After a rather long break (due to children and life) - actually I can´t really believe it is that long since my last post, I am now posting again and hope to be posting much more often in the future. To mark the "official" start of my return to semiotics (both personal and professional), I will be attending Semiofest 2013 in Barcelona at the weekend. I am really looking forward to meeting lots of great people and talking about the weird and wonderful world of signs and wonders.
More later
Two things have led to this post, which might be the last for a while (Baby literally due today). One is that I have discovered the joy of podcasts (I have a lot of time to kill at the moment) and in particular the joy of podcasts from RadioLab. This is just the right kind of programme for me - sciency but not geeky. They approach science as a mystery which it would be fun to find out more about - right up my street.
The second factor is that I have by necessity been thinking a lot about how things come about and appear and become what they are. Having a baby is a time when you start to think a lot about your life and what you have done up to now and how you have got to where you are now -without in my case any value judgements, rather just a review of all the steps along the way.
And emergence is more literally something that I have of course been thinking about - as I want this baby to emerge very soon.
But now what is emergence? Try this for size. Basically it is a theory about how complex systems or organisms produce the results they do without any overarching guiding entity. It explains how our brain works and how ants can be so clever as a group and so stupid on their own.
In particular I like the theory of emergence when applied to cities. It finally explains to me why in the best cities you will have an area which specialises in say food or antiques or clothes. It all has to do with the swerve!
The swerve is what shop owners want. They want you to swerve from what you were doing and come and look at their shop. The more shops of one type in an area the more likely you are to swerve (if you are in the market for an antique chair that is). Of course too many shops of one type could mean you avoid the area. But then another area will spring up with the same function but slightly different somewhere else.
This in a way explains gentrification but above all it gives me a great phrase to apply to marketing and brands: Make them swerve! That is the aim of the game
PS: Haven't read this yet but have it on order and am really looking forward to it.
Or is it?
For obvious reasons (being 3 weeks away from giving birth) I have been thinking a lot about names recently. In particular about how names work and sound in different cultures.
Our aim is to find a name for our baby that will not only exist in both English and German but that is also pronounced approximately the same. You would think that this is easy, but believe me it is not!! Because of course we both have to like what the name stands for as well.
I have also realised that certain combinations just don't work in one language, when they work in the other. TH- being a rather obvious one in German. I also personally don't like starting a name without a strong syllable at the beginning.
And of course there is all that talk about how a name can affect your personality - and if that wasn't bad enough, a friend told me yesterday that she was really interested to find out what we are going to call our baby. So am I!!
Sometimes I wish we could just stick with our working title!! You won't find that on this list.
More thoughts on this topic here
It is that time of year again - Well actually no. We are doing Interesting Berlin 2010 earlier this year than last. To be honest, mainly because I wanted to do it before my pregnancy turned into motherhood.
It is going to be great this year. We have a cool new location which is much better suited for an evening of exciting and interesting presentations i.e. it has a stage and proper lighting and there are no holes in the roof so we don`t have to worry about it raining. We are at the Heimathafen, which is an old dance hall which has been reopened to do modern theatre for the people and of the people ("Volkstheater").
We are not letting talk more than 10 minutes, so there is even less danger of getting bored. And we have some great speakers. I can´t wait to find out what happens when it rains moon or what all the stupid questions that people ask when they get a tour of Berlin (Quote: So where is the wall then?) And much much more.
We have sold lots of tickets but there are still some left. You can get them online or directly from the office at Heimathafen.
Any other questions, just drop us a line: interestingberlin (at) gmx.de
It has been a long time since I posted last but I have three good excuses: Pregnancy, work and Interesting Berlin 2010. Another post to follow on that in particular.
Maybe it is because we used to go there at the start of summer, but when I was surfing for something on the web, Stephen Smith´s website caught my eye so I decided to check it out.
I couldn´t help smirking at the banner.
Why? Because for so long coming from the North of England basically meant that you had a heart of gold but either had no money or you were very tight with it. (see wikipedia entry on Yorkshire - interesting I didn´t know that David Bowie´s father came from Tadcaster) It was a poor area which never really got going again after the End of the Industrial Revolution - outside of the city centres of Leeds and Manchester that is. But now all of a sudden the Internet allows you to make an asset of being "cheap"! I love it.
Interesting article on the Brandchannel about the use of Cadillac Plan in the US to describe a luxury health plan with all the bells on. They are basically asking how much longer will it continue to make sense to use the word for Cadillac to describe something extremely luxurious and opulent. Back in the day this might have been appropriate but the Cadillac brand has changed a lot since then. Interestingly for someone living in Germany, they suggest that it might make more sense to call it a Mercedes or BMW plan.
I can´t help thinking that this shows how little the Americans have really moved on in their thinking about cars and automobiles. Surely the days of such luxury car brands have to be numbered. There is an article in the Economist about it this week, pointing out (which I didn't know) that one of the reasons that small cars are so much cheaper than large cars is because the car manufacturers make less profit on them. Not because they are cheaper to produce. But their main point is that we will be buying fewer and fewer large cars in the decades to come, due to economic, environmental and demographic reasons.
So maybe the Americans will have to come up with a new name for luxury health plans. How about the Ritz Carlton or the Country Club of health plans. That might make more sense.
In a few weeks Germany is holding its general elections. As I can't vote (or only on things like should there be more lampposts in the neighbourhood), I have been observing the whole thing with a certain amount of distance. What has struck me however, is the prevalence of posters and billboards. Some billboards have even been specially erected for the great day!
What I have found the most interesting are the way that some but only some of the politicians have steered away from the typical portrait plus specious election slogan which is generally used (in particular by the main parties CDU and SPD).
A very well known politician and green campaigner is carrying on his tradition from the last election and is using a cartoony approach to the whole thing.
I think this is great. It is fun, it says people working together to change things they don't like. There is a great dirty pile of bad things on the ground that they are all just going to march over and Marx is watching over everything from a cloud. Although I don't know why there is a question mark around that. Wolke?
Another poster that caused a lot of furore was from the CDU politician who is campaigning against Stroebele. I think she probably decided she didn't have anything to lose by playing the female card. And so she showed what more the CDU has to offer - cleavage.
I also like this guy, who has obviously decided that he has had enough of bad photos and is also picking up semiotically speaking on the whole tag cloud idea. It shows that a cartoon does not have to be cartoony. In fact this poster almost made me want to vote for the guy - except I can't. Except for the fact that he seems to be going on a bit too much about being child friendly, when I think what he actually means is parent friendly.
Then of course there are the real outliers. Like this one.
Literally translated it means "with arse in your pants" or with guts. I think I like.
And here for the benefit of my "strategic advisor" (sorry, in joke) are the blatantly contradictory posters from the resurgent Left Party.
1) Wealth for all
2) A tax on wealth
Well, I guesss you just can't have your cake and eat it too.
And here you can see both together in their full contradictory glory!
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