“Dear Volkswagen. I’m stuck in traffic and my ‘Smileage’ is zero.”

My second post as guest editor for Branded Arts Review is all about Volkswagen's new app, Smileage.

Smileage is the first cab off the rank in Google’s Art, Copy & Code project, and for this reason alone it’s worth checking out.

The app allows you to tag passengers, share photos, virtually ‘punch’ other cars, and lets friends keep track of your journey. I'm not convinced it's going to change the world, but you can decide for yourself...

"I like to soak in now-ness"

This week, I interviewed Nathan Yong for Incubate magazine.

Nathan Yong is an industrial designer based in Singapore, who creates furniture and objects that are deceptively simple and beautifully engineered. He is taking the international design world by storm, yet remains endearingly humble.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from our interview:

"I see poetry in the everyday: an ice cream dropping on the ground, a sad child, a rusty tool, a broken chair... everything seems to be in slow motion and beautiful for me... I know it is a cliche but it's true for me, I like to soak in now-ness."

"To me beauty is skin deep, we need more depth to appreciate how things work, and from these understandings we can appreciate the things around us, it is my way of respecting life.

"Design is sexy but without any purpose or reason, it can be dumb at times. Engineering is clever and that to me is sexy."

"My constant goal is to always be a better designer and a person, I believe the rest are transient and don't really matter."

www.nathanyongdesign.com

Target at TED & SXSW. Really?

I'm delighted to be guest editing Branded Arts Review this month, which critiques innovative projects that infiltrate popular culture, yet were created and funded by brands.

For my first post, I've written about Target.

When you think of Target, you probably think of its bullseye logo and the cheap clothes, kitchen appliances, tea towels, garden rakes and underpants that are sold from its gigantic superstores.

So what was Target doing last week at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, the world’s über-cool barometer of innovation and a breeding ground for the likes of Twitter?

And what was Target doing at TED’s Long Beach, California conference a couple of weeks earlier?

Was it a stroke of sponsorship genius? Or is Target skewing oddly off course, forgetting it is not in fact a start-up tech company, but a discount retailer?

You can read my critique here