www.onehousandcranesforjapan.com #helpjapan #1000cranes

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ANOMALY NEEDS HELP!!

Hi,

I wondered if you guys could please help us out with a project we've worked day and night on the last week. We're trying to raise money for Japan but more importantly to make people stop for a second and send their thoughts and wishes to the affected. This is done completely pro bono and we're reaching out to everyone we know to drive PR and awareness of this initiative

Please forward to everyone in your office and every contact you might have that could make this reach further.

As the aftermath of the tsunami continues to cause serious disruption throughout northern Japan, we need to bring aid and support to the area as quickly as possible. Although financial donations will be greatly appreciated, it is also important that the people of Japan to know that we are contributing in a way that transcends monetary worth.

An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish. Today, the Japanese still respect this custom and use it to help loved ones recover from illness or injury.

One Thousand Cranes for Japan takes this tradition and expands it across the globe in a unified display of goodwill. Anomaly has together with Unit 9 created a project where in exchange for a donation you can print a specially designed pattern to fold into an origami crane in support of Japan.

Many famous artists have donated patterns for the initiative. We launch with designs from animators Zeitguised, photographer Todd Selby, artist Paul Slater, creative collective Actop, illustrators Brian Grimwood, Hennie HaworthLaura QuickMatt Lyon and directors Tokyo Plastic.

We will add designs as they come in day by day: we are expecting submissions from Diane von FurstenbergBrian Grimwood, Andy GilmoreJames JoyceMr BingoJody Barton and many more...

A donation to the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund allows you to download and print off one of these illustrations, complete with instructions on how to make your own origami crane.

We are hoping many thousands of people will make a crane and in doing so focus their wishes of hope and recovery for those in the grip of this tragedy.

Please contact us if you require imagery for publication.

Kind Regards,

Anomaly and friends


I never liked history or data at school...

But this is the kind of thing that always changes my mind.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered. This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More here.

Thanks to Tom U for the reference, and our Nathan for the post I mostly just copied above.

Post Endorsement

The advertising industry spends as much time on sites like YouTube and Vimeo looking for inspiration as they do complaining about how lazy everyone has become because of it. There are countless examples of ads that have clearly ripped off existing content, but the discussion has mainly been concerned with whether it's OK or not to 'be inspired' by such content, or if 'stealing' is just creativity by another name.

Since we find solving problems more intriguing than just discussing what causes them, we felt honour-bound to spend some time thinking about this. Is there a way to acknowledge the original work of the artists? To create more relevant communications for our brands or our those of our clients? To spend less money on redoing something that already has been done, and share the love with the original creators?

In the video above, it is impossible not to think about Nintendo, about the hours you've spent with Tetris, with the classic soundtrack in your ears and that heavy Gameboy in your hands. This animation is advertising Nintendo whether the creator likes it or not. Traditionally some creatives working on Nintendo would see that the clip had been viewed 125 000 times and think that redoing it would be an excellent idea because it's already been proven to work.

But what if we could let the clip be as it is: relevant, engaging and original, and then endorse it by paying the animator for the rights and by sponsoring his Vimeo page? We would brand the page rather than smack a logo on the end of the clip (or making a worse version). By doing this we would support creative people, we would endorse content relevant to the brand and we get content that has already been proven to have a 'viral' effect.

What do you think?

What would you repair?

Media_httpwwwwiredcomimagesarticlemagazine1709ffcraigslist5fjpg_mxbelkdehbrgmdb
Extreme Makeover: Craigslist Edition on wired.com

In their Extreme Makeover series Wired gave some thinkers/designers the hypothetical task of redesigning one of the most used sites in the world, Craigslist. A site with one of the poorest user experiences on the internet. As a first time visitor it's hard to even understand what the site is used for.

Some interesting concepts were put forward, some more conceptional than others and it's interesting to see how easily the site could be different, and how much better it could be.

What if more things were put under review, not necessarily by Wired, conceptual design competitions or students doing mock pitches, but by an agent linking up problems with possible solutions over all instances in society. What if everything was up for public repair, a crowd sourced society, where the ones that create the problems doesn't own the rights to solving them.

What would you repair?

We're considering the reading experience on local transport, summer related handicaps, our favourite market, the place we go for lunch amongst other projects. We'll keep you posted on the progress with those, if you keep us posted on your ones.

Our new home

We just moved our content from Tumblr to Posterous simply because we find the user experience more engaging and it allows everyone in the office to post to it. If you follow us on Tumblr via RSS, Posterous will post automatically to it so no need to update if you don't want to, if you're still into the old school way of typing in URL:s (how easy is http://anomalousness.posterous.com to get right the first time?) please come here in the future.