31: Using Twitter

Double posting. The incorporated use of twitter this week in one of the mini projects was really interesting. So I did some browsing online about using Twitter and came across some other existing projects that use it.

http://twistori.com/

Twistori is a real time visualizer that pulls and displays tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. It works really well because it's visually outstanding.

www.twittervision.com

a Twitter visualization website built with the Twitter API, using location data from Twittermap (a Twitter/Google Maps Mashup). What's really cool is that you can zoom right in to to see what street people are posting from.

30: We Feel Fine

Really interesting site I stumbled across using stumbleupon.

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

29: Click, Click, Click, Click

"Click, Click, Click, Click" by Bishop Allen from the album The Broken String on Dead Oceans. Directed by Randy Bell. Love the music video!

28: Spirituality & Japanese Design Practice

Excerpts from the article I found interesting:

The Japanese have demonstrated a rare syncretic genius in learning how to borrow and adapt from their own culture and elsewhere, and then to retool these materials into something uniquely theirs.

The Japanese don’t see emptiness as synonymous with infertility or barrenness as we tend to perceive it. Instead, nothingness is that from which form can emerge. The painters of Japan believed that emptiness was apparent as a context only after the first well conceived stroke was put to paper. What might seem like an inconsequential difference actually structures an entire people’s appreciation of meaningful presence. Emptiness to us, by any other name, plays a procreative role in Japan and, through its subtle mastery, achieves meaningful presence. A similar appreciation can be seen in design theory, such as in Alex W. White’s Thinking in Type: “The spaces surrounding and within letters are as significant and the letters themselves. In fact, the shapes around the letters define the letters. Managing the spaces between and around letters makes type more or less legible.” A simple context taken outside of the constraints of language can allow for a deeper understanding of typography, architecture, or one’s spiritual journey.

Read the full article here: http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/spirituality-and-japanese-design-practise

27: ABC Pop-Up Craziness

Coolest pop up book i've ever seen. Very clever. By French graphic designer Marion Bataille.

26: The Break-Up

The Break-Up' is about the relationship between an advertiser and a consumer. They've agreed to meet in a restaurant. The man's feeling perfectly happy, until the woman makes a painful announcement: she wants a divorce. In the course of their conversation she makes it clear to him why she is leaving him. And he makes it very clear that he doesn't have an empathic bone in his body. At the end of the movie the woman walks away disappointed but determined. The advertiser stays behind alone.

Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions wanted to make this movie because: “We want to try and tell that digital media is not about technology but about quality of communication, about the interaction between 2 people. There is no better medium than a movie to symbolize the one-to-one communication between people, in this case between an advertiser and a consumer.”

“We wanted to do this movie to really debate with our partners and marketers the changing relationship between advertisers and consumers. We are always discussing the changing media landscapes, how consumers have changed and how advertisers need to redefine how they connect with them and we wanted to really bring the subject to life and walk the walk in terms of new ways of connecting. We want to be able to use the movie online but also at every point in face-to-face interactions with our customers to open up conversations about how media is changing and of course we then want to go on to discuss how we can partner with them in this area."

http://bringtheloveback.com