-
I love words: manopause, faffage, hellacious
I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).
Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.
The thing that really makes my head spin is the way language evolves. Even as I type this, old words are morphing and merging to send nifty little neologisms strutting out of our cultural soup of signifiers, all a-dazzle with tasty wordiness. Perhaps my favourite of these is the portmanteau, a linguistic mashup of two words and their meanings.
For some time, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the niftiest new (or new to me) words I come across in daily parlance. Here are three I have enjoyed this week, with more to come as I encounter them.
Manopause
Noun: a break from dating, flirting, and all forms of sexual interaction with men
“He is totally giving you the eye, go for it!”
“I can’t, I’m on a manopause. He’s fit though — get in there, Shaz.”Faffage
Collective noun: timewasting, to-ing and fro-ing and general faffing
“You’re right — there is a direct correlation between the number of children a person has and the degree of faffage involved in their getting from A to B. Thank God we chose art over ankle-biters.”
Hellacious
Adjective: really awful with a sort of visceral twinge; a combination of hellish and atrocious
“During the coldest night that winter in Siberia, Ferdinand was forced to rise every hour to stoke the fire with priceless Louis XIV furniture. For an antiques dealer it was a truly hellacious experience.”
Photo courtesy of New York Public Library, used under a Creative Commons licence
-
Content design with cojones
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Your content isn’t the same as my content
There are some sites that people check two or three times a day. BBC News is one of them for me. However, out of the 50 or so articles on their home page in the morning, I’ll probably only read around ten stories. As I check back during the day, there’s a law of diminishing returns, in fact every time I visit I usually end up reading half as many stories as I did the previous time.
-
Can I Have My Opinion Back, Please?
I seem to be one of a dwindling number of people who believe that opinions are among the most valuable commodities we have. Somehow, we’ve allowed the old ‘everyone’s got one’ joke to convince us that all opinions are equal, when they clearly aren’t. I think it’s hurting our creativity, it’s robbing us of leadership, and ultimately is retarding the pace and quality of innovation.
Photo by pink_fish13I’m sure it’s a function of the recession that people become more risk averse. People want ‘proof’ that their ideas will work before they spend money on executing them. But predicting what will work in the future is and always has been just expensive guesswork.
-
Online > offline: we still love paper goods
Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.
(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)
It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design types larging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.
The exhibition covers the gamut of design: architecture, furniture, product, graphics, interactive and fashion. One of my favourite pieces was a bit of folly with a serious message: ‘Panda Eyes‘ a crowd of WWF Panda collecting tins, wired up to a camera in the sky to detect human movement and shift in sync as you walk around them. Its intention is to raise awareness of pandas’ plight in the wild. I think.
What I found interesting is that some of the graphic entries were really all about the relationship between online and print (and therefore arguably candidates for the interactive category). These three entries all had online generation in common: the articles, images, comment and opinion are all drawn from the crowd, using twitter, blogs and data to bring a concept to life.
Newspaper Club (which for some reason has a bit of an ugly website, but produces beautiful papers) allows anyone to create and print their own newspaper, without the need to be a multi-millionaire media mogul.
Here’s a particularly cool example that’s both useful and will please anyone who likes a bit of data visualisation loveliness. The Postcode Paper was an experiment from the Newspaper Club themselves that took information from data.gov.uk such as local services, crime stats and other useful stuff you need to know when you first move somewhere, like TFL transport links, and republished it in one handy, paper format.
(Photo credit: Newspaper Club)
It’s Nice That brings together the best of the creative industry in one place. As well as existing online, they also produce “a bi-annual printed publication, monthly talks and videocast, an online shop selling exclusive products as well as regular interviews and features with current practitioners.” I haven’t seen the print publication, but they feature some mighty nice stuff online.
And having recently received an extremely dull pre-conference magazine for SXSW, I can appreciate how something like The Incidental would be refreshingly interesting and bring the good stuff to your attention when wading through the programme at a conference. Essentially, it’s “a community-generated news pamphlet and website at international design events which offers debate, reviews, news updates and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about.”
This has given us some ideas for SXSW…
-
Discrepancy of scale: Ron Mueck
Recently while on holidays in Melbourne, I went to see an exhibition in The National Gallery of Victoria by hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. Having heard about his lifelike but not life-size human sculptures, I was very excited to enter into his world. I was keen to see the way Mueck plays with scale and creates human sculptures presented at all stages of life.
As I entered the room, I encountered the first sculpture of the exhibition “Dead Dad”; a representation of Mueck’s dead father, naked, lying on the floor, only three feet long. The hyper-realism of the model was so striking that I could feel the fragility and the morbid temperature of the body. The fact that he was naked and exposed to the fully-clothed onlookers made him look extremely vulnerable, and I felt a slight discomfort looking at him.
As I continued my journey throughout the exhibition, i found that each sculpture had it’s own story to tell. Mueck’s depiction of different emotional states, such as isolation, fear and tenderness, made me feel like I was observing the human condition through a magnifying glass. I felt trapped in an enclosed space surrounded by emotions.
However the most powerful story was represented by the “Wild Man”, a nine-foot sculpture of a bearded man clutching stiffly the stool he was seated on. Despite the monstrous size of the man, he seemed so vulnerable and the fear and anxiety emanated from his eyes. It felt like as if he was terrified of us – the audience. I could strongly empathise with the feeling of intimidation that was brought to life so vividly by the sculpture.
Every sculpture looked so realistic that it was hard to resist the temptation of touching them. However as I got close and reached out my hand, security approached me immediately, and so my desire was left unfulfilled! I still wonder if they feel as real as they look.
-
SXSW countdown: two weeks, one day
We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.
As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.
Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:
This was our first attempt in Photoshop. Each person gets a panel that shows their avatar and latest tweet. We’ve colour-coded the boxes to show recency, with the freshest content (hot colours) at the top, and the stale content (cold colours) at the bottom.
However, we wanted the page to update in real time, which would mean people and their panels moving around the screen. We figured that was going to get far too busy and complicated… Onwards!
Here’s the next stop on the journey:
Here we’ve brought in a bit of alpha-order to give everyone a spot on the page and keep them there. This solved the busy problem, but when the coloured panels are shown in a non-spectrum order, it looks confusing. We trimmed the colour back to what you see here but found that they meant less.
Standing back a bit, we worried that this design was actually a bit boring and unemotional… just not MxM enough. Next!
Finding the right conversational note:
Here we’ve started to play around with something that’s a bit more conversational and has more personality. There’s still more work to go, but we think this could be fun. Now we’re moving in the right direction.
We agreed this design and we’re taking it forward even as we speak.We’ll preview this project again next week, but in the meanwhile, feel free to tell us what you think.
-
Going to SXSW? Come for a drink first
We’re inviting all SXSW-bound Londoners for a drink on Monday 8 March.
Freelancers, agency folk, designers, planners, developers and general rabble-rousers… all are welcome. In fact, even if you’re not actually based in or near London, if you’re going to be in the neighbourhood and you’re headed to Texas soon after, please stop by!
Top 3 reasons to come to Made by Many’s pre-SXSW meet-up:
- Knowledge is power. If you’re a first-timer, this is your chance to corner some people who have gone before and get the skinny on SXSW.
- It’s cool to know people. If you’re headed over on a solo mission or don’t know that many other attendees, this is a prime opportunity to make some connections beforehand.
- It’s Monday — what else are you doing?!
We’ve got some space at Two Floors in Kingly Street and we’ll be there from 6:00pm. Depending on how big a crowd we’re expecting, we might just book out the whole of the first floor, so if you are coming, please let us know (comment on this post, DM or @madebymany us).
Please feel free to share this post and invitation with anyone who might be interested.
Photo by sidewalk flying used under a Creative Commons Licence.
-
The Web is a Truth Machine
I can’t remember where I read this, or who wrote it, but I am being stalked by this phrase:
“The Web amplifies the truth about a brand”
For brands, and marketers, this is a great thing if the brand is true. It’s brilliant. But if you’re lying it’s getting trickier. The truth will out.
And this truth machine doesn’t just work on brands. The music industry, movie studios, print and TV companies all know, the awful truth about digital is that it strangles all the cosy inefficiencies out of your business – you know, the ones where your margins used to be – and it’s not easy (and may be impossible) to make up the lost revenue simply by optimising what you used to do for digital platforms. I take no joy in saying that, I’m just saying it’s happening. The Web is a deflationary, flattening monster that’s gonna stamp all over you. The truth will out.
Of course, as anyone who’s been watching the BBC’s Virtual Revolution series will now know, the Web was invented by that guy from the Grateful Dead to share cute images of cats and stuff and accelerate the frictionless distribution of truth. Who can blame brands, advertisers and media owners for wanting a piece of that shit? And so they pile in wanting to be like LOLcats. But the truth machine will ultimately show the bad un’s up like luminous bacteria glowing with disclosing fluid. The unavoidable and unsavoury truth laid bare in an ultraviolet glare that cannot be avoided. It doesn’t matter what anyone of us do. The truth will out.
And with people, I’ve been enjoying the call to action issued by Hugh MacLeod, aka Gaping Void, with his “Remember Who You Are” manifesto. It’s a wake up call. We should all remember who we are. The truth will out.
-
How Would A Robot Read a Novel?
Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.
Alceste doesn’t understand meaning, and makes no pretenses about trying to do so. It was created by Max Reinert of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and is now marketed by a company called Image that holds all rights to it, from what we were given to understand.
