Kitchen clock
First cup of tea
Alarm clock
Travel day today
jedi tricks
Once upon a time this blog was all about pictures of Arthur and random stuff I'd found in the street. It wasn't all poluted with planning and brands and stuff. Let's recapture a bit of that spirit with Arthur practising his light sabre skills and his serious expressions - simultaneously.
life cubed
The nice folk at AKQA took us to Microsoft Lifesquared today. It was an interesting experience, especially as I've been thinking about Scott's questions about fakes/authenticity in the comments on this post.
I love Microsoft. Have done ever since I really got to know them as a planner on the business. I love the fact that they keep trying to do much harder things than anyone else. Building expensive laptops for art directors is easy, building an impressive OS that runs on everything is really hard. So I'm always willing them to be good, and Lifesquared almost was, but wasn't quite.
Their idea was to present various technologies (or perhaps a 'technology lifestyle') via some vignettes of 'real people' demo-ing the stuff. So we met a guy who ran a marine accessories business, and one of his employees and his wife and they were all loaded up to the gills with Microsoft stuff. Nothing really wrong with that as an idea. It wasn't exactly a show, more like being inside a very dull episode of Howard's Way.
And lots of the techology was actually quite impressive, I'm a huge fan of Tablet PCs and OneNote for example. And they just gave us a little taster of that. Could have done much more. Microsoft/IP TV looks really good - smart applications, clever execution, Media Centre was impressive. The tech was great. So it was really frustrating to be kept from it by all this lifestyle fakery. The actors were fine but they couldn't answer any real questions and you really wanted an actual engineer in the room to demo the thing properly.
I remember when I worked on Microsoft at w+k. We'd have these intense three day long briefings on the newest version of Word or something, and it was mind-numbing, but you learned stuff. And you were getting it from people who knew what they were talking about, you were getting expertise. What you were getting from Life+ was marketing. Which is fine, nothing wrong with marketing, and I appreciate they were trying to make it more accessible and wrap some storytelling around it, but when you go into someone's environment like that you want to really meet them, to understand what they can tell you, what only they know. Not feel like you're walking into a big ad.
They'd obviously put a lot of time and thought into it so it's a real shame that you spend your whole time noticing the artificiality, like the fact that the fake small business had no paper in its files and no kettle. Or the fake wife had no wedding ring and the the fake 15-year old boy apparently spent his time listening to Jools Holland.
I was really itching to sit and get hands on with the stuff and have someone who really knew it talk to me and tell me what it could do. But we didn't get that. We didn't get a vision of the future, we got a vision of a slightly more organised present.
Shame. But I hope they try again, because I bet the next version will be ace.
stamping, the human face
I got my copy of Tom Peter's 60 today. On first glance it looks splendid, though I've not had time for a proper look. But what made me really smile were all the stamps, you can't beat the real, organic touch of genuine stamps - they're a sign that an actual person has been involved. And they illustrate that it's come from somewhere other, it's exotic, it's like the crackle on the World Service, it adds to the appeal.
walking back to happiness
Popped out at lunchtime to visit the Richard Long show at the Haunch Of Venison gallery.
I liked it. I liked that it was quick to visit but still worthwhile. I liked that he's picked a thing to do and he keeps doing it, you don't get the sense that's he relentlessly searching for novelty, he's found something that he thinks is good and he's been doing it since the 60s. And he's had a consistent typographical and graphic approach which gives the stuff a pleasingly timeless quality, like those Swiss railway clocks.
But most of all I think I envied his life. It seems like a great gig. Though I'm sure there is much travail along the way.
The title of one of his works reminded me of a post I want to do about the benefits of simplicity and of complexity. Must get around to that.