The Client is Not Your Enemy

and other useful statements at burnsautoparts.com

bad times, new logos

Yes! Amateurs!

Yesterday  i mentioned Penelope Umbrico and her great collections of sunsets and ebay pictures:but there is more, lots more.  Like the well known serie of In almost every picture

and my favorite, Ivar Gravlejs collection of Latvian boys and girls…

unhappy crowd

There is a lot of debate going on about the recent success of crowd sourcing design companies and less recent, the overwhelming success of amateur stock photography. Is it all evil? Will this be the end of craftsmanship and professional design/photography? At No! Spec they take a strong stand against the speculation (only the winning design gets paid) based design websites. Here’s why:

“With legitimate design opportunities turning into calls for spec work at an alarming rate, it is our goal to arm designers with the tools they need to take a stand against this trend, as well as provide businesses with resources and information on why spec work harms our industry, and alternative solutions to their design needs that do not involve working on spec.” 

In stockphotography the same debate took place a couple of years ago. Did we see the end of photography? Did the amateur photographer took over?

“It would seem that the squabble has ignited the design community against the barbarians at their gate. And that would seem to bode ill for the future health of the spec sites, right? Don’t count on it. A similar debate was taking place in the stock photography world when we published “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” in that bygone era of June 2006. The fact this debate has been largely settled — in favor of the barbarians — speaks volumes about where graphic design, and, for better or worse, most other creative fields, are heading.” more in this article at www.blog.wired.com

We’ll have to see and wait. The World Press photo contest opened up for amateur photography but nobody came, maybe that’s because the amateur photographer still loves his sunset pictures and is reluctant to go to Baghdad and do some street photography over there…But in general i would say: there is nothing wrong with a good amateur. The next posting shows why, but here is a preview:

Penelope Umbrico (professional!) and her collected  Flickr sunsets (amateur!)

 

Vormator

“Vormator is the ultimate challenge of your creativity: the aim of the book is to give each artist the chance to show his abilities to create a stunning piece with limited means. The contributing artists each get the exact same set of 8 shapes, the Elements. With these shapes they are challenged to create their own unique page for the book, within the limitations provided in the Rulebook. Designers are thus challenged to create a unique piece within a strict set of rules.  We aim to establish an international collaboration of artists where the contrast between the art and the means has been maximized: each artist starts with the same set of forms but will have to end with a different, individual piece. Do you think you’re up for the challenge?”

Below some samples of this project, the work of 80 artists were selected for the book you can buy at Vormator

cut & paste

The Battle of Design, cut & paste is a social arena for the discovery, advocacy, and elevation of design.

“We recognize that in a competitive marketplace, talent unseen or undeveloped is talent wasted. Such talent need not go to waste. Cut&Paste’s mission is to provide channels of visibility and inspiration for designers, both aspiring and established, to reach their existing audience as well as potential fans. Our targeted goals are to promote the designer’s ability to achieve exposure as an individual; to expand the designer’s range of possibility in attracting professional opportunities; to form and encourage positive interaction within the design community; and to broaden the mainstream perception of design and further its appreciation by sharing and demystifying the creative process. A world full of inspired people is a better world.”

check out the results of a logocontest for streetwearcompany 55dsl

I’ll do something, but only if other people will too.

We are all individuals (I’m not!) but we act only if other people act too, otherwise nothing happens. This mechanism is extremely strong but can be tackled by  something you could call social crowdsourcing. Fix My Street and Pledgebank are two examples, both started by My Society

MySociety  is a non-profit based on a charity, a community of volunteers and (paid) open source coders and runs most of the best-known democracy and transparency websites in the UK. MySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives.

Pledges can be about anything. Earlier we posted about Ebbsfleet United  here is a pledge about some serious scoring power up front: Darius Charles. it almost succeed…

I like the simple idea of starting a pledge, set a target, get more people and succeed. Fix my belly, Fix my bike and Fix my carreer, Fix my life!…anybody out there?

here is a 49 min. lecture about MySociety and more..

mobbing a capitalist

The angry mob at the door of a notorious capitalist is almost a reality these days with AIG and other financial misbehaviour. Can we, the people, the exploited labourer, act against it? ok, ok, calm down a bit…But do we have a voice? Yes! We can!

Carrotmob is a method of activism that leverages consumer power to make the most socially-responsible business practices also the most profitable choices. Businesses compete with one another to see who can do the most good, and then a big mob of consumers buys products in order to reward whichever business made the strongest commitment to improve the world. It’s the opposite of a boycott.

