PSFK Author:
Guy Brighton

Neww of youths getting involved with underground farming typically suggests the illicit and causes a bit of concern… but not this time! Inside a former bank vault hidden beneath a high rise building in Tokyo’s Otemachi business district, a square kilometer of subterranean soil has been planted with rice. There are also different rooms for growing tomatoes, lettuces, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs.

The facility, Pasona O2, was built as a training facility for wanna-be farmersto create job opportunities in the agricultural sector. The project is targeting “freeters,” a Japanese expression for people between the age of 15 and 34 who lack full time employment or are unemployed. The facility is open to the public and encourages businessmen and office workers to drop by and experience hi-tech farming on their way home from work.

[via marukuwato.multiply]

More than a year ago SMITH online magazine challenged their readers to compress their life story into six words. The magazine was flooded with 15,000 entries and almost 1,000 of these tag line life stories have now made it into the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure. In addition, the editors have thrown in a couple of celebrity autobiographies including Aimee Mann, Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, Amy Sedaris, and Dave Eggers and the result is, according to SMITH,

“[…] both a moving peek at the minutia of humanity and the most literary toilet reading you’ll ever find.”

As we all know, everyone has a story – the reader contest for the next six-word memoir book is now open.

[via The New Yorker]

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Urbanites might never stop craving nature in the concrete jungle, and in Seoul, they’ve found a nice compromise in Ann Demeulemeester’s new boutique. We talked about the rise of “botanic architecture” last week in our post about Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University; and this boutique follows a similar concept, bridging the gap between idyll and city with its vertical gardens. Originally conceived by French botanist Patrick Blanc, “Le Mur Vegetal” (or in English, “wall of vegetation”) relies on a lightweight material upon which greenery (in this case, manicured moss and bamboo) is cultivated and grown slowly. With the Belgian designer’s boutique, the Korean design firm Mass Studies have used Blanc’s idea and sowed the first seeds of ‘organic architecture’, as it is known, in the fashion world.

Contributed by Jessica Greenwood:

I, and no doubt thousands like me, have been closely following the case in which an Erasmus student was murdered last week in Italy. Erasmus is an exchange programme in which European universities allow students to study for a year abroad. I did my own Erasmus year at Bologna University, not far from Perugia where Meredith Kercher was killed.

It’s obviously a high profile case given that the victim was young, beautiful and intelligent, and although precious few details are forthcoming, we know that Kercher’s death was both physically and sexually brutal. In addition to this, it’s throwing up all sorts of interesting questions about the way in which web 2.0 is having an effect on the way in which we appropriate news events. The minute tragedy strikes, the contents of personal web pages – whether of the victim, or the perpetrator - become a source of endless discussion. Facebook and MySpace pages are now seen as a fair and accurate way in to that person’s character and personality, yet the divide that still exists between the person that we actually are and the person we project ourselves as being in an online environment is never taken into account.

At the centre of this lies an awkward symbiosis. On the one hand, there is what appears to be lazy journalism, eschewing serious investigation in favour of the facile sentimentality that social networks churn up daily – ‘The last thing she posted on her Facebook was a message to her friend saying she’d see her later’ etc. And on the other? An insatiable voyeurism on behalf of a public too confused by the blurring of the lines between virtual and real, public and private to tell the difference. I Facebook, therefore I am.

I started thinking about it this morning when people in the office were gossiping about some violent short story that this American flatmate had apparently posted online and wondering why ‘no-one had done anything about it.’ The actual story was a fictional short story that included a rape accusation which she wrote for a college assignment. But what did the Daily Mail say? “Inside the twisted world of flatmate suspected of Meredith’s murder,” and focused only on that part of Knox’s MySpace site. Her MySpace friends were also hounded by the American press, simply by virtue of having clicked on a button that said ‘add friend’. And similarly, a picture of her boyfriend dressed as a bloody surgeon for Hallowe’en and pasted on his MySpace profile is now being paraded around the Internet as evidence of his complicity.

Whether they were guilty or not, the way in which we now choose to splay selected elements of our lives out for all the world to see has ostensibly granted the public the right to judge our online personas without actually knowing anything at first hand; a process not muted but positively encouraged by traditional media sources.

