There’s lots of text on the blog at the moment. Time to add a little bit of colour with some links that have been floating around the studio.
Following last week’s link to Reknit, friend-of-BERG Rod McLaren gave me a link to Goldenhook. It’s a French business selling knitted goods with a twist:
Golden Hook is an innovative fashion brand which allows you to create made-to-order beanies by choosing your beanie style, material, and color. You also choose the authentic grandmother who will knit your beanie from our gallery of grandma photos.
Authenticity being sold through choice – and a personal connection to whoever’s knitting your new hat. Fun, although if Goldenhook is anything to go by, Granufacture isn’t very cheap yet.
Meanwhile, from Kottke – and a great many other sites – comes news of increased sales of miniature sausages in Korea:
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
Meat styluses. I really have no sense for the Korean market: might this be a hoax? No idea; it doesn’t seem so, given the coverage. And it definitely works, as this video of someone playing Taiko Drum Master with a pair of sausages demonstrates. That’s one way to keep your fingers warm.
Matt Jones sent this to the studio mailing list last week, and it was destined for the blog from the get-go: a beautiful collaboration between Lego and MUJI Japan. It’s so simple: a model made out of a combination of Lego pieces and what look like origami squares, with pre-punched holes for joining the paper to the bricks. And: what a cheery crocodile.
Finally, via our frequent collaborator Timo Arnall comes a striking depiction of one potential Augmented future, courtesy of Keiichi Matsuda. Matsuda writes:
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
In his video, the home becomes another space for being advertised to in – with the catch that the more advertising you choose to be subjected to, the more revenue you’ll generate. The glitches in the AR system, and the horrible Girl From Ipanema cover are the icing on an entertaining (if somewhat bleak) cake.