aspire to enquire

Experience the future together

A month or so ago, respected colleague Nick Hirst won Gold in the 2012 Admap Prize for his article ‘Experience the future’. It caused a bit of a stir at the time and got me thinking about a few things myself, especially about how his ideas might be realised. I also did a lot of talking to Mark Hastings, who influenced some more of the thinking here.

There he is

To paraphrase Nick: There are two broad flavours of Brand Planner; the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘programmatic’. Traditionally the former would be found at a creative advertising agency thinking up the positioning behind slogans like ‘just do it’ and ‘every little helps’, whilst the latter has come from the world of the media agency, a bit more focussed on numbers, reach, and that kind of thing. Whilst they have both had their merits over time, there are gaps and missed opportunities in both ways of thinking, resulting in a current situation where media agencies are pitching creative work and ‘big idea’ agencies are bringing senior numbers people in to brand strategy teams.

But Nick didn’t think that either cross-pollination was really going to answer the emerging problem.

There’s a growing school of thought that has understood that we experience brands over time, in places and in different contexts. We build our relationships, as Paul Adams also says, through “many, lightweight interactions over time”.

The answer, Nick suggested, is that a form of Experience Planning becomes the future of Planning.

I agree. For a good few years now my personal grapple has been trying to understand where in an organisation I can most effectively ‘design’ how people and organisations interact. It’s something I’ve written about before. Luckily EP at Dare seems to be the right place for me.

Planning could say this if it was a person

But despite the perceived flaws, Brand Planning is a decades old discipline which has generated the stand-out communications ideas of our time, and it must continue to do so. What I understood from Nick’s piece was that these ideas need to be thought of now not as slogans, but as portable and flexible (please excuse this) ‘brand essences’ that people can engage with in a variety of contexts.

So arriving at something like a ‘customer experience objective’ in the first instance could go a long way towards answering this. From there you could brief everything in a far more creative and innovative way, as you look for ways to communicate an experience or feeling rather than a specific endline. Some are already doing this of course, in the shape of things like Gorilla and Apple.

But I’m not sure it would be exactly right for people who have so far focussed in Brand Planning to simply transition into becoming Experience Planners. Essentially I think it’s too much for one person.

The Experience Planning world has amassed years of know-how in things like User Experience, research, lab testing, and all of that stuff, and now we’re increasingly applying this digital thinking to ‘real life’ communications situations. We have this ability to go from high-level customer needs and experience objectives right down into specific moments and interactions; we use our understanding of technical underpinnings, aesthetics and user behaviour to guide people through often complex situations.

The complexities of life helpfully illustrated by this junction in Swindon

Each of these situations will be determined by a whole load of societal and brand-factors which as Experience Planners we absolutely need to understand. But I would argue that our skillsets shouldn’t be diluted by trying to develop our own techniques for uncovering and interpreting these factors into usable insight; that’s what Brand Planners are already awesome at.

So for the time being my proposal would be to explore teams of planners, just like creatives do. Brand and Experience Planners working together. Of course there will be crossover in thinking, and as we move forward and our disparate histories become more intertwined we may find we share similar spaces. Often the copywriter will contribute a visual idea, often the AD will have ideas on how the copy should work. It’s a discussion between a well-tuned team that results in a solid creative idea.

With the Brand/Experience Planning pairing, the opportunity is to work up solid long-term strategic objectives for entire brand experiences, which are simultaneously aware of market/demographic factors and behaviour/usage patterns. There are implications in terms of budgets and timelines, but the time saved in not re-establishing objectives and briefs across the life of a client would hopefully negate a lot of them.

So that sounds to me like a good way of setting ourselves up so that we’re making the most of both of our skillsets without diluting them, learning from each other, and keeping each other in check so that the experiences we create keep customer needs at heart.

What do you think?

Design for the good people

I'm finding my current workplace incredibly inspiring at the moment; not just because of the amazing Dare people, also because there is a whole heap of awesome on the floor below in the shape of agencies like Identica, Your Studio and thinkpublic. 

It's not too often that we really collaborate though, due to the usual reasons. So it was entirely refreshing to be able to help thinkpublic in a workshop over lunch on Friday, especially as it moves towards being a year since I left Public Zone.

