pushes emotional buttons

http://jameshogwood.typepad.com

2010-07-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah. This is an ex-blog. For quite some time I've been blogging at my new home on Typepad. If you're bored, why not take a look for more thoughts on communications and other stuff? You can also see what I've been up to with my middle names project. Be lovely to see you there.

chapter three: notes from the story

2010-02-23T02:06:00.000-08:00

So Matt Locke's The Story happened last week. It was really good. About 400 people filled the Conway Hall to listen to people tell their stories or explain how they tell their stories. Everyone listened and laughed and applauded in the right places. In the breaks everyone filed out and drank lots of coffee. Coffee breaks looked like this, in fact: But I won't attempt to tell you about the whole day - partly because there was so much on, each talk was so different from the last (and yet the whole thing hung together so well), and partly because my notes and impressions would probably make no sense. In any case, the nature of the day I'd probably have to extrapolate at length to find a "point" where a lot of the time the only point might have been to tell a good story. So I'll concentrate on my highlights instead. Annette Mees and Tassos Stevens of You Have Found Coney told us about their immersive theatre experience, A Small Town Anywhere. "What do you call it?" I wrote in my notebook alongside their names. Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games showed us the inner workings of their Echo Bazaar Twitter game. "You need an organising principle" and "Go mad and hallucinate lizards" are a couple of the notes I've put against their talk. That seems to say more than I possibly could. What the Failbetter and Coney chaps have in common is that they are striking a deft balance between the player/participant driving the story and the interventions the storyteller needs to make to get you to where they want you to go. That choose-your-own-adventure, gaming aspect to their storytelling really appeals to me; at once brilliantly nostalgic and yet at the same time feeling a bit like the future of media (and other stuff). Regular readers of this blog will know of my soft spot for comics. So perhaps it's no surprise that Sydney Padua, author of the Lovelace and Babbage web comics was another highlight. Smart but self-effacing, she showed the crowd how she told stories visually as well as verbally. Her slides were great, too. I was too far away to get any real detail on my iPhone in this pic, but at least you can see that everybody's heads were pointed in the right direction. But my clear favourite was Tim, who read a story about the failure of a marrriage whilst the hero attempts to fool his business partner into thinking a project with Harrison Ford was on the cards. No one seemed able to work out whether it was invented or true, or at least what the balance really was between fact and fiction. Which is exactly how I think the very best stories should be. "Strange synchronicity" and "My moustache is a symbol of my misery" seem to sum it up perfectly, somehow. So I'll leave it there. More eloquent and interesting observations can be found on James Bridle's, Rebecca Denton's, and Vicky Matthews's blogs.

chapter two

2010-02-19T13:53:00.000-08:00

As expected, this was great.

submit your idea and vote for your favourites

2010-02-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

This, this and this all collided in my head the other day. On the one hand: as a charity with limited budgets and (if you're good) a well defined strategy for achieving what you want to do, you might not want to listen to other people's ideas about what you should be doing. On the other: why hasn't a charity found the right level of (or at least started toying with) crowdsourcing ideas to do good?

recording the voices in your head

2010-02-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

Tim's Say What You Want To Hear play was broadcast on Radio 4 today. And you can catch up on it for the next seven days. As with everything from Tim, there's an interesting digital storytelling element to it, as it was part written by the secret things listeners regularly say to themselves or wish that other people would say to them. Was your #swywth on it? If you want to take part, you can still do so via the Twitter and Facebook group.

chapter one

2010-02-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

[Photo courtesy of James Bridle.] For lots of reasons I've been thinking about books and literary forms in general recently. And I've just finished reading Immanent in the Manifold City. It's brilliant. One of the interesting things about using Newspaper Club is that it can't help but remind you that many books used to be serialised. Whether it was simply about keeping interest in the story alive, or making it affordable to more people, there's something interesting about serialisation, issuing a novel as part of a periodical. I think there's something to be said for it as a unit of literature today. It feels relevant. The delayed gratification aspect. And the knowledge that it can fit into the bigger and more important patterns of your life. How great would that have been, to be able to get your Charles Dickens or George Eliot fix in your magazine or newspaper? I'm sure it would click with lots of people's media diets in 2010, as much as it did in the 19th century. And I think it would be an interesting literary unit for me especially. Otherwise short story collections are my staple. I hoover up short stories on the commute to work, but novels tend to take me at least a couple of weeks because the only time I have to pay proper attention is on the train. I can't think of much better than a story unfolding over the course of weeks and weeks, in small and easily digestible pieces (nicely designed too) for me to look forward to. There's loads of clever things you could do. Sort of like The Dongle of Donald Trefussis, but keeping on going. If I keep thinking about it, I may have to write something for serialisation. Just a thought.

