Simplicity. Clarity. Fun.

Yum.

I’m a bit fond of innovation and I have quite a big crush on the MIT  High-Low Tech group.

It seems they’ve tasked themselves to integrate high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures.

What I love about this aim is that they’re engaging diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies- paper architects, fashion and textile designers as well as the usual suspects.  By situating computation/ technology/ agile deployment in new cultural and material contexts they’ve created a wonderful story that might just facilitate the democratisation of engineering.

The project demonstrates a belief that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices.

The goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end the group explores the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design. And they ask themselves bloody good questions.

Have a look at some of the projects (a complete list so far here):

• living wall: project site
  • This project experiments with interactive wallpaper that can be programmed to monitor its environment, control lighting and sound, and generally serve as a beautiful and unobtrusive way to enrich environments with computation.
• teardrop: a kit for paper computing: project site
  • What interfaces might we build if we could sketch functional systems directly on paper? What will circuits look like when they are painted or drawn instead of etched or machined? This project explores the creative and practical potentials of paper-based computing.

Spotted this on the great Kitsune Noir blog.  It’s a design piece by Jessica Hisch.

I think you might use it like sending letters to Santa- fill it out and set it in fire.

Downloadable version here.

The Perfect Gift for a Man – 30 Stories about Reinventing Manhood :

Well-known author of the book Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph:This is one hell of a book. Born out of a triple j week  focusing on men’s lives, and created by its listeners, it’s a remarkable piece of work.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the current suicide rate for men in Australia is more than three times the rate of women. But research shows that encouraging men (and young men in particular) to share their feelings and their experiences has a huge impact on their health and wellbeing.

Please buy this wonderful book for the men in your life – regardless of whether they need it or not. Encourage them to read it and to share it with their mates, with their uncles, fathers and sons.

You can buy the printed book from Blurb.com or you can purchase the eBook version from The Perfect Gift for a Man website. ALL the profits from the book are being donated to The Inspire Foundation.

You can also find out more about the book and see the social media release here.

And dip you toes into some of the chapters here (make sure you have some tissues):

found on the pretty fabulous Me Against Them

A  freak stranglet from the Large Hadron Collider is interfering with many potentials incuding my ability to get my thoughts down in post form. Time is not my friend right now. Perhaps the future is merely being kind.

There are heaps of speaker notes in the presentation- loads of chewy thinking:

Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?

“People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.

Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt Jones explores what we might call neochronometry and illustrates some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material.”

Episode 4

• “Collaboration” just means you’re in charge but you want people to feel included in the process.
• Feel free to edit anyone’s contribution without their knowledge- particularly if you’re not presenting that particular piece of work.
• Remember: no discipline integrating with yours needs more than 5 minutes to explain itself or its role in your idea.

Missing!!! AUSTRALIA, originally uploaded by ihateyoubikethief.

I love a rant- especially one that starts a global movement.

Check out the global phenomenon of cheesed of bike (ex)owners :

Join us in our campaign against these criminal fools and send us your stories in any form – video, pictures, or just your own words – at ihateyoubikethief@gmail.com. We’ll post your story. And if you get really inspired, create your very own poster against these two-wheelin’ villains and send it our way.

Or…get your t-shirt at Threadess

]]> http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/venty-mc-vent-vent/feed/ 0 katiechatfield http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-more-things-change-2/ http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-more-things-change-2/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:56:07 +0000 katiechatfield http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/?p=1345 ]]>

still the same when it’s called experiential…

I’m riding my bike to work. Usually in a frock and heels. It’s great.

And I just wanted to share it- the great feeling of getting the wind in your face every morning, the comradery and casual chats with other cyclists at the lights, the ‘good on yous’ from people in my apartment complex…but most of all I’ve felt a big hug from pretty much all my co-workers, my friends and my family who have gone out of their way to make sure that I’m safe- that I have lights, that I wear a helmet, that I stick to the bike paths.

We’re all in it together.

I’ve been ruminating on complex systems science and the small world theories of Duncan Watts for a while now since falling in love with their elegance and potential after watching the documentary How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer ( you can watch it here)

Here is my delicious file on network thinking: http://delicious.com/katiechatfield/network

What got me started? What did I fall in love with?

• the notion that everything is much more interconnected than we thought
• the idea of mapping the amount of nodes you need in a system before you achieve synchronicity
  • like: how few mobile phones do you need in a football stadium before anyone can instantly pass a message to any other person?
• the democratisation of where trends start and how information flows
  • the hierarchical top down notion of Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory strikes me as having very little rigour and a lovely fairytale of post facto rationalisation
  • I’ve worked in industries that trade on the currency of cool…but I’m much more interested in the architecture of effectiveness

In 2006 Duncan co wrote a paper Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation:

A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires more careful specification and testing than it has received.

A key finding of the paper is:

Large-scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else but rather by easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.

