From The Evening Standard:

A new augmented reality app centred around the “David Bowie Is” V&A exhibition has been released today, on the star’s birthday.

British actor Gary Oldman narrates the app, which turns the award-winning show into an immersive experience.

Users can explore the exhibition by journeying through various rooms, interacting with costumes, videos, lyrics and original artworks.

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From NME:

David Bowie Is…, a collection of costumes, original artworks, handwritten lyrics and more, closed for the last time in Brooklyn last summer, having worked its way around galleries all over the world. There was pandemonium when the visual feast made its way to the UK in 2013, and it became the most popular exhibition ever created for London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, where it debuted, attracting 1.5 million visitors across its eight-date stint.

And now you can explore the exhibition from the comfort of your mobile phone for the low, low price of £7.99 [and $7.99/USD]. It’s like actually attending it, but there’s no-one else around and and you can spend as a long as you want admiring the exhibits. You move your camera as though you’re moving through the room, the screen filling with the costumes, lyrics sheets and more that are on offer.

Read the Complete Article

Direct to “David Bowie Is” App Info Page

Direct to David Bowie Is (AR App): via iTunes

Direct to “David Bowie Is” (AR App): via Google Play

See Also: There’s A David Bowie VR Exhibition That Allows Users to Try on His Costumes (July 17, 2018; via MixMag)

Snackman (1993), Jeroen Koomen of SONIX

[archive.org (playable), Mod Archive]

Thanks to the thousands of readers of my Dakota Stevens mysteries, in the past 18 months I’ve been able to fulfill two lifelong dreams.

The first was going to Paris, spending two solid weeks exploring every inch of that gorgeous city, and walking in the footsteps of my literary idols—including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Flaubert and Maupassant. (You can read about that trip here.)

The second, which I fulfilled only two months ago, was driving through all of England and Scotland, seeing the castles of my ancestors in the Scottish Highlands, and visiting the iconic locations associated with my favorite works of English literature: the Chatsworth estate (the basis for Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice), Stratford-upon-Avon (the birthplace of Shakespeare), and 221B Baker Street in London.

In front of the ruins of one of my family’s ancestral castles in Scotland. 

A famous vista at Chatsworth. 

The River Avon. Photo © by Chris Orcutt.

In front of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The plaque designating 221B Baker Street in London.

This last location, of course, is the residence of the most famous detective ever—Sherlock Holmes. A detective so famous that some people don’t realize that he and his partner, Dr. John Watson, were entirely fictional—the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, a medical doctor himself.

From the time I was 10 years old, well into my late teens, I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. I read all 56 short stories and four novels multiple times. I collected Sherlock Holmes encyclopedias and books about Victorian London. I read biographies of Doyle. I read textbooks about criminalistics and forensic science (this was many years before the CSI TV shows). And I went to college to study forensic science, with the original intent of graduating and working at the FBI crime lab.

One of the original illustrations from a Sherlock Holmes story.

My plan to get a degree in forensics and work for the FBI lasted two semesters. Through one of my courses—Criminalistics and Crime Scene Investigation—I met a forensic scientist from the state crime laboratory and shadowed him. I visited his lab, interned for a few hours a week, and accompanied him when he testified in court. Doing these things, I began to realize that I wasn’t cut out for the largely tedious work involved in forensic testing, nor would I enjoy being grilled on the witness stand by needling lawyers second-guessing every test I performed.

By then I knew that I didn’t want to become a forensic scientist, and I had decided that the sciences were boring; ultimately the answers (or at least some of them) were in the back of the book. Besides, I had discovered that I was more interested in questions than answers, and I enjoyed literature and storytelling too much to give it up for what I perceived would be a humdrum life of science. So I changed my major to philosophy, expanded my reading of the classics, and began doing seriously something that I had done since I was 11 years old—writing stories.

But it all went back to Sherlock Holmes. Even though I didn’t write a mystery of my own for many years, the richness of the Holmes character, and the verisimilitude of his world (as described by Watson) had made a deep impression on me. I knew that whatever the subject or genre, my goal was to write stories as entertaining and compelling as Doyle’s, with characters that were equally strong and larger-than-life.

Book #1 in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series.

