the marketing mix by bud cadell
October 23, 2009
Innovation Project*
Goldsmiths are piloting an MA in Innovation.
This hasn’t even been approved yet and I already want to beg them to sign me up.
From the prospectus:
“This programme is a collaboration between you, your place of work, and us here at Goldsmiths. The MA enables you to bring an academic perspective to an ‘innovation project’ identified in the context of your work place; a project that is beneficial to your ‘actual work’ – either a company you work for or your own practice. You will have the opportunity to work with experts from a wide range of subject areas and disciplines (designers, social scientists, philosophers, creative business experts, psychologists, engineers and material experts) whose differing knowledge and critical focus will help you develop your own innovation project.”
* the asterisk is an especially nice touch – ’subject to validation’ sounds like the ultimate in academic swashbuckling…
October 21, 2009
Disparity
Sometimes we just want to buy things. And leave.
Case in point: the disparity between John Lewis opening a big shop in Cardiff and the new Dixons.co.uk ad campaign on the Underground. This pretty much summarises online vs in store retail for me. The ‘John Lewis shopping experience’ and branding carnival against self informed, swift transactions and value for money. Anyway.
From the John Lewis press release:
“Crowds waiting outside the shop will be treated to entertainment from a samba band and jugglers, while John Lewis rickshaws will drop off people at the new shop and models will act as living mannequins in the city centre to showcase the new and exclusive fashion brands on offer. Inside the shop Cardiff Arms Park male voice choir will perform to entertain people as they browse.”
Spotted on the tube:
October 18, 2009
A certain thinker
“We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.”
‘Affinity’. Almost No Memory, Lydia Davis.
October 17, 2009
Design thinking
I cannot stop thinking about this.
‘Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”
October 13, 2009
Poem cup
Working around the clock, cell phones in the middle of the night, googling this and that. How do we reconcile our physical needs with our virtual bodies? Katarina Häll’s graduation project is a comment on a world spinning faster and faster. The Poem cup offers a moment of reflection, a meditative break in the rush of everyday life.
Now to perfect left-handed cup lifting…
via swissmiss
October 9, 2009
Talking about books #2
I have a troubled relationship with Germaine Greer. Sometimes I like her, sometimes I don’t.
When she reviews Stephen Bayley on Woman as Design, I like her very much. Especially for this quote:
“By having fig leaves painted over the genitalia of Adam and Eve, they [the Council of Trent] made them occult and mysterious. Bayley doesn’t notice that they left Eve’s breasts on display, because breasts had yet to be eroticised. If Bayley were to tell Giotto what he likes to do with breasts, Giotto would probably throw up.”
October 8, 2009
Litho positive
Digital printing does a lot of things. It’s faster, customizable and generates less waste. It fits with our infinite choice/finite time mode of media consumption.
I know all that. But this abandoned printing press still gives me pangs for ink and heavy machinery.
image via mallix
September 2, 2009
Persuadable
“The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”
‘On Not Knowing Greek’. The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf.
