Infomagination

Sketch2Photo turns your doodles into art

Every now and again a piece of technology comes along that just makes you go, WOW, HOW COOL IS THAT?!  For me, the latest is Sketch2Photo, an uber clever bit of software developed by a group of students in China.  Sketch2Photo creates Photoshop style montages based on your doodles, by scouring the internet for images tagged with your annotations, cutting them out and working out the best way to fit them together.

No word yet on when the software will be available to play with, but you can read the paper on it here and watch this video of it in action:

Whenever it comes out, one things's for certain: whether you're mocking up concepts or just pimping your Powerpoint, this is going to be one useful bit of kit.

Emotional Cartography: a lovely free book on emotion mapping

  is a lovely FREE book, which you can download here.   It's a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists brought together to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology.  It'll show you how you can use equipment like this   to make "emotion maps" like this

Pretty cool, huh?  But how could we use them?  Well, if I was working on a tourist attraction, like Alton Towers, showing people the levels of emotion inside vs outside your grounds could be a fascinating way to sell it to them.  It could also make a fun addition to the traditional map people get given when they arrive - heightening their experience of the day.  Allowing participants in the project to take home personalised emotion traces could also make for a fantastic memento - and a great change from the usual, slightly embarassing photo of you getting drenched on the log flumes. 

Places like the Tate Modern or Saatchi Gallery also seem like a good fit with emotion mapping.  As well as helping them to understand which pieces truly move people, the result could be a piece of art in itself - and an ever-changing addition to their collection.

These kind of devices can also help us understand behaviour a bit better.  As the book says "The Greenwich Emotion Map suggests an experience of the city as a series of distinct ‘events,’ by which we mean moments of distinctive attention.  The actual nature of these ‘events’ varies from meeting people, taking a photo, crossing roads, to being annoyed by one’s surroundings.  What these events have in common is an element of novelty which has caused the person’s attention to become focused...  Within this ‘event space,’ a fork in the road causes a moment of indecision which competes for attention with the family argument taking place at the same time." 

With this in mind, you can see why it takes something pretty new and powerful to get people to engage with our ads.  So much of our behaviour happens on auto-pilot.  So much else is happening.   So is it any wonder that so much brand building happens subconsciously? It's "osmosis," as Alex calls it.  And, speaking of free downloads, if you haven't read his IPA Excellence Diploma essay yet then you can check it out here.

Microsoft predicts data a-go-go by 2019

Anyone whose wondering what all this "Age of Infomagination" malarky is about should check out this video from the guys at Microsoft Labs.  According to them, by 2019 we'll have a veritable orgy of inter-connected, interactive information, quite literally at our fingertips:

Looks like the future is shaping up to be a pretty exciting place.  So let's get making it!

PS  If you like this, have a watch of the longer sister video on John's blog.  Props to him & the Faris Twitterers for digging it up.

Knitting with data

Hello hello,

Fresh up from my musings on painting with data, it turns out some clever people have been making clothes out of the stuff too.  News Knitter captures live news feed from the internet then analyses, filters and converts them into a unique pattern that's read by a knitting machine.  The results are actually kinda cool:

Wear your data on the outside and it becomes another way of expressing yourself.  Imagine...

...wallets designed from your bank account history (now mostly available in red).

...personalised Oyster card holders, based on your most travelled journeys.

...an iPod casing that changes according to your listening tastes.

...mobile phone covers based on your call records (note to Orange's "I am who I am because of everyone" campaign :).

...T-shirts covered in Twittering.

...album artwork featuring all a band's MySpace fans.

...bracelets with the profile photos of your Facebook friends.

...designing NikeID trainers with your Nike+ data.

What would you make with yours?

GPS graffiti: painting with data

Now this is pretty cool.  A graffiti artist in New York has made a tag so big you can see it from space - all by using a GPS device to record a meticulously planned 46 mile, 8 day journey.  The results spell out a message to his countrymen:

For more info, take a look at the sparse blog at www.areyouwatching.tv. It doesn't really give much away, but the slickness of it makes me suspect there's a brand involved somewhere.  Personally, I hope I'm wrong.  For a start, I'm not big on unbranded teasers campaigns; revealing there's a boring old brand behind something that seemed cool and genuine is inevitably a bit of a disappointment.  More than that, though, it'd just cheer me up to know that there's people out there with the ingenuity and drive to go out and do this stuff, without any financial motivation. 

Whichever way this story plays out, what it certainly signals - along with things like Radiohead's House of Cards video - is that data is not just a reporting tool, but a creative one as well.  The sooner that we welcome information as another brush in our palettes, then the quicker we'll be able to use it to paint new and inspiring masterpieces for the brands we work on too.