Design Triptych with Private Snafu
August 27, 2008
Remarkable is nothing.
Viral ideals divide.
You are what you left.
Private Snaufu was a collaboration between Frank “It’s A Wonderful Life” Capra, Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, Directors such as Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, and Mel “Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Barney Rubble, Mr. Cosmo “You’re Fired!” Spacely” Blanc and the genius Frank “funny bone” Tashlin.
Talking Open for Africa’s Education System
July 2, 2008
Last month I decide to quit my job and have a huge rethink about what I wanted to do with my time.
Much of the reasoning to leave the role was based upon wanting to do something very different with technology, editorial and brands. There is very little value in using digital as a promotional tool compared to using the aesthetics of networks, manufacturing and communications for devising new markets. I’m particularly interested in temporary markets as the frailness of this form of economics creates a stronger network of merchants, which in turn pushes invention, rather than innovation. This is what sustainability demands – frailness.
The Joneses project was my thesis of a business model for production and consumption of media that enabled a manufacturer to find new markets and understand the role of their prospect’s communities through the co-creation of entertainment.
For this to function, Creative Commons licencing was fundamental, in fact the format of the business model was built around the opportunities that the Attribution – ShareAlike model afforded.
The Open Rights Group, as I noted before, produced a lovely case study on this.
To which, Frances Pinter, heard about the work and invited me to the London School of Economics to talk it through with regards to her current research for the Education Publishing business for Developing Countries.
So on Tuesday we met, along with her colleagues Eve Gray and Steve Kromberg of Creative R&D, and Batambuze Charles of the National Book Trust of Uganda, and went through how a brand funded a marketing programme that led to open publishing and how this could be applied to the infrastructure of developing nations, specifically Africa. Their project ‘PALM’ : Publishing using Alternative Licensing Models, looks to answer the question:
Can the adoption of more flexible licensing regimes contribute to improved publishing and better access to learning materials in Africa today?
It was really interesting valuable to talk to non-brand-oriented marketing people about the Joneses Project; firstly they asked the same questions as any business strategist would, (legal negotiations, rights), and touched on many that comms strategists have asked me (ROI, reach, production), but more importantly, they could see the potential in how the model applies to manufacturing as much as it does to marketing.
And this went straight into the big question for me; how do brands integrate into the infrastructure of society and bring huge social value to prospects rather than waste time and money in promoting their own values. This begins to address the futility of an ‘author’ in digital and the importance of learning the ingredients of data (the factors that produce data) – which leads us to the social understanding of how data can be used to create new entities that have nothing to do with the original data sets. Otherwise we end up with condensation trapped within rather than utilised outside the businesses engagement.
(Hans Haacke, Kondensationswürfel, 1963)
This may seem like a quantum jump for clients and agencies to even consider developing, but with projects such as Planning For Good and John’s Green Manifesto, the conversation has started. Droga5‘s Tap Project for UNICEF is at the crossroads of service and advertising. It doesn’t reach into designing a solution to the crisis, but it does take communication design to the areas of life that really need it. Charity is a symptom of a sick society; it is not a business case to solve.
The root of such concerns reside in a broader issue of how society understands itself. The Tap project is a Campaign because a Charity is a campaign. And I’m sure it saved lives.
Here’s another great video from this years Cannes Festival, with UNICEF giving some of the projects background.
For me it highlights the grave concern of the understanding of sustainability. Sustainability requires frailness; sustainability is a network concept and the best networks, are the most frail,
After the past couple of years looking hard at the way Brands manage their business communications, preferring advertising (“the tax for poor products”~Anomaly) to marketing (“listening to what prospects want from life”~Google), preferring media centric campaigns instead of growing digital platforms; ignores the value in human interactions that can be enhanced by a brands facilitation of services.
It’s massively rewarding that a brand’s marketing model can inform other markets far outside the the intended demographic, never mind a completely different sector, or Continent. It demonstrates the power of adoption and sharing within open business models. It’s how good ideas spread and has nothing to do with being ‘viral’, it’s about finding new markets through collaborative design over time. This is where Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (written 4 years before the ClueTrain Manifesto) becomes really interesting in terms of service design and content creation.
If I get asked once again,and I’m sure I will, what the ROI of the Joneses project was, I’ll say it’s helping the future of design, production and distribution of developing countries, specifically around technology that are shared globally. It’s hardly philanthropy, but it does demonstrate that a marketing programme can ensure the client is part of a much wider, deeper conversation about how the world’s societies are operating, and to a degree, lead the debate. I think this is what Russell means by being polyphony. Metrics are single dimensional understandings.
Leaving these opportunities to ‘governing’ bodies will eventually erode a clients freedom of speech; as Richard suggests, privileges of a corporation’s use of marketing, and advertising, can be withdrawn; such restrictions on freedom of expression (corporations have the same rights as people in terms of possession and thus expression) will lead to more and more propriety models, may they be business design or communication / information systems. That’s not good for any one.
How long can you go for without a great ‘brand’ experience. What is that space between advocacy and addiction?
