The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.
Steve Cluett
Creative Director
- Loves: Wolverhampton Wanderers, Indie Music, Marathon Running
- Hates: Balloons, Marzipan, Heights
- Inspired by:
- Lomo Photography - www.lomography.com
- Rob and Nick Carter - www.robandnick.com
- New York City - www.nycvisit.com
- My links:
games, Venn Diagram, Google, Winner, Wave, Cancer Awareness, Trending Topics, Social Media, Fans, Full Moon, GoogleWave, Raffle, Brand, The Sandpit, genius, Tilt-shift, Facebook, Playgroup, GoogleDocs, Bart Bonte, Colour, Aero Film, Docs, Adnams, Email, simple, Waver, Playful09, Sam O'Hare, New York City
Hope you had a frolicking good time at Playful09 last Friday and that you came away suitably energized and inspired – plenty of food for thought. For those of you that spotted the raffle ticket in your lunch bag, here as promised, is the randomly selected winning ticket.
If you’re the lucky holder of ticket #255, then just drop us an email with your contact details and we’ll pop something ‘playful’ and of pretty limited value in the post. You’ll need to tell us the unique five-digit code to verify your claim (sneaky eh?).
Well done indeed!
email: steve@playgroup.com
I was especially sad to hear of the passing of sixties chat show host Simon Dee last week. Not that I remember the swinging sixties – when Dee was the hottest property on TV. No. To me, and my neighbours, Simon Dee was the reclusive man who lived round the corner, spent nearly all of his time tending his tiny patch of garden, and would occasionally pass the time of day. For a long while I had no idea about his celebrity past.
In his heyday he interviewed stars like Sammy Davis Jr, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Hope, Charlton Heston and John Lennon on his twice-weekly chat show Dee Time. The show, which opened with the catchphrase “It’s Siiiiimon Dee”, attracted 18 million viewers – he was like Jonathan Ross and Chris Moyles rolled into one. He compered Miss World, appeared on Juke Box Jury and Top of the Pops, helped launch pirate pop station Radio Caroline and even had a cameo role in The Italian Job. His freewheeling, irreverent spirit is said to have been the inspiration for the Austin Powers character and he could often be seen cruising down the King’s Road in his Aston Martin DB5 with a glamorous blonde in tow.
The BBC thought Dee was becoming too big for his boots and after a disagreement over his huge salary demands, his contract was reviewed in 1969 and he left the channel. He was offered £100,000 for a two-year contract with the independent channel LWT and commenced a series with them in January 1970. But Dee fell out with the LWT management as well and they terminated his contract after only a few months. Having alienated both the BBC and independent television, Dee prematurely disappeared from the airwaves.
He signed on for unemployment benefit at the Fulham labour exchange and, unable to revive his showbusiness career, he took a job as a bus driver. He also had several court appearances and in 1974 he served 28 days in Pentonville prison for non-payment of rates on his former Chelsea home. In 1994 he came to Winchester, where he lived out his final years in a small, warden controlled council flat in Hyde.
Asked recently about his dramatic fall from grace, Dee said, “I’ve no regrets. If you change your past, you change your present. Bitterness destroys, but laughter lifts you.”
And that’s exactly how his neighbours in Winchester will remember him. Cheerful, eccentric, roguish and reclusive.
I really hope that someone looks after his plants.
Playgroup and printers Good News Press invite students, graduates and young photographers to submit entries to a photographic competition entitled “The Power of Play”.
Winning entries will be printed in a high quality publication themed around play which will distributed to all the top creative directors in London and beyond. It’s the perfect opportunity to show off your skills and get some exposure with the most influential people in the industry. To launch the brochure Good News Press will also be hosting a special private view of the winning entries.
Theme
The human need to play is a powerful one. As children we learn as we play, and through play we learn how to learn. Play holds no boundaries – it encourages an uninhibited, free-thinking, just-try-it-out kind of mentality that stimulates imagination and creativity.
"The true object of all human life is play."
