Radio NZ: Sounds Like Us

After yesterday’s post on Radio Canada and design, one of my students pointed me to Radio New Zealand‘s Sounds Like Us design competition supported by Weta Workshop and New Zealand’s National Museum, Te Papa.

“Open to all New Zealanders, the objective of the competition is to design a radio that captures the essence of New Zealand.”

Here are a couple of my favourite entries sample designs:

Caravan Radio

Maori Radio

And the Judge’s Choice winner, Grandma’s Knitting Basket Radio, inspired by NZ wool:

Grandma’s Knitting Basket
Designed by Courtney Foon

“My concept is based around my grandma and my ‘Grandma’s Knitting Basket’, which is also the name of my radio. My inspiration came from my grandma always having a little woven basket with all her materials in it like balls of different coloured wool, knitting needles, scissors, cotton and thread. She knitted everything from scarves, jumpers, doilies, gloves etc. I liked the idea of soft wool paired with sharp, hard objects such as the scissors and knitting needles. Radio used to be a family gathering before television, and also where grandma would sit with the family and knit. I think of wool as being a New Zealand product. Wool products are a big part of the New Zealand heritage and still in today’s society but just bringing it right back to grandma is choice.”

CBC + Radio Canada

I was searching the Canadian Design Resource for my next lecture, and came across a concept radio by Toronto-based designers Science + Sons that shows how great culturally inspired design can be.

RADIO CANADA: our home and native waves
Materials: Maple, Aluminum, Electronics
Size: 8″ x 4″ x 4″

“This radio console design was inspired by the dedication of the many CBC listeners who keep their radio dials permanently set to our national broadcaster. After setting the radio to local CBC frequencies, listeners can toggle between CBC Radio One and CBC Radio Two without hearing the static in between. The elegant design of RADIO CANADA celebrates the immediacy of the medium and reflects the quality of the broadcasts it receives. Additional features include MP3 player compatibility [for all your Radio 3, DNTO, Quirks & Quarks, Search Engine and Spark podcasts].”

I love everything from the prescribed stations and use of Canadian maple wood and aluminum to how the speaker cut-outs are inspired by the (1992-present) CBC/Radio-Canada logo:

And while we’re on the topic, the CBC/Radio-Canada logo has a lovely design history:

Left to right, top to bottom: 1) 1940-1958; 2) 1958-1966; 3) 1966-1974; 4) 1974-1986; 5) 1986-1992

The CBC Gem logo (4) is an icon of Canadian design and cultural identity: “The C in the middle stands for Canada, and the radiating parts symbolize broadcasting.” Designed by graphic artist Burton Kramer in 1974, it marked the CBC’s full transition to colour television broadcasting. Plus, check out this gorgeous station identification storyboard:

Of sheep and men and canine cyborgs

Before I arrived in New Zealand late last year, I found the NZ On Screen website to be a treasure-trove of Kiwi culture. I learned about the language they speak here, NZ’s fascinating history and the political and comic genius of Billy T., but mostly I’ve used it as a research tool. For example, The Sheep Collection brings together 16 titles about Kiwis and their “ovine kin.” Unfortunately, the site doesn’t offer video embedding, so you’ll have to follow the links below.

There are films that address the darkness of remote farm life and the comedic horrors of sheep run amok, as well as historical and contemporary documentaries on the significant role of sheep in Kiwi culture, the challenges of sheep farming, the bonds between shepherds and their dogs, the world of competitive sheep dog trials and sheep-shearing techniques.

But a true highlight for me was the second segment from the Country Calendar Spoofs Special, which features “Fleet” the radio-controlled sheep dog. In this doco-style video, we’re told that the “average working dog leaves a lot to be desired” and a “sheep dog is only as good as its master…Until now, that is. Modern science is on the threshold of making the trained working dog as defunct as the dodo.” Enter Dr Ross Duncan, an expert in neurosurgery and veterinary science, who implants 74 “very small, multi-functional electrodes” in a collie’s brain. Later, a hand-held radio transmitter is used to communicate commands back to the dog (through a receiver connected to the electrodes) in order to control its movement. Although it’s easily compared to a remote-controlled car, during field trials the scientist reminds the farmer to “take it slowly” and “watch the dog” because “it’s not a toy” and he “could pull a muscle” in the animal by jerking it back and forth too quickly.