For me, the internet's best moments have been when an offline/physical experience has been enhanced by connections or knowledge gained through a digital channel. Brighton council has an email list of residents with 4x4s who have volunteered to deliver meals on wheels in case of snow. I have more than once discovered a quaint new back street bar off the back of a foursquare notification from a friend. The amazing breakaway discussions at conferences initiated via twitter.

All that stuff that takes the empowerment of a one-to-many publishing medium to inform action or change in 'real life'. As we see more things with their own personalities online, these interactions are likely to become more complex, but also more open to amazing innovation. It's kind of what's motivated me to get involved with The Brixton Society.

So I'm totally inspired by the possibilities of this new project 'Impossible.com', which we talked about on Friday. It's quite a long video, but it's worth sticking with it:

There are so many challenges ahead for impossible.com, but it's exciting hearing people so truly committed to a cause. All those obstructions and contraints that face a project must still be there, but there's so much positivity in the answers they give in the video. If they approach the whole project in that way it's likely that they'll make a whole heap of progress. I really hope they do.

Plus everyone involved so far happens to be world-leading in some way, which probably helps.

I'm going to see about doing my bit by making my own wish, to help out in any small way I can.

Russ Mills Byroglyphics

What a weird pleasure to discover the work of Russ Mills through Booooooom. He's called it Byroglyphics, which is lucky as I don't think there's any other single genre his work would fit into. 

Knowing where you are in a space that doesn't exist

A fascinating TED talk from Neil Burgess about how our brain lets us know where we are in a space by firing particular bits of our brian at different locations.

Researchers measured the brain waves of mice in a physical space, and of humans in a virtual reality space, and found that both animals' brains were sending elecrical pulses when they reached certain points. In fact, the mice's brains were creating pulses that mapped out a triangular grid of the whole space.

But when researchers added new walls in the space, or changed the size or shape of the space, the same pulses became less accurate, leading to the conclusion that the brain was having trouble adjusting to the change in the parameters of the space, perhaps causing the subject to become disoriented.

This is lovely, but so what? Well, as technology and people become more and more comfortable, we rightly challenge conventions established at the birth of time the world wide web. And now as we embrace post-PC thinking, it's going to be even more tempting to reinvent wheels and re-frame entire experiences to let our content shine through. I'm talking about navigation structures that change, whole sections of content that hide themselves away once you've moved through them, and things like sub-categories and product ranges being presented alongside un-related content & links.

But watching Neil Burgess's talk I guess I was reminded not to take things too far - we are still animals with brains that like to know where we are. And even though we're moving through two dimensional representations of interfaces, not real spaces, we still need to establish the boundaries of our environment so that we can find our way back to the content we came here for.

 

Here's another link to the Neil Burgess TED talk.

dConstruct 2010 speakers and themes

Thanks to my lovely employers Public Zone I was able to go down to dConstruct in Brighton on Friday. Aside from a minor falling-asleep-on-the-train-related distaster in getting back to London, it was a really good day. dConstruct is one of those conferences that people seem to make a lot of noise about so it was nice to get down and see if there really was any fuss to be made, and hear from some leading figures in the industry.

My speaker highlights were most probably Brendan Dawes, Hannah Donovan, James Bridle and Tom Coates. 

Brendan Dawes talked in a very candid and accessible way and made me quite excited about the idea of Manchester as a place to do creative things. His talk was titled 'boil, simmer, reduce'. For me, working in the non-profit space there can be quite a lot of pressure to pile in features, links and buttons, and Brendan's talk was definitely one I'll be keeping in mind as I work through site designs from now on.

Hannah Donovan gave a talk on musical improvisation and how some of the lessons and techniques could be applied to creative collaboration. She pulled out some Jazz teachings that said that you could only fully express yourself through improvisation if your instrument became a natural tool that you were fully in control of. Later in the talk Hannah drew parallels with how this should also work for design and development. In theory this means that younger generations will be freer to improvise, experiment and innovate with digital as they will have grown up full digital natives. Another very key point was her insistence on finding partners or co-workers with whom you could actually have these jam sessions with in a comfortable, rewarding and beneficial way.

James Bridle gave a very powerful argument for preserving digital history and communities. Very inspiring, especially in relation to the work I'm doing with the Brixton Society at the moment. You may remember James from Interesting a year or so ago, this talk was way better. 

