aspire to enquire

A review of the year gone

I wanted to review 2011 when it finished, but things have got no less hectic in 2012. In a way, having a bit of space from something means it's easier to consider it objectively and really pick out the main events. So by means of getting on with 2012 and putting some new content up here I present to you my review of the year gone.

The Barry Horns

I got back into trombone playing in a big way, not least because of The Barry Horns, 'Welsh Football's Brass-Driven Pressure Group'. Our first public outing was around the Millennium Stadium before Wales v England, and we've been at nearly every international game since, as well as a few other notable outings. It's also been really interesting working on the digital side of the band and seeing how people choose to interact with us online. We've got a lot of excitement in the pipeline gearing up to going to Brazil 2014, so I'm sure this won't be the last you hear about us on this blog.

The Brixton Horns

Another big series of events has been getting to spend more time with the awesome Nick Briggs and playing together as a little mini brass section that one of our more regular gigs has dubbed 'The Brixton Horns'. Not an entirely deserved name in terms of heritage (or skill!) but we do both live in Brixton, so.. Anyway we're doing a bunch of shows this year with Rebel Control who I highly recommend - they have a few albums on Spotify.

Uncle Stephen

A thoroughly gutting experience was the loss of my amazing uncle Stephen who decided to take his own life last spring. It completely devastated his immediate family as well as the wider family he'd built up through generally being warm, friendly and supportive of anyone he met. As well as having been the 'cool uncle' while I was growing up, Steve gave me my first job out of high school, and the time we spent together at work gave me the impression of someone determined to keep doing better for himself, someone finding new challenges in order to push forward, with tremendous integrity. He was a man who used every experience he had as a springboard for the next one, and who finally looked like he was reaching the point he'd been working towards. Spending time coming to terms with losing him has also been about considering my own outlook on family and future, and what I dedicate my efforts to in order to achieve both.

Leaving Public Zone

All of which led me to reconsider where things were going with my own career. Public Zone had been a great lifeline to me after graduating from UWIC and coming to London, and 2 years later I'd learned and developed enough to have moved from design into a more strategic and socially-focussed role. I had so many friends there (who I'm still in touch with, you know they're proper friends then) it was a difficult decision to take. But I was a team of one within a small agency with clients whose stakeholders lives rightly demanded maximum attention, effort and thought, all of the time. There wasn't much space in the production schedule or budget to really think about how we could grow the capability I wanted to offer, and as a relative junior I had little justification or support for my own ideas on where we could take things. So it was possibly quite a defeatest approach to decide to move on, especially with nothing concrete to move on to, but sometimes the correct decision is about looking back at all the aspects in play and working out where they're going. So yes. Strangely, some subsequent developments there suggest a similar realisation across the board, so there are quite exciting times ahead for Team PZ and their massive new client list.

Bikes and Weddings

A great year for cycling around places with Alison and celebrating various friends' weddings. We spent time with some of my family in The Hague before riding up to Amsterdam for a few days, and over a beautiful July weekend we took the bikes out to the Isle of Wight for a wedding weekend filled with beaches, walks, dancing, bunting and barbeques. 

Freelance life

The relative freedom of contract work meant I had a few spare weeks to work on projects that I really believe in, which co-incidentally also meant spending time out on Jamie's Farm helping with their social media plans for the future. I was also able to lend a hand on the farm, trimming back the last of the summer growth ready for autumn, with noisy machines running on 2-stroke. A lot of fun and very satisfying at the end of the day. I also managed to get a few big brand names under my belt, notably Vodafone, Premier Inn and Barclays, and working with amazing teams at Dare became the start of 2012...

Dare

The relative freedom of contract work also meant the complete unpredictability of my financial situation, and having found such a good fit at Dare it was pretty awesome to be offered a permanent role there. I've joined a brilliant team of 8 who are leading the way in this 'Experience Planning'; looking at matching customer's experiences of brands to the objectives laid out by more traditional brand planning thinking. We're using strategic disciplines like Behavioural Economics and choice architecture, user experience and information architecture: all the big words. It's based in digital but what I love about it is how we're given the space to think about the entire experience from shop floor or ATL advertising, right through digital channels and back out into the real world and actual actions.

Hopes for 2012

After a 2011 of mixed emotions I'm hoping to stabilise a bit this year. Hopefully next year's update will be a lot shorter! There's a lot in store for The Barry Horns, with the World Cup qualifying matches starting in the Autumn, and quite a few dates for Rebel Control over the next few months. We should hopefully see the project I'm on at Dare come to life and go out into the world, and I'm looking forward to all the other opportunities that will doubtless pressent themselves there. I'm planning to spend more time back in Wales and with the Bridgend family. And I'm looking forward to getting a bit more financially stable so I'm able to get on with the future.

