SoMaFusion :: travelogue

A lovely surprise this morning as I was walking past Trafalgar Square (London as always) with the latest WWF project.

The London Ice Bear is in Trafalgar Square from Friday 11 December until Sunday 20 December, slowly melting over that time to reveal a dramatic bronze skeleton.

Inspired by the Arctic landscape, it’s a life-sized representation of a male polar bear in hunting pose.

Everyone is invited to touch the ice sculpture. Artist Mark Coreth hopes that by touching this sculpture audiences can become sculptors themselves and make a direct connection with the bear and its icy Arctic kingdom, now under threat from man-made climate change.
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I particularly like the way it’s all been communicated by WWF in various way.

The sculpture
It’s difficult to describe how striking the sculpture itself is. And the cool think is that you want to go again and again to see it in various stages until you can finally see the skeleton underneath the ice.

The people
You are approached by lovely young people who wear the WWF jacket and talk to you about what the bear symbolises. No talk of joining the organisation or supporting them financially (which I appreciated no end). Instead if you are willing to give them your e-mail they will send you all the information. Notice how the young man in the photos is not holding any paperwork. They all have little handheld devices where they note down your e-mail.

The goodies
If you are willing to give your e-mail the nice young people give you an wrist band and a Christmas card with a cute polar bear. Just as a thank – you but I love how when I returned to the office people asked me about the wrist band. Smart way to cause a conversation methinks.

The flickr group pool
You are encouraged to join the Flickr group and upload your pictures of the polar bear. The most interesting ones are also uploaded on the WWF IceBear website. We already added ours of course.

The streaming video
It was great fun. They are actually streaming the whole melting process on their website – Needless to say I called Manolis and I was waving at the camera grinning like mad. Epic win for WWF here.

All in all I think this is an ingenious interactive installation. Absolutely e v e r y o n e is fascinated by it, people love touching it and photographing it. Thumbs up for WWF.

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Don’t forget that in about 10 days London Digital Week is taking place in our fair city. Check out the events pages – there seems to be great stuff there.

A week of conferences, workshops, meet-ups, presentations, networking, parties and exhibitions bringing together the digital-orientated industries in and around London under one umbrella event. 2009 marks the beginning of this annual festival, drawing in local and global industry leaders and mavericks to celebrate our talented innovators, thinkers and doers, who have helped to put London firmly on the global digital map. The events aims to further the understanding of digital, to share knowledge within the industry and to showcase the best work of companies, groups and individuals in London and the UK to the rest of the world.

We are planning to attend some – we’ll update via twitter and needless to say we’ll also be blogging about them.

See you there?

Arched people
Originally uploaded by Miodrag Bogdanovic

I wrote about being in London the other day and pointed to an interesting discussion about creativity in the City (I would recommend listening to the discussion wholeheartedly – it’s from a Design Museum event). In that blog post I refrained from explaining our attachment to London too much – mainly because it’s such a difficult place to explain in words. Each Londoner (whether born here or not) will have a different take on the city – which is one of the things I love about the place.

Well London doesn’t only lack a clear definition it also lacks a clear brand and visual identity. That’s what our Mayor thought and gave out a tender for the creative development and design of a brand for London.

Moving Brands decided to pitch and they took their quest to the outside world. They’ve been blogging and using twitter - asking what people think of London, what are the great characteristics, how London makes people feel.

This tells me that the people at this project are genuinely interested in doing a good job and they consider research part of that job. Too often we seem to forget to ask the audience – and what better way to engage with them than going out there and just asking? Already they have received marvellous feedback and lots of good stories and experiences.

This has sparked a whole lot of thoughts and discussions over here at SoMaFusion – I promise I’ll soon blog about them.

Our best wishes to Moving Brands and anyone else pitching for the brief – we are waiting with excitement the outcome of the whole process.

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I found out via London Interesting on twitter

Originally uploaded by J!mbo

Being in London matters to us. It is difficult to explain exactly how London can help with your creativity but for us it’s a city that just works in terms of being inspired and staying that way.

I tracked down the other day a marvellous discussion (the link points to an .mp3) hosted by the Design Museum and it helps explain why being here makes sense.

Hussein Chalayan talks about how London influences his work and why he bases his International fashion business in the vibrant and gritty East End. Chalayan is joined by other key design creatives who base themselves in the city, including writer and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Foreign Office Architects partner Farshid Moussavi and acclaimed emerging writer Bola Agbaje.
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The Chair starts by giving a quote to the panel, to start them off in discussing creativity and London: “Britain has been forged in the crucible of fusion of hybridity. London is that crucible that national forge the city where no one belongs is where I belong.”

I think the panel make a very good case about how London helps creative people.

My favourite part is when Hussein Chalayan explains that his own background (he is Turkish/Cypriot) enriched his London experience and how the city gave him the necessary distance to understand the richness of his cultural background.

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I would definitely recommend browsing Hussein Chalayan’s ‘Art Projects’ part of his website – my favourite remains Afterwords, even after all these years, it is a fascinating study/ mashup of fashion – architecture – design.