Roll up, roll up

Next week, as part of the Clerkenwell Design Week, I'll be on the panel for Design Crimes - a session of strong opinion and forthright debate around crimes in performance, function, form or simply interactive frustration. Previous selections have included TV remotes, DFS sofas and the UGG boot.

The theme for Wednesday's event is "Revival", and we've been asked to select those designs from the past which we believe would have been better left where they belonged: in the past.

More details here and Clerkenwell Design Week guide here. Get in.

Desert Island Digital: Steve Price

On this week's Desert Island Digital my castaway is Steve Price. Steve is a Creative Director, Meat Club President, Dad, martini drinker and the first real-life friend I ever made on Twitter. Rumour has it, he has his own set of monogrammed towels at Shoreditch House. 


Here's his choices for life on the island.

One tweet upon arrival on the island:
@planbstudio

Fuck desks. Here's my new studio. #Love&Support

One app:

Hailo. is awesome cab app but not sure it would work on a desert island. So probably Instagram - at least I can keep people posted with which coconut I am wearing.

One #ff (Follow Forever) on Twitter:


@dalailama to help me gather my thoughts everyday



One album on Spotify:


Pearl Jam, Twenty

One YouTube video:

One photo:

Me and my son. So happy, so excited. 

One digital luxury:


Laptop (and wifi)

What's in a name?

Camilla's Store is the name of this blog. Camilla Grey is my name. The former sounds like a Texan junk shop. The latter sounds like a Pantone chip. Both sound made up. When I started Camilla's Store, the need for social media usernames was minimal. Plus, I was young, naive and, like many at that time, half believed this whole 'Internet' thing would never really take off.

Fast forward five years, dozens of online profiles, hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets later and I have a problem. A geeky white girl problem, but a problem none the less. I have become the victim of my own good branding. Real people think my real name is Camilla Store.

At first I laughed it off, but then I put on my serious Brand Strategist hat and asked myself what I would advise a client in a similar situation. And my response would be to change the name that no one knows. As the guys at Wolff Olins say, "Your brand is whatever Google says it is". Combine that with what I say, which is "Your brand is whatever people on social media say it is" and you've got the answer. I'm going to have to change my real name via deed poll.

Who cares about the legacy, heritage and family ties that lie behind Grey? So what if, as an only child, it falls to me to continue the legacy of Grey's into the next generation? The people of Instagram and Twitter want fresh links and hot #matchymatchy's, not some sob story about my Ukranian ancestors slumming it in East London before it got cool. And, as a Strategist, I firmly believe in giving the brawling masses what they want.   

If you insist on living by the sword, you have to be ready to die by the sword. And anyway, if I had to choose between Google and the Passport Office, I'd go for the one least likely to invent Google+ every time. 

Kid, you'll move mountains

Tales from a new friend about the desert utopia that is the Burning Man community have got me dreaming of bleached out sands, lost wild nights, and no tan marks! 

Desert Island Digital: Panja Gobel

On this week's Desert Island Digital my castaway is Panja Gobel. Panja is a designer of immersive environments and digital experiences, as well as a pretty cool cat. What she doesn't know about the interplay between people and technology isn't worth knowing. Just last month she was on the jury for the D&AD Awards in the Digital Design category.


Here's her choices for life on the island.



One tweet upon arrival on the island:
@panjapop

Yo! #unplug 

One app:

Draw Something - I love the way an app can have such bad UX and still gets me hooked just on it's concept. No, I don't love it - I'm suffering from UX huffing and puffing syndrome. Recently they integrated a share button, that spoils battles by posting them prematurely on Facebook. Brilliant, who thought of that? It should really be put into the replay section of a past battle. So listen up and sort it out. I also would like a gallery, so I don't have to painstakingly screen grab it myself and generally it would be good to have some sort of scoring table. Then make everything look a little nicer and we are there. Despite these extreme UX issues I am addicted. Normally I try to have at least 10 battles going parallel so I always have at least 2 a day. Most days I just wish my finger was more pointed. 

One #ff (Follow Forever) on Twitter:

@lukid - always a welcome and wayward distraction to my life

One album on Spotify:

"Electric Africa" by Manu Dibango

Pata Piya or Electric Africa are just brilliant. Perfect Desert island music - cheerful music to dance to with coconut bras and banana leave skirts or just naked.

One YouTube video:

David Weiss of Fischli & Weiss died a few days ago. They were the best and most influential art duo ever. Personally I thought they were immortal. I also would be making a lot of stuff like that on the island.

One photo:

This is the kind of stuff my daughter builds around the house for us. These little worlds always cheer me up. Apparently this one is a series of cakes.

One digital luxury:

Asimo - I just love him and want him to come with me anywhere I go. Wonder how he would cope on an island… not really sure wether he could swim or whether the sand would damage his mechanism. Obviously Asimo, with his Honda genes also loves Fischli & Weiss, which will help.

Bridging the gap

Just for kicks I sometimes enjoy messing with the Netflix algorithm by watching movies way out of my usual 'taste preferences'. So with this in mind and to cheer myself up a bit, I watched 'The Bridge' - a moving documentary about the people who take their lives by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

I've driven across the Golden Gate several times now - more often than not in The Great Red Shark while listening to the soundtrack from The O.C. But even then, the bridge holds a strange sense of foreboding within its straining ironwork and startling russet tones. The inclement weather patterns, for which SF is known, seem to begin and end at the bridge. The mists roll in and out, sometimes gleaming brilliantly in the Californian sun, other times shrouding the entire structure in cloud. On the gloomy days, with the rain and the wind and the shadow of Alcatraz in the near distance, it really couldn't be further from the picture postcard image of majestic structural engineering.