[image credit: Country Calendar]

Ultimately, the scientist justifies the use and cost of the new technology in terms that sound eerily familiar today: “All we’re doing, really, is taking technology that’s now available to us and perfecting what farmers like Brian have been trying to do for years…” There’s a bunch of interesting things going on here in terms of human-animal-technology relations: science as superior knowledge, technology as prosthesis or extension, control over nature/animals, etc. And for anyone interested in design fiction and future technological scenarios, what also makes this video so fascinating is how plausibly or successfully it tells a story. Apparently, “the phones rang red hot” because the spoof was “just a little bit too real for some folk.”

Another interesting video also appears in the Country Calendar Spoofs Special. The third clip features Dominic and Brian, a couple of hairdressers-turned-farmers who bake bread and produce better wool by running a “stress-free” flock. We’re told that their “radical” process has tripled their wool receipts and brought them “a substantial grant from the Wool Board.” The pair had noticed the negative effects of stress on people’s hair during their salon days, and they claim it has the same effect on sheep wool. To calm their sheep, “respect their sensitivities” and improve wool quality, the couple take picnics with the flock, chant yoga-inspired mantras to herd them, jog with them to encourage fitness, transport them via trolley instead of dragging to increase comfort, play classical music through headphones for relaxation during shearing, leave a “protective layer of fleece” to keep the sheep warm, and take time for comforting, touch-based therapies like regular wool washing and styling.

[image credit: Country Calendar]

While the video is clearly meant to make fun of city-folks in general and gay men in particular, it also pokes fun at what kinds of research government and industry are seen to support. Although I am no fan of the homosexual stereotype that underpins the primary joke here, it does open up space for the kinds of emotional connection with, and caring for, animals that are often excluded from representations and performances of masculinity so often associated with sheep farming. This is also interesting given today’s marketing of “ethical” merino wool which relies, in part, on definitions of animal welfare that include Icebreaker affiliated farms hand-shearing their sheep to ensure a thicker layer of wool stays behind to keep the animals warm.

Questions for further research:

• What role can humour play in the critical design of future technological scenarios? What kind of knowledge can be produced? How can we determine successful public engagement?
• What elements of sheep farming and wool production can be characterised as “caring” or “loving”? How do those actions, relations and values relate to “animal welfare”?

Agricultural traceability initiatives in Canada, NZ and USA

[image credit: Biomark]

The first RFID livestock tracking device was developed in 1979, but increasing public concerns over food safety coupled with decreasing technology costs have recently made RFID-based agricultural traceability both more desirable and more feasible. A good introduction to global traceability efforts can be found in this Review of Selected Cattle Identification and Tracing Systems Worlwide (pdf), but I’d like to take a closer look at Canada, NZ and USA here because I see their responses to traceability efforts running on a continuum from support to acceptance to opposition. I’m interested in unpacking the politics embedded in these responses, and wanted to gather a few things I’ve been reading into one place.

According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, animal traceability systems have three main goals: “the identification of animals or products, the ability to follow their movement, and the identification of departure and destination premises.” Canada’s National Agriculture and Food Traceability System (NAFTS) will make RFID-based tagging mandatory by the end of 2011, because “the ability to rapidly trace an animal throughout its life cycle is essential to isolating animal health emergencies and can help limit the economic, trade, environmental and social impacts of such emergencies.” Agricultural traceability has enjoyed a good deal of university and government support–although Canada recently received a food safety grade of “poor” in the area of traceability–and IBM was instrumental in testing a new “farm to fork” traceability system as part of its broader Smarter Planet: Smarter Food initiative in Manitoba. However, some Canadian farmers were less convinced of the benefits last year when the National Farmers Union said “the initiative will do nothing to increase farmers’ profits because it doesn’t include labelling regulations, yet will be more time-consuming and create more paperwork” and Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter said “If we don’t deal with the income situation that hog and livestock farmers face, we’re not going to have anything to trace.” Currently, the National Cattle Feeders’ Association “welcomes the national traceability program” and the Canadian Pork Council has created the PigTrace traceability program.

[image credit: Noma Bar]

New Zealand’s National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) programme will also make cattle and deer tagging mandatory in 2011 and 2012, respectively, using a similar rationale: “NAIT will safeguard the New Zealand brand and farmers’ income by protecting market access for New Zealand animal products through enhancing regulatory and consumer confidence in New Zealand’s ability to manage biosecurity and food safety.” However, NZ’s Federated Farmers claim that the biosecurity claims are overstated, there is no market demand, the on-farm costs are too high, and there are data validity and protection issues; they do not currently support the implementation of a compulsory system. However, the NAIT Information Document (pdf) claims that consulted “farmers are supportive of a mandatory traceability system, with a far greater number expressing support (58 percent) than those against it (17 percent).” Interestingly, the same document also points out that regardless of whether or not these efforts are supported, “eighty percent of farmers believe animal traceability will become mandatory in New Zealand at some stage.”

