Sunday, February 16, 2014

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Move Over Product Design, UX Is The Future

Co.Design | business + design: For decades, the most successful businesses thrived on product innovation as the natural strategy to increase revenues, market share, and loyalty. Fast forward to 2014: today’s product innovations, and the growth they create, are often incremental, narrow, and fleeting. Take TVs or PCs--every competitor quickly matches the latest features, speed, brightness. As a result, companies are finding that returns from product efforts are harder to rely on. Among the Global Innovation 1000, R&D spending rose 5.8% last year, yet revenue for those companies increased less than 1%. Global competition and technological diffusion mean that competitors quickly catch up with most improvements, while the transparency of digital and social media also prompts consumers to quickly switch allegiance with each new alluring offer.
Enter: the experience.


What Makes an Artist Qualified to Tell a Story?

HowlRound: When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with mythology. Greek, Roman, Indian, Norse, you name it…I loved them all, more so than your standard fairy tales. I loved the epic nature of the stories that were so magical but also so obviously written (or orally shared through time) to speak to universal truths about the human condition. They were remarkably similar from culture to culture, and transcended the boundaries of time. In the seventh grade, we were assigned the task of writing a myth, and I wrote one with the Norse gods, explaining how Norway got its jagged coast. I have it to this day, with the red A+ prominently displayed at the top, not as a reminder of my twelve-year-old genius (note heavy sarcasm), but a reminder that no matter where you’re from, you can tell a story about another person if you focus on the universality of the tale and their experience, and not the specificity of their race. I believe my teacher assigned this task to teach us just that…no matter the color, gender, or year that a character belongs to, their humanity makes their story equally worthy of being told.


A Message From Flea

RHCP News: When we were asked by the NFL and Bruno to play our song Give It Away at the Super Bowl, it was made clear to us that the vocals would be live, but the bass, drums, and guitar would be pre-recorded. I understand the NFL's stance on this, given they only have a few minutes to set up the stage, there a zillion things that could go wrong and ruin the sound for the folks watching in the stadium and the t.v. viewers. There was not any room for argument on this, the NFL does not want to risk their show being botched by bad sound, period.

The Show Goes On

St. Louis Magazine - January 2014 - St. Louis, Missouri: Ron Himes stands next to a photographer at the back of Harris-Stowe State University’s Emerson Performance Center. A social-media consultant and Harris-Stowe’s facilities manager look on as the photographer snaps pictures. The venue is significantly smaller than the 470-seat Grandel Theatre, where his theater company, The Black Rep, performed for two decades. Here, shows are scheduled around basketball games and other events, so the photographer tries to work quickly.


How 82,529 Hats Became a Video Screen For Super Bowl XLVIII

Show content from Live Design Magazine: On Sunday, 82,529 fans descended on MetLife Stadium in Rutherford, NJ, for what would be the most watched television event in history, to the tune of 111.5 million viewers. As the fans took their seats before the Super Bowl began, they were given a bag of goodies to help combat the expected cold temperatures, despite the balmy 49 degree kick-off temperature. In the bag of goodies, under the gloves, hand warmers, tissues, lip balm, and scarf, was a small black beanie in a bag with a warning label on the package telling fans not to open the bag until instructed to do so by the stadium announcer. Most fans followed instructions, but I had an idea what was in the bag and couldn’t resist opening it early. Most fans didn’t notice, at first, the three small LEDs and the infrared receiver mounted to the front of that hat, cleverly hidden within the logo of the Pepsi Halftime Show. Most fans didn’t realize that they would soon be a part of the largest human video screen ever created.


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