I can see a lot of the thinking that might well have been inspired by the presentation given by Matt Jones at Design by Fire 2009 called “we have all the time in the world” - but Bud has taken this seed, personalized it, brought it to life within the context of message creation and the potential of the ideas of how we experience ‘time’ to help craft more effective opportunities for calls to action.
Seriously- lovely work.
A freak stranglet from the Large Hadron Collider is interfering with many potentials incuding my ability to get my thoughts down in post form. Time is not my friend right now. Perhaps the future is merely being kind.
There are heaps of speaker notes in the presentation- loads of chewy thinking:
Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?
“People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.
Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt Jones explores what we might call neochronometry and illustrates some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material.”
Filed under: Experience
still the same when it’s called experiential…
Filed under: Experience
I’ve been ruminating on complex systems science and the small world theories of Duncan Watts for a while now since falling in love with their elegance and potential after watching the documentary How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer ( you can watch it here)
Here is my delicious file on network thinking: http://delicious.com/katiechatfield/network
What got me started? What did I fall in love with?
- the notion that everything is much more interconnected than we thought
- the idea of mapping the amount of nodes you need in a system before you achieve synchronicity
- like: how few mobile phones do you need in a football stadium before anyone can instantly pass a message to any other person?
- the democratisation of where trends start and how information flows
- the hierarchical top down notion of Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory strikes me as having very little rigour and a lovely fairytale of post facto rationalisation
- I’ve worked in industries that trade on the currency of cool…but I’m much more interested in the architecture of effectiveness
In 2006 Duncan co wrote a paper Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation:
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires more careful specification and testing than it has received.
A key finding of the paper is:
Large-scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else but rather by easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.
Since writing this paper Watts has become a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. The presentation above show some of the Big Seed thinking he is developing there and my favourite (well apart from the notion of ‘mullet strategy’) is this juiciness:
- Bad news is that complexity of influence networks means we can’t predict either what will succeed, or who will make it succeed
- Good news is that we don’t need to….
…and so this this is how I get to my thinking around ‘curating resonant agents‘:
- A resonant agent is a stakeholder that is easily influenced to take action on your message
- Curating is partly Watt’s notion of “DIY Influentials’- promote those who promote you- but more active than merely recognising them and using them as part of your broadcast/ blogger outreach strategy.
- Curating is about creating experiences for resonance. It’s about Kurt Lewin’s wonderful equation:
- B=ƒ(P,E).
- Behavior is a function of the Person and his or her Environment
- It’s about the more you understand people, the better you can design environments that they can experience in order to deliver the impact on their behaviour you’re after.
Filed under: Experience
One of the greatest client obstacles I come across with transmedia planning is predictive modelling. Everyone wants to know exactly what they’re going to get for their investment. Before it happens.
We forget that every time we put out a message into the complex system of society- it’s an experiment.
No one seems to be aware that when we’re talking about numbers here, we’re essentially talking experimental rocket science…
Let me thrash out a metaphor. The word quantum is Latin for “how great” or “how much:
Quantum mechanics helps describe potential: the state of a system at a given time is described by a complex wave function. This abstract mathematical object allows for the calculation of probabilities. For example, it allows one to compute the probability of finding an electron in a particular region around the nucleus at a particular time.*
The deal with quantum mechanics is that observation collapses the waves of probability (essentially a description of all of the potential outcomes) into a single reality. So you don’t know where some thing might be until you look at it. Then you definitely know (but you’ve probably affected it’s position by looking at it.)
Right- so how does this relate to predictive modelling?
- Unless your clients can deal with this:
they probably won’t be able to understand how people might respond to:- (SM+ UCG+ CRM+ CSR+ ATL +WOM…)
- and we probably won’t know how to model it either
Let’s look at this differently:
- What if we don’t try to accumulate numbers, what if we try to curate them instead?
- What if we tried to find out where the energy is in the system between a brand and it’s stakeholders?
- What if we tried to find out the most resonant agents in that system?
- What if we tried to find out how few people we could talk to to get the effect we were after?
- What if we tried to find the people that counted? (and not just count the people?)
Ultimately, media+messaging really isn’t about what gets served…it’s about what serves you.
* Yes I know QM is about subatomic particles. It’s a metaphor.
Part 3
- hold on to your idea tightly
- anything that is not your idea is a bad idea
- resist asking for the premises of anyone’s conclusion- it will only cloud things
- the most important thing is to be right
Filed under: Experience
In this short film, Continuum strategists discuss Design Strategy and the methods they use to guide the development of experiences and products that matter to people.
It asks great questions:
How do you know what to do next?
How can you know when you’ve got the right idea?
How can you deliver something that you can’t think of today but that tomorrow will be obvious?
