aspire to enquire

House plans

I've been starting to think about my Small Stone Cottage for the Lyddle End 2050 project.

There it is as it arrived from Russell Davies, around a month ago. A combination of Christmas, work and school has meant I haven't really been able to get into it, but as my dissertation draws to a close I'm hoping I can spend a day or so working properly on it towards the middle of January.

So I've been thinking about houses in 2050, and houses in 1966. If we'd done this project then, what would they have thought houses would look like now? If you follow the thoughts of Archigram, then we'd now be in walking, adaptable houses, which is kind of why I like this idea. But, in much the same way as we don't have a colony on a moving moon, a lot of those predictions are yet to be realised.

It may be a bit sad, but given Councils' approaches to planning, and considering the current housing financial crisis and the resulting future housing capacity crisis, and taking into account the ongoing energy/climate debate, I'm thinking my house will probably end up a little like this:

 

Maybe I'm not thinking far enough ahead, this house does kind of look like a house I'd like to live in now. 

But I'm having issues with seeing any of the new crop of eco developments, like the ones I've mentioned before, becoming widely adopted. 

Firstly, house builders seem intent on building those horrible red and yellow mock-traditional community-destroying chocolate box houses with paved drives and annoying dead ends. They market those to 'traditional families', leaving 'eco' developments to be pitched to the audi (or prius) owners, with an audi price tag. Any attempts at affordable eco developments, so far, seem to be one-off case studies for town councils to shout about while they carry on not building any other housing and blocking progressive developments. 

Secondly, are we really about to demolish our town centres, Le Corbusier style, to accommodate more efficient housing? Of course not, we're British. Are we going to build effective, sympathetic new eco towns into our green belt to meet the demand for greater capacity? Of course not, we're British.

So in my house, I've had to extend to accommodate higher shared occupancy brought about by unstoppable rise in demand and therefore price. I've built out over the back, and into the roof. There are solar panels to power the house, not for hot water, (they're so efficient by 2050 that they can provide nearly all the house's needs). I've added a roof garden, because I like them, and because I imagine most of the actual garden will be used for growing food. I haven't yet added any communications, and I'd like to add a little wind turbine to the chimney stack, but I think this is pretty much the shape I'll be aiming for. There will also be some sort of grey-water collection system, and probably a bike storage shed.

Craft knifes at the ready!

Yulia Brodskaya

We're working on a competition brief in uni at the moment, for the ffres awards. The brief is to design a new cover concept for a series of modern interpretations of The Mabinogion, Welsh folk stories.

Quite a few other people on the course, myself included, have decided to pursue a 'typographic solution'. I've always felt that this was shorthand for, in our class at least; 'not really doing any proper work, just choosing a nice font'.

Well, we could do a lot worse than checking out the work of Yulia Brodskaya. I have a feeling her work for The Guardian (pictured above) will be doing the rounds on the blogs for some time (it's already been picked up on our uni blog, and I have to thank Death By Kerning for the tip). But it's really worth checking out the rest of the illustrations on her site. 

It's a really timely reminder of exactly what is possible with type. My work on this project so far has gone a lot further than I'm used to going with type, and it's been really fun. Now, I'm not sure if 'inspiration' is the right word, but I'm looking forward even more than I already was to redrafting my submission. 

Not copying, or even anything close. For starters I couldn't cut paper that well, and even if I could, I couldn't photograph it. I think the 'Look Good' one is my favourite. 

I'm just inspired to go away and make some, you know, sexy letters. 

Maybe 'inspiration' was the right word, after all.

Badges

I picked up these badges at an almost-trendy 'zine launch the other week. Good aren't they? Good as in bad.

I used to ride Thameslink quite often, and always wondered why it was called Thameslink when it ran perpendicular to the Thames, from Brighton to Bedford. I think it's called Capital Connect now, which is a bit better. For ultimate clarity, they could have gone for 'freezing cold and slow but it does stop at gatwick and kings cross'.

Riffing on Woolworths

I had the pleasure this week of visiting Clwb Ifor Bach to support a friend's first foray into live music promotion. 

Clwb was one of the first clubs I became a regular visitor of, and also where I played my first gig, which, writing this, I've just realised was nearly 10 years ago. I also was pretty privileged to be asked to play with Ozomatli at the venue a few times. After coming off stage with them on one occasion, I was asked to join Shootin' Goon, and the rest was (pre-myspace website-building) history. Sort of.

Shootin' Goon, me on right. pic © Andrew James 2003

I still love our music, but The Goon were notoriously ropey during live sets. We all had our moments of string snapping, part-forgetting glory.

If you have ever been to see a band where there's been a local support, you'll probably know the kind of thing (mp3 link): A song finishes, and the singer announces awkwardly that there are 'a few technical problems' before breaking into some kind of jam session with the drummer while the offending player repairs their kit.

