This week we’d love to go to Opole, Poland to see this Aatrial House designed by KWK Promes. The modern design (rooted in the cube-houses of the 70s) caught our eye because it creates a continuous space around the house, unobstructed by any sort of driveway or path (which descends below ground level for access to the house). The result is a living space surrounded by gardens that can only be accessed from the house; turning the outside in or perhaps the inside, out? Either way it reminded us of a little bistro in West Yorkshire called the Outside In where anyone can enjoy a Chicken Supreme under their fairy-light, star-studded interior.


Reference:
Architects and Photographs: KWK PROMES

When a product hits the shelves it has been carefully designed, packaged and manufactured. With the start of the 3,894,209th (or so it seems) series of Big Brother this week, this got us thinking about how people are designed for media consumption. Past reality show successes have included Tourettes poster boy Pete Bennett, anorexic WAG Nikki Grahame, and the infamous Jade Goody. All of them possessed the now formulaic talents needed to make it into the public eye: personal tragedies, life-threatening illnesses, and utter stupidity. Having your 15 minutes now takes a simple design process. It starts with the TV auditions. After queuing for hours the wannabes are put through a process of exploitation. Those who make it through are the ones with the juiciest secrets, the least dignity, and the most desire to ‘make it’. And so, the new batch of celebrity prototypes is ready. Only the best will survive the next production stages. Once in the house/jungle/etc, the contestants are tested to the max through tasks, video diaries, and personality clashes. They are whittled down over the weeks and the ones that have sparked the most tabloid interest will make it through to the final, where one remaining guinea pig will be selected. This final product has been perfectly designed for celebrity consumption. The final stage for the short shelf-life star is a desperate attempt to cling onto their fame, usually by writing an autobiography or appearing in Nuts. After this, they are thrown into the reduced items basket, with the new batch already processed and waiting to be sold.

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The best strategy for getting what you want out of life, according to the economist John Kay, is to stop pursuing your goals. He argues that goals are best achieved indirectly, what he calls Obliquity. A few of us went to see Kay talk about this at The School of Life, in a very quirky alternative sermon that involved singing Talking Heads songs. His book on Obliquity deals with the art of decision-making in the modern age. An Aristolean thought, Kay argues that happiness is a by-product of fulfillment in work and life, not by pursuing it directly. If you look at the most profitable companies the world he says, they are not the most dedicated to profit. Even a toupee profiteer like Donald Trump says, “I don’t do it for the money. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.” The planned cities of the world like Canberra and Dubai, are dull and soulless. The great cities of the world like Paris and London, evolved of their own accord. Obliquity is being described as a revolutionary, if paradoxical concept. However, us Mother lot left John Kay at the pulpit with the distinct feeling that we’d heard it somewhere before. Is there really a difference between ‘obliquity’ and ‘serendipity’ (the happy accident)? Isn’t obliquity what John Lennon was getting at when he sang ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans’?  Perhaps John Kay would whole-heartedly agree, in which case, he’s given us one more word with which to describe the delightful art of ‘going with the flow’.

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Imagine when a machine can not only convince us of their intelligence, but attract us with it. Bladerunner gave us a glimpse in the 80s: sexy androids manipulating humans with their power to woo. Science fiction has always tackled the sticky subject of sexuality and technology. What about virtual reality? Think of The Big Lebowski: “Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. 100% electronic!” ‘Exosex’, sex outside the biological body, could be simulated in virtuality, much like Second Life or Skype and other digital formats where sex is enhanced, extended, digitised, and synthetic. It would be more real than real – a hyper-real experience. One of the activities which we consider to be uniquely human is our relationship with sex. But as “human” evolves, what happens to sex? In the future, sex for procreation could be separated from sex for pleasure. What if future generations wanted to separate the practices altogether, trusting embryos to the controlled safety of test tubes? And if biological sex were suddenly divorced from its evolutionary function, how would such a shift change our societies? Polyamorism is predicted to become the norm. In Brave New World, a major character is reprimanded by her friends for not being promiscuous enough. After all, “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Huxley’s dystopia offered a critical perspective on how our values evolve with both our technology & society, and he knew that sexuality wasn’t static.

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Say happy 50th birthday to the Pill, born May 9 1960. The contrary story of contraceptives in tablet form is painted in the latest issue of Time. Interestingly, the Pill was the first medicine ever designed for people who are not sick. Its inventor was a conservative Catholic who was looking for a treatment for infertility and instead, found a guarantee for it. It was blamed for unleashing the sexual revolution amongst suddenly swinging singles, despite the fact that in the 1960’s women typically had to be married to get a prescription. The Pill has been accused of promoting many ‘social ills’ in its time, from promiscuity, to adultery, to the breakdown of the family. On the other hand, it has been credited with women’s lib so the Pill shouldn’t be grumpy on its big day.


Thanks to paula bjork for this story.


Image Credit:
Time magazine

Every country has its own distinct way to fight terrorism. The Americans: shock and awe. The French: a dismissive laicite. The Dutch: an obsessive multiculturalism. And us? Wit. Satire is a uniquely British skill. Oswald Mosley never got within an inch of power because we couldn’t take fascists seriously – all that goose-stepping and black uniforms, it offered just too much material. Satire works when it mirrors reality, and there is no shortage of material among the Jihadis. Think of Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas pants bomber, or the “Toronto 18” cell who couldn’t remember the name of the Canadian Prime Minister they were plotting to kill.  A report published by our friends and research partner Demos has found a significant part of al-Qaeda’s appeal is not its ideology or message, but its mystique, glamour and modish coolness. Its members style themselves as modern day James Bonds and Che Guevarras, playing their role as a heroic warrior against Western tyranny. If the biggest draw to al-Qaeda is its “cool-factor”, then one of the key policies in fighting terrorism should be to make it boring, says Demos.


Thanks to Demos for this story and report author Jamie Bartlett.

‘The Girl Effect’ is the term coined to describe the positive chain reaction that results from the way women invest their money. In the developing world, girls and women who earn an income reinvest 90% of it into their families (as compared to only 30-40% for a man). This leads to positive ripple effects, such as healthier babies and better quality of life for all. The Nike Foundation created The Girl Effect campaign in order to support adolescent girls who are proven to be the most likely agents of change, despite the fact they’re often invisible to their societies and mainstream media. Females were centre stage at this year’s Davos in a plenary session that included Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank; Ann Veneman, executive director of Unicef; Melinda Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And at the U.N. in March, around International Women’s Day, the interagency task force on adolescent girls promised to increase efforts to include girls in development programs. Girls and young women are starrting to be seen as the centerpiece of sustainable economic recovery.


Thanks to Jon Miller for this story.


References:
Business Week

Pop neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield researches digital technology and how it affects the human brain. She has a really fascinating theory about how the internet is ‘infantilising’ our minds. “Humans will crave a more instant world; a literal world that is laden with senses, that is process driven rather than content driven, focused on the experience rather than the meaning; [a world that is] about the thrill of the moment, where there are no consequences because you can just go back and do it again. People will have shorter attention spans and perhaps higher IQs; they will have a shaky sense of identity; they may be more hedonistic and less reflective, and will take more risks. These are not altogether bad characteristics, they are simply different from the behaviour that guides society today.”


Thanks to sarah and Paula for this story.


References:
A report sarah once did
The Future Laboratory

Banksy has a knack for exploiting the feverish interest in his anonymity and has provoked a lot of hype around his recent documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. The world’s most notorious street artist turns the camera on himself in the only way he can, to reveal a backlit figure, gesticulating hands, and a voice carefully distorted, as he explains that this isn’t really a film about him. In fact, it is a film about Thierry “Terry” Guetta. Guetta, a Frenchman living in LA, is obsessed with street art and sets out to follow and video major practitioners like Shepard Fairey, Invader and the ultimate catch, Banksy.


What follows is the Guetta creation of an alias dubbed Mr Brainwash, who takes over Hollywood’s derelict CBS TV studio to create a huge-scale, much-publicised pop-street-art exhibition of massive unoriginality, aping Warhol and dribbling paint Jackson Pollock style onto prints passing them off as collector’s items. Entirely taken in, LA Weekly put him on their cover and the art world declares Brainwash a success. What we are left with is an exposé of the art market and the suckers with too much money who want to be part of the latest trend.

But is the joke on us the viewers? We never really know the extent to which Banksy directed this film as we are given no clue of Guetta’s involvement. Indeed, in Banksy’s world we really know nothing and nobody to be who they say they are. Indeed, Banksy has the potential to remain anonymous forever. Even if someone was to come forward and say I am Banksy or if a person was caught doing a Banksy painting, could we ever really belief them to be the real deal? What Banksy has done is to create a persona that is utterly a media construct based on fragments truth and hearsay, where everything is speculation and lives up to Banksy’s inversion of Warhol’s words that ‘In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes’


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References
Telegraph
Guardian

Alcohol, for all its benefits, has many drawbacks. Now, Korean researchers have found a way of tweaking alcohol to limit the fallout without cutting its potency. Doctors Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University, studied the properties of oxygenated alcohol – booze with oxygen bubbles added – a popular concoction in Korea. In these drinks, oxygen is added the way carbonation is added to soda, and scientists have found that it sped up how fast drinkers got sober and cut back hangover time.

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