Perhaps we’ll see this happen with AnalogFolk. “Communications Products”, like Branded-Utility-ala-Social-Objects, may end up be defining workflows as products. After all, it’s the ‘brand experience’ that is the product; but fundamentally, its what the ‘reader’ (audiences) brings to the experience that defines the activity.
And I think this plays havoc with ‘planning’, strategy and insight. To be adaptive, agile business models are a must, may this be the institute that you work within and the work that you do for others. The thinking behind executions has to be holistic, not local, so that local adaptation is possible by the ‘locals’ themselves. In return, local adaption must freely be influential to the holistic model. This is conversation. This is business dialogue and it’s how design is used in the most effective way.
Design is brilliant for problem finding; it’s not purely the domain of making things look good. Design used to problem finding, will remain open. A closed design is a fixed message, and that denies sharing and adaptation.
This is why, promotional design work (advertising) has little impact on business – design needs to be used to change a business’s social interactions, not merely change it’s ‘face’.
The full gamut of digital technology, aka ‘software’, isn’t changing the business of marketing; it’s changing the whole reason for business. And I think that’s what I was explaining to the the LSE, that publishing, essentially an author’s marketing business, has finally realised that by giving away the product, you will learn more about an audience, who will show you new markets through their consumption habits. Publishing is a value-added communications channel, and the role of this when brands are trying to engage with society is to fund the needed productions.
Need is driven by an audience’s desire for their own amplification. Interactive publishing is a design tool for collating rare data. Twitter collects rare data – it’s data that no one else has (well, twitter gets it first, then passes it onto any ole aggregater) – but it’s the live semantic web using the audience to live through meaning, instead of technology systems ‘learning’ and storing. The Wisdom of the Crowds has superseded the expectations of Artificial Intelligence because collective design ensures emotional engagement.
Publishing is not a destination; publishing is the most powerful of all conduit systems humans have. It’s why marketing depends on it and why publishers need to collaborate with a broader range of commercial models than it’s supply ‘n’ demand legacy. Any future of a publishing relevancy must be based upon currency being extractable from any ‘object’ in any way you imagine. Invention exists only when ‘borrowing’ can occur. This is why you must understand the creativity within licenses to get the best out of the use of technology – it’s the artistic licence, if you will…
This is the social network that will communicate what to manufacture. If there really is more value in the Long Tail businesses, then bespoke manufacturing is the holy grail – essentially, taking what prospects what ‘now’ and delivering with exclusivity. As Gaping Void would testify. It was the basis for Adidas. It’s the index of the Internet. It’s the basis to identity.
So for me, these are all strong indicators of where I should be paying attention, and my meddling, in service design, open business models and creative use of technology.
Technorati Tags: ORG, WRTJ, wherearethejoneses, education, opensource, creativecoomons, servicedesign, economics
My Factoid Trivium
June 10, 2008
Toxi published some images from his fiducial generator project; making keys for a reactivision setup (I guess…)
Reactavision, in action, can be seen here, rocking out with Bjork, no less.
You see the blocks they are using on the table? The underside has an image, which is a key, which connects to other objects in predefined ways – programmed as the image.
But the images,they’re great fun, just as images. They all have a MutantTeddyBearNess to them.
I couldn’t …resists…meddling.
Bit of context with warm sunny light.
Mocking something up on a side of something, gives context of sorts.
Viscousy and silk-screening; tacky pop.
TV themed, in a poltergeist kind of way.
And something you’d find on a techno album cover.
They kinda got darker as I went along, into the night, Gimping. I sucjk at photoshop.
Now, as they (the images) are ‘keys’, and he says they need only be binary (black and white), so colour has no impact on their function (their geometry gives the uniqueness, thus there can be maaaaaaany of them.), therefore, I guess they will still work, even if hacked with some poor ‘photoshopping‘ gimping.
Exploring the idea of keys having personalities, to the point where you don’t need the physical ‘key’.
Kind of like the ‘book people’ in Fahrenheit 451.
QR codes don’t really do it for me. They need to have more ‘personality’. Though I do like the term paper storage. Did you know you could get video encoded into coloured QR codes? You can, you know. Not available yet though.
As much as I liked pixelated animations, it takes some extremes to work in a (full functioning) QR code.
I picked up a book called Meet Mr.Product whilst in Dusseldorf, visiting the exhibition Tim Keil suggested over the twitterwaves.
Here’s some photos.
What a wonderworld that must be, if they could all live in a Truman show kind of thing.
Clear characters, with purpose in life, looking for friends, happy to help and eternally young.
It could be a world where brands could bred freely.
Could a multi-branded version of Spore, the new eagerly awaited game from EA, be educational or really annoying? (<- use this link if the video below has given up the game.)
See, a platform like reactivision, affords many, many, maaaaaaaaaany clear characters to exist, with purpose in life, looking for friends, happy to help and eternally young.
Platforms inspire a million characters, if they have a clear purpose within the context.
But, these characters are roles, if they have purpose. Roles are agents conspiring to bring conformation through differentiation; the fiducial teddy bears are the affordance of the platform; conformed in geometry logic, diversified through irrationalities.
