Archive for August 2008

We’re moved by this new work by Banksy spotted in New Orleans. The prolific street artist created these pieces to serve as bold reminders of the devastation Hurricane Katrina left in its wake, and to pay homage to the citizens of New Orleans who continue to endure it.

SuperTouch reports:

Said Banksy of the operation, “Three years after Katrina I wanted to make a statement about the state of the clean-up operation,” and attested that the city’s levee wall offered “the best painting surface in the state of Louisiana.” In the art world, timing is everything, and as the anonymous bomber wraps up his project, the city once again braces for the onslaught of an oncoming tropical storm…

SuperTouch: Banksy Paints New Orleans as Katrina Memorial

It’s Friday post time, and the HR people are not going to be happy about this one. The Sun just published results of a survey of 1200 office workers. It seems people are getting a little naughty at the office, which makes sense, I suppose, because of the ungodly amounts of time the average person spends there. It’s reported that 600 hours of worker’s lives will be spent checking out attractive collegues, and two out of five employees end up in bed with their workmate.

Other interesting statistics from the report:

The average worker remains at their desk for 60,000 hours as they toil, drink 32,000 cups of tea or coffee and make 110,000 phone calls, according to the research for a recruitment firm. They will also write 50,000 lists of things to do over the years, receive more than 320,000 emails and have 13 job interviews,

The Sun: “Workmates ogle for 600 hours”

Mike Davis, a designer and DJ from Minneapolis has started a great new blog, that showcases graphic design and illustration from the 1960s through the early 80s. Lots of visual inspiration for designers and fans alike.

Mike’s motivation for creating a catalog of vintage design:

Any designer’s studio or home is filled with books, stickers, posters, postcards, and other pieces of history. I started this blog to share some of the work from my collection that’s inspired me as a designer, primarily from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. I’ll be posting logos, postage stamps, motion graphics, packaging and promotional design from the time I consider to be the golden era of graphic design, just before computers took over and anyone with a copy of Photoshop and 10 fonts started calling themselves designers.

So Much Pileup

Apparently, Coca-Cola is on an innovation binge! In addition to introducing new design to their bottles, the world’s largest beverage firm is planning on unveiling a proprietary fountain system capable of pouring 100+ different flavored beverages from a single unit. Though still in testing phase, these new dispensers are about the same size as the typical eight-valve ones, using higher concentrate ingredients to make it possible to cram several flavors cartridges into a small space.

AJC reports:

“Innovation is our lifeblood,” said Chris Lowe, president of the Coca-Cola North America food service and on-premise division, “and we wanted a dispenser that offers consumers greater beverage variety while helping our customers increase beverage profitability.”

Verdict: More soda flavors means more power to the consumer! Power to drink more sodas. 92 more sodas. Hm.

[via Engadget]

As a follow up to an earlier post, we decided to venture out and see Ralph Lauren’s QR codes in action. At the Rugby store near Union Square, as well as locations in several other cities, Ralph Lauren has inserted touch screen TV’s built into their window displays. The display is linked to the Ralph Lauren website and allows you to select items of apparel and capture their corresponding QR code via your cameraphone. Upon capturing the image, the item is placed in your online shopping cart where you can complete the purchase using your mobile phone, or over the Internet at a later time.

When we questioned the usefulness of this technology, the RL rep pointed out that if you are walking by the store when it’s closed, you can identify a piece of clothing you like in the window and immediately save it to your shopping cart (as well as follow through and actually make the purchase if you like).

While an impressively progressive move by Ralph Lauren, we continue to wonder about the present  usefulness of the technology. Currently, few phones in the US are capable of reading QR codes. This is something that will change with time - we guess it’s just a matter of how much. And the wall mounted interface appears somewhat redundant, as you are really just navigating the RL website. Perhaps it would make more sense if each item featured in the window had a prominently displayed QR code beside it, so that you could immediately snap a picture and put it in your shopping cart, skipping the in-between step of navigating through their site. Overall, though, a noteworthy signal of things to come.

Some time has passed since PSFK took a survey of retail window displays. We were curious to what effect the current economic challenges were manifesting in how retailers were using windows to attract customers. We didn’t see much glitz. In fact, Kenneth Cole, Paul Smith, and Diesel in fact presented some pretty rough imagery. Kenneth Cole posts a slew of provocative slogans ranging from ‘Boycott designer t-shirts’ to ‘Truth: It will all come out in the washington‘. Paul Smith forgoes the clothes for wrecked band instruments (party’s over?) But the darkest of them all comes from Diesel who have assembled a sinister collection of windows inspired by what looks like the set of a stalker movie. The two front windows contain racks of old video equipment with flickering surveillance footage.