Since writing this paper Watts has become a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. The presentation above show some of  the Big Seed thinking he is developing there and my favourite (well apart from the notion of ‘mullet strategy’) is this juiciness:

• Bad news is that complexity of influence networks means we can’t predict either what will succeed, or who will make it succeed
• Good news is that we don’t need to….

…and so this this is how I get to my thinking around ‘curating resonant agents‘:

• A resonant agent is a stakeholder that is easily influenced to take action on your message
• Curating is partly Watt’s notion of “DIY Influentials’- promote those who promote you- but more active than merely recognising them and using them as part of your broadcast/ blogger outreach strategy.
• Curating is about creating experiences for resonance. It’s about Kurt Lewin’s wonderful equation:
  • B=ƒ(P,E).
  • Behavior is a function of the Person and his or her Environment
  • It’s about the more you understand people, the better you can design environments that they can experience in order to deliver the impact on their behaviour you’re after.

One of the greatest client obstacles I come across with transmedia planning is predictive modelling. Everyone wants to know exactly what they’re going to get for their investment. Before it happens.

We forget that every time we put out a message into the complex system of society- it’s an experiment.

No one seems to be aware that when we’re talking about numbers here, we’re essentially talking experimental rocket science…

Let me thrash out a metaphor. The word quantum is Latin for “how great” or “how much:

Quantum mechanics helps describe potential: the state of a system at a given time is described by a complex wave function. This abstract mathematical object allows for the calculation of probabilities. For example, it allows one to compute the probability of finding an electron in a particular region around the nucleus at a particular time.*

The deal with quantum mechanics is that observation collapses the waves of probability (essentially a description of all of the potential outcomes) into a single reality. So you don’t know where some thing might be until you look at it. Then you definitely know (but you’ve probably affected it’s position by looking at it.)

Right- so how does this relate to predictive modelling?

• Unless your clients can deal with this:
  they probably won’t be able to understand how people might respond to:
  • (SM+ UCG+ CRM+ CSR+ ATL +WOM…)
  • and we probably won’t know how to model it either

Let’s look at this differently:

• What if we don’t try to accumulate numbers, what if we try to curate them instead?
• What if we tried to find out where the energy is in the system between a brand and it’s stakeholders?
• What if we tried to find out the most resonant agents in that system?
• What if we tried to find out how few people we could talk to to get the effect we were after?
• What if we tried to find the people that counted? (and not just count the people?)

Ultimately, media+messaging really isn’t about what gets served…it’s about what serves you.

* Yes I know QM is about subatomic particles. It’s a metaphor.

Part 3

• hold on to your idea tightly
• anything that is not your idea is a bad idea
• resist asking for the premises of anyone’s conclusion- it will only cloud things
• the most important thing is to be right

In this short film, Continuum strategists discuss Design Strategy and the methods they use to guide the development of experiences and products that matter to people.

It asks great questions:

How do you know what to do next?

How can you know when you’ve got the right idea?

How can you deliver something that you can’t think of today but that tomorrow will be obvious?

I particularly like the notions of the confidence you need to build around being right and the journeys that you can take to get there, essentially how you can make ideas actionable and real and deliver experiences that resonate from being understandable, relevant and believable.

Go on watch- it’s 10 minutes of style and substance and the infographics are marvelous.

Jeff Bullas summarizes a couple of reports about what top brands are doing in Social Media.

His 4 Key Observations

• As the number of channels increase, overall engagement increases at a faster rate. Brands that were in seven or more channels engaged deeply across all channels where they were present, as compared to brands that were present in fewer channels. There is an exponential growth in the depth of engagement as the brand extends itself into more and more channels.
• Engagement differs by industry. Not only are some industries on average present in more channels, they also engage with them more deeply. For example, media and technology companies tend to be in more channels and engage deeply within them than,…. apparel, consumer products, food & beverage, and financial brands  which is to be expected given that companies in these industries are just beginning to experiment with social media.
• Financial performance correlates with engagement. Back to the million-dollar question: Why do social media? Because it pays off. While no one yet has the data to determine direct cause and effect, what is found is a financial correlation between those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers
• It Provides ” Multiple Communication Touch Points” More touch points can present a ripple effect, inducing viral marketing, boosting brand recognition and driving sales volume. Simply it means that different people prefer different types of communication, so the more types of communication, you as a company are enaging in, the more chance you have of creating a broader and deeper reach in the market place.

15 Best Practices of Social Media Implemented by the Top 100 Brands

1. Deputize people throughout the organization.
2. Understand how each channel provides a different dimension of engagement
3. Centralize coordination
4. Find champions who can explain and mitigate risk.
5. Be in it for the long haul
6. Pick channels carefully.
7. Spread engagement to employees beyond the social media team.
8. Open the platform to anyone and everyone.Encourage employees to tap into social media to get work done
9. Engage in new channels where people already are
10. Support engagement as an extension of the company culture.Be conversational from the start.
11. Be conversational from the start.
12. Make social media part of the job, just like email
13. Modularize and synchronize content across channels
14. To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job.
15. Emphasize quality, not just quantity.

A trip down memory lane. Recycled posts from the last three years:

The shouty:

• Would you like a small dash of Get Stuffed with your Shut the Hell Up?

Institutionalised Rudeness by Sociopaths (IRS from now on) is far from OK. In fact IRS is so far from OK it is huddling in a yurt in Outer Siberia. With no booze. And no friends.And it’s not invited to any tzushy end of year drinks parties either. It’s banned. Passe.

In addition the “Punch In The Face” motivation technique is also banned. Previously thought to inspire the creative class to consistently meet the 20 hours overtime barrier, it has been recognised as an illegal tool of IRS and is now a Taser-able offence.

If you have been subject to IRS, or any suspect ‘motivation’ techniques, you can apply for your branded taser (which can also do double duty as an attractive cocktail shaker).

Bring it on.

The sweet:

• The Power of Noticing
  • Sometimes doing research for my job I come across a piece of truth and beauty. One example is  this article “Kindness Counts”.

  Mostly I think that we just need to be kind to each other.
  And notice each other.
  And value the power we have inside of ourselves to make a difference- especially those who are blessed with the gift of being able to notice what’s going on in the world around us.

The serious:

• ROI= Risk of Ignoring
  • So what are you missing out on? What’s the ROI?
  • As with anything that’s going on in social media, it’s all about the Risk of Ignoring:
  • • As a reader of blogs: Can you afford not to be informed about the latest thinking in your discipline? Can you afford not to learn from some of the brightest minds and most passionate advocates in the industry?
    • And as a writer: Can you afford not to keep a notebook of your online reading? Can you afford not to contextualise and have an opinion on what’s going on in advertising?
    • And ultimately, as an ad-exec: Can you afford not to have experiences that would help you understand people’s behaviour in the social media space
• Value and tulip bulbs
  • In the book  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote about tulip mania.
    • We can get terribly focused on the bulb- on the device that will deliver the results that we are after.  As strategic guardians of brands we need to remember the heart of what it is that we are trying to deliver- to plant a seed so that a flower will grow
• What’s your Return On Ego?
  • The context here was making sure that you compartmentalize business decisions in the online space between those that are founded on KPI’s and those that make the Brand team feel good.

You can see all the bloggers involved here: Recycle A Blog Post Day #rabpday . Nice one Mark.

What are you going to re-share?

We are all superheroes.

That’s because science now suggests that we have more than five senses, that actually there are more than 17 senses defined by neural pathways. One of the first to announce we are hypersensorial humans living in a quantum world was well-known scientific psychic Ingo Swann at the United Nations in 1994, yet it wasn’t until 2005 when New Scientist magazine asked, “What would you do with 21 Senses?” that global research findings were disclosed.

Beyond the notion of the sixth sense, or what’s commonly considered intuition, additional senses include everyday experiences such as temperature, pain and balance, while others, a bit more obscure, include proximal, physical closeness; eidetic, photographic memory; and geogravimetric, the ability to sense mass differences.

The reality that we can go beyond the five senses and experience more is joined by the curious fact that everyone is born with a condition called synesthesia. Unlike anesthesia, which means no sensation, synesthesia is where two or more senses are hooked together, so for instance, a person can taste shapes or hear colors. As our brain develops, we lose this neurological ability, however for some well-known artists and thinkers such as Baudelaire, Kandinsky, O’Keefe and Feynman, this ability to intersense colored their lives.

Considering that telematic sensing is the aim of industry and our senses are merely electrical signals interpreted by our brains, and Sony has already been granted a patent that uses ultrasonic pulses to beam information into our heads, the future of gaming and entertainment will no doubt be transformed, triggering everything from whole-body thrill to memory enhancement. Bluntly put, the idea that extraordinary powers are beyond our grasp is over. So go ahead, drape the cape.

Crush + Lovely // Deltree is working with PostSecret to produce a video in support of their upcoming book: Confessions on Life, Death, & God.

“I don’t keep any secrets”….”I am an open book”.

Secrets kept from others. Lies you tell yourself  to keep on going.  We all do it- and we all deny it. Powerful stuff. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow- but interesting things can hide in dark places, no? Opening the book of personal dilemma  that is Postsecret allows you to remember the thousand coloured veils of denial, aversion, self sacrifice, bravery and despair that everyone tries to hide in tightly grasped hands held tightly behind their backs. It’s magical to see them unfolded and proudly displayed in the light.

PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits.

Part 2

• it’s perfectly OK to interrupt another meeting in progress with a ‘quick question’
• turn up late to meetings and leave before they’ve finished
• keep your mobile on, read your emails on your blackberry and snort at your Twitter messages
• don’t distribute information before meetings, read your documents word for word
• remember that your time is ever so much more important than others