Filed under: Experience
I have a half a library of notebooks that have acted as drawing boards and kept me company all throughout this year.
My favourite is the one I use on Fridays.
Fridays for me are for compassion and conversation- being there, in the moment, for both. I’ve been fortunate in this downturn to have the opportunity of a four day week, and all the sums seem to have turned out in my favour. That extra day to play and give back….
Here are some snippets of the conversation notes:
- (note): expectations are premeditated resentments (SHARE!!!)
- (note): what effects/ impacts handwriting on a day-to-day basis?
- (note): eating wild boar prosciutto with an ex vegan chef talking fish and chipocrates
- haiku and origami
- (List): Something fun, funny, relevant, timely. Entertain and Inform. Stuff that matters. Generosity, giving, sharing, real experiences, genuine interactions. Belive in something. Progress+ Passion+Playfulness
- (coffee morning list): Cognitive Edge/ Dave Snowden, Top 50 Arts videos on YouTube , Rolling Stone interview between William Burroughs and David Bowie, Laurie Lock Lee, Nancy White, Johnnie Moore, Dave Pollard
There’s a lot of organic flow chart diagrams unpopulated with text- empty buckets quickly drawn that I must have been using to explain a concept to someone. They all look completely mad though now.
The compassion scribbles are different. They’re witness to time spent in wards and waiting rooms:
- (List): scrabble, a bag of furry ears, 2 word dictionary, Julia + Julia
They’re longer, they’re less visual and more first person. The time between breaths. Pen and paper can bind, can help close open wounds. Reading these notes reminds me how fresh those scars are. Luckily I’m a big believer in scars. They are a map of how you came to be and a measure of who you are.
Filed under: Experience
BBH London has posted a series of “audio walks” on the Johnnie Walker Web site, in which folks like Richard Branson, Ranulph Fiennes and, yes, John Hegarty are heard ruminating about life and work while walking around places that mean something profound to them, personally or professionally.
In the clip, BBH founder Hegarty strolls through Carnaby Street and Soho in London, recapping his career. He covers lots of ground—why he was petulant and angry as a young creative, his advertising philosophy now, the interplay between inspiration and fear, what he learned about business from playing tennis,
Filed under: Experience
I’m sure that everyone is under the ‘oh… can you get back to me before Christmas’ pump right now.
While it’s awesome for revenue that people are realising the ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ nature of most marketing budgets it is astounding to me that rigour and strategy can tend to go out the window.
Like trying to find a present at the last-minute, trying to come up with innovation and excitement for a blue sky briefing in 24-48 hours (even for a six or seven-figure budget) is kinda hard. Bowerbird ways and kaizen ‘how can we do this better next time’ practices can help build a cache of ideas and tactics that can pay real dividends on their investment.
I’m more than happy to spend other people’s money. I’m really glad to have thinking already charted up and mostly costed that as ‘value ads’ that never got the time of day…which only need the current context so that they can now contribute to the bigger picture
Don’t be afraid of the zeros at the end of your estimates. Big thinking doesn’t cost you more and sometimes there is a big present under the tree waiting to be unwrapped.
Filed under: Experience
Maybe the greatest art director ever was Helmut Krone. At the end of his life, someone asked him why advertising had become so predictable.
“We were anti-establishment. But nowadays the kids want to be part of the establishment.”
It reminded me of a Picasso quote:
“When the avante garde becomes the establishment, you’re in trouble.”
And the wrong kind of trouble. The dull, boring kind.
Now there’s more reason and more opportunity than ever to create controversy, and free advertising.
Isn’t that what creative people enjoy?
“It’s more fun to be a Pirate than to join the Navy.”
Filed under: Experience
I’m a bit of a bricoleur – I love collecting random facts and lists and etmymologies and anything that will add colour and movement to the improvisational nature of most of my expressions whether it be my paid work or cooking or scaring people at dinner parties…well anything really.
@charlesfrith: New etymology last night. Conspire = breath together; con spire. Sweet eh?
You can’t make good decisions unless you have great choices, and I’m a big fan of stocking up on those. Adding articles into Delicious is a great example that kind of bowerbird behaviour, and this combined with feeding my favourites on Flickr, my Google reader starred items and other caches of bits and pieces that have caught my eye helps me create collages pretty quickly.
It means that you need to have the discipline to contribute to your stock pile every day- but when fast strategy is required it really does become a pirate’s treasure just waiting for you to dig up. Tag ho!
Dr. Lene Nielsen outlines her approach to developing personas:
Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.
You can have a look at the entire article here, and see a larger version of her chart here.
Thank to Ian Lyons for the find.
In the West Wing episode “Constituency of One” the VP says to Will:
“I admire speech writers. They have to have the tendency to doubt and the capacity to believe in equal measure….”
and I can’t help but think that these are one of the base pairs in the DNA strands of planners.
I often have people ask if I need to 100% believe in the product I’m working on- or if cynicism feeds good work.
Yes and no.
You need to doubt that the problem put in front of you is the one that need solving, you need to doubt that you have enough insight into a group of people of which you are not part and whose behaviour and reactions you’ll need to understand. You need to doubt the ‘known knowns’.
You also need to believe- that what you’re doing can help keep businesses sustainable, can create great culture and good working environments inside of organizations and that the siren call of the manifestations of our entrepreneurial spirits will write the kind of future we’ll want our kids to live in. You need to believe in answers.
As for the balance between the two? All things in moderation- including moderation. Passion will out. Know what feeds yours.
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.
One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries.
The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
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.