The benefit to this: transmission.
Finding friction free, high capacity storage ‘objects’, needs for one thing – be able to transmit.
Technology is a real time story, looking to make objects that transmit.
Objects, that receive is not a request of technology, or any facate of craft, but a burden of language.
Language doesn’t learn to be better, users adjust it to work within changing frameworks.
To store changes, we have to extend language to work as containers, to which we can place ‘understandings’.
We create languages to store objects that relate; sub-languages such as slang, is used within peer groups, who want to describe ‘understandings’ in their social-economic contexts.
The relationship between language and object, is technology – the crafting – the act of transmission is a scribe within the objects construct. Technology gives us a timestamp to decode the relationships between objects, but cant itself create languages. Technology may give us daily, monthly, yearly, new parameters for ‘creating’, but the ability to create ‘storage’ objects comes from the limitations of expression within time.
Could it be possible to make zillions of boxes, and automate the storage of things as they ‘appear’ to us?
Without an understanding of surface, a complete understanding or the properties of the perception plane, the answer is no. The translation of ‘insight’ to the ‘physical’ requires a mapping of time to material – unless we can find ways of making things outside a linear production model. Open Source, which you may not consider a linear production model, is just that. Although all the tributaries flowing into a single build, the linearity occurs at the ‘gateway’.
It’s because things are not divisible by things. Everything is estimate; precision lies.
Although storage is amenable to the most awkward items, it handle infinite variants very well.
Gursky
Another Gursky.
As soon as a wrapper is applied to an object, the immediate context changes and thus invokes the story of the relationship between the storage and the contents.
This relationship is the root of the factoid, the point where fabrication and digestion of the narrative’s objects commences, unleashing it’s trivium. Because you apply a language to something, you are creating the relationship.
Thomas Ruff.
Another Thomas Ruff.
Note the jaggy jpg compression tearing (the pixelation), that’s intended. These are huge digital prints, made up of recursive colouring of the pixels. Here’s some more, so you get the idea. (I saw these in NYC last November, and feeling blown away by them.)
Both these artists studied under the Bechers , who did lots of this:-
Classic.
Comic.
It’s why this campaign is more than an advert. It’s demonstrating personalised recursive storage. The creative multiples the storage of the media space. Spaces within spaces within spaces, all ‘humanised’.
Check out the London underground carriage posters – they all have 3 ‘hidden’ smiles. Brilliant recursive design.
Using anthropomorphic storage platforms enables us to see ‘things’ as people and relationships.
We can engage in these relationships as we would people – on our own terms, our own language systems, our own arguments attended to.
A world of relationships, seen not as things.
A technology of stateless storage, recursively designing, producing and distributing relationships, for personal gain.
Which takes us into the uncanny valley.
An anthropomorphic system that responds with authenticity, requires a depth of experience that equates, not betters, the human relationship. Importantly, feedback time is critical to authenticity. The space of time that something is not doing something indicates factors of the transmissions.
The pauses between our spoke words are just as important as the words themselves.
This is a form of error handling for the transmission. Packets of data are sequenced with silence. Like music…
Scripting Artificial Intelligence will lend itself to one benefit: building a system to judge and attempt- it’s why they are so popular in gaming systems – A good AI is judged on the array of faults you can exploit, not the definition of it’s persona. In fact, the array of faults constructs the personality based upon your Factoid Trivium. Any faults in comprehension remains in the design of the key properties.
So where can character driven arrays take us if sequencing is initiated by investigation?
More likely to be this…
Design Triptych with Robert Rauschenberg [RIP]
May 13, 2008
It doesn’t have to be that good to become poetry.
Get your Goat.
If you have size, you have proportion.
Rauschenberg interview starts at 29m30s.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” [link]
Robert Rauschenberg, multimedia artist, October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008
Schrödinger’s Movie
April 24, 2008
Let’s play a game to demonstrate that the future of movies is dead.
First, pick you favourite movie.
I’ll wait… I know it’s a tricky question
OK, Good choice.
Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.
Ok, What’s you second favourite Movie?
Ah! Crafty one.
Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.
Right, third (and final) favourite movie choice.
Heh, ok.. I see what you did there.
Ok, you know the score, Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.
You now have three movie files on your laptop, all 5Gb in size.
We wont mention this to the copyright authorities. It’s between you and me.
The thing is, you only need the one file for all three movies. The data for each movie has been conformed to the same size, it’s the sequence of the data that enables the viewing of the movie – through the player that understands the codec.
You see, any movie that has ever been made also exists within the single 5Gb file.
Still with me?
The data file is just noise, it’s how you tune out the movie you want is the trick.
But the fact that every movie that has ever been made is held within that data file also means that every film that will ever be made is within that file.
[Pause for thought – I know you’re thinking at this point.]
Think of it like radio, you have to tune to the right sequence of the data to get the movie you want or the movie you can imagine you would like to see.
Now, for the technical reader, I know you’re snarling at this – yes – it’s a question of retrieval and we don’t have the technology nor the methodology to tackle this puzzle.
