CHI'S

Domino's Pizza Tracker

Tells you if your pizza is stuck in traffic or still in the oven...

Super Lego Mario

FT: Guerilla Retail

Via the Financial Times

Edgy, secret and slightly illicit
By Becky Sunshine of the FT
Published 26 January

Pop-up or guerrilla shops have been lurking in the shadows of the world’s cities for the past few years. Rei Kawakubo of fashion label Comme des Garçons is often credited with launching the concept five years ago, when she set up a temporary retail outlet in a disused, dilapidated building in an unlikely neighbourhood of Berlin. The space was cleaned up – just enough – and equipped with rails of clothes, some design objects and a cash register. It was an instant success. Customers who found it felt they were in on something edgy, secret and slightly illicit: something that was hardly a business at all.

Since then, Comme des Garçons has created a handful of 12-month shops in cities such as Beirut, The Hague and Vilnius, while other big fashion brands including Uniqlo and Target have followed suit. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the idea is now trickling through to other realms. Designers and design stores in particular are embracing this raw, low-tech approach as an antidote to homogenised, glossy stores and as a way to create a sense of discovery and urgency among buyers.

“It’s about not knowing what to expect,” says London-based design consultant Jacob Peres. “People seem to want something less finished [and they] need a new destination to visit [so] what a great way to exhibit new work to a new audience. It forces a retailer to be more creative, spend less on a shop-fit and come up with an interesting new concept to attract people. That way the visitor is feeling like they’re in on something cool from its inception.”

There are practical considerations too, says Sean Sutcliffe, co-founder of UK furniture company Benchmark, which has its first temporary store on London’s Brompton Road open until October. “Benchmark primarily functions from its Berkshire farm shop base [and] we have a steady flow of business but it’s a long way to come [from London],” he explains. “A retail space in London gave us the opportunity to bring our new collection to a wider audience. It was purely about trying something different without too much commitment.”

Curator Libby Sellers, whose eponymous gallery featuring work from young British designers opened from the London Design Festival until the Frieze Art Fair and during Design Miami last month, thinks guerrilla stores are often the best way for fledgling retailers or gallerists such as herself to launch. “Doing things organically is affordable,” she says. “There is an added frisson, an excitement in an underground feel, of course, but it’s about [business] development [too]. I imagine my gallery website as shop window and then I’ll take on spaces when I have a particular show to exhibit. That also means I can find appropriate venues to suit specific pieces. Design lends itself to that. It should be functional and in fact a [non-traditional] setting might work better [than a conventional space].”

Having sold several pieces and garnered plenty of press attention in London and Miami, Sellers believes the element of surprise is the key benefit of utilising a temporary venue. “It was a sense of visitors discovering something new every time that kept it all fresh,” she explains. “The downside of this, particularly if showing internationally, is maintaining the brand or a following – staying in people’s consciences. That’s where a website becomes even more important – acting as a shop window while the real window is being redressed.”

London seems to be a hub for pop-up activity. Aside from Benchmark’s shop and Sellers’ gallery, the city has seen a Hector Serranco-designed collaboration between Noel Hennessy and the Spanish embassy that showcased the work of eight Spanish designers from the London Design Festival until early November; a pop-up from UK retailer Greenwich Village in Covent Garden; and art dealer and curator Kenny Schachter’s private gallery The Apartment, which showcased limited edition pieces from Ron Arad, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Alessandro Mendini and Philip Michael Wolfson.

This weekend curator and writer Janice Blackburn has a pop-up selling exhibition, “Small show huge talent”, in London’s Notting Hill. It showcases the work of 11 British and Dutch artists and designers who aim to blur boundaries between art, craft and design. The space, a large house in Hillgate Street owned by architect Seth Stein, is ideal, says Blackburn. “It’s such a brilliant opportunity to use a great modern space for a short time with no commitment or ongoing obligation. It’s great for independent people like me. I am not, nor ever wish to be, a dealer or have the aggravation of my own permanent gallery.”

But the guerrilla movement is without question a global one. In China, pop-up retailing is quickly becoming an essential tool for the young experimental crowd as well as larger commercial brands looking for a new angle, says PT Black, the Shanghai-based partner of Jigsaw, the consumer lifestyle research house.

“Rogue shows or pop-up spaces appear all the time now,” he says. “Retail is still quite chaotic in China and therefore the smaller, less established designers and retailers setting up have a better chance. Beijing is arguably more accessible for pop-ups as there are more informal retail spaces, while Shanghai retail is incredibly expensive. And the art and design scene is blossoming in China so there’s no shortage of domestic and international interest.”