Awesome. 

 

Time to make a plan

I'll save the full 'it's been a funny year' post for next month, but, well, it's been a funny year. A year where I've realised that the 'business plan' my generation was brought up expecting probably isn't going to work out, a year where I've questioned my own perceptions of success and achievement.

I've kind of realised I need to get on with life now. Under the circumstances I have, not the ones that might eventually present themselves.

Art by Friedrich Kunath, via Natalie Olah

I also realised that although I know there's loads I don't know about lots and lots of things, I'm never going to find out about them if I don't just get stuck in.

So by means of setting things down so that I have to do them, I've decided (in no specific order) to list the things I intend to do with my next ten years:

• Make a home
• Launch a lifestyle & hospitality brand
• Start a family (and add to the one I have)
• Use my passions and what I know to change something
• Make more music

Some are more nebulous than others, and some don't lend themselves to getting started right away. That leaves a couple that I really should be getting on with right now.

More on those soon.

 

 

 

 

We have the video to prove it

I'm working somewhere between IA and this thing called 'experience planning' at the moment, at a courageous digital agency. I'm really enjoying it. Major agency, major client, lovely and inspiring colleagues.

Whilst the long evenings and intense brain excercises going on in the project room can get a bit draining at times, the project itself, if we get it right, could be reasonably awesome.

Anyway. As it's not launching till mid 2012 (which suddenly doesn't feel that far away) and will hopefully be around for a while, we're being forced to really explore where we think people's lifestyles will be over the next few years - the direction of travel, and what the nature of an acceptable intervention/transaction will be. 

A great set of starting points to challenge / examine is this tumblr set of videos by various corporations predicting how technology will become more deeply interweaved with our day-to-day.

This video by Ericsson is one of my favourites, and goes into the exciting world of the internet of things...

Also not to be missed are Berg's fantastic near-future imaginings on incidental screens in collaboration with Dentsu London a few months ago. 

A little note to self

Found on tumblr somewhere.

Which way next

I'm looking for a new job.

It's been a cat at least near a bag for about six weeks now, so I thought I'd step things up a little and talk about it here.

You'll probably know, if you've been stopping off at this blog for a while, that for about two years I have been doing things with the amazing people at Public Zone. First as a UX designer & researcher, and then as a research & strategy planner-type person. 

Well, although there were still awesome things going on I felt a little lonely as the only planner and knowing there was a lot more experience to be gained out there from bigger agencies and bigger brands. There were some organisational changes at PZ as well that made the timing a little better.

There's never a good time to leave a job though, and whilst the conversations and interviews I've been having for the last few months have got me more fired up than ever about planning people's brand experiences, they've not led to anything I could call a 'new job' just yet.

So I'm sending out CVs, drinking lots of coffees with people, discovering exciting avenues I never thought I'd explore and spending more time with my girlfriend before she moves away for a bit.

Essentially this is my blog-based plea for work!

Things I consider myself to be very good at:

• Marrying strategic and tactical thinking
• UX research and testing
• Social & mobile internet
• Creative thinking
• Getting stuck in

I've updated my home page to be a bit of a 'tom hub' with lots of the things I've been up to, but I also just got a Zerply page - have a look!

If you think there are things I could help you with please do give me an email using the link on the right.

What's in a name

There have been some interesting posts over on the BBH Labs blog about how young talent should be packaging itself to get into the advertising industry.

I'm thinking about my own packing at the moment, and I've always had a challenge with what my strapline should be. I have a mixed bag of experience that is hugely valuable to me but it's hard to pin down into a single proposition.

So it made sense to see what other people I respected were doing. With internet things, we have more access to people at the tops of our industries than ever before. We're able to hear what they're excited about and how they're selling it in real-time, and uncover their networks through blogs, twitter and linkedin. And when those people you respect start talking in a certain way, I think it's natural to think you should try to follow suit to some extent. Even though you know there's still lots more to learn.

When I started this blog back in 2008 I was still a graphic communications student but I wanted to get out and question things I saw in my life. So I went with the title 'Aspire to Enquire' as a sort of statement of intent.