I particularly like the notions of the confidence you need to build around being right and the journeys that you can take to get there, essentially how you can make ideas actionable and real and deliver experiences that resonate from being understandable, relevant and believable.
Go on watch- it’s 10 minutes of style and substance and the infographics are marvelous.
Jeff Bullas summarizes a couple of reports about what top brands are doing in Social Media.
His 4 Key Observations
- As the number of channels increase, overall engagement increases at a faster rate. Brands that were in seven or more channels engaged deeply across all channels where they were present, as compared to brands that were present in fewer channels. There is an exponential growth in the depth of engagement as the brand extends itself into more and more channels.
- Engagement differs by industry. Not only are some industries on average present in more channels, they also engage with them more deeply. For example, media and technology companies tend to be in more channels and engage deeply within them than,…. apparel, consumer products, food & beverage, and financial brands which is to be expected given that companies in these industries are just beginning to experiment with social media.
- Financial performance correlates with engagement. Back to the million-dollar question: Why do social media? Because it pays off. While no one yet has the data to determine direct cause and effect, what is found is a financial correlation between those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers
- It Provides ” Multiple Communication Touch Points” More touch points can present a ripple effect, inducing viral marketing, boosting brand recognition and driving sales volume. Simply it means that different people prefer different types of communication, so the more types of communication, you as a company are enaging in, the more chance you have of creating a broader and deeper reach in the market place.
15 Best Practices of Social Media Implemented by the Top 100 Brands
- Deputize people throughout the organization.
- Understand how each channel provides a different dimension of engagement
- Centralize coordination
- Find champions who can explain and mitigate risk.
- Be in it for the long haul
- Pick channels carefully.
- Spread engagement to employees beyond the social media team.
- Open the platform to anyone and everyone.Encourage employees to tap into social media to get work done
- Engage in new channels where people already are
- Support engagement as an extension of the company culture.Be conversational from the start.
- Be conversational from the start.
- Make social media part of the job, just like email
- Modularize and synchronize content across channels
- To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job.
- Emphasize quality, not just quantity.
Filed under: Experience
That’s because science now suggests that we have more than five senses, that actually there are more than 17 senses defined by neural pathways. One of the first to announce we are hypersensorial humans living in a quantum world was well-known scientific psychic Ingo Swann at the United Nations in 1994, yet it wasn’t until 2005 when New Scientist magazine asked, “What would you do with 21 Senses?” that global research findings were disclosed.
Beyond the notion of the sixth sense, or what’s commonly considered intuition, additional senses include everyday experiences such as temperature, pain and balance, while others, a bit more obscure, include proximal, physical closeness; eidetic, photographic memory; and geogravimetric, the ability to sense mass differences.
The reality that we can go beyond the five senses and experience more is joined by the curious fact that everyone is born with a condition called synesthesia. Unlike anesthesia, which means no sensation, synesthesia is where two or more senses are hooked together, so for instance, a person can taste shapes or hear colors. As our brain develops, we lose this neurological ability, however for some well-known artists and thinkers such as Baudelaire, Kandinsky, O’Keefe and Feynman, this ability to intersense colored their lives.
Considering that telematic sensing is the aim of industry and our senses are merely electrical signals interpreted by our brains, and Sony has already been granted a patent that uses ultrasonic pulses to beam information into our heads, the future of gaming and entertainment will no doubt be transformed, triggering everything from whole-body thrill to memory enhancement. Bluntly put, the idea that extraordinary powers are beyond our grasp is over. So go ahead, drape the cape.
Crush + Lovely // Deltree is working with PostSecret to produce a video in support of their upcoming book: Confessions on Life, Death, & God.
“I don’t keep any secrets”….”I am an open book”.
Secrets kept from others. Lies you tell yourself to keep on going. We all do it- and we all deny it. Powerful stuff. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow- but interesting things can hide in dark places, no? Opening the book of personal dilemma that is Postsecret allows you to remember the thousand coloured veils of denial, aversion, self sacrifice, bravery and despair that everyone tries to hide in tightly grasped hands held tightly behind their backs. It’s magical to see them unfolded and proudly displayed in the light.
PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits.
Looking forward to dipping into “the Social Brain‘: a project that looks at research pitched at the three levels of brain, individual behaviour and social organisation. It aims to integrate this research into a credible and useful model of decision-making, in light of the breakdown of the rational-choice model employed in recent years. The idea is to give an account that does full justice to all the different ways we are human.
Tomorrow’s Investor: Where is your money being invested?
Arts and Ecology: Gustav Metzger: artists“taking moral standpoints”
Design and Society: Calling spiritually prosperous and self-knowing designers everywhere!
Thanks for the tip off Mark.
Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. They fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world.
