Hive Health

A delight of a rage has set over me this morning after reading an article in Timeout. The article outlines the current wrangle between a favourite haunt of ours Dream Bags and Jaguar Shoes, and car manufacturer Jaguar. Who are locked in as dispute over copyright and intellectual property.

DBJS is a boutique bar, exhibition space on Kingsland Road, Shoreditch who have for years now championed art, design, creativity, events and exhibitions. The unusual name of this founding business is comes from the two 1980′s bag and shoe wholesaler signs that hang on the buildings original shop front. The venues hosts Jaguar Shoes an arts organisation born in 2002, which the bars owners have been trying to protect by registering the name as a trademark. The application has resulted in Jaguar contested the filing, saying that this could cause confusion between the two brands.

Nick letchford, (co-owner) said in the Hackney Citizen last Sunday “We just hope that Jaguar will see sense and we can come to an agreement that both sides are comfortable with, and we can both have our brands and co-exist,”. All sounds very sensible and tremendously mature.Two brands doing different things in the world. The final ruling from the patent office comes in on the 6th of June unless they can reach a compromise with the giant car firm. .

What strikes me as ridiculous is Jaguar’s position in all of this. I can understand the imperative to protect their marque. But surely considering any usage of the name confusing is bordering on the ridiculous. I don’t order Tiger in a restaurant and worry that I am getting Kelloggs frosted flakes. Or sit at a bar and not buy a car. Why? Because I’m capable of holding two things in my head at once.

The irony is provided 1 mile down the road where the car giant are seeking to add cool/design/cutting edges to their brand equity with their sponsorship of The Clerkenwell Design week. Hoping to be seen supporting the “60 showrooms and a multitude of architectural and creative practices” in Clerkenwell. A case of the legal team not speaking to the marketing/sponsorship department? Or an example of a cynical brand hoping to milk some cool with one hand, whilst suppressing a boutique arts collective with the other?

A delight to read that “Design has always been at the heart of Jaguar and we are delighted to be the title sponsor of this exciting design event” alongside “A spokesperson for Jaguar said the company did not comment on ongoing legal matters”

When you compare this to the need for Jaguar, ”to reach a new and enlightened customer base that is rightly demanding of the cars it buys.”

It does rather suggest that this new enlightened customer base might just respond to you not being such a dick.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/jaguarshoes/

Brilliant piece on space, offices and community management sent over by a delight of a mate who knows we are midst an office move and community design project.

The below film was  part of a Pecha Kucha for the ConnectingHR unconference on  a week or so ago.  I loved the term Tummeler taken from the yiddish for noisy disorder, it’s a new word for me and a new competency for us.

This month’s Hive Review looks at an exhibition.

As one of the incurably curious, the Wellcome Collection is my favourite science museum in London. When I found out that the newest exhibition explored “what humans have done to brains in the name of medical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change” I popped down as soon as I had a spare moment. As usual the exhibition didn’t disappoint.

With over 150 artefacts including real brains, artworks, manuscripts, videos and photography, ‘Brains’ asks not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains. The exhibition isolates the brain from the individual and presents it as a purely scientific object: something which can be measured, classified, modelled and mapped, sliced, freeze-dried and pickled.

Presented as a maze of four sections, the exhibition reflects this: ‘Measuring’ defines the relationship between the brain’s function and form, ‘Mapping’ explores anatomy, ‘Cutting’ delves into the gory history of surgical intervention and Victorian quackery, while ‘Giving’ deals with brain harvesting and research.

Alongside a wealth of scientific information, what really make this exhibition unique are the art pieces interwoven throughout.

Curator Marius Kwint selected works by contemporary artists, who responded to the form and physical matter of the brain in various ways. There are abstract offerings in Katharine Dowson’s glass laser render of a her own brain which from afar looks like a delicate puff of silk, Susan Aldworth’s watercolour series and stills from Andrew Carnie’s film ‘Atlas’. There are also some touching works exploring the brain’s physicality, such as photographer Corrine Day’s pictures of herself before brain surgery, and Ania Dabrowska’s portraits of brain donors alongside podcast monologues. Rather than being ghostly these recordings are gentle and reflective making them one of my favourite sections of the exhibition.

All in all ‘Brains: Mind as Matter’ is science communication at its best: complex medicine interwoven with art and beauty (and a little bit of gore). It’s on until the 17th of June and it’s free, so I suggest you take your brain down for a little look.

This week I have been heading a couple of categories of the Communiqué awards. An honour and delight to sit, chair and discuss such talent. Midst one entry discussion we got deep into the different approaches we take on how we view our audience. Are ‘they’ our targets, inert fodder for campaigns and as such need protecting by our paternalism, or  do we feel that they are intelligent enough to spot a ruse, and sit alongside in the quest for better health.

I can’t get into specific on the category or the entry but the room was divided. I feel we could learn a lot from the ad man exceptional; David Ogilvy.  Ogilvy was passionate, to the point of dangerous, when he encountered agency folk who felt that the divide between us (marketers) and them (consumers) was huge. Terms like ‘punter’ were banned and a deep level of respect was insisted upon. In his mind our target audience were people to respect and cherish not dumb down and patronise.  “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” -David Ogilvy, Elements of Advertising. Published in 1983 sums it up for me.

Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer who later was editor of The Associated Press staff in Saigon, died on Thursday in Munich. He was 79. If you are a fan of photography, communication and visual talent this should give cause to pause and reflect on a human being who nailed  audience respect better than anyone. Whether that be New York Times readers havig breakfast or Communist insurgents featured in the haunting photographs of the Vietnam War he never presumed to protect or provide anything but the naked reality of the situations he saw.

If you are unfamiliar with his work, he is responsible so many of the images we have of  the horrors of war. He managed the transition from field to office as Editor if AP without compromising his desire  to educate and inform.  “I don’t think we influenced the war at any time,” he said in 1997. “I don’t think we helped to win it or helped to lose it. We didn’t work on the outcome of the war.” Making photographs about the suffering and horror of war, he said, is simply better than not making them. Such talent balanced with such pragmatism.