Posts tagged “image”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from Dan_Soltzberg] Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years: A Half-Century of Automotive Eyesores [BusinessWeek] – [Interesting to look at design from a "greatest misses" rather than a greatest hits point of view. Can't say though that I agree with all of the selections for ugliest car – I do have love in my heart for the AMC Gremlin]
  • [from steve_portigal] Pampers offers Rowley-designed diapers [The Associated Press] – [Interesting to hear a story about this trend on NPR's marketplace, suggesting that this was designed to appeal specifically to the mothers. Obviously since the chooser isn't the user here, that's nothing new in itself, but these brands are making explicit the idea of the product design being a reflection of the mom instead of a projection by the mom – here's who I am instead of here's who my kid is] Popular designer Cynthia Rowley has designed 11 styles of Pampers, including pastels, stripes, madras and ruffles. P&G says they'll be offered in Target Corp. stores beginning in mid-July. Jodi Allen, a P&G baby care vice president, says in a statement Wednesday that diaper performance comes first, but parents consider the look important, too. Pampers is the No. 1 worldwide brand in sales for the Cincinnati-based consumer products maker. Dallas-based competitor Kimberly-Clark Corp. last month launched U.S. sales of Huggies Jeans Diapers, giving babies' bottoms a denim style for the summer.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] Rent a White Guy [The Atlantic] – And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.” We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie. His business cards had already been made. (via @Kottke)
  • [from julienorvaisas] Hey Facebook! Here’s your privacy redesign [Fortune.com] – [The community is now literally begging Facebook to fix this issue. Free design!] We asked several leading user experience designers how they'd overhaul the social network's obtuse privacy settings interface if given the chance. Here, in their own words, are their innovative solutions.
  • [from steve_portigal] For Forgetful, Cash Helps the Medicine Go Down [NYTimes.com] – [The challenge of marketing, design & other forms of corporate persuasion is revealed when you see that people need incentive/motivation to take medication] One-third to one-half of all patients do not take medication as prescribed, and up to one-quarter never fill prescriptions at all, experts say. Such lapses fuel more than $100 billion dollars in health costs annually because those patients often get sicker. Now, a controversial, and seemingly counterintuitive, effort to tackle the problem is gaining ground: paying people money to take medicine or to comply with prescribed treatment. The idea, which is being embraced by doctors, pharmacy companies, insurers and researchers, is that paying modest financial incentives up front can save much larger costs of hospitalization…Although “economically irrational,” Dr. Corrigan said, small sums might work better than bigger ones because otherwise patients might think, “ ‘I’m only doing this for the money,’ and it would undermine treatment.”
  • [from steve_portigal] Creativity thrives in Pixar’s animated workplace [SF Chronicle] – At another company, the employee in Payne's position might be a feared corporate rules-enforcer – the guy who tells you not to put tack holes in the plaster or forbids you from painting over the white walls next to your cubicle. But the architect and 14-year Pixar veteran embraces the madness. Among the more creative additions on the campus: One animator built a bookcase with a secret panel – which opens up into a speakeasy-style sitting area with a card table, bar and security monitor. Other employees work in modified Tuff Sheds, tricked out to look like little houses with front porches and chandeliers. "Sometimes I just have to let go," Payne says with an amused sigh, as he walks into a newer building with a high ceiling – where someone has interrupted the clean sightlines with a wooden loft. A couch and a mini-refrigerator are balanced 10 feet above the floor. [Did a mini-ethnography of Pixar a few years ago and the cultural factors around creativity and community were outstanding]