now is the splinter of our discotheque

2010-02-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

A very lovely mailer. Three A2 posters from Jim (one of the nice men of 26), designed by Elmwood.

immanent in the manifold city

2010-01-31T03:10:00.000-08:00

[Photo courtesy of James Bridle.] Looking forward to getting my copy of this from James Bridle. (Made with Newspaper Club.)

world's most amazing libraries

2010-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

These amazing pictures from the Huffington Post of the world's most amazing libraries (via Tash via @JensBookPage) made me wonder how books will be collected in future. We all know about on-demand printing and e-readers. But at some point it feels like people will be writing transmedia books (something like one of James's projects perhaps), in the same way they have been doing transmedia for broadcast for a long time. If books spill across the printed page, out onto the web and onto mobile to fit your media diet, how will they be brought together and stored? And what kind of librarian staffs the new kind of library?

moodi million

2010-01-23T07:38:00.000-08:00

Why play Farmville or Mafia Wars when you can play the Moodi Million instead?

positive light

2010-01-23T07:24:00.000-08:00

while no one was looking

2010-01-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

ultimate 81s are melting my mind

2010-01-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across the Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81s online. They were in such a brilliantly garish colourway I just had to have them. Orange, turquoise, white and purple. This isn't the first time I've bought trainers online. But it is the first time I've bought a brand that I don't know very well. (I'm not a very loyal sneaker person. I don't have a big Nike or Adidas habit. I have a more magpie-like taste for Puma, Gravis, Tretorn, Converse, Etnies.) I like the silhouette. I love the toe. The toe shape is very important to me. Nice and rounded, not too pointy. And I love the hexagonal pattern on the sole. I'm just not sure about the big scoop in on the arch of the foot. Tash thinks I'll get used to it. Says Onitsuka Tigers are really comfortable. But I just don't know. I'm all confused. I love the colourway. And it is a reissued running shoe really. But...it's the scoop. Just thought you would want to know.

winterval

2010-01-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

Although the snow has probably cost the economy billions this week, pushed the NHS into crisis, brought the roads to a standstill, and surfaced a whole lot of previously concealed aggression on the trains, it sure does make you see things differently.

i made a superhero

2010-01-03T14:49:00.001-08:00

Using Marvel's create-your-own tool. (If only Dark Horse and those guys had a similar toy.) Henceforth you shall know me only as Strike.

small chair

2010-01-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

McSweeney's has made an iPhone app called Small Chair, which gives you curated access to stuff from their Quarterly Concern, Wholphin, The Believer and the daily site. I can't find anything smart to say about it. I like it too much.

top fives: things i have learned

2010-01-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

OK, so I failed to do my last in the top fives mini-series before the end of 2009. Oh well. The moment's probably passed to look at them in great detail but in case you were wondering what they were, here's my list. 1. treat it as a story 2. think of it as a game 3. i need to read faster 4. the agency doesn't always know best 5. do more, read less (as long as you don't read too little) The chances are that I'll be banging on about one or more of these things here very soon anyway.

top fives: good things

2009-12-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

And so onto my highlights from this year... 1. good projects I don't talk about my work that much on this blog. Don't know why that is. But I had a few especially good projects this year. I worked with interesting people, did some naming projects, wrote lots of stuff, art directed other bits, worked on Facebook apps, and was the voice of a brand in various social spaces. I enjoyed them, was tested creatively and in other ways, got good feedback (mostly) and learned a lot. Oh, and Contagious magazine said the first one "put shame in the game of many youth brands". I'll take that quite happily. 2. my son's first birthday Milo's birthday weekend was so, so good. The best two days of the year. We went to see Pop at the Tate Modern, and he loved most of it, especially the Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst rooms. The next day we had 40 or so friends and family over for his birthday party. There was cake and there were goody bags, as there should be at every good party. And we got him a trike that he loves. 3. watchmen marketing Watchmen was a transmedia narrative par excellence, with games, mock documentaries, printed stuff, music videos and more springing up around it. The distributed story was so good you almost didn't need to see the movie. 4. robots were awesome

Playful 09 - Gamechanging & Change Through Play

View more presentations from Katy Lindemann.

