Mission: Menu
Written on 23 February 2008
A number of months ago, while walking through the back streets of Chippendale, a real-estate agent sign drew me into a derelict, yet intriguing, little house which I soon discovered used to be a church. This converted 19th Century church has since found a tenant and today houses on its ground level a charming wine bar/restaurant, named Mission, after the building’s original use, and a gallery on the upper level.
I am in two minds about Mission’s interior, which incorporates too rich a palette of materials, finishes and lighting, which can initially dazzle those who have an eye for simplicity. However all the details have been carefully orchestrated to create a cosy and pampering atmosphere, whether you are there to dine or drink. Behind the considered design, there is also a fine element of cheekyness, as if aimed only at those who wish to see it.
A sense of play is also expressed through the restaurant menu, which explores a different way to list the culinary option. The expected breakdown of meals, based on Entreé Main Desert has been excluded from the menu and instead food is categorised by price range, which clearly implies the size of serving within each category.
Whether you feel like 6 – 11, 12 – 17, or 18 – 26,
go there:
3 Little Queen Street
Chippendale, Sydney
What do you think? [1]
I Feel Fine, Thank You
Written on 8 September 2007
“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)…”
source: wefeelfine.org/mission.html
Reading the opening passage of the project mission statement, one can’t help but think that one or both of the project authors have been the subject of an alien abduction earlier in their life.
We Feel Fine is one of Jonathan Harris’s masterpieces brought to being with the help of Sepandar Kamvar.
The website represents the above-mentioned harvested data in a range of nifty visualisation modes. Viewers can easily switch between modes and observe the feelings represented as particles, colour shapes and text snippets to name a few. It was intriguing to observe that the most common feeling expressed by people is when they feel BETTER, followed by BAD and that GOOD came in third. But bearing in mind that people are less expressive when they feel fine, these results are less surprising.
We Feel Fine is not just a passive observation experience – users can play with the represented data. Each feeling can be clicked to bring up the originating blog or internet page and an intuitive user interface makes it easy to extract specific statistics by segmenting the results based on age, gender, date, geographical location and other characteristics. If by chance you feel like seeing how your feelings compare with your peer, We Feel Fine can help you find out. You may find that people in your hometown are happier than the world average, or that like you, many more people prefer living in that other city.
Visual wonders on the net are a great way to tune out and get distracted.
Whether you’ve just spent too many hours on Halo 3, or you are actually interested in statistics about how people feel, We Feel Fine ranks high on my list of things to do in times of procrastination.
Spare a moment to view Jonathan Harris’s presentation at TED 2007 or check out some of his other projects
What do you think?
Banalities of the Perfect Home
Written on 21 May 2007
SLOT is an exhibition space that measures 2.35M high x 4.5M wide x 1M deep. It may sound a bit tight, but considering it’s slotted into a window, one should not compare it with a typical gallery. SLOT is located in the street level window of 38 Botany Road, Alexandria in Sydney. Like similar art spaces that face the street, SLOT blurs the boundary between the gallery and the street – artworks become public artworks. Art then becomes accessible for pedestrians, and more importantly, brought closer to people who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to it.
In a very down-to-earth kind of way, SLOT’s website further elaborates on its location, mentioning that it is nestled between a laundrette and a Thai restaurant. Quite a nice Thai place I might add. I went there tonight to grab some takeaway and noticed the complete facade of the adjoining building had been covered by large white text highly contrasted by black background. This was an unexpected but pleasant surprise. For a fleeting moment I thought that what I’m seeing is a construction site concealed by a decorated hoarding. But that didn’t really make much sense. Quite quickly, I came to the realisation that this had something to do with SLOT.
For a space that measures only 2.35M high x 4.5M wide x 1M deep, this installation by Ruark Lewis is quite an undertaking. “The process of articulating and translating words in our environment–building meaning and rendering association–is something we do everyday subconsciously”. In Banalities of the Perfect Home Lewis encourages us to be aware of and question our immediate surroundings.
Unexpected ‘surprises’, such as this one, that appear in public urban spaces carry an important social value. They engage people in an untypical way, add vitality to our streets and enhance people’s everyday experiences.
Banalities of the Perfect Home on display until 2 June 2007
What do you think? [2]
The Feltron Report
Written on 20 April 2007
There is something extremely quirky about creating an annual report that summarises your own personal life over the past year. Nicholas Felton has been doing it for two consecutive years, demonstrating that clever information design can really make tables and charts visually interesting.
Earlier this year I came across Nicholas Felton’s Annual Report, in which he charts aspects of his life, such as visited places, read books and types of beers drank. He has kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions.
Q&A with Nicholas Felton
1. How long have you been practising as a designer? What areas do you focus on, or do you have special expertise in any area?
I have been professionally practicing for almost 8 years now. I’m comfortable in a range of work from publication to web to identity design… but my expertise would certainly lie in typography and logo work.
