When Naomi Klein published No Logo in 1999, I embraced it as a welcome intervention to the massive over-branding that was going on in the consumer goods industry. Like Ed O’Brien, the guitarist of Radiohead, I felt that
No Logo certainly made me feel less alone. She was writing everything I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting.
On the other hand, I was left with the feeling that No Logo failed to offer answers. In 2002, the Economist asked:
What is the superior alternative to capitalist development that Ms Klein proposes? She feels under no obligation to say. It is not her job to dictate to the movement. The most she can do, in all modesty, is to offer indications and observations; the people, thus empowered, must do the rest.
Now hobbyprincess offers an alternative that I dig. She suggests: instead of No Logo / Pro Logo, think ‘Own Logo‘. Instead of doing away with logos, the point is to create tools that allow people to create their own designs and labels:
An essential aspect of the own logo phenomenon is the branding of one’s own creations. Many of the people who have started to make their own designs (including me and my friends) want to tag their creations with their own symbol. The symbol can be their initials, a nickname, or any other sign that they want to adopt as their own brand. These people would probably agree with most of the arguments that Naomi brings up in her book. Still, instead of No Logo, they are signing up for Own Logo.
Christian took us to see the Light Vests at the Cyberdog store in London today. They’re really neat. The basic design is a black shirt with a postcard-sized passive-matrix display velcroed on the front. They show various looping animations in all flavors of psychedelia. The high-end model titled “Light Red Alert Vest” in the online store (unfortunately made with Flash so I can’t link to it directly) allows you to type in a custom message to a scrolling LED display (think Joi’s hecklebot). The designer calls himself Lightmaster. He offered to make a custom one for me, complete with PC software to personalize it. With an 802.11 radio it could, for instance, display images going by on the wireless network Etherpeg-style.
Last week Nokia displayed a fuel cell-powered Bluetooth headset, which is now undergoing user trials (see the last slide in Yrjö Neuvo’s presentation). Sure, the increase in battery life is a major incremental improvement. However, in his blog Christian Lindholm suggests the replacement of the solid battery with a fluid tank may trigger radical innovation in the design of mobile electronics by enabling form factors that have previously been possible only in sci-fi movies. “Liquid is esentially free from form and will thus enable us to make radically different electronics. It will stimulate an era of organically shaped electronics,” he predicts. I agree. What’s exciting about fuel cells is not their capacity as a power source, it’s their potency to catalyze a new design paradigm.
What brand of recording eyewear would match your style: Gucci, Armani, O’Neill… Or: Apple, Sony, Nokia…?
A few years ago my DJ friend taped a small condenser microphone to his glasses to record audio samples on the street, in elevators, wherever he went but couldn’t bring a conventional mic. Now the smallest affordable camera optics are about the size of his mic, so I wonder who’s going to be the first to integrate fashion with function and introduce eyewear that doubles as a stylish and intuitive image capture device.
A pair of such glasses might be built like this: the left framing could house the camera, the right one a directional mic. Behind one ear could be a jack for connecting to an iPod or a cell phone for power and data transfer. Perhaps on some models, behind the ears there could be pull-out earpieces and a pull-out handsfree mic tube.
It’s not hard to think of applications: no more hassling with digital cameras or camera phones, just touch your eyewear to start recording. OCR for reading glasses would be cool, and glasses that stamped each captured image with a GPS location and the direction the camera is pointing would enable someone like Google to build virtual walkthroughs of places by combining imagery from different viewers’ eyes.
Steve Mann has of course been inventing and using wearcam stuff for a couple of decades already, but now the technology is approaching a price point that warrants more commercial speculation. So I wonder, will one of the big technology players be first to bring recording eyewear to the market, or might the first-mover opportunity be seized by a new entrant perhaps joining forces with some well-known designer?