TED TALK: Richard Seymour on product beauty

“BEAUTY is in the eye of the beholder”, they say. To someone more cynical about love: beauty is in the eye of the beer holder. To the advertiser and product designer, beauty is in the limbic system of the beholder.

Beauty is intrinsically tied in with advertising and new technology. I was intrigued to recently discover that the marketing of motor vehicles is not so much about shapes but reflective surfaces. The recent motor show illustrated this well, with each car shimmering more than the next in the strategically placed lighting. This has the effect of making stationary objects come to life.

Consider Steve Jobs’ claim to fame. The flood of articles that have emerged since his death remind us that Jobs was not the genius behind Apple software but rather the chief designer and marketer. His work revolved around beauty and involved appealing to the emotional beings that we are.

Designers and advertisers are responsible for shaping our ever-evolving ideas of beauty year after year. This year some of the criteria that signify beauty in technology are flat, touchable surfaces, thin and light-weight with rounded corners. The beautiful colours are black, white and silver – much like the colour scheme of what we might imagine a modern-looking kitchen to embody.

A lot of funding for the marketing of new technologies goes towards understanding how people’s brains respond to images. Debates have revolved around whether we “think beauty” or “feel beauty”. What we do know is that it takes a good few seconds for stimuli to enter into the cognitive portion of the brain, where we get a chance to really think about what we have just seen or felt.

Television adverts take this fast-paced form of advertising to the extreme – quickly throwing imagery at our eyes coupled with strange statistics and tidbits of information. They attempt to embed these into our subconscious and supply us with answers before we get a change to think about what just happened. When we happen upon the product later on we suddenly feel a strange sense of familiarity with it.

Then there is the other extreme. There is roughly a six second period whereby stimuli and information reach the cognitive part of our brains – six seconds which is crucial to advertisers and product designers. The lights dimming before a movie starts in the cinema, for example, takes roughly six seconds. The intended effect is to create feelings of anticipation and excitement. BMW copied this technique with their slow dimming lights.

Richard Seymour: How beauty feels

Richard Seymour is a product designer who revealed some of these secrets during a recent TED talk. In his talk, Seymour explores our response to beauty and illustrates the surprising power that objects which exhibit beauty can have over us. Seymour explains that the goal of advertisers and designers is to form emotional bonds between us and products. What we see, he argues, “is an electro-chemical party trick that happens before we even get a chance to think about it.”

“We are slaves to the first flash”, says Seymour, and “we see and understand things not as they are, but as we are”, to quote the philosopher Anais Nin.

Seymour also shed light on how the beauty and our perception of something can change according to the information we are provided either before or afterwards. Consider ballet, for example. One who doesn’t understand the pain and discipline that ballet dancers endure would find it far less beautiful than someone who truly understood and appreciated the art.

It makes one wonder if the small and curvy Blackberry is suddenly less beautiful now than it was before.

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WEBSITE REVIEW: Create impressive presentations online

MOST people would find the idea of giving a presentation to a crowd of people quite daunting. Having to project enthusiasm about an idea or piece of work and be able to paint a picture with words and a few bullet points is no easy task.

One bestowed with such a frightful endeavour may recall sleepless nights playing with PowerPoint until the early hours of the morning — overdosing on caffeine and inevitably losing all apparent enthusiasm for what really is a good idea but is now more likely to come across to your audience as a pig’s breakfast. I’m so glad those days are over.

No, we need instant gratification these days. Advertisers, educators and presenters need to bring the bling and appeal to our severely diminished attention spans. This is why it’s so interesting to witness the new wave of online advertising that offers a degree of interactivity and really engage with their audience. Fortunately there is one website that allows us common folk to do just that.

Create professional looking presentations such as these

A screenshot of a TED presentation made using Prezi

Prezi

Prezi is a popular piece of presentation software and storytelling tool that allows creatives to craft colourful presentations upon a virtual canvas. Users can optimise the use of a digital whiteboard rather than using traditional slides. With Prezi one can zoom in and out of this canvas, embed images and videos, move these around, add music and sound effects to a presentation and pan and zoom between all objects. The platform allows free-form brainstorming as well as more structured presentations.

An added bonus is that Prezi does not require a lot of technical know-how to use. It is intended to be intuitive and offers easy-to-follow instructions as you go along. The software was initially developed by someone with a visual mind — Hungarian architect Adam Somlai-Fischer. Initially, Prezi was intended to be an architectural visualisation tool, but now operates under the mantra of “make sharing ideas more interesting”.

I was intrigued to see that Prezi is used by some of the top presenters over at TED. Prezi therefore offers a high level of professionalism but can also be used for school projects, work presentations or for creating birthday montages.

There are some great examples of presentations on the Prezi website which will give you a good idea of what can be created using this powerful software. Users are also able to rate and comment on other Prezis too, which may provide useful feedback for any newcomers. There is now also a Prezi Viewer application for the iPad, which allows one to create touch presentations - making your work or idea even more interactive and engaging.

