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Predicting Education

Next week, Apple is having an education event at the Guggenheim in New York City and the rumors and speculation have begun flying around. Today we want to draw your attention to a blog post that Dave wrote two year's ago with some of his predictions for the iPad, in particular predictions about the education market that are most likely spot on in relation to the announcement next week. The point is, the mobile space is evolving rapidly. On the same Apple it's having their education event Dave will be presenting his next update of The Mobile Mojo talk (follow us on Twitter @themechanism for more on #MobileMojo in the coming days).

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

January 9, 2012 - Comments Off on Mesmerizing and Mystical

Mesmerizing and Mystical

Very quick morning meeting today so I took a bunch of old sketches and tried to collage them together though somewhat unsuccessfully I feel. Not enough time to really bring them together into a cohesive piece but there's a seed of something in there at least.

The beautiful photography of Don Hong-Oai on the other hand manages to do much more. The border between photography and traditional Chinese painting blurs to the point of nonexistence in his gorgeous photography. I've always been a big fan of block prints and traditional Asian painting such as ukiyo-e and sumi-e in Japan. The strength of such pieces' elegant and beautiful compositions with subtle color is the ultimate example of creating using the minimal number of elements for maximum effect, the greatest challenge in any discipline of creation.

As much as I love working in web, its sad to see a lot of sites repeat the same style and interactive elements. When I see yet another site dependent on rounded corners, tabs, folded headers or any of the other "trending" web elements I may just hit the back button immediately. So it's nice to see a site like Kinetic Energy's, a creative agency from Singapore. The Victorian-era circus pamphlet style is certainly unique. However the same can't be said for the animated scroll events though they have a few clever ones (beware this sight has sound by default and its quite...unique). Sadly, as with many sites of this ilk, the disjointed copy and font use make it hard to get a feel for what the site's actually about. However from a visual level, it is is truly fascinating.

As always, video was the hardest selection for this week. Should I try to make you laugh? Maybe I should make an effort to inspire? Or maybe just give you something to sing along with? However at the end of the day this little gem that I've seen passed along by a variety of friends takes the cake, especially since I'm planning on going to said event this year with my sister.

The short made me realize that Burning Man is, at its core, a Dr. Seuss book come to life for adults; a place where individuality rules over all and the surreal imagination of participants takes living form in an isolated desert, if only for a week. Hope to see you all there!

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism
Tags: art, Don Hong-Oai, photography

January 6, 2012 - Comments Off on Elementary

Elementary

Last Sunday the second season of Sherlock began airing in the UK. The first episode of the second season is very good, though technically I'm not supposed to know that first hand. Like the first series, created by the imaginative Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the second series consists of three ninety-minute movies that probably had a collective budget lesser than the two recent Holmes-inspired Hollywood blockbusters. The tv series, a reimagined and modernized version of the classic Doyle stories, is creative, clever and certainly entertaining. And if you live outside of the UK you have to wait until they come to a television near you.

Over the holidays there were many UK tv series with vast worldwide followings premiering episodes, including Downton Abbey, the return of Absolutely Fabulous and let's not forget Doctor Who. They were all great, really great. There is a kind of British television storytelling that you can not find anywhere else. Again, technically I'm not supposed to know that.

Well, I'm okay on the Doctor Who, also under the creative direction of Stephen Moffat, because the BBC, BBC Worldwide and BBC America realized it is one of the most sought-after pieces of digital content on the internet and managed to work out a process by which the episodes premiere in the UK and the US on the same day.

This pursuit of quality entertainment, and my support of companies that make it easy for me to consume their products, keeps resonating in my head every time I have a conversation about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA).

[Let's pause for a surreal aside. In Spanish sopa means soup, so every time I see SOPA on the news I think of soup, specifically the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld yelling "No soup for you!" which seems very fitting.]