Tom Coates's talk was pretty extensive, beautiful and amazing, about networked things and the power they will have in our lives in future. Definitely worth listening to, and imagine slides like the one above (from the BBC series The UK from Above) all moving and nice.

So those were the key speakers for me. 

Some themes:

Taste

A bunch of speakers talked about 'taste' as a prerequisite for making good things. There were suggestions that all sites should be 'auteured' by one person, a bit like a film director. Although I said I'll be bearing what Brendan Dawes said about reducing etc, I have a bit of a problem with this being informed by taste. I agree that there are a lot of rubbish websites out there that have clearly been designed by committee - but who's going to define this taste? Not every user wants to spend their time navigating round iPad rip-off websites, because for them that's not their reality. Far more important than taste, for me, is a sensitivity to the tastes of others, and an ability to empathise with their needs from a product, either functional or visual.

"If I'd asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a faster horse"

 

A few people also raised this one - people in favour of Mr Ford, saying that a lot of research time could actually be reduced down to having the faith to go do what your instinct told you –and the people against, saying that there were actually some very useful insights to be gained from research and development. The real problems, they said, were in asking the right questions, or drawing the right conclusions: If research is telling you that people think your product is different, what kinds of words are they using? Are they saying good different, like 'weird' or bad different like 'strange'?

Overall, I think I was in a bit of pessimistic mood on the day. There were some great and insightful talks, but there were a few that I completely switched off in. The one on Typography, by Samantha Warren, for example, was completely lost on me. See my tweet at the time. But looking at this write up I realise there might have been something there. Her talk wasn't "look - fonts have personalities!", it might have been "you can do typography on the internet now, be responsible".

Anyway. Cheers to everyone who spoke and also to Clearleft for organising.

Onward and upward...

This is what we have got to march for

I felt inspired to pass this video on after hearing so much about it this morning. Gordon Brown has had a pretty rough ride over the past year, as any leader and political party should have. But whenever I've seen him speak in the flesh, the sense of his dedication, commitment and gravitas have been overwhelming. This video goes a long way to conveying that sense. 

I hope I won't lose followers over posting this, but I also hope that if people chose to use their vote this week they'll make decisions based on a fair appraisal of the party policies, the leaders, and the teams behind them and their respective experiences. 

It's going to be a very interesting and exciting night on May 6th.

This is the ad

This new campaign by Fallon for French Connection is one of my favourite ever  I think. It's classy, but tongue-in-cheek, knowing but edgy. Everything you'd expect from a brand called French Connection.

It's not that new any more, but I've been saving every piece of it I've seen in magazines and on the street so that I could share it here, except that Sell Sell have produced a far more eloquent and educated review of it already, so I direct you there.

Here is also a video:

It's a shame that most of their mens range still seem more suited to a night at Infernos though.

 

Cake or death politics - Eddie Izzard visits Cardiff

Eddie Izzard visited Cardiff yesterday to canvas the City centre with Labour's candidates for Wales in the forthcoming European Parliament election. Queen Street is the pedestrianised shopping centre of the City for the time being, an archetypal regional high street, and is usually bustling with shoppers. I have many a fond memory of treading its glistening pavers whilst flyering for Tiger Tiger.

There's also a towering statue of the late Nye Bevan at one end, often the perfect place to set up a political stall and talk amongst yourselves. It was in his shadow that around 30 Labour supporters and friends gathered to meet Eddie, after receiving an email tip-off. 

Getting to meet Mr Izzard. It was special.

But let me firstly mention a few things as a point of reference: I am a Labour party member, who believes in a lot of the principles set out by people like Anthony Giddens. I'm into government intervention to assist community social enterprise and small businesses, I'm into the NHS, Sure Start and the Minimum Wage, and firmly on the fence over a number of other issues. I'm into diverse and active communities. I think Clause IV is awesome, but until recently I'd not read the old one. So in theory I'm a perfect 'New Labour' supporter.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a fair proportion of the rest of the UK believe in all those things too. I think Labour politicians still have that at heart somewhere. In my area, our local Councillors do a fantastic job and our MP and AM have been in the area for years, and know the constituents well. That's why I'm still a Labour supporter.

