Clare Townhill

Industrial Design That Transcends Cultural Boundaries

10 examples of total feralness in toy-design. This is number 7: Inflatable Wolverine. "Kids: if somebody tells you this is how you “jumpstart his mutant healing factor,” find a teacher or a police officer immediately." Taken lock-stock from Guyism

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Guardian API

Nice new toys to play with from The Guardian. Good talk on this by Simon Williams at BarCamp6. Alas falling down a deep dark pitch hole means I'm a bit tardy with posting the details. The API was launched at the beginning of March and currently has two components:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Data Store is just genius, enables some great uses and insight via blogs like Ouseful and bawdy yet no less interesting guest posts like this:

'Towards the end of last week, a sleepness night led me to indulge a childish sense of humour with 15 minutes of tomfoolery, the output of which was a graph comparing the decline and fall of various swear-words in the pages of the Guardian over the last decade. In a bid to retain some sense of self-respect, I'll for now ignore the fact that this graph has achieved a readership that dwarfs anything else I've written in my career to date, and focus instead on how I did it.'

The Guardian Open Platform

Doggy iD

Sniftag: Tails told, friends made. This really is very lovely. It's a Nike iD for dogs and their owners combined with an introduction service under the pretence of building social networks of four-legged friends. Genius.

From one snif to another. New research on what makes dogs noses so brilliant:

'Snot makes dogs supersleuths'

DOGS' extraordinary ability to sniff out anything from cocaine to cancer turns out to owe much to the gunk inside their nose.

Dogs have many more nerve cells in their nasal cavities than we do and a wider variety of receptors to latch on to odour molecules. Now a team led by Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University in University Park has shown that the complex network of snot-coated tubes in a dog's nose also "pre-sorts" smells, which may make it easier for the brain to identify them.

Before odour molecules can reach smell receptors, they must get through a layer of mucus - and some molecules are absorbed quicker than others. To find out how this might affect smell perception, Craven's team used MRI images of a dog's nasal airways to develop computer models of how air travels along them. The team found that different molecules are first picked up at different points in the airway network.

Until now, research has focused on how receptors pick up different chemicals. "We've shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is also important," says Craven. The team presented its results this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society's division of fluid dynamics in San Antonio, Texas.

Mystery on Fifth Avenue

Here is another post inspired by last week's Playful Event. I was tempted to call this post 'Rekindling of Faith' which is the feeling I had after hearing Eric Clough talking about his architectural-puzzle-wonder on Fifth Avenue in NY. Eric was commissioned to apply his architectural and design talents to create a 'non-cookie-cutter style apartment' for the Klinsky-Sherry family. What followed was this:

1. The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky-Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.

But not all at once. One of the things I love about this is the patience, the ability to hold back, wait:

Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:

We’ve taken liberties with Yeats

to lead you through a tale

that tells of most inspired fates

in hopes to lift the veil.

The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that contained a beautifully bound and printed book. The book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.

 

3. A rectangular panel in the den and guest room opens to reveal acrylic slices, far left, that fit together to form a cube. When the chamfered magnetic cube lodged above the slices is dragged over the 24 panels on a nearby wall, they open.

4. Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky, the apartment's owner, for his wife, Maureen Sherry, and their children.

5. Decorative leather molding stamped with letters in a hallway can be popped out and wrapped around a rod removed from the foot of Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky’s bed so that the letters on the coiled leather spell out a clue.

Here's something else that I love about this story; here's a little piece from the full NYT article:

'Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their custom-made bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. “I’m thinking, What the heck kind of cheap bed is this?” said Ms. Sherry, who phoned Mr. Clough the next day.

His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger “story” and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to just snap the piece back into the bed.'

And she did.

6. Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.

7. Millwork panels in a hallway were designed to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one fit together to make a key that opens the other.

8. In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

9. Photographs of the apartment’s original interiors have secret writing on the back that reveals the number of salamanders in the apartment. The salamander is a motif that is part of the puzzle and appears throughout the apartment.

