The Post-Digital Week – 1st April

Adam Tinworth

The week in post-digital thinking, starting and ending with watches…

A day late: my apologies. Life trumps digital once in a while. Although, it might have been a good thing not to publish on April Fools' Day… :)

Can analogue concepts be reworked with a digital twist to make something new? The trend for wearable digital health devices implies that they can…

And here's an interesting example of how combining the physical and the digital can lead to conflict with the limitations of one medium or the other:

Right before Christmas Activision released a game called “Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures.” It’s a fairly straightforward adventure game with a twist: it isn’t entirely digital. Collectible figures known as Skylanders can be inserted and removed into the game (via RFID, I assume) to enable players to use different characters as necessary (in my house, usually because the 4 year old has run one into the ground and it needs to rest).
There are somewhere upwards of 30 of these figures, and after the rush of Christmas it became apparent the game was hugely popular because it is now nearly impossible to find these figures. And if you do, you’re going to pay a premium.

The whole post is an interesting examination of the different effects of constrained supply on physical and digital.

Meanwhile, the Ad Contrarian posts a response to the Fast Company advertising piece I linked last week.

Video of the week:

I ran this on my blog ages ago, but it's just occurred to me that this has a post-digital element, and the device fades away into ubiquity. Plus, it's a great futurology watch:

Art Corner

Tweet of the week

For humour value alone:

Photo by GollyGForce on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence