Creative Review held a tweetup. I am kind of apathetic about tweetups sometimes and like it when they are filled with good things and interesting bits: something unusual to savour. They held it at the London Design Museum where we were thrown a moleskin with ‘CR’ emblazoned on the front. Too susceptible to stereotypes, I was pleased with its quality of no-cost and have been filling it with awesome new words I am learning as some sort of happy little dictionary. Best so far:

Dilettante. “1. A person who claims an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.”

They hunted out an epic roll of paper spread out to draw on, gave us a giant bag of lego and a mission to build dream houses, and had a bring-some-art exhibition. It was totally my sort of thing, albeit surprisingly different. (Neil Ayres, the chap who organised it, writes a good write-up of the night.)

With the lego I got distracted building not my dream house as the theme ‘dream house’ unsurprisingly proposed, but, on discovering my lego man had a strange head piece that looked like a giant blonde wig, launched into creating a Rapunzal style castle. Off task, but fun. The exhibition was nice, and some awards were given out. Some for the best twitpics of the night, which were displayed in live feed monitors around the room. Again, we got distracted from the general purpose of it all..

Ben Stockley

The goody bag was awesome, for those interested in a year of top artsy media campaigns. The Creative Review book – the type agencies buy – is filled with good pictures from campaigns of the last year. I like owning my own copy – they’re normally the sort of thing I’ll see in the design stores and marvel at but never buy because I don’t yet have a coffee table to fill with nonsense that I’ll barely read. Possessing such things is lovely though. You can easily tell it’s something I’d like because the cover has brightly coloured burst balloons over it in an artsy fashion, and I am always a sucker for colourful nonsense like that. A little pointless perhaps, but a fantastic little flip through of campaigns and other creative bits from the year.

Ben Stockley has taken some lovely photos of London Fashion Week, nominated Best in Book in the Creative Review Photography Annual for his Surfrider and British Fashion Council commissions. Honestly, I may only like them because they aren’t the repetitive and uninvolved photos that London Fashion week normally throws up across blogs, and seem to focus on a calmer more thoughtful side of the atmosphere, with one of my favourite shots a gorgeous brown-hued church interior.

My words are all suspiciously close to what he says in interview: “I wanted to convey the energy and atmosphere but also a more contemplative side to the shows and the industry in general [..] I wanted to catch the anticipation of the subject – the backstage of split seconds before a show, and the anticipation of the waiting crowd, the moments that get missed in the noise.”

His behind the scenes shots from a Coca-Cola filming are pretty special too. Maybe I’m just drawn to orangey hues. I always seem to delve into an obsession with lightweight, rich and faded hues, and out of focus gleams. My past history of photographer-spotting would suggest so.

There’s something very pleasant about it all though.

Part of me dies when the word Twitter comes up in conversation, regardless of how much I like it. This spoof of the Facebook film is very good though. I’m going to stomp around office cubicles bellowing “HASHTAGS!” now, so excuse me.

A week or two ago I missed Mr Shirky talk about Cognitive Surplus, because a train was delayed. Inside I sobbed violently, but got over it okay. Essentially it’s “the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.”

He has a similar sort of talk up on Ted, above. (I really have to stop posting TED talks up here.) I like it though, because I can sit happily and reflect on the number of projects like Bored of Brighton taking place around the world to help people. And I like shiny Clay Shirky because a great deal of the second year of my degree focused on his work, and he writes about blogging nicely. All this makes me happy.

Today, the ever-wonderful Information is Beautiful have created a visualisation: US adults watching TV vs. the creation of Wikipedia. “A shocking proportion,” he says, but then.. we do multitask, no?

The V&A is a very nice museum. There is a mad hanging thing made of glass from the ceiling. We queue and I stare at it. (There is another ceiling made from flattened trumpets in a different hall which we’ve seen something similar to in the Tate and disliked its new art status but we like it at the V&A.) It warrants spectacles. After admiring the stairs and finding the toilets, which we admire slightly less, we hunt out Decode.

The entrance has lights on the end of sticks that react as you make noise and rattle them. “Ah, art” I revel gleefully. It is full of good things.

There is a board which creates a shadow on itself when you stand in front of it. I peer at the side of the board; a whirring weave of light-reactive electronics which pulls strips of light/dark material back and forth to form the shadow.

The best part is outside around the corner in a modern tech section where I find a big table-sized machine that makes music (it looks a bit like something very expensive used by very rich musicians I’ve forgotten the name of). I have a play, and the man who made it explains it brilliantly.

“Oh,” I think as I listen. “This would be ace if I’d got a recording.” My powers of foresight avoid me for the rest of the day but I make haphazard video clips left right and center. And now I put them on youtube. Tada! They are in order of favourite bits – the shadow-making machine and the musical thingummy are best, and there are lots of colourful things (hit HD for decent quality).

I went last month but Decode finishes on Friday, WEEP WEEP! So you must go now! That said, I liked Kinetica a bit more (where I was given EVEN MORE brilliant explanations of things I don’t have clips of) because it was so mad and busy and bustling. I suppose that’s the difference between a weekend event and a three-month event.

A nice site has made it simple to compare political policies called Vote For Policies – and everyone liked the Green Party apparently, even me (although I looked up only four policy topics, namely: schooling, health, crime, and democracy). Every party’s policies of privatisation, deportation, and re-hauling systems seemed to be terrifying. Perhaps no one wants too much change, and that’s why we all like The Green Party.*

My notion of politics comes from somewhere between a horiztonal drawing which read along the lines of ‘liberal vs privatisation’ along it, and Adrian Mole books in which no one likes Thatcher.

“Conservatives want to privatise the schools and hospitals,” said my Mother. “They did it with the milk.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“No,” she said sagely.
“Who do you vote for Mummy?” I asked.
“It’s a secret. I’m not telling you.” I wondered for a couple of years.

I was very pleased when Tony Blair came into power when I was in Year 6. Lots of people said “Tony Bleurrrghr” and made vomiting noises, but the grey haired man on television was dull and Tony Blair did good speeches. (It’s to do with the mono-tonal voices that children of a certain age ignore no doubt).

I took some tests on The Political Compass answering the questions in as bias a way possible. ‘I’m near Ghandi and Old Labour,’ I said, pleased. I spied New Labour. “What is this?” I outraged. “They’re near the conservatives – and we don’t like them because they take our milk,” I thought, and set about using Wikipedia as my sole source of information about Old and New Labour. My conclusions, at age 13, were that I would vote for Labour, and so thus the New kind if I must. I would vote, but I would be voting on the principles of the 80s. This would fix things, even if I wasn’t a coal-miner.

I was talking about politics the other day, and my (reasoned) disdain for small parties, people’s lack of enthusiasm to vote for them, and generally pontificating on a subject I know little about. I’d like to compare policies, in the same way I want to find a chart listing pros and cons of iPhone vs Android (another pressing problem in today’s society) that makes it easy to work these sort of things out:

‘NHS privatisation’ tick, cross, tick.
‘White supremacy’ – tick, cross, cross.
This would make things easier.

Of course, it’d be all the more effective if I’d ever voted. Last year I incorrectly put envelope B in envelope A and voided my vote.

*Alternatively, this link is passing around only certain demographics via Twitter, all of whom happen to cycle bikes and like the environment and such. Also note, the current voting stands at 119 completed surveys, which isn’t hugely proportionate.