Game submission for NYC's Come Out & Play festival closed yesterday so now the count down is on until we can take over the streets of NYC and turn the whole city into a playground! The festival will run from June 12-14. The Tank, a wonderful non-profit arts space, will play host and serve as the central headquarters. Lets hope old favorites like Snap-Shot-City and Korean Laserball will return as well as a host of other awesome and exciting games!
I posted a while ago about the awesomeness of Six to Start and their We Tell Stories project. They have just been awarded the Experimental and Best of Show awards at SXSW for the collaboration with Penguin Books.
The new book by Seth Graham-Smith is feeding a Zombie frenzy. Just add “and Zombies” to a search and see what you can find.
Pride and Prejudiceand Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton--and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers--and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.
Austin, Texas - Hackers perform public service warning commuters of Zombies in area: "Zombies ahead! Run for your lives!"
Interactive internet movies and Zombies
What would you do? This interactive horror film allows viewers to make their own decision to live or die. Make the right choice, and live on to the next scene. Make the wrong decision and it could be your last. Http://www.survivetheoutbreak.com
All around the world, individuals and organizations are making it easier for you to get engaged and get active in making the world a better place.
A great big call to action has gone out to the world - In fashion, music, education, gardening, public space, art, politics etc. The concept of user generated experience (or just getting out and doing stuff), of volunteering time, energy and innovation has re-infiltrated our everyday lives and people are getting together online and on the ground to make incremental changes to their communities in fun and adventurous ways.
Now is the time to take matters into your own hands. Are you ready to get involved?
The Call To Action: Crime Fighting - Mexico City Mexico called, and Super Barrio answered. Maybe a little to much action for most, Super Barrio is the real life masked crime fighting hero of Mexico City’s working class.
He can be seen in the 2007 feature documentary film Super Amigos where he is joined by companions Super Gay, Super Ecologista, Super Animal and Fray Tormenta as they fight against evil slumlords, corrupt politicians, homophobia, pollution, animal rights abusers, and poverty.
Wearing the traditional Lucha mask of Mexican wrestlers, the heroes patrol the streets of Mexico city fighting injustice. The masks are magical devices that represent the community. With them, the superheroes can be everyone and no one at the same time. The masks are symbols of collective hope.
How You Get Involved: Go see the film, Buy a Tshirt - $8 from every sale goes to help their causes, get inspired into action by their theme songs, or don a lucha mask of your own and go bust some injustice! Kapowee!
The Call To Action: Art - Montreal Actions: What You Can Do With the City presents 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture between November 2008 to April 2009. The CCA is challenging citizens to be part of the movement and take actions big or small to change the everyday life of their cities. Whether old or new, submit your photos or videos and share the story. All entries will be displayed on the website and reviewed by the Actions team. Only a handful might make it to the CCA’s Shaughnessy House.
An example of a submission is Michael Rakowitz's paraSITE project using ventilation shafts to create inflatable temporary shelters for the homeless.
How You Get Involved: Submit an entry. Submit a Challenge.
The Call to Action: Fashion – New Orleans Prom Dresses For New Orleans has a simple goal – help the young ladies who lost everything in Katrina get to the prom. Many of the residents of New Orleans lost everything... Help make prom possible for the young ladies in Louisiana who no longer have a dress to wear to prom. Share your past prom and party dresses, so that others can experience the joy these dresses brought to you. They still need our help! Your generosity is greatly appreciated!
How You Get Involved: Give another girl the chance to regret wearing puffed sleeves and pink satin. Send your worn prom and party dresses to a new home and another night of self conscious dancing.
Call to Action: Politics – Australia Get Up! is an independent Australian political action group aiming to build a progressive Australia.
GetUp! brings together like-minded people who want to bring participation back into our democracy. GetUp.org.au is providing Australians with the tools to fight back, and take innovative and effective action on important issues facing our country. GetUp members are building a ground-up movement of real people who are putting the participation back into our democracy.
GetUp.org.au members take action. By signing up for updates, GetUp.org.au members receive emails alerting them to new campaigns and providing ways of affecting positive change. Whether it is sending an email to a member of parliament, engaging with the media, attending an event or helping to get a television ad on the air, GetUp members are always only ever asked to take targeted, coordinated and strategic action.
How you get involved: sign up, participate in campaigns.
Call To Action: Education - USA Once Upon A School is the result of Dave Eggers’ 2008 TED Prive Wish. It is a collaborative online initiative developed to inspire and collect the stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools.
How you get involved: Tell stories, Get involved in your local school.
Call to Action: Music – USA & UK... more to come I should just come out and say that I love Rock Corps. It’s a terrific balance of social action, good solid community work, high profile engagement and damn good fun.
