Jemima’s Blog | London

What a top year. Met so many incredible people.

:)

And if they don’t yet, they very much should. Get with the agenda… you… you web 1.0 people you.

Here are my 5 favourite infographics, or infographic creators of all time:

David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful

Check out this baby, which sort of craps all over the green movement (but in a beautiful way):



and the graphics on this page which illustrate that the best month in which to fly (if you don’t want to die) is May, and that North America is the world’s capital for fatal air accidents with 2613 accidents since 1942.

Matthew Inman, of The Oatmeal

He created this, which should fill you with a worldly knowledge of, and insatiable desire for, coffee!:












Now, who next you ask?

Randall Munroe, of XKCD

Who created this visual (which I blogged about a few weeks go, sorry), bootiful datalicious depiction of The Lord of the Rings (and a few other films):


The green stuff is quite popular, so here’s another:

Surface area required to Solar Power the world, from Land Art Generator

Click and make it big buddies.
I love it when great graphics come from independent sources rather than the old and trusted sources. Great link bait too.


click for larger image

And the big question:

Is the World Getting Better or Worse?

Again, click it to view it nice and big.
I love a good collection of stats. Sometimes you just can’t answer a question or make a point with one iconographic visualisation – the below is a pretty good shot at answering one question, multi-approach style.


click for larger image

If you like these, you should subscribe to The Guardian’s Data blog. It’s neato.

Toshiba sent an armchair into space:

The vid on youtube

• The shots were taken at a staggering 98,268 feet above the earth using Toshiba’s own cameras
• To reach the altitude required and to conform with Federal Aviation Administration regulations, the weight of the rig had to be carefully managed to a weight of no more than four pounds
• Tied to the rig was a specially created full-sized model chair made of biodegradable balsa wood – the chair was made by a company called Artem and cost about £2,500
• Launch coordinates of the rig were – 119 degrees, 14 minutes by 40 degrees, 48 minute (12 miles North-East of the town of Gerlach, Nevada)
• The quality of the footage from the Toshiba IK-HR1S cameras was: 1920×1080 pixel count; 1080i @ 50hz; 100 Mbps
• The temperature dropped to minus 90 degrees when the chair reached 52,037 feet
• The chair took 83 minutes to reach an altitude of 98,268 feet where it broke and took just 24 minutes to fall back down to earth with the rig.

We’ve all been in those marketing meetings when everyone gets a bit over excited talking about ‘award winning campaigns’. We’re high on inspiration, a bit rowdy perhaps, and start believing that perhaps world domination is merely one single well-timed mouse click away. Of course (most) awards worth having are hard fought little things, and your best shot is at something in your niche. I mean, you’re not exactly going to win a Nobel Prize for the best kick ass facebook application, right? For argument’s sake, let’s imagine for a second that you could win a BAFTA for your social media wizardry… how might you go about that?

Well, first of all you’ll be needing a great CONCEPT.
The best campaigns are based around ideas that are actually quite simple – an open concept that forms the brief for the final product. When you get your brief, you might like to deconstruct it and find a single nugget that stands out – something as simple as, say, the human need to feel loved. So take that concept, and create a new brief based around that. Let’s say you come up with: “Build a tool that illustrates, using social media, the human need to feel loved – and its tendency towards narcissism”.

Now that’s a brief.

Next you’ll need a CONNECTION or an association.
This is something that connects your concept (that floaty thing) to something existing, live, and kicking. For example, you might want to associate the concept with a group of people, your target audience perhaps… Not something too broad like ‘The yoof of today’. Perhaps instead choose something specific that we can all relate to, such as: “A young, media savvy unsigned band, fighting it out on Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and the like, in search of that elusive record deal”. Sound familiar?

Ok, we have a narcissistic unsigned band, fighting for a record deal, desperately wishing everyone loved them.

Now we need something totally unique, a RANDOMISER.
It’s the equivalent of feeding your fantastic idea through the Enigma machine to produce something totally unexpected. We need to take this existing (now grounded) concept, and warp it through the mind of a mad genius or two, shock it with electricity, make it travel back in time for a while, hook it up to the social web, give it the means to make music, and then squeeze it into an antique cupboard placed in the corner of a modern art gallery.

Now THAT sounds award winning, right?

