A doctor’s waiting room is a perfect self-organising system. You always know who was there before you came in and who came in after you. Many Matter subscribers believe we send out boxes on a similar, first-come-first-joined basis. But, it’s not true.
It’s unfortunate that we’re long on subscribers and short on advertisers…at the moment…though we’re working hard to fix that.
However, no matter when you joined–and many of our subscribers have been with us a long time–you always think everybody else joined afterwards. It’s not like a Doctor’s waiting room because you can’t see who’s in front of you.
So, to minimise wastage, of boxes going to out-of-date addresses, we ask everyone to request a box and confirm their address. And while we have limited supply of boxes, we try and make it fair by picking from the requests at random.
Once we get more advertisers and more boxes, we’ll devise a different system that makes sure more people get them
Picture reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence from IK’s World Trip. Thank you.
So… after much ado, the next edition of Matter is finally here. Though, this time it’s quite different.
The original idea for Matter was to bring a number of brands together to bring interesting items to enthusiastic consumers who will then go on to share with their friends their experiences by word-of-mouth and through social media. It’s proved to be a devil of a job to get enough companies together with something interesting to say to the same audience at the same time. But, in developing this latest edition of Matter, Cadbury and their media agency PHD were enthusiastic supporters of Matterbox from the outset and as it developed it became clear that we could do a Matterbox just with them provided that, and because, the content was so good.
I won’t spoil the surprise of what’s actually in the box until you get yours, but it should be really good fun and we hope it causes a big stir.
The next edition of Matter is going to our 18-24 year old subscribers and we’re going to be doing something unusual with it. Cadbury, as official sweet sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics, are setting out to create a new kind of game that everyone can play and can carry around with them–called Pocketgame.
Potential entries were sourced and last week the agency coordinating all this, PHD Media, hosted a judging panel (with (Mark Earls, Katy Lindemann, Neil Perkin, Tim Milne & Robert Jeffries, Adrian Hon, Holly Gramazio, Russell Davies, Tony Ellis & Annie Panter) to evaluate the relative merits of all the entries and come up with a shortlist. The session also included playing some games just to get into the spirit of it and as more of a playful way of arriving at the shortlist.Anyway, you’re invited, no urged, to vote on which you think is the best.
The best two entries will then be produced and will be included in the The forthcoming Generation Y edition of Matter, where Matterbox subscribers will be invited to play the games and vote for an eventual winner.
We’re talking to advertisers about the next edition of Matter (Generation Y), so I thought it might be interesting to see what you come up with.
Come up with an idea for a specific (well-known) brand and if it’s something even half-way practical (the kind of thing that would actually go in a Matterbox), we’ll send you a Matter T shirt.
It’s not a competition. We’ve got a limited supply of T shirts and if we like the idea you get a T shirt. Who gets one ultimately is down to us.
Just a quick last-minute reminder to anyone thinking of entering our Christmas competition and the chance to win a iPod Touch.
It’s pretty simple. Download the pointy-finger from the Matter site, print it and cut it out and take a picture of it pointing to The Thing You Love Most About Christmas.
Then go, to the Matterbox Fan Page on Facebook, join us as a fan and upload your picture along with a comment that includes the phrase “The Thing I Love Most About Christmas”
You can enter as many times as you like. The winner is the one that makes us laugh the most.
I was just about to ask Jim to send me a picture of another friend’s wooden business cards–to carry on the nepotistic theme–when someone handed me this.
I was part of a panel discussion at the iDesign 09 conference in London about what a Post-digital world might look like and, of course, I spoke about the role of real things in a digital world. Immediately afterwards someone gave me this–part of a recruitment drive to get people to take part in the largest community arts project in the world–painting the Heygate Estate in Hackney.
What better illustration of how real things can be used to convey the real essence of a project and engage and entertain people into further (digital) interaction.
Now, I know this is getting silly–given that his business card was OOTD#1, but Jim sent me his new box he’s doing to promote his creative retail print service. I know I was supposed to get excited about the sumptuous piece of fabric inside, but I was really blown away by the richness of the ink on the outside of the box and how he’s used the hit-and-miss nature of the actual print as his identity.
It might not look like it, but this is using printing process as a creative process–in as much as each one is different depending on how the ink flowed through the screen–rather than reproductive–where this pattern of misprinting would be an artwork and every one would be the same–and as an logo. Fantastic.
Still with the nepotistic theme, but spreading my connections as far afield as San Francisco and my good friend, Philip Wood, owner and curator of objects-as-artform store, Citizen-Citizen. Philip gets this whole language-of-objects completely and has made quite a name for himself with this stuff in the US.
This splendid item is called Brush #1 by FredriksonStallard and is an irreverent take on Christian morality that “may ward off evil and dirt in the same stroke”. It sells through Citizen-Citizen’s on-line store.
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