As I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere, when I was creating the Dakota Stevens series, Sherlock Holmes and Watson couldn’t help but be literary touchstones for me. I wanted a Holmes–Watson dynamic, but I wanted such a duo to reflect modern sensibilities, and I knew that I wanted the counterpoint, the yin and yang, of having my “Watson” be a woman. And so I asked myself, “What would the dynamic of a modern Holmes and Watson—a man and woman detective team—look like?”

And that’s where Dakota Stevens and his “Watson”—the brilliant and beautiful Svetlana Krüsh—came from.

I didn’t get a chance to visit 221B Baker Street until the morning of my last day in the UK. Alexas and I had specifically chosen our hotel because it was in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, relatively close to Holmes’s address, and when we exited the hotel early that Sunday morning, we were unsure whether to try and walk there, or take the Underground.

The black London cab that whisked me to 221B Baker Street.

We were fumbling with the map when I glanced down the sidewalk and saw a cabbie buffing his freshly-washed black cab. One of my other, smaller, dreams was to ride in a London black cab, and so I got the idea of fulfilling two dreams at once. I would take a London black cab to 221B Baker Street.

I asked the cabbie if he was taking passengers yet (it was barely seven-thirty), and when he replied, “Absolutely,” Alexas and I climbed eagerly in.

“To 221B Baker Street, my good man,” I said. “And hurry!”

Even though it was early on a Sunday morning, there was considerable traffic on the streets, and it took a good fifteen minutes to reach 221B. During the ride, the cabbie asked me why I wanted to go there, and I gave him an abridged version of everything you’ve read so far. I also told him some of the history of Sherlock Holmes, and how Doyle had based the character in part on a medical school professor, Dr. Joseph Bell. I mentioned that I was a mystery novelist from the States (“Not famous—yet,” I added), and the cabbie said he would buy my books on Kindle (Dakota Stevens #1 & #2). Finally he dropped us off, and I gave him an extravagant tip. I wanted him to remember me as generous so he’d be more likely to buy my books and tell others about them.

221B (left) and a Sherlock Holmes museum/shop (right). Holmes’s apartment is on the 2nd floor.

With the exception of a few construction workers gathering in front of a building a few doors down, Baker Street was empty and quiet. A single door, marked 221B, sat next to a closed Sherlock Holmes collectibles store. I knew from my reading ahead of time that Holmes and Watson’s apartment on the second floor was decorated and staged as though they still lived there and had just stepped out. I also knew that admission to the apartment was ridiculously expensive, and was sure to be a disappointment—what with having to share the experience with a mob of people who were merely going there so they could check one more item off of a “bucket list.” It was unlikely that the true Holmes lovers, the serious aficionados, would be part of any tour group. They’d all know it was a Barnum sideshow.

Besides, the building, with a Victorian façade on it, didn’t fit with the other buildings on the street. Not only were the other buildings of more modern architecture, the building numbers were out of sync. It was clear that 221B used to be farther down the street, but that building had been torn down and rebuilt, so they created a new 221B Baker Street (in Victorian style) and wedged it in a few doors down.

But it wasn’t about the actual, physical address anyway. It’s not as though Holmes and Watson had really lived, and I was seeing the exact building and apartment where they’d resided. No, it was about the idea of 221B Baker Street. It was about what 221B represented.

As I stared up at the windows, the stories came flooding back to me: “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (a great TV version here). “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” “The Final Problem.” “The Musgrave Ritual.” “A Scandal in Bohemia.” A Study in Scarlet. The Hound of the Baskervilles.

It was about all of the pleasure these stories had given me since I was a boy, and how Sherlock Holmes had been a constant companion to me through my difficult and awkward teenage years. It was about how these stories had launched me in a certain direction in life, and how they had inspired me to write the best detective novels I possibly could.

At last, in front of 221B Baker Street in London.

Alexas took some photos of me standing proudly in front of 221B Baker Street, and then we took a few of a young Japanese woman who knew that 221B was famous for something, but famous for what, she had no idea.

So often in life, the moment of actually realizing a goal, fulfilling a dream, is a letdown compared to how we imagine it will be. But not this time. Not for me. Seeing 221B Baker Street—the home of my childhood hero—affected me much more deeply than I thought it would. As I stared at it for the last time, I realized then how much I had dreamed of being there, how important the place was to me. And I told Alexas so, and began to cry.

When it comes to branding, Coca-Cola is an absolute phenomenon.

Blue Marlin New York's Anna Milivojevich takes you on a journey on Coca-Cola's creative direction.