Introducing Cybraphon – the BAFTA award winning Autonomous Emotional Robot Band

This 1 minute video explains it perfectly:

“Cybraphon automates the now-familiar process of musical performance, followed by obsessive tracking of online opinion, and subsequent mood swings. It is the 21st century equivalent of the player piano, but instead of your coins, it begs for your attention in the online world. Its music is purely acoustic, played robotically on antique and junk-shop instruments in a gallery in Edinburgh; but what it plays is driven by its mood, and this is shaped by its 24-hour monitoring of the whole of the web for comments, reviews, or simply traffic to this web page.”

Genius, no?

Well done Si Kirby for winning a BAFTA for the best use of social media I’ve ever seen. You’ve set the bar buddy, now watch while everyone struggles to keep up.

Here’s the HOW and WHY for those that want to know more.

I highly recommend that everyone watches one or two of the videos on Cybraphon’s video page to see the incredibly long and hard fought year of genius that led to the launch of Cybraphon.

Oh, and here’s a video and some photos that I took at the launch of Si’s last genius project ‘Etiquette’ (a table that could see and play very good music), which was on display at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop a couple of Edinburgh Festival’s ago. That’s me in orange on the right.

Enjoy.

Last week I was having a look through the first site that ever sat on this domain. It was an architecture and photography portfolio from my uni years, and whilst clicking about I stumbled across an old project.

The project was to design a school on a brownfield site to form part of a brand new extension to a town just outside Edinburgh called Granton.

With only 3D models of what the rest of the new town was going to look like, sources of inspiration were limited to the history of the site and the surrounding architectural remnants. I decided to try and design the school so that it would tell a story. The story didn’t have a beginning, middle, and an end, per se, but it told the history of the ‘place’ and how it connected to the rest of Scotland. I racked my brains for weeks over how to use different vistas of the same space, or interlocking spaces to give just enough info and evoke just enough emotion to covey this story of sorts.

Flicking through my notes I saw this quote:

“Often a transition is marked by a structure,
as a sentence is marked by punctuation,
bringing pause in the rhythm of one’s progress.”

Ian Hamilton Findlay

I wasn’t totally happy with the final design, but I always though that the ambition was an honourable one. Perhaps if I’d been reading www.xkcd.com back then I’d have had more success.

Here’s how to draw a story:

That there is top notch data visualisation. ;)

Image from Flickr user Kaiiit

This week I had two separate close encounters with a couple of brands, both of which I already have a good opinion on. Though both happenings, in their own ways, concluded in positive experiences, the intentions behind each was very different. One of the brands had specifically sought me out as a suitable user upon which to bestow this positive experience, whereas the other I had sought out myself – the positive experience was mostly incidental to a task that I was carrying out.

Introducing Bombay Sapphire (the London Dry Gin)

A few weeks ago I was invited to a ‘Gintelligensia’ event for ‘Notable London Bloggers’ (one of which I’m not, but that’s beside the point). The event was to be held at Dusk Bar in Sommerset House; the venue was an outdoor pop-up bar designed by Tom Dixon (who apparently makes a living out of creating these temporary bars). It began at 7, and was hosted by Bombay Sapphire’s ‘brand ambassador’, the very gentlemanly Sam Carter, who spent the best part of 3 hours entertaining us (myself and 3 others) with tales of Gin’s rich a long history.

We were treated to several cocktails, a couple of which we made ourselves, and also a trip around the world (virtually, of course), tasting each of the 10 raw botanicals that are used to infuse the gin with flavour. It was a genuinely fascinating evening, though unfortunately not all the bloggers maintained quite the same degree of decorum as the genuinely stand-up Sam Carter. At the end of the evening we were quizzed to see how much we’d learnt, with the winner receiving a bottle of gin, and were sent on our way each with our own goodie bag (also containing a bottle of gin) that was filled with some fantastic, and high quality, cocktail making equipment.

