Animal Stickering per lo Zoo Safari

DDB Brazil ha realizzato questo simpatico stickering con adesivi elettrostatici da mettere sui parabrezza delle auto in sosta per dare la sensazione di essere guardati da vicino da un animale,  proprio come accade in una visita allo Zoo Safari!

Trovato qui.

• Febbre suina: guerrilla tra le strade di New York?
• Writing & Street Art Performance
• Non mettiamo in galera i soffi dell’anima: cosa pensiamo del decreto legge contro la street art
• Guerrilla-Art: come le strade diventano street museum
• Guerrilla che spacca per uscire dal grigiore delle tv generaliste

Project: Design a Livable Street

There's a great project going on at GOOD where designers post "before" and "after" pictures of redesigned urban streets. Check out lots of submissions here.

Taikkun’s Tibetan tourists’ prayer-powered LEDs

City officials in New York occasionally have to remind us residents that while tourists are occasionally irritating, they are an important source of revenue for our city and should be treated like guests.

Designer Taikkun Li is taking that a step further, and treating tourists like an energy source with his Prayer Wheel Energy Generator, envisioned for Tibet:

Tourists traditionally spin a multitude of prayer wheels in Tibet. Now that positive energy can be harvested along Tibetan streets, turned into electricity, and used to provide evening lighting along those streets and inside the adjacent homes.

The prayer wheel generator is built on a base of used bicycle parts and a discarded surplus fan motor, making it ideal for use in the developing world. This invention supplements an inadequate and unreliable electrical grid with the power of electricity generated by tourism. By combining the low-cost efficiency and long life of 21st century LED lighting, with the simple 20th century efficiency of a bicycle, the Prayer Wheel Generator uses the best of high and low technologies.

I do my part to help NYC tourists by giving out unsolicited directions; at least twice a week I orient a map-studying pack of peeps. But if they were somehow making a dent in my Con Ed bill, heck, I'd cook 'em dinner.

Brain Rules for public speaking

SB: How can a lecturer use attention, but make sure not to abuse it? Or put another way, does repetitive use of phasic alertness, getting an audience to refocus their attention ever few minutes, have declining effects over time?

JM: I do not believe in entertainment in teaching, during the holy time information is being transferred from one person to another. I do believe in engagement, however, and there is one crucial distinction that separates the two: the content of the emotionally competent stimulus (“hook”). If the story/anecdote/case-history is directly relevant to the topic at hand (either illustrating a previously explained point or introducing a new one), the student remains engaged. Cracking a joke for the sake of a break, or telling an irrelevant anecdote at a strategic time is a form of patronizing, and students everywhere can detect it, usually with resentment, inattention or both.

Do you think the size of a classroom has any effect on students ability to pay attention? Does Posner’s model of attention change if we are alone in conversation, vs. in an audience of 99 other people listening to a lecture?

I don’t think the size of the classroom has anything to do with the functional neural architecture proposed by Posner, but there is a universe of difference in how it behaves. The behavior has to do with our confounded predilection for socializing. People behave very differently in large crowds than they do in small crowds or even one on one. Very different teaching strategies must be deployed for each.

Bligh’s book “What’s the use of Lectures?” identifies 18-25 minutes, based on his assesment of psychology studies, as the key breakpoint for human attention in classrooms. Whether it’s 10 or 25, why do you think so few schools or training events use these sized units as the structure for their days, or their lessons?

I don’t know why schools don’t pay attention to attention. Perhaps it is a lack of content knowledge. If I had my way, every teacher on the planet would take two courses: First, an acting course, the only star in the academic firmament capable of teaching people how to manipulate their bodies and voices i to project information. Second, a cognitive neuroscience course, one that teaches people how the brain learns, so teachers can understand that such projections follow specific rules of engagement.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrainRules

Emotional Cartography: Implications of Visualizing Intimate Biometric Data

The (44MB freely downloadable) book Emotional Cartography - Technologies of the Self [emotionalcartography.net] is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psycho-geographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology. The theme of this collection of essays is to investigate the apparent desire for technologies to map emotion, using a variety of different approaches.

Probably the best known emotion maps are the ones resulting Bio Mapping project, a community mapping project in which the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), a simple indicator of the emotional arousal, is recorded in conjunction with one's geographical location. By combining the emotional responses of over 1,500 people over a period of 4 years, several "Emotion Maps" were generated of the city in which the participants roamed around.

Interspersed throughout the book, are the images of the printed Emotion Maps as well as photos of the participatory process. As mentioned before, the book can be freely downloaded and includes some compelling examples of mapping the subjective views of our daily experiences in a visual form.

Thnkx Bonnie.

1 Hour Design Challenge Highlight: ‘Seed Card’ let’s you plant your business card and grow a flower!

The entries are pouring in for this month's 1 Hour Design Challenge: Business Card Hacks, where designers and makers are invited to create ingenious items out of ordinary business cards. The concept above, "Seed Card," is a twice-ingenious design. The business card is part seed paper, part paper. You tear off the seed paper part and plant it in some soil, then use the remaining portion of the card as a plant flag with the card holder's info on one side and the flower type on the back. Says designer Greenman, "We typically use flowers to think of, or remind others of us, so I thought it was appropriate." Nice.

View all the 1 Hour Design Challenge Business Card Hacks right here, and upload your own. The 5 top designs will win 1000 free business cards from our sponsor, UPrinting.com.

>>ENTER NOW!<<

Frog design’s super Social Security card

"Of the three forms of identification we have in the states--the other two being the passport and driver's license--[the Social Security card is] the one that unlocks your life," says Frog designer Laura Richardson. To that end the design firm presents the Troika, an aluminum SS card with a multifunctional screen.

"By combining the familiarity and proportions of a standard ID card with the durability of a water-resistant, flexible screen and the security of biometrics, [a card like this] could revolutionize the future of identification," says Richardson.

Two things are of note here: One, this is a concept design only, cooked up specifically for a Forbes.com "Special Report on Identity." Two, it is ironic that while this card is intended to be a superior vehicle for the delivery of crucial information, the very article that presents it provides no legend or explanation of those five numbers on the photo above. But from what we gather, it's like this:

1. Thumbprint reader, or thumbprint storage pad to be scanned by a reader?
2. Changing screen
3. Buttons that change the screen from SS to Driver's License to Passport
4. Some type of protective rim
5. Aluminum body

Berlin