herebenotions

Check-out

A refreshing use of of the supermarket check-out belt.

This is part of a lon-running campaign for Denver Water by Sukle Advertising & Design, USA.  the objective is to get people to reconsider how much water they use.  The line on the orange dividers says "Keep our rivers flowing - Use only what you need".

A different kind of street art

The National Gallery has placed about 44 famous paintings on walls in the streets of Soho and Covent Garden. They've called it The Grand Tour.

The nicest bit is that there are various audio tours that you can download: like the lunchbreak tour, the lover's tour, the heavy hitter tour.

On till the end of August.

Ghost ads

Waiting for the bus in downtown Seattle this caught my eye.  Not a great example of wall ads but it reminded me of some great flickr groups: ghost signs, wall ads, faded signage, old wall ads.  Interesting how advertising was once so integral to buildings, but now posters are usually limited to designated sites and quickly vanish. It's as if businesses were more confident in the past.  Big displays of who they were painted on their building walls, their business names etched in stone. 

Platform for art

A nice little something from London Underground’s 'Platform For Art'; which is a great use of space and brightens up the daily commute.

Gloucester Road Tube station has just started to show the work of artist Chiho Aoshima. City Glow, Mountain Whisper, (digital prints on vinyl) is on display until the end of the month and is Aoshima's first solo exhibition. The landscape she has created runs along all 17 archways which sees the scene graduate from day to night and from urban to rural.  On display until the end of March.

Finding a good match

Been meaning to write about this since October...retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

Retrievr makes use of a Flickr API, which allows outside developers to incorporate Flickr functions and data into their own applications.

Read more in this Wall Street Journal article. 

Pictures of walls

Pictures of walls.  Amusing graffiti photographed on walls and street furniture.

 

If you only had one page...

...what would you do? 

Below is week in review. It's an hand drawn representation of the week’s news, posted on-line for the larger, virtual audience.

You can read what the founder's say about it here.

I think it's a lovely collaborative way of making the mass of stories out there personal - And it has several things I love - news, chatting and creativity, and drinking of course. 

Anyone can go along and participate (this week's example is from the LA chapter), and what makes the page will depend upon the views and interests of the people contributing that week.  People who can't make it to the actual bar for the drawing session can submit a story online.

Undersound

Undersound is a site outlining an idea to distribute music around London Underground trains. Users would be able to upload songs from their collections to centralised distribution points, and download tracks left by other users.

"undersound is a new type of experience, an interface that is on your mobile phone and in the underground stations you pass through every day. It is part personal, part public and all about the tube. undersound is a way of listening to, distributing and affecting the flow of music in the underground that goes beyond just the music itself. It allows you to see your journeys, the people around you, and the tube itself in a new light."

The designers talk about three key inspirational themes or aspects of life underground that they tapped into in the design of undersound:

a platform for art - a sense of place, the idea that the tube is seen as a site for the creation and appreciation of public and personal art

an ecology of objects - localized interpersonal interactions, the importance of the multiplicity and the interaction of the objects people bring into the underground

emergent socialty - subtle social patterns and norms emerge in the underground creating unique opportunities for social understanding and interaction

There's some very interesting parrallels with the web.  For examples, each track in the undersound system would be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information would be visible as the track is being played. This might trigger memories and musings around the listeners personal relationship to that place. You could ask questions like, "Is there a correlation between the flow of people around the tube network and the flow of music tracks around the undersound network?"

Water, water everywhere

There seems to be no end to the things people will try to get their message out there...

There's another similar one here.

Kicking use of space

Tried a different walk to work this morning and this store window caught my eye.  Great use of space.  The shop is called TN_29.  There are no shoes on shelves; they're all hanging in the air which invites you to be tactile and explore them.

Tracey Nuels, talks a bit about the store design on the store website.  "Ignoring retail space as we know it, shoppers can feel at home with scents of warm baked bread and freshly ground coffee. Chosen because these evoke warm, loving memories but aren’t usually found in a shoe shop, customers can then question their surroundings and their senses are alerted."

"TN_29 regards footwear as an extension of the wearers personal expression. TN_29 footwear offers individuality and timelessness providing an alternative to the norm. Shoes can be more than mere containers for our feet." 

All the photos except the one on the top-left are from the store website. If you fancy visiting the store here's a map.