Archive for April, 2008
Comments(0)Inspiring Video
A very powerful message encoded in a very clever narrative - it’s all a matter of perspective and choice, isn’t it? If that previous sentence seems a little cryptic - just watch the video titled Lost Generation - I just don’t want to spoil it.
What are you doing now that is making your world, and this world, a better place?
Dear God
In a similar spirit to projects like PostSecret and 6 Billion Others, Dear God is a project that aims to allow people around the world to share their dreams and prayers - think of it like, peeping at God’s inbox.
Dear God is a global project for people around the world to share their innermost hopes - and fears - through prayer.
It doesn’t matter what your version of God is…Jesus, Allah, Buddha or simply a spiritual universal energy… praying to a higher power soothes and heals. It’s scientifically proven that people who pray are healthier, happier and more resilient.
Share your prayers here and help us create hope one prayer at a time. Simply send us your personal letter to your God and/or a picture that sums up your message visually. (Dear God will source a picture if you don’t have one).
Here’s what the site look like:
Content wise, it shows ordinary folk’s ordinary prayers (often in extraordinary circumstances), highlighting a sense of common emotions/struggles that we all share. However, I do feel somewhat alienated by the presentation.
Visually the website is certainly very polished - the people behind this project are after all a design agency. However, it is this invisible sheen on the site - almost like the shrink wrap around a package - that seem to have made it lose a certain sense of authenticity amidst the postcard perfect (stock?) images. In a way, it felt too - dare I say - polished. That this is a ‘post-production’ piece. Insulated. And perhaps that much less personal and direct.
Contrast this against Post Secret - where the individual postcards were made by those who were praying (or more often, screaming out against an invisible force); or the 6 Billion Others project, where you can actually see the person’s face as they talk about their dreams/struggles into the camera.
I get the feeling that the prayers on Dear God became more like pages lifted off an ad campaign - and that much more superficial, even if the text content is as real as it gets. It also reminds me of a recent post I read on the authenticity of a designed experience - could the slickness and polish that design often (by default) bestow rob the project off its authenticity and impact?
In this case, I think it’s a really delicate choice between the raw and the polished. Sometimes, it is more apt to serve chilled juice in a fancy clear crystal glass on the rocks, topped with the little plastic umbrella and a sliced orange. In other times, it’s just about sticking the straw through the coconut.
In the Grand Scheme of Life
Some posts back, I blogged about Carl Sagan’s insightful and inspiring take on the smallness of mankind in the grand scheme of things - Earth was really just a speck in the universe, and humans are, in turn, specks on this little blue dot.
Here again, is yet another take on the smallness of Man in the grand scheme of Life. A visualization we might all be familiar with - the branches of life zoomed out in each frame to reveal its place and proportion in the overall picture.
And with this perspective, does the further divisions - the artificial divisions that we have erected in our existence - race, nationalities, religion, origins - start to fade away, and perhaps seem somewhat less surmountable?
I’m a Huge Metal Fan
A bit of amusement for the midweek? (Sorry, been quite busy with work lately…)
How far we’ve come
Found this bit of recollection on the Times of India (excerpt below):
And if you did have a phone, it wasn’t necessarily a blessing. I spent my high school years in Calcutta, and i remember that if you picked up your phone, you had no guarantee you would get a dial tone; if you got a dial tone and dialled a number, you had no guarantee you would reach the number you had dialled. Sometimes you were connected to someone else’s ongoing conversation, and they had no idea you were able to hear them; there was even a technical term for it, the ‘cross-connection’ (appropriately, since these were connections that made us very cross). If you wanted to call another city, say Delhi, you had to book a ‘trunk call’ in the morning and then sit by the telephone all day waiting for it to come through; or you could pay eight times the going rate for a ‘lightning call’ which only took half an hour instead of the usual three or four or more to be connected. As late as 1984, when a member of Parliament rose to protest this woeful, appalling performance by a public sector monopoly, the then communications minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country, telephones were a luxury, not a right; that the government had no obligation to provide better service; and that if the honourable member was not satisfied with his telephone, he was welcome to return it, since there was an eight-year waiting list for this supposedly inadequate instrument!
Indeed, it’s probably easy to take for granted these infrastructure that have improved communication so drastically - even as we’re now looking at the imminent decline of the phone line as mobile communication and VOIP now makes the fixed-line phone looks somewhat inadequate. Still, some great perspectives!
[via Niti Bhan]
Oil Trading Hand-Signs
If you pinch your nose with your fingers, usually it means you smell something awful. If you’re a trader on the floor though, that’d mean ‘Gasoline’ (not too far an association, I might say). An interesting set of hand signs over at New York Times.
Shoulder Bag
There are quite a few bag designs in the series, though I particularly liked how this Square Bag designs by the Dutch design group XS-M-L takes the familiar bag-toting posture on the shoulder, and highlighting it through the kidney-bean shaped opening. A bag to wear and not to carry - interesting! Check out other interesting works too - the site is in Dutch though.
Elephant Self Portrait
Hmmmmmm… was this elephant a painter in the previous incarnation?
What is obsolete now?
“Real people going on game shows. When we were kids, we’d watch ‘The Price is Right,’ and the contestant would have curlers in her hair — she’d look like your neighbor next door. Real people got a chance to shine. Now, everyone comes out of some stupid mold from a moronic casting director’s idea of what is exciting to watch. All the reality is removed.”
“Dictionaries and encyclopedias. They’ve been replaced with Google, Wikipedia and online dictionaries. It’s been years since I looked at the dictionary or encyclopedia on my family’s bookshelf.”
True blind dates. “In the beginning, courtship on the Internet extended this trend. It was the place where, literally and figuratively, no one knew you were a dog. No longer. Now, if a friend sets you up with someone, and you don’t automatically Google that person, check his or her “relationship” status on Facebook and do a quick vetting via Cheaternews.com (the modern answer to stocks and pillories), one might question if you are really fit to date at all. “
Interesting perspectives on what is lost in each generation - Washington Post Magazine asked experts, celebrities and average Joes to cast their minds back to objects, habits and paradigms that have been left behind just in the past couple of decades. What habits/products/items have you shed?