Please do stick with me, I will make a point soon…

It's classic local support behaviour. The problem comes when you play away and become tour support. In my own experience, Shootin' Goon were given pretty much the best start to a career we could have been offered when we secured 10 UK dates with Reel Big Fish.

They blew us away. No string breaks, no set lists, all completely professional, rehearsed, funny, and a pleasure to watch. At the time we called it "SLICK" and aspired to do a similar act from then on, with limited success.

I was reminded of all this the other night. Headliners Romeo Must Die really acted like the headline band and played a blinding (and deafening) set. They worked the small and bored crowd as if they were playing to Wembley but in such a humble way as to get even the likes of me bopping my head by the end of their set. The same could not be said for their support bands.

It's kind of the same for brands, isn't it?

I was thinking about all this talk about brands focussing on their core activities. Staying on message. All that is fine, but what about between songs? A band's core activities are obviously their songs, but if they mess up the inbetween bits, it totally falls apart. 

By the way, if the earnings model for music is going to move to Live, then those bits are going to become even more important. Keeping the energy going, maintaining the atmosphere, offering up more than what the download could.

For a brand, exactly the same. All those car manufacturers with rubbish local dealers. 'Classy' nightclubs with shoddy POS. Commercials that offer no resemblance to the actual christmas shopping experience. 

So my point is, at a live gig, people don't give as much attention to the supports. They automatically expect the standard to be lower and it's not really what they came for anyway. They're like Woolworths. No one bought into it because it was a bit rubbish. 

Picture from Russell's site, sorry. hope that's ok.

If only they'd made that their brand. It could have been kind of like the Great British Seaside, but for shops.

I know tons of bands that have huge gaps between songs, where they talk, joke, whatever. In a kooky kind of way, unprofessionalism is kind of what makes conversational brands like Innocent so endearing. Even though Innocent obviously have pretty slick supply chain management gubbins to get fresh products out so regularly, and their drinks are amazing, I bet people would be totally cool with it if once in a while their favourite wasn't available because the factory had run out of oranges or something. At Woolworths, if you'd visited at all, it would have just qualified for a 'tut' and then walking out wondering why you'd thought to bother in the first place.

Little Chef should take note.

Credit Crunch Shoes

Where do the average people go?

There's a piece in the Media Guardian Podcast last week about it being tough for people from lower income backgrounds to get into journalism. They referred to a lecture at the Guardian Student Media Conference, where the main reason seemed to be that these days new recruits are expected to go through months of unpaid work experience, which is not feasible for someone without mummy and daddy's help.

They did say things like it helped to have a blog, it helped to work on local news to get cuttings, and so on, things that can be done during a degree course or from home. So the main outcome of discussion was that if you're really, really committed, you'll find a way somehow.

But the initial speech did ring true a little for me. Luckily, I have great parents who up till now have helped me do the internships I've been lucky to seek out. But it's not really got me anywhere, so I'm obviously going to be doing more next summer and beyond, for which I'm pretty certain my parents aren't going to be able to be so supportive. It's unreasonable of me to expect them to keep helping me after I graduate.

Outside of journalism, there are apprenticeship schemes across most industries to bring new people in, which I think is a definite step in the right direction for making it possible for those people less fortunate to get into entry level positions.

Personally, I didn't get through to the first round of any of the graduate schemes/fellowships in advertising that I applied for this year. 

This isn't particularly upsetting for me because I found the experience of doing the forms really helpful, and if I do them again next year, I'll definitely be able to hit the ground running. Especially since I've been working on my dissertation alongside them all this time. I also had some great advice which I'm really, really grateful for, which hopefully will continue to improve my future applications. But after listening to the podcast today I got thinking about all this middle ground.

Say you're super committed, but you're not very good? When do you find out? What do you do then? From my own experiences as a line manager and from my staff at the moment, there also appears to be another option; what if you're neither good nor committed? 

From the places I've worked in the past, I know that these people do get jobs, which is encouraging. But how? Where are all the job adverts looking for "regular, apathetic, jobsworth graduates with no real ambition or desire to succeed in an environment whose pace, fast or otherwise, appears completely irrelevant?"

So far, I've been coming away from internships with glowing reports about being committed and able and so on, which I've always been really proud of. But all that really proves is that I have a polite phone manner, know how to make a pdf and can make (or order) a good coffee. 

For the next few months, while I finish my degree, I'm going to try to put this out of my mind, but there seems to be a really interesting (and currently very scary) grey area between proving yourself as an intern, and proving that you're good enough to actually get a job. 

But then, I suppose, if you want a job in advertising you should at least be able to sell yourself.

Street bug

I had to walk down West 25th Street in Chelsea, NY nearly every day whilst I was away this summer.

On the last day I did it, I took a look at this signpost right outside the door to Black Frame.

and noticed that little guy! I guess he'd been there the whole time.

Kind of reminds me of Little People a bit, except a little different.