Prezi Pricing

The free Prezi package allows anyone to create, showcase and share their presentations on the website as well as download them for offline use. One is afforded 100 megabytes of storage space to save presentations within the cloud. The paid-for packages start from $59 (around R400) a year and allow Prezi creatives to keep their presentations private, use their own logos, allow them to create presentations offline and get direct support from Prezi staff.

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TED TALK: Building a 3D model of the mammalian brain

HERE’S something that might blow your neo cortex. Neuroscientists are confident that within the next 10 years they will be able to construct an artificial human brain that functions very much like the real thing.

This is according to brain expert Henry Markram — director of Blue Brain, a supercomputing project that models components of the mammalian brain to precise cellular detail — and simulate their activity in 3D. Markram’s ultimate goal is to build a detailed, realistic­ computer model of the entire human brain.

Talk of neurology tends to be very scientific by nature, so I have attempted to dissect Markram’s work from a talk he gave at TED — a small non-profit organisation devoted to "ideas worth spreading". TED started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from the three worlds of technology, entertainment and design, and the talks given in these fields are simply fantastic.

The holy grail of neuroscience is understanding the design of the neo cortical column, which could inevitably help us better understand perception and reality (Photos: Blue Brain)

BUILDING A BRAIN

Understanding the human brain is a key step in evolution that will better equip human beings to understand one another and the societies in which they live. Being able to study and experiment with working models of the human brain will also do away with the need for animal experimentation.

In his talk, Markram pointed out that there are over two billion people on the planet today suffering from mental disorders. The drugs that are used to treat such disorders are largely empirical and far from conclusive. Understanding the human brain may lead to more concrete solutions to treating people with such disorders.

There are many theories regarding how the brain works. One that is drawing the most attention according to Markram (pictured right) is one that theorises how the brain creates or builds a version of the universe and projects this around us. This particular theory has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. However, with brain simulation, this theory can finally be tested and explored further.

Markram highlights decisions as the main factor influencing our perceptual bubbles. Upon walking into a room for example, one has to immediately process all kinds of information regarding what you see. Decisions regarding the size of the room, its dimensions, the height to the roof, all the objects in the room etc. have to be made in an instant. Markram posits that 99% of what we see is not what enters through our eyeballs, but rather what we infer about that room.

OUR BRAIN IN EVOLUTION

If you are an evolutionist, you may know that it took the universe 11 billion years to develop the brain into what it is today. The exciting news is that this development has by no means slowed down. On the contrary, our brains are currently evolving faster than ever before. In fact, because of the restrictiveness of our skulls, we can already see how the growing brain has starting to fold in on itself to accommodate more grey matter.

The neo cortex is the latest evolutionary achievement. This is arranged in columns and is where all our more complex functions occur. The holy grail of neuroscience is understanding the design of the neocortical column, which could inevitably help us better understand perception and reality.

Neuroscientists have systematically dissected the neo cortex over the past 15 years. Understanding how the neo cortex works largely involves understanding how our neurons are arranged and communicate with each other.

The biggest design secret of the human brain, according to Markram, is diversity. Not only is every neuron different, but their arrangement differs too in each and every human being. What we do all share is the same fabric and chemistry, which is how we can all perceive and understand the same reality­. This is also believed to be species-specific, which might explain why we can’t communicate across species — more naturally at least.

To create a working model of the neo cortex of a rodent (consisting of 10 000 neurons), Markram and his team required an entire laptop to power a single­ neuron. A refrigerator-sized supercomputer was built (basically consisting of 10 000 laptops) and neuroscientists have began to gain the first glimpse of what happens in our brains when they receive a stimulus.

Stimulating stuff!

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TED TALK: Tom Chatfield chats about the benefits of gaming

I'VE always believed that games can be highly beneficial in many ways. I remember always trying to justify why I played games so much to my folks at a tender, young age. Apart from improving basic hand-eye co-ordination, I argued that I was learning a great deal about history.

Sid Meier’s Civilization was my main ammunition for this argument, but even World War games with real historic footage and snippets of factual information made learning an incredibly engaging and fun process. There is even the chance that gaming could make you a braver person in the real world.

Tom Chatfield gave a TED Talk this year about the benefits that games can have on the way the brain learns new information and responds to stimuli in both the virtual and real worlds. He suggests how universities and business can learn from gaming by applying some simple techniques.

The video takes a few minutes to get into the juicy bits, but it really is interesting stuff and well worth a watch. Enjoy!

Tom Chatfield: 7 ways games reward the brain

About this talk
We're bringing gameplay into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours -- and real money -- exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? As Tom Chatfield shows, games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.

About Tom Chatfield
Tom Chatfield thinks about games -- what we want from them, what we get from them, and how we might use our hard-wired desire for a gamer's reward to change the way we learn.

About TED
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading". It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design.

That's www.ted.com

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