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Meta
From: Kai
Subject: Re: update and complaint
Date: August 6, 2009 2:57:16 PM GMT-04:00
To: Dan
The whole idea with the guy sailing in the bottle developed like this. I thought the metaphor of a ship in a bottle was good for our project as it alludes to the fact that we are on a vessel inside of a finite vessel with limited resources. I looked at a bunch of clip art of ships in bottle, cars in bottles and even bottles in bottles. The ones I saw were mostly the classic clipper ships. I thought a simpler sailing craft would be better and to have a guy on the bow looking forward to what lays ahead is even mo’betta. Where could I get such an image?
My take – the ship in a bottle, a detailed model of a ship built in the bottle by someone with time on their hands and superhuman dexterity and patience. My idea about ship’s in bottles is that the ship model would then be protected from dust and the elements, sort of preserved or pickled. It’s a meta view of the ship and it’s mechanisms that could be viewed from any perspective with a gesture, a visual aid for the apprentice sailor, an interactive documentary. Now stick the holokai sailor in there and it’s the adventure shared, the lone explorer distributed, the adventure encapsulated and washed up on your shore. Translated certainly, but not in the flat screen sense of TV and movies, rather in the sense of holding it in your hands, a precious fragile thing hand built, entrusted to you. Both a gift and a responsibility.
When we talked on the phone August 6, you also mentioned the earth’s atmosphere is the bottle. A bottle can only hold so much, it can break too.
This whole idea came from our earlier discussion about a simpler cover page to the site. I really like the layout of this one: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/WaterFootprintCalculator The graphic in the corner is simple and in keeping with the message of the site. (The windows calculator could have been done a bit better, using a simpler graphic.) On the to-do list when you mentioned that you wanted to make some cards to hand out in RL I thought that the card needs some kind of central image to convey our ideas in a nutshell as well. The lone sailer in a bottle conveys our message on many levels. I love your interpretation! I’d like to offer these as well. The bottle as a metaphor for the earth, itself fragile and carrying a fragile cargo. The sailer looking from the front of his boat at what lays ahead, the narrow part of the bottle sealed with a cork indicating that we have a finite amount of time and resources to figure out our long term survival as a species and as a planet. Maybe part of the answer is to bust out the cork and sail beyond the bottle?
In short I think the image works on a bunch of levels for us. Maybe we need to work on the graphics a bit but I think we should go with it.
I’ve got my hands full at the moment (understatement) but further visual development would be fun. Once I am underway I can imagine playing around with sketches. Check out my image on the ALM event page…
Dan, I love the ALM image although I think you need to make it a bit smaller or reposition it so that the categories sash doesn’t clip it. Why does the post say ‘Comments are closed’ ? ~Kai
The original DLR Hawaiian Islands visualization image was also clipped by the sidebar, for banner images I find this appropriate. Don’t you have better things to do than micromanage my event? 🙂
As we discussed, pages are navigation gates that lead deeper into the site. Comments are closed on pages generally to keep the noise down. You (Kai) use multiple comment modes anyway, email and phone along with this blog.
My preference would be to open comments on everything and have the collaborators do 99% of their process right here via posts and comments, making our process transparent. You expressed discomfort with the clutter inherent in process, that it confuses navigation and makes us look like goofballs. The plan was to structure the blog so that process is available as folks dive deeper. Then it’s their own fault when they get confused and/or discover that we actually ARE goofballs.
Summary: We are attempting to create a fortunate balance between process and clarity.
With such grace, the balancing act that you are working on between the process and the clarity.
I just thought the logo was cool, but your postings are very entertaining, what a pair to draw to!