They really were. There were great things like Chalkbot and Katy's presentations for Interesting and Playful too. 5. slow projects Earlier this year I felt like I was losing track of writing for my own fun. So I've made a point of making time for it. It's starting to pay off too. I enjoyed NaNoWriMo, although I didn't get far. I had a bit of success with Leaf Books and a couple of other things. There have also been Crossrail Pop-up Pop and a bigger thing, which I've often obliquely referred to but never got round to finishing. So maybe that'll show up one day soon. The point is to start these things, even if you may never finish.

top fives: bad things

2009-12-28T13:20:00.001-08:00

So here are the things I won't miss about 2009. They are a bit of a random mishmash of personal/worky/other, so they probably look a bit odd piled up next to each other like this. 1. my son being in hospital There have been a few difficult things on the personal front this year, but none more so than my baby boy spending time in hospital. Three times in 2009 with breathing difficulties. (Apparently they don't say it's asthma until you're a bit older.) So the fact I've had a heavy cold over Christmas has meant I've pretty much spent the whole time scared that he would have to go in again...and that I'd be responsible. Thankfully, that hasn't happened (hope I don't have to say "yet"). Here's to a healthier 2010, Milo. 2. michael jackson During the summer I found it really weird that there wasn't more of a conversation around Michael Jackson on the planning and creative blogs. He seems to have been knocking around some of the really big cultural shifts of the last five decades. As a performer, as a brand, as a social phenomenon (I found out on Twitter before it was on the news - you probably did too), it didn't really feature. But as an uber-fan, maybe I'm just being a bit precious. 3. losing too much time to free flash games OK, it's not the biggest thing in the world. I got hooked on sites like Kongregate for a bit in the middle of the year. And then moved on to Canabalt, which is awesome. But if you add up the total time I've lost over the whole year, you'd probably laugh at me. And life coaches would offer me their services for free. Seriously, it must be four days or something. 4. brands trying to show how social they are Making ads like this. Rather than behaving socially. 5. felipe massa's accident OK, so formula one is my not-so-secret guilty pleasure. There are lots of good reasons not to like it, but I can't help it. Somewhere along the line I managed to invest myself in the story of it, and I've been hooked ever since. When this happened, I was absolutely gutted. Felipe should have won the championship the previous year, when it was claimed by Lewis Hamilton. (The driver was the consistent side of the partnership in Ferrari, the team was at McLaren. If you don't agree I will fight you on this.) That image I have of him beating his chest on the podium in Sao Paolo, knowing he'd won the race but lost the championship by a single point, holding his head up high...that's one of the most inspiring sporting images of the last decade for me. To be hit on the head by a spring from someone else's car the following season, whilst travelling at 162 mph, that just doesn't seem fair.

top fives

2009-12-20T02:38:00.001-08:00

if you want to see the future

2009-12-20T02:26:00.001-08:00

24 November 2009, originally uploaded by mattcottam Via Magical Nihilism.

games teach

2009-12-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

"Games teach that failure isn't bad, and that collaboration isn't cheating." Henry Jenkins, quoted by Alice Taylor in this Do Lecture. Lots of nice brainfood in this. If I had my way, all (OK, not all, lots) of comms would have a playable element of some kind. Worth a lunchtime view. Or watch it on the podcast.

crossrail pop-up pop

2009-12-09T15:21:00.001-08:00

Rishi and I started something called Crossrail Pop-up Pop recently. Look, here it is: We wanted to create a place where we could gather memories about gigs we've seen at the Astoria, as a sort of tribute, and as a little way of holding the Crossrail and Westminster Council to book over their promise to create a replacement music venue. Firstly we want to make sure that happens. Secondly we want to make sure that it's got enough personality (call it grubbiness, call it patina, call it what you will) that it doesn't just join the pantheon of bland, branded and well lit "entertainment spaces". (I always think you can judge a gig or club venue by the special stickiness of its floor. Something to do with years of spilt beer and sugary drinks, condensation and perspiration. Or something.) Because the Astoria was enormously important to me, growing up as a suburban Londoner. It was where we went to see proper big bands, rather than the sort that played at The Venue in New Cross, our other big indie hang-out of the time. I have a big nostalgic attachment to it for that reason. But we're a bit slow off the mark though. And we could do with your help. So should you wish to, you can share your gig memories from the Astoria or manifestos for the new venue at http://crossrailpopupop.tumblr.com/submit. And you can follow our Crossrailpop Twitter here. Or use the hashtag #tcrcrossrailpopupop. Any or all of those things would be lovely.

just a little thing

2009-12-09T12:40:00.000-08:00

A while ago I entered a postcard writing competition from Leaf Books. My entry didn't win, but turns out they quite liked it. Like lots of things I write for myself, I'm not sure I like it personally. It's a bit overwritten. But should you wish to judge for yourself, it's over here.

i don't know, do i?

