Most people use Flickr to say, here I am, here is this object or building and tag it so people can find it. I think I like the reverse more though.

A good friend Trevira is one of those people who collect the interesting and bizarre, mostly for aesthetic reasons alone, with out knowing what it is.

Flickr provides the perfect universe of Miss Marple’s and Dr.Watsons to do your detective work for you without having to resort to the long queues at the antiques roadshow and the humiliation of being told, in front of the masses on Sunday night television, that your prize Bakelite Elephant is a 2003 copy made in Southend-on-Sea.

Trevira’s identified items range from the ‘Billy Fury’ (way cooler than Adam Faith!) type.

…to precision Blackpool bus identifications.

VFR372 Leyland Atlantean PDR1 with 50 seat Weymann body. New in June1961 to Standerwick as No.30

It’s a real ‘History Reunited’ for extraordinary items and their past, with no alternative motives for one-upmanship on the class bully.

“I’m constantly amazed by the knowledge and helpfulness of Flickr people - and very, very grateful. ” says Trevira

This system might not be so applicable to some objects.

‘Here is an atom, can anyone describe its rules and behaviour?’ Might not get such measured results from undiscovered quantum physics geniuses out there, but as far as recognising your great auntie Nora on her holidays in Butlins Bognor Regis, just from her knobbly knees, it’s got real potential, and Flickr agree.

Just as Nasa images are not generally copyrighted the status of many ‘found’ objects is being re-described, until we know otherwise, as ‘no known copyright restrictions,’ specifically for Flickr’s The Commons project.

Organisations such as The Public Catalogue Foundation catalogue the nation’s resources of publicly owned images, many of which linger in museum cellars with unknown artists or subjects, currently fitting the ‘no known copyright restrictions’ model perfectly, and missing story or history.

The Flickr commons project first attracted our attention though the circulation of the amazing images The Library of Congress have put up, and secondly by the idea of crowd sourcing its research on the photos content.

Flickr say

“Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.”

And from the reaction on the Flickr blog it seems to have been a raging success so far.

“In the 24 hours after we launched, you added over 4,000 unique tags across the collection and just over 500 comments (most of which were remarkably informative and helpful), and the Library has made a ton of new friends (almost overwhelming the email account at the Library, thanks to all the “Someone has made you a contact” emails)!”

The Library of Congress Flickr albums are unusual and breathtaking. Women workers in the second world war have an otherworldly beauty akin to Hollywood stars. Sports stars of the past have a surprisingly natural physique. Unknown soldiers are brought to life. Pastoral dust bowl farms with subjects clearly uncomfortable in front of the lens give a real sense of the making of America.

Hopefully, the positive response will also encourage the Library and others to allow more of their materials to be tagged, enhanced and used by us “ordinary” people.

On a purely selfish note, I have owned this postcard for years –

Can anyone tell me more about it?

iDesign, London’s first big conference on digital design, provided the main digital focus for the London Design Festival, backed by the London Development Agency. The event brought together online, mobile, film, games and TV, aiming to discuss how these affect our collective digital future with a focus on design principles and practices for both economic and social benefit.

iDesign itself was organised by Dynamo London and New Media Knowledge, and hosted by Simon Waterfall, who established a company Poke, and is the current D&AD president. Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson and Production Director Jason Ryan were in attendance after Malcolm Garrett of Applied Information Group nominated Cogapp as a creative inspiration in the digital supplement for Design Week magazine. The panel of judges, including Malcolm Garrett, talked about their inspirations, with some quite experimental and ‘out there’ ideas.

The event show stealer was Martyn Ware, a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17. Martyn’s current work with illustrious focuses on public space interactives that are very information driven. Martyn works in collaboration with Vince Clarke, from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, and showcased some terrific soundscape material, focusing on 3D sound and interactive spaces. Other contributors included (Malcolm’s fellow student) Peter Saville and Nick Knight’s SHowstudio, and D-Fuse.

Other speakers included Adam Gee, who presented on Channel 4 Big Art Mob – an arts-based cultural project housed by Channel 4 which uses mobile technology and user generated content to create what “the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art”. Although not fully cross-platform yet, the response from users is already encouraging.

Interactive lighting artist Jason Bruges, showed his illuminated visions of architectural augmentation. He has a strong body of work, doing public space projects like wind-generated light sticks, with really beautiful design. Dazed Digital have a feature on Jason to watch here.The iDesign panel showed a great deal of pioneering and emotive projects, and the design discussions were very broad in topic. There was a really nice wide discussion about how these things need to start connecting with the important side of user experience, online and offline campaigns, and more; bringing a very intelligent and fun edge to what was a pure design conference. You can read a full report on the Dynamo London site here.

Here is a video clip of Malcolm Garrett’s talk at the conference we thought we’d share, with some rather familiar characters featured. Thanks to Youtube user Drumgold who has lots of other material from iDesign.

Character designed by Dainippon Type Organization - http://www.kokuyo.co.jp/hiramekitoys/toypography/

The font set is broken down into parts which can be transformed into Japanese text, or fun creatures!

Theo Jansen started making full size working flying saucers in the 1980s that understandably brought Orson Welles/HG Wells-esq hysteria to the town of Delft in Holland.

Strandbeest is his latest series of ‘new nature’ formed over the last fourteen years. Skeletons of very basic materials (bottles and yellow tubes) are used to produce beautiful and unusual walking animals, powered by the wind.

The Strandbeest themselves live in a real world environment where they successfully avoid water, survive wind, and walk over obstacles. Watching them leaves the same haunting impression as the Antony Gormley beach sculptures, an unnerving sensory recognition of the closely familiar, yet unfamiliar.

It seems odd that a Dutch artist’s sculptures manage to achieve such holly grails that Sony, Honda, Toshiba and other high profile bots still struggle with, and this interesting video on Ted.com provides some clues.

Strandbeest’s simple ‘behaviour parts’ produce actions we see as intelligent (e.g. avoiding water, storms) without any complex definable central brain. The combination behavior of all the smaller ‘intelligent’ parts gives the overall first impression of these creatures being very much alive.

These re-usable ‘behaviour parts’ (nose, legs, water detector) if they prove successful in helping the animal survive in its environment are passed down to each new generation of Strandbeest, with more behaviour parts (time/power storage bottles etc) being added in layers to aid or inhibit other behavior.

These Youtube clips show CGI animations of the ‘walking’ behavior.

Clip 1
Clip 2

Theo Jansen’s approach is Darwinist, with himself as the ‘Watchmaker’ guiding each step.

Stranbeest living characteristics appear to be formed through simple subsumption architecture, Rodney Brooks’ approach to intelligent bots.

So as Sony, Honda and others struggle on with their massive budgets, hi-tech sensory motors and inflexible stance, Theo has re-invented the wheel in a very practical and artistic way.

It would be interesting to know how these creatures are designed, and what accelerated evolution would do to their shape and forms in a virtual environment.

As it is, we are happy for Theo and his ‘new nature’ race of Strandbeest to evolve, at their own slow pace, situated in their own environment, where Theo hopes herds of Strandbeest can live out their own lives.