Anyway, now that I’ve given you the context, let me move on to explaining what was really interesting about the talk. Dr. Kavita Abraham, a researcher at the LSE’s Methodology Institute, used Alceste to analyse a novel called the Kilburn Social Club by Robert Hudson. It is worth noting here that when Alceste was introduced as having been used to assess some literary works earlier as an experiment, members of the audience were easily able to identify the books as being Oliver Twist and Moby Dick. With the Kilburn Social Club, Dr. Robert Hudson (a history academic-turned-author) admitted that Alceste’s analysis matched the pattern of the story he started out intending to write, in that the words used were seen as generally being grouped around 4 themes (16% descriptive, 12% football, 22% finance and 50% relationships). So it could be used, hypothetically, during the process of writing to ensure that a book wasn’t skewed heavily in one or the other direction.
Dr. Hudson clearly meant ‘hypothetically’, though, because the truth is, as we discussed after the talk, we don’t really need Alceste to tell readers about patterns in books. Why would you want to reduce a work of art to a mere jumble of statistically co-relating groups of words? People read literary works FOR that element of bias (I think James is writing a post about how opinion – bias, if you must – is in fact often not given the respect it deserves in today’s world). A quote of Mark Twain’s was proffered by one of the panel members: ‘A classic is something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read’, but I’d argue that at a stretch you can extend it to summarizing business books – the way Kevin Duncan does on his blog, for example. It’s useful to time-starved people who want to be able to speak intelligently about a book and learn the distilled lessons from it, but who don’t have the time to wade through it in its entirety. You just can’t do that with novels, though! Here’s an example of how Alceste summarized that potboiler of potboilers, The Da Vinci Code. It’s quite a laugh.
One of the issues that was left simmering in my mind as I left the venue is that there are so many technologies we’re introduced to on a daily basis that many of us perhaps do not really question the need for – probably even more common in the case of clients. Is ‘I want a social media’ really still an accepted statement?
Google Buzz is being debated upon as either a highly intrusive or potentially highly social application, while right here at Made by Many we’re arguing the benefits of using Yammer at work versus plain old Twitter. The question isn’t what we can do with it, as in the case of Alceste, where it has been accepted that it is really only useful to the social sciences because that discipline is based on the removal of bias. The question is do we need it at all?
(A PDF of the talk, for those interested, is now available here).
-
SXSW countdown: three weeks, two days
Plans are still afoot — and are growing more evolved by the day — for our big trip Southwest.
As mentioned the other week, we’re working on a little project to bring our Texan adventure to life for the people back here — our friends, clients and industry colleagues. Our primary aim is to put together something that shows off what we’re up to at SXSW, and does it in real time.
Here’s one of our initial sketches. We think it’s a fun idea, but we also think it might be a slightly formal execution.
Archive for February, 2010
You are currently browsing the Made by Many blog archives for February, 2010.
Our latest tweets
- #valeriecasey keynote hasn't gone down that well with the @madebymany crowd. #clayshirky on the other hand... 14 mins ago
- Aww shucks. RT @jeffersonb: Creativity Online gives props to @madebymany for SXSW curated updates http://bit.ly/bx77ok #icsx 3 hrs ago
- RT @simonianson I would cross the Atlantic again to listen to #clayshirky I want to watch a video of his talk now. 3 hrs ago
- More updates...
Most commented
People
Categories
- advertising (5)
- agile (5)
- Clients (26)
- Conferences (30)
- content (3)
- design (13)
- Games (2)
- Great Stuff (8)
- innovation (10)
- Labs (8)
- Made by Many (124)
- mobile (1)
- New connections (2)
- opinion (33)
- publishing (1)
- Social Web (115)
Archives
- ▼2010 (60)
- ▼March (15)
- The Kingdom of Awesome
- Can there ever be an online masterpiece?
- Conflict resolution (or How to Deal with Bastards)
- South by round up Day 1
- Battle for Your TV: The Big TV Smackdown at SXSW
- When blogging met Twitter: meet Ready for Ten
- The iPad: one step forward, two steps back?
- SXSW countdown: one day!
- Paxo on Chatroulette
- What I'm hoping for from SXSW
- SXSW countdown: one week
- A call to arms. Make way for 'the builders'.
- Trying to describe what we do. It's complicated.
- Gnawing on the bones of Hendrix
- Introducing Made by Many's Posterous
- February (15)
- January (30)
- ▼March (15)
- 2009 (153)
- 2008 (91)
Sites we like
- Aaron Koblin
- Barbarian Group
- BBH Labs
- Big Spaceship
- Big Spaceship – Think
- Bud Caddell – What Consumes Me
- Creative Applications
- David Armano
- Faris Yakob
- Ffffound
- Gareth Kay
- Howard Rheingold
- Iain Tait – Crack Unit
- idsgn
- Manuel Lima
- Mike Arauz
- Neil Perkin – Only Dead Fish
- Noah Brier
- Not For Paper
- Paul Davis – Our illustrator
- TED Blog
- Undercurrent
- We Are Social