“Waste Not” by Song Dong (MOMA)

An installation currently on the 2nd floor of the MOMA, unveiling the life of a typical Chinese woman through the objects she collected in her lifetime. “It is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence.” It is mind blowing to see how much one can accumulate throughout their life if they do not dispose of the unnecessary/impermanent objects – “a time capsule of a lost era of Chinese culture.” – via NY Times

The installation is the work of Chinese artist Song Dong, in which he exposes the contents of his mother’s home acquired over 50 years, “during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or “waste not,” was a prerequisite for survival.” Waste Not” is Dong’s first solo museum show in the U.S.

See the stop motion video of the installation coming together HERE

A Culture of Sharing: the HCD Toolkit by IDEO

IDEO partnered with International Development Enterprises (IDE), Heifer International, ICRW, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a toolkit for applying Human-Centered Design to inspire new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need.

The Toolkit is divided into four sections:

The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.
Download the Intro Guide.pdf

The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.
Download the Hear Guide

The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.
Download the Field Guide
Download the Aspirations Cards

The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.
Download the Create Guide

The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization's existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.
Download the Deliver Guide

Also check the article by Alissa Walker (Fast Company)

Consumers in a downturn: a new spending habit? (part 1)

The business channel of The Atlantic Online published this weekend the first of two articles by Grant McCracken on the implications of the recession on consumer habits. This article just deals with three variations of a mere quantitative change. The qualitative change — where consumption patterns might change in kind and not just in quantity — will be addressed in a second piece. What will the current downturn might mean to consumers? Will their habits change in lasting ways? Could we return from the downturn to discover that consumers are a very different animal, that our economy runs on new principles. David Brooks wondered recently whether we might someday look like abstemious Amsterdam. There is a scarier prospect: that we might go the way of Japan. [...] Consumers scales back existing consumption habits. They buy the same things, roughly speaking, but they shift from expensive to cheaper versions, from big quantities to small quantities. This suggests a shift from European luxury cars to Japanese sedans, from luxury goods to something more generic, from national brands to store brands, from eating out to eating in, from steak to hamburger. The logic is a simple diminution, a quantitative change that produces no qualitative change. The world of consumer demand remains what it always was, scaled back for the moment in a managed retreat. When trust, job confidence, credit and prosperity are restored, the consumer will come charging back. All is forgiven. All is forgotten. We will party like it’s 1999. Read full story (alternate link) via Putting People First

A glimpse ahead: the Microsoft Office Labs

Microsoft just published a series of videos where they envision the future of work and life in the year 2019. From their websites, the Microsoft Office Labs:

Take a step into the future and get a glimpse into how technology may transform the way we live and work in the years ahead. Explore some of our concepts for how leading edge technologies might be used in real world settings – such as health care, manufacturing, banking and retail – over the next 5-10 years.

via The Customer Experience Labs‏

Here is the video that summarizes the different future visions.

Video: Future Vision Montage

Trivial Europe - Five Greatest Cities of the World

What´s the European thing about Europe and how trivial is everyday life? © DIE FABRIKANTEN	A transition of a different kind. From Thessaloniki in the Southeast through Novi Sad, Linz, Essen to Liverpool in the Northwest. DIE FABRIKANTEN Promenade 15 4020 Linz Austria Phone: +43 (0)732 795684 Contact: labor@fabrikanten.at www.fabrikanten.at/trivialeurope TRIVIAL EUROPE ON SCREEN within the 'Stadtkino' Linz09 - films about Linz, in Linz, from Linz. Moviemento3, Linz, Austria. March 20th, 2009 5:30 p.m. ORDER PREVIEW DVD NOW

TRIVIAL EUROPE
Five Greatest Cities of the World
Documentary, A 2007, 60 min.

What´s the European thing about Europe and how trivial is everyday life? There are lots of stereotypes about each European country. What do these images mean to networked and cultural addicted coevals?

In nighttime walks DIE FABRIKANTEN, an artist collective from Linz, are looking for answers: Equipped with headlamps, residents of Thessaloniki, Novi Sad, Linz, Essen and Liverpool lead us to their favourite places.

The result is a transition of a different kind.

In THESSALONIKI, computer salesman and freelance online journalist Kostas Karderinis leads us to his favourite pastry-shop, ex-highjumper Chrisa Theodoridou to her father´s minigolf course and the architect Eugene Balassis into an occupied university.

In NOVI SAD Zelimir Zilnik, Filip Markovinovic, Vladimir Radisic und Zeljka Jovic tell stories about the day of the Nato-barrage, comets and wine festivals. Two Romanies give an account of their sex- und alcohol conflicts during Ramadam.

The journey through the city of LINZ at night is a mixture of red-hot steel and slightly broken 'Schwedenbomben', rusty transport ships and illuminated architecture. Along with us come Florian Sedmak and Michael Rusam.

The artists Karl-Heinz Mauermann und Johannes Gramm lead us through ESSEN in the German Ruhrpott. We get to know their favourite pitch, the very first Aldi store worldwide and the ugly Porscheplatz, which no longer can be called a square.

