A truly remarkable motion graphics video. Made me remember and reminiscence about Tintin more than all the fuzz about the movie.

Gives you perspective. A perspective that Douglas Adams would surely appreciate =)

MK12 ZeroFilm NYC Open from MK12 on Vimeo.

it's always great when your art manages to be both current and nostalgic.

The American Geophysical Union blog has a link up to a very interesting table, and I feel strongly enough about this topic that I want to share it with you. It’s a list of words scientists use when writing or otherwise communicating science, what the scientists mean when they use that word, and most importantly what the public hears.

[Click to enverbumnate.]

I’ll admit, when I read it I laughed. But then my chuckle dried up when I realized just how dead accurate this is. And the smile pretty much left my face when I read that this table is from an article called "Communicating the Science of Climate Change," by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today.

Yup. I think they have a pretty good point.

My career at the moment could pretty much be called "Science Communicator". I do it here on this blog, I do it on Blastr and in Discover magazine, and when I give talks. Before that (and I guess it’s an occupation that never really leaves you) I was a professional scientist for many years. My training ran deep: 4 years undergrad, 6-7 in grad school, then a decade or so of research after that. I could toss around the phrase "Don’t over-iterate the Lucy-Richardson deconvolution algorithm or else you’ll amplify the noise and get spurious data spikes" with the best of ‘em.

As a science writer, though, I can’t use that! I have to say, "Cleaning up a digital image means using sophisticated mathematical techniques that can sometimes mess the image up and fool you into thinking something’s there that really isn’t."

I hope you can appreciate the difference.

Great contribution to both science and communication. Thanks to @sinanaral for pointing this article.

The panopticon was a building design dreamed up by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and in its most basic form, it’s a prison scheme which allows observers (i.e., prison guards) to have a constant view of the inmates if they so desire, without the inmates knowing for sure if they are being watched. The effect, of course, is feeling that one is always being watched, resulting in altered (more “normal,” acceptable) behavior. Bentham’s idea was, he said, applicable to poor houses, hospitals, schools, and mad houses — though he ultimately devoted his time to designing for prisons. The express purpose of the panopticon is behavior modification, what Bentham described as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” No such prison was ever built to Bentham’s specifications.

It doesn’t take much thought to see why people concerned about things such as privacy would begin to make the association between Bentham’s panopticon and the encouraged over-sharing of modern social networks: the mind adjusts to a way of feeling watched over in perpetuity. However, I think the connection between applications such as Rdio and Facebook are the first concerted steps by Facebook to actively implement the digital panopticon. You see, “frictionless” sharing is code for sharing constantly, without editing or choice beyond that initial click which creates the first, most important connection. What I find unsettling about it is the mental change that must come with the knowledge that, as I sit at my computer, day in day out, listening to music (which I do all day, every day), someone is likely aware of what it is I’m listening to. It’s this knowledge, both alluring and disconcerting, that I am watched (and in many ways not alone) when I am, in fact alone. Facebook’s intentions are not at issue here: the action (and the result) is what matters.

Social networks like Twitter have nudged us in this direction — anyone who uses the service as much as I do has surely noticed the odd phenomenon of watching people at an event or watching an award show, and feeling as if the people Tweeting as they experience are not experiencing in the traditional sense: they are sharing as they experience the experience, which in turn alters the experience.

Warren Ellis/D'Israeli comic about augmented reality with secret UV backstory

Cory Doctorow at 3:58 AM Tuesday, Jul 5, 2011  

 

Warren Ellis, Matt "D'Israeli" Brooker and the London design firm BERG have all teamed up to release a marvellous and scary comic called SVK. SVK is an exploration of some of the terrifying possibilities of ubiquitous augmented reality in comic form, the story of a disgraced spy who is tasked with recovering a top-secret package lost by a military contractor. Throughout the comic, a second story is revealed in ultraviolet light, visible with the accompanying skinny, wallet-sized UV flashlight (it also works on the joke ads and the real ones). Interspersed with learned essays on comics as an art form (William Gibson), augmented reality (Jamais Cascio) and the history of novelty comics (Paul Gravett), SVK is more than a story, more than a design provocation and more than a warning about the unchecked future of technology in the hands of the military-industrial complex.

BERG have published the comic themselves, and are selling it in a sweet package with the required UV torch for £10, plus £3 shipping (UK -- £8 elsewhere).

Comics break the rules of storytelling, invent new ones, and break them again - more often than almost any other medium. This graphic novella is about looking - an investigation into perception, storytelling and optical experimentation that inherits some of the curiosities behind the previous work of BERG.

Litho printed on 115gsm silk paper in tones of black and blue, SVK uses a third ink invisible without the SVK object. The object is a UV light source which unlocks hidden layers woven throughout the comic book. Reading SVK becomes a unique and strange experience as you see the story unfold through the eyes of Thomas Woodwind.

First and foremost SVK is a modern detective story, one that Ellis describes as "Franz Kafka's Bourne Identity".

It's a story about cities, technology and surveillance, mixed with human themes of the power, corruption and lies that lurk in the data-smog of our near-future.

Buy SVK

SVK photos and scans

 

 

 

 

I recommend this comic to all of my friend who still think that augmented reality is mainly an iPhone/Android phenomenon. As they generally do, some clever people shows us the opposite. A comic book that utilizes augmented reality as a story telling technique with help of a 10$ UV torch and no camera, no iPhone/Android or any kind of silicone. Just a neat light trick, happening right in front of your eyes...

Bu çizgi romanı özellikle augmented reality'i hala bir iPhone/Android fenomeni zanneden dostlarıma tavsiye ediyorum. Basit bir morötesi ışık yardımıyla augmented reality deneyimi yaratan çizgi roman bu sırada ne bir kamera, ne bir iPhone/Android cihaz ya da CPU'su olan bir cihaza ihtiyaç duyuyor. Yalnızca gözünüzün önünde gerçekleşen basit bir ışık oyunu...

Own a shape

Visual identity takes many forms, from the most superficial of trademarks to the most integrated of design signatures. Shapes are part of its language. At their most basic, shapes are universal, untetherable to any name, product, or brand. But in context, in their intersections and in the synthesis of forms, they are powerful.

Illustrated above are four shapes: a square, a roundrect, a squircle, and a circle. Bilaterally symmetrical and geometrically simple, each shape’s popular associations are innumerable. Yet in a particular space, the context of a particular market, this is inverted: In the world of mobile software, each of these shapes has a definite association, some quite strong.

To the victor go the squircles

Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle).

And yet there are pretenders to every throne. Samsung’s Bada may use the square, but it can’t hold a candle to Microsoft’s Mondrian-esque masterwork. RIM may use roundrects pleasantly enough, but not with the subtle consistency Apple does. The lone standout is Android, which doesn’t really have a unifying shape – a symptom of fragmentation?

Like color, which also despite limitless associations has a history of strong associations within a market, shape is a powerful, yet subtle differentiator. Owning a shape isn’t easy – by itself, as demonstrated by Samsung and RIM, a shape is hardly potent. Those who have successfully laid claim to a shape have used it as a building block rather than as window dressing. Use the power of shape to reinforce good design with coherence and identity – and that shape may one day be yours.

Shortlink: http://iuface.net/7xd

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Very clever, Design 101

Infographics in it's best form

Design is what designers do and they do it with any material they get. Great design!