Terminal Three electricity quest

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At Heathrow there are inumerate banners, animations and promotions proclaiming the availability of “the wireless web”. The T-mobile extortions have even come down in price (to 5 quid an hour – still hurts… Narita is 5 quid-ish for 24 hours) to entice the 802.11 enabled further.

However, there’s still the old problem of electricity. Terminal Three seems to be full of false electrical dawns. Plugs by comfy chairs that don’t deliver any juice when you hook up to them. After trying about 4 of these and not getting anywhere, I homed in on a pack of tanned middle-aged men with a complicated array of “fannypacks” and rucksacks. “Aha – silicon valley middle management types!” I thought.

Lo and behold they had discovered the electrical watering hole. FYI – it’s by the central pillar if you draw a line between Dixons and Hugo Boss.

Crisis over, I’m now getting a little bit of extra charge on my iBook for the inflight emergency episodes of Alias if the movies suck.

So, the question is – why don’t T-mobile and BTOpenzone spend a little bit of their marketing budget on signage or seating by electrical outlets?

Perhaps even underwrite a little interior design or minor capital works to get a couple of extra outlets in there. It would probably encourage a lot more usage of their services, and cost very little. Having some kind of physical locus would encourage things like interchange between experts, novices and the curious – further word-of-mouth marketing and free technical support.

It would help travelling wifi users with little time on their hands to explore for electricity, make incremental sales, and create warm-and-fuzzies about the brands involved.

Why not?

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an “i”

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BBCi is no more! The BBC.co.uk homepage has ditched the BBCi identity in favour of what people outside the BBC peskily persisted in calling it, despite spending lots of funny money on marketing.

What a relief. One hilarious consquence of the BBCi branding was how often when I met people external to the corporation or where introduced at an event at first they thought I worked for BCCI, the disgraced financial institution.

So far good.

However the new logo isn’t, shall we say, “all that”.

I’ll lay odds it was designed by a corporate identity design agency, and looked great on a powerpoint or on a piece of foamcore; but it really doesn’t survive on the webpage. I’ll also lay odds that a designer or client-side coder inherited eps files from the bigshot agency and cursed them as they struggled to reduce it to the size on screen with out it looking too ratty at the edges.

Their hard work was in vain. There is no need for this vainglorious logo other than having given marketing managers something to nod sagely about for a couple of months and sign cheques.

It’s literally a waste of space, occupying prime real-estate with tatty nonsense that doesn’t tell you anything that the URL you’ve entered, or the nice discrete classic Lambie-Nairn designed BBC logo in the top-right hand corner, or for that matter the demoted-but-distinctive doesn’t already tell you.

Also, BBC – the design agency you hired haven’t ready the BBC’s corporate identity guidelines – or they have wilfully ignored them.

Lambie-Nairn’s guidelines state that the boxed-capitals of B, B and C are Solid Colour (black, white, green, whatever) with the letterforms “punched-out” from the solid colour, revealing through them whatever colour is behind (as in the top-right-hand-corner version). The letterforms are not meant to be white on colour as executed here.

Also – what are those psuedo-3D planes behind the BBC.co.uk doing on a site which has done so well in the last couple of years in reaching a lovely, consistent, graphically strong ‘2D’ aesthetic?

What the hell do they signify? What do they add?

It’s really a shockingly bad, sophomoric logo which should never have made the cut, even if it was deemed there was sufficient reason to retro-brand the site.

2/10.

Ah well. I’m sure the rage will subside and I’ll get used to it, like I did BBCi.

Lifegame

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The Guardian interviews people on their experience of Improbable Theatre’s Lifegame, “in which a show is improvised around an interviewee’s life story”

“In some cases, Improbable’s versions of my memories have almost replaced my actual memories: the way they did my mother singing around the house; the way they described how I came to read drama at university, creating puppets out of newspaper. They asked me how I would like to die; it wasn’t something I had particularly thought about, but I said dying on a limestone ridge in the Mediterranean would suit me fine. Now every time I go on holiday and go walking on high limestone ridges, I remember their depiction of that scene. “

If someone tells a better story of your life to strangers than the one you actually lived, it may lodge itself in the spotless mind…

Falling down under

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^ Surfer in collage snapped at the Archigram exhibition this weekend, at the Design Museum.

The exhibition and Archigram have been written about nicely by Dan, so I’ll just remark that it left me feeling elegiac, for a fallen future we used to picture; full of the psychedelic technologies of freedom.

The schemes, epigrams and illustrations looked like they were straight out of the pages of The Invisibles, or at least an imaginary Homes and Gardens feature on Mister Six.

It was interesting to visit with an art-director friend of mine, who was looking at it more through the lens of graphic design, and how the work has influenced recent graphic artists and commercial imagery.

Off down under for a couple of weeks, for some sun, surf and switch-off. I’ll leave you with this from The Guardian Review, a passage on Falling (and surfing) from Nicholas Lezard’s review of “Falling” by Garrett Soden:

“There are primatologists and anthropologists who suggest that it was a very strongly vested interest in not falling that led to our development of consciousness. Smaller animals, such as chimps, need not fear the consequences of a drop from the trees as much as we, or other great apes, such as orang-utans, who climb slowly and with deliberate caution. Besides, we have spent far more time, if you examine our family tree, up that tree than on the ground. With quite sophisticated balance skills, we are certainly very good at controlled falling: skiing, skateboarding, hang-gliding, mountaineering. Captain Cook was flabbergasted at the surfers of Hawaii: a lieutenant on the Discovery commented that the Hawaiians’ skill was “scarce to be credited”.

Surfing, for them, was a matter of deep religious significance, and when the Calvinist missionaries arrived, Soden writes, “a gravity sport was attacked as the devil’s work” – and not for the first time. Falling has always been metaphorically consistent in this regard: it is not approved of.”

Back in May.

The philosopher and the thermostat

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Daniel Dennett profile in today’s Guardian

“He’s famous among philosophers as an extreme proponent of robot consciousness, who will argue that even thermostats have beliefs about the world. This argument turns out to be more about what constitutes our own beliefs than about the inner life of a thermostat. Part of this is because he uses the term “opinions” for the kind of conscious and considered ideas about the world that many people would mean by beliefs. He doesn’t think a thermostat is conscious. But he thinks its behaviour embodies assumptions about the world, and these can’t be distinguished, in their effects on the world, from beliefs: “Intentional systems have beliefs, or as-good-as beliefs. I use the word beliefs for the intentional states of all of them, including the notorious thermostat. But we have opinions as well as beliefs.”

Entire US captured in 20 days

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Not an update of the current nasty geopolitical situation, but something from The Google CityBlock Project [found via ChrisDodo’s del.icio.us]

This aims to produce a visual search of the urban environment. In one of their presentations they have an estimate of how long it would take to acquire images of the US’s entire commercial streetscape:

  • “~2.4 million miles of paved road in the U.S.
  • We estimate that about ~1% are commercial
  • With a high speed camera (~250 fps), we can capture driving at about 10 mph
  • It would take approximately 100 days worth of driving time to capture the entire commercial U.S.
  • Spread among 20 vehicles and allowing 6 hours of capture time per day, it would require approximately 20 days of acquisition”


So, very impressive in capturing images of the city; but what about the Image Of The City that we actually perceive? Schyuler and Rich’s excellent tutorial at EtCon made this distinction plain.

However I guess – as ever with Google – worth keeping a close eye on.

Iteration’s what you need

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From the N-Gage site today:

“The N-Gage QD game deck has all the gaming features of the original game deck, plus a few welcome adjustments – like hot swap for your game cards. We trimmed off the MP3 player (and some of the price!), gave it a slick, non-sidetalking design, and shrunk it all down so it fits better in your pocket… Hey, you talked, we listened!”

Seeing phone design iteration cycles in the console world, even the portable gaming world is exciting – also that the N-Gage folk got the joke, listened, acted and then co-opted the gag…

Stay on topic!

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“Stay On Topic: This mailing list is by and for those who practice interaction design. All discussions on this email list must relate to interaction design. This can include discussions of sister disciplines such as information architecture, visual design, etc. but only as they relate to interaction design. For example, a conversation on color theory would be out of place, but one about the best highlight color for buttons would fine for discussion. For a draft definition of interaction design go to our web site at interactiondesigners.com.”

Oh boy.

My inner-masochist has driven me to subscribe.

I’ll see how I do…