The concept has also made its way to the US. Last May Tobias Wong, an artist and curator, and Gregory Krum, director of retail for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, opened the Wrong Store for two months in New York. A compact shop brimming with limited edition or rare pieces from designers such as Fredrikson Stallard, Marcel Wanders, Yves Behar and Ineke Hans, it didn’t offer anything for sale but the look was certainly more shopping environment than exhibition space.

Casa Décor is an example that predates even Comme des Garçons, having launched in 1985 in Buenos Aires. The aim was for architects, designers, builders and even homeowners to experience new trends and technology. At Design Miami last month more than 60 international designers, architects and manufacturers moved into a 50,000 sq ft space for five weeks to explore new design possibilities.

“We’re showcasing the work of everyone from the carpenters and painters who install to the architects and designers whose work is shown,” says UK president Kersti Urvois. “Casa Décor is the ideal, direct way to speak to both industry and potential domestic clients. The concept has worked so well that we’re now opening in Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan and Belgium next year.”

Other pop-ups at Design Miami included a collaboration between the Deitch Project and Paper magazine, a guerrilla space from Gallery Libby Sellers and an intriguing pop-up tattoo parlour called As Long As It Lasts, with creations by designers such as 5.5 Designers, Tord Boontje and Hella Jongerius. “I loved the idea of a fleeting venue for something as permanent as a tattoo,” says co-organiser Aric Chen. “Getting a tattoo, after all, is often an impulsive act: one that stays with you – though our tattoo parlour won’t. If you think of pop-up stores as being about rarefication – get it now, or lose out – then it seems to make sense to take it to the next level: the body. Almost all the tattoos had takers; for one guy, getting his Kaws designer tattoo was like a life-changing event. We had asked how far design and art lovers will go and apparently the answer is pretty far.”

Rotting London Grocery Store Sign

Via BoingBoing

Goodnight Electric - Am I Robot

CINEMA41: 1-seat Cinema in Amsterdam

From Cinema 41

3 Euros entry, 1 soda and popcorn included...

ECONOMIST: Face Value

From The Economist

Face Value
What the boss looks like determines how he performs
The Economist
Published 24 January

A couple of years ago a group of management scholars from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh tried to discover if there was a link between a company's success and the personality of its boss. To work out what that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their bosses for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data were analysed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection between how well a firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far as they could tell, a company could not be judged by its chief executive any better than a book could be judged by its cover.

A few years before this, however, a team of psychologists from Tufts University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when people watched two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were pretty good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was. At the end of the study, the perceptions generated by those who had watched only the clips were found to match those of students taught by those self-same professors for a full semester.

Now, Dr Ambady and her colleague, Nicholas Rule, have taken things a step further. They have shown that even a still photograph can convey a lot of information about competence—and that it can do so in a way which suggests the assessments of all those senior managers were poppycock.

Dr Ambady and Mr Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. These traits were competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness.

By a useful (though hardly unexpected) coincidence, all the businessmen were male and all were white, so there were no confounding variables of race or sex. The study even controlled for age, the emotional expression in the photos and the physical attractiveness of the individuals by obtaining separate ratings of these from other students and using statistical techniques to remove their effects.

This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work has shown that such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a reasonable accuracy.

And Dr Ambady and Mr Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students' observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students' assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company's profits. Moreover, the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they controlled for the “power” traits, they still found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and power.

These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.

Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these traits are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet another thing that stockmarket analysts might care to take into account when preparing their reports: the physog of the chief executive.

Living Patterns

Via Swissmiss

Surrogate Arm

Via Het Zesde Vlak

More Tattoos: To-do Tattoos

I posted previously about the return of tattoos in fashion.
Now Notcot reports about a ''To-do Tattoo'', a temporary tattoo as a reminder.
I guess you could also write a note in your phone or the traditional way using pen and a piece of paper.
But that wouldn't be very exciting I suppose...

Races in 1906

Brian Herzog's Flickr Photostream Via BoingBoing

I was going through my Great Grandmother's old school books, and found this "Race Types" plate in Maury's New Complete Geography,  copyright 1906.

Almost any viewpoint from the past will be interesting for the contrast to current thought, and race issues especially so. In this case, it's interesting who they chose to highlight as a race, ie, "Scotch Highlander."

Also, this books groups Anglo-Saxon, Arab, Hebrew, Russian, and others all as "Caucasian," and classifies American Negro as "Ethiopian."

Is 2008 better or worse than 1906?

