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.
Another one of my good friends (I might well start with nepotism and work upwards) sent me details of this nice little item…
David runs auto-journals–a digital alternative car magazine written by owners–and went to the Frankfurt Motor Show where he got this cool leather-bound memory stick from Ferrari as part of the press kit given out to all journos for the launch of the new 458 Italia. 5,000 were given away in a few minutes, apparently.
What Ferrari (and every other car manufacturer) know is the value of cool objects to make journalists say nice things about their cars. We don’t think journalists should have a monopoly on this kind of communication and believe that Matterbox subscribers will be just as enthusiastic about brands if they were given nice items too.
If you have anything you think would make it as OOTD, please send me a picture / description to: tim[at]artomatic[dot]co[dot]uk
As you know, Matter is all about real things. More specifically, it’s about how we value real things more in a digital world. Most of these things are printed, since the upshot of all this technology is that we’re moving from a printed media world to a digital media world. So, I thought it might be a good idea to illustrate this with what I think are interesting (printed) physical objects.
First up is my friend Jim’s business card for his printing business Wonder. Printed on a dayglo polycarbonate with a silver foil-effect ink, it’s super lustrous and makes you want to just keep turning it over to see how the light changes it.
If you have anything you think would make it as OOTD, please send me a picture / description to: tim[at]artomatic[dot]co[dot]uk
Obviously, it’s been a bit quiet around here and maybe you’re wondering whether we’ll ever do another box. Well, we will and we are.
We’re putting one together now for delivery in a few month’s time. It’s taken a while, we know, but we’ve been beavering away at getting in front of brands and advertisers to show them why giving people something is better than telling them something.
We’re making progress and will have the next box out as soon as we can gather enough brands together to make some nice things to go in it.
We’ll post more news when we have it.
Tim
The best picture I could find of a Tumbleweed: DBR62
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