Somehow, though, as all these passionately socially minded democrats have united and governed over the past 12 years under a Labour banner, something seems to have gone a bit wrong. I don't especially mean that something's gone wrong in running the country, although there are obvious points of argument that might suggest otherwise. What I mean is that something's gone wrong when a party with  social justice and equality at its core can be as unpopular as Labour currently is.

I'd love to blame the media and the general trend towards 'soundbyte' news for polarising the public and mis-representing the issues. But based on what I saw yesterday during Eddie Izzard's visit, I'm going to blame the Party. Not the elected politicians, but all the young suited career types waiting to replace them and working for the Party in the meantime.

Here's Eddie talking to the press who'd been invited to cover the event. BBC Wales were there, but haven't yet reported the event. Media Wales, or whatever they're called, were there, but their coverage was pretty poor from a Party perspective. So in terms of the 'buzz' that a visit like this was meant to generate, fails all round. There's not even a mention of the actual candidates' names in either news item on WalesOnline.

The party seem to have missed a few media channels off their press-release list, channels that as we know can be a brand or organisation's most loyal followers and advocates. Interestingly for the Labour Party, they're even more powerful than that, they're voters. And Queen Street was full of them yesterday.

Not that any of them could take advantage of the story as it unfolded. Luckily for me, I got to spend a few minutes asking Eddie why he wasn't standing himself ("I need to kill my career first - maybe in 10-15 years") and if he'd come to Chapter when it was fully re-opened ("Yeah maybe, I tend to just chose places with a map and a pinboard"). But it took a good 20 minutes or so to fight through the placard wavers and party staff to even ask for a picture, never mind spending time actually discussing anything. Did he introduce me to Lisa or Derek? Maybe he assumed I already knew who they were. Did they introduce themselves? Maybe they didn't see us talking behind the balloons.

I wonder if most people on Queen St even knew if we had one of the world's biggest entertainers amongst us. For the most part, we looked more like some kind of Labour Party Roman Legion doing that tortoise-like attack formation with the shields. And with the current expenses kerfuffle and the prior malaise, they knew to use their celtic upbringings and stay well away.

They're going to stay away on June 4th as well. Did you know that that was when the election is?

Here's my suggestion. Lose the placards and balloons - they differentiate us from 'real people'. Lose the Party supporters. You can make us feel far more valued by inviting us to a private show later. Take the 'celeb', the candidates, and some kind of press officer, and actually spend time meeting people. Tell people why Europe is important. Allow a lot of camera phone picture taking. Set up a facebook group in advance. Maybe tweet your celeb's whereabouts as he moves round the city. Get a few flyers done that the celeb can sign for people that also start to engage with some issues. Reach out to people who put their photos online and start some conversations...

...Repeat as necessary. As a media campaign, if it works for T-Mobile it can work for anyone. As a political exercise, you may have just opened someone's eyes to a whole lifetime of engaged political participation, based not on party politics and logos but on issues, and on getting things done. 

We need to celebrate what we're about. If people aren't into it, hopefully they'll still respect your opinions and start some meaningful debates. Let's stop threatening people with the alternatives and have something to say for ourselves that we're proud to shout about. Let's stop faffing about with placards, smear campaigns, dodgy websites and leadership elections and get on with getting people excited and making things work. 

Let's have a party. A Labour Party. With cake. Otherwise, DEATH! 

The geography of aspiration ('state of the uni, part 2')

A week or two ago, I asked if it would be worth universities switching from a focus on numbers and recruitment to a focus on enthusiasm - a focus which in theory would lead to better recruitment numbers.

I went to see Peter Saville talk for D&AD at Logan Hall a few weeks ago, and found that many of his opinions resonated quite strongly with my own. Whether this is a safe position to be in seeing as he is 25 years into being at the top of his game, and I don’t even know which game to call my own yet, I don’t know.

But he did offer a very interesting answer to a question about design education:

Peter Saville Q&A: What's wrong with design education? from D&AD on Vimeo.

I love the idea of ‘the geography of aspiration’ and I’ve been thinking a lot about whether the experiences he had would still be possible, and whether he was right to say what he said about St. Martins Students. The closing remarks about the mechanics of actually teaching graphic design were pretty spot on as well, I thought.