It is clear once you see the list of backers and opponents of SOPA it's hard not to identify the generational differences between the two. The majority of the opponents are those businesses that have adopted the new economic value system that emerged from the original propagation of the Internet. To understand its value origins you simply need to spend some time with Steven Levy’s Hackers and the ethos of MIT’s model railroad club. The backers of SOPA clearly come from a more traditional economic reality fixated on managing scarcity – a problem that Copyrights and Intellectual Property (IP) was created to manage. (via)

Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1955 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2012. (via)

At the same time the 1976 Copyright Act was coming into existence and influencing the creation of content the corporation was going through their own transformation, shifting towards a focus on maximizing the return to shareholders. Roger L. Martin, in his book "Fixing The Game," considers this paradigm shift "the dumbest idea in the world."

Martin says that the trouble began in 1976 when finance professor Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester published a seemingly innocuous paper in the Journal of Financial Economics entitled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.”

The article performed the old academic trick of creating a problem and then proposing a solution to the supposed problem that the article itself had created. The article identified the principal-agent problem as being that the shareholders are the principals of the firm—i.e., they own it and benefit from its prosperity, while the executives are agents who are hired by the principals to work on their behalf.

The principal-agent problem occurs, the article argued, because agents have an inherent incentive to optimize activities and resources for themselves rather than for their principals. Ignoring Peter Drucker’s foundational insight of 1973 that the only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer, Jensen and Meckling argued that the singular goal of a company should be to maximize the return to shareholders.

To achieve that goal, they academics argued, the company should give executives a compelling reason to place shareholder value maximization ahead of their own nest-feathering. Unfortunately, as often happens with bad ideas that make some people a lot of money, the idea caught on and has even become the conventional wisdom. (via)

The road to SOPA began in the mid 70s. The corporation, the creator of product, began to focus on how to maximize return on investment and how to protect said investment through IP. At the same time the internet was also emerging.

Today the internet is a catalyst for political unrest, leads to progressive changes in education, and content creators are bypassing corporations talking directly to the people interested in their product, their art. For younger generations, by which I mean generations growing up so completely comfortable with technology they have an intuitive understanding of smart phones, tablets, and the internet, there are no borders. They can connect with friends in other countries in the same way they connect with the friends they see in "real life." These internet users feel the same way about digital content, if they can communicate with their friends all over the world why can't they consume the same content. Why can't corporations figure out a way to make this happen.

Instead we get SOPA, with copyright not as a resource for content creators but as a weapon used to fight a growing open internet culture. Copyright as a resource to help creators is important, that's why Creative Commons exists, but so is works becoming part of the public domain.

Kevin Kelly, futurist, editor of Wired magazine and former editor of Whole Earth Catalog (of Steve Jobs "Stay hungry. Stay foolish" fame,) explains:

It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar. (via)

The second episode of the series Sherlock airs in the UK this coming Sunday. It is worth pointing out that this series would probably not exist if it wasn't for the fact that the large majority of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes works are in the public domain.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

January 4, 2012 - Comments Off on Starting Mobile Web Development

Starting Mobile Web Development

We recently underwent the process of making our site mobile and tablet friendly. The next phase in growing our business and making it much more accessible is definitely to branch out and use services of qualified companies like Vecro Tech for our application making it easily accessible on android, windows, and ios operating systems. The results look fantastic but our implementation has, in places, been a bit cumbersome since the original site was not laid out with such an adaptation in mind. Now that we're more or less done I felt it would be pertinent to create a list or useful resources found and lessons learned along the way. Since this entire branch of web development is still so young and liquid I don't know how long the following will be useful but I hope it helps those as lost as I was when we began this trek.

Adapt or Leave?

One of the biggest questions when faced with the prospect of creating a mobile site is "Should my site adapt or redirect?" Unfortunately I don't believe there is one right answer to such a question since, like so much in life, it depends!

Some key factors that might affect our decision include the functionality we want, type of content we mean to serve and look/feel of our design. Is it important that our mobile version have stunningly different design and/or app-like animation effects? Then we probably need to hire a landing page expert. Are we mainly trying to provide a mobile version of a news, blog or other site where content is the focus? Then a media query adaptation would be beneficial as we make it easier for users to share content between devices (and keep all that traffic in one place to boot). However both options can be adapted either way if we put in enough work.

Let's not forget the last option: making a web app. Using services like PhoneGap we can take a our HTML and make it into a bonafide app on the user's device...well it's really just a virtualized webpage with greater device integration (accelerometer, media, camera, etc.) and a dedicated icon on the device but sometimes that can be a great branding edge. And there's the added bonus that users can then use our "site" even when not connected to the internet though the line between website and app begins to blur at this point. A direct migration of your website to an app will probably never clear the iTunes store's strict approval process so we need to add something unique which may be more trouble than its worth.

Let Me Pose You a Query Sir

Media Queries: confusing, under-documented, cutting-edge, useful as all hell and bloody confusing! It took me awhile to get my head around these little statements of goodness. Once I did I came to understand their power and structure. We have two main options when dealing with media queries; we can use them to specify certain CSS links or alternatively we can write them into an existing CSS file. Personally I used a mix. It made sense to use the internal CSS version when altering this blog's WordPress theme while on the other hand the link option made sense for most other pages. In general I'd recommend the linking option since it keeps each CSS shorter, allows for easier document navigation and generally keeps our process cleaner.

It's easiest to think of media queries as giant "If" statements that inject our extra CSS when our given properties are met. As such, we must remember to override existing styles in order to apply our new device-friendly ones. It can be tedious searching through our original CSS file to see which specific properties need to be overwritten. I found it easiest to simply copy the entire original CSS, do all changes as required and then go through and delete any definitions or properties that remained constant (I sniff an extremely useful code highlighting/SVN tool that could do this comparison automatically along the liens of CSSlint).

Another nice benefit of media queries is the ease of testing and updating them. During the development process, make sure to specify "max/min-width/height" AND "max/min-device-width/height." This will ensure that our queries appear not only devices with the specified resolution but also any similar window viewport allowing us to use Firebug/Chrome Inspector as we normally do for a familiar debug cycle as well as useful previewing tools like Protofluid. Just remember that once the site is live, we should only target devices if we don't want adaptive versions appearing on desktop browser windows of the required size as was our case since the mobile versions or so device specific.

Quite Novel

Don't forget this is a completely new ballgame. Using media queries, especially with mobile devices, we can add all sorts of fun and/or hidden functionality into a site. How about a site that literally changes personality the smaller the window? Maybe you have a logo or character that actually reacts to the changing amount of space they're given as elements shift about them? And don't be afraid to think even more radically. The very function of a page could alter depending on a devices orientation. We could have our copy appear in portrait and then an image gallery appear in landscape (as is the case for our iPad site). Such novel use of media queries can completely redefine how people interact with a site and help redraw the front lines of the ongoing war between app and webpage.

No touchy

Of course not all the changes that come out of these new device are solely good. In fact the biggest one requires a fundamental change in how we think about design and interaction: touch. No cursor means no hover. Truly though, hover is simply an artifact of the invention of the mouse, itself not very old and clearly diminishing in importance. There's now a new frontier of interaction and design patterns to be explored.

Here though, the waters are still quite murky. Some plugins, like this jQTouch one, allow a webpage to respond to touch-specific events that most browsers and libraries don't yet natively handle. Of course this comes with the down side that we also lose our native touch-to-scroll ability (though theoretically we could reconstitute this functionality by hand or via work-arounds). For sites designed specifically for small screen devices this opens up many new possibilities that before only existed natively in apps and not on the browser.

Real Estate

One clear limitation we have on mobile devices is the lack of real estate. Design is all about creating something to fit within certain restrictions which are quite tight in this case. However good design often comes out of such challenges so the news isn't all bad. Sadly problems arise since lack of space also reduces our margin of error. When designing a website for the browser, we can safely assume that most screens will fit a design of a specific minimum height and width with room to spare or allow the user to easily scroll about the page to see everything. You can read the Space Selectors blog for more information (https://spaceselectors.com/blog/).