RockCorps harnesses the power of music to inspire volunteering. We produce concerts for which the only way in is to volunteer 4 hours at a project we organize with non-profit partners. You can't win a ticket; you can't buy a ticket; you have to earn a ticket to a concert that becomes a celebration of giving back.
In 2005, we launched a national movement and since that time, more than 30,000 young people have been directly involved in one of our projects. Millions more have heard the message that "Volunteering is Cool".
Rock Corps is partnered with BoostMobile in the USA and with OrangeMobile in the UK. Stay tuned – I’ve heard rumors of new collaborations coming in China and Australia in the next year.
How you get involved: Sign up with friends, work for 4 hours, party.
Call to Action: Leisure – San Francisco/Global One of the earliest action games, SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities.
How you get involved: Sign up, join a team and get started.
Call to Action: Gardening – London and beyond... Guerilla gardening is an emerging form of public space reclamation using plants in illicit cultivations on publicly owned land. Lead by Richard Reynolds, author of Guerilla Gardening – A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries, this growing global movement encourages you to get out a trowel and plant a few seeds in any space that needs a little herbaceous helping hand.
How you get involved: Check out Guirilla Gardening tips at any one of the growing number of specialist blogs, make a seedbomb for some planting pandemonium, grab a trowel and some seedlings and set out on a landscaping mission.
Call to Action: Volunteer – Global A few years ago I was talking to a friend about how she wanted to volunteer to help out some sort of nonprofit organization. She didn’t know what she wanted to get involved in, but knew that as a financial analyst she had some critical skills to offer. However, as a busy professional she had no way to she could find no way to find out who needed her services. We decided that there needed to be some kind of dating agency for volunteers and organizations that could match skills, locations, availability etc. Unsurprisingly, someone else had the same ideas and created the extremely excellent Volunteer Match. It does what it says on the tin. It matches volunteers to organizations.
How you get involved: Check out http://www.volunteermatch.org/ and find an opportunity that’s right for you.
In the fairly grim Archinect industry survey released today, President of the Boston Society of Architects, Diane Georgopulis, is quoted saying: "architects at some level are kind of the canaries in the mine. When development dries up, architects are probably the first people to know."
As economic canaries, architects are now at the coalface of the changing economy. The survey goes on to detail the doom and gloom of thousands of design professionals, the fear and concern about job losses, and paints a fairly scary picture for both professionals and students in an industry suffering huge losses and a bleak outlook. However, like most news dealing with the economy these days, it attempts to finish on a high note – suggesting opportunities for re-skilling, building networks, focusing on what’s important, diversifying – and in an industry with a tradition for collaborative and competition based work this should put them in an ideal position to take advantage of the new style of crowd sourced, collaborative work towards innovation.
Competitions have become a common and democratic way to generate innovative ideas for modern building and city design. In Australia, the most recognizable architectural landmarks are the result of international competition and collaboration. In 1912, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony were awarded the winning entry to design the new Australian capital. In 1957 (out of 233 entries from 32 countries) Danish architect Jørn Utzon was announced as the winner of the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. More recently, in 1997, London based LAB Architecture Studio (partnering with Bates Smart) beat 177 local and international entries to win the competition to design Federation Square.
In the last few years, with the evolution of more intuitive web based mass collaboration, innovation competitions have become a cheap and wildly successful means of generating massive numbers of innovative ideas from a global pool of cross industry talent.
A great use of these competitions has been for catalysts for social enterprise and innovation. For example:
Picnic green challenge:One bright idea can make a big difference. The entrant with the best idea for a greenhouse-gas-reducing product or service wins €500,000, expert coaching and a starting list of customers!
The Google Lunar X PRIZE– a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.
Insurance Automotive X PRIZE- invites teams from around the world to focus on a single goal: design viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy... This will be a race for the ages, with major publicity and $10 million waiting for the champions… and perhaps our future hanging in the balance.
Changemakers:is building the world's first global online "open source" community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions. Changemakers begins by providing an overarching intellectual framework for collaborative competitions that bring together individual social change initiatives into a more powerful whole.
Increasingly, as a lack of full time job security forces professionals to rethink how they work, collaborative research and competitions become a more valuable means of both embedding oneself in a learning network, and distinguishing oneself from the crowd.
As the projects above demonstrate, there is some serious capital investment behind these ventures – so as we all pull together to stay afloat in these uncertain times, a new collaborative social innovation economy is emerging. And that’s good news for architects and good news for all of us.
I work in the in between - building meaningful connections between people, places & technology for engagement, experience & everyday adventure.
Open your eyes to the extraordinary. Everyday. Everywhere.
(Re-)connect with where you live. With each other.
In real life. And online.
(In a snap-shot)
Have fun.
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