In the crack of dawn in LIVERPOOL Tamasine Seibold and her musical saw give a concert. Peter Hagerty adores the sea and the calm. The loud and flashy Liverpool is presented by Roger Hill alias Mandy Romero - Liverpools most famous Drag Queen – one of our nighttime escorts.

CREDITS

Director/Producer: DIE FABRIKANTEN
Gerald Harringer and Wolfgang Preisinger
Editor: Julia Pontiller
Musik: Thomas Reinhart
Camera: Kristaps Epners, Gerald Harringer, Dziugas Katinas, Wolfgang Preisinger,
Michael Rusam, Viktoria Schloegl, Miho Sugita, Gert Hatsukov.
Concept: DIE FABRIKANTEN

REVIEWS

'Your film reminded me very much of something that Serge Daney once said when describing his favorite films, the 'one-of-a-kind' films, as he called them. (...) In true travel, what matters are the magical accidents, the magic of the night, the discoveries, the inexplicable wonders and the wasted time. And your film is one-of-a-kind; it's a true travel, a wasted time. And when I say wasted time, I mean that as the most beautiful compliment that I can really give you.' Jurij Meden, film critic und curator, Slovenia

After the premiere at VIDEOMEDEJA in Novi Sad, Serbia, in November 2007, TRIVIAL EUROPE was on screen at the DIAGONALE 2008, Graz, Austria (competition) and at CROSSING EUROPE 2008, Linz, Austria.

Within the 'Stadtkino' series of Linz09, TRIVIAL EUROPE will be on screen again on March 20th, 2009, 5:30 p.m. at Moviemento3, Linz.

THE IDEA BEHIND

After the book BOTSCHAFT LINZ, the documentary TRIVIAL EUROPE is the second part of a project series about places in Europe. Places with a tale to tell.

Since 1989, the artists and designers DIE FABRIKANTEN put their transboundary projects into effect, be it adventures in communication in everyday life, at the internet or at cultural festivals.

Always tightrope walking between art and reality, communication and culture, they find new crossconnections manifested in corporate designs, rooms, situations, films, communication concepts and communication projects. These contentions guide amongst others to Turkey, Greece, Israel/Palestine, Czech Republic, India, Erbia, United Kingdom, Germany and the USA.

via e-artnow

Just missed

S1NGLETOWN is a Droog and KesselsKramer project.


The S1NGLETOWN paper is edited by Chris Foges and sponsored by the Ymere housing corporation, responsible for the first Droog house for singles in Amsterdam.

Participating designers includes Nacho Carbonell, Agata Jaworska, mkodama design - Mino Kodama, Marko Macura, Casulo - Sebastian Mühlhäuser & Marcel Krings, NEXT Architects
SMAQ - Andreas Quednau & Sabine Müller

Exhibition photography by Liz Hingley

S1NGLETOWN is part of ‘Out There, Architecture Beyond Building’, this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky and on view to the public from 14th September to 23rd November 2008. An accompanying newspaper features specially commissioned articles and art exploring single-living in greater depth.

Third-Culture Kid, Obama and innovation

Read this week

I came accross a great post looking at Third-Culture Kid and living on liminality

It does resonate with me, and really sums up my cultural upbringing. It is quite difficult to figure out how you can capitalize on being in born in one country (france), growing up in another (Cameroon) ad living in the third (UK). This article helps me figuring out

And to summarize the qualities of the individual,

I'm going to highlight key statements that articulate the characteristics of a person who embraces liminal space,

• Cross cultural skills such as flexibility, tolerance and strong observation skills
  • As cultures and communities come increasingly into contact, we need to know how to respect, observe and learn from cultural differences.
  • We are life-long learners, and the world is our classroom
• Poised to deal with rapid change. Comfortable with ambiguity.
  
  • The ability think quickly on our feet and can take the initiative to troubleshoot -- but we often do so in a context of understanding the currents and observing the situation first.
  • Flexibility and tolerance don't always translate as strong points in business.
  • Observation in particular seems to be underrated.
  • Tries to figure out which way the river is flowing before jumping in. i.e. sees the big picture.
• Multi-dimensional world view
  • We don't assume that our way is the best or only way.
• Greater "spiritual" perspective or Open to other value systems.
  • We observe that different people's experience has created different truths in their lives -- from how to relate to self and others to how to relate to spirituality.
  • Question those who promote a belief that there is only ONE way to nourish a spiritual life.
  • Rather than be threatened by different belief systems, relish the beauty in the diversity, taking something from everything.

Bruce Nussbaum gives President elect Barack Obama some advice on who can help him get innovation right

Also if you speak French a great three-part radi programme on the The impact of mobile technology around the world (via Putting people first)

Péril Jeune: The brand YOUTH @ the Musée Ethnographique de Neuchâtel

An ethnographic look at youth or being young as a brand with its stereotypes and signifiers
Great show





La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN











Révolte purifiée- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN












Le salaire de la peur- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN.





Comme un disque rayé- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN



Comme un disque rayé- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN



Péril en la demeure- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN




L’âge d’or- Photo: Alain Germond, © MEN

Musée Ethnographique de Neuchâtel
28 juin 2008 au 1er mars 2009 - La marque jeune

via LaMJC, High Snobiety