Snow Flakes

This panel discussion features Dustin Hostetler from Threadless, the hyper-popular crowd-sourced t-shirt design site, Gina Tripani from Lifehacker, artist Jen Bekman (whose projects include 20×200), Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City and Nion McEvoy from Chronicle Books.

While discussing the tools they use for crowdsourcing, Bekman just lamented that Twitter, though her (and the others’) preferred means of reaching audiences, “was getting a bit too big to handle”.

Trapani made an interesting observation: when you have a strongly devoted and involved crowd, there’s a risk of homogeneity, or of creating an “echo chamber”, in which popular ideas get more popular and interesting fringe ideas are muted.

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I’m in LAX airport as I write this, held up from getting to Austin, Texas, and the South By Southwest conference as a result of a flight cancellation.

It’s a bad thing in that 11 hours in an airport is excruciatingly boring, but a good thing in that it gives me time to give some background on SXSW — since I’ll be blogging about it here quite a bit in the next few days.

(Oh – who am I, exactly? Briefly: I’m a producer at Digital Eskimo with a background in web, journalism and new media.)

SXSW began 23 years ago as a music conference, but wisely expanded into a media conference about a decade ago, adding a film festival and an interactive sub-conference to their schedule.

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Our first DE Talk* speaker was  Sohail Dahdal: an award winning filmmaker, new media artist and interactive designer. He’s been described by AFTRS as “a leading force in bridging the gap between the new forms of interactive multimedia and the traditional art of filmmaking.”

Sohail spoke about one of his recent projects: the online component of First Australians; a powerful, moving and innovative online experience that compliments the historically important documentary series screened on SBS in October 2008. If you’re interested in the process one must go through to get a large scale online production off the ground through funding bodies like SBS in Australia then the Q&A at the end will be of particular interest.

We are also looking to help Sohail and SBS spread the message that this tool is for Indigenous Australians to tell their stories. There are great features allowing the uploading and editing of stories. So get the word out. We’d also like your help in letting people know about this, all Aussies need to interact with this and learn more about this country’s past so …

Visit the web site and learn then twitter, blog, email, im chat, and tell every Australian that you know.

*Digital Eskimo is hosting a series of fresh and stimulating talks to inspire you. We want to create an opportunity for people with a passion for design and sustainability to gather, listen to a short talk, have a lively chat and take away new ideas to spread through our community.
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The team at Digital Eskimo would like to offer our heartfelt condolences to the people of Victoria who have been affected by the horrific fires of the past week.

We’d like to do something to help so we’re working on a range of banners and buttons you can put on your websites. Send us an email if you’d like them when they are done or check back in the next few days.

Meanwhile go directly to the Red Cross Donation page, 100 % of the money goes into a Government managed fund for the appeal. Right on.
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Furthering our efforts to be a sustainable organisation, Digital Eskimo have teamed up with Locavore who have installed a rooftop garden above our studio. The Locavore landscape gardeners designed and built a custom shade cloth ‘vegigloo’ and planted a range of herbs and vegetables, including mint, basil, lettuce, rocket, pumpkin, watermelon and corn.

The plants were chosen according to permaculture principles. Already surviving our Christmas break and a blisteringly hot start to the new year, it has started to produce a good crop. We shared our first harvest recently at our weekly friday night wrapup session, consisting of some green leaves – basil, mint and lettuce.

The garden is for nourishing our staff and is part of an integrated system at our studio. We collect organic waste in our kitchen and it is fed to our three worms we have in our basement garage (we’ve effectively converted our ‘car space’ into a ‘worm space’). Our worms produce very rich liquid and solid fertiliser, which is then fed into the soil in our rooftop garden and from that grows more food for our staff, closing the loop.

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Thanks to everyone in our community for your support this year. Together, through the effectiveness of our Considered Designs and the vision of our inspiring clients we made a real difference in the world in 2008.

We had many highlights including launching major web presences for newmatilda.com, the LHMU, the Victorian branch of the ETU, BigPond’s new messaging system MyConnect, and the Guide Dogs NSW social media strategy and pilot MySpace page to name just a few.

While we focus on effectiveness it’s always nice to be recognised for our work and we took away a swag of awards including a Finalist in the Classical Music Awards for Sydney Symphony’s Sinfonietta project, two AGDA finalists for our “Hey Joe, know an eskimo?” recruitment campaign and an FBI/Timeout SMAC award for the Raise The Bar campaign. Co-collaborator John Wardle and I were also recognised in Sydney Magazine’s Top 100 influential people awards for our work on the campaign.

Speaking of which the first small bars opened in Sydney just a few weeks ago and live entertainment will soon be filling pubs, restaurants and those new bars thanks to changes in the planning laws. Nothing short of a cultural revolution has begun in NSW and Digital Eskimo is proud to have played its part in this.