2009-12-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

I came across Ben Harris's blog this evening. It's rather good. You should look at it in fact. It persuaded me that I should add the silly little diagrams and sketches I do to my blog, rather than relying too much on things like Daytum. So yes, I'll do that. That shall become A Thing. It also reminds me that there should be more Venn diagrams in blogging.

bonkers good personalisation

2009-12-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

My brother sent me this film he made from a toy produced to say thank you to Swedes who pay their equivalent of the licence fee. You've seen such things before with the Dexter Hitlist. But I love the epic feel of this. The person featured, in case you're wondering, is my baby boy Milo.

curating stories

2009-11-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

This, which by the looks of things will happen, sounds like a tremendous thing indeed. Especially if they can work past their concerns about "stories in the digital age". Because there must be something in the idea that old book-based and oral storytelling aren't so far removed from gaming and film stories after all.

you were here first

2009-11-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

A while ago I retweeted a retweet from Lawrence about Foursquare and Gowalla and things like that. I love games of all kinds. Immerse-yourself-and-buy-the-extra-chapter kind of games, five-minute iPhone distraction games, and the pretend-you're-a-robot-Sherlock-Holmes-and-fire-lasers-from-your-fingers-as-you-walk-down-the-road imaginary kind of games (maybe that last one is just me). And there's been lots of conversation recently about the use of gaming techniques in communications, and relationships between the personal and the social on games. And I'm into that, and those people say it better than I ever could. So there's a bit of me that feels like it's none of my business which games people choose to play or where they talk about them. But the number of times I've seen Foursquare and Gowalla pop up in my Twitter feed means it's nearer the front of my mind. I love things that give you a score and that unlock achievements. But I sort of feel like that this kind of social/play space has kind of been done...and that it has a platform already. And that platform is Facebook. Obviously half the planet disagrees with me, which is okay. But it just feels disconnected to me that there's this other place where you earn currency for having been the first to a bar, or that you've become a mayor of such-and-such cafe. It's like an elaborate bragging game designed around your disposable income, and/or marital status and/or richness of your social life. I add those things up and keep getting Facebook. Foursquare and Gowalla are useful because they connect your network to reviews and new social destinations. Which is a good thing. But that's not the quality that seems to rise to the top. And in any case I think I'm after a different sense of utility. Like I'd love a social game that uses the same model to share recipes around butternut squash, or unlocks prizes for knowing how to make your own harissa. Or that helps me make more informed about buying ethically. And I love how things like Noticings start rewarding you for the little diversions that ordinarily would just stop you from doing what you're supposed to be doing. These would just seem to be more interesting things to me. Of course another way to look at it might be to go back to that point about your disposable income and richness of your social life. Because I've got a mortgage and a one-year-old. So that may mean that I'm just jealous.

canabalt

2009-11-14T13:15:00.001-08:00

Canabalt is about as pure as Flash games get. That is all.

under the dome

2009-11-11T14:30:00.001-08:00

Thought I'd blog this, seeing as my NaNoWriMo effort is going so slowly. To celebrate its release, Stephen King's new novel was split into more than 5,000 pieces and concealed in a massive game of hide-and-seek. And there was a creative writing competition too. There's got to be a reason that entertainment properties can often produce much more interesting comms. Is it because there's already a story at the heart of them? Maybe that's a topic for 19 February.

nanowrimo

2009-11-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

I've signed up to NaNoWriMo. Which means I have 50,000 words to write by December. And after just one day, I'm already behind. So embloggening might be a bit sporadic during the month of November.

beyond the brief

2009-10-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

A while ago I had a bit of a rant about messaging. A few things have been piling up recently to make me think that's not so wrong. Like this ace Zeus Jones post (via The Planning Lab). And the APG paper for somebodyelsesphone.com. I think the latter does it for me especially. So much planning and creative work takes place upstream, in a brief-shaped bubble. You determine the insights, determine the shape, brief it in, sign it off and buy the media space. However much it's intended to change, adapt and live, it doesn't quite do it in a convincing way. So the emphasis on a different kind of team in both of these posts seems pretty relevant. It's not about carving out ever more niche roles, it's about knitting groups together more effectively and taking advantage of the overlaps in skills. That's how I work best anyhow. And that kind of work doesn't produce the normal comms outputs, because it's born of the need to evolve and react. Which is less about messaging and more about conversations and experiences.

