For me, Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum was a highlight speaker in this early session.

Shelley spoke about the agile and creative online projects that the small team at the Brooklyn Museum are creating to attract new audiences.

Cutting through some of the user research demographics, she simply stated that the Brooklyn Museum treats their online audience as a “single, credible group that has value in it’s own right”.

This was supported by the quality of projects they were producing such as the Facebook app Artshare: a new way for users to share their collection and display their favourite art works in their Facebook profile.

She went on to present the results from their youtube competition launched in October last year. The quality of the content was superb, fresh and low-fi. Shelley noted a good point about the importance of clear rules for their online competitions and the importance of letting the user know what the brief is and what they are being asked to do.

The Brooklyn Museum seems to be a small, confident leader in this field, where larger museums find it harder to be reactive and agile in such a high octane web 2 environment, Shelley and her team seem happy with the model of “begging for forgiveness when the project has launched” rather than “pleading for permission to go ahead”…

A refreshing and confident attitude that is attracting a credible, sustainable and engaged fanbase.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

Last week saw the annual dSCAPE 2007 event that’s part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

It’s a great event that is brilliantly organised by the team at Wired Sussex, and a rare chance for agencies, freelancers and students to meet and talk about inspirations, innovations and share ideas (and beer).

Cogapp attended 2 of the events, Folio Clinic on the first night and Designers Night on the final night.

Starting with Folio Clinic, an event where students and freelancers can talk to established creatives and get advice, direction and possible opportunities in a quick-fire, informal environment.

Ben Aquilina and I were at the Cogapp table and had a steady flow of students and freelancers all night. It was a high standard overall and we were really impressed by the variety of skillsets available in the local area. Lots of 3D animators, illustrators and some really strong print and interactive designers bringing fresh ideas to the table.

You can see more images from the Folio Clinic on the dSCAPE website here.

The dSCAPE week finished with Designer’s Night at the Sallis Benney Theatre.

The presentation format was Pecha Kucha, where speakers, myself included, get 20 slides each lasting 20 seconds. It’s very informal, high paced and offers each person 6 minutes 40 seconds of banter/mayhem before the next presenter is up. The idea is to keep presentations sharp and to the point, and keep the interest level up for the audience.

The evening was a great success and the format made it superbly entertaining and inspirational. All the speakers were varied and had a great range of subjects to talk about, from ‘The Side Effects of Too Much Choice’ by John Davison of Kanoti to ‘Beautiful Music (2.0)’ by Mogul and the Prawn and ‘Subtractivism’ by Hamish Makgill of StudioMakgill.

You can find a full list of the speakers and their subjects here.

The was no overall ‘best talk’, that’s not the point, it’s the collaborative effect of all speakers that makes an entertaining and unexpected evening for the audience. But for me, particular mention goes out to Steve Price of Plan-B Studio for his amazing skill in delivering a brilliant talk despite a technical meldown of keynote and 5 minutes of mad ranting heckles by someone in the audience.

My talk (shown below) was titled ‘Click Art’ - A seat of your pants journey through the world of Art, interactives and inspirations, plus some random things thrown in for good measure.

A great night that was inspirational, entertaining and superb fun. Let’s have more of them…

These people found themselves with an awful lot of spare time, a few extra GPS devices and some very active dogs called Boris and Gemma. A brilliant use of technology and livestock.

GPS dogs

People on bikes also did some rather nice ones too.

There has to be some advertising potential here?

Chances are, if you’re watch telly any point soon you’ll probably be seeing a font created by Fontsmith.

Ben, Fiona and I have come across Fontsmith a few times this year, they’ve created a number of stunning typefaces used by a few of our clients and are currently the ‘tour de force’ of type design studios.

One of the things that really sets Fontsmith apart is their ability to create really beautiful typefaces that work superbly on screen; BBC One, Channel 4, More 4, ITV, Film 4 to name a few.

Enjoyable and well worth looking at - Fontsmith

In the spirit of debate about the 2012 brand launch, design consultancy Bibliothèque exhibited their fantastic collection of design work by Otl Aicher and his team for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

It’s a timeless and extensive communications system covering books, posters, signage and was executed by a team of over 4o designers.

Wonder if 2012 will be admired in a similar way in 25 years (hope so) ?

Bibliothèque 72 Exhibition

Wiki - Otl Aicher

Using a tool called Walrus, a clever chap called Young Hyun thinks it looks like this:

“Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, it provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context.”

The Gallery of images depicts nodes in a surprisingly organic and natural looking way, featuring visualisations of web site directory hierarchies, CVS repository (not normally known for their visual beauty), and directory trees.

Much prettier than we thought it would be.

If anyone has any children’s drawings of ‘What the web looks like’ we would be interested to see.

Created by Brand New School in New York, this interactive billboard was designed to in conjunction with the launch of Adobe’s new CS3 range of products and it’s tagline ‘Creative License’.

It’s an interesting execution of a simple idea and one that starts to push the boundaries of brand experience a little further away from the standard self contained brand showreel approach towards something a little more interactive.

http://www.brandnewschool.com/project.php?id=410

I found this site whilst doing Discovery for a pitch earlier this year. I’ll make no bones about it, it’s pretty ‘out there’ in terms of design and IA, the idea of placing the car parking information in a giant pop up car possibly verges between madness and genius, you decide.

It’s certainly memorable…

http://www.airport-cgn.de/

After a few minutes playing with the site I actually quite liked it, in a crazy, chunky soft icons sort of way.

Found this nice little shockwave (does anyone still use shockwave?) app some time ago whilst doing discovery for an interactive project. It’s part of the Getty ‘interact 1o ways’ campaign, in which companies such as Tomato, Less Rain, Sumona etc… created apps that explore the ‘power of the image’ - it’s been on the front of digg when it was launched way back.

Here’s a short blurb by Sumona:

“From its content to its visual components, a photograph is filled with information. Choose a point on an image and delve deeper into it, linking one idea to another in a never-ending chain.”

Reminds me of those fantastic Chuck Close paintings, which is why it inspires us.

The endless loop of interaction, a journey, telling a story - all parts to be considered in any user experience.

Interact 10 Ways - Sumona App