2. What is the design project that most inspired you in recent times?
The thing that inspired me the most recently was the alan fletcher exhibit at the design museum in london. His work is amazing, and the way that he reinvented himself and remained relevant through numerous chapters of his career is an even more universal lesson for all of us.
3. How and when did you first come up with the idea for the Feltron Annual Report?
The first proto-report was a project called Best of ’04, a typical wrap-up of the year which included a lot of my favorite discoveries from 2004, but also contained a few statistical gems that I was able to unearth from my notebooks, itunes and computer.
The next year, the Annual Report was born. The 2005 report relied on my daily ical entries to piece together many more statistics than opinions about the previous year… which makes it easier as well as more interesting for me. With the help of a few friends who passed around the link to this exhibit, and some passionate bloggers, the idea took off and the response completely exceeded my expectations.
As a result, I decided that the 2006 report should be bigger and better in every way – which is why I chose to produce it as a print piece.
4. What was a greater motivation for the project–passion for creative information design or reviewing and summarising your past year?
Definitely the latter. The information design is the icing on the cake, but the cake would be inedible without it. In my mind the information design is a slave to the content… because if the statistics are not easily understood and communicated then all the other ideas of the report are moot.
5. You could have chosen any of many concepts and formats for this project–Why Annual Report?
If I understand you correctly, the term and associations of an annual report are extremely useful for the project. What I’m doing is a bit oddball, but can be fairly generally described to anyone as a “personal annual report”.
6. How did you go about choosing the typefaces and colours? Was there a reason why you opted for a condensed font style?
The condensed typeface has proved its worth over the last 2 executions of the project, previously garage gothic and opti giant this year. They both allowed me to get a maximum impact in minimum real-estate, and I relied on opti giant again this month for a chronicle of a week’s consumption for print magazine.
I’m a sucker for yellow, and the process colors in general.
7. A cynic might compare this with a commercial Annual report and argue that this project doesn’t serve any real- world purpose, or that it is creativity for the sake of creativity. What would your response to that be?
I’ve heard worse criticism. The most deflating comments the few people who have called it arrogant or self-aggrandizing. Fortunately, they are well-outnumbered. But it’s a massive misunderstanding of my purpose. My life is not particularly fascinating, but it’s the questions I ask that resonate for readers – and that’s where I feel it can make a claim at being art… something that a cynic could say doesn’t serve any real-world purpose.
8. In my mind, there are many annual reports that follow a very expected format and lack creative flare. If you agree, do you feel this is due to designers not trying hard enough, or is t the client’s prescriptive briefs and limited budgets?
It seems that annual report design is viewed as a graveyard for designers. That’s not to say that there are not beautiful reports made all the time, but they tend to be viewed by clients, designers and the public as quotidian.
9. Obviously, public companies have a responsibility to publish an annual report for their share-holders. If you were offered an open brief for a client’s annual report, what would you propose as a creative design solution?
I don’t know that there’s a catchall solution to fixing the universe of annual report designs. What I would suggest is that there are alternate statistics a company might project that will give a more humane and impressive picture than those required by the regulatory bodies.
What do you think? [2]
Dashanzi Art District
Written on 24 January 2007
Beijing’s race against the clock as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics has been leaving very large footprints across the city.
As part of an unprecedented redevelopment, the city is undergoing a massive facelift, however the scale of this metamorphosis extends the boundaries of the built environment – Last year the Chinese government launched a campaign encouraging residents to shed previously accepted habits, like jumping queues and spitting in public.
While the scale of change is massive, some stones are being left unturned, giving birth to a new landscape as old and new are juxtaposed.
In a district north-east of Central Beijing, a cluster of old decommissioned military warehouses has become home for a thriving contemporary arts community. Dashanzi Art District, also known as 798 by locals, after the electronics plant which now houses one of the main exhibition spaces, initially attracted artists for the cheap rent and large spaces. Since 2002, tens of galleries, artist spaces, design studios, cafés, bars, restaurants and design and art shops have moved into the complex of derelict warehouses at Dashanzi, refurbishing them one space at a time, making the area popular amongst emerging artists as well as those with international acclaim.
As you hop between one exhibition space to the next, it is not uncommon to come by a floor in a building which still houses old industrial machinery. An OHS hazard by western standards, the raw materials and surfaces add a sense of realism to the whole experience of Dashanzi.
A highlight of my visit was Wang Fuchun’s exhibition Chinese on the Train. Trained as an engine driver and working as a train technician, Fuchun has been photographing people during their long-distance travels on China’s rail network. Almost like peering into a person’s bedroom, Fuchun’s photos depict the train as a transitory home for passengers as they become comfortable in this space they sometimes occupy for days en-route.
It appears that in between the orchestrated urban renaissance of Beijing–and despite it–some things are taking shape organically.
For a society known for its oppressed past, Dashanzi Art District provides hope and offers a better future, where individual thinking has a platform, an audience and where a decent glass of wine is available.
Where: Dashanzi Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianquiao Road, Chaoyang District.
What do you think?