We’ve assembled a gallery of these examples plus a few others that caught our eye. Have a look here.

All Day Buffet has compiled the New Orleans 100, a list of innovative and world-changing ideas that have come out of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Designed to encourage discussion about the rebirth of the city, the NOLA 100 highlights the good that has grown out of the tragedy.

PSFK sent a few questions to 5 of the groups from the New Orleans 100 list who are making change for the better in New Orleans.

Our final interview is with Lauren Baum, from Idea Village. They are a really great non-profit organization that nurtures entrepreneurial innovation.

Tell us about Idea Village.

In 2000, The Idea Village was founded by a group of New Orleans expatriates who returned home energized by experiences in thriving entrepreneurial communities across the United States. The founders realized that fostering similar activity in New Orleans was the key to creating positive economic and social change.

The Idea Village formalized in 2002 as a private, independent 501(c) 3 non-profit organization whose mission is to foster innovation and accelerate the growth of entrepreneurial ventures in the New Orleans region.

A hub of talent that acts as a start-up advisory team for entrepreneurs and innovators in New Orleans, The Idea Village has been a key driver of business innovation in New Orleans by providing direct strategy to entrepreneurial ventures and advocating for a vibrant and economically sustainable New Orleans.

How did the tragedy of Katrina provide a unique opportunity for innovation, change and growth?

Katrina exposed the inner entrepreneur in everyone. As we encouraged the local entrepreneurial community to remain relevant, flexible and resilient, we, too, re-focused our efforts to instill the fundamentals of entrepreneurship - self-sufficiency and creative problem solving - at every level. Our staff swelled from 2 to 11 faithful fans of innovation, stronger and more committed to our mission than ever before.

Since Katrina The Idea Village has:

• Supported over 230 entrepreneurs, 90% remain open and 35% have expanded.
• Retained over 1245 jobs and $105 million in revenue.

Three years after the storm, we believe the local entrepreneurial community is, too, stronger and more resilient, with a confidence and a swagger that is untouchable.

What about New Orleans inspires you?

New Orleans has, indeed, become a laboratory of innovation - a hotbed of talent, optimism and opportunity with new networks flocking to the city and existing networks stepping up in full force.

Ironically, where New Orleans’ challenges were exposed by Katrina, the opportunity to leverage a global network of talent subsequently emerged. New Orleans is uniquely positioned to inspire, connect and engage an international audience in developing a vibrant and economically sustainable community and it is initiatives like New Orleans 100 that provide a platform to do so.

Katrina exposed challenges that are not unique to New Orleans – entrepreneurship, education, urban planning planning, politics, economic development — they have national and global significance and consequences. But if you can solve them here, you can solve them anywhere….and we will.

Thanks Lauren!

Idea Village

Paris-based photographer Gregoire Alexandre is currently exhibiting a selection of his work at the Atelier de Mecanique, in Parc des Ateliers.  Christian Lacroix, a guest curator of the Recontres d’Arles 2008, chose to feature Alexandre, whose work he describes as “contemporary poetry” in the latest issue of Wallpaper. 

Alexandre has chosen from photographs taken between 2002 and 2008, the majority of which are the result of commissions from fashion, design, and music projects. The exhibit features no captions, titles or dates, leaving visitors to take each image at face value.

According to Atelier de Mecanique:

Gregoire Alexandre’s photographs are fuelled by a set of constraints that generate a highly fertile context conducive to the emergence of new worlds.  Here we find pared-down spaces in which reality merges with abstraction, dialectical/paradoxical games with a marked fantastic side to them and narratives for which we do not quite possess the keys.

While that description is above this writers head, the images are in fact quite beautiful and thought provoking.  The exhibition is being shown through September 14th.

The Museum of Modern Art has a new show that looks at the period of time in the 60’s and 70’s when artists were expanding their creative horizons. “Looking at Music” gathers choice examples of cross-media works, where artists tried doing music, or musicians started making films. It documents an era that foreshadows our modern world of “DIY”, where artists can dabble in all parts of the creative process.

The New York Times reports:

Today it is not unusual for artists to moonlight as rock stars (hello, Martin Creed) or for musicians (Kim Gordon) to dabble in the gallery world. This phenomenon can be traced back to the 1960s, when being creative meant doing a little bit of everything (substances included). The lines dividing art, music and film were blurry enough to allow Laurie Anderson, Bruce Nauman and Yoko Ono, among others, to shift from object making to performance and back again.

“Looking at Music,” at the Museum of Modern Art, a recently opened exhibition of about 40 works from the museum’s collection, emphasizes the experimental nature of the late 1960s and early ’70s. As its curator, Barbara London, writes, “It seemed as though every artist of this time was in a band.”

NYT: “Artist as Musician, and the Other Way Around”