But it does indicate a finite number of movies that can be made. It’s a huge number – but it’s finite.
Look at it from an single image perspective.
If you have a jpg file, 800pixels x 600pixels, the limitation of the dimensions, that is, the number of pixels multiplied by the colour depth is the limitation of the format of the image.
As screen/image performance ‘increases’, the colour depth improves and thus more variation can occur, but there is a limit somewhere. 32bit colour depth is probably what you have your monitor set to. Hi Def Tv blows this away, but the visual plane of us creatures is limited to a spectrum. We can only see so deep.
But back to the movie puzzle.
Schrödinger set a thought puzzle back in 1935,
He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, where the cat’s life or death was dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the box is opened.
You can read the whole cat debacle on Wikipedia.
If you have a 5Gb of data, the movie you want is in there if you can perceive it.
Now, there’s an alternative view of this puzzle from proposed in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal. Their experiment essentially involves looking at the Schrödinger’s cat experiment from the point of view of the cat. It’s called the Quantum Suicide.
Which makes me think what will power does a movie that has never been made have, to fight it’s way out of the 5Gb of noise, sitting on your desktop?
What ‘will power’ do characters and scenes of movies that, don’t exist, have?
This question shows how our minds project emotive responses towards fictions, how we project our own sensibilities onto formats of existence. Narratives act as vehicles for our own perceptions, but do they have a magnetism to the needs of conversation between ourselves?
It makes no sense to reference movies that don’t exist because they are not a shared point of understanding – we tend to use the past as a reference, not the future. But as the sum total of all possibilities of movies can be formulated if we understand how language informs communication, then reference points remove any notion of authored time – that is, what will be and what has has no hierarchy – that is, the past is no more informative than the future.
But I digress.
If every movie can exist within 1 file, have a look at Amazon, Blockbusters, netflix and youtube. That’s a lot of duplication, a lot of technology used to propel unit sales where instead we should be looking at the solution of movie automata – growing movies – so that we are freed up, to move on to something else.
If you’re in marketing, especially planning, and tuned into the digital storytelling scene (ahem), you’ll know about Faris’s Transmedia Planning essay. You’ll probably know that it comes from Henry Jenkins notions of Convergence Culture, and you might know that he took it from Nicholas Negroponte, Director of MIT, book called Being Digital, where he talks about Bit Streaming. Bitstreaming is where the point of production which becomes the point of consumption (basically – think about Lifestreaming, User Generated Content and Conversation On-line). Your doing is the act of consumption. To use is to learn.
BitSteaming is not Transmedia, something has got lost along the way here. We have to stop thinking in terms of making media; production and distributions are side effects of design, they are not a means to an end.
Design, as an act, infers solution. Design is much better at finding problems than having to abuse creativity to produced polished productions for consumption.
Brilliant things are the messes we are fixated upon. Headlines in the press attract attention, not for the morbid cultural events but for the persuit of reason. A mess is a loose space that we can occupy mentally. There is peace in the eye of the storm. Time stands still in this space.
There has been so much written about this area within marketing, and I think Marcus bagged the best review so far, but it all amounts to avoiding the subject that authorship does not matter. It matters not for an audience nor for the producer, authorship is a channel for communication. Communication, does not need a singular writer to produce media. Films may have a director, but there is almost a countless cast of assistants required to design, produce and distribute.
There’s is also the notion of copyright and licence. That was demonstrated in Where are the Joneses?
You may want to look at Roland Barthes ‘Death of an Author’ or Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Both have indicated the moral and virtues decline in the notions of authorship. It can be argued that authorship maintains our identity as humans. Crosbie and Doc Searles may debate that synthesis of human authorship is almost upon us. Though Andrea may not agree.
Digtal methodologies, as we have seen within all forms of publishing, does not honour the author as a predicate for future productions. From Markov chains to Bayesian search theory, pattern matching of semantics is beginining to be taken seriously as the direction of technology which will author our future. BookLamp is doing something interesting in this area (Thanks to Ben for the link). We will be experiencing the automaton of narrative far beyond the postmodernism of Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra as seen in those Matrix Movies.
This is why Hollywood is dead wood, tinsletown will burn to the ground.
We’ll be left with an ever present of change, a shifting sifting of values that look more like noise than logic.
The Semantic hope of web3.0, where stuff talks to each other, means that we are the participating audience of a story that we all know even though it has not been written, and constantly trying to escape by retuning the aesthetics back to what makes us feel comfortable. It’s going to harder to be feel secure in the thought that you have a fate, destiny or an objective future when the principles of subjectivity are iterations of a systematic upgrade of general consensus – you belong to your peer’s perceptions.
Narrative may well collapse into pace determined by a rhythm of participation. The story and melody could be perceptive instead of prescriptive.
From storytelling to synthesis, we see performance and identity central to the act of engagement. The human centrality is the primary node within a creation plane, which is pure transaction – an act. It’s how you map the individual the execution of transaction that will make the semantic web, not the alignment of meanings within language. An act is a meaning – a word is a symbol. Signs are conduits between the two.
