Posts filed under 'history'
Grant Park’s tipping points
Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.
Walker Smith writes:
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.
Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.
1 comment 7 November 2008
The world in your pocket
Tom Ding writes:
When I discovered last week that my brand new phone gives me unlimited Google Maps on-the-go, I had one of those ‘The Future Has Arrived’ moments, able to locate the nearest pubs and bus stops at a glance. Which got me to thinking about the different functions of a map, and how cleverly Google has partitioned them. You see, Google Maps is useful indeed: It can be a Sat Nav in your pocket or a route-finder on your PC and it has an interface perfectly suited for such quick tasks.
Perhaps though, we should regard it as the latest evolution of the 1920s ‘wrist-mounted, wind-up Sat-Nav’ shown in the picture at the top of this post. Google Maps gives you no context. It is great, so long as you know exactly where you want to go to. It is a road map, not an atlas, and definitely not a globe.
And this is where Google Earth comes in. Here, exactly the same data has been used for something completely different, and this time it is all about looking, rather than finding. Instead of the watch, I think of Google Earth as being a modern equivalent of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican- somewhere that you go when you cannot see a place first-hand, somewhere that you could easily lose a few hours and somewhere that not enough people know about.
And Google Earth is getting better. We are now all free, in a Wikipedia-esque spirit of collaboration, to hack the program, at least a little bit, and create our own ‘layers’ dedicated to whatever topic we choose. Just this week, someone has published a layer called “Crisis in Darfur“. There is a layer of “Lighthouses in New Zealand” and another of Frank Gehry buildings. With all of this within a couple of clicks reach, I can’t help but feel like Google is biding their time here- waiting for their user-generated library to reach a critical mass before they tell the world about it.
By then, it will not just be an old fashioned globe, but an encyclopedia inside a globe. We will be able to visually explore almost any subject by geography, by topic and by time. And then, well, then the future really will have arrived.
Add comment 5 November 2008
Flying the flag (post 1 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
As a closet vexillologist, I have always had an inexplicable fascination with flags. Flags are brands with armies and navies. Just like brands, they can be relaunched, repositioned and stretched. They can suffer from all the hazards facing any consumer good: lack of differentiation, poor on-shelf standout, out of step with current values, and so on.
Indeed they are probably the most powerful expressions of graphic design and branding anywhere. Try to imagine the brief to a flag designer: “Zac, mate, we want you to unite a people - or at least try to foster cohesion. Can you also try to convey a sense of mission, reference history and national allegiances? And differentiate us. Make it visible from a distance too? Is Monday morning okay? We’re presenting on Tuesday morning”.
There’s no better recent example of a wholesale brand relaunch than the new flag of semi-recognised Kosovo (top left). The use of blue and yellow - to say nothing of the stars - intentionally references the EU flag (top right), with EU membership being something of a national mission for Kosovo. Meanwhile, the new branding has wholeheartedly dispensed with ethnic Albanian symbols and colourways - the black eagle on a red background. The hope - the optimist might say - might be to engage (or at least pacify) new target markets: the Serb population, along with EU opinion. This is one to watch, and the most recent off the catwalk.
Kosovo wasn’t however the first to adopt those go-faster-stars. The flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina (top centre), adopted in 1998, also donned an ‘EU’ colour scheme, reflecting similar aspirations to membership, and also a similar brief to avoid favouring any of B&H’s constituent ‘nationalities’. The result is not very Serb, nor Croat, nor Bosnian. Looking at it another way, both these new flags might be seen as EU brand stretch.
1 comment 4 April 2008
In with the old?
Jo Philips writes:
I was struck by the following quote when reading the historian Theodore Zeldin today:
“What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time. My solution is to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance.”
Zeldin’s argument reinforces Michelle Singer’s previous post on understanding both macro- and micro-narratives to build a robust picture of change. History also helps. Recently in an office workshop we looked back to images from 50 years ago to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some of the findings were quite surprising, and it made me think about the importance of a grounding in history to imagine the future. Perhaps the New Year newspapers’ reviews of 2007 are as important for understanding future change as their predictions for the year ahead…
Add comment 7 January 2008