One thing is certain; a lot more St. Martin’s students get featured in Creative Review and Grafik than UWIC students do. These students may have been more talented to start with, they may just produce better work, or UWIC and its students may be very bad a promoting themselves. But leaving those truths aside for a minute, what if there’s more to it? What if part of what makes a St. Martin’s student’s work great is informed by the stimuli around them?

What if the awareness of different possibilities encourages students to create work to meet those possibilities.

This is where Saville’s idea of aspirational geography gets interesting for me.

I’m able to excuse myself my own inadequacies because being an amazing designer (or should I say 'an amazing image-maker') was never my objective in applying to the course I’m on. But for a short experiment, let us take two foundation students of equal niceness and talent and good-eggness, who over the next three years will receive the exact same standard and frequency of teaching in design education. But if we surround one with cultural capital, in a cultural Capital, and give the other one more of a regional outlook, I think it would be fascinating to see the results.

Saville’s suggesting that working towards London, and 'raising their game', makes regional students better. And maybe with the amount of students graduating graphic design each year, maybe it is realistic to only expect 1 out of a class of 40 to get the kind of ‘London’ opportunity we’re all meant to aspire to. My own opinion would be that there’s a lot more to be done.

Fish from the Genting Highlands, as seen by BAGC2 students

But things are getting better, although I wonder what the balance is between institutional change and individual student proactivity in this case. A group of students from the 2^nd year has set off to Malaysia for the duration of the Easter break, and they’re posting about it here. Judging by the infrequency of their posts, I’m guessing they’re having the best time, and as Fran noted, learning a lot about the outside world and the possibilities that are available outside of N-Block.

I’m looking forward to seeing whether they’ll come back and enthuse the rest of their year group to open their eyes to the opportunities around them and just a few hours away by train, or whether the rest of the year group will just shrug it off and put their heads down again, such is the ethos here at the moment. Which ties me back nicely to the end of my last post about this.

While it’s correct and fine to expect students to take their own initiative, the context in which to take that initiative needs to be right. Students need to be made to feel empowered, wherever they are. Perhaps the question should not be of the geography of aspiration, but simply of aspiration.

There was this one speaker...

In the spirit of my previous post, we had a bit of an amazing talk a few weeks ago, from Tim Walker, who I've blogged extensively before and is no less awesome now that I've had the chance to meet him.

I guess it's also the beginning of a response to the 'why don't you do something about it' argument that will no doubt come from some readers of that last post as well. I was pretty chuffed to be able to organise this talk.

I was meaning to do a full write up, but on the night I was on 'click the next slide on powerpoint' duty with Tim's assistant Francesca, so didn't really have a chance to take pictures or make notes.

But, my course mate and good friend Matt Hilde did, and he seems to have a pretty good recollection of many of the main pointers that Tim made in his hour and a half long talk.

Matt's notebook, original pic by Matt Hilde

The best thing for me was probably Tim's presenting style. He sat at the back (hence us sitting by the projector clicking 'next'), and talked through each image and the process in creating it. At the start, he implored the audience, over 200 strong, to ask questions at any point, and they didn't disappoint. It soon became a fascinating discussion that everyone came away from thoroughly enriched and excited about image creation and pursuing individuality in creative work. Well, I did anyway. 

It was funny picking everyone up from the station. I'd hired a car because the family one was in the garage and I was a bit concerned about taxis, since we have 4 campuses and many entrances, and it was rush hour. The car was this hilarious tank-like chrysler thing. On the way there, in the traffic, we have to drive past Rohld Dahl's old house, and talked about that for a while. Then his first slide was inspired by Rohld Dahl! I felt like a bit of an idiot for not knowing about that particular shoot.

It was great fun to organise in conjunction with Olwen Moseley and Angie Dutton at the school, and something I'd love to do more of in the future. We paid for some of it with residual money from the Summer Ball.

There's a Cardiff Design Festival planning meeting on Wednesday that I'm looking forward to, in preparation for this year's festival in October. I don't know what I'll be able to contribute, I don't even know where I'll be by then, but I'm hoping to get involved somehow.

Also if I'm going to ask anyone else to sign any books, I need to do it while I'm still a student, otherwise I'll feel a bit silly.