Coca-Cola is arguably the best branded product in the world. Its sheer might and force of character, its stamina and precision, its ability to get it right time and time again, is undeniable. It’s a true juggernaut, dominating the global landscape and embedding itself into world culture as it corners the soft drinks market by simply focusing on selling ‘happiness.’

When it comes to branding, Coca-Cola is an absolute phenomenon. It’s a brand that has found the right rhythm of constantly evolving and continuously exciting the consumer yet always remaining true to itself (despite the dark days of New Coke, which in the end may have served to solidify the universal love for ‘The Real Thing’).

New Coke is one of very few failures for Coca-Cola.

The question is, how does a brand that has remained relatively unchanged over such a lengthy period continue to be one of the most innovative on the planet?

Coca-Cola is a brand that has remained relatively unchanged over such a long period with such sustained success.

I would contend that Coca-Cola’s power over the people has little to do with its product and everything to do with its branding. In fact, a senior executive at the company once proclaimed, “If Coca-Cola were to lose all its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. In contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.”

My personal admiration for Coca-Cola is born out of the fact that it’s a largely design-driven brand. Amongst several other factors, I believe its faith and commitment to design has kept Coca-Cola fresh and ahead of so many fierce competitors. Whether it be limited editions, new flavour variants, sustainability, market expansion, packaging formats, social connection or supporting good causes, Coca-Cola always plays at the top of its game, setting the trends that others follow.

Below are several diverse and beautifully executed examples of how Coca-Cola expresses its brand through design.

Fashion Partnerships

Supporting A Good Cause
 

Summer Editions

Shape Exploration

Diverse Graphic Design

Social Connections

There aren’t many brands that are universally understood like Coca-Cola. It uses this to great effect within its social connection campaigns, which bring happiness and people together. What’s particularly interesting to me, is that packaging design is so often the primary vessel for such marketing.

Partnership With Spotify

Coca-Cola creates partnerships that foster the idea of global community. Generating brand awareness by connecting to young people through both technology and one of the most powerful outlets of self-expression and culture; Music.

Sustainable Campaigns

Coca-Cola continually produces stunts and campaigns that are surprising and unexpected. The melting bottles are a particularly apt example as they not only demonstrate Coca-Cola’s tendency for the spectacular, but since they disintegrate completely after use, they are sustainable too. Of course, the ultimate aim is for the beverage to be served the way it should be – ice cold.

Coca-Cola is also sponsors countless global events.

Re-Appropriation

While a creation by Coca-Cola itself, these chairs made from re-cycled and re-appropriated Coke bottles show just how far our relationship with the brand stretches.

About Anna Milivojevich

Website • Twitter 

Anna Milivojevich is a creative thinker with over ten years of industry experience, who joined Blue Marlin as New York Design Director in January 2010, and was promoted to Associate Creative Director in March 2011. Highly skilled in the creation of innovative packaging, brand identity and design strategy, she has lent her talents to numerous Fortune 500 and niche brands.

Anna has worked on projects for Gillette, Colgate-Palmolive, Tropicana, Kimberly Clark, Thresher Group (UK), Pepsi, Black & Decker, Pepperidge Farm, Unilever and Pfizer. She has also won several awards for her work on Splenda Mist and Duane Reade.

If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff.

Neff wasn’t just an architect–he was a starchitect. One of his most famous projects was the renovation of Pickfair, the estate owned by the iconic silent film actress Mary Pickford, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks. When the couple moved into Pickfar, the house sat on a nameless street in an empty neighborhood called Beverly Hills. If you were lucky enough to be invited to dinner at Pickfair you might find yourself seated next to Babe Ruth, the King of Spain or Albert Einstein. Life magazine called Pickfair “only slightly less important than the white house, and much more fun.” Neff designed estates for Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Groucho Marx. His Libby Ranch is now owned by Reese Witherspoon.

But at the end of his life, Wallace Neff lived in a 1,000 square foot concrete bubble. And Neff believed that this simple dome was his greatest architectural achievements.

(Wallace Neff at an airform construction site. Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Near the end of World War II, architects were anticipating the post-war housing shortage. Neff wanted to create a solution that would not only meet this demand, but address the need for housing worldwide.

The idea came to Neff one morning when he was shaving. He looked down and noticed a soap bubble that had formed on the sink. He reached out and touched it. The bubble held firm against his fingertip. That was the moment the idea struck him. He could build with air.  He could make bubble.

