Tahrir on Tweetdeck Past midnight. February 6, 2011: I was frustrated by the incompetence of the coverage of the Arab Spring by most American TV news networks. Tahrir square had turned into a tent city. Andy Carvin‘s twitter account was my primary news source. I had the Tweetdeck app open and Al Jazeera‘s online live feed on my browser. The [...]

Rachael Morrison smells every book in the MoMA Library collection and records the call number, title and a description of the smell of each book in a ledger. This is part of a performance titled plainly Smelling The Books. The performance romanticizes the book: the physical artifact. When I first read about this, it seemed [...]

Internet memes are inherently silly. That does not mean we can’t learn from them. Regardless of their content, Internet memes are spreading far and fast with no advertising budget. They are leading people to land television deals, interviews, book deals, and revived music careers among other things. Sounds pretty nice, huh? We tried to break down why this is happening.

Data is abundant today. In a world where data is easily accessible – ‘data about data’ or metadata and how we manipulate it will become increasingly important. I’ve observed this with the music industry – but I think the principles apply to any form of digital commodity.

We are very liberal with the use of metaphors and models in our language, thought process and problem solving approaches. They act as bridges between concepts and disciplines. But without some vigilance, these metaphors notoriously pigeon-hole us into a partial suspension of reality.

Planners have supposed to have gone beyond digital, made something and figured out our T-shape. But what do strategists and planners do? What is our craft? Every person in an agency is a problem solver. Art directors solve by making things beautiful, copywriters solve by writing and technologists solve by making the interwebs tick. And [...]

Len Kendall feels Spell-check makes him a bad speller. He is not alone. We are all experiencing the same, in our own lives.

[Check the entire Digital and the Brain series] It is the endless vortex that pulls me in. I submit without any resistance – every single time. It has a way of getting into my head and switching off the button that connects my psyche to my immediate surroundings. It is what fills the distance between [...]

[Check the entire Digital and the Brain series] The nature of the medium can be more powerful force in the world than the content of the messages that pass through it. – Marshall McLuhan It never ceases to amaze me how perfectly McLuhan’s theories from the 1950s apply to today’s world. I never wondered about [...]

[Check the entire Digital and the Brain series] A lot of people seem to be obsessed with all this media around us and how that’s affecting our brain. This was in no way sudden. One early sign was how neurobiology started getting more coverage in rather mainstream media two years ago. Then Barnes & Noble [...]