Tag: blogging

Tooled Up For School.

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This video appeared on the West Midlands Police Youtube site last week. It is part of the Tooled up for School campaign.

As I write this has been seen a couple of hundred times.  It is a song produced for a dvd which is used in schools to discourage children from carrying weapons.  In it the singer Witness uses the phrase “…goodness gracious me” rhymed with ..”weaponry”.

The video is beautifuly made, the music good quality and getting this onto youtube makes sense simply because, with all public organisations, my view is if you’ve got it then share it, somehow.

But this is material designed to be used in a controlled, adult led, educational environment yet is now spilling onto the social web.

Some questions: Had it been intended to make its way on the social web in the first place would it be the same product? Is this optimised to go viral amongst children who will be tempted to carry weapons in school?  Is it right that the campaign url www.oneknifeonelife.co.uk  essentially re-directs users to part of the West Midlands police website?

The whole programme has been funded by the Birmingham Children’s Fund, Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and West Midlands Police – a force that took to podcasting very early on with the fab Plodcast.

Designers needed to help ColaLife turn this crate into a thing of life saving beauty

Coca-Cola crate by S1m0nB3rry.

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Dimensions are 36cm in height, 42cm in length and 32cm in width. Can you help find a way to use this crate?

And let’s imagine all the answers we will have to come up with. Like
“How are we going to incorporate non-Coke items in Coca-Cola crates?”

Questions like this spark other questions like “What are the
dimensions of the Coca-Cola crates and bottles used in east Africa?”
and so on.

Can anyone with thoughts, answers or more questions please post them here by commenting? Click here and scroll down.

More from Simon here.

Update:  I’ve also just e-mailed the product design course at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, part of Birmingham City University.  Worth a try! If any of the students pick up on this let me know, I’ll happily praise them to the skies, as I’m sure will others.

Seth Godin’s First Law of mass media:

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling,
spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun
morphs from “you” to “me” to “us” to “the corporation” …

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between
real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with
more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

Fascinating observations found here. At this stage I am working with organisation try to persuade that social media is about the individual and the personal. I’ve not yet thought that if/when I win that battle there will still be substantial forces of de-personalisation trying to undermine that work. I’m hoping that the right way will be so liberating and so transparently useful that only a lunatic would want to go backwards. Umh….

Hattip. See also.