A little perceived knowledge is a dangerous thing. Sometimes people are exactly who they say they are online. Sometimes they are not. The point is, their virtual presence is only one side of this equation, and because we have no first hand experience we have no frame of reference with which to decide how closely related Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are in practice. Whilst I have no issue with the applications themselves, being a self-confessed Facebook obsessive since April, I do struggle with the way our perceptions have changed. Now, a person’s actual self is subordinated to the broad brushstrokes of a social network homepage. That’s not a problem with Facebook, it’s a problem with us. It’s not the band, it’s the fans.

Most worryingly, the idea that people should have ‘done something’ has huge implications for freedom of expression, particularly on the web. Done what, exactly? Prior to the explosion of the ‘create and share’ generation, the responsibility lay with friends, family, teachers and parents to flag up disturbing behaviour. These are people with real world connections, and first hand knowledge of the tendencies on display. Now, because every element of our lives is public, we are fair game not just to those who know us but to everyone who doesn’t. This notion of a huge, self-monitoring organism – what a remarkably prescient Foucault termed a panopticon years before the inception of the Internet – is positively Orwellian in its implications. Fiction with violent subject matter and Hallowe’en costumes are now considered evidence of physically violent tendencies in a person. With an atmosphere this hysterical and a community of online curtain-twitchers this large, how long will it be before a photo of you drunk outside a club leads to you being flagged up as a dangerous element?

There’s a great quote about this in an article that India Knight wrote in the Times about Kate McCann, and the public’s disgraceful behaviour towards her:

‘For once I don’t mean the (British) press, which seems to me, despite its inevitable mawkish descents into sentimentality, to have acted pretty responsibly. No, by “we”, I mean the public. Forget that old chestnut “I blame the media”: now that everyone has an opinion and an embarrassment of outlets in which to express it, “I blame the public” is going to become the refrain of the coming decades. There is no shortage of online places where people may freely and anonymously air their opinions, even if their opinions are vile or demented or both; and there are millions of these newly voluble people. They have made it all right to say unspeakable things, to air the most shameful thoughts, always to think the worst, and never to give anyone a chance…The McCann story may end up being about the death of empathy.’

The death of empathy. Is anyone else terrified?

- Contributed by Jessica Greenwood

Jess Greenwood’s Facebook page

Hosted by The MIT Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), The Futures of Entertainment 2 conference featured 6 panel discussions spread over the weekend. With attendance split roughly 50% industry and 50% academics the event provided a debate forum on the fresh ways we interract with consumers and brands, forming richer, more meaningful experiences and strategies in the cluttered landscape of new media. A backchannel site was launched and with audience questions projected in real-time.

Mobile Media

Day one featured a discussion on Mobile Media with panelists Marc Davis (Yahoo), Bob Schukai (Turner Broadcasting), Alice Kim (MTV Networks), and Anmol Madan (MIT Media Lab). Acknowledging that in the US we are years behind the rest of the planet when it comes to the closed networks our mobile technology currently hangs from, the panel talked about the ways we can expect to see this change and the technologies that will become more and more useful as it does. As walled garden business models are gradually replaced by open, internet based models, our mobile devices will increasingly become tools not just for consuming, but producing, building a collective map of human attention. Marc Davis talked about the social effects of mobile hyper connectivity, how the use of Zonetagging though Flickr and urban mapping platforms such as Fire Eagle and Twitter are changing the nature of media towards a growing culture of status casting.

A question from the backchannel asked “When does mobile media become entertaining as opposed to just exchanging information?”

Marc Davis: “We’ve seen some interesting experiments for augmented reality, such as Jane McGonigal’s ARG’s (I Love Bees). This concept of what is the story world? If you know where a person is and you have a map of the physical world, these things start to connect. Being a body connected to other human beings is the best MMORPG. The best potential entertainment forms when you play in the world using these (mobile) devices.”

And all of this will be impacted by the upcoming sale of the 700mhz spectrum and enhanced by the further implementation of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem.)

