Cool Memories

"In the end, it all matters: every meme, GIF, and seemingly silly video. Nowhere else can we..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:08:47 +0200

“In the end, it all matters: every meme, GIF, and seemingly silly video. Nowhere else can we rediscover the fascination of our everyday world, spark synapses that unlock our creative potential, and amplify the joy we feel in a global exchange of energy. And through it all, we connect more deeply with each other—and ourselves.”

- MEMES WITH MEANING: WHY WE CREATE AND SHARE CAT VIDEOS AND WHY IT MATTERS TO PEOPLE AND BRANDS

Google’s Abigail Posner explains why those screaming goat videos aren’t just a mindless distraction.

So what can brands do to start tapping into all this visual play? Most important, start thinking like a creator, less like an advertiser. While posting the glossy photos from the photo shoot or :30 spots online may be part of your approach, it shouldn’t be your entire approach. Think content, not commercials. Here are a few thoughts to get started:

Help us rediscover the beauty of a forgotten familiar.
Find something familiar—in your product, brand, or from people’s lives—and help us see it in a fascinating new light. It could be as simple as taking a kitchen appliance and turning it into a science experiment or reminding people to capture just one second of their daily lives and compile abeautiful montage.

Find ways to spark synaptic play and participation.
Search for your brand online. Chances are your fans are already mixing and mashing your brand with something seemingly unrelated. Build on it, fuel it, steer it, and help us make more with it.

Give happiness we can share in.
Ditch the pitch. Instead, start an energy exchange. Create content that reminds us of our own capacity for excitement, happiness, and vivacity so we want to share in it with others.

Dumb ways to die…

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:38:46 +0200

Dumb ways to die…

How Not to Be Alone

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:06:32 +0200

How Not to Be Alone:

By JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
NY Times Published: June 8, 2013

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I saw a stranger crying in public. I was in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, waiting to meet a friend for breakfast. I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early and was sitting on the bench outside, scrolling through my contact list. A girl, maybe 15 years old, was sitting on the bench opposite me, crying into her phone. I heard her say, “I know, I know, I know” over and over.

What did she know? Had she done something wrong? Was she being comforted? And then she said, “Mama, I know,” and the tears came harder.

What was her mother telling her? Never to stay out all night again? That everybody fails? Is it possible that no one was on the other end of the call, and that the girl was merely rehearsing a difficult conversation?

“Mama, I know,” she said, and hung up, placing her phone on her lap.

I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or be inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some straightforward logistical way. An affluent neighborhood at the beginning of the day is not the same as a dangerous one as night is falling. And I was me, and not someone else. There was a lot of human computing to be done.

It is harder to intervene than not to, but it is vastly harder to choose to do either than to retreat into the scrolling names of one’s contact list, or whatever one’s favorite iDistraction happens to be. Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.

Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

Shooting off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching someone. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

THE problem with accepting — with preferring — diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too, become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.

With each generation, it becomes harder to imagine a future that resembles the present. My grandparents hoped I would have a better life than they did: free of war and hunger, comfortably situated in a place that felt like home. But what futures would I dismiss out of hand for my grandchildren? That their clothes will be fabricated every morning on 3-D printers? That they will communicate without speaking or moving?

Only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. It’s possible that many reading these words will never die. Let’s assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers.

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or — being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” — but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks “getting it wrong” and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

(via youmightfindyourself)

keithwj: “What do we want people to feel?”

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:58:30 +0200

keithwj:

“What do we want people to feel?”

11 SIMPLE TIPS FOR HAVING GREAT MEETINGS FROM SOME OF THE WORLD'S MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:54:49 +0200

11 SIMPLE TIPS FOR HAVING GREAT MEETINGS FROM SOME OF THE WORLD'S MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE:

MARK ZUCKERBERG, RICHARD BRANSON, NILOFER MERCHANT, CLAY SHIRKY, VALENTINA RICE, GUY KAWASAKI, AND OTHERS KNOW ABOUT GETTING THINGS DONE, BEING PRODUCTIVE, AND KEEPING A CROWD ENGAGED. SO WHEN THEY TALK, WE SHOULD LISTEN. UNTIL THE MEETING IS HAPPILY ADJOURNED.

Ferran and Albert Adria, world renown for the now inactive El...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:36:14 +0200

Ferran and Albert Adria, world renown for the now inactive El Bulli restaurant, have united the cuisines of Peru and Japan (known as Nikkei) to form Pakta, a fusion restaurant near Avenida Paralelo in Barcelona. The three head chefs working at the restaurant are the first ‘fusion’ element one can observe as Kyoko Ii, Jorge Muñoz and Albert Adrià all have different nationalities and backgrounds. For the interior, Adria once again turned to El Equipo Creativo, the design duo also responsible for the Adria restaurant and cocktail bar Tickets and 41º. The designers Oliver Franz Schmidt and Natali Canas del Pozo are clearly inspired by the traditional Japanese tavern, which they combined with bright and warm colors, evidently Peruvian. The two cuisines and aesthetic-elements which are the foundation for the restaurant explain the word ‘Pakta’, which means ‘union’ in the Quechua language spoken in the Andes region.