storytelling

2009-10-24T03:13:00.001-07:00

If and when it happens, you should definitely go to this.

the art of blogging without blogging

2009-10-18T15:14:00.001-07:00

While we were in hospital, any spare moments spent fetching coffee or snatching breakfast in the greasy spoon were filled with thoughts of what to blog about, various writing things I'm doing and general ambitions from cleaning the fridge through to getting my Here & There prints framed. Now that I'm back at home I'm behind with all my RSS feeds and everything, work beckons, the house is a bit of a state, and we haven't done nearly enough to get ready for Milo's first birthday party, I still have the burning desire to be productive but seemingly very little time to achieve it in. But then I've noticed that lots of my favourite blogs go through really quiet spells followed by a flurry of publishing. You can almost see the work/life arc behind it. Very few post something every couple of days. I'm not sure how they manage it. Which got me to thinking about the delayed gratification part of continuous partial attention. A lot of the time I click through from iGoogle even if I can't see something has updated, because there's always a bit of a delay before it registers a new post. I'm looking for opportunities to be interrupted. And it's an awesome feeling when I discover that someone cleverer than me has something interesting to say. I like it when someone hits a groove and publishes a load of stuff before going away again for a bit. There's that tension between wanting to be a live node and wanting to save things up, craft them and develop them perfectly. And that kind of thing.

significant objects

2009-10-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

Can a great story give a worthless item some real monetary value? That's the question asked by the Significant Objects project. So far they've managed a significance premium of more than 2,000 per cent. Nick's written a nice poem for this clown figurine.

high dependency

2009-10-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

We're back from a couple of days spent in hospital with Milo. He's fine, but it's his second time (the first was about a month ago) in with breathing difficulties caused by a viral chest infection. He had to work very hard to breathe when he went in. You could see his stomach sucking in, and he was using every muscle in his top half just to get air in and out. We stayed in what was called the high dependency unit, where you need a bit more regular attention. But now, thanks to lots of inhalers, nebulisers, steroids and other things he's much, much better. The NHS is a funny thing, and I know this isn't everyone's experience. We had to tell the same story and give the same details about five or six times within the space of a few hours. As a customer journey or relationship thing, that's a bit bonkers. But the people, all of them, from the paramedics who took us in the ambulance to the A&E doctors, to the nurses, doctors and consultant on the children's ward, were absolutely incredible. You could not fault the level of care and attention to detail. They remembered our names, had proper conversations, remembered our stories and who we are, and passed it on from shift to shift. When by comparison you consider how much many commercial companies invest in their CRM and still get it massively wrong, you realise that the NHS has a lot right with it. And probably the thing that makes the difference is the thing that underlies any customer relationship programme that works: people who care.

love distance

2009-10-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

I was due to go to a Contagious briefing with Emma and Emily the other week. It was all about brands being useful, so I was sad not to make it in the end. Anyway. They went and saw this as a case study. Hadn't seen it before, and I just really like it. Love Distance was a piece of comms to promote Sagami condoms in Japan, dramatising the benefit that they are just 0.02mm thick. Unbranded ads appeared on TV, starting to tell the story of a couple in a long-distance relationship. They drove you to a site you could choose to enter as a boy or a girl. There the story continued to unfurl over time, showing how the man and woman were running 1,000km across Japan to be with each other by Christmas. But you still didn't know who it was for. At the end of it all an ad pieced the whole story together, including appropriate visual metaphors and pack shot. It's the transmedia storytelling that I love. I know, I know. It's still just flogging stuff. But I'm hooked on the idea that a brand can entertain you over time - bringing you something that feels more meaningful or substantial, campaign as content, that kind of thing. We organise ourselves around stories, whether it's the novel or magazine in your bag, or the film or soap you watch on TV. So it's always a good thing in my book when a brand wants to create the platform for a story, and not interrupt or arrange itself around them.

data about data

2009-10-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

Jessica has done something very clever with her Daytum sets. Meta meta data data is her recording of her recording of data. It's something she presented at Interesting 2009. An event which I missed. Bah. But at least it's up on Flickr for you to enjoy now. And it's beautiful.

for every problem, there is a solution community

2009-10-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

More things should be solved like this.