'The Bridge' includes footage of real people jumping, shot over several months by the film's makers. Apparently, on average, two people take their lives at the bridge every 15 days. It's easy, it's dramatic and it's high enough to be a sure thing. But the most emotive element in the film were the interviews with the jumpers' friends and family. Just like the ambiguous nature of the bridge itself, they veered between understanding the actions of their loved ones, while struggling to comprehend how anyone could fall so deeply into despair.

One of the parents interviewed wondered if her son chose the bridge because he "wanted one last chance to fly". The footage of him - Gene - pacing next to the barrier for hours before finally leaping triumphantly onto the rail and throwing his arms up in a swan dive takes your breath away. Just as the bridge is a testament to man overcoming nature - connecting two sides of San Francisco bay - so these fatal acts depict an individual's conquering of his or her own destiny.

You can check out the trailer out here.

And as for me, don't worry I'm back to Season 3 of The Rachel Zoe project. All good.

Desert Island Digital: Mills aka CHIEF WONKA™

On this week's Desert Island Digital my castaway is the self-proclaimed King of Succailure™, Twitter flaneur, Keynote master extraordinaire and co-founder of ustwo™, Mills.


Here's his choices for life on the island.



One tweet upon arrival on the island:
@millustwo
Success Island™ - CHECK


One app:
Twitter for iPhone - laying on the sun bed, beer in hand and iPhone in other = Heaven. I need to touch the hearts and minds of the industry I love.


One #ff (Follow Forever) on Twitter:
@Mr_Bingo  - unquestionably the biggest fool I know but unquestionably the funniest.


One album on Spotify:
The year was 1999, the first time I heard their virginal voices, they touched me in a way I never forget. If you could bottle love, these guys would be the milkmen. 
Westlife by Westlife - it's now a cult classic.


One YouTube video:
I have no idea if this is real, or if it is made by some student, but what I do know is that it's utter genius and should be the benchmark for all adverts. 



One photo:
My studio - there is no place like home

One digital luxury:
My Kindle -  so far I've had my Kindle for a year and have yet to get past page 78 of Onward by Howard Schultz, even though I bought it a year ago. The Kindle is genius and I love the feel of it in the hand, the simple page turn, the fact I can have thousands of brain foods in it. Having it with me on the island means I may actually find time to use it. 

Love it when you go bump bump bump

It's not often that a new technology works its way seamlessly into your life. There's almost always that love-hate tussle throughout the learning and adoption curve stages - that phase where you can see it's kind of a big deal but it takes concerted effort to remember to use it. *Looks accusingly at Path*. Indeed, many of the tech clients I've worked with have referred to that hallowed position of "owning" a part of the brain - the type of ownership that sees brand names become verbs; "Google it", "Wikipedia it", "Netflix it".



So I've been pleasantly surprised to welcome the Bump photo transfer app into my life and given that it doesn't require you to tweet about it or form communities around it, it seemed only fair to give the app a little loving shout out on here. For those of you who follow my ramblings on the @movingbrands Twitter, you'll know that my colleagues and I fell instantly, and hard, for the neat interface of hitting the space bar with your iPhone to transfer photos to your desktop. But initial thrill over, I've returned to it again and again.

If I have the choice to email a photo to myself, wait for iCloud to sync or simply "bump" it - the answer's in the lexicon.

(Also finally found an excuse to try out the new Spotify embed option. #HandClaspOfChampions)

Desert Island Digital: Jack Schofield

Welcome to this, the launch edition of Desert Island Digital, where I am very excited to welcome Jack Schofield, Computer Editor for The Guardian and preeminent tech journo, as my first castaway.


Here's Jack's Desert Island Digital selection...


One tweet upon arrival on the island:
@jackschofield
Just hitting the beach. It looks like I'm stranded.... #groan


One app:
FreeCell 
... because it's an entertaining way to waste five minutes. I've been playing it since Windows 3.1 came out. I like winning.


One #ff (Follow Forever) on Twitter:
I'd follow @paul_steele, because he comes across as a really nice guy and he tweets the sort of amusing links I like. In fact, we retweet each other. 


One album on Spotify:
Keith Jarrett's Changeless isn't my favourite album but it's the one I'm most likely to put on repeat. I've been playing it for a couple of decades, so I know I won't get bored with it.


One YouTube video:
'A Normal Day' by Thomas and Sebastian, with the backing track that uses fragments of pop songs, such as the Kinks' You Really Got Me. That version has been removed because of our deranged copyright laws, but the "tricks" are still great.



One photo:
My wife and my son, setting off somewhere different. At the moment, she's in Malaysia and he's in Kuwait. 

One digital luxury:
I'd be carrying my Nikon D90 anyway, so I'd just like to hang on to it. I used to edit photography magazines, and I could happily spend the rest of my days taking pictures.

*New Feature Alert* Introducing Desert Island Digital

It is with great excitement that I announce the launch of my first feature for Camilla's Store. Inspired by our deep love affair with tech, I'm on a mission to learn which virtual, intangible objects people hold most dear in their lives.

'Desert Island Digital' updates Radio 4's concept for a modern age by encouraging people to cut through the noise and think about what really matters to them in digital form.

My invited castaways to the desert island arrive armed only with their smartphone and a wifi connection. However, the native, highly reclusive tribe are very strict about how much content they can access.

So just what will my castaways need to survive digitally?

Find out tomorrow when my first, and very special, castaway reveals his Desert Island Digital.

#desertislanddigital