Alas the fragmented nature of the mobile market, even if we disregard tablets, poses greater challenges since different devices not only have a wide range of sizes and screen ratios but also numerous different abilities and native elements. As such we must be dead certain that our site is adaptive to many heights, widths and especially devices. Yet by in large the best mobile sites are designed to fill the screen perfectly so making adaptive designs can be difficult to impossible. Perhaps this is where "good enough" is fine since the prospect of specifying designs for each resolution is daunting to say the least. Furthermore, we can try and maximize our real estate by hiding browser elements when possible. For instance many mobile sites "hide" the address bar on mobile Safari by programmatically scrolling the page down by the bar's height giving us more space above the fold.

If It Ain't Fixed

We've grown used to a lot of functionality on the web but many of these norms may not have been carried over to the mobile world, at least not yet. Some APIs may not yet have native support for our platform of choice but we can, on occasion, find workarounds like this one for the Google plusone button. However, sooner or later we have to simply cut functionality from our mobile site and sometimes this may be for the best considering the restrictions and problems discussed so far. So if you're wasting time trying to get a certain resource to function on your mobile site when you could be perfecting the design itself or, better yet, device testing, consider simply hiding that element or simplifying the functionality. After all, even if you get it to work it's only a matter of time until official support rolls out and your work's left out in the cold.

References

Smashing Magazine Intro Tutorial
Less useful Adobe Tutorial but with great list of possible properties
ProtoFluid is a great way to test out your Media Queries. It essentially creates a iFrame of a given URL with dimensions specified by the chosen device. I found it to be a bit unstable and often designs look different on the actual device. There is also the lack of scroll/touch, the persistence of hover states and other Desktop-Device hybrid funniness but its great for checking your initial layout. BE SURE TO TEST ON DEVICES AS WELL!!! (Note: since Protofluid works via Desktop browser, make sure all your queries specify "width" and "device-width" as outlined above)
Hide address bar in iOS mobile Safari
Google+ plusone mobile button fix

Published by: benchirlin in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: adaptive, app, ipad, iphone, mobile

January 2, 2012 - Comments Off on Mayans and Mayhem

Mayans and Mayhem

Happy New Year all! Sorry I didn't get a post up last week but I decided I'd only do one if I came up with a truly great sketch or idea, neither of which occurred while I idled by in my deep holiday coma brought on by good food and a nauseating amount of ye olde consumerisme. Anyways, seeing as how some people are convinced the end is nigh...again...I thought I'd draw up a nice Mayan inspired sketch (though my style tends to add a lot more North Eastern indigenous stylings since I prefer the organic shapes, patterns and I grew up on the stuff in the Smithsonian). The disc supposedly has January 1, 2012 in Mayan numerals displayed as the number of days since the beginning of the current Mayan epoch, but I'm no anthropologist only a Googlist.

Do you like eyes? Do you enjoy staring into someone's eyes and getting lost in those pools of inky blackness? The windows to the soul are an artistic obsession with practically every creator out there. Plus they're right up there with faces and genitals in terms of things people identify in abstract works and nature. I'd wager its an evolutionary survival thing (keen tip: if you're in a crowded city like NYC make sure you're looking directly where you want to walk, this is actually how we tell where others are walking and not by any other factors like body language). Clearly Stylianos Schicho also loves peepers.

Stylianos' focus doesn't end with eyes. Most pieces share an isometric perspective and a fish-eye lens effect around the point(s) of interest(s); normally the subject's eyes. Also, a running theme seems to be people in space normally under some sort of surveillance system. Together these facets give an overwhelming sense that these images come from some artistic security camera positioned discreetly in the corner of each setting. However, the fact that the subject(s) make direct eye contact with the camera/viewer is quite unnerving, making each piece a powerful statement about civil liberties and personal space.

Now making a website full of content can be difficult. Its easy to clutter a page and no amount of cool interface or graphic design can save a page that has been overloaded. Such is the sad fate of sports clothing brand Protest. I love the site, don't get me wrong, however the homepage is an overstimulating mess in spite of some really cool little bits of functionality like the movable shelves and slick hover transitions. I simply don't know where to go or what to click.