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Japanese cultural norms – asking about weight – Insightful little culture-clash story; an American working in Japan isn't sure how to deal with blunt (especially from the Japanese!) questions about his increasing weight
  • Clive Thomson on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, renowned for his use of mathematical game theory models for prediction – Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. “His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”
  • New York Times Magazine on the Beatles’ Rock Band videogame – This is a fantastic article that spans many big issues: gaming, music, performance, art, history, culture, product development, authenticity, creativity, entertainment, technology. It's a must-read.
  • Brian Dettmer turns books into sculptural pieces – Contemporary visual artists see opportunity in what many bemoan as the twilight of the age of the book. John Latham (1921-2006), Hubertus Gojowczyk, Doug Beube and others have treated books as sculptural stuff. But no one whose work I have seen tops that of Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer at Toomey Tourell.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Morphed photos help dieters visualize a thinner self – ThinnerView is a service that shows dieters how they'll look if they achieve their goals for losing weight. Customers begin by uploading a photo of themselves at their current weight. From there, ThinnerView hand-alters the image based on the customer's requirements, bone structure and body shape to render the most realistic results possible—it does not use simple, generic slimming software. Within two to three working days, the customer can download their "after" image, share it with others or post it on their Facebook page. $14.99 for the first image

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • A sociological-framed blog with (like so many others) commentary on images from media and daily life – The sociological imagination is a woefully under-utilized tool. We hope this blog encourages all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination and that, between all of us, public discourse will increasingly include a sociological lens with which we can all learn about social processes and mechanisms, critique social inadequacies, and design functional and equitable alternatives.

    We assume that you, our audience, are sociologically-inclined folks. So we do not typically include a lengthy sociological interpretation of the images.

    Images are polysemic and people will view and use them in many different ways, so our commentary, when offered, is never meant to control how people use the images (as if we could anyway). We welcome comments that offer additional or alternative interpretations of images.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Large collection of (actual?) screenplay pitches (technically query letters). – Just one:
    Title: Remnants of Hammers
    Logline: Constant bickering drives this comedy-drama as the plots of immature Bill, rabble-rousing Eldon, and ex-Marine George converge upon poor Dr. FitzUrse.
  • The Che brand – In "Che’s Afterlife.” Casey has written a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame. It is about how ideas travel and mutate in this age of globalization, how concepts of political ideology have increasingly come to be trumped by notions of commerce and cool and chic, and how the historical Che gave way to other Ches: St. Che, said to possess the ability to perform miracles; Chesucristo, a Christ-like figure revered for his ideals, not his advocacy of violence; an entrepreneurial Che, promoting the lesson “that individuals should honestly strive to produce their utmost for the good of all”; and the Rock ’n’ Roll Che, more representative of youthful anti-authoritarianism than of any political dogma. Che has become a generic symbol of the underdog, the idealist, the iconoclast, the man willing to die for a cause. He has become “the quintessential postmodern icon” signifying “anything to anyone and everything to everyone.”

Improve your hearing and enhance your image!

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Another culture-revealing promotion: a hearing aid that looks like a bluetooth earpiece (or “cell phone ear adapter”).

If a conventional hearing aid sounds like an embarrassment to you, try the Stealth Secret Sound Amplifier. It looks just like a cell phone ear adapter and works as a sound enhancer so you can join conversations and even hear soft voices from 50 feet away. Now you can enjoy the best of both worlds: a more youthful appearance and better hearing.

As we’ve written before, one strategy to lower barriers to adoption is to disguise one behavior to look like another one that is more normal. It’s interesting that the Bluetooth earpiece is presented as normal enough to be desirable over the hearing aid. I guess it’s better to be a young douche than an old fart?

Previously: The Ultimate Tech Accessory

Thanks, Amy!

Neologism du jour: Google pr0nrank

I may not be the first to air this idea, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Google pr0nrank refers to the number of Google Image Search pages it takes to reach a NSFW/dirty/titillating image for a given search term.

winston churchill is 48; an image of a bodily organ near a face appears on the 48th page of results.

aficionado is 1. The first row of results contain suggestive bikini ladies.

In neither case, of course, was I expecting to find such images.

Make any image a “Polaroid”

This is pretty crazy – you can take any online image and turn it into a Polaroid. Now of course, a Polaroid has many attributes – in the taking, the developing, the texture, the quality, oh and the little spot to write on. This doesn’t really offer all of this, but it still someone qualifies (in someone’s mind) as Polaroid-ness. No doubt this is infringing on something?

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