And Neff wanted to build them by the thousands.

(One of Neff’s patent drawings for a double-bubble house. Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Neff never intended to make money from the bubble houses. Having already made his fortune as an architect for the rich and famous (and his grandfather was Andrew McNally, founder of Rand McNally publishing), Neff say these bubble houses as a way of fulfilling a social responsibility. He wanted to engineer a new way to provide low-cost housing.

For the record, dome-shaped living structures was not a new idea. The indigenous Acjachemon of Southern California had wickiups, the Ojibwe had wigwams, and the Inuit had (and still have) igloos.  And even during Neff’s lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was creating his own circular solution to the housing shortage: The Geodesic Dome. (See Episode #64). But Neff’s design was something completely different.

The process was called “airform.” First, a big slab of concrete was poured in the shape of a giant coin.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Next, they inflated a giant balloon in the shape of a grapefruit, with the flat side down. This balloon was tied down to the foundation using steel hooks.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

After the balloon was inflated it was coated in a fine powder. And then it was cover with a magical substance called gunite–the product of water and dry cement mix combined at a high pressure and shot out of a gun.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Two men with a balloon and a gunite machine could turn a bare patch of soil into a bubble house in less than 48 hours. And after the gunite dried the balloon was deflated and pulled out through the front door so it could be used again on the next house.

When the gunite dried it was more than twice as strong as regular concrete. Wallace Neff was so confident in his design that he would invite people to bash the walls of the bubble  with the back side of an axe. The axe would just bounce off.

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

In October of 1941, Neff began construction on a community of twelve bubble houses in Falls Church, Virginia. The project was paid for by the federal government, and was used to house government workers.  The neighborhood would eventually take on the nickname Igloo Village.

(Credit: Wallace Neff. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Life in a bubble house could be problematic. Their round rooms were difficult to furnish, and the concave walls were not conducive to hanging pictures.

(Credit: Huntington Library, Maynard Parker Collection.)

(Courtesy of Steve Roden and Jeffrey Head.)

Igloo Village was in the middle of the woods,  cut off from the rest of the town. And because it was so damp, mold would appear inside the house. And to make matters worse, kids from neighboring towns would drive into their community to ogle these weird buildings. There were no streetlights in Igloo Village, which served to make the headlights of the intruding cars all the more ominous and penetrating.

Wallace Neff was able to land a few more clients for his bubble houses. The Southwest Cotton Company hired him to build a desert colony of bubble houses in Litchfield Park, Arizona. Loyola University in Los Angeles contracted Neff to build a bubble house dormitory. And in 1944, the Pacific Linen Supply Company commissioned a bubble structure 100 feet in diameter and 32 feet high–the largest ever built.

Eventually everyone moved out of their bubbles. With the exception of a bubble in Pasadena that Neff himself lived in, every one of Neff’s bubbles in the United States have been demolished.

But if there was one good thing about the bubble houses, it’s that they are incredibly cheap and easy to build–qualities attractive to much of the developing world. There have been, or still are, bubble houses in Pakistan, Egypt, Liberia, India, Jordan, Turkey, Kuwait, South Africa, The Virgin Islands, Nicauruga, Venezuala, Cuba, and Brazil.

The biggest collection of bubble houses–a community of 1,200–was built in Dakar, Senegal.

(Credit: Huntington Library. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

(Credit: Wallace Neff. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Many of these bubbles are still around today.

(Credit: Candice Felt. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Wallace Neff wanted a building solution to house the masses. So in a sense, Neff actually got what he wanted.

(Credit: Candice Felt. Courtesy of Jeffrey Head.)

Los Angeles-based reporter David Weinberg spoke with historian Jeffrey Head, author of No Nails, No Lumber: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff.  David also spoke with Kathy Miles, who grew up in Igloo Village; Steve Roden, an artist and current resident of the last remaining bubble house in the US; and architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who has his practice in a classic Spanish/Mediterranean-style Wallace Neff building. (Polyzoides personally hates the bubble houses.)

We also hear from Dakar-based producer Juliana Friend, who was nice enough to go check on the bubbles over there.

A different version of this story originally aired on KCRW as part of their Independent Producer Project.

David is also the brains behind Random Tape, an audio experiment in, well, random tape.

