Hasta La Creative!

NEW YORK – Publicis Groupe has acquired the US financial PR agency Kekst and Company, in a deal reputed to be worth over $100m.

In a development that just seems wrong in an Orwellian kind of way, Captivate Network—the elevator-media company, whose name seems kinda creepy if you give it a few seconds of thought—is now also providing desktop content via blogs linked off the Captivate Web site that, according to Brandweek, “amplify topics featured on its elevator screens.” (Captivate’s movie blog is called People Tell Me I Look Like Han Solo.) Mike DiFranza, Captivate’s president, explains: “Nearly 50 percent of our viewers identify Captivate as their primary news source.” Recalling the vacant stares of the people who ride the elevator with me during the week, I can believe it. DiFranza concludes: “People are time pressed and catch information on the fly, and when they want to dive deeply, they go to the Internet.” True enough. Most people want to take their media wherever they go. But who wants it following them when they get off the elevator and lurking on their desktops?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

LONDON – ‘Top Gear’ has been criticised by the BBC Trust for glamorising drink-driving when it showed presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May drinking gin and tonic at the wheel.

LONDON – BP has been unveiled as the sixth top-tier domestic sponsor of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

LONDON – TNS has rejected a fourth offer from the WPP Group, this time valuing the market research giant at almost £1.1bn, as the company tells Sir Martin Sorrell to ‘stop interfering’.

KUALA LUMPUR – The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have announced the launch of a Malay-language regional news channel.

SINGAPORE – GroupM has made two senior management changes in Singapore, promoting Maxus MD Sony Wong (pictured) to a dual role running Maxus and MindShare, and head of trading Bharad Ramesh to deputy MD of MindShare.

SHANGHAI – Hong Kong’s Health & Lifestyle Broadcast Company will join forces with Shanghai Media Group’s free-to-air Young Channel in Shanghai to co-produce a one-hour lunchtime TV show for the two cities starting 2 August.

The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven’t been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest.

Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.

The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to ‘produce’ a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.

Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.

The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.

Filling the bottles in the City…

That’s what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to “buy” bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.

selling tap water on Broadway Market from Tuur Van Balen on Vimeo.

You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?

With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.

Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario…

All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen.

Related: 24c3: Programming DNA – A 2-bit language for engineering biology, Designer Microbes.

LONDON – Project Kangaroo, the proposed broadband video-on-demand service from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, is on the hunt for an advertising agency.