10. Door knockers on opposite walls of a hallway initially seemed pointless. They can be removed and joined to create a crank that opens hidden panels in the dining room sideboard.

11. The custom-made sideboard has hidden panels on either side that can be cranked open to display keys and keyholes.

12. When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed.

13. The drawers contained acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle. The answers to the crossword puzzle led to the panels in the guest room, behind which were the words of the poem.

14. The children’s bedrooms have radiator covers with poems written specifically for each child cut into them in code. The Caesar Shift cipher in the bedroom of the oldest child, Cavan, was broken by a friend.

All pictures taken from the NYT slideshow 'Cracking the Code'. Full 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' article and narrative here.

Bloody wonderful.

Tots Want Tech

Good article in the NYT today about technology for the age-group 3+:

'Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.'

Worth also noting that this is broader than vying for children's attention in the toy market: it's the business of competing for children's attention in the multi-media age.

NYT: For Toddlers, Toy of Choice is Check Device

'I'm a Barbie Girl, In My Online World'

Ever the obsessive, I decided to do this good and proper. Here are all the links to the various sites unearthed by a good old Google around the doll we all love to hate:

What happens when Barbie becomes part of a third-grader's science fair project called 'Does skin color make a difference? Quite a lot apparently:
http://www.barbiesciencefair.info/

The Decline of Civilisation Barbie Page
Lots of good links to Barbie satire including commemorative stamps celebrating 35 years of teaching anorexia.

Tourette Syndrome Barbie

Adios Barbie
A PC site for body tolerance whatever your shape or size (apparently); on-site game which allows users to catch food in a models mouth (so not quite as tolerant as it would first appear). Also contains some good facts on the plastic princess:

Every second, two Barbie dolls are purchased in the world

Placed head to toe, all the Barbie dolls sold since 1959 would circle the earth more than seven times

Barbie has had more than 75 careers, from registered nurse to rock star.

About one billion fashions have been produced for Barbie and her friends during the past four decades. The doll has had over a billion pairs of shoes in that time.
      
More than 100 million yards of fabric have gone into Barbie's outfits, making Mattel one of the largest apparel manufacturers in the world.

One woman's quest to become Barbie via a lot of plastic surgery:
CindyJackson: Living Doll

And, perhaps most horrifically of all, the official Mattel site. Not for the faint hearted or those with the slightest aversion to pink. You have been warned. Puke-arific:
Barbie Everything Girl

Kill Barbie

Obviously having a Barbie orientated day. Stumbled across this on YouTube today. Again courtesy of the BLO (Barbie Liberation Organisation). Here's an update of their latest action in the form of the BDI (Barbie Disinformation Organisation):

Calling themselves the Barbie Disinformation Organization, the group strikes not at the dolls themselves, but at the packaging that envelops and contextualizes them. They print up stickers in a style identical to traditional Mattel packaging and slap them on Barbie products on the shelves (front and back), effectively replacing Mattel's pleas to the daddy's little girls of the world with their own. And what tow-headed little princess wouldn't want the "Barbie Lesbian Barber Shop" (formerly "Barbie's Stylin' Salon"), complete with instructions on how to give Barbie "Dyke Haircut nos 1 & 2". And what father wouldn't want her daughter to beam in psychotic gratitude for "Lipstick Lesbian Betty" (formerly "Barbie's Best Friend Betty". There's something for the young presumably pre-date raping males as well- somehow "Secret Agent #007 -- with uppercut punch action!" Becomes "Corporate Drone Dan -- with Gropomatic(tm) Fanny-Patting Grip".

Barbie in Wonderland

From the company that brought us the 'Math is Hard' Barbie, I find it a little odd to say the least that they have incarnated the world's favourite airhead into a literary classic. Reading is obviously easier than math. As for what they've done to Ken, who I always believed couldn't get any gayer, he seems to have been turned into a tiny version of Quentin Crisp.