living identities

2009-10-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

Tim's a nice man. Well, we've never actually met in person but he always comes across very well in the world of 26. Tim has written a book with Moving Brands all about their idea of living identities that evolve as the business does and as the communication challenge changes shape. How to bring that to life in an interesting way? Why, pimp the cover up with augmented reality. I'm looking forward to seeing the video, because I was really excited by augmented reality a while ago. And 95 per cent of stuff from the last six months has been rubbish. There's only been a few examples of it being creatively interesting or of monetising it well. With lots of people (like Katy for instance) talking about the relationships between web and print, this seems quite timely (as does the subject of the book, by the way). There's been lots written about the digital future of books and on-demand publishing by people much cleverer than me. But I like the idea that you could use augmented reality on the shelves at Waterstones. Maybe even embed the film preview or bring the protagonists to life by pointing your book camera at a display computer. Or, even better, make something augmented and social, in the way that Berg's The Incidental is social map making, or that Tim's Kidmapper project is a new way of thinking about book clubs. And that kind of thing.

visualising voices

2009-09-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

The Voicebot pt 1 from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

If you know me, you know I love robots. So engineering them in to a participatory comms solution is going to push all my hot buttons. It seems to be working for others too, as there's a fair bit of pick-up on places like PSFK and Wired. Voicebox describes itself as "a data visualisation project, curating young people’s views on issues that matter, visualising the findings, and then setting the data free for you to do the same." It's a project from V to demonstrate to politicians, the media and everyone else that 16 to 25-year-olds care about stuff. And are articulate about those things that matter most to them. And they have an API, so if you can do clever things visualising data, that's nice. I especially love how Sidekick Studios, the people who built the robot, describe themselves as a social innovation company using the internet to fix problems and make life more useful. As Voicebox and Timetable would suggest, they are interested in the internet of things, and a world where there's no seam between the digital and physical worlds. That seems to be the best way to create things that are comms, product, service and community all wrapped up in one. At the moment I hate finding myself at a loading bar, Flash-heavy adverwebby site, because it's so of the internet and not of life. You turn the power off and it's gone. Whereas things like Voicebox allow you to do something to the real world via the computer. And this physical expression of yourself is still out there, somewhere, when you shut down for the evening. Maybe it's also because projects like this are also quite defiant of analytics. It's quite hard to quantify the true meaning of someone's self-expression, no matter how good your social media metrics. So your criteria for success are completely up in the air. When you're dealing with what matters most to people, that feels important somehow. So yeah.

learn something new

2009-09-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is one of those big, dumb blog post steals. But it's so good, and I've been sending it round the studio and to a bunch of friends, I thought it was worthy of it. Learn Something Every Day is a project from UK design studio Young. Nice colours, innit. And a great engine for pub conversation. Via the excellent Noisy Decent Graphics.

food for fork

2009-09-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

It was Tash’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. She was dead excited to receive a beautiful glass cake stand from her best friend, Claire. And Claire’s sister Gina got her a beautiful cake slice from Bombay Duck to go with it, too. She loved it because it went really well with the vintage teaspoons that she already had from Bombay Duck. The only thing that was missing were some nice pastry forks. So naturally once she’d made her favourite Victoria sponge, she blogged about it. And she happened to mention that she didn’t have a nice set of pastry forks. That was that. Then someone from Bombay Duck left a comment on her post. They didn’t sell pastry forks, they explained, but they’ve passed the idea on to the design team. So you never know. Simple and pure. And nice. Lots of people are talking about how the product or service should be its own marketing, so I know this is an obvious thing to say. But maybe at some point in the future all customer service teams are going to be completely proactive, rather than existing to simply react to your issue or complaint. They’ll be able to design their own service model. And maybe they will have their own creative types embedded into the team. So that they can make stuff. Just simple, nice, little things that give you a very personal value exchange. Or maybe the customer service value will be embedded directly into the development of products. Maybe if Bombay Duck choose to make those pastry forks, they'll be kind enough to send the first two sets to Tash and Gina. I’d like that.

extra reading

2009-09-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Death of Bunny Munro - Enhanced Edition Promo from Enhanced Editions on Vimeo.

