In honor of the Furtherfield Ada Lovelace week and Marc’s email wondering where the girls are I’ve decided to end my procrastination and return to posting on the Furtherfield Blog. I hereby recommit to regular postings here! And to (re)begin few things on my mind of late… I recently managed a small stress fracture in my hip and have had to walk with a cane for the past month or so. A lot of my work has looked at how we interact with machines and supports or devices that we use to help us with this. Suddenly having to use a cane to do everyday things only seems to heighten my sense of this. In a lot of ways the cane is now an extension of myself. My cane and ergonomic wrist supports share a similarity. I’m not really sure where these thoughts will end up but I keep having vague thoughts of large sculptures of canes. One of my most favorite random little places in London is the Museum of Brands. They have a nice little time line of package design, branding and advertising through from the past two centuries. I first went about a year ago and one of the things that stood out to me most was how package design changed during the Great Depression. Manufacturers used less packaging, reused bits of packaging, all in efforts to save money. I immediately wondered if this same idea would hit with the push for less waste and “greener” products. It only seems to make sense. Sure enough a few weeks ago I saw an article online (ironically from the British press) about brands using less packaging because of the economy. But most certainly has not hit the extreme of the minimal packaging from a century ago. I’m left wondering if it ever will? Has our sense of advertising, branding, and marketing just gone so bizerk that unless things have huge shiny packages we won’t buy them? On the flip side, I’m also aware of the recent decline in jobs because of using less packaging. If we use less, there are less for people in recycling plants, less jobs for people who make boxes for little disposable toys, less jobs for people who have to assemble the mass amounts of packaging. Personally, I’m a big recycle/ reuse/ use less person and actually DO take into consideration the amount of packaging that goes into things when making purchases. But I think it’s an interesting dilemma that can’t be solved easily – using less, consuming less, changing behaviors to not need more packaging, but not cutting so many jobs that the economy suffers. Lastly here is a little article from the NY Times about the “grass mud horse” in China. I thought a cleaver response to censorship online. A little YouTube cartoon video about a mythical creature, playing with the way words look instead of pronounced. When the words are pronounced in Chinese it sounds a lot like “fuck your mom”. A smart little way to get around censorship (or at least try).