Music: “Memory Pictures”- Patten, “La Seine”- Hauschka, “Sunlight (Sequence 1 & 2)”- OK Ikumi, “Kamogawa”- Hauschka, “Until Then”- Orcas, “Happiness”- Hauschka, “Memory Pictures”- Patten, “Bubbles in the Forest”- Lullatone, “Scrambled (Forest World Remix)”- OK Ikumi

There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally can’t get out of your car. Inside of a driveway moment, time becomes elastic–you could be staring straight at a clock for the entire duration of the story, but for that length of time, the clock has no power over you.

But ironically,  inside the machinery of public radio–the industry that creates driveway moments–the clock rules all.

At NPR’s studios in Washington, DC, there are clocks everywhere. Big red digital clocks, huge round analog clocks. There’s even special software and time calculators, where 60 + 60 = 2’00.

(All Things Considered director Monika Evstitieva during a live broadcast in NPR’s Studio 2A. Credit: Julia Barton)

Each show has a ‘clock’, a set template, from which the show almost never varies. Every show that broadcasts—or aspires to broadcast—in the public radio system has a clock. This is the All Things Considered broadcast clock, which NPR and stations across the country refer to on a daily basis:

It’s actually a pretty cool piece of visual design, but one which functions best when it is never seen. This template is used twice every weekday: ATC Hour 1, from 4:00:00pm through 4:59:59pm ET; and then for ATC Hour 2, from 5:00:00 through 5:59:59pm ET.

Here’s how it works: at the ‘top’ of the hour, there is a 59 second “billboard,” which announces what’s going up in the program. Then there’s five minutes for the newscast, which is itself divided into two segments (“Newscast I” and “Newscast II”). Then there are the “blocks”–A, B, C, and D–which is where the stories and interviews (or “two-ways”) live.

Segments can’t run long by even a second, because most of the local stations are automated to cut off the national program where the clock says they can. These times–the dividers between the sections on the clock–are called posts. You have to hit the post. Nothing can go wrong.

Though, of course, things go wrong every day.

(When Julia visited ATC, a live interview segment accidentally got wrapped up 35 seconds early. Then it was on Monika, the director, to figure out what to do. Credit: Julia Barton)

Taking care of the clock is so ingrained in the director’s psyche that a common side effect of the job is waking up in the middle of the night fearing that you’ve blown the post–these are called “director’s dreams.” To cope with the anxiety, ATC directors make their own cheat sheets to help them memorize every queue of every hour of broadcast.Visit any studio that does a regular live feed with a broadcast clock and you’ll likely find a cheat sheet one somewhere in the studio.

The director’s cheat sheets at ATC  have been used so much that they’re in tatters. They have since been laminated.

(Note the correction in the “Top Credit” in the upper right. It’s not “1:00″, it’s “:59″)

When NPR began in the early 1970s, show clocks were much less regimented–or they didn’t have clocks at all.

One of the early champions against the fixed clock was Bill Siemering, a founder of NPR who helped design the network’s overall sound. He came up with the name All Things

Considered (original title: A Daily Identifiable Product). Siemering wrote the mission statement of NPR, which is enshrined in the halls of NPR (note the text on the walls).

(Credit: Interior Design)

Siemering liked a clock that was more free-form, because it allowed for spontaneity and unpredictability. But spontaneous and unpredictable does not always make for compelling radio. Done wrong, and you wind up with laughably bad “Schweddy Balls”-grade public radio.

When Siemering left NPR in the early 1970s, NPR chose to have more subdivided clocks. The constraints forced the shows to get tighter, which some say makes NPR stronger. One person is Neal Conan, former host of Talk of the Nation, who maintains that the earlier, freer days of NPR were not as halcyon as some may remember them.

 These days, podcasting allows for shows such as this one to be free of a post, and go on for as long or short as is fitting for any given story.

Reporter-producer-editor (triple threat!) Julia Barton visited NPR’s old headquarters at Washington, DC, where she spoke with ATC directors Monika Estativia and Greg Dixon, and former Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan. Julia also spoke with public radio’s patron saint, Bill Siemering.

Many thanks to All Things Considered Executive Producer Chris Turpin and the other powers-that-be at NPR who gave us unfettered access to the shop during Julia’s visit.

(Note: Julia visited NPR while they were still at 635 Massachusetts Ave, NW. They have since moved to 1111 N. Capitol St.)