blog.dakrawiec

One of my favorite things in the world is when people hold on to outdated, irrelevant laws/guidelines/conventions for no apparent reason other than that it's what they were told or taught to do so many years ago that they don't remember the justifications for it anyway.

Ahh, viral videos. Humanity's bane or the internet's boon? Probably both. Many companies have tried to "force" commercial campaigns to go viral, apparently to lock down the 12 to 14 year-old male internet lurker demographic. I firmly believe that whether or not a particular piece of content goes viral is essentially a random chance based on what these 14-year-olds happen to be doing between their afternoon sessions with their favorite sock, however there are some patterns and basic practices that show up repeatedly in videos that have successfully gone viral.

There are several ways that we can use interactive media to create empathy in the audience. In fact, some of the best examples of the different methods of inspiring empathy come from TV advertising. If you pay attention to advertisements for a while, you'll notice a handful of different approaches. The most notable of these are:

The criteria for what makes an image iconic are a bit difficult to pin down. On the one hand, most iconic images have similar positive qualities that help to solidify them as icons. Iconic images allow us to make a connection with something intangible that the artist is communicating (whether on purpose or not) to the audience. Most often, we are able to make this connection because some aspect of the image is relevant in some way to our current cultural context.

So here are 3 ads from various automotive manufacturers, and I think that each takes a different approach with its audio.

Recently I was struck with a bout of pure and unbridled boredom during which I decided to pass on my infinite knowledge of web design. Design like the pros! It's all right here.

Enjoy!

After talking a bit about all of this in class, I think I'd like to revise my earlier rant a bit. There's an important distinction between technology itself and the way in which we change that technology through our usage habits. Google by itself doesn't necessarily make us stupid--it's the way in which cultural and societal trends encourage us to use Google's system that makes us stupid.

I was looking over and messing around with this experiment from Flash and Math the other day, and it reminded me of an area of digital art that I'd previously associated primarily with Processing.

Google is making us dumb. Absolutely. Not just Google, of course--as Carr mentions, it's the system of the internet and the way in which we use that system that affects our capacity to think. We live in a society where just about any piece of information you could imagine is constantly at your fingertips, and therefore the idea of 'knowing' things seems archaic, because we can just look everything up.

Don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. This is a good example of a flash-centered interface that I remember from a while back. It's not necessarily the most feasible interface for every device (think mobile devices with touch screens), but I think it's a great example of a cohesive system for a navigational interface. They provide several different ways to get around clicking as well as a discussion of their pros and cons.