El Equipo Creativo’s head ingredient for the hybridization of the two country’s distinctive styles was the Peruvian loom which one sees throughout Pakta, in the form of a series of wooden loom-like frames. Schmidt and del Pozo have suspended different coloured yarns up the walls and across the ceilings. As the restaurant is housed in a long narrow space, their idea was to compartmentalize the different dining and drinking experiences. At the front of the restaurant there’s a bar area, formed by a grid of wooden batons which acts as shelving in front of the window. This is followed by a sushi bar, where chefs concoct the dishes in front of diners on three vast marble plates. The chairs and banquettes share their colour with the red lacquer found on traditional Japanese furniture. And at the back, the activity of the kitchen can be watched through glass panels with different degrees of transparency.

[via Dezeen]

What we do well - what we want to do - what we can be paid to...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:56:39 +0200

What we do well - what we want to do - what we can be paid to do.

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:38:31 +0200

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?:

Nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, to be published later this year. Thus we see, for example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?

"Here’s the problem with all this advice to young women these days – from Sheryl Sandberg to a..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:49:09 +0200

“Here’s the problem with all this advice to young women these days – from Sheryl Sandberg to a Princeton mom – even though gender equality has made great strides, there’s still an assumption that women are best suited to the motherhood role.
Throughout my education, every time I spoke with a guidance counselor, I couldn’t express the desire to accomplish certain goals or enter certain fields without being asked how or when I was going to fit marriage and children into the picture. I was steered into less demanding career paths because it was not only assumed that I wanted children, but that if I had them, I would need to put any and all other obligations of my life on hold in order to be their primary caretaker.”

- My take on Sheryl Sandberg: a woman’s place is wherever she wants to be, Chelsea Welsh, The Guardian

"Documenting your entire life history, building a timeline, a shrine to yourself, so that the people..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:27:28 +0200

“

Documenting your entire life history, building a timeline, a shrine to yourself, so that the people you grew up with will be impressed? That’s for baby boomers. Their children want nothing to do with it. Kids are for living, oldsters are for dying.

There seems to be this belief that there’s stasis in the digital realm. As if Microsoft still ruled and tablets were not about to eclipse desktops.

Bury that information on Facebook, soon no one will see it. But those who care are exchanging real time info constantly in the new world. That’s where it’s at.

”

- From the article ‘Facebook Is For Old People‘ by Bob Lefsetz

Brad Frost: ‘Death to Bullshit’ At...

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:43:00 +0200

Brad Frost: ‘Death to Bullshit’

At CreativeMornings/Pittsburgh, Brad Frost speaks on information, bullshit, craft and the future. He talks on the information overload we currently experience, how most of it is bullshit, and what this means for us moving forward.

youmightfindyourself: punkysdilemma: I haven’t enjoyed anyone’s...

Wed, 29 May 2013 11:47:48 +0200

youmightfindyourself:

punkysdilemma:

I haven’t enjoyed anyone’s illustration/design as much as I enjoy Geoff McFetridges since Mike Mills, especially this reductive series, filled with humor and driven by economy.

His earlier work was more of a place with mid 00’s design with a strong a 1970s/Ironic feel but as it’s progressed, become warmer more personal and he’s taken on this really lovely simplicity of line, the closest thing to it being maybe Ben Shahns illustrations or Marjene Satrapi, and It’s also nice to see someone take on multiple-mediums, McFetridge has done ceramics, wallpaper and is working on some fabrics in addition to fine art and commercial illustration, it makes you nostalgic for a time when fine artists had democratic instincts and not just commercial ones, and vice versa.

photojojo: Simply put, your kitchen’s contents can say a lot...

Wed, 29 May 2013 11:47:11 +0200

photojojo:

Simply put, your kitchen’s contents can say a lot about yourself. To explore this idea, Erik Klein Wolterink photographed 11 different kitchens in his home of Amsterdam.

What makes these photos awesome is that they’re actually collages. Erik photographed each individual drawer, cabinet, and appliance separately. Afterwards, he made a composite image of the original photos.

Kitchen Portraits Speak Volumes About Owners

via Slate

devidsketchbook: SONOS PLAYGROUND Deconstructed Museum of the...

