Brain Pickings

Mobile Mobile: The Christmas Tree Retought

Dusty phones, giant chandeliers, and a post-modern Christmas tree that tweets.

This month, interactive artist James Theophane was tasked with creating a holiday experience that embodied the spirit of collaboration for London ad agency Lost Boys. When he heard that there had been an agency-wide cell phone upgrade two months earlier, leaving behind fifty old phones, Theophane decided to upcycle the old phones into a reinterpretation of the idea of the Christmas tree and its role as a communal focal point.

The result was Mobile Mobile, a giant interactive chandelier, where each hanging phone plays a different note of a Christmas carol and flashes in time.

The elaborate scheme works by assigning a tone to each phone and making it individually addressable by a computer to create the choral arrangement, bringing the choir of devices to life.

Visitors and onlookers can “play” the installation from their browser, and it has also been wired to respond to tweets.

Indulge your inner geek with a behind-the-scenes look at the rather impressive production process. And if you have an old phone lying around, unless you can wire it up into a brilliant interactive chandelier, why not consider donating it to Hope Phones?

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A Stop-Motion Treat from BBC Radio 1

42,000 antidotes to anonymity, or how to close the feedback loop by opening up the silo.

We’re all for openness and transparency. Which is why we love BBC Radio 1′s Access All Areas initiative — a weeklong experimental exercise in cracking open the silo and offering listeners a gritty, live look behind the scenes of the iconic studio.

As part of the project, Radio 1 launched the Meet The Listeners campaign, negotiating with all the mobile operators to drop charges for picture messages to Radio 1 and asking listeners to send in pictures of themselves in order to put put a face to the loyal audience that defines Radio 1.

In a single day, they received 42,000 photos, then used them to stitch together this lovely stop-motion film:

Simple, wonderful.

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DoGooder: Do Nothing, Change Everything

How to bypass annoyance with slick design and serious dogoodness.

UPDATE: DoGooder is now available for Chrome, the Brain Pickings browser of choice. Perfect combo of performance and purpose.

This week, a new report found that the average American guzzles more than 34 gigabytes of data per day. And anyone who’s ever been online can attest that a hefty portion of this comes from advertising, which, with the exception of the best-curated sites (ahem…), can be anything from a distraction to a nuisance. This has led many to the infamous Adblock Firefox plugin, eliminating ads altogether. But why take your negative experience and turn it neutral, when you can turn it positive?

Enter DoGooder, an ingenious new browser plugin for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer that turns your ordinary browsing into donations supporting sustainability initiatives and movements — with no cost to you and no change in browser performance.

Here’s how it works: DoGooder hides all the ordinary ads and swaps them out for simple daily green tips, health and wellness ideas, and well-designed messaging for meaningful initiatives from the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) category. Half of their profits then go to a thoughtfully curated list of charities and nonprofits — which means DoGooder has the potential to generate thousands of dollars a month for good causes.

If you’re a publisher, there’s nothing to fear — DoGooder doesn’t block ads from being served on your site, it just changes the end-user experience, so your CPM earnings remain unaffected. (Think of it as slipping a nice cover over a questionably designed couch.) If your run a charitable or sustainability-related site, you can even drop DoGooder a line and they’ll whitelist you and “exempt” your site from ad-blocking.

This is what a couple of popular sites look like goodified:

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, you can even keep track of how many ads have been swapped.

And if for some reason you’re particularly enamored with the regular ads on some site, you can always disable DoGooder there simply by right/ctrl-clicking on the site and selecting “Show Original Ads.” The right/ctrl-click is also the way to let DoGood Headquarters know about a good cause they should consider featuring — just select “Suggest a Cause to Support.”

Genius, or what?

Thanks, Andy

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