Noel Coward's Brief Encounter Live on Stage

Just thought i would write an entry for this as it's not really realated to interactive design but i loved the way it was made. Just before the production began with a cinema screen and a live band, i noticed the two actors sit on the front row of the cinema. In the first scene, the actors got up from their seats and performed in the isles of the cinema. The first scene of the film was also playing at the same time on the cinema screen (which was just slanted blinds. One of the actors then climbed through the cinema screen which was made to look like she had just climbed into the screen.

I havn't seen a style like this before and it just amazed me the different approach they took on the scene. From this point on, most of it was a theatre production following a young couple who met accidently at the station cafe every thursday due to a similar routine. They ended up falling in love eventhough they were both married, and the play follows their troubles and trauma of their fleeting romance.

In the interval the actors who worked in the cafe servinf tea and bath buns on stage in the production, came round to the audience serving cakes and cucumber sandwiches. This approach made the audience feel much more involved with the actors and therefore more involved with the narrative.



http://www.seebriefencounter.com

V&A Museum: China Design Now

Yesterday I visited the V&A Museum to see the design exhibiton about China. The exhibition was in three sections, representing three different cities in China, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing.



Shenzhen: Frontier City

No longer than 30 years ago graphic design in China did not exist. Before the design industry began to flourish Shenzhen was nothing more then a cluster of fishing villages on the northern border of Hong-Kong. In 1980 these were converted into the countries first Special Economic Zone, which is now the worlds largest manufacturing centre. Shenzhen, could be called the 'birthplace' of contemporary Chinese graphic design due to endless printing resources available.

Typography became very popular in Japan due to the unique pictoral Chinese characters, which is rather different from the 26 letter alphabet in Western tpyography.

My favourite piece of design work from the exhibition were these two posters. The first called, Graphic Design in China, by Chen Shaohua, 1992, and the second called Design and Lifestyle by Alan Chan, 1998.

Dexia Tower, Brussels

The dexia tower can be found in Place Rogier in Brussels where each day and night is ensured to be the cities best landmark attraction. The building is made from 6,000 windows and at the bottom of 4,200 of these there is a rail which contains 12 lightbulbs, with LED's in red, green and blue.

Each window in the building acts like a pixel and can make shapes, adverts or type. For the building to work successfully each window blind in the building must be closed as the light will not cover the whole surface of the window.



To make this all happen the bank teamed up with lab[au] who helped build an interactive station which was installed at the bottom of the building. This meant that members of the public could create interact with the building in real time to create their very own light show. Furthermore, their compostition could be photographed from another tall building in the city by a push of a button and then forwarded via email or printed out and taken home. lab[au] refer to the work they produce as 'MetaDesign'. 'Design' is in reference to the Bauhaus and 'Meta' is coming straight from computer science.



By many this building may be seen as a waste of resources and just another contribution to global warming. However, the building is not as big of a waste of energy as it may be thought to be. In actual fact, in recent tests the Dexia tower uses a third less electricity than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The building effectively uses an LED lighting system (electro luminescent diodes) in which each LED only uses one watt of electricity.

Information Architecture

I found this map quite interesting as it is a map of the internet as if it was the train system of greater Tokyo.

The full map can be found at
http://informationarchitects.jp/start/?include=1
with links and thumbnails of websites included.

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