The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin
Flags of Our Fathers by Barry Bostwick
The medical dictionary Medterms is a really useful site if you ever find yourself working on a project and wondering, “Oneirophrenia? What the heck is oneirophrenia?” Constantly being updated and “100% Doctor-Produced”. Can be browsed alphabetically or searched for a specific terms.
“Design Not Found, published by 37signals, is a collection of real-world examples of good and bad contingency design (design for when things go wrong).”
Be sure to click on the “Snapshot Library” tab.
A slightly dated (PointCast?), but otherwise useful article outlining ways a speaker can prepare for the unpredictable nature of what they do.
Excerpt:
I didn’t care who was responsible. My audience didn’t care who was to blame. All we knew was that there was no picture and it was showtime.
Well, I knew that wasn’t ever going to happen to me again. I decided to take control of my equipment and my destiny.
Every speaker is the ringmaster; the person in charge of the event. If something goes wrong with the audio-visual material, it will reflect badly on the speaker. So the speaker must take control of the environment.
According to my referers page, The Eyes Have It tops the list when performing the following searches:
The Weblog Review reviewed The Eyes Have It and gave it a 5 out of 5 rating . Thanks Wendy!
In The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson uses the term “mediatron” for what we think of as screens/displays/pages that can be placed anywhere. The emerging technology described below is the first generation of the mediatron. Here’s a passage from The Diamond Age illustrating one of the possible effects being immersed in this type of visual environment could have on human interaction — given our hardwired susceptibility to visual stimuli. Sounds like it might be fun.
He opened a desk drawer and took out a roll of thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable. There was a lull while Hackworth and McGraw watched the little scenes; one of the hazards of living in a world filled with mediatrons was that conversations were always being interrupted in this way, and that explained why Atlantans tried to keep mediatronic commodities to a minimum. Go into a thete’s house, and every object had moving pictures on it, everyone sat around slackjawed, eyes jumping from the bawdy figures cavorting on the mediatronic toilet paper to the big-eyed elves playing tag in the bathroom mirror to….”
What would you do if you were able to put your most powerful, full color/motion designs and productions almost anywhere? What would change in the way you think about “pages” or “screens” when you’re starting to work with a material that can almost completely merge object with imagery? Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about a display being developed by a local company (Universal Display Corporation) that will allow these types of mergers to be explored. Animated .gif courtesy their website.
Glowing wallpaper that replaces light bulbs. A flexible video screen for your shirt cuff. Windshields that flash with driving directions.
A small Ewing, N.J., company is betting millions that such innovations - the stuff of Dick Tracy comics and futuristic films - are just around the corner.
Universal Display Corp. is drawing expertise from engineers and chemists at nearby Princeton University and the University of Southern California to come up with a new generation of video screens: super-thin, flexible, and cheap as dirt.
Such screens, etched transparently onto films of plastic, might retract like a window shade into a device the size of a pen, be form-fitted to a dashboard, replace newspaper, or be slapped onto a cereal box - as in the current Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report, set about 50 years hence.
The material might even be rolled onto walls and ceilings for lighting or to display video murals, said Janice K. Mahon, vice president of commercialization for the company.
I’m not sure if I can recommend the music that goes with it, but this video (made completely of infographics) rocks.
Amazing collection of 700 electron microscopy images with annotations and explainations. Searchable. Click on image number for a larger version. At left is image 49, a blood lymphocyte.
