icon 013 I was pretty pleased with this piece, though there are few juicy details or great stories in it. I guess it was with getting a sense of the way they spoke. I was sad to hear that Shin and Tomoko recently split up and have established their own seperate studios. Hey ho.

Shin Azumis DVD player won’t work properly. He fiddles around with the on-screen menus in single-minded concentration rising frustration while Tomoko, his design partner and wife, waits with bemused patience for him to come and pose for icon’s photographer. But this is important for Shin: he wants to show the work of Scots-Canadian animator Norman McLaren, who for him encapsulates the Azumi’s approach to design.

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A tumultuous day.

My first knowledge of the explosions was on being evacuated from Stratford Station in east London. Stratford is where the Olympic Games in 2012 will take place, so outside the station the remnants of yesterdays celebrations at winning the hosting remain, along with TV crews, which are suddenly having to report somewhat less triumphant news.

I can feel the day already going down in mythology – from London’s celebration to London’s disaster.

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The paucity of posts recently has been because of the birth of our baby, Jack, a couple of weeks ago. I can’t say there’s much going on in my head other than the dizzy turmoil of us learning to live with each other with as few screaming fits as possible, and there was no chance I’d make it down to the Royal College of Art to see this year’s crop of graduate work.

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Dan Hill blogs that BBC Radio 3 Online’s initiative to provide free downloads of all Beethoven’s symphonies has been highly successful.

Not everyone thinks that this is necessarily a good thing – no commercial agency can really compete with the BBC’s ability to provide free online media, and if the BBC expanded this service a lot of websites would lose custom.

But for the rest of us it’s great. To watch how the BBC might implement such ideas further will be fascinating – don’t forget, some of the BBC’s many websites continue to be among the most progressively designed in the world. And as Dan says, it looks likely that they might:

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I finally finished Resident Evil 4 yesterday, one of the best games I’ve played for ages. Intense, imaginative, surprising, and horrendously beautiful to look at, Resident Evil 4 is a massive evolution of the zombie game series.

But despite how good it is, I’ve taken a couple of months to complete it, playing through sections one at a time, bit by bit. The progression was so slow because of a few reasons. Partly it was because I wanted to draw the game out, not rushing those amazing set pieces, trying to note and savour every detail of this incredibly meticulously detailed game world.

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I’m extremely late to the party, but I finished watching the first series of 24 last week and embarked on the start of the second yesterday. It’s gripping stuff. With that breadth of experience I bring you a list of top tips for 24:

• All women are evil, impressionable, useless or poignant triggers for male action. 24 is a man’s man’s man’s world (actually series two seems a little more balanced: perhaps the scriptwriters had gotten over their marriage break-ups in time for it).
• Always have an atrocity in the first episode, the awfulness of which should go almost entirely uncommented on for the rest of the series (i.e. passenger plane explosion, Bauer cold-bloodedly killing a suspect and hacking his head off).
• General guide to characters: ugly = evil, beautiful = good/innocent. Some difficult but good characters should be half ugly, half beautiful (i.e. Darlene-out-of-Rosanne’s CTU computer character in series two, the nerdy CTU computer guy in series one, CTU chief Mason). This rule particularly applies to non-Caucasians: 24 should demonstrate that the US is a paradise of ethnic diversity but all representatives of that diversity must be beautiful. All ugly non-Caucasians are evil.
• The “difficult” choices that 24 has its characters make should never actually produce truly ambiguous situations so viewers never have to feel uncomfortable about them. Always fit choices into a rigid moral framework (i.e. the over-riding importance of family bonds).
• The main source of threat should originate from outside the US. While it is OK for lackeys of that threat to be American, they must be ugly and therefore be easy to dismiss as morally depraved and worthless.
• Each character should be set with a limited set of situations that are repeated throughout the series (i.e. daughter Kim in constant cycle of threat of kidnap and attempted escape, CTU man Tony either under suspicion of being a traitor or suspecting others). This is so that viewers that miss several episodes always know roughly what each character is going through.
• It’s fine for LA’s size to fluctuate, depending on the requirements of the narrative – similar journeys can vary from five minutes to an hour.

Of course, these problems are highly exacerbated by the fact I’ve been viewing 24 over the course of a few weeks on DVD, often two in a row. It’s fascinating how the producers have created a shorthand of visual cues (physical appearance, lingering shots on certain facial expressions and so on) to communicate a twisting, fairly complex story over a long period of time to a wide audience.

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A few months ago I played Pokémon Ruby on the GBA. I never finished it because I got stuck on the final marathon of a battle. But until that point it was a horrendously compulsive experience, eating my hour+ journeys between work and home. The excitement of finding, catching and then training new Pokémon is still hard to beat.

A really important part of the whole process was naming. On capturing each new Pokémon you can give it a name, an essential part of producing a sense of ownership over the little guy, giving it a degree of personalisation beyond its skill sets and stats.

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The “shortlist” for INDEX:, a new design prize based in Denmark, has been announced. The jury is proud to have selected 118 designs (from an original 538 submissions) to vie for the five prizes of DKK100,000. The focus seems to be on worthy “live-improving” stuff, all solar pasteurisation units to clean AIDS-infected breast milk and robot assistants for the elderly.

All very good, but thing that struck me while reading the press release is where the designs come from:

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I love maps. And I really love this – Google Maps annotated with Flickr photographs taken at those locations. That’s where we live – there are even pictures taken at the pub down the road.

I generally hesitate at the prospect of “convergence”, because mixing ideas together often ends up in compromising them. But sometimes mixing creates a kind of technological poetry, like the joining of a mobile phone with a camera. And this joining of Google Maps and Flickr is one of those poetic moments.

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Do videogamers, among enthusiast groups, have a disproportionately large interest in the business behind their interest?

Do car fans obsess over every new business decision made by Volvo or Mercedes? Do gardeners get excited about the latest compost trade show in Los Angeles?

I really don’t know, but what I do know is that videogamers are absolutely fascinated by the business of games, much as their analysis of it is often uninformed, misreported, narrowminded and partisan.

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