Image from Flickr user Jorge

It was a genuinely good experience, and successfully played upon the vanity that bloggers are partial to when someone plucks them out of obscurity and shows a little love. Not unlike ‘followfriday’ on twitter, I now feel obliged to speak on their behalf and in turn recommend them to my friends. As it is, I’m quite the gin drinker anyway, (my favourite being Hendrick’s, with a cucumber julienne) but there’s no doubt that I will now pay more attention to Bombay Sapphire, and perhaps specify it by name over the standard ‘Gordons’. Perhaps I’ll take advantage of the goodie bag , which contained, quite cleverly, all the ingredients needed to create the first cocktail that Sam Carter made for us, lemons and all. I’m having a few friends over tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll tell them all about how nice Bombay Sapphire was to me, and have some fun making a Gin Collins (on the house)… or perhaps the bottle will end up in the drinks cupboard only to be consumed at 3am one drunken Saturday night when there’s nothing left to drink. Who knows… but it got me thinking about intentional positive experiences, and how much power they really have, when everyone in the room knows exactly what the deal is. When I place a monetary value of about £60/70 on the cost of the entire evenings entertainment (including the gift bag), how does its potency compare to say, the below.

Introducing Apple, or rather, the Apple Store in the Westfield shopping centre.

Now, I like Apple – always have, despite their equipment constantly crapping out on me – it’s O.K because I know that I can tab open the Apple website and quickly book a genius bar appointment for lunchtime the following day. They’ve swapped over several iPhones for free (even though I’ve been honest with them and mentioned the possibility of it having maybe slightly fallen gently onto a concrete paving slab – though I can’t really remember because it was 3am, and dark, wink wink), and they’ve always been there for me in a lost data crisis, or battered laptop situations. I feel unsurprisingly rather chuffed, but ever so slightly guilty, that I’ve only once had to pay for an apple repair in 7 years of beating their tools into hard manual labour. An architecture student, with a few years as a photographer, and a strong dislike for those god awful looking Crumpler laptop bags, has meant my laptops have become ‘old friends’ very, very quickly.

Image by Flickr user ijustine

It’s not surprising then, that my latest MacBook’s battery died. It’s almost 3 years old, and though I now work behind a desk in an office, for a long time it was my web-designing, on-set tethered up photography gizmo numero uno. What did unsettle me though, was that it was almost 6 weeks before I finally managed to nab an appointment at the Genius Bar due to an apparent severe shortage of Genius. I ended up with a 9:20am appointment in a distant Apple Store on a Saturday morning (urgh, I hear you say), yeah.

So far, not so good, but I’m an Apple hard-nut, so I’m not easily fazed. Unfortunately, on the morning in question, I was scootering all the way from Stoke Newington (the deepest darkest NE London), and also got hopelessly lost in Westfield’s cavernous interior. I was 20 mins late to the Genius bar, and the rather unforgiving ‘concierge’ said they’d cancelled my appointment, no smile, no apologetic look, just a sorry, no. Whatever. I managed to catch eyes with a nice chap behind the bar and explained that it was just the battery – a simple swap in, swap out job – and so he complied. Unfortunately, with some testing it turned out the battery had been used far beyond its usual duties (no surprise there), and so wouldn’t qualify for a free replacement. It was only £70 to buy a new one though, and by that point my hangover was really starting to kick in, so I too complied.

We chatted away, as usual, whilst he filled in the paper-work, and I made some friendly glances over towards the Genius dude who’d been too busy to see me earlier. Nothing unusual, just general friendly Saturday morning Shepherd’s Bush related banter. The battery turned up, but when we got to the till to run my card through, the machine wouldn’t boot properly. With quite a few customers vying for the nice chap’s attention he called on the assistance of the Genius dude, who strolled over with a genuine air of calm and kindness about him, and told me that I may as well just have the battery for free. Free! Jemima bags a free Apple repair once again, score! I showed my gratitude, and headed off to enjoy the rest of my Saturday morning (now rather glad of the early wake-up call).

So, what makes this positive experience special? Because as a customer who had sought out the services of the Apple employee, and had had to work quite hard to secure it, I felt that I owned this positive experince. I’d had to work for it, it wasn’t laid on with nibbles in a posh bar, there was no script or golden globe shaped bar on wheels; it was accidental, the convenient offshoot of a series of negative experiences on the way to the completion of an errand. This positive ending far outweighed the unforgiving concierge, or the overworked and unavailable Genius’, and most of all, it wasn’t forced or planned.

An experience like this, which had a monetary value exactly the same as that provided by Bombay Sapphire, gives me a much longer lasting positive feeling about the brand involved. While Bombay Sapphire impressed and complimented me, I felt at all times like I was under pressure to be wowed by their charade (I was being sold to), whereas Apple’s employees had come down my level, seen things from my side, and just made my Saturday a little more positive.