Wed, 29 May 2013 11:35:31 +0200

SONOS PLAYGROUND Deconstructed | GIFs made by DevidSketchbook

SONOS PLAYGROUND Deconstructed | GIFs made by DevidSketchbook

SONOS PLAYGROUND Deconstructed | GIFs made by DevidSketchbook

devidsketchbook:

SONOS PLAYGROUND Deconstructed

Museum of the Moving Image

[ gif made by DevidSketchbook ]

“Sonos Playground Deconstructed is a site-specific installation in the Nam June Paik / HBO Production Lab at the Museum of the Moving Image. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Spectacle: The Music Video.

The installation aims to bring minimalist art to life as an immersive music video environment. Inspired by the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt and the room-flooding sound of the Sonos Playbar, Sonos Playground was originally installed in a 250 sq. ft shed at the Sonos Studio at the 2013 SXSW festival. At Museum of the Moving Image, Sonos Playground Deconstructed has re-imagined the experience using five detached walls suspended above a reflective floor.”

"I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet...."

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:18:34 +0200

“

I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.

So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a “Facebook friend,” but I can tell you that a “Facebook friend” is better than nothing.

My best long-distance friend, one I’d talked to weekly on the phone for years, moved to China this year and I haven’t spoken to him since. My best New York friend simply faded into his work, as I failed to keep up my end of our social plans.

I fell out of sync with the flow of life.

There’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality.

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

”

- ‘I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet’

Very interesting article by Paul Miller about logging off from the Internet for one year trying to reconnect to his ‘real self’ and finally realizing that reality and virtuality are already too closely linked to each other.

True! wearethedigitalkids: The Bridge Personality: People who...

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:33:12 +0200

True!

wearethedigitalkids:

The Bridge Personality: People who connect cultures play a vital role in an increasingly connected world.

“Most of us can’t aspire to be bridge figures—we’re simply not rooted in multiple cultures. But we can aspire to be xenophiles. It’s my argument that we must. The world we live in is so complicated and interconnected that solving many problems requires openness, understanding, and the ability to communicate with people from different cultures…

Bridge figures face the challenge of finding people who are willing to listen and try to understand the variety of global and cultural dialogs. Xenophiles face the challenge of locating and listening to these different voices without being overwhelmed by the roar of the Internet. For those of us who believe that we benefit commercially, creatively, charitably, or politically from encountering a wider world, the challenge is figuring out how to make the Internet more powerful for xenophiles and bridge figures alike.”

Image and quote from frog

theformofbeauty: If grandmothers around the world had a...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:41:09 +0200

theformofbeauty:

If grandmothers around the world had a rallying cry, it would probably sound something like “You need to eat!”

Photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s grandmother said something similar to him before one of his many globetrotting work trips. To ensure he had at least one good meal, she prepared for him a dish of ravioli before he departed on one of his adventures.

“In that occasion I said to my grandma ‘You know, Grandma, there are many other grandmas around the world and most of them are really good cooks,” Galimberti wrote via email. “I’m going to meet them and ask them to cook for me so I can show you that you don’t have to be worried for me and the food that I will eat!’ This is the way my project was born!”

The project, “Delicatessen With Love”, took Galimberti to 58 countries where he photographed grandmothers with both the ingredients and finished signature dishes.

He acted as photographer and stylist during each shoot with the grandmothers, taking a portrait of both the women and the food they made for him.

From top to bottom:

Inara Runtule, 68, Kekava, Latvia. Silke (herring with potatoes and cottage cheese).

Grace Estibero, 82, Mumbai, India. Chicken vindaloo.

Susann Soresen, 81, Homer, Alaska. Moose steak.

Serette Charles, 63, Saint-Jean du Sud, Haiti. Lambi in creole sauce.

The photographer’s grandmother Marisa Batini, 80, Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. Swiss chard and ricotta Ravioli with meat sauce.

Normita Sambu Arap, 65, Oltepessi (Masaai Mara), Kenya. Mboga and orgali (white corn polenta with vegetables and goat).

Julia Enaigua, 71, La Paz, Bolivia. Queso Humacha (vegetables and fresh cheese soup).

Fifi Makhmer, 62, Cairo, Egypt. Kuoshry (pasta, rice and legumes pie).

Isolina Perez De Vargas, 83, Mendoza, Argentina. Asado criollo (mixed meats barbecue).

Bisrat Melake, 60, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Enjera with curry and vegetables.

anothercompany: The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2013 on...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:34:05 +0200

anothercompany:

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2013 on Hypebeast

Yummy new coffee at Sourced & Sold in the heart of the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:29:15 +0200

Yummy new coffee at Sourced & Sold in the heart of the Jordaan. Give it a try!

FREUNDE VON FREUNDEN: Finally. One of my favourite (inspiring!)...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:20:07 +0200

FREUNDE VON FREUNDEN: Finally. One of my favourite (inspiring!) magazines/websites launched a convenient iPad App!