Daisy Chains

It struck me as a little interesting that today while trying to make daisy chains for my wee cousins, I found myself thinking like a designer. Looking for only daisies with thick stems, long stems, etc I quickly found that some daisies were more useful than others. I've never really made a daisy chain before but I learnt very fast how to connect all the daisies together and which were useful and those that were useless. Without even realising I was using different skills e.g. thinking creatively, methods of construction, understanding ergonomic factors, etc for something as trivial as a daisy chain.

I just thought it was interesting how I adapted knowledge I had used for other areas of my design and applied them to something as simple as this.

Tricks of the mind

Derren Brown...marmite?

I personally think that he is so talented. Attending his Enigma show in Edinburgh on Friday, some of his predictions were incredible. Hypnotising people, contacting 'spirits', controlling the audience and generally just entertaining us all I was left awestruck with some of his predictions!

Making use of Frisbees to choose unsuspecting members of the audience at random to participate in the show helped quiet those sceptics who suggest that he plants people in the audience. Others volunteered themselves to him when he induced the audience into a catatonic state. Some people could not control themselves from standing up while others were left sitting in their seats - it was those that were easily controlled and that stood up who were used for the trick. The behaviour by these volunteers was similar to those experienced by sleepwalkers and when the trance was finally broken they had no recollection of what had just happened!

One of the tricks in the show relied on the use of subliminal messages, something which I wrote an earlier post about. Appealing to the audience not to divulge any of the tricks that had been performed in the show it is hard to talk about the trick but basically the set of the show had been designed to influence our choices and sure enough he guessed it right. I found myself throughout the show trying to figure of what the set was hiding and apparently so was the rest of the audience. Some friends I spoke to after the show said that they had not chosen the same object as so many others had, either lying or not as susceptible to these messages as others. Although people may disagree about this, I feel that most of his show is down to this sort of technique, but there is no denying that most of his tricks are down to his amazing talent!