In terms of who I am professionally, I'm fairly happy with 'Creative Strategist', but it does bring some complications with it. If it could be longer, I'd probably try to say something like "someone who believes in understanding audience situations and motivations in order to plan organisational strategies and creative campaigns", but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

5 Things

Super late on this one, but I thought I'd try to pin down the five top things I've been thinking about recently. They're all things I'm still in the midst of thrashing out for myself, but it's quite nice to give them an airing and read them back.

1. Weak Ties with tinted spectacles.

Whilst trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life I've been thinking about how people's relationships with each other are defined by assumptions, brands, class, etc. that we've learned to identify ourselves and others with. Nothing groundbreaking there, but it's been useful to try to sketch that out and think about how technologies factor in communicating those preconceptions.

2. Charities in fashion.

I expect I'll need to write about this a little more and get it clearer for myself, but there's a line in The Devil Wears Prada that's stuck with me, where Meryl Streep explains to Anne Hathaway how her high street sweater ended up being blue, and I'm wondering if campaigning organisations could use this knowledge as well when trying to engage with certain audiences. They do a bit, of course, but I'm wondering if a more active trend antenna could be a useful thing in the non-profit sector.

3. It's ok to design things that look bad

I've done a few local / government things recently at work, and with everything that's going on they've tended to ask for things to be toned down a bit. Based on my days delivering local newsletters for Labour councillors in Canton, where our ward actually increased its Labour vote against a massive city-wide Lib-Dem swing, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. As long as the user experience is right, perhaps it can help an organisation's long-term aims to look a bit cheap and amateurish. I've probably not articulated that right, but it's something I'm thinking about anyway.

4. I'm probably not meant to be a designer.

Not at all related to point 3 (although maybe by saying point 3 I am proving my point?), but perhaps fairly related to points 1 and 2, I'm finding my interests much more grounded in the evaluation, planning and conceptualising parts of communications thinking at the moment. It would be good to do more. There.

5. Mobile css needs to start being a requirement in traditional site builds.

This link to digital agencies' mobile sites was quite startling (even if it was actually the 'iPhone sites' not 'mobile'), and I'm starting to think that regardless of what your site is for, it should at least have a hat-tip to the visitor's medium. Maybe a part of this process would be to think what the different requirements of a mobile visitor would be, and just create a style for that stuff with a little link back to the main site? I don't know.

What are your five things you're thinking about right now?

New work

Some new projects have popped out recently that I had quite a lot to do with, so I thought I'd post them here. Obviously I was part of a bigger team in each instance, but I feel comfortable talking about the visuals and IA because I was at least responsible for those bits.

The new Play England website is one that's come out of a new digital strategy that Public Zone worked on; the re-working of the website was the next step. I played with a few routes whose main intentions were to give a more tactile and evocative feel to the site, in an effort to win supporters and advocates through nostalgia for their own play times. It's actually quite scary when I think of the kinds of things I used to get up to, and what I probably learned as a result, that aren't really possible for today's children. There's actually a campaign about that; the Manifesto for children's play.

TrueTube is another project I've been heavily involved with. It's a video resource site for teachers to use in classrooms. There are all sorts of problems with getting YouTube through school internet connections, so this site acts as an accessible collection of films grouped loosely into curriculum and subject areas. Some of the films are also made by students through a sister site, BoldFace Productions.

The main challenge with this one was designing a site that made it easy for teachers to find content and buy into the site  (quite similar to the Play England requirements), but also to design something that kids would respond to in class and feel that the content was for them.

There's quite a lot of content still to go up on the site so there are a few awkward gaps, but one gets the idea.

It seems that in both cases I've gone for quite a full on environment, which seemed right for the briefs at the time. There are always bits of sites that you get critical about, and things that didn't quite make it through the development process in the way that you'd hope, but overall I'm pretty happy with these two. Hopefully they'll do what is required of them for the foreseeable future.

I've updated my website a bit

There's always something more pressing to do than update your own website isn't there. 

I've been planning a new build and design for quite a while now, and of course it's going to be awesome one day.

But I realised today that there were quite a few quick fixes I could do that would solve most of the things that really needed solving. I thought that maybe by doing those sorts of things every now and again, I could work my way forward in a more realistic fashion.

So we've gone from this:

to this:

 

What do you think? 

The venn diagram was inspired by the one that used to be on Iain Tait's blog. 

My next iteration will feature an updated portfolio section, and hopefully will integrate much better with this blog. But I'm pretty happy with where I am for now. 
  

I've made a new blog

I've been talking about this for ages, so I set up a tumblr of people jumping into water, like, 2 months ago. I thought I should probably share it here. If you see any good shots to add, let me know!