Design Laboratory

this idea started when Rebecca asked me if I could control a sign at Piccadilly Circus what would i do? I thought about it, and I would let people say something instead of big companies.

I want to create a social billboard. were anyone can post a message. its kinda inspired by twitter. and how users of the site take part in an act of advertising.

i want the information to collate. which could help answer my first question. “when is there just too much information?”

Rebecca showed me some work by Randall Hoyt. His “art poem unit”

He placed letters on a billboard that could be arranged by anyone to say something else.

i want to create something similar to this only digital. allowing it to be accessed from anywhere.

Twitter is a social networking site were you post up a max of 140 characters, and say what your doing.

The idea of this mass of searchable information, were you see only what you want is great. you see only the “tweets” from people you are following.

I’m not really a fan of twitter, i don’t really get it. however i am intrigued by it. i’ve been forcing myself to use it. in this time i have noticed a huge amount of advertising within the posts. but its not like regular advertising. its just people talking about what they like.

right now one of the one of the most talked about topics on twitter is American Idol. thousands of people saying if they loved or hated the show. giving the show free publicity.

this is so different from normal advertising. it’s like the peoples advertising.

probably the most effective way of selling something. because you are more likely the listen to a recommendation from a friend, rather than from a poster.

one way companies have managed to do this is by creating a buzz for a product, giving them social importance. meaning that people wanna talk about there product.

I went for a walk from were I live. Up past Shadwell DLR, along the A13 and back round.

I took photos of all the visual information I looked at. even if I just took a quick look.

from this picture you can clearly see that there are alot of advertisements along the busy A13. the scale of the images is to show the amount of time i spent looking at the sign/ad.

i singled out all of the visual information. so you would be able to see the ad’s more clearly, without any distractions. so you could make a decision on wether there is too much information.

i like how the images give you a strange sense of space. the ability to pan around the image makes it so much more real, rather than just a still image.

the process to do this was lengthy. i had to paint it all manually. i thought it was going to look rubbish wen i started. it didn’t look like anything until i had completely finished.

i want to make this live action. so you have cars buses and people walking past. but only being able to see them if the move in-front of ad’s. or buses with advertisements flying past.

I have decided to take some 360 degree photos. that i can them stitch together to make a interactive panorama.

so i just took out my camera on a tripod and went ad hunting.

i am going to take some images of a street. Remove everything but the signs and adds. i want to see if you can tell were the photos were taken, just from the mass of ad’s, or if you get a sense of 3d space just from the scale and angel of the ad’s.

it will also be a visual way to measure the amount of information on the street.

this is a mock up of what i am aiming for.

Amateur product placement.

The Samsung Instinct campaign site that encourages people to drop an image of the phone into their home videos and upload them to you tube.

Bright GIS rents out billboard space all around the (virtual but real) world: “Promote your business through our world-wide network of hundreds of Google Earth Virtual Billboards. Located in dozens of cities around the world, these billboards can serve as the face of your organization in Google Earth. No experience with 3-D modeling necessary! We’ve already done the hard work for you. Simply provide us with a copy of your promotion, or work with our design team to develop your ad, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

This is the story of stuff. Annie Leonard’s 20 minute-short film “The Story of Stuff” is a “is a look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns”. And a reminder of what what they do to our planet.

she states that advertising is a huge part in the development of a throw away society.

i don’t know tho?

They deleted every single public advertising space in a Vienna shopping district for two weeks.

(Howard Gossage)

(Crispin Porter + Bogusky Employee Handbook)

i traveled on the tube as i do every day. only wen i changed onto the central line at mile end. i realized  the carriage was a little darker than normal. the train started to enter the tunnel and the carriage was plunged into complete darkness. it was kinda scary how dark it was. i couldn’t even see my hands in-front of my face.

all visual information was removed.

i became much more involved with the music i was listening to.

made me realize how much we aimlessly look round at things.

stopped b4 liverpool street for like 15 mins. in complete darkness. in the end people were getting there phones out. My attention was then focused completely on the only light, the only thing i could see. the light from peoples phones.

this has inspired me to look at the saturation of information in day to day life. This illustrated to me how we ignore information when there is too much of it. because i had nothing to look at i was actively seeking out things to look at.

with or with out? The top image looks so deserted even tho there are people there.  you don’t realize how in your face the adds are until you remove them.

i am also going to be tacking results from commuters on the tube.

Roughly

of people feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising and consider it to be out of control.

2004 Yankelovich study

how memorable is it? with the amount there is?

Too many road signs? don’t we need to be keeping our eye’s on the road?

getting a little silly… people just covering there backs so they don’t get sued putting signs up which assume no one has any common sense

blogs - twitter - do i really need to know what everyone is doing at any given second?

i have decided to research into the question:

In day to day life we are constantly bombarded with visual and audio advertising wether it be on the radio, news, tube even surfing the internet. Its part of life. What i am interested in is how much of this mass of information actually gets though to the general public. i believe a large majority of it is simple ignored therefore pointless, because its not for-filling the purpose it was created for. in some cases causing a public nuisance.

i am going to execute some tests of my own design to see if i can answer my question.