Bob Schukai: “In the future all devices will have an IP address. People will pull and share content because they can connect any IP device to any other IP device. Imagine you’re watching a fantastic picture (or immersed in a game) on your IP TV, but you could switch the stream to your PC or your phone - IP addresses will open up this kind of communication.”

Marc Davis: “It’s important at this point to make the industry open, to have content flow freely over it. The crucial thing is to you write software and provide services on top of distribution platforms that consumers can afford to access. We’re in one of these major transition towards a market place where people can actually share content. (If Google aqcuires the 700mhz spectrum), the challenge is the balance of user privacy. They need to be able to connect consumers to each others, to content, to advertisers, but in a way that protects privacy and enhances trust.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Paris has always been the city of lights, the city of great scents, and great perfumes… Think Jacques Guerlain, or Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in the movie The Perfume…

Nowadays, the trend in the city is not really about limited editions any more- that was dismissed as being not quite costly enough, - now it is about possessing your own unique fragrance.

Uniqueness, a contemporary aspiration, a celebration of one’s Ego, and one’s “Me-Power”… Quintessence of a new luxury, less show-off and more intimate. Parisian dandies are on a quest of the ‘Nez’ that will create for them, their grail, their unique scent, and that will make them feel Unique!

We’ve captured this trend and its symbol, Blaise Mautin, in a nine-minute documentary. More than a job, it is a passion that this perfume-master offers to his contemporaries by creating exclusive, unique and deeply intimate perfumes.
He captures one’s personal identity through his creations, and furthermore one’s environment and that’s what makes him so extraordinary.

His latest creations? A masterpiece perfume for the helicopter of a Californian billionaire, and more recently he created an Olfactive Universe for the Park Hyatt resorts.

Welcome to his world in this “Luxury Podcast” in French of course .

Uploaded by DARKPLANNEURContributed by Eric Briones & Thomas Mondo from Darkplanneur.com

Wendy Dembo who spoke at PSFK’s New York Conference has decided to speak up again, this time in the form of a T shirt. The Gap’s Red t-shirt line spurred her to mimick the design and address the rather shocking rate of health insurance in the United States.

As the inside of the shirt states, 46 million US citizens have no health insurance. New York Magazine reports:

It’s a state of mind so common, in fact, that the insurance industry has a name for it: the “young invincibles,” those who, betting they can get through their twenties relatively unscathed, “choose” to go without insurance. They are the fastest-growing segment of America’s uninsured population.

Need something appropriate to wear on a date to see Sicko? You can pick one up at Jeff Staples Reed Space.

New York Magazine, The Young Invincibles

PSFK recently had the chance to partake in a conference call discussing Timberland’s newest Corporate Social Responsibility report. The organization has set up an independent panel to aid in the discussion surrounding their movement towards creating more transparent business practices. The company has been making an increasing effort in asking for assistance from their consumers, critics and business leaders.

The CEO, Jeff Swartz was candid about the concerns his company currently faces when presenting a true and honest approach to establishing more greener business practices. Jeff spoke of Timberland’s need to create a CSR report that would not come across as “Corporate Cologne”. He believes that this type of honest transparency cannot come from leaders in the company, but must come from the community and thus has appealed to them to weigh in on Timberland.

Jeff candidly addressed his concerns and was open in his desire to “seduce consumers to care”. He spoke of his need to change the way the shoe industry deals with their present environmental impact and was forthright in his need to find viable solutions for not only his companies business practices, but to the overall industry as well. Currently the shoe industries main environmental issues revolve around the need to find better solutions for leather waste, chemical usage in factories and energy use in China.

At present the fashion industry is one of the worst polluters to the environment. Jeff spoke of the missing third party to bring leaders of the Industry together and find solutions. At present, due to the competitive nature of the business, this has proven quite difficult.

We found it refreshing to see a CEO willing to create a dialogue that could potentially elicit just as much criticism as helpful insight. The need for transparent business practices are the embodiment of a new way of doing business. As Corporate Social Responsibility reports will continue to play a bigger role in determining the value of a companies moral and financial value, it is valuable to see the thoughts behind what would otherwise be a recycled paper report.

Timberland