The Design Museum’s recent exhibition of trail-blazing film title designer Saul Bass provided interesting clues for both the history and future of digital poetics with its emphasis on real-time and trans-medial experimentation. Reviewed by John Cayley

One of the most beloved experiences of Americans is visiting their other national capital, Disneyland. But, can it be a model for urban design? This exhibition slips this and other questions in between original promotional watercolours and various charming historica from the Disney team archives, documenting the emergence of the Disney territories from California through to Tokyo.

As its subtitle - A THOUGHT-PROVOKING Look at the Planning and Construction Behind the MAGIC - illustrates, the exhibition is a little vague as to whether it wants to be critical. It's a small, small yet terribly sensitive Disney spot in the American heart, to whit: when Disneyland opened in 1955, critics accused Walt himself of, "callously commercialising characters that were already embedded in the imaginations of most Americans".

Buried away in the summer programme of the ICA, the new media show Radical Entertainment represented an ambitious attempt to anthologise recent interdisciplinary work focused on the digital domain. Here, Ian White reviews the exhibition and asks whether our idées fixes about the new media genre – its levels of ludic subversion, its critique of the institution of Art, its interactive nature – aren’t misnomers in the face of the realities of the white cube. Instead, he suggests, we might view these ‘black box’ works as a revitalisation of the legacies of Romanticism

Graphical User Interfaces are still the dominant means by which we address our computers. Jason Walsh argues it’s time for an overhaul

>> Apple's OSX [http://www.apple.com]

Apple released Mac OS X last year. Having used computers for almost twenty years, I can say that this new operating system is undoubtedly the best ever. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disappointment. There is something wrong with this OS. It’s not the MACH microkernel, the UNIX core or the fluid motions of the new GUI. Well, actually it is the GUI. It’s not a bad interface, it’s probably the best yet, but isn’t it about time we stopped pointing and clicking?

At some points Web Wizards wears so much Net Chic that you would be forgiven for thinking that the Design Museum had re-sited across the river in Hoxton.

Catalogue of Strategies is an illustrated compendium of Dutch design iconoclast Mieke Gerritzen’s ‘design mentalities’. Lavishly published by Ginko Press, this edition is designed by Gerritzen and written by three new media pundits, the foremost of whom is Nettime co-founder Geert Lovink. After an initial interview with Gerritzen, a bold, red message alerts us to ‘STOP READING | START BROWSING’. On the whole, this proves to be sound advice.

This issue’s head to head takes on a subject which gets most web designers clawing at their mouse pads: USABILITY. Is the internet a huge bank of information looking for its unified front-end, or do such dreams of standardisation completely miss the point?
Bo McFarland, austere usability guru, and Curt Cloninger, romantic design degenerate, exchange pistol shots at dawn. Well, sort of...

HEAD 1 - Bo McFarland:

Entrants to the 5k web design competition had to design a complete web site in 5120 bytes (1k=1024 bytes). The challenge of turning around a design within such tight parameters seems to have tickled the fancy of the web community: the judges were swamped with entrants. Among the winners was the Web’s smallest art museum, displaying a Barnet Newman, a Rothko and a Mondrian. To view the other winners under the categories of Function, Aesthetics and Concept & Originality point your browser at the address below.

http://www.sylloge.com:8080/5k/home.html

Simon Worthington

Cooper James on Election 97 at the BBC

Now that the dust from the election has settled, it's time to look back and try to discover just why it was that after 18 years in the coverage wilderness the BBC managed not only to win on May 1st, but to rout ITV and score their biggest election victory since 1812.

John Birt's large scale restructuring of the organisation obviously played a major role; his introduction of an internal market and his fostering of a culture of managerial accountability has done a great deal to make the station once more appeal to the middle class viewer. But many politicians are now agreed that the deciding factor was in fact the BBC's superior deployment of 'presidential style' graphics on election night itself.

Tom Flemming teamed up with multimedia sculptress Philippa Thomerson to find out how anti the memory in the boiler house can be.

Designers frequently conjure up new ways of putting it. Each evaluation of media and language carries its own incorporated charm. When you are not too sure on how to present this, the general phraseology is applied. An inherent meaning," you are buying something good here. Rest assured. Your assets have been placed well." You succumb to expertise and ponder in digital nirvana. Never has code been so sensual.

A multimedia cooperative named AntiRom

Coming into the Covent Garden work space the air of the boiler room hits us. We are here to find out what the mediators are up to. Digitalia is placed, misplaced, fed with coffee on keyboards, and sellotape on vents." Ah, here's a.... code paradigm shift..."