This video is nice. The design is nice, it’s clean and minimal and it looks nice. But the best thing about it is what it represents. This merging of physical and digital items, it’s been happening for a long time, it’s what I studied at college, but with iPads getting more powerful and the imminent arrival of NFC objects, this could become so much fun. Books that interact with the dolls that match the characters in the story, interchangeable scenes with props and items you could acquire digitally and interact with physically. Combine all that with some meaningful augmented reality…then it won’t be long until we have anti-collision RFID readers and then I’ll be able to finish the dolls house I started in college!

Ever since I was in college and I discovered We Feel Fine, I’ve been a Jonathan Harris fan. His simple storytelling infrastructres are immersive and intriguing, whether they’re stories he wants to tell himself like The Whale Hunt or bigger communal stories, the latest of which is “first loves” – a story, or more descriptively, a collection of stories, about peoples’ first loves, which was launched yesterday, Valentine’s day.

First Loves is charming and lovely to listen to/read through, but the intriguing thing about Cowbird, is the image that is painted in the about section.

“…a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events.”

This one line got me thinking. Journalism has indeed changed, grown and evolved rapidly in recent years, but events are still generally built by several large, summarising stories. This idea says that they can instead be built of hundreds, thousands, of unique, emotional, human stories. Technology allows us to bring a galaxy of details into articles which would usually be limited to lines on pages.

The Arab Spring would be the first example of this kind of potential. If there was a hub, or a home for all of the social media content that arose from those events, you would be able to see the big picture, understand the results, but at the same time zoom in and understand on a real human level, how it effected people.

The nearest thing we have to this right now would be a twitter hash tag. One thing everyone can use to unite their content. So is something like Cowbird more solid, more founded, is it something like this that would form the news agencies of the next generation?

Interesting…

If you recognise this invitation, you already know that I’m going to be in New York for the week of Presidents Day, the 20th through the 24th. Let me know if anyone wants to meet up, the best way to deal with the cold is just to hide from it, probably in a pub.

So after watching the Alaskan wake boarding video, I went on a trip down extreme sports memory lane, I watched the Chilean street dual slalom race, some Danny MacAskill re-runs, and I was feeling good – until I saw this.

I’ve never been much of a BMX fanboy, having had the mountain bike life bred into me from a young age, but this guy is – incredible. Watch it once – you’ll watch it 5 times. The combo tricks he pulls off in the air are mind bending, and the end is just not of this world.

Found on Design You Trust

Just a quick post, I saw this, and I like it. It’s the simplicity that I like, the alternative approach to ‘media’, it hits it’s target audience in a place that is personally and emotionally important to them (the place where they run!) and it says exactly what it needs to say: keep running.

Found on Design You Trust

Since I mentioned Man vs. Machine, I’ve been waiting to see what came of their More4 work – and here it is. I love it, it makes me want to instantly go out and hire a workspace where I can chop things up and stick them together with other things, put an arduino board in the middle and hope it comes to life. But you get the idea, this stuff is just beautiful.

And this is the making of: