Russell Davies

objects with voices

We've gone anthropomorphic crazy in our house. First it was objects with faces. And now I've realised that everything's talking to us. Well not quite everything. We've been living with Nabaztag (archibald2 at nabaztag.com) for a while. Though the only thing he really does for us is announce the time in a serious of (sometimes annoying, often genuinely funny) eccentric ways. It's a top thing. My only gripe is that Nabaztag Tag is made from more brittle plastic than the previous model and it seriously affects the quality of the clocky sounds he makes before announcing the time. The previous one had a nice dull resonance which made the noises coming from him seem almost organic. The new one's a bit too tinny.

Nab is now joined by Jeeves / Stephen Fry, embodied in this splendid (and quite reasonably priced) alarm clock. He wakes you up with gentle, butler-y insistence and with great sound reproduction. It's nothing like the badly robotic Tomy sounds of the past. I like these slightly humanised objects. It feels like the future we were once sold.

And it strikes me that there's an element of unproduct about all these things. The Nab can go on being renewed ad infinitum, (though it's not great that he's always on) and I guess it would be possible to create a version of the Fry alarm clock that could be updated remotely. Though presumably not for the same price. And I have to admit that the addition of the facial stickers to my phone has delayed my inevitable purchase of an N95.

objects with faces

This seems like an idea that should have been around forever. But I'm not sure I've seen it actually in the shops before. It's just a bunch of stickers to add faces to your stuff. (Good thing - they're pretty durable and waterproof.) I'd been sticking banana stickers to my phone to differentiate it from every other k800i but I already like it a whole lot more now it's scowling at me crazily all the time.

a brief commercial interruption

Over on the blog of professional interest for advertising people I've stuck three recent Campaign columns. There's one about the hell of judging websites for a creative awards thing, another about advertising's declining influence, and one about the Innocent blog and the McDonald's thing.

There are also a couple of new job ads. One for BBDO Dusseldorf. And one for the Conservative Party, which I hesitated about putting up, but I guess they're as entitled to find a planner as anyone else.

And there's also the chance to put your questions to David Wheldon of Vodafone in the Big Ideas interview.

And finally, and best, Rob has stuck the next Account Planning School Of The Web assignment up. It's a doozy. Full marks to him. Go and have a look.

interesting sounds

Here's a chance for all of you to start getting involved with Interesting2007, due to the generosity of Simon and Curtis James. Simon and Curtis run a couple of really interesting sound-related companies - audemos and simonsound. (They do fantastic stuff but my absolute favourite thing is the Sleeping Steam Machines project which you can find if you go here).

They're going to be recording stuff at the conference, not just all the talks but talking to people, collecting ambient sound, all sorts of stuff and they're going to make a sound montage of the event afterwards which I'm really looking forward to. More details on all of that later, but this is the bit where you come in:

Simon and Curtis are also going to make an audio identity for the conference, something we can use on the podcasts and video and stuff, and maybe play at the beginning of the conference. But in the spirit of what The Design Conspiracy have done with the visual identity they don't just want to create something new, they want to build it out of stuff you send in.

So we want you to send us sounds. You can email them to me as digital files, or you can call this skypein number and leave them on the voicemail there - +44 (0)20 7871 1267. You can send anything you like. Anything you think is interesting. You can just say 'interesting' into the voicemail, you can  tell us what you think is interesting, you can record yourself practising the tuba. But the more interesting you make it, the more interesting it'll be.

Does that make sense? I hope so. Please get your contributions in.

the contrariness of crowds

Watching Eurovision last week reminded me of something I think we're all going to have to get used to - the contrariness of crowds; the fact that large groups of people, hidden behind the safety of numbers sometimes like nothing more than just to fuck everything up, because it's funny.

Of course the Serbian victory wasn't just about that, it was partly regional solidarity, it was partly that different cultures like different music (which we need to learn to accept) but it was at least partly sticking two fingers up to Old Europe and it's notions of acceptable taste. (In the context of Eurovision, which is admittedly a strange place to be talking about taste.)

I think my favourite instance of this was when David Bowie decided he'd perform his greatest hits on his Sound + Vision tour and he'd get people to phone in and vote for what they wanted him to play. The NME started a campaign to get everyone to vote for novelty Bowie song The Laughing Gnome which was so successful they ended up scrapping the voting.

A more recent incidence was the campaign to keep Sanjaya on American Idol. The individual mischievous feelings that we all sometimes get, just wanting to do something contrary and awkward and funny are magnified by these mass interactivity events, especially if something like votefortheworst catalyzes it. It's not quite the same as that activist impulse to subvert some UGC thing, it's more like the dumb, fantastic joy of chanting at the referee. It's about the mischief of the herd. Low effort, high fun.

I wonder if these kind of mass rejections of accepted taste have something in common with the rebellious celebrations  Barbara Ehrenreich talks about in Dancing In The Streets. 

boost the sample

John is stuck. Can't decide on what to call his new book. So if you're doing nothing he requests that you go here and express yourself on the matter.

And with that, I'm of on hols for a week. Again, with all the comment spam floating around I'll have to turn on comment moderation while away. Sorry about that.  Lots of Interesting2007 news when I get back.

bristol coffee

Mike is trying to spin up a coffee morning in Bristol on Friday. Anyone want to join him?

original monster

Those of you who are fans of Stefan Bucher's Daily Monster project (and if you're not, you should be) might like to know that some of his original drawings are on sale here. You could also start to become pre-excited  because he's promised to do a special Monster film for Interesting2007.

pointful comedy

Where's the British equivalent of The Daily Show? Wouldn't that be good? This is a great interview with Jon Stewart. (via Johnnie Moore.)

interesting speakers

This is quite a daunting moment for me. This is where I find out whether my definition of interesting matches with yours. I think some people were expecting a conference about digital marketing or something. But as you'll see, Interesting2007 is not going to be that. If anyone wants a refund just let me know, and that's fine, I believe Eventbrite is fully able to cope. And I hope someone will take your place.

I should also point out that this is not a definitive list of speakers. Partly because I've not finished rounding up speakers yet, partly because not everyone's got back to me with a rough idea of title and partly because I'm convinced that I've asked some people to speak and then forgotten to email them again. So if you think I've asked you to speak and then not followed-up then a) please let me know and b) I'm sorry.

Anyway, here, in alphabetical order are the speakers thus far lined up and confirmed for the conference.

And could I say that I'm massively grateful to everyone that's agreed to speak at this thing. I think it's going to completely bloody fascinating. And, hopefully, after you see the list of stuff you'll agree.

These are the people doing the shorter things - 3-5 minutes. (And in some cases verging on 10). A high level of technical difficulty but often the most rewarding bits.

Adrian Gunn Wilson will talk about how to split a log with an axe. (He warns us that this will include gory pictures.)

Andrew Hovells - will give us a talk entitled - 'Doing something well (or I'm useless at football so I swim)'.

Diego Rodriguez is going to talk about Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness. (I can't quite believe he's coming all the way over for this, but he says he is, so I'm very chuffed about that.)

Emma Holloway - will talk about 'Ideal Homes? Designing the British Mobile Home'.

Matthew d'Ancona will talk about 'something like: From Citizen Kane to YouTube.'

Phil Gyford will talk about 'something to do with acting'.

Seb Palmer is going to talk about how the world looks to a skateboarder.

Sophie Dollar - will talk about a haphephobic French fruit painter. With a couple of slides.

Tim Milne - is going to talk about the magic of printing.

Tom Lewis Reynier will talk about knots.

Tommi Brem will give a 3 minute talk currently entitled: 'People have no trouble imagining infinity. They have trouble imagining finiteness.' Though he promises a shorter title in due course.

These are the people doing the longer things; 15-20 minutes, so a bit of room for them to stretch out but you're still comfortable in the knowledge that if they're not doing it for you, you're never more than 20 minutes away from something else.

Anne Ward will talk about something like 'how the web is reclaiming niceness.'

Chris Heathcote will be speaking and cooking about EBCB for the 21st century, and probably launching forkbot.

Dave Funkypancake will show photos and talk about something probably including various bollards.

Deborah Khan will give us 'why do we listen?'

Fiona Romeo will talk about the museum visitor as performer, based on her experiences putting together The Science Of Spying at the Science Museum.

Grant McCracken hasn't decided what to talk about yet, but I'm hoping to persuade him to tell us of his experiences going on Oprah.

Jack Schulze is planning to talk about comics and pictures that know they're being looked at.

Jennifer Lyon Bell will talk about 'what makes a sex film sexy' using her own experience as an erotic director. She may be accompanied by Jeffre Jackson.

Matt Jones will be talking about 'The Vernacular of the Spectacular': a wünderkammerkaze ride round the (possible) future(s) of bits, cities, rocks, robots and shoes.

Rebecca Northam is going to talk about Ibsen or The Muppets, or possibly both.

Richard Wilson is going to talk about how TV gets made, and show us a rather splendid personal project. But since he's got the first show of a new programme going out the next day, he might not make it.

Tom Armitage is going to talk about pipes and tubes. He might use this to talk about the joy of infrastructure at large. He is finding it hard to resist calling this talk "A Series of Tubes", but he's just about holding up.

And that's the list so far. As you'll see it's a lot to pack in, and I might have to delicate conversations with a few people about shaving off some minutes, but I think we can make it all work.

I have more people to prevail upon, to persuade them to contribute. We will also have musical and video guests. And some small-scale fun surprises. More announcements on all that to come.

(I'm going to add this list to the wiki and will update it as people get added, come up with a better title or decide to chicken out. And I'll post significant updates here. Check out the attendees page, by the way, there are going to be some dead interesting people in the audience too. If you're coming, why not add yourself to the list?)

I'm staggered and delighted that 300 of you bought tickets without the first clue about who's going to speak at this thing. So I really hope this list excites you. It excites me and I'm going to love listening to all these people. I hope you feel the same.