, spokesperson for Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures. “In the new innovation model, research needs to keep addressing the need of the mother company.”

• Some thoughts about the importance of and access to “think time”
  …The list that follows is reassuring for those who crave some repose without the need for an ashram. The “oases of thought” Buzan hears about are commonly: the shower; the bath; the loo; shaving; walking in nature; in bed (before sleep, in the middle of the night, or first thing); looking at water; listening to classical music and long-distance travel, such as running or driving. ..
• Confessions of a Superhero
  Documentary that follows the lives, history, home life, and motivations of four “characters” on Hollywood Boulevard, people who dress up like Batman, Superman et. al and are tipped for posing for pictures. More than a fascinating look at a subculture, it digs deep into the ordinary aspects of less-than-conventional individuals and raises questions around the Hollywood dream, identity, character and so on. Fantastic.
• Hands on a Hard Body available on Google Video
  This is an excellent documentary about an endurance competition that pits twenty-four contestants against each other to see who can keep their hand on a pickup truck for the longest amount of time. Whoever endures the longest without leaning on the truck or squatting wins the truck. If I’m not mistaken it’s been out of print for a while.