What’s the Matter?

I had a nice surprise waiting for me at home after a weekend away: a ‘Matter’ box, the latest project from Artomatic.

The Matter blog describes the contents better than I can. It also describes the philosophy behind it:

The idea behind Matter is to create a new kind of communications channel around the idea of giving people stuff. … In a world that seems to be increasingly dominated by digital communications, and where the net effect of those media is to render our experiences as being somewhat remote, the idea is to balance that by providing a way for advertisers and companies to start talking to people by giving them things.

It was Andy Piper, via del.icio.us, who put me onto it in the first place (thanks Andy), and I notice that he’s already got a review including a nice little unboxing video up on this blog. Dale Lane wrote up his (two) to. Bobbie Johnson has a great, thoughtful post too.

While rummaging around Flickr today I was interested to see that Adam Crowe has spotted a ‘rabbit hole’ (e.g. a hidden clue, the beginning of something else, in this case a party invite) in the Stoli leaflet.

Considering it’s free, there are some impressively cute and useful things in there. The thing that impressed me most though was the large percentage of recyclable paper and cardboard used in the packaging. The Nissan crayon soaps are packaged in a plastic box and there are small amounts of cellophane used by the Evo trumps and the Sony-Ericsson Music Monster. Everything else is packaged in card and paper, which a a very good thing indeed.