Beautiful Nokia advertizing. My Sunset Is Your Sunrise or “Feel the Globe” on YouTube.

Excerpt from ft-tech blog: Spike Lee: With user-generated content, who needs ad agencies? (June 26, 2009 by Tim Bradshaw)

It’s a brilliant Nokia ad - the sort of simple, well-executed idea that agencies charge six-figure sums for. Only this one wasn’t made by an ad agency - it was made by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan, who’d never made an ad before. The film, “Feel the globe”, took just two days to make.

Hiroki’s 30-second video was the winner of a competition run by Mofilm - a group working with film schools and YouTube addicts to find the best in user-generated content. Mofilm convinced companies such as Visa, HP, Best Buy and AT&T to “put their brands in the hands of consumers”, as Nokia’s head of brand engagement, Fiona Bosman, put it at yesterday’s press conference at the Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Judging this contest was Spike Lee, director of Malcolm X and Inside Man and an enthusiastic supporter of user-generated content and DIY filmmaking.

“I watched the final 12 films, the quality is amazing,” he said. “I think that this demonstrates that you can’t dictate where talent is. The same way I feel you don’t have to go to film school to be a filmmaker, you don’t have to be an employee of an advertising agency to make advertising also.”

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Congratulations!!! The Smart City Group (Bill Mitchell, Ryan Chin, etc.) win the Buckminster Fuller Challenge :-)

SPM/MoD isn’t just about the design of these lightweight, highly efficient, electric vehicles, it is about inserting that technological innovation into the social and cultural environment and designing an intuitive system within which they function. The technological innovation embodied in these vehicles is just one piece of a larger system design which addresses issues from pollution, to congestion, to urban space, to economics, to energy use, to the very idea of personal transportation and what that means in a world with nearly seven billion inhabitants. It truly is - in the Bucky tradition - a transformative solution rather than an isolated piece of technology.

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Via superuse: when recycling meets design.

Hotel Transvaal uses the surplus of empty spaces in the neighborhood. In houses soon to be demolished, not yet sold newly built on derelict land and in unused spaces that have been refurnished by merchants from the neighborhood and artists into 1 to 5 star hotel rooms. The supply of rooms is very diverse in terms of furniture, luxury and price, so that anyyone, businessmen, students, tourists, residents and other guests can rent a place. When homes are sold or the torn down the hotel rooms move on.

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Post diploma offered at Paris-La-Villette. Check the blog: Cities: Mobility/Nature.

The city of XXIe century will the sustainable city, opened to the plurality of mobilities and to the natural elements with a new philosophy of the relationship between nature and artificiality. It is a question of designing the contemporary cities around this new goal: to think urban space for lifestyles reconciling mobilities on a territorial scale and on a new proximity scale.

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Graffiti last seen in Boston, on the Green Line, April 2009.

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Renate Mihatsch, Austrian architect and artist, has invited me to contribute to the book: Taking From. Leaving In. Moving On.

This is the abstract of my contribution:

The twitter line definition of neo-nomads is that neo-nomads are individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means. One of their strategies to formulate home is sampling. In (electronic) musical terms, sampling is the appropriation—selection and recording—of sound and music bits (often part of a precedent creation by another artist) for reuse in a new musical piece. The musical analogy holds true for neo-nomads as they sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have amplified the phenomenon. This piece is an adaptation of the research on the technologically mediated relation between people and space when always on the move.

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An interesting opinion in LeMonde: Pourquoi les Vélib’, fétiches des bobos, sont vandalisés, par Bertrand Le Gendre. Apparently it is because it is the iconic urban device of the “bobo” (bourgeois bohême)… because there are more tourists in Paris (who don’t really know how to use it; it is CERTAINLY NOT user friendly at the beginning); it is easier to steal than a Mini with anti-theft devices… But seriously, I can’t believe that in our Orwellian societies these bikes weren’t tagged, GPS tracked or so. Although I like the new sociality that these bikes have engendered I am convinced that they need a total redesign, their parking places/locations included.

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Died June 8, 2009. His bio on wikipedia.

He authored:
Métapolis ou l’Avenir des villes, éditions Odile Jacob, 1995
La Société hypermoderne ; ces événements nous dépassent, feignons d’en être les organisateurs, l’Aube, 2001-2005 nouv.éd.
Les Sens du mouvement. Modernité et mobilités, éditions Belin, 2005 (co-direction S. Allemand et J. Lévy)
Le Mangeur hypermoderne. Une figure de l’individu éclectique, éditions Odile Jacob, 2005

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“The Suburban General Store is a fun and logical strategy for saving fuel by introducing commercial use into America’s residential suburbs.” Michael Piper partner at DUB Studios and his crew were the runner up of METROPOLIS magazine design competition. Check it out on R&DAR, his design research practice that “brings pie-in-the-sky ideas down to earth.”

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Just a link to what seems a very promising event! Global City Abu Dhabi.

On the schedule:

The Leaders’ Summit, co-organised with City on The Move Institute, France, a PSA Peugeot Citroen Foundation, and supported by the Forum for Urban Management, France, is a closed-door meeting exclusively for mayors and city leaders and by invitation only [So frustrating!?!?!?]. Organised around discussions tables, it provides them an exclusive opportunity to discuss the pressing issues facing their communities, to meet with their counterparts and to share their personal visions of sustainability. Dedicated to urban leadership challenges, the 2009 Leaders’ Summit will focus on “new mobility patterns for the 21st century”. In this leadership summit, we will discuss the most promising solutions and evolutions and we will try to evaluate their potential development. Various aspects will be approached, on 7 workshops, each of them being moderated by a recognised expert:

- Designing infrastructure in view of 21st century mobility requirements
- Technical management of the urban flows
- Urban road pricing: what for? Benefits, costs and risks for cities. How do you find out if it is a good idea to use this tool
- Multi and intermodal mobility centres
- The New Pedestrian
- Developing modal options closer to people’s requirements and to sustainability
- Goods mobility and freight & delivery management

The 3D City
Expert: Marcel Smets, Professor at the Department of Architecture, Urban Design and Regional Planning of Leuven, Belgium

Technical management of the urban flows
Expert: Jason Barnes, Editor in Chief, ITS International Magazine, UK

Urban tolls
Experts: Christian Gauffin, General Secretary of NEELS (Network of European Elected
Representative for local Services of general interest), Sweden and Jonas Eliasson, Director of the Center for Transport Studies, Stockholm

Multi and intermodal mobility centres
Expert: Chris Gibbard, member of the Transport Direct team, UK

The new pedestrian
Expert: Georges Amar, Director of Prospective, RATP, France
Inter-modality

Expert: José Viegas, Professor at the Lisbon Superior Institute of Technologies,
Portugal

Goods mobility and freight & delivery management
Expert: Laetitia Dablanc, Senior Researcher at the French National Institute for Transport
Research and Safety (INRETS), France

• divx fast and furious 4

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