Braun and Apple

When I visited Braun in Frankfurt last year, they had an exhibition showcasing the last 25 years of their designs. Most notable, and even acknowledged by Apple, was a comparison of Dieter Rams designs for Braun in the 1960s and Apple's contemporary product designs. I took a photo of Rams T3 pocket radio beside 2 generations of the iPod. It isn't the only thing to be ripped off, er, I mean *influenced from Braun.

Searching Flickr, I found that stumrob had uploaded an image of the Braun Loudspeaker Model No. LE1 and iMac G5 2004 Model side by side. These I had seen in the same exhibition in Frankfurt only my photos of them were a bit crap. I don't think the images belong to stumrob, but other photos of both products were easily found because of the name and tags the user had attached to each photo, here is the speaker again taken by An Unseen Ruler, and the iMac 2007 Model taken by Robert Scoble. In a historical sense, photo sharing sites like Flickr are a great way of documenting and archiving events and objects, and even people, making available images that you would be unable to access otherwise.

It can be used to for navigational purposes, to compliment the functions of Google maps as you can get often get better views of a destination by searching image sharing databases like Flickr. If you want a view of Kastanienallee in winter, chances are someone has gone to Berlin in winter and walked down that street and taken photos of it, and if they are caring, they will be sharing it on something like Flickr. 

Like many social sites, if you decide to have a Flickr account, granted you need a Yahoo ID to join, you can tag your photos for better cataloging, and searching. I came across this rare photo of the interior of the Nagakin Capsule Tower, which they say will be torn down pretty soon. It's such a shame because it's a real beauty.

Before you get too trigger happy with tagging, there's an obvious flaw in all this. Upside is it's handy, and connects you to similar or same information easily. Downside, you are the authority, the tags are subjected to you, and you are at the mercy of the tagger. If you tag a photo of your dog as 'Major Bleed', it may not be a very helpful tag. Should we be the authority? If I tag this blog as 'the most awesome-adrenaline-inducing-punch-in-your-face blog ever', is that wrong?