I've been reading and hearing lots about e-books for a while. How they are becoming more popular, how Sony, Kindle and so on are going to be eating up the paperback market until we're only left with summer blockbusters and trophy hardbacks in print. I've had a play with a couple of friends' readers and I've tried a few books on iPhone, but I've just not got it really. I like having the book as a physical product in my hands. Even if they've skimped on the paper quality, you get that little snapping sound as you flick a corner and turn the page. And the cover design on literary fiction is pretty interesting too, most of the time. You don't get that when you're scrolling pages onscreen. So this Enhanced Editions thing is very good. It's what e-books should be about - or ones for the iPhone anyway - which is translating something text-based into other, extra media experiences to enrich your reading.

smokescreen

2009-09-05T13:26:00.000-07:00

Smokescreen Game from Six to Start on Vimeo.

Smokescreen is a new online game story by Six to Start for Channel 4. I'm loving future-ish media projects like this at the moment. And Channel 4 seems to just churn them out with things like Yeardot, Battlefront already under their belts. Smokescreen is a game that centres on an imagined social network called White Smoke, spilling across IM, games, phone calls, podcasts and suchlike. It's a story that spins out through play across all these mediums. The future-ishness isn't just in the transmedia storytelling; it's also in the theme of identity and relationships that spills out of the social setting. It's about who you want to be, who you can trust and how you make those decisions. It feels like it emerges from the lives of its target audience, making it a Very Good Thing indeed. More things should be like this. So that's that.

rfid tours

2009-08-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

We went to a village called Much Wenlock in Shropshire over the Bank Holiday. It was for a wedding, probably the poshest I'll ever go to. The reception was in Weston Park, the nearby stately home in whose grounds the V Festival took place a couple of weeks ago. Anyway. The next day we went to the ruins of an old priory back in Much Wenlock. And wandering round really reminded me of something that Tim Wright was saying about war monuments in his article for 8, a newspaper by the BBC about what it means to be a digital public service broadcaster. Specifically about how great it would be to embed RFID into the monuments and the landscape. It'd be great for these English Heritage and National Trust-type things, rather than carrying those push-the-buttons-and-listen wands you carry on on those audio tours. It'd be a great way to immerse your visitors in the stories that surround a place. You could layer up the narratives (rather than edit them into digestible soundbites) and let people follow the thread that most speaks to them. And following Ted's thoughts on RFID, you could use the same device or mechanism you use to consume the experience could be the same one you use to give back to it, in the form of micro-donations. That's what you call closing the loop, I believe. Me likey.

flash games are eating my brain

2009-08-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year we started some of our first social media experiments with young people. As part of it, we asked them about the sites they like. And loads came back with places where you can play free Flash games. I had to try a few out, partly because I was writing about it. But more because I was intrigued. And now I'm hooked. I started with this motocross game. I moved on to Tactical Assassin 2. And now it's all about Street Skating. And I do mean I'm hooked. I don't know what it is, but whenever I need to get something done, these games provide the perfect segue for some reason. They just get me into a zone for proper thinking. And I don't know why I like them so much. I think it's just the simplicity of it all. It's (relatively) democratic in that all you need is a laptop with up-to-date-ish software, rather than an expensive story engine. And there's something charmingly rickety about the gameplay. There's something simple and nostalgic baked into it, like Bubble Bobble, but with hitmen and stunt riders. All of which makes it demanding enough to be addictive, but at the same time a distraction, something that refreshes your head before you move on to the next thing. I'm sure this says something interesting about continuous partial attention, using gaming techniques to improve productivity, or something like that. But I'd have to play a few games first in order to work out what I really wanted to say about it.

decked

2009-08-26T15:02:00.001-07:00

I should be better at passing on details of friends who are doing interesting things. So Leticia is showing at the Decked project, a skate-inspired exhibition at the StolenSpace gallery in Brick Lane. It's on until 30 August. And some of the decks are for sale! Have a look if you're nearby.

feast of strangers

2009-08-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

Philosopher Theodore Zeldin is inviting everyone in London to celebrate his 76th birthday at the Feast of Strangers, tomorrow (that's 22 August) at the Treehouse Gallery, Regent's Park. It's a bit of a School of Life-y feeling event, with a menu of conversation (topics include "How have your priorities changed over the years?" and "How has your background limited or favoured you?") to facilitate interesting dialogue between people who've never met before. Find out more here. Nice little experiments in communicating and connecting. I always like the sound of things like this. Just thought you might like to know.