Marketing campaigns are fine – but in my opinion, good old fashioned honesty, kindness, and transparency have a much longer shelf-life than pop-up bars on London terraces.

Which experince would have been more powerful for you?

One of a few gems amidst a crowd of conference vids, I’m glad I persevered and eventually watched the above. Am now a definite fan of Laura Fitton.

…and pictures:

Here’s a wee run down of what I’ve been up to in August – illustrated heavily with pics and photos.

If you’re on facebook or RSS and want to see this post in its full glory with vids and all, then click here.

From the set of Tiff’s film (in my house):

Some videos of Tiff doing her thang:

Click here to view the video of you’re on facebook.

We were impressed. And more… though I pressed stop just before TIff said ‘Action’ which is annoying:

And after everyone had left:

I ordered some funky glasses from ‘Glasses Direct‘ (thanks to Jennie Albone’s recommendation). They’ll send you 4 pairs of glasses to try on for 10 days – and if you don’t like them you can just send them back!

I decided to get everyone else to try them on too:

My boss, Richard Baxter:

and Georgina Maude:

Suffice to say, I sent them all back, except for one pair which my mum decided to buy – a photo of that another time.

On a lunchtime walk I found this rather fabulous courtyard near my office which seems slightly time-warped. If only could afford one of these gorgeous mews houses:

Here’s another spot from a lunchtime stroll:

And another lunch-based discovery – un-knockoverable glasses at Strada on Baker Street:

Watch the vid here.

Last Saturday I went to a rather fun sports day birthday event in Ravenscourt Park. I was made an honourary member of the Aldensley Awesomes – and we had wicked outfits:

Here’s a photo I didn’t take:

Sarah and Steven:

Here’s us on the way to the pub after it had all finished. We lost, but how cool do we look! That’s Mabel, Tiff’s Labradoodle.

And Sarah’s hand, at the pub:

Here’s the rowdy bunch, in their natural habitat:

And me in my natural habitat on a Sunday morning at home:

Or a weekday evening after a day at work:

And Steven a la amazing iPhone application OldBooth :

The beautiful Anna Dina invited me to her Summer party, which was a hotbed of creative performance activity.

Here’s Anna posing:

And dancing:

Vid here

They decided to put up tree houses in Regent’s Park, which is pretty cool:

Regent’s park is full of ducks:

This is my fireplace – quite pretty no?

Flame’s birthday came, and we had a fantastic dinner/cocktail fueled dance-off at Floreditas, which though not cheap was an asbsolute stormer:

I went to the Shunt preview show for ‘Money’, which was awesome. Here’s a video:

Click here to watch video for facebook people.

and we bumped into Katie Sanders after – who decided to put on my scooter helmet:

On another evening, Nadine, from work, posed for some photies (lighting by zakazaka):

I quite like this girls shoes – anyone know where they’re from?

Ok, ok… it was amazing – I know that, you know that, but for some reason I haven’t been able to sit down and write about it. We didn’t do as well as we had hoped, so I imagine that may be playing a part (8th instead of my aim of 5th) – that and that fact that I’ve been surprisingly busy since returning from Prague in July.

As it turns out, I’m still not going to write about it. I feel that I learnt an unimaginable amount about myself during those couple of weeks and I’m more than happy to just store it up and take it along with me without the need to deconstruct. That said, I did write one more blog post for the World Cup site which I didn’t post here.

It was the only post I managed to make whilst actually out in Prague – as you can imagine I was rather busy! It was written just after our opening game, which was against the Czech Republic. It was absolutely terrifying and I don’t think I quite recovered from it for the whole tournament. They had a wall of supporters which I was surprisingly affected by. I did, however, win the MVP (most valuable player) award which was an enormous privilege and quite a surprise.

Oh, here’s my profile page on the World Cup Site, by the way – it’s an index of all the posts I made (not as many as I should have).

