A special birthday celebration for Johnny Sullivan Hamilton. Forties for everyone.

A little project some friends and I started:

Little Keys is a local art project-meets-computer game, created for the little ones. Using recycled keyboards, Little Keys allows toddlers and young children to finally mimic their computer savvy parents. Kids bang away on brightly colored keys to create playful patterns of letters, numbers, and shapes without parent’s fearing of erasing their address book.

Little Keys was created by a small group of Brooklynites working at web agencies, and the donation of keyboards from The Barbarian Group, Big Spaceship, and Neighborhoodies.

Currently we’re winding down the operation. We participated in a few flea markets, but once we ran out of keyboards we can’t do a whole lot.

If you have a huge collection of USB mac keyboards you want to toss, let us know, and maybe we’ll make another batch in the future:)

Check out the fickr feed:

How often do you hand write a note? Better question: how often do you write in cursive? I’ve had a few random discussions about this dying form of communication, and just recently came across an article that confirmed what I feared.

It’s an interesting truth that we’re trading a more expressive form of communication for a faster, more efficient one. I rarely write notes. I only write cursive for my rent check and signatures (though I think my last name only has 3 letters in it) and reading birthday cards and notes from grandparents is becoming a very slow, painful process. Our digital means of communication doesn’t require much more than a specific series of taps so it becomes an almost logical transition. The Globe reports that a 2007 study shows 9 of 10 teachers only devote 70 minutes to the teaching of handwriting a week.

I didn’t really have a strong position on this until I found an old moleskin from college. What I learned after reading a few pages is how much communication and expression is visible beyond the simple words. The pen pressure, the movement of the pen, size, neatness, angle of writing, sentence structure, and especially the character style.. I could practically turn to the pages that were the most involved and inspired, simply based on the writing.

These nuances of communication create a fabric of expression that can be more honest and insightful than the actual content. So I began to think about the comparable data that could be collected in the digital world. Type speed, number of errors, long pauses, erased content, style of writing, sentence length… If we could record this information while creating a blog entry, perhaps we could recreate a similar way of experiencing, understanding, or even organizing our thoughts. Documenting these unperceived habits and visualizing them in an understandable way; a little more honesty and feeling in the type.

Let’s not loose this nuance, but rediscover it in the digital realm.

Here’s a flickr group of people sharing their handwriting, and learning a little more about themselves.
!!

The day has finally come, amen.

One Laptop Per Child is having the special “Give one. Get one.” campaign back this year and doing is better than ever! It’s just begun, and already Tom Brady has dontated 1,500 laptops, and accessory sites like ILoveMyXO.com have been born. We teamed up with TAXI to help with the OLPC digital campaign for the little green machines.

Amazon has become the e-commerce platform for the laptops, and is extending the reach well beyond the US to 40 + countries, which is extremely impressive and we’re very proud of. The Barbarian Group took on the storefront as an opportunity to push what is possible within Amazon, so we created a unique, fully branded experience, that never been done before in Amazon, including images and video. Check it out amazon.com/XO, and don’t forget to support.

Halloween photobooth was a success. Check it out here:

I’ve been working on a photo booth for a Halloween party the last few weeks with some friends. Its been a labor of love, as we built the structure and stable housing the we eventually decided was “drunk-proof” with glass and bolts to protect against the roughest of guests. We also turned a toy gun into the remote trigger for our Canon 5D and strobe kit.

The guests had a monitor to see their images as they were taking them. We had some spoof job posters outside the booth with pull-tabs sending them to flickr.com/loft910 to find the photos later. It worked like a charm, and 2,000 photos later we had a pretty amazing set of images.

Because of the sheer number of photos, here is the time-lapse of the whole event.

”... the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls “digital natives,” are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.”

Steve Jobs has an issue with belts. No mishaps yet though.