Whyte studied urban environments using movie cameras, recorded observations, and interviews in an attempt to understand how people actually use outdoor spaces such as plazas, sidewalks, and street corners. Whyte's earnest and often humorous narration make the film entertaining, but more than this, the material itself --the people watching-- is fascinating. Moreover, many of Whyte's findings challenge commonly held assumptions about urban design.

Watching this film was one of the most entertaining and educational hours I ever spent in graduate school. There are lessons here that any designer can learn.

Unfortunately, the video is out of print, but you can still pick up a copy of the book which covers the same material.

Google Books is a project to digitize as many books as possible. Though the content in many of the books is copyrighted (particularly in latter titles), the words themselves can be mined/visualized to facilitate research in the Ngrams viewer, basically Google Insights for print. There are a ton of interesting use cases for this, both seeing trends in ideas/concepts and trends in language over time. (And actually, if can be difficult to disaggregate these - as people use more specific terms over time, or language changes over time. And one would like to see a graph of just the amount of words scanned at points in the timeline.  Simple queries can lead to some pretty dramatic conclusions...). Be prepared to get sucked in by this tool. Here's a favorite:

A small but good collection of Ngrams is forming on this tumbleog, and there is a good writeup with nice examples here.

1. The Thatcher Effect

This image looks pretty normal when viewed upside down, even though the mouth and eyes are inverted in both versions of the image. Really. Turn your laptop upside down, right now. Behold, the Thatcher Effect.

Researchers from Emory University attribute the phenomenon to our sensitivity to the relationship between facial features in upright faces, a sensitivity that also allows us to differentiate between faces and recognize familiar faces. Read more.

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Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge...Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge...Once you're at the boundary, you focus.

And, that dent you've made is called a Ph.D.

1. Do animals need privacy?

Brett Mills at the University of East Anglia suggests that the ethics of the media and privacy should be extended beyond humans to the animal world. He says it might be acceptable to film "public events" such as animals hunting - but questions more intrusive recording. For humans, he says, it is assumed that documentary makers would need consent to go into people's private lives, but no such boundary exists for wildlife filmmakers.

Albrecht Dürer, Young Hare

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1. Unilever's "Crowdsourcing" Outted as High-Tech Spec

Unilever, which encompasses dozens of popular brands such as Lipton, Bertolli, and Slim-Fast, fired the ad agency representing Peperami (British Slim Jims) and replaced it with what it calls a crowdsourcing solution.

But while most crowdsourcing involves leveraging the collective intelligence of a group for mutual benefit, Unilever marketed the call for ad ideas to professional ad agencies only. Moreover, they are offering a $10,000 bounty to the winning idea. Sound familiar? It's the classic spec work pitch.

They should crowdsource a packaging designer, too....

Advertising Age called them on it:

Crowdsourcing at its core is about mass collaboration. Unilever's move, on the other hand, is nothing of the sort. Unilever is looking for no collaboration here. What it is looking for is to get lots of high-quality creative ideas at a significantly lower price. End of story.

UPDATE: There appears to be a whole section on NO!SPEC regarding unethical crowdsourcing practices!

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The Fall of Man, Lukas Cranach the Elder

Namely, it indicates that 67% of consumers believe it's important to buy ethically responsible products, and that 51% of them are willing to pay more for those products. What's more, 28% of consumers avoid buying products from companies whose political and social positions they disagree with, while 17% have told others to stop buying products from those companies.

While none of comes as a surprise, exactly, there's another interesting statistic that might: according to the survey, 23% of consumers say they have "no way of knowing" if a product does what it claims. To wit, there what appears to be a statistically verifiable "green trust gap." Now, why might that be the case?

Raphael Bemporad, co-founder of BBMG, says the findings mean that marketers need to better communicate with consumers and be more transparent. DLB's official response? Well, duh.

Back in July of 2000, British Petroleum, the world's third largest global energy company, launched a massive $200 million public relations and advertising campaign, unveiling their current "green" brand image, in an attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers. The campaign was created by the British advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, who later the PRWeek 2001 "Campaign of the Year" award in the 'product brand development'. All told, BP spent around $200m on the rebrand.

The big ideal? What's that again?

The heart of the rebrand involved changing the company's name to BP (back from BP-Amoco, the result of a recent mega-merger), creating a wordmark in which small letters were used ("bp" was thought to have fewer imperialist associations than the erstwhile "BP"), and finally implementing a new corporate tagline, "beyond petroleum."

BP's then CEO John Browne said: "It's all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites." And it apparently did: During more than a decade with Browne as chief executive (ending last year), BP's market value rose fivefold and its share price rose 250 percent.

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