Blanka Brzozowska

Clown in service of corporations – Ronald McDonald and the new challenges of consumer culture

This article aims to present the changes in the image of the McDonald’s mascot – Ronald. These changes are mainly set in the context of social movements for healthy food and issues of advertisement ethics – especially advertisement addressed to children. In the face of intensifying voices of discontent, the corporation is trying to re-create Ronald as the Spokesman, who responds to the challenges posed by the consumer requests. Despite these efforts he remains controversial and ambiguous, which is reflected in the subversive practices of using the clown character as a tool of artistic and political provocation

The aim of the paper is to present the issue of crowdfunding in relation to urban projects, with particular emphasis on the participation in its latest media dimension. Combined with a critical approach to urban creativity policies, this perspective broadens the scope of the debate on urban communities and the involvement of city dwellers in the bottom-up modification of these policies.

The paper constitutes a commentary on the current state of research on crowdfunding and proposes a holistic approach towards it which is based on the concepts stemming from cultural studies, media studies, and urban cultural studies.

The aim of the article is to present the challenges posed to the visual documentation of city cultures by the new social phenomena of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, which create new forms of participation in shaping urban culture and the urban community. In order to discuss the new phenomena some examples will be shown. A fake subway map, a crowdmap or an amateur science project data visualization show how visual tools can be used in the crowdsourcing and crowdfunding models of action as a collaborative project.

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the use of somatechnics as a part of the ideation in the design process. Even though extensive literature has been devoted to the issue of the embodied design and the possibility of a practical application of somatechnics, the problem of articulation of somatic experience remains marginalized and unresolved. This is not so much about theoretical considerations as about the possibility of developing description tools, or more broadly, a language of communication that would be useful both: researchers dealing with the description of the design process and designers themselves. This problem is particularly interesting in relation to developing trends related to the use of fun and participation in the design practice.

The aim of the article is therefore to describe the problem of articulation of somatic experience in the context of developing a language that can allow an effective and satisfactory translation of the initial idea of designing experience into its final effect. The emphasis is on designing experiences related to urban space. In the face of problems arising here (during the implementation process itself), the possibility of using the “language of movement” will be examined, according to the theory and practice of the Laban Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS). This system has hardly found a detailed description so far as one of the somatechnics that can be used as part of embodied design projects. The main issue is how to link motion observations and articulate the effects of these observations with strategies for embodied design in interactive environments. Considering that this system provides not only extensive conceptual equipment for describing and developing the language of movement but also visual tools derived from the Labanotation model, it is worth looking at this system in the context of its possible application as somatechnics in the design process, especially when it comes to experiences related to the use of urban spaces.