G K Chesterton
Around children we are given permission to play, unrestrained by the need to conform to social norms of what is ‘acceptable’ grown-up behaviour. But while play is vital to child learning and development, it is also crucial for adults too – for our mental creativity, our health and our happiness. Play gives us a platform for new perspectives and enables us to generate ideas in an organic and fun way.
Brief
We’d like you to give us your interpretation of play. We’re looking to create a collection of striking images that give a sense of why play is vital throughout our lives.
All of the images need to be of high resolution and can be either colour or black and white. The brochure will be showcasing Good News Press’ new Staccato print process. Staccato printing is typified by extremely fine detail, excellent reproduction of subtle tones (like skin tones) and smooth gradations of tone or colour so we’ll also be looking for images that display some of these attributes.
Deadline
In the first instance please email your entries to Steve Cluett, Creative Director, Playgroup steve@playgroup.com Please include your contact details and a brief title/description of your shot(s). All entries will then be uploaded to a dedicated Flickr page at www.flickr.com/photos/thepowerofplay for viewing. For reproduction purposes all winning entries must be available as high resolution images (minimum file size 15MB). We are happy to receive photos via file sharing websites such as File Dropper (www.filedropper.com) if you prefer.
Closing date for submissions is Friday 11 September 2009.
Happy playing ;-)
In these days of the aggresive hard sell, it was really refreshing to encounter a particularly ‘soft sell’ the other day.
We were at the wonderful Hat Fair in Winchester, which is the UK’s largest festival of Street Theatre. Milo, our little lad, had spotted a number of kids carrying around fairly convincing monkey puppets and he just had to have one. Eventually we found the Monkey Man’s stall and Sharon went to ask how much they were – twenty minutes later, we were still there.
Chris, the monkey handler, informed us that we weren’t allowed to buy a monkey. We could adopt one, but only if the monkey agreed to go with us. These were vulnerable monkeys that had been treated badly when they were young and their mummies had left them – that’s why they were being so quiet. Chris got down to Milo’s level and only showed him the little monkeys. Milo immediately fell in love with Mikey. He listened intently as the Monkey Man laid down some adoption rules. Mikey was to have bananas or banana sandwiches every day and if you take him into MacDonalds or KFC an alarm goes off from a microchip he has in his ear. If he becomes really unruly you can gently rub his ears to calm him down (apparently this also works on ladies). If it doesn’t work you can call him and he’ll come and pick up all the unruly monkeys in a big lorry (also full of naughty children). Milo had to promise to look after Mikey, and Mikey eventually agreed to come home with us.
Milo doesn’t think Mikey is real. But he is enjoying the responsibility of looking after him. We’re going through bananas like there’s no tomorrow.
Incidentally adoption costs for a small monkey are just £7. Almost all of the puppets are sold by street traders, who bring a playful spirit to our streets, entertaining children and adults alike. At the same time they raise awareness of the plight of our primates and raise some cash for their rehabilitation, with a proportion of all sales going to The Orangutan Foundation.
That worked.
But as the proliferation of communication/media channels increases, how do we ensure that our message is heard through the hubub?
I for one am drowning in a sea of emails, tweets, SMS messages and status updates. Yesterday I received 139 !!!VERY IMPORTANT!!! emails, all vying for immediate attention. What’s more, none of them were spam. No ‘me love you long time’ little blue pills, no unbeatable (fake) Rolex watches, and no ‘not to be missed’ Nigerian Investment Opportunities. No. These were 139 genuine work related messages. Just 30 seconds spent reading each email equates to nearly an hour and ten minutes. Factor in response time as well as updating my ichatflickrfacebooklinkedintwitter status and you begin to understand the term comms fatigue.
We need to be more effective in our email behaviour. More consideration of the subject line and less blanket cc’ing (incidentally when did cc’ing become a verb – I cc, you cc, we cc…).
Interestingly the only email that stands out from yesterday was one entitled: Please, please, please read my CV. I did.