The United States Department of Agriculture recently dismantled their National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and is currently negotiating state-level animal disease traceability efforts. The NAIS was unpopular amongst farmers, in part because of a generalised and farther-reaching resistance to perceived government intervention, ownership and surveillance. The NAIS STINKS website sums up their opposition with the following statement and posters:

“The proposed draconian NAIS protocol is of a more severe degree than surveillance required by a convicted pedophile or child molester in the USA. Please join in opposing NAIS for the freedom of all to raise livestock without complicated government enforcement and oppression.”

However, the use of RFID microchips as livestock anti-theft devices has received rather greater support, although government absence may also be required for its success. As Curt Hopkins explains:

“I believe the key to any future adoption of tag-based livestock control, the kind of control that would have rustlers where they belong – running in place at the end of a spar – will require the participation of independent entrepreneurs and developers. A rancher is a lot more likely to trust an indie dev than a government rep, a federal investigator or a salesman from some software chaebol. Perhaps kids that were raised in the sticks and still have an affection for it, who do not want to see this way of life dead and who don’t want to see either the rustlers or the agricultural conglomerates determine how we eat, will apply some of their unique technological know-how – and a little of their grandparents’ elbow grease to the problem and come up with a way to read, record and retrieve information that ranchers could get behind. Maybe they could create a nation-wide, but decentralized and privately-held national cattle ID database, utilizing cloud computing and available to law enforcement as a tool that the ranchers themselves, and their indie tech partners, hold and control. Anything that doesn’t have their brand on it, they won’t touch. Amen to that.”

There’s a lot going on in all these programmes and people’s responses to them and it helps me to see it in one place. At first glance I recognise risk management, acceptance of new technology, national pride, support for government, skepticism about new technology, resistance to government, concerns over farmer welfare and technology management.

Questions for further research:

• What are the primary benefits (e.g. food security, market participation, etc.) and issues (e.g. cost, data accuracy/reliability, data privacy, changes to work, etc.) associated with traceability initiatives?
• How can multiple, and possibly contradictory, concerns be represented (e.g. infographics, stories, objects, etc.) to stakeholders? Which distribution channels, sites and/or events are best suited for public engagement?

Framing tiny things

Seed Magazine showcases some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time: Howard Lynk’s collection of Antique Microscope Slides from the Victorian Era c. 1830s – 1890s.

In the early 1800s, as optical instruments like the microscope became more refined, there was a corresponding demand for things to look at and a commercial industry in prepared or mounted slides emerged. Not only did these slides gather and portray an astounding array of natural objects, but the actual mountings are beautifully crafted.

“Many of the slides…use a method of construction wherein the mounting slide (usually a 1″ x 3″ piece of glass or wood) is covered either wholly or in part with colourful gilt decorated lithographed papers. This practice of using paper covers originated as a necessary means to mechanically fasten the mica or thin glass covers that were placed over the specimens, to the main slide. However, the paper covers quickly became more of an expression of decoration and individual presentation than need, as the use of Canada Balsam and other mounting media became widespread. Much of the best early preparers work is immediately recognizable, as they each settled on standard paper colours and graphic designs, which became their trademark of sorts.”

Individual craftsmen – and they do appear to have been men – became known by their particular styles, and slides often bore the name of both the mounter and the optician who sold the slides. I was quite taken by the arranged slides – where many small objects were placed to form designs or patterns. Some of this work was so delicate that it required the use of boar bristles or cat whiskers to manoeuver the tiny objects or pieces into place.

Diatoms (Ernst Thum)

Radiolarians (Amos Topping)

Diatoms, Butterfly Scales, and Spicules (Mounter Unknown)

“A variation on the ‘Arranged Object’ mounts, Exhibition slides [1st and 3rd above] were often considered to be the pinnacle of the commercial mounters art, considering the degree of difficulty in their preparation. Combining various objects, often many 100s (or 1000s!) of individual butterfly or insect scales, diatoms, spicules, etc.; each piece was individually selected and assembled to create pictures or complex geometric arrangements.”

I was also really impressed to learn about microphotos, or those photographic images of “famous people, art works, buildings, geographic landmarks, etc.” that are only visible through a microscope.

There’s just something really astonishing about seeing the moon through a microscope; it messes with everything I understand about scale!

But I think that, most of all, I just love the attention to detail and the value placed on materiality. And I wonder: is there any contemporary or digital equivalent?

[Cross-posted at PLSJ, with comments]