SparkBlog by The Hartman Group

Weekly Six: Bar codes, color wheels and punch art

In Japan, Even the Barcodes Are Well Designed
D-barcode specializes in turning barcodes into something fun and memorable.

iPhone App for the Environment
GoodGuide iPhone app scans bar codes for environmental and heath ratings

Graph Media Activities With a Wheel Chart
Hand-drawn "media wheel" shows what media people consume when and where

The Worst Cities for Walking
Transportation for America released a new study on which U.S. cities are most dangerous for pedestrians.

Hole Punch Art
A self-portrait created with holes of 10 different sizes.

And for the "wow" factor: Video Remix
[via Kottke]

We do not live in public

Currently the socialmediasphere is abuzz about Tumblr’s decision to reconfigure its entire site (or “Dashboard”) to accommodate Justin Johnson’s video-crafted marriage proposal to Marissa Nystrom. And, of course, she said yes.

Marissa, will you marry me? from justin on Vimeo.

Now, no doubt, an infestation of lifestyle journalist hacks will descend upon the “story” to document our life in these most curious of social media times. But Ondi Timoner’s pleadings aside, we’d like to interject a healthy dose of reality with the following proclamations:

1. We don't live like this: The last time I checked, many—though not all—of us live in houses or apartments, that’s how and where we distinguish our private space from public. True, we have cell phones and now waste the time that used to get wasted on comic books and sitcoms with things like Facebook, but we still live in private. Hey Ondi, I saw your film, but the more interesting thing is that when you and Josh were living in that giant tunnel pretending to be artists, nobody even cared…because they didn’t know! They were in their homes! Get it?
2. Nobody I know ever lives like Justin and Marissa: As others wiser than we have pointed out, the marriage proposal looks much more like life in a Zach Braff film (i.e., Garden State) than the everyday reality of mere mortals such as ourselves. Our friends have real life problems like broken cars, diabetes and divorce and tend to focus on much more important things than spending 6 years documenting their relationship with a $2000 video camera and a suite of editing tools.
3. It is a sad world when the notion of love becomes a commercial to lure the clueless marketing types further into the imagined world of social media.

Remember, social media is like advertising, if you would just quit looking and listening, maybe—just maybe—they’d go away.
 
Bottom line? Like wow man...

Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day from all of us here at Tinderbox! Let's all crack open a beer from a wind-powered brewing company and spend some time perusing blogs that are known for their green-mindedness. Below is a short list of our favorite green websites:

1. Grist
2. Treehugger
3. World Changing
4. Ecorazzi
5. No Impact Man

Enjoy and have a lovely Earth Day!

Photo Sets with Umph

Time and again, Flickr proves itself as a go-to resource for innovative photography on the web. With near-perfect search functions and organizational features, Flickr boasts a devoted community of users with diverse talents and interests.

Here are three photo sets worth exploring:

1. Faces in Places (and blog)

2. Ticky-Tacky Westlake

3. The Art of the Business Card

Do You Like Us? Check Yes or No.

What do you like most about us? Our dazzling smile? Our winning personality? Our sparkling dinner conversation?

Although we missed out on National De-Lurking Week by about eight months, we are now officially sounding the call for comments. We'd like to know what you think of our blog.

Do we have something in our teeth? Does this outfit make us look fat?

Now is the time to fess up. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

Too shy to speak up in front of the class? Send an email to info@tinderboxthg.com

Act now, or we may just take to the sunny skies forever.

Stairway to Cat Heaven

Sometimes the spirit of innovation moves us to create. Sometimes we'd rather purchase the darn things ourselves. Somewhere in the middle lies Ikea. For better or worse, Ikea is legendary for supplying a boxed version of the DIY spirit to its customers, from the simple construction of, say, coffee tables to the daunting undertaking of room-sized organizational sets. The minimalist instructions provided with each piece prove ripe for modifications. Who is to say that your run of the mill Laxvik shelving unit can't be reimagined as a fetching wall divider for a small studio apartment or even a large-scale wine rack for serious collectors?  Luckily, the folks over at Ikea Hacker have documented such occasions for innovation.

Looking to fashionably entertain your cats on the cheap? Ikea's minimalist Bjarnum/Jarpen wall shelves showcase your pets while adding a modern flare to any living space. That said, a paper box also does the trick.

(via Consumerist)

Just in time for Halloween...

As a special tribute to Halloween, we’ve compiled three of the most frightening things we’ve recently stumbled across.

1) The first is fairly straightforward. While working our way through the pages of Frightcatalog, we found this treasure, the fully-animated Vomit Barrel.

As the name might imply, this is a life-sized replica of a zombie perpetually heaving its guts into a barrel. Just so you don’t get any crazy ideas, the barrel is marked “INEDIBLE.” Best of all, the vomit function activated by motion sensor and includes all relevant sound effects. Perfect for your next Rob Zombie show...

There’s even a video of the Vomit Barrel in action after the jump.

2) Next, we turn to NACS Online (The Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing), where we find the following listed under Cool New Products:

Introducing the Monster Chili Cheesedog, from Don Miguel Mexican Food!!!

As the copy entices:

“Forget the mess and hassle of the traditional cheesedog. The 1/3-pound Monster Chili Cheesedog gives your customer a better tasting, more portable alternative. The Monster Chili Cheesedog is perfect for the roller grill or hot to go. It is also available not fried, so customers with deep fryers can also take part in this delicious new idea that will keep consumers coming back.”

Ma, it’s time ya done fire up the deep fryer, we got Monster Chili Cheesedogs a comin…Yup, I done hear that train a comin...

