D-School List

Businessweek magazine, on it's site, has a list of the top design schools (D-Schools) according to their "expert panel". I'm not sure who is on that panel, but hey, atleast our school made the list. We're about half way down. Cool.

Top 10 Books ...

Funny trivia discovery: Australia's (as a nation) favourite books, as posted on ABCnet.au.

The list is pretty predictable, I'd say, for any "Western" English-speaking country.

It is as follows...

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Bible (Various Contributors)
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
6. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (Book 5) by J. K. Rowling
7. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
8. The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
9. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
10. A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey

My personal list of top ten ... if I had to go on personal favourites. (Disclaimer: I love reading and this is not a definitive list simply out of the fact it's next to impossible for me to limit my

1. Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
2. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
3. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
4. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
5. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
6. A Taste of Honey (a play), by Shelagh Delaney
7. Generation X, Douglas Coupland
8. Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
9. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
10. The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho

OH ... and 11: Famous Five (series), Enid Blyton

The culture of 'cool'

I was reading someones blog entry about Nike Swoosh tatoos on Nike employees.

I know it's true because I've seen the pictures. It was a big story in the media when I was a university student in Canada. In 2003 I visited Nike's campus (that's what the firm calls it) in Beaverton, Oregon, for a story I was doing for Transworld and the head of the shoe-freak phenomnenon SB division gave me a fantastic tour of every nook and cranny on that campus. And I even met one of those notorious Nike employees with a Swoosh tatoo. "No way" I thought. "Is that real?"

Walking away, my contact read my mind (and smirk), and said, "By the way, that swoosh was real."

Anyone that has grown up in a society obsessesd with popular culture , namely North America or Britain, has a deeply personal relatinship with the phenomenon. It could be conscious or subconscious, but it exists.

It's somewhat of a joke for people from other parts of the world, but most "dialled in" North Americans can tell you how much Tom and Katie Holme's baby weighed when she was born, what city Tom Green is from and how much Toy Story II made at the box office.

That's just it. The concept of being "dialled in". It'ss a term used all the time in the media and only those who are dialled in actually know what it means. It's a secred that started on the playground. The secret of personal consumerism and culture of identifying with a brand.

But the question is simple: how far can marketing and branding go before it becomes psychotically egoistic?

Tattoo artists being brought into offices by corporate hq? C'mon Nike.