One solution, as illustrated by McCormack and Morrison, is to take those individual elements and let them fill the page to prevent content bloat. Granted such a model probably wouldn't work for a retail brand like Protest who wants to put as much purchasable material and engaging links in front of the user immediately but one has to acknowledge that a usability line has been crossed sooner rather than later. At the very least Portest could benefit by giving each element more space, perhaps a whole horizontal line, or generally giving their homepage a more regular grid pattern.

I always love when I find a video for the Sketching Mechanism actually centered around sketching. But 12 Dessins Par Jour takes it to a whole other level. Denis Chapon, a French animator, chose to recycle some aluminum paper with the help from scrap metal pick up Newcastle . The results are fantastic and clearly show how ridiculously skilled Chapon is at animation and drawing. His command of perspective creates some truly fabulous shots and the entire sequence, despite having no planned out narrative, is a fantastic exploration into the power of his imagination. I want to know how he stayed so consistent in style and line over three years, not to mention how he addressed the frame registration problems he must have had.

I hope you all have a great 2012. My New Year's resolutions: to keep getting out there and host more parties. I can't wait for my first New York Spring.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

December 19, 2011 - Comments Off on Molasses and Merriment

Molasses and Merriment

Happy Holidays all! This will most likely be my last post before the New Year but I may do a short one during the break. Today's sketch was a fun little multi-holiday idea I came up with. "A Holiday Wager" depicts a card game which determined who gets their holiday first...along with a small cash settlement (only redeemable for milk and cookies of course!). I really like this scene and would love to find the time to paint it properly and make it into a little holiday card. Maybe for next year?

In stills we have the work of Xiuyuan Zhang from Vancouver. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to have too much work online but from what I can find I really like her work. Her strength lies in bold, liquid illustration tending towards the surreal but she also showcases a broad range of abilities in painting and figure in posts on her blog. However the only truly complete works seem to be by in large illustrations. Clearly she has a bright future and I wish her the best of luck.

For web I found quite a tasty treat though it was a tough call this week between the chique and the modern. However Rally Interactive stole the show with a stunning combination of HTML5 savvy and adaptive design. After a bit of reverse engineering I realized, much to my awe, that each triangle on the page is in fact a canvas element such that the transition from triangle to circle is a tween on the rounded edges property of the triangle. Impressive stuff, especially considering how much custom Javascript is in the page to allow for smooth animations and tweening of the page elements. To top it off, the flexible design transitions nicely depending on screen size.

On to the moving image, I came across a bunch of truly strange things this week that, while most definitely interesting, are so out there that they're more useful as reference than actual consumable media. Many had interesting ideas at their core but failed to truly engage. So instead I bring you a fun short film: Page 23.

In the tech world at large much happened this week. Wired's new redesign is truly stunning. I love the new focus on text and the way the new layout pulls shapes out of each section's typography for inspiration. Take a look at the magazine if you see it on the stands. I'm really curious to see it on iPad since the redesign is seemingly meant to nudge the readership in that direction even more so (currently at 20%).

Likewise Facebook revealed their new timeline feature and I think I'm in love. My Facebook activity fell off rapidly after my first few years of college as I realized I didn't want to be a slave to such a service. Even up to that point, I mainly used it as a way of sharing photos but my shutterbug habit died and therefore so did my use of the network. I continued to use it to share movie reviews and had some content automatically funneled from other services but that was about it. Then came timeline.

Timeline revitalizes Facebook for me, at least in the short-term, because it creates a more meaningful profile page. However, since mine is largely devoid of personal touches as I don't use the site, the design pushes me to fill out my timeline to better represent myself to other potential visitors. I've already wasted a good amount of time choosing a "cover" image, the new dominating image on your profile that can really add some personal flavor to the once bland page.

Where timeline truly succeeds is in showing people as truly 4-dimensional beings. Up to this point, a Facebook profile was merely a collection of the assorted detritus, voluntary or no, of a person's life. But by organizing this digital flotsam in chronological stream, Facebook has given it a cumulative value, greater than any one lone piece, that begins to actually feel like a true representation of a human being. Nick Felton and Joey Flynn, the designers behind the feature, have some really interesting things to say in this short article from Fast Company.

Well I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and a fabulous New Year. I'm looking forward to a small dinner party I'll be having later this week which will undoubtedly also be a source of great stress for which a friend recommended me to check the Gelato Cake Cannabis Strain review by fresh bros. Wish me luck. And as a bonus for Christmas, please enjoy:

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

December 12, 2011 - Comments Off on Movement and Mauve

Movement and Mauve

I have to first apologize for the quick post today since it's a busy day in the office and I don't have lots of time to write self-indulgent critiques of other artists works whose skill and talent far surpasses my own. Sorry! Quick archived sketch from last week today (short morning meeting) with which I took a different tact to coloring; focusing more on the negative space rather than the character himself. I think I'll try and maintain such simplified approaches in the future since they get a lot more bang for my buck considering my limited time for these. However I'm still most proud of my Thanksgiving scene and plan on doing a similar one for the holidays (possibly a Christmas card?).

Now onto said far superior professional works: in keeping with the pastel palette above I'd like to feature the awe-inspiring paintings of Micha Ganske. His monstrous canvases, fine detail and washed out palettes create some truly impressive works. Many seem like a Photoshop job gone awry in just the right--experimental--fashion.

The first image gives you a sense of how beautiful his works can be with their soft, pleasing color palette and their graceful, meticulous composition. The second piece, a detail of a massive 7'x10' acrylic on muslin, further impresses by showing the fine detail present in each work. This further inspires comparison to digital photography manipulations as its like a super-fine photo awash with beautiful chromatic aberration but done in such a way only Michah's painting can capture. If you are looking for authentic acrylic prints to print out beautiful images such as In the Red or Sleeping Dragon which can make your house look vibrant then find out more info about acrylic prints here.

In web this week, I have another design house (possibly a direct competitor with our London office) who's home site showcases some really interesting new age web ideas. I particularly like the use of angles on their services page. The color scheme is bright and refreshing as is their element design (their logo is especially fun). However some elements are a bit bothersome. Transitioning between sections can get a bit buggy at times and the way project images fly in as you scroll is a bit tricky to navigate (not to mention that the case study pages themselves carry over little to none of the homepages eccentricities though I do like how they paginate).

Lastly in the moving world, if you've never had the joy of being introduced to the magic of Math, and more specifically the Fibonacci sequence, do yourself a favor and watch this video below. I find the fact that such beauty and order exists in the seemingly chaotic world of nature very moving.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

December 9, 2011 - Comments Off on The Futures of Entertainment 5

The Futures of Entertainment 5

The Futures of Entertainment conference brings together artists, artisans, technicians, academics and real-world producers for a lively conversation about the future of media, culture, marketing and entertainment. The conference was started by Henry Jenkins and is now also the sister conference to Transmedia Hollywood, which occurs on alternating years. Jenkins explains the conference best:

The goal of the conference is to provide a meeting ground for forward thinking people in the creative industries and academia to talk with each other about the trends that are impacting how entertainment is produced, circulated, and engaged with. Through the years, the conference has developed its own community, which includes alums of the Comparative Media Studies Program who see the conference as a kind of homecoming, other academics who have found it a unique space to engage with contemporary practices and issues, and industry leaders, many of them former speakers, who return because it offers them a chance to think beyond the established wisdom within their own companies. Our goal is to create a space where academics do not read papers and industry folks don't present prospectus-laden powerpoints or talk about "take-aways" and "deliverables," but people engage honestly, critically, openly about topics of shared interest.

This year FoA5 took place on November 11-12 with a special event on the eve of the conference. Here are summaries of all the sessions with links to the videos.

Pre-Conference

Global Creative Cities and the Future of Entertainment.

Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment?

Moderator: Maurício Mota (The Alchemists)
Panelists: Parmesh Shahani (Godrej Industries, India), Ernie Wilson (University of Southern California) and Sérgio Sá Leitão (Rio Filmes)

Day 1

Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)
William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. (9:00-10:00 a.m.)

How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green-co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media-share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.

Speakers: Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications) and Joshua Green (Undercurrent)

Collaboration? Emerging Models for Audiences to Participate in Entertainment Decision-Making. (10:15 a.m.-11:45 p.m.)

In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?

Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation)
Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University), Seung Bak (Dramafever) and Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)

Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content. (12:45-2:45 p.m.)
Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent?

Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile)
Panelists: Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil), Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland) and Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)

Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories (3:15-4:45 p.m.)

Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?

Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University)
Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Dan Street (Loku) and Andy Ellwood (Gowalla)

At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. (5:00-6:00 p.m.)

The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?
Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University) and Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)

Day 2

Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)
Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)

The Futures of Serialized Storytelling (9:00-11:00 a.m.)
New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?

Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech)
Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK), Steve Coulson (Campfire), Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic), and Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)

The Futures of Children's Media (11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.)
Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?

Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California)
Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron), Gary Goldberger (FableVision) and John Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling (2:15-4:15 p.m.)
Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have-and might-nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?

Moderator: Johnathan Taplin (University of Southern California)
Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB); Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News), Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College) and Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)

The Futures of Music. (4:45-6:45 p.m.)
The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation?

Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University)
Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)

via henryjenkins.org

Published by: antonioortiz in Entertainment, The Thinking Mechanism

December 5, 2011 - Comments Off on Masks and Manatees

Masks and Manatees

What a beautiful weekend it turned out to be here in NYC. I really do like the crisp cold weather but it does tend to make me feel a bit sick so I'm forced to dream of the warm sea.

A strange underwater scene this week. While masks appear to be a theme throughout a lot of my sketches, I think they turn up in so much of my work because its an easy, and cool looking, way to resolve a mismatched face or dead look on a character. Sticking to the dark and weird, this week we have the gritty work of Blaz Porenta. It almost shames me to put my own subpar work I banged out in an hour above this but here we go. Through his coarse and complicated dry (digital) brush work and some truly emotive compositions, Porenta's work conveys both a captivating and kinetic energy.

Even better Porenta has a detailed walkthrough of his process for the piece directly above to help out budding digital illustrators like myself. I will definitely be stepping through this later on (though work of this level is so very time consuming, especially when trying to acclimate to the digital medium). On his work, I love the way he manages to use a very bright, thorough, color palette despite the apparent darkness of each piece. His use of color in fact contradicts one's assumptions for the scene drastically adding to the piece. Especially in the second work above, we can see a Crayola's box worth of colors used throughout the piece to great affect, keeping the eye engaged and the scene interesting.

Speaking of kinetic, the site for 901 Tequila (Justin Timberlake's own tequila brand) is truly dynamic. As appears to be the fashion, this site is a long-form anchored site with responsive scrolling (every cool new site now is either like this or filled with heavy vector graphics on an intriguing layout).

While sites like this are becoming more and more common despite their heavy reliance on this single gimmick and apparent inflexibility of content, I feel 901's is worth mention for its use of user generated content. Though somewhat hidden, the site contains user tweets from different timeframes throughout the page in keeping with the company's "night starts at 9:01pm" branding. Furthermore, the small self contained widgets like the user sunset photo gallery or the small tequila process slideshow are cleverly designed and fun to use. An especially cool inclusion is the built in Google maps zipcode search to find the product near you accessed by clicking "Find 901." In fact, the only problem I have with the site is that besides the five sections clearly marked on the left hand side, much of the best functionality is hidden by either a lack of a clear calls-t0-action or the sometimes crowded layout of the subsections. Regardless, overall a great example of combining responsive scrolling, interesting content, social networking and clear branding all into one site.

Lastly, I'd like to share this well done documentary I have to thank for introducing me to my new favorite band: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. Not only are they super hip (since they're relatively unknown) but their sound is very unique and varies nicely song to song while staying firmly in the electronic dance/ambient camp. Beyond their music, it's clear that the band has a strong bevy of visual artists working with them. From their neo-electro costumes to their bright pink videos I thoroughly enjoy their unique homespun aesthetic. I only wish they had more work easily available in the US. Their recent single "Garden" seems to have gained a good bit of attention lately due to a Nokia spot so here's to a bright future.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

December 2, 2011 - Comments Off on Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity, in essence it is the very opposite of the cloud. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

Written and edited by Ben Mendelsohn.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

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