Georgia's latest column for Luxury Briefing.

" The luxury consumer is driven consciously or subconsciously by two conflicting concepts, the concept of fear and the concept of meaning..."

http://www.luxury-briefing.com

Richard Prince is selling art from other peoples' instagram accounts. #art #modern #photos #90,000 #reappropriation…

But what about the little hashtag symbol that lives on our screens and in our social media streams. 

The Octothorpe, as the professionals call it, is a survivor. Its origins are Roman and in this digital age we are still using it as a communications tool. Its use however has changed over the millennia.

The Libre Ponda, latin for a pound in weight, "17lb", now imagine jotting it down, scribbling it on a ships manifest or transcribing a complicated formula. It morphed into "#". On a side note the English pound symbol "£" is another form of "lb", neatly joining together the ℔ to create the modern symbol. 

Fast foward to the typewriter, the octothorpe survived this culling; the pilcrow and interabang didn't. And then the touch tone phone, the next leap forward for communications. The little octothorpe lives below the 9 and next to the zero. Why? because people could start speaking to computers, and dial past the first phone number, navigating through menus and entering information. 

Then 2007, two things happened that gave the symbol its current meaning; the hashtag. Firstly, Chris Messina, a UX designer,  chose to use this symbol for collating Twitter searches because he wanted a sign that could be input from a basic mobile phones. He had two options: octothorpe or asterisk. He chose the former. Secondly, a twitter coder wrote a single line of code which allowed its search engine group the posts together... 

The symbol has survived in this era because it allows us to communicate with computers, reading a tweet in a few years might sound like reading out a telegram today. STOP. We change our language to make it more computer friendly, but we need to invert this; the computer needs to be more friendly to our language. 

What will the Octothorpe symbol become to mean next?

Is it #instagrammable? - #not sure 

A great little read about wonderful symbols; Shady Characters. 

 

Today Ireland became the first country in the world to make marriage equality legal by public vote. The #hometovote campaign went viral — with an estimated 32% of the people traveling to vote being creatives. As with many other worldwide social / political campaigns, designers and artists were compelled to use their respective skills as a medium to communicate their opinions.

 

Graphic design has always played a huge role in this form of innovative communication. Historically, the poster has been utilised as a language for social innovation and a tool for political persuasion. "As a medium for social change, posters record our struggles for peace, social justice, environmental defense, and liberation from oppression" (Elizabeth Resnick on her exhibition, Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age 2001-2012). However, in recent years we have seen these campaigns transcend traditional media touch-points into digital and social platforms. The "yes for equality" campaign was no different. 

 

Artworks produced spanned from social media emoji sets to street murals, performance art to poetry. Dublin-based graphic designers set up a website that encouraged designers and studios from all over the world to publish digital posters in support of the Irish referendum.
yes-for-love.com

 

These activities are events that happen on daily basis but they remind us that we have a skill, and that this skill can help to encourage progressive change.