"all children are born artists"

2009-08-17T01:27:00.000-07:00

I saw this talk for the first time at the weekend on Carina's blog. (Hers is new to me, but I think I'm going to be a fan.) Sir Ken Robinson is one of those names, isn't it? Like Clay Shirky or Seth Godin. Ooh, Ken Robinson, wanna go see him talk. And, watching this one from 2006, you can see exactly why. It just set my week up in a hopeful, sideways-looking kind of way.

tweeting with extraterrestrials

2009-08-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

A friend posted about Hello from earth on Facebook. It's an Australian site that's collecting messages to be transmitted to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our solar system which may support life. They give you 160 characters to write your message in, which feels like a luxury compared to Twitter. And you've got until 5pm Monday 24 August 2009 Sydney time, or 07:00 GMT the same day, to write yours. In the spirit of conversation and learning from each other, this felt like the most appropriate message I could send. What sort of a message would you send?

rubbish signs #17

2009-08-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

After an age, it's the return of rubbish signs. It's not technically a park if water fights aren't allowed. And I don't care what the secretary of state says. Thanks very much to Rishi!

monday music

2009-08-02T22:35:00.000-07:00

Since Milo was born I seem to have caught a steady stream of colds and other stuff from him. I was off again at the end of last week, at a really bad time. I think I must have had 30 emails about work on Friday - on a sick day! - because it's just like that at the moment. So I'm feeling a bit apprehensive about what lies in wait when I go back today. To compensate, I've planned a rigorous schedule of Monday music. To psyche myself up, because it's looking like it might be a tough day: For punching the air if everything goes well: To keep me focused when things get tough again: And then this if everything works out across the day: You may have noticed that I'm anticipating a positive trajectory to the day overall. If things don't work out as hoped, I'll end it like this:

nicer ways to work

2009-08-02T11:55:00.003-07:00

More TED lectures. This one by Alain de Botton from last month's conference warmed my heart. It's about rethinking what success means, and it's as simple, easy and wise as you'd expect from him. I think there's something to take from it whoever you are...as long as you have worked at some point in your life, you'll recognise something, even if it doesn't reflect where you are now. Like how a culture of fear is sometimes assumed to drive success, the status snobbery behind "What do you do?", or the occasionally dispiriting implications of working in an environment that refers to itself as a meritocracy. Something to remember the next time you're holding your breath and counting to ten.

fox

2009-08-02T11:55:00.001-07:00

I picked this up from Daniel's blog. I'm excited about it! It's directed by Wes Anderson, and you can sort of tell as soon as the characters start moving. The film feels lived in - it has a kind of patina - that comes from the stop animation. I love the fact that it rejects the idea of complex 3D modelling on a computer screen and goes for something with a bit of nostalgia baked into it instead. There just feels like lots of knowing nods to the kinds of children's TV programmes I grew up watching whilst reading Roald Dahl's and other books. Here's why, I guess. Tash has started following the puppet maker's blog. She does lots of other children's work, like Postman Pat and Bob the Builder. Good stuff.

adventures in failure

2009-07-31T14:36:00.001-07:00

So I haven't quite cracked the names thing I said I'm working on. It's almost there. It's just, y'know, those little details. The tricky last ones. It'll probably be another week.

constant affectionate maintenance

2009-07-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

I don't often read Campaign, but this really sat nicely with my Sunday morning cup of coffee.

"Agencies don't often look for inspiration from pack designers. But the best pack designers are brilliant at making deft little regular changes to treasured packs so that, while never seeming to change, the packs never get any older. That's an extremely unselfish skill; they're not using the brand's money to say, look at me! But then the best brand custodians have always been unselfish people."

postcards from lewisham

2009-07-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

My favourite app at the moment is Postman. It's like a much simpler version of things like Dopplr and Yellow Arrow. You choose a picture you've taken or take your location from Google Maps, fit it to a template of your choice, write your message and send it. OK, the user interface isn't as nice as it could be, and a couple of other postcard apps have better designed templates. But you can't beat Postman for sharing options. Like GPS Mapcard, I'm definitely liking those apps that give you a sense of the whole place/location thing without expecting you to make the same sort of commitment. You get the location-based storytelling and active remembering without having to do much legwork. It's like a very easy game to play. Which feels important, for some reason.

the ecosystem of comics

2009-07-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

We've been away this weekend. Even though I didn't have a lot to drink, I was knackered when we got back. I think it's something to do with having an eight-month-old baby to look after through trips out, dinner and all of that. Babies aren't necessarily that well equipped to cope with big changes to their routines. But anyway. So this evening I spent an hour chilling out doing one of my favourite ever things. Which is to start with a comic book superhero on Wikipedia and follow the links to see where they take me. I started with Scarlet Spider (an off-shