This evening, come to the water poet near Liverpool street station for some service design thinking talking and drinking! Officially beginning at 7:00, but come straight after work!
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I miss making things and thought a bit of light humour and green advocacy was the perfect excuse to dust off the old CS4 and make a new BP logo for Greenpeace's latest creative lobbying experiment against BP. Check out their gallery here:
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/tags/bp I know boycott's a little strong as everything's made out of or runs on the stuff, but if anyone can suggest a word beginning with 'B' that means "understand we're all responsible for creating a need for petroleum in the first place and therefore must reduce our consumption in little ways each day that mean corporations and governments don't do things we don't want them to" I'd be indebted.
---Letter of complaint, from me to Yahoo!---
I signed up for Delicious a long time ago and have been using my personal account quite actively for a long time, hassle-free. I wanted to set up another couple of accounts for my design studio, and I must say I'm horrified at the new Yahoo sign up process. For starters, I don't want another email address, yahoo ID or whatever appalling messenger program you think I need. I really don't, but you don't know me. You don't know your users and that's the problem. Because what you offer isn't good enough even if I was looking for those things. I clicked a link to sign up for Delicious and it's like I've been re-routed to something completely irrelevant. It's like walking into a shop for a pint of milk and the shopkeeper refusing to sell you it unless you buy a cow, cow health insurance, milking services and pay rent on a farm somewhere. You need me to fill out TWO pages of forms, including my CREDIT CARD DETAILS???Are you trying to kill off this service?Whatever notion you have of 'getting more data from our users will enable us to provide us with a better service' is massively misunderstood. You're scaring people off in their droves from using this service, and cutting off the lifeblood of the service - its users! PLEASE, just let me sign up for a Delicious account - like it says in the link I clicked 20 minutes ago!Yours Sincerely,
Beyond the constant news stream, political back and forth, the numbers and graphs, and the comical branding of 'Recession UK', it's the little signs that unnerve me:
top-left: Some graffiti poking fun at the inertia of public mood and action against the UK's huge bailouts in exchange for no legislative changes. top-right: An advert, in prime space on the underground, for an exhibition that ended eight months ago - still visible because no-one is buying ad spacebottom-left: The niceties and persuasion of advertising honed over years are here abandoned for a proposition in the tone of an east end gangster. bottom-right: A more obvious sign, taken from the book chain Borders just before it closed down. But still an unsettling atmosphere to be in.
A beautiful fractal pattern found covering my family car during the holidays!
Created by Participle, this excellent scheme seeks to tackle social isolation in the elderly and build communities by providing a framework of value exchange, motivations and rewards.
Find out more here
The studios of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Digg, via flavorwire . Sigh.
I also love Youtube's über-geeky Star Wars room.