Net Works

Playful Innovation

Philips Design published few materials about the use of ’serious games’ in design and innovation- see Playful Innovation on their site. There is a pdf describing one of such games – Spark, a small boardgame helping to generate new thoughts and ideas, creative, yet grounded in real life.

In another publication, Playing with Futures, about the use of serious games to explore possible futures, they mention another game, Building Futures.

[The] “game developed by Philips Design for Design Initiatief, a new Dutch organization helping businesses collaborate and co-create new future-proof solutions. In this game, different teams construct possible futures in an interactive and competitive way, using ideas as building bricks for their projects. Importantly, people not only ‘imagine’ new futures, but are also ‘live’ and ‘work’ in them – preparing and transforming themselves for new emerging realities.“

Zombies Always Win!

Looks like playing video games can *also* improve your memory – at least that what the ‘playful experiments’ by the Pivec Labs point to. The company developed a small, funny, yet necessarily scary game to measure your memory capacity (Phonological Zombies). The first results shows that “video gamers have a commanding grasp of memory over their non-gamer counterparts” – according Paul Pivec (Zombies Help Scientists with Memory).

What Occam?

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

My first shock was to discover that the *analogue’ version of the U2’s newest album, No Line On the Horizon, is cheaper than the digital one; iStore is currently selling it from 9.99 euro, and the shop where I bought the CD (MediaMarkt, for the reference), slashed the price to 9.49 euro. And the analogue copy of course include the box, and the jacket, and collectible stickers etc.

My second shock was to see that the first thing my wife did when getting the *analogue* version of the album is to make a *digital* copy of the cover, “just for my memory”.

“Simulacrum simulacrumus est”.

Obama ‘Gotham’ is the Desingers’ President

Last issue of form publishes an article by Erik Spiekermann that looks at the US presidential campaigns with an eye of graphic designer (and ES, renown German designers, founder and for many years a director of legendary MetaDesign studio, does have such an eye).

Few excerpts:

“Type doesn’t provide the melody” [I guess, he meant 'meaning' here], but the sound of a text. A song strummed on a banjo will sound different from the same song performed by a full philharmonic orchestra. Listeners will know. And designers have, of course, always been aware of that fact.

“Barack Obama himself also has to abide by some of these unwritten laws. His logo shows a blue semi circle, rising like the sun over three curvy red stripes that flow towards the upper right – into the future?

“OBAMA’08 is set in roman capitals. But his motto ‘Change’ makes a much more definite typographic statement.

“Above varying sublines it is set in Gotham, the typeface that want to be generic. Its designers were inspired by vernacular type found on the New York’s public buildings. Batman lives in Gotham City, the mystical New York. Gotham looks simple and geometric, but not as cold or constructed as DIN [similar font, used, for example, on the road signs along the German highways]. It has authority but tolerate dissent.

“The candidate on the other side, John McCain, makes a Freudian choice, typographically speaking. Optima, of all the things, the typeface that doesn’t know whether it is a serif or sans.

“This wimpish alphabet is supposed to represent the war hero and hardliner in matters of security. His logo also features a golden star that looks like it belongs to a uniform, but he cannot kid us, experts: if this election campaign is about brands, there can only be one real candidate: Barack “Gotham” Obama will be the designer’s president.”