Life will become a pure dress rehersal because the movie will never be made. Maybe this is the constant betaness. Maybe this is how we should never to be afraid of making mistakes. This sense of ‘incomplete’ or ‘disconectivity’ makes us relate more to each other.
Our patience for this consistant change will be subject to invariants. Just as the notion of interestingness is based upon anomalies; configurations, standards and useful protocols that provide moments of clarity, will become the Greek island oasis that defines peace – and maybe peace of mind. While Advertising hates this, marketing loves this. Disruptions in perception are only useful when you want someone to believe that they are in control – isn’t that so tiger?
But I digress, again.
I’ve no idea on how to retrieve the finite collection of movies within the 5Gb of data, but I’ve started using Twine to collate the ideas and references that made me thinking of this problem called Schrödinger’s Movie . If you’re using Twine, do pop by and have a look, help out, or comment.
Either way – the song remains the same. Open up.
Update [27-04-08] There is now a really interesting thread on Yahoo!Groups about this post.
Open up
Now open up
You lied
You faked
You cheated
You changed the stakes
Magnet toss that pie in the sky
Unrehearsed let the bubbles burst
All in all a three-ring circus
Of unity with parody tragedy or comedy
Probably publicity
Open up
Make room for me
Now open up
Make room for me
Lose myself inside your schemes
Go for the money, honey
Not the screen
Be a movie star Blah, blah, blah
Go the whole hog
Be bigger than God
Burn, Hollywood, burn
Taking down Tinsel Town
Burn Hollywood, burn
Burn down into the ground
Burn, Hollywood, burn
Burn, Hollywood, burn
Take down Tinsel Town
Burn down to the ground
Down into the ground
Burn
P.s. Ask me sometime how I know Peter Andre is responsible for LeftField’s first 2 albums.
Design Triptych with Snoop Doggy Dogg
April 20, 2008
Designers should always have a have a plant not a bird.
Work, talk less.
Pull off something at the table.
Time after sometime you meet The Appropriate Moment
April 20, 2008
Click for a larger version of the diagram
You can argue there is a right time for everything; you could say that the unexpected is always a jolt to your perception.
Either way, there must be a correlation between usefulness and uselessness and the sweet spot must be a time based ideology.
Now, if time has curves to it, then the act of serendipity acts like a magnet to possibilities, and possibilities are either useful or useless, depending on what you think you are looking for.
Being in a state between passive and alert, shall we say ‘open’, at what point in the cycle of interaction of stuff do we identify possibility?
Basing this upon the 4 Humble Demands, and mapping on LongTailness (Green line in the diagram above) [via Chris Anderson] and The Dip (Blue Line in the diagram, above) [via Seth Godin], with an understanding that inventions are either pushed onto audiences (Advertising) or pulled into markets (Marketing), we can see two points of attraction/repulsion that seem to occur in society debate: Criticism and Appropriation.
Godin’s point about the Dip is one of persisitance and quitting – identifying what you are expert at and disgrading the rest of your work – as ever – the persuit of the remarkable.
Andersons, well discussed, model of markets as a Long Tail, where there is more possibilities in the tail, than in the head of market releases, that is, your back catalogue is of more value (if not the same) than your new inventions.
I’ve nudged Andersons long tail model to have a bump, so to reflect the point of interest in a back catalogue. Let me expand upon this.
When a new movie comes out (normally pushed) it will pass through criticism and drop to a level of the market, after which referals to the movie will be peer or algorhythm based (Amazon/Netflicks) after which the title will fade to obscurity (either being watched lends itself to being shelved or that the referal wasn’t adequete).
Therefore the bump in interest is the secondary market moment.
Now, as with the Dip model, a market that examines your efforts (criticism) increases your desire to succeed until you find a moment of self doubt, which makes you rexamine your interest in what you are going. It’s during this Dip that you look around for something that will help you understand and refine your offering, and if you get out of the Dip, you know you’ve found something useful.
It’s the point at which The Dip and the secondary Market meet each other that is of interest to me. It’s where a connection is made that either enables the Longtail model to revive a market or an inventor to disolve an interest. It’s a point of grave decision on what to do next.
Let’s look at the time factor, between the Slow and the Fast.
Releasing an invention (book, film, lawnmower) is a done with some form of promotion: with (creative) agency engaged, the clock starts to tick because the billings have kicked in. You have stock in the warehouse and you have to shift the glorious invention. Time is money at this moment. Costs are driven by a demanding ROI.
Equally, those who invent in public (always in beta) are looking for feedback – the faster it comes, the faster the product can be refined.
In both states, adrenaline is pumping – it’s exciting to be involved with inventions. It’s a birth thing…
But the thing about enthusiasm, it wains, and even if you artificially pump the enthusiasm with buzz and PR, unless the invention finds a residency in usefulness, the interest levels drop to what a market will find acceptable. The pace of conversation around your invention will naturally succumb to banality, because there is always something else that is being invented, released and hopefully criticised.
