10 second visit

On the face of it a 10 second tour of someone's home, portrayed as a series of still images doesn't sound that exciting, but it has surprising impact. Those fleeting glimpses of striking images are somehow compelling and stick in the mind, like being on a train at night and glancing into the rooms of passing houses.

I am a visiting tutor for the research training sessions at Sint Lucas School of Architecture (Brussels) and we ask our students to take a different look at the environment around them by photographing from a fixed point in a street outside the school, looking for artefacts that reveal knowledge about the people around them. I am wondering about incorporating something like this video into the project.

Gangsta rap about cardboard boxes

This is great - a gangsta rap in praise of kids doing creative things with cardboard boxes and toilet roll tubes ... yes, really!

via BoingBoing

How 'social' is social networking?

Facebook always provokes strong emotions; some people love it, spending their entire lives on there, and others hate it and will not go anywhere near it.

There is an interesting article in today's Guardian which suggests there is a growing body of evidence that social networking can have an isolating effect on people. People are getting more and more drawn into the 'social' media itself and so spending less and less time actually interacting with real people.

I love Facebook and spend quite a bit of time on there, not playing games, just reading the trivia about my friends lives and sharing my own, along with sharing interesting things I have seen or read. To me this feels like real, meaningful exchange, which increases my sense of connection with my friends. So, how come other people end up feeling that they are isolated observers of other people's lives?

I think the answer is to do with tacit knowledge. When I spend 'live' time with my friends I see their facial expressions, hear the nuances in their voices and can gauge their subtle reactions when we talk. After a while we build a tacit understanding of each other that then carries through to our online interactions. I can read between the lines of their posts or understand a whole lot more than was written into a brief text.

Looking back at my model of learning developed in my PhD, I would say that when I get to know somebody I have moved to the 'expert learner' stage where I can observe their online dialogue and understand without needing the 'bridges' provided by face-to-face interaction. So, for me this virtual contact  is really meaningful, is often the starting point of conversation when I meet friends, and is a vital point of contact with friends who live far away and I see rarely.

For those who find it isolating, I guess they need more balance in their lives. They need to try to spend as much real time with people as they do virtual time, and to narrow that virtual contact to include many more real friends and to cut out many who are just virtual friends. My personal Facebook rule is that I am only 'friends' with people I know. Some of these are people I don't know well and am never likely to, but it would have been rude to refuse. So, I file them into a category where they do not see the personal things I post and I do not see theirs, they have had the satisfaction of adding me to their list but nothing more.

The same goes for so many things in life - a little in moderation is good for you - but too much of anything usually has negative side affects!

Video concealing complexity

I have often observed that film of a skilled practitioner can easily conceal rather than reveal the complexity of what they do. I was just sent a lovely example of this in the form of this short video showing how to fold a shirt:

When I actually tried to copy what she was doing, with some help from a couple of friends, we could not figure it out at all until we found another video where we could follow the narrative in English (rather than Japanese). However, we still had to stop, restart and rewind the video several times until we got it.

In my experience of interpreting craft practice, video is great for giving a quick overview, inspiring someone to want to do it. However, the actual 'how to' is most efficiently put across with a few of simple line drawings to explain the crucial bits.

Piano stairs and the theory of fun

A lovely example of how a playful approach can change people's behaviour. In Stockholm, a set of stairs with an escalator next to them, so nearly everybody uses the escalator...

Kesurokai documentary film

My film of the Chisana Kesurokai 2010 event is almost complete. I am going to Germany this weekend to show it to the group of carpenters who took part in the event in Japan last summer before finalising it. It is a little scary showing it to the people I filmed, but I am pleased with the result so feel fairly confident they will be too.

The majority of my previous film work has been 3-5 minute youTube material. Making sense of a huge amount of footage shot over a seven day period and reducing it to a half hour documentary has been an interesting challenge for me. However, video-logging techniques developed during my research helped immensely and this documentation of all the video clips enabled me to search and select appropriate material fairly efficiently.

Once it is finished I shall post it on my vimeo site.

The two buildings and some of the carpenters involved.

Cambodian donut shops

This is a lovely bit of film making and a fantastic story. Their work ethic is phenomenal and I love that the Cambodian community have generated this new knowledge and then shared it with their family and friends so there are a whole load of Cambodian donut shops in the area.

500 coloured pencils

Delayed gratification meets OCD color theory with Felissimo’s 500 colored pencil set for Social Designer.




Designed by Felissimo for Social Designer this complete set of 500 colored pencils consists of 20 units, each pencil telling its own story with a unique name. You cannot buy the complete set of pencils all at once, but you can receive them over the course of 20 months. Four different display methods let you keep your pencils at hand, while being displayed either as an artwork, or kept aside as a special collection.
via Blogless

Photographer Bill Durgin's unusual figure studies

From his artists statement, "The gesture within each photograph is created through exploring my own physical limitations and collaborative improvisation with dancers and performers. Often I will come up with a pose and demonstrate it and then ask the model to repeat or respond to it. Each pose transmogrifies the figure towards abstraction; exaggerating or diminishing the skeletal structure until it approaches an amorphic form. I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but also to be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous."

via BoingBoing

Save as WWF, Save a Tree

A new green file format: WWF

The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out – then simply save them as WWF.

Save as WWF, Save a Tree