It’s been a long held belief that the fusion of skills and methodologies that all good designers possess – creativity, inquisitiveness, analysis, storytelling and collaboration – would be applicable in many other spheres of life and to many other problems than the traditional confines that ‘graphic’ or ‘industrial’ design allow.
It was fascinating, therefore, to hear Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, espousing such a notion at his recent Talking Design talk at the V&A. IDEO have a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative by fusing design, business, and social studies. They’re the kind of firm that companies turn to when they want a top-down rethink of a business, product or service – from futuristic mind-control devices to enabling nurses to make their shift change more efficient.
Inspirational stuff.
Tim has a book out in September called ‘Change by Design’ but in the meantime check out this playful talk from the 2008 Serious Play Conference.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html
Along with 235,581+ fellow followers I’ve been avidly devouring the tweety musings and poetic ramblings of cyberhero Stephen Fry recently. Like some intrepid explorer reporting back from far flung corners of the Empire he delights in regaling us with daring stories of whale encounters and drunken Hollywood shindigs.
Where on earth does he find the time?
There are cynics out there that say he can’t possibly be doing it all himself. Yesterday he posted 22 tweets – my favourite being his description of a mule ride which resulted in a “testicle snuggled in each armpit”. I heard recently that Britney Spears actually employs a Tweeter, Lauren, to keep us up-to-date with her vacuous life (“Just found out that Britney had Pinkberry Sunday night. She gets the plain flavor with berries on it. Yum!”). Outrageous. Stephen would never do that. Each post has his distinctive timbre – you can almost hear the words resonating in those dulcet Public School tones.
Whatsmore, accessing Twitter as I do from my iPhone makes it feel like a personal relationship – Stephen’s posts arrive like texts, and I find myself worrying if I haven’t heard from him for a while.
So like some obsessed cyber-stalker I’ll continue to follow, along with a quarter of a million of his closest friends.
http://twitter.com/stevecluett
To demonstrate the speed of their mobile broadband cards, US 3G network Sprint recently unveiled this captivating ‘widget’ by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners which displays a multitude of statistical data gently ticking over in real time before your eyes. By constantly polling other data sources on the Web, the site shows such vital information as ‘how many bicycles are currently being produced worldwide’ and ‘the number of people currently stuck in elevators’. A live snap-shot of what is happening ‘Now’.
Utterly useless. Totally captivating. Plug into Now!
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
Right. Let’s get on with it then. I don’t think we need to be American.
Incidentally isn’t it amazing how quickly Obama has sunk into public conciousness. He hasn’t even started his new job yet and already my two young kids are referring to their pyjamas as Barack Obamas – and they aren’t even Cockney!
My son Milo is a fairly typical five year old. His world revolves around Scooby Doo, Spiderman and Star Wars. At school, like his contemporaries, he’s being primed in the three R’s, and he’s pretty much where he should be for his age. Milo loves school, but like all boys I’m sure he’d sometimes prefer to be hurtling round with his mates.
Why is it then that at such a tender age, and with such little worldly experience can he whoop me every time on our new Wii?
It’s a glowing testament to the developers at Nintendo that they’ve created a console that is so utterly intuitive that a child can not only master the motion-sensitive controls, but also build on their experiences to understand the nuances of gameplay in such a short period of time. Two weeks ago Milo didn’t even know what Bowling, Baseball or Tennis were. Now he can be heard running round the house shouting ‘Ha-ha Daddy – forty love.’
Play undoubtedly nurtures creativity and problem solving capabilities and the concept of learning through play is something that is not only being taken into the classroom, but into the workplace too.
Wii can all learn through a little play.
Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Check out this wonderful, and utterly riveting footage of the Monster Trucks Smash Derby by Sydney based photographer Keith Loutit. Using a combination of techniques including tilt-shift and time-lapse photography, Loutit gives the overall impression of a Lilliputian stadium, with miniature spectators, toy trucks and radio-controlled cars. The vehicles almost seem to take on a life of their own. I particularly like the busy little dumper truck that comes to the rescue of the floundering beasts. Brilliant.
Metal Heart is just one of a series of short films by Loutit – view them all on Vimeo.
