YiLin Liu Jeffrey: 2011

Oprah Winfrey

After 25 years of her daytime television show Winfrey will now concentrate on making a success of her own cable channel. The influence of Oprah Winfrey’s chat show here in the United States is well documented. But it long ago spread beyond our borders, being broadcast in around 150 countries.

“I don’t think there is a talk show host in the world now who hasn’t studied Oprah and thought, I’m going to be the next Oprah,” said Ellis Cashmore, author of the book ‘Celebrity/Culture.’ “Every talk show host has some semblance of Oprah. Her fingerprints are everywhere.”
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Over the years The Oprah Winfrey Show has been described not just as a kind of therapy for viewers, but as a kind of church even. Winfrey has long preached a message of inclusive, personally transformative spirituality, even as she’s avoided talking about specific religions.
But that tone wouldn’t work on The Patricia Show, said its host.
“We kind of expect that from America and we accept it from America,” said Patricia Amira.
“But it’s not necessarily the way we live our lives. For me it’d be very much, go out there, do it, look at this story, it’s very inspirational, there’s something to be learnt, if you want to help, yes you can, but it’s about to that level. We haven’t got to a place of being comfortable in that zone after twenty-five years, no.
The Oprah Winfrey Show was comfortable in that zone.
And so was its global audience, which for 25 years witnessed an African American, and a woman, working and succeeding on her own terms.

Source from: "Oprah Winfrey’s Influence Around the World"

link: http://www.theworld.org/2011/05/oprah-winfrey-influence/

Gaga

No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga. In her somewhat un-meticulously constructed universe, there’s nothing that can’t be rewritten, refigured, revised or reborn. Not long ago she was playing confessional piano music in tiny New York rooms. Now she’s the biggest pure-pop-music star of the day, a mercurial talent lurking beneath an orgy of mirrored balls and bubble clusters and vinyl curtains and sticky lace.

Lady Gaga has become successful by adhering to the belief that there’s no inner truth to be advertised, or salvaged: all one can do is invent anew.It wasn’t that long ago when artifice appeared to be on its last leg. In the mid-to-late-1990s female performers especially were in a confessional place, a movement captured and branded by Lilith Fair, the summer tour package founded in part by Sarah McLachlan that ran from 1997 to 1999.

On Saturday the revival of Lilith Fair limps into the New York region (at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J.) after a challenging summer. About one-third of the original dates have been canceled, reflecting a soft concert market but also shifts in mainstream tastes.

That Ms. McLachlan and Lilith Fair executives would choose this summer to bring back the tour was perhaps a doomed decision from the start. Everywhere you look, pop has gone Gaga.

It’s Halloween-costume empowerment, sure, but her fingerprints are all over the revised images of Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Beyoncé; and on new artists like Kesha, Janelle Monáe and Nicki Minaj. These performers might not cite Lady Gaga as a direct influence, but the work she’s done since her 2008 debut album, “The Fame” (Cherrytree/Kon Live/Streamline/Interscope), has nudged loose conventional boundaries. The space for women in pop to try out new aesthetic identities hasn’t been this vast in some time.
source from: "Lady Gaga and her massive influence on female pop music"
Link: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/49132991.html#ixzz1PDFkCvcK

Jonathan Ive

A lot has been said about Jonathan Ive’s influences, almost singularly and iconically Dieter Rams of Braun. To say Apple products now bear striking resemblance to Braun products then is not an understatement and is unmistakably intentional. Rams and Ive share the same philosophy and language of design. They’re minimalist. There’s only as much form as is needed to utterly get out of the way of function. The radio is a speaker, the iPad is a screen. They are what you use them for.

And because of Apple’s inexperience with phones and the compromises mentioned above, perhaps it’s no more coincidence that past iPhones bear less resemblance to the work of Dieter Rams than that the next generation one bears total resemblance.

Apple’s gone unibody, they gone glass edge to edge, and most importantly they gone Apple A4 inside and shrunk the guts down to unbelievably small sizes, leaving room for ginormous batteries and little else but design. What was previously curved and more complicated now be flat and simple. It not only just works, it just fits in the broader context of Ive’s work and the influence of Rams he’s shown such homage for over the years.

According to Gizmodo there is an uncanny resemblance between the great work of Dieter Rams to the work of Jonathan Ive head of Industrial Design at Apple.

When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.”

Jonathan Ive’s dedication to “honesty” and “simplicity” in design pays great homages to Dieter Rams’ 10 Commandants in Design, and is something that Japanese design great, Naoto Fukasawa, indicated was his major design influence as well. Rams’ 10 Commandants was also recently printed in Wallpaper Magazine’s September 2007 issue, and was something that I wanted to write about but totally forgot! Here they are, in brief as extracted from Wallpaper Magazine:

Dieter Rams 10 Design Commandments
Good Design:
1. is innovative
2. makes a product useful
3. Is aesthetic
4. Helps a product be understood
5. Is unobtrusive
6. Is honest
7. Is durable
8. Is consistent to the last detail
9. Is concerned with environment
10. Is as little design as possible

link: http://www.97018.it/tag/jonathan-ives

http://www.designsojourn.com/jonathan-ive-design-genius-or-something-else/