It’s easier to understand if you look at an example. In the first ever Carrotmob event, a liquor store agreed to invest in upgrades that made their store more energy-efficient. In exchange, hundreds of Carrotmobbers showed up at once to support the winning liquor store. Here is a video of that campaign, and the mayhem that ensued…

more from the sheepmarket

singing sheep and more interesting stuff from the online workers of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we mentioned them before

crowdcover

This cover of Publish (magazine about digital creativity) was made by 20 designers. How it was done is written here (in dutch, sorry for that, but it is well illustrated) coverstory 

avatars art

Through 2006 and 2007, Eva and Franco Mattes (who are also known as 0100101110101101.ORG) created portraits of avatars, i.e. the customizable personas that people inhabit in online virtual worlds. Addressing the new online environments as places to socialize, nurture celebrity, and perhaps leave one’s real self behind, these images capture members of the popular online virtual world Second Life, combining the traditions of glamour photography with the brilliant colors and hard-line aesthetics of the game-world. The Mattes’ work questions both the traditional role of portraiture and the nature of the morphing relationship between identity and public presentation in virtual worlds. Like Andy Warhol’s legendary Factory, Second Life is about the creation of alternate identities, of building and living a fantasy.

the lonely artist as a myth

We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. As James Joyce memorably put it, the artist forges in the “smithy of [his] soul”. Yet many of the most highly regarded television programmes of recent years are written by teams of writers; and the majority of films go through rigorous screen testing exercises (and are often altered as a result) before they reach the paying customer. The painters Holbein and Titian, among any number of their contemporaries, used students to add the detail to their pieces before signing them, a tradition continued to this day by Damien Hirst who openly acknowledges the contribution of his studio team.
But what about the novel? Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? Typically, a writer will acknowledge in print the efforts of their book’s editor, copy editor and agent, since they each will have read the work in draft form. But such acknowledgments regularly include a disclaimer along these lines : “Any errors that remain are, of course, my own”. So the majority of published writers depend on collaboration, but only up to a point. After all, there is usually a single name on the jacket of a novel.
So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour – the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

here is some more collective writing:

the wu ming foundation

future of the book

Welcome to a magnificently chaotic pure democracy

 

Situated in Kent, England, Ebbsfleet United play in the Blue Square Premier, which is four divisions below the Premiership.

In February 2008, the members purchased the football club for £600,000. Just three months later, Ebbsfleet United won the FA Trophy at Wembley – the club’s greatest achievement in a history that dates back to 1890.

Owning a football club is normally the hobby of ex-dictators, global media moguls or shady oil entrepreneurs. Considering the level of organisation in a professional football club the daily management is probably better of when done by their own hooligans. The membership of Ebbsfleet United will cost you £35,00 and then you can vote about almost everything. Before every match, MyFootballClub members have a say in team selection. They can back the coaching staff’s judgement, or choose to pick the team and formation themselves.

Members also get to vote on other fundamental decisions, from setting a weekly playing budget (£10,000 this season) to deciding on season ticket prices to approving Nike as the club’s supplier and its designs. 

sell a band

Another example of using a crowd and a new democratic proces of ownership. With Sellaband, money is raised to give starting musicians the opportunity to make a professional album in the studio.
Believers? That is what we call the music lovers who will finance ($10 minimum) your SellaBand album. You must create a profile and upload your music, pictures, bio, etc. in order to attract their attention. You can upload a maximum of three (demo) songs that you think represent your music best.
All your Believers will receive a Limited Edition copy of your SellaBand album. SellaBand will also make available a standard version of your album and you will receive 100 copies to use for promotion. On top of that, SellaBand will open up its distribution network to you, to sell your music world-wide.

In the near future sellabands members will play at Arenafest, big Arena’s, big crowds, here’s an expample:

the crowd vs. a monkey

Stockbroking is best done by monkeys as they recently concluded, it’s evidence based. People in the financial world may find that disturbing so they still do deep, complex, analytic research into the stockmarket. This is all fine and most of the time it looks very scientific, on the other hand it may be just about emotions, gut feeling etc. In the end all indexes are the result of a active buying/selling crowd. Is there more financial wisdom in a crowd?

“Piqqem does strongly believe that every individual has some unique knowledge that is relevant to at least some set of stocks. That knowledge may be deep or superficial, but it doesn’t really matter because when there are large numbers of people independently expressing their opinions that data can be analyzed to determine the relative agreement or disagreement of users – a valuable metric either way. The stock market wisdom we’re after resides not in any particular individual, but in the aggregate opinion of the crowd. Even without any individual realizing it, the crowd can gauge the potential of stocks to move up or down, and spot trends well before the best analysts. Pretty cool that there might be stock market wisdom none of us has individually, but all of us have collectively, don’t you think? We do.

Piqqem is a web application that gathers stock sentiments from its users, analyzes them, and then displays aggregate results back to users. Users are encouraged to submit as much information as possible, giving us a large and diverse pool of data. In turn, this pool provides a real, working advantage over even seasoned stock market pros – those who might study securities in great depth but don’t have access to anything as comprehensive as our shared knowledge base.”