Tentempié

Organic is one of those words that are heavily used to reinforce any argument these days. It has some kind of positive attribute. In opposition to industrial, organic is fresh. It is cool. It’s like the word strategy. Nothing better than to spilt strategy in the middle of a sentence to show how much you master the issue. Or at least to pretend it.

Organic, used for food labeling tries to say that it was produced in a certain way. The process can be eco-friendly, but not necessarily. It also can mean that no synthetic chemicals took part during the preparation (and please don’t say just chemicals).   But at the end, it is just a market denomination to differentiate the product by some kind of quality measurement. The funny thing is that sometimes it can happend to sound kind of stupid.

What’s the opposite of an organic egg?. An engineered one?, a robotic egg?. The same thing frequently takes place when you use organic at work.

- Its design approach is organic.

- Our team is organic, we can adapt.

- Your website content strategy is organic. (Double score).

It may seem cool to use organic, but actually most of the time it’s imprecise.  Don’t hide yourself beneath vague words.

Signs to avoid dirty hands at Boqueria Market in Barcelona. In terms of natural selection what makes us strong as individuals, makes us weak as a specie.

In China it’s common that many objets keep parts of its original package. Adhesive films, cardboards and foams are everywhere. Is this carelessness or a true will for preservation?. I’m not quite sure.

These ketchup packs made me think about the previous shapes of objects. We are surrounded by things with an evolution history. Few of them are created and used as raw, without hard modification. Even the simplest materials requires some treatment.

You’ve surely noticed that when browsing the web some ads are closely related to your previous visits to certain pages. Even if that happened days ago. Online behavior tracking have been there for some time, and boost sales enormously for an online retail business -just to mention one-.

How do you feel about that?. It’s obvious that it have some minority report alike effect, orwellian if you prefer. Does it discomfort you?. Recently I realized that it works for me as a reminder. As a pending to-do alert I have to fulfill. Weird. But in some way it push me away from completing my purchase through clicking the banner. It’s just like when you have too much attention on you from the staff in a brick and mortar store.

I would consider seriously  the negative outcomes of feeling chased and the impact on brands over the sales.

AIGA alike sign in a ferry. Easily understood despite not been able to read chinese characters. I wonder how many signs (or combinations) are we familiar with due to repeated exposition during the years.

Some days ago I found this unused parking meter near a comercial area in Beijing. It was installed about 5 years ago, but for nothing. I was told that car owners didn’t know how to use it, and didn’t care about the whole thing. Now it stands as a testimony of the locals slipshod sense for authority.

This is a lift calling deck, with nonsense duplicated buttons. Remember me the double checking problem some people experiment.

Seen in Glory Mall, Beijing

Is Gucci selling rubber carpets?. Read carefully, it says Gucgi. But that doesn’t matter very much to your brain, at least at first glance.

Seen on a Taxi on Tianjin, China.

It’s taken for granted that order makes our life easier. And it’s also better known that shopping malls are created so that you have to walk a little bit to come across shops while you seek for the next escalators.

What really surprised me was to know that some malls are designed to get us completely lost. They talk about it in The secret life of buildings, a great series that face how building’s shape affect us. Since watching it, I’ve been quite obsessed  analyzing path routes in every shopping mall I visit. It turns up to be kind of fun to discover every trick that architects have planned to makes us walk along the building:

• Escalators that drives you not just one floor, but accidentally two or even more without almost noticing it.
• Lifts that works only for some floors.
• Levels that are only accessed by some lifts and escalators.
• Different placement of lifts and escalator, it’s a seek and find game to spot the right one that takes you where you want.
• Solitary escalators to which you have to walk, just to check if it’s going up or down.
• The list continues up to the infinite…

The series can be found here:

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=XWZHIMJO

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=GHIWY73L

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=ZWP5AZOP

Thanks to Dámaris for telling about this!