Moving picture show.

Remember that great Rice Daubney site which used (and at www.ricedaubney.com.au/ still uses) animated figures and lets you meet and hear members of this Sydney practice? Since then there has been an explosion of site personalization--OK, a mild flurry.

One example is the site of the Princeton, New Jersey, practice Hillier. You type in the url www.hillier.com and for a moment there is this rather dull screen. All of a sudden, a vast mug shot pops up. Who is it? you think, slightly appalled. And what is that square thought-bubble doing with the message 'How are great architects like financiers?' You suppress the obvious answer 'because they slave-drive their staff and try to work out what is going on. Who, for example might be Diana Lapins, director Int Arch Design, who is credited with this thought? And is hers the smiling visage half obscured by the box--which expands when you click on it to provide a verbose answer and a possibly, related link to a recent Hillier project. Worried, you navigate your way to 'People'. She's not there, even in the senior staff list which is where the director Int Arch Design surely must be mentioned.

You turn off your browser in puzzlement and decide to have another go. Up comes ... not the same person--this time it's Chizura Tomioka with a message box half obscuring her left eye. A mere architect, she's not going to feature on the internal list. And no, after you've searched, she doesn't. But after much turning off and on, it seems that the opening page features a random selection of big close-up mug shots of women and men from the office (or not). The fact that some of them are women and that they are not all big cheeses in the practice suggests a nice feeling of democracy. But nice and all though it is to get a row of grinning teeth in your face when you were only looking out for a practice which might design you a hospital, you wonder what it's all about.