I was scoping out Dharavi yesterday for upcoming ethnographic research and came across this pair sharing headphones to catch the India/Sri Lanka cricket match via a mobile phone. The aspiration value of this part-shared, part-private use of a cellphone feature was evident – as onlookers could sense the excitement they were missing, through following the men’s expressions as the game progressed.
You can follow research updates on the REculture and Prepaid Economy blogs, plus check out images over upcoming weeks on my Dharavi Flickr set.
What challenges will the next decade bring?
How are we going to overcome them?
So asked the The Institute for the Future of thousands of participants via its progressive Superstruct online interface to co-create its Ten Year Forecast. Density Design was asked by Italy’s Wired magazine to devise a visual synthesis of the forecast which could be used to stimulate onwards discussion by a wider audience.
Density Design is a research lab at the Politecnico di Miano which explores the emergent relationships between communication design, information visualisation and complex systems. It supports the use of communication design to facilitate dialogue within participatory decision making.
Creatively combined with an exquisite concoction of allegorical illustrations, the resulting Map of the Future provides a common visualisation on which to base discussions and analysis of what may lie ahead. The map has already been put to use at the Capitale Digitale collaborative sessions held by Wired & Telecom Italia. Hard to imagine going back to a paltry powerpoint pie-chart after being served up this flavorsome infographic feast.
See stunningly detailed sections of the map on Behance.
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I was particularly heartened to come across the recently launched mash-up of fashion and fundraising: The Uniform Project in which a pledge has been made to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.
Actually there are seven identical dresses – one for each day of the week. Every day the dress is artfully reinvented via layers and accessories and images posted online in the effort to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation – a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India.
The project’s brainchild Sheena Matheiken recollects “I was raised and schooled in
India where uniforms were a mandate in most public schools. Despite the imposed conformity, kids always found a way to bend the rules and flaunt a little personality… Girls obsessed over bangles, bindis and bad hairdos. Peaking through the sea of uniforms were the idiosyncrasies of teen style and individual flare. I now want to put the same rules to test again, only this time I’m trading in the Catholic school fervor
for an eBay addiction and relocating the school walls to this wonderful place called
the internet.”
It all made me reflect on my past delvings into fashion and connectivity which I covered in my paper Fashion, Humanism and the Online Environment (1.8MB). Written in 2005 I’m the first to admit that the dialogue has definately moved on. However at the time Web 2.0 was still a fresh enough topic to win me a junior faculty travel award to present at the International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes conference in the US. (disclosure: my main driver for submitting the proposal was the thought of a two week escape from the excrutiating heat of high Indian summer – to which, as a New Zealander, I was entirely unaccustomed.)
The Uniform Project goes a long way in exemplifing my suggestion:
“through the internet, fashion holds the power to create space for social, cultural and altruistic discourse… the multi-layering of internet based communication affords the opportunity to participate in the arena of commerce while remaining culturally relevant, responsible and active.”
While I was more speaking about fashion brands leveraging cultural connectivity The Uniform Project is instead an online fundraising initiative masterfully leveraging fashion itself. Great to see the Manolo on the other foot!
A couple of years back, while teaching design at the National Institute of Design (NID) in India, I carried out a study on the visual marketing of Coca Cola for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Viewing Coke’s journey through the lens of glocalisation, I explored notions of branding as a site of negotiation between global business interests and local cultures.
You can download the Glocal Cola PDF (2MB) containing a significant part of the research or if you prefer just looking at pictures you can check out my Cola Collection on Flickr.