On the other end of the spectrum of pace, is the slow time, the pace of acceptance and controllability. This the audiences control over the objects in circulation. It’s the pace at which a decision (acquisition) happens.
The 4 Humble demands (Inspiration, aspiration, insight and acquisition) are charted as volumes of time, not spped of time. I have a base line ratio of these 4 psychological phases, there are:
Inspiration – 30%
Aspiration – 20%
Insight – 40%
Acquisition – 10%
So as acquisition takes up the smallest amount of time (this is the actual transaction) it also happens with a pace of consideration. Insight on the other hand, has more energy and more depth to the action. Insight and Aspiration, although have a greater degree of excitement, the attention or dwell time is less significant.
So you get the idea.
Now, back to the point of this, finding the point at which invention becomes a useful, or why inventions don’t become useful.
There are two significant moments of in the diagram that influence the outcome of invention. First is initial criticism, which either way creates buzz for you (No PR is bad PR) and the second is the point of the invention being picked up for REUSE. Now this is likely to be of renewed interest based upon a contextualisation of circumstances, or that there is a detail in the invention that is applicable to something unrelated; regardless, the Appropriate Moment is activated when retrieval and doubt meet.
Uniting the sought and the lost which make a connection happens pace begins to slow down; the attributes of the seeker and the object are identified, connected and revived because of time resisting to be used as a catalyst.
This point in the curvature in time can make a journey become fascinating; renewed understanding of the relationship of things can not happen when an accelerated conversation is happening, nor when the audience is asking what, why, where, when or how (Aspiration phase).
The implications of this are curious – the mid paced ethos of curating has more value to society than the release of new inventions – it’s the recycling of the existing which hold the value of markets.
I think we know this deep down.
Equally, the Dip is nothing more than an opportunity to explore markets for cross-selling and product development.
Now, I could go off on a tangent to mark that commercial appropriation only really works with a Creative Commons BY-SA licence, though many IP lawyers will point out that the largest market for them is the abundance of patents their clients own make them the most money – and of course these are activated financially at the Appropriate Moment.
But I wont.
Instead, the lesson from this is that the channels of pace are widely overlooked in terms of marketing.
Instead of the heady pace of releasing the new (and The Shock of the New is worth a read to understand when an art market goes nuts the quality of production’s interestingness plummet), the area to focus on is around the Appropriate Moment, the space where the audience can gather, create and refine their interests.
It’s some time after the time where they ask questions (“Do you have these in a Blue?”) but before they make a purchase decision. Hmm, that’s a bit obvious isn’t it.
Ok, the Appropriate Moment is when the audience / prospect is beginning to considering.
You know that moment when you get cold called and the smart ass broker is yakking and yakking, you said yes to a couple of meaningless questions and then they drop the line on you and you pause to think…
That’s the moment.
It’s the moment that useful and useless collide and all you can see is possibilities.
That’s the invention of use.
Use does not come from invention but a grasping of the affordances of oppotunity.
An invention is just a configuration of what already exists because the inventor found an Appropiate Moment.
Design Triptych with Peter Thiel
March 26, 2008
Freedom is designed to be currupted.
[31m00s onwards]
Sell, Sell, Sell the team.
Invest in fences.
(Peter Thiel was an Exec Producer on Thank you for Smoking and the Angel Investor of Facebook)
Last November I was approached by the Open Rights Group about the business model of Where are the Joneses? that Imagination constructed for Ford of Europe. Lured by my use of the Creative Commons BY-SA licence – meaning that there were no commercial restrictions of the use of the media assets produced during the course of the project – ORG recognised that this was as break through for copyright, agencies, brands and media producers alike.
ORG superhero, Michael Holloway (above), who I met a year before at the ORG’s Drunken Brunch meeting of like minded open licence people (I recall meeting Dan Lockton there), interviewed me in November in preparation for a couple of talks I gave last week.
Michael, with Suw Charman-Anderson (in the red top), have been working with the interview to produce a case study for everyone to review and hopefully, use, as a framework for other commercial open media projects/companies/initiatives.
On Monday, Rob Myers (pictured above right), joined me to talk about the use of Creative Commons and it’s relationship to Intellectual Property. Rob and I have been friends since 1992, meeting at art college, and since have discussed how the economics of media production, the downstream of culture, as we learnt at college, is the building blocks for anything today and tomorrow.
The framework of the Joneses project – not the storyline, nor the commercial relationships with Ford of Europe, owes a lot to many many many conversations Rob and I have had over the past 16 years. It’s a very special model that could never have been worked out within the confines of a job, or a hobby, or as artists. The relationship between producers and the audience at large, the communities within communities that wrapped themselves around sections of the Joneses – both agency and public attention – was a mix of perverse curiosity of what this model was and anticipation to see the comedy, the editorial, failing.
The heritage of such a project also owes much to the work of XPT – and in particular, Tim Wright. XPT’s Online Caroline and Tim’s own Oldton project are very close to my heart as a technologist and as a creative. Those who lived with the projects when they we’re alive and kicking have extremely fond memories of the productions – an emotion far removed from serial broadcasting – because the audience made the memories between themselves.