Enjoy. ;)

Lacrosse in the sun, Prague here we come

The Scots have just walked away from our first World Cup match with a big ‘W’ and an incredibly hard fought one at that. The Czechs are a ‘mean’ team, they’ve obviously been working their socks off in preparation for the world stage and it shows clearly in their play. I have to admit that I was totally unprepared as a player coming to my first World Cup, for the sheer wall of sound that a supporting (or opposing in this case) crowd can produce, and the Czechs should be incredibly grateful to their supporters for making such an incredible racket. I don’t think I was at all expecting myself to be intimidated by the supporters, but I could barely hear myself think over the drums an chants. Our stand, on the other hand, was rather bare with just a few early bird supporters filling a row or two. What we did have, however, was one rather poetic lone piper whose fantastic playing whenever we were down in the attacking end was what helped me re-focus on my game after the first few minutes of nerves and frankly, shock. From then on the game was incredible, fantastically enjoyable and simultaneously sickeningly nerve-wracking. SO glad to have got the ‘W’ though, and wish the Czechs the best of luck in the rest of the tournament – they’ve got fire in their bellies.

A few of our team mates have been to several World Cups and tried to warn us newbies about what to expect, but despite all the preparations I don’t think anything can make you ready for every eventuality. We did try though, and last week played two friendly matches against Australia and New Zealand. Apart from the odd tour to the States, over the last couple of years as a team we’ve mostly been playing ourselves, and occasionally England, and Wales, and these two friendly matches were my first chance to play world class teams that I’ve never laid eyes on before. Their styles of play and moves were impressive, and I took many a tip away, but mostly the experience in the beautiful summer sun of England went a long way to preparing us for the incredible heat of Prague. It may sound like a small problem, but as a goalie I’ve been struggling to find the perfect sock/shinguard combination, and have been experimenting with countless variations. Thankfully, after these two matches I’d pretty much whittled it down to the right combo for the heat we’re to expect in Prague. We’ve been enjoying a lot of sun in the UK recently, and have been taking full advantage of the longer evenings and need to wear fewer layers, or barely any at all in fact!

This is Flame and Clare training on Spencer Park in London one sunny afternoon, sports bras and all.

Over the last few weeks every spare evening and weekend has been spent in the above park with the goals out practising shooting (or saving in my case), doing sprints/agility, circuits… and largely topping up the tans. We were also doing a pretty good job of trying to avoid any last minute injuries, with only one small nose shaped hiccup, which is now nicely healed (in the wrong place). When not training (or on the way there) we were round at our friend Lou’s place for sports massages every available minute, with a few opting for acupuncture which I’m still yet to try.

Here’s Flame getting whipped into shape by Scotland’s Physio, Lizzie (aka Lizzio)

Other than that, it’s been packing, making lists, buying stuff, and repacking. The new kit arrived (just in time) and looks splendid, but most importantly it fits and it’s nice and cool. We definitely feel like a unit, and in particular I’m loving our motto T’s. I don’t have a pic, but the motto is:

Together we stand

And winners take all.

Here’s a shot of us arriving in Prague, trying desperately to fit about 60 bags and 24 bums into a rather small bus.

We’re dead chuffed with the hotel – the rooms are clean, and it’s a stone throw from Tesco for those with a sensitive palette. Since arriving I reckon we’ve been doubling Tesco’s usual takings. Today I had a little joke with the guy trying desperately to re-stock the Powerade shelf, battling against us hordes emptying it every time we have the opportunity. If I spoke Czech I’d tell him to fill a whole cabinet with it to save himself the time, but perhaps he’ll work that out eventually.

Other than strolling around the aisles in Tesco there’s been some serious stick maintenance going on. This was mostly done in preparation for the official stick check and it was quite timely as there were many a frayed edge. The whole team were scattered between a couple of rooms picking at each other’s sticks, comparing with their own, and then picking at it again. It reminded me of a family of gorillas picking flees out of each other’s fur, very caring, but unfortunately we didn’t get a tasty snack at the end of each stick we fixed. A fun little team effort though, here’s Cat and Julia working away happily.

Other than fixing sticks, there’s been some experimentation and imitation going in the hairstyle department with several distinct schools of thought emerging. I’ll let you take your pick from the below selection.

If you want to keep up with the hairstyle debate, I suggest you get yourself down to a Scotland match (Germany today at 1, and New Zealand tomorrow at 4pm)

Till then, adieu… I’m off to warm up for our Germany match, but I can’t leave without adding in this last pic of our beloved coaching staff (and manager) – from Left, Martha, Justine, Katelyn and Colleen.