In recent months, QR codes seem to have started appearing all over the place. They've been getting some attention from arts marketers over the last year; personally I'm not sure how useful they are, but I'm willing to give them a chance - so, at work, our first ones are now beginning to appear on this year's Christmas show posters.
To see how well the public understand them - and whether they're here to stay, or just a fad - I tried to find some relevant stats on UK consumer uptake of QR codes. Research agency Simpson Carter recently (September 2011) published some interesting information on them. In their online survey of 794 people, they found that:
Read on... »
Feeling nostalgic for my student days, when I used to potter about in charity shops, I headed down to Stockbridge to reminisce and maybe track down some unusual books, for Stockbridge is where they all seem to end up.
It was on the bottom shelf, hidden away among the usual charity shop junk, that I found one gem. Outwardly very plain, having lost its jacket, the spine simply read "Adventures in Space". Inside, though, was a different story - this late 1970s book of sci-fi stories for children was richly illustrated, in that inimitable "everyone has 1970s haircuts" style. Here are a few of my favourite pictures from the book.
First off, we have this, possibly the strangest scene depicted in the book. I haven't actually read the story, but from the accompanying illustrations, I gather people from the future mistakenly caused a dinosaur-based battle, where a gathering of human armies from across time was assembled in order to combat the accidental reptilian incursion.
Read on... »
