Chas Porter

Who to believe about SOPA and PIPA? Ben Huh or an old white guy?

Clearly Ben Huh and his great glasses. Seriously, the contrast between new and old, which is at the core of the debate behind SOPA and PIPA, is summed up in this still, captured from this debate last night on PBS. Watch it, listen, and you'll see what this picture tells us: clearly Huh understands the Internet, the old white guy, he's there to "protect the Internet" with "the rule of law" so that it benefits an old, stagnant industry that wants the world to be as it once was. Face it old white guy, you can't win. The Internet is a monster. It can't be stopped.

The Gamification of Your Daily Commute

Chromaroma takes your travel data and makes it into a game where every journey counts in a competition for the city!

Via @AndrewKorf

Jackson Pollock's barn floor

From the Pollock Krasner House & Study Center web site:

In his barn studio, he spread his canvas on the floor and developed his compositions by working from all four sides, allowing the imagery to evolve spontaneously, without preconceptions. Pollock described this technique as "direct" painting and likened it to American Indian sand painting. He maintained, however, that the method was "a natural growth out of a need," and that its only importance was as "a means of arriving at a statement."

More here.

 

WiiSpray Teaser

The Wii isn't a game console with a controller, it's a digital platform with a hand-held metaphor that people use to play. Very cool.

Dr. Stuart Brown and why play is vital, no matter your age.

Adult life is serious business that demands no fooling around in order to survive and thrive. Play is for children, at least that's what they tell us. Dr. Stuart Brown has a different idea. Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, Stuart Brown first recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life stories of murderers and felony drunken drivers. His years of clinical practice affirmed the importance and need for healthy play throughout the human life cycle, and his later evaluation of highly creative individuals revealed the centrality of playfulness to their success and well-being. This TED video, shot in May 2008, is worth watching. Here are four passages that resonated with me:

Play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams...

The opposite of play in not work, it's depression. If you think about life without play–no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy–try and imagine a culture or life, adult or otherwise, without play. The thing that is unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole life...

The basis of human trust is established through play signals, and we begin to lose those signals, cultural and otherwise, as adults...

I would encourage you all to engage, not in the work/play differential where you set aside time to play, but where your life becomes infused, minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kind of play and I think you'll have a better, more empowered life...

I love creative work because it requires play. Thinking "outside the box" is play expanding the game beyond previously determined borders to explore new territory and connect previously unconnected ideas. Play to me is like air. I need it to survive.

Just think how different the world would be if we took play seriously. It's worth considering. Dr. Brown has a new book titled Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. The National Institute for Play, founded by Dr. Stuart, is committed to the unrealized knowledge, practices, and benefits of play into the public life.

Is spec work evil? Who cares.

A SXSW panel today will attempt to answer whether spec work is evil, a question a lot of people, designers and non-designers alike, have been asking since Forbes published this article on Crowdsourcing in February 2009.

Frankly, the question is completely irrelevant.

Crowdsourcing isn’t evil, it just is. In much the same way newspapers, music, and TV have radically changed, Crowdsourcing is the graphic design industry being transformed by the Internet. And like newspapers, music, and TV, graphic design will never be the same.

Instead of wringing our hands, designers should ask “what new opportunities are being created by the forces killing the old model?” There are new opportunities: the same network that connects clients to thousands of designers willing to do spec work also connects a designer to a global market. All we need to do is imagine the possibilities and get busy.

Genius: Mother of All Funk Chords from Kutiman

Does this have hit written all over it, or does this have hit written all over it? Go get yo' groove on.

Using facial recognition on metered devices

Using facial expressions to indicate positive or negative results on a metered device is brilliant. In this concept from Robert Fabricant, Dick Cheney smiles when energy consumption is high and frowns and ultimately disappears when consumption declines and reaches the desired low point.

While I love this idea, I have two questions.

Does the use of Cheney limit the market for this device or does it make it more visible and attractive to people already concerned with energy consumption?

Does the use of irony (his smile indicating negative) limit the market or increase the emotional power for the smaller, more energy-conscious group?

My gut says the latter in both cases, but these questions are worthy of more research or a variation in the concept: offer users the ability to upload their own images and set their own associations with positive and negative results.

Still, well done Robert.

Failure: The Secret to Success.

One of my early ski coaches used to say, "If you never fall down, you're not going fast enough". True words that have encouraged me, even thirty years later, to push my life experience beyond what I already know, even at the risk temporary failure. Today, thanks to John Schneider, comes this great video that got me thinking again about the important role failure plays in success:

Some level of failure is always guaranteed because assumptions are often wrong, context is always changing, people make mistakes, and nothing is ever perfect. Yet a surprising number of corporations and people live life as if failure must be avoided at all cost. This is unrealistic and a huge impediment to personal and corporate growth. I think it better to reverse the equation, to say success must be secured at all cost, and that means we're going to have to embrace our failures and learn from them along the way.