But what inspired the use of Creative Commons as the turnkey solution for the Joneses (it could never have been done under normal copyright models) is that Free Culture is the basis to facilitating a conversation – it’s a giving host, not a prescribing guardian. For the ethos that I wanted Ford of Europe to understand and it’s relationship to its shifting understanding of marketing, the non-30sec-spot 360-channel matching-luggage-prescription that a large network agency uses to manage a global communications campaign erodes the relationship with the intended audience and the client. The care and attention that goes into grading, editing and placing adverts is very agency/brand focused – it’s self gratifying and loses the attention of amplifying an audience who wants to be considered important.
It’s why Imagination was a great place to make WRTJ, we are small and nimble yet large enough to speak our mind about invention instead of waffling on about innovation. Case in example is Ford of Britian’s follow up to the Joneses by Mindshare and Ogilvy – Bite. Big ready made audience from Yahoo and Channel 4, low emotional resonance.
The same applies to Kate Modern, a show used to drop in product placement, focused on young impressionable Bebo minds. And possibly a smart move to enable a lumbering AOL to regain some value. I’ll leave this for another post about my anti-hero Carl Icahn.
An audience without participation, nor the right to control the editorial, is being treated like a herd. Such mentality is why the commissioning model of media results in the pursuit of conversation.
ORG are not a marketing focused organisation in so far as their interest does not cover the interest that brands or advertising are efficient, measurable or actually gain a sale. With the Joneses, ORG, a government backed organisation, has become acutely aware of the damage advertising has on culture – advertising agencies produce more copyright material into the world than any other producer – as a rage to conquer all human attention, especially if we are hitting the peak, a social concern of not just urban/social spam comes into consideration, as we saw in Brazil, but also of the moral consequences of making a world full of unreusable communications, unreusable under legal frameworks that benefit neither audience nor client nor even agency.
Suw is currently pulling together the report and will shortly be available for everyone to review here. I’ll post when it’s ready.
For me the Joneses has been lingering around for months but I’ve enjoyed watching the amount of commentary about the project. There is much behind the scenes about how it was managed and the micro conversations between users that I was privileged to participate in.
I will compete a longer essay about the project when time becomes available. In the meanwhile, it’s lovely to spend time doing Questions and Answers about the project – especially to new audiences such as the one ORG arranged.
Again, many thanks to Suw and Michael (and Becky Hogge) for acknowledging the project.
Do check out the ORG wiki, especially the other case studies presented alongside the WRTJ – namely Tom Reynolds: Blood, Sweat and Tea and John Buckman: Magnatune.
Photo credits to Marc Hankins, who released the session photos under CC-BY-SA.
Design Triptych with Christopher Walken
March 25, 2008
Identify and promote the anomaly.
(If you have a fever and need more cowbell, the original dosage is here)
If you have to work with a FatBoySlim tack, make the most of it.
Question authority.
The Age of Conversation – The Sequel
March 25, 2008
Second albums are always the hardest, so I was thrilled to be called into help Gavin and Drew make the Age of Conversation sequel even better. I’ll be nestled in amongst 275 other meddlers of marketing, adding a little salt with an article on how to give away your intellectual property and profit/win an audience/make better products/sleep well at night.
The book will be themed ‘Why don’t they get it?’ – alluding to clients who either refuse to accept that the audiences are in control of commercial communications (in design, distribution and production) or who believe that all this web2.0 malarkey will just go away some day…
So in true collaboration style, Gavin and Drew handed out 7 topics for us to pick from and write under.
They are : –
- Conversation to Action
- Manifesto
- My Marketing Tragedy
- Business Models
- Keeping Secrets
- Life in the Conversation Lane
- A New Brand of Creative
You can see who’s writing about which topic here.
I’ll be sketching out my article on my wiki, here.