How to get pen marks off your hands

Via Tokyomango

Myths about the Rise of China & India

From the Boston Review via 3quarksdaily

What makes a Miracle
Some myths about the rise of China and India
By Pranab Bardhan - The Boston Review
Published 27 January

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).     

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

...

Continued here

What do Chinese people think of Hillary and Obama?

Via Shanghaiist

Susanne Sundfør - I Resign

What font says ''Change''?

Via the Boston Globe

What font says ''Change''?
By Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith - The Boston Globe
Published 27 January 2008

Clinton

The Hillary type palette is far from fresh and colorful; it is begging for legitimacy instead of demanding respect. It projects recycled establishment. The type has a tired feeling, as if the ink has been soaking into the page too long. The Hillary logo has the look of an '80s newspaper layout or an investment company. The tall lower-case reminds me of someone with their pants pulled up too high. I wonder about the significance of the three stars and three stripes. A third term?

Edwards

Edwards is the only candidate to use a sans serif typeface for his main typeface. Sans serif typefaces do not have the added elements at the ends of the vertical and horizontal strokes. Unlike many of the traditional sans serifs used in campaigns, Edwards's typeface is open and friendly. It's utilitarian. In past campaigns, Edwards used a serif typeface. Perhaps he is subtly distancing himself from his unsuccessful 2004 bid. The Edwards type is very Wal-Mart, tabloid, middle class. Not a whif of high-powered lawyer.

Obama

Obama's type is contemporary, fresh, very polished and professional. The serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit. The ever-present rising sun logo has the feeling of a hot new Internet company. His sans serifs conjure up the clean look of Nike or Sony. This typography is young and cool. Clearly not the  old standards of years past.

Huckabee

Huckabee has the most inexplicable selection of typography and graphics, from the six floating stars to the white stripe seemingly stolen from the

Coca-Cola

logo. The overall effect is clutter. The main typeface, used to set the candidate's name, is very tightly spaced, or tightly tracked, as typographers like to say. Some letters, like kab, are actually touching each other. Then "Mike" is tucked in between the H and k as if "we almost forgot to tell you his first name." Setting FAITH. FAMILY. FREEDOM. in such a thin weak sans serif feels as if it was added as a committee compromise or an afterthought. The type is too light, too small, and does not have a real voice.

Romney

Uppercase can attract attention and project boldness, which is probably why the Romney campaign set his name in all caps. It works pretty well for 'Romney'. The letters fit comfortably and form a pretty solid unit.

Unfortunately, MITT does not lend itself well to this treatment. The two T's create a big space between them compared with the space between the MI or, to a lesser extent, the IT. The result is an irregular rhythm and feeling of inconsistency. The graphics are puzzling. The eagle logo has the head of the US Postal Service logo and body of the Norwegian flag flowing behind it. Not sure what that means.

Giuliani

Like Clinton, Giuliani has abandoned his last name nearly completely. Rudy is four easy-on-the-eyes letters set in a strong serif with an eye-catching red border. It is set in a strong, bold serif typeface; the serifs themselves are clear and decisive. Using his short four-letter name allows him to set it particularly large. His message is all about Rudy, name recognition. The enlarged R introduces the other letters like a big, protective parent.

McCain

McCain uses type that is a perfect compromise between a sans and a serif, what type geeks call a "flared sans." Not quite sans and not quite serif, sort of in between, moderate, not too far in either direction. The strokes have contrast between the thick and thin, creating the feeling that the ends are going to have cute little serifs, but they just flare out a little, not forming actual serifs but wanting to. The military star centered and shadowed is a not-so-subtle touch. And McCain just says "President," as if to say he's already been elected. Everything about this logo says you can buy a car from this man. From the perfectly centered star to the perfectly spaced type, the entire design looks like a high-end real estate company. McCain has done something no other candidate has done, he uses all blue, no red - not even a dash. If we were to predict the results based on typography and design, we would pick McCain and Obama.

Tattoos return

Should we thank Amy Winehouse?...

Pictures from the New York Times, Levi's and Style.com

Italian Vogue

Levi's ad

Juicy Couture

Jean Paul Gaultier Paris show January 2008

PK-14 from Shanghai

The Lifecycle of a Blog Post

Via Wired Magazine

More info here.

Red Light Fashion

Video by Bright Magazine

From the Red Light Fashion Website:

The Red Light Fashion Amsterdam project originates from a collaboration between the municipality of Amsterdam, NV Stadsgoed and HTNK, consultancy and recruitment agency of the fashion industry. In order to redevelop the centre, NV Stadsgoed bought several brothels. For the period of one year these buildings will be loaned to Dutch fashion design talents and used as shop-windows, workshops and living areas.