Their philosophy
- ideas are not selfish.
- ideas are not viruses.
- ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life
The site contains jaw dropping videos of the most amazing thinkers, or ‘extraordinary minds shaping modern thought’ like the transcript below from Wade Davis who is the National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence,and honorary member of the hundred-year old Explorers Club. He’s an ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, observing worldwide indigenous cultures and the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants, celebrated in his best-selling book “The Serpent and the Rainbow” about the zombies of Haiti.
In the Amazon, I’ve been with hunters who could smell animal urine at forty paces and tell you what species left it behind. You look at the Polynesian seafarers who could, just by reading the ocean like a series of rivers which is how they saw the currents, by looking at the rhythm of the waves, they could sense the presence of a distant atoll far beyond the horizon. You talk about how, even the taxonomy of the Amazonian shaman, when they begin to characterize and systematize creation, particularly with some of their sacred plants. For example, one of the most important Amazonian plants is something called Ayahuasca, which is a Liana and, to the botanical eye, there’s one main species that’s used. But that species is actually, by at least one tribe that I know, the Sienna Sequoia(?), they recognize 17 different types of it. Now, to our scientific taxonomic eye, they’re all referable based on morphological traits to the same species. Indistinguishable. They consistently distinguish them and from great distances in the forest. And you ask them what is the foundation of their taxonomy? And they’ll say to you, “Well, you take each one on the night of the full moon and it sings to you in a different key.” Well, obviously, that’s not an idea that is going to get you through Harvard with a PhD, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than counting stamens. But, more importantly, you start thinking of what does that intuition really says to you? How do they find these plants in the forest, for example? And they say to you, “Well, the plants talk to us.” And we, of course, with our Descartian rational mind say, “Well, that’s nonsense.” And it’s only nonsense because it doesn’t fit into our paradigm. But when you begin to consider the possibility that different societies belief systems can make almost for different individuals, but also make for different levels of perception.
Filed under: Experience
My lovely friend Luc asked me for a definition of a creative strategist….and I had this in the cupboard.
The embed from Slideshare doesn’t seem to be working properly you can find it here:
What’s This Creative Strategy Thing All About?
from Wired: Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film
del Toro: In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform “story engine.” The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.
Wired: It sounds like you’re talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.
Wired: So how will the public story engine tell those same 10 stories differently?
del Toro: We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
Wired: But these nonlinear, hybrid storytelling forms involve gaming tech, which could trap them in a geek ghetto. What’s going to bring down that wall?
del Toro: Go back a couple of decades to the birth of the graphic novel—I think we can pinpoint the big bang to Will Eisner’s A Contract With God. Today, we have very worthy people doing literary comics. I think the same thing will happen on the Internet-gaming side. In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.
Rosebuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuud!
I love radio. I love the immediacy and the deadline and the wonderful opportunity of telling a story with the human voice. I had my own show for four years and know exactly what track you need to play to make a cup of tea and make a pit stop. But Ira Glass of “This American Life”, can tell you a lot more than I can on how you can know that you are on your way to developing the building blocks of a great story.
To paraphrase:
You start out doing something (like writing, or making films, or painting)
Because you love the form and because you have great taste
And then you start out doing it for your self- and because you have great taste you know that what you’re doing is not good
It’s kinda crappy
It falls shortA lot of people never get past that stage- they quit
Everyone goes through this stage – its totally normal
Sometimes it takes years to get past itThere’s only one way out of it
The most important thing that you can do -is a lot of work
Put yourself on a deadline
Get someone to expect it, to make you create that output
Don’t miss out on his excellent delivery, wonderful self analysis and the end of his story…it’s part of a series.
Filed under: Experience
Gotta love ‘em, those third act twists. They seem to happen all the time in ad land and they’re all the colours of the rainbow: just part of the job, ma’am.
Sometimes I feel that working in fast turnaround high pressure creative communications is a little like being on the stage, tap dancing on ball bearings. The trick is to make it seem effortless, hold your form while keeping a great smile on your face and giving everything you’ve got to keep your grace.
Never, never let a client see you running. One of mine used to say:
When you come home and your house is on fire, the last person you want to see bolting is the fireman.
Good advice. Perception is everything. Turning in circles is probably best avoided too. Especially if someone can see you. Try to keep that stuff on the inside.
There’s no way to theoretically teach someone how to manage the twists. It comes from experience in the trenches- war stories and battle scars are not only great anecdotes and funny after the fact- they are the only medals a professional soldier needs to mark their measure.seriously
When you can play all the roles and have grease paint and a grin and calmness in the face of a fire storm you’ll not only survive the third act, you’ll turn the play from a tragedy into a comedy. And earn yourself some pretty good drinking stories too.