To be honest, I haven’t a foggest who most of my fellow writers/bloggers/evangelists are, so I’m going to have spend some time going through this lot :-
Adam Crowe
Adrian Ho
Aki Spicer
Alex Henault
Amy Jussel
Andrew Odom
Andy Nulman
Andy Sernovitz
Andy Whitlock
Angela Maiers
Ann Handley
Anna Farmery
Armando Alves
Arun Rajagopal
Asi Sharabi
Becky Carroll
Becky McCray
Bernie Scheffler
Bill Gammell
Bob Carlton
Bob LeDrew
Brad Shorr
Bradley Spitzer
Brandon Murphy
Branislav Peric
Brent Dixon
Brett Macfarlane
Brian Reich
C.C. Chapman
Cam Beck
Casper Willer
Cathleen Rittereiser
Cathryn Hrudicka
Cedric Giorgi
Charles Sipe
Chris Kieff
Chris Cree
Chris Wilson
Christina Kerley
C.B. Whittemore
Clay Parker Jones
Chris Brown
Colin McKay
Connie Bensen
Connie Reece
Cord Silverstein
Corentin Monot
Craig Wilson
Daniel Honigman
Dan Goldstein
Dan Schawbel
Dana VanDen Heuvel
Dan Sitter
Daria Radota Rasmussen
Darren Herman
Darryl Patterson
Dave Davison
Dave Origano
David Armano
David Bausola
David Berkowitz
David Brazeal
David Koopmans
David Meerman Scott
David Petherick
David Reich
David Weinfeld
David Zinger
Deanna Gernert
Deborah Brown
Dennis Price
Derrick Kwa
Dino Demopoulos
Doug Haslam
Doug Meacham
Doug Mitchell
Douglas Hanna
Douglas Karr
Drew McLellan
Duane Brown
Dustin Jacobsen
Dylan Viner
Ed Brenegar
Ed Cotton
Efrain Mendicuti
Ellen Weber
Emily Reed
Eric Peterson
Eric Nehrlich
Ernie Mosteller
Faris Yakob
Fernanda Romano
Francis Anderson
G. Kofi Annan
Gareth Kay
Gary Cohen
Gaurav Mishra
Gavin Heaton
Geert Desager
George Jenkins
G.L. Hoffman
Gianandrea Facchini
Gordon Whitehead
Graham Hill
Greg Verdino
Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming
Hillel Cooperman
Hugh Weber
J. Erik Potter
J.C. Hutchins
James Gordon-Macintosh
Jamey Shiels
Jasmin Tragas
Jason Oke
Jay Ehret
Jeanne Dininni
Jeff De Cagna
Jeff Gwynne
Jeff Noble
Jeff Wallace
Jennifer Warwick
Jenny Meade
Jeremy Fuksa
Jeremy Heilpern
Jeremy Middleton
Jeroen Verkroost
Jessica Hagy
Joanna Young
Joe Pulizzi
Joe Talbott
John Herrington
John Jantsch
John Moore
John Rosen
John Todor
Jon Burg
Jon Swanson
Jonathan Trenn
Jordan Behan
Julie Fleischer
Justin Flowers
Justin Foster
Karl Turley
Kate Trgovac
Katie Chatfield
Katie Konrath
Kenny Lauer
Keri Willenborg
Kevin Jessop
Kris Hoet
Krishna De
Kristin Gorski
Laura Fitton
Laurence Helene Borei
Lewis Green
Lois Kelly
Lori Magno
Louise Barnes-Johnston
Louise Mangan
Louise Manning
Luc Debaisieux
Marcus Brown
Mario Vellandi
Mark Blair
Mark Earls
Mark Goren
Mark Hancock
Mark Lewis
Mark McGuinness
Mark McSpadden
Matt Dickman
Matt J. McDonald
Matt Moore
Michael Hawkins
Michael Karnjanaprakorn
Michelle Lamar
Mike Arauz
Mike McAllen
Mike Sansone
Mitch Joel
Monica Wright
Nathan Gilliatt
Nathan Snell
Neil Perkin
Nettie Hartsock
Nick Rice
Oleksandr Skorokhod
Ozgur Alaz
Paul Chaney
Paul Hebert
Paul Isakson
Paul Marobella
Paul McEnany
Paul Tedesco
Paul Williams
Pet Campbell
Pete Deutschman
Peter Corbett
Phil Gerbyshak
Phil Lewis
Phil Soden
Piet Wulleman
Rachel Steiner
Sreeraj Menon
Reginald Adkins
Richard Huntington
Rishi Desai
R.J. Northam
Rob Mortimer
Robert Hruzek
Roberta Rosenberg
Robyn McMaster
Roger von Oech
Rohit Bhargava
Ron Shevlin
Ryan Barrett
Ryan Karpeles
Ryan Rasmussen
Sam Huleatt
Sandy Renshaw
Scott Goodson
Scott Monty
Scott Townsend
Scott White
Sean Howard
Sean Scott
Seni Thomas
Seth Gaffney
Shama Hyder
Sheila Scarborough
Sheryl Steadman
Simon Payn
Sonia Simone
Spike Jones
Stanley Johnson
Stephen Collins
Stephen Cribbett
Stephen Landau
Stephen Smith
Steve Bannister
Steve Hardy
Steve Portigal
Steve Roesler
Steven Verbruggen
Steve Woodruff
Sue Edworthy
Susan Bird
Susan Gunelius
Susan Heywood
Tammy Lenski
Terrell Meek
Thomas Clifford
Thomas Knoll
Tiffany Kenyon
Tim Brunelle
Tim Buesing
Tim Connor
Tim Jackson
Tim Longhurst
Tim Mannveille
Tim Tyler
Timothy Johnson
Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Toby Bloomberg
Todd Andrlik
Troy Rutter
Troy Worman
Uwe Hook
Valeria Maltoni
Vandana Ahuja
Vanessa DiMauro
Veronique Rabuteau
Wayne Buckhanan
William Azaroff
Yves Van Landeghem
And if you haven’t picked yourself up a copy of the original book, there’s a ‘crowdsource-mega-bum-rush’ on the 29th March – details here. Go on – join the conversation…