We also moved into our new open plan studio this year, giving us 300 square metres of bamboo floored sunlit space in which to create and collaborate. We continued to eco-innovate in the space, bringing our third worm farm online to process our food waste and we recently installed a rooftop vegie garden, closing the loop on our food usage. And finally, in a market downturn we ended the year strongly; picking up key clients Artbank, UTS, UNSW and Randwick Council.

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On Tuesday night I spoke on behalf of the Eskimos at the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) Sustainable Design Event in Adelaide. The passionate and optimistic crew of S.A have initiated a program that they call “studio and practice”, aimed at inspiring and showcasing sustainability initiatives from Australia’s Design Community.

It is always nice to discuss the possibilities that designers can bring to societies, it excites and encourages me to continue to use my problem solving skills to output solutions that have a positive effect on the world.

Digital Eskimo has joined the The Designers Accord, a pledge to raise social and environmental impact with every client and to collaborate with one another. It is an agreement to reroute design, manufacturing and even the economy towards a livable ecological future.

100,000 designers have already signed up, it’s time for all designers to step up and take responsibility for the social impact that our work has.

Thank-you to Matthew Wright-Simon, Director at Ecocreative for asking me along and the participants for allowing themselves to become engaged and welcoming the opportunities that we as designers have before us.

Photograph by Luke Simon
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Mark Lee, CEO of SustainAbility UK, spoke at the Sustainable Brands 08 conference on the history (and future) of changes in society around sustainability suggesting we can see them as four waves (a metaphor as an Aussie living near the beach I can relate too!).

The citizen/regulation driven first wave triggered by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 60s-70s, followed by the consumer led green movement of the 80s early 90s which ended in a sea of green wash. The third wave was more focussed on social issues such as equity and governance through the anti-globalisation movement.

Mark posits we are now in the fourth wave which is more complex characterised by multiple issues and systems (with a climate change focus at the moment which he argues we shouldn’t overly emphasise).

It’s a fascinating future looking speech so watch it to understand the fifth wave which he identifies as demographics and food related in the shorter term. He also touches on the localisation vector which is something Digital Eskimo is working on at the moment, more on that soon!

Watch Mark’s Presentation here.
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As George Monbiot has pointed out, plane travel is difficult to reconcile with a planet loving green lifestyle (though others disagree). Either way it’s easier to commit too when you live in Europe, but is much harder when you reside in the rather isolated countries like Australia however – and so with a heavy green heart i recently agreed to travel to Europe for a wedding.

I’ve made the trip part business, part pleasure and extended the trip to maximise the value and reduce the need to travel again next year. I also made the most direct flights rather than the cheapest to and from London. Once in Europe I am minimising my carbon footprint by utilising the train and ferry networks. So all intra European travel on the trip is via trains, ferries and wherever possible regular public transport. (ok ok and the odd cab when its just too hard!)

A great website to assist the sustainable traveller is The Man from Seat 61 – a self confessed train boffin and ex British Rail manager who has pretty much travelled all over Europe and the world via train and can tell you which trains and even which carriages are the go for various legs of your journey. He’s passionate and as always it rubs off – i’m a convert to train travel as the most sustainable and cool form of long distance mobility – tis a shame there’s no underground from Australia to Europe though.
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Above is a fantastic piece of political art created by a friend of ours. It’s brilliant – I think it’s strength is in its simplicity of message, and the way in which it still manages to summarise so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics themselves as a force for change in the world as well as the Chinese Government and it’s use of extreme force at Tienanmen in particular but since and before of course.

One of the events that forged Digital Eskimo into being was the Sydney Olympics. I’d just returned from a few years working and living in London and the sheer hypocrisy of the PR and media supported spin regarding Australia as a reconciled and fair country was staggering (especially given the severe lurch to the right under the Howard Government of the proceeding years). Practically no dissent was getting into the mainstream and so we were inspired to create a satirical spoof site of the Sydney 2000 site, we dubbed Shame 2000.

We received a bit of press and attention (including from the IOC’s legal attack dogs – a cheeky exchange is archived on the site for those interested) and all this resulted in a serious amount of traffic and i think some good exposure to the issues that were not being discussed, or as we put it the “Events that Matter.”

Not much seems to have changed as Chairman Rudd and others remain silent on the big issues as the spectacle unfolds. What better way to say to China and the world, if you play our game we don’t mind what happens off the field?

UPDATE: Another nice piece of artwork on the topic .. Do-It-Yourself Tienanmen Square Memorial Kit from artists Wei Lai and my wonderful friend Deborah Kelly.
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