3) And finally, we saved the most frightening for last.

For reasons unclear to all, someone got the bright idea of doing a Bob Dylan Broadway musical choreographed by Twyla Tharp, the mind behind Billy Joel’s recent revival. But rather than tackling sticky subject matter—like, say, the long-standing allegations that Dylan used Ramblin Jack Elliot as an entre to Woody Guthrie’s world before turning his back on both greats—this is straightforward Broadway treatment.

And what would such treatment look like? Will the motorcycle wreck get a new dance move?

To quote Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal, “"The Times They Are A-Changin' is so bad that it makes you forget how good the songs are.” Or, as The New York Times Ben Brantley suggests, a “systematic steamrolling of Bob Dylan.”

But don’t trust us, see for yourself. Happy Halloween!

Friday's cool product

Meet Fred.

Fred is a new brand of water.

Fred fits in your pocket, more like a trusted friend than a nagging visitor.

Fred also hosts a trendzine called the Fredspot.

There you can read about William Oceans noble experiment to wear the same pair of jeans for 3 months without washing.

Whatever.

Chris Anderson's Zeitgeist

As some may be aware by now, Wired guy Chris Anderson presented at Pop!tech last week and made waves by not talking about the now well known long tail metaphor. Instead, he riffed on what happens when “things get to be free” or, in fancier parlance, economies of abundance.

As in, what happens when, say, computer chips become crazy powerful because they’re loaded with thousands of free transistors…Well then, you start designing playful GUI interfaces a. la. the Macintosh and liberate folks from having to use those old-fashioned command-line interfaces many of us still miss...

This leads to the observation that traditional media is really much more the outcome of economies of scarcity rather than economies of abundance. There’s limited space on the newsstand, limited channels on your television, limited space on your grocer’s shelf etc. As a result, we tend to get these lowest common denominator products which are designed to offend no one and, in the process, have no sense of genuine appeal.

By contrast, things like the blogosphere and YouTube are described as economies of abundance, where without the limits of conventional economies, folks are free to express theirselves in ways previously unimagined (which ironically channels the familiar naïve, myopic optimism which has long plagued free-market economies).

Next Anderson hits on several of the critical trends emerging as we move from economies of scarcity to economies of abundance—and it’s a very familiar territory…You know, the old rule of turning everything on its head for rhetorical gain. …If scarcity is about paternalism, abundance is about equality…scarcity was top down, abundance is bottom up…if scarcity was about command and control, abundance about losing control…We seem to remember Clinton using this same “inversion” trick to trash big Bush in the '92 election.

Then Anderson touted his new management style “I just try to listen and do whatever my intern tells me to do…” (if the rest of us over the age of 40 did that, we’d likely be having a heck of a lot more fun…which I suppose is the real point...)

The talk then closed with a wonderfully produced video (done by others, no doubt) on the nature of abundance and long tails and new media and what not…

I think the real take-away here is not so much whether Anderson is right or wrong, or whether you agree or disagree with the fervor and optimism surrounding Web 2.0, consumer generated content and so forth. Rather, Anderson seems to have a knack for capturing that certain spirit of the moment—the Zeitgeist if you will.

And that spirit is alive and kicking and screaming to be heard in the following video currently making the rounds:

Product Music

One of the oft-unrecognized benefits of the internet, especially the 2.0 version, is the vast amount of historical media artifacts available for immediate retrieval. Out of print books and records, obscure films, underground comics and zines—these were once physical objects, typically produced in small numbers, which required great patience and tenacity to track down. It was not unusual to encounter collectors who had been searching for some highly prized artifacts for several decades.

While original media artifacts are always highly prized for their authenticity, there were many of us in the 60s and 70s who simply wanted the ability to listen to the music, to see the images or to read the words with our own eyes. Ownership is great for bragging and all, but it’s a lot more fun to share the cool stuff with others. Fortunately, today’s internet—what with its infinite series of tubes and all—makes most of that instantly possible.

Which brings us to today’s great find, product music. We’re referring here to the classic  industrial musicals of the 50s and 60s. Borrowing on the cultural legacy of the work song—a worker-created tune designed to alleviate the boredom of a physical, repetitive task—companies relied on elaborate song and dance numbers to promote enthusiasm and camaraderie among the employees. The main difference, which eerily foreshadows many contemporary developments, is that the songs were written not by the workers but, rather, were outsourced to professionals based on management’s whims.

The result is a treasure trove of surreal, whimsical ditties sung with an earnestness and enthusiasm which is no longer possible in the irony-infused, detached cultural pose of the present. Consider “Up Came Oil” (Exxon), “He’s a Penney Man” (J.C. Penney’s), and the classic “My Bathroom is a Private Kind of Place” (American Standards). The always entertaining WFMU blog has the whole catalog available for download in mp3 format. In a similar vein, check out an entire LP of Chevrolet Showroom Music from 1972. Our personal favorite is the “Test Track for Factory, Impala and Caprice.”

Upon listening to this music, one can’t help but to recognize that there was a time and place in which marketers were content to simply entertain. Compared to today’s world of hyper-targeted communications and messaging, where every word is focused-grouped ad nausea, with supposed scientific precision, the casualness with which marketers appeared to approach their craft seems darned refreshing. Today’s auto ads, for example, may communicate volumes of information about product performance or (supposedly) trigger aspirational emotions, but they aren’t very fun to listen to or look at.

While we’re surely not suggesting anything resembling another wave of ironic, nostalgia-based marketing, is it heresy to even suggest that the message might not be as important as the medium?