“
Business Insider reports that a group called “Get Health Reform Right,” composed largely of insurers, has been paying people “virtual currency” to send emails opposing health care reform to their representatives…
That’s remarkably shameless—it’s not quite money-for-contacts, but it’s only a tiny step away, since GHRR is obviously paying to have the surveys inserted into FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Interestingly, the same scheme could work without even virtual currency payments…
” —Elisabeth Oppenheimer, “Citizens of Farmville, petition your (real) representatives!”
(so much attention to Farmville right now—)
Aqualta // Studio Lindfors
“Aqualta visually explores what a coastal metropolis might feel like a hundred years from now due to rising sea levels.”
See all the images here. More great speculative work from Studio Lindfors: Cloud Skippers, Cloud City.
But what no one is writing about is the possibility of a game to teach real behaviors, or the use of digital tools to help maintenance (like using botanicalls in an edible schoolyard garden)—that’s the story here, I think. Games are complex worlds of systems, and a well-designed game could lead to real action (we don’t have to abandon games as a great idea for farming awareness).
——
“But Farmville’s farms don’t actually mirror reality. In Farmville, farmers can get high returns. Seeds mature at impossible rates. It’s a place without slaughtering. There’s little of the harsh reality that Americans value food only enough to spend 10 percent of their income on it. If you had any doubts, know that Farmville is complete fantasy. In 2004, Eleanor Agnew wrote a memoir, Back From the Land, about her homesteading experience. After being lured by the idealism of living in nature and trying to live off the land, she eventually moved back to the city. Life in the country was tough. She spent an exorbitant amount of time making ketchup. Her marriage disintegrated. “Liking the idea was not enough,” she writes. Liking just the idea of farming has little potential to transform the world; Farmville’s online community of artificial soybean farmers won’t improve our food system. To do that we need real farming, and that’s not a game. It’s time to support actual small farmers and stop playing around.”
- Peter Smith, “What Does Farmville Mean For Farmers?” Good.is, December 17, 2009
Samantha Tio’s Conveyance, a study of the traffic patterns in Asia
and for modded things just below the surface:
Bund Sightseeing Tunnel in Shanghai from Flickr user Erwyn van der Meer. From this designboom article on subway architecture.
This is a “short distance transporter” since the distance is 647m—seems like it’s a choice to take this lighted travel option.
“Halifax, Canada — The Internet surrounds us like air, saturating our offices and our homes. But it’s not confined to the ether. You can touch it. You can map it. And you can photograph it.
This modest indentation on the Canadian coastline is a major Internet landmark, a sort of Ellis Island of the Web: It’s where a submarine cable owned by Hibernia Atlantic comes ashore. (Eleven major lines cross the Atlantic, and this one lands under the manhole, above left.) This particular bit started at a Hibernia sister station in Southport, England, and traversed the ocean in about 0.0028 second. It will then skip along one of two fiber-optic thoroughfares: the cross-Canada pipe, which goes to Montreal and points west, or the southern route, down the East Coast, through Boston to New York City. An injection laser diode encodes the information as superbright pulses of light.”
value added.
via jeannr:
My new project: turning money into Lichtenstein paintings.
“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”
- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)
from 2004, this is culturemodding (love friendly celebrations that involve enabling pedestrian pathways).
Another temporally green bridge, this one in Budapest.
Paris Métro as a star map—“the wonderful design mind that goes by the name Clémentine Tantet decided to see it in space.”