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Interaction just got PHYSICAL.

((Click Play above ^^)) Read about the SMS Slingshot on designboom.com and think its got great potential, conceptually, to be the 'next big thing' in physical interaction between brand and consumer. I can imagine similar useage for people at train stations, waiting for trains. It is a great way of getting a prospective consumer/client to start a conversation with a brand. Here's more on what it is exactly & how it works:

And as described on the website: "The SMS slingshot allows users to digitally send text messages onto urban facades through a slingshot-like device. The project is the creation of vr/urban a berlin-based group that describes itself as ‘a collective of public media inverntionistas’. Through the device users can create their own augmented reality within their city. The wooden slingshot device comes with a built-in mobile that can store messages and a laser that can blast their message onto a nearby wall via a projector when they physically shoot the slingshot. Messages appear on the façade as colour splashes with the text inside."

All-in-all, bloody great piece of equipment that I can see being lapped up by advertisers and used commercially to kick-start consumer to brand relations. I'd use it. It taps into the urban, enhances our surroundings, whilst simultaneously encouraging users - like the Wii - to have a more active lifestyle. Instead of sitting down and stagnating whilst waiting for a train we can have visual stimulus to toy with, and burn a few calories along the way ...

Digital Life

Came across this by TNS Digital Life at http://discoverdigitallife.com/. It is, as it's tag line suggests:

"The most comprehensive study of the global digital consumer, ever"

sure to become an invaluable tool for consumers and industry professionals alike. Not only is it unimaginably comprehensive, it is also fantastically visualised, making it easy to find out STATS. The selling point behind the application - as is explained on the website - that "to understand what consumers do is not enough. ‘Clicks’ are not the whole story. To get a true picture of the consumer, you need to understand their history, their needs and emotions. This will explain why they do what they do." Hence, Digital Life offers a glimpse into the evolving world of digital via a study oflifestyles that have emerged, and that are emerging. For example, the profile below shows the driving force and use of Social Networkers:

Beyond that we also have access to a visualisation of the digital life of the world as-a-whole, that if be click on - as shown below - delivers a country's digital profile:

Further still, we are able to choose from a variety of headers (below) in which we are able to insert our own stats to see how we fit statistically into the digital world sphere - I appear, from the space ration I've taken up below, to be an avid social networker, my 400+ friends on Facebook placing me roughly 250 above the national average:

The package includes information on the worlds digital landscape, digital lifestyle, drivers of online behaviour (to name a few). It is awesome, check it out.

Chance Favours The Connected Mind ('Where Good Ideas Come From' by Stephen Johnson)

Interactive Evolution by Clever Old Tippex

Following in the interactive footsteps of Burger King's Subservient Chicken (as experienced here: http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html). Although I believe Tippex, the correction fluid, to be a rather outdated product - the ability to retype & reprint documents being a more popular choice of correction in the Digital Age - their new interactive campaign has certainly riled up its spectators being described as 'insanely phenomenal' by one Twitter user.

The YouTube clip works like this:

1.You watch a bizarre, badly lip-synced, mock authentic home-video of two gentlemen camping, chatting about girls, when their campsite has an unwelcome visitor - a grizzly.

2. At the end of this clip the above option is given, enabling viewers to click & choose whether the frightened campers should 'SHOOT THE BEAR'/'DON'T SHOOT THE BEAR'.

3. On clicking through, I must admit I was drawn to the SHOOT THE BEAR option, the gentleman decides he'd rather not and - reaching out of the mock-YouTube box into a nearby Tippex advert to the right - picks up the Tippex mouse and erases our option (featured in the header) with the Tippex before willing us to type our own correction into the, now erased, space where SHOOT used to be:

I typed a few obscenities (which were all met by a Parental Advisory sign covering a clearing humping bear and the camper) before going for the option shown below:

...now press enter and watch the romance unfold. I'd rate that 10/10 for interactive evolutionary initiative - clever ol' Tippex.

The Future of Screen Technology

UH-UH, NO YOU DEE'ENT.

Reading The Observer with a cuppa tea this torrential August morning I came across THE NEW REVIEW'S SNAPSHOT section that read 'Inappropriate ads' and it made me chuckle. "Don't you miss those simple days of courtship when blowing fag smoke in her face was all it took to get lucky", it read regarding Tipalet's rather odd ad above. "Nothing sells like the sight of a distraught, half-drowned child trapped under a hipbath", it continues - mocking Pears Soaps vision of 1900 child neglect (also above). "Take that, elf'n'safety! Throw your baby a razor blade and tell it to man up" the author, Hermione Hoby, jokes whilst referring to Gillette's utterly bizarre 1909 Safety Razor ad (that recently provoked a spoof vintage of Frida Kahlo's famous self portrait - her iconic mono-brow this time shaved into smooth submission). But the inappropriate Pièce de Résistance:

Oil company, Humble's, 1962 ad (as Hoby writes) is a "reminder of the rich eminently mineable seam of incredulity, outrage and hilarity offered by dodgy bygone ads." And quite rightly so if we refer to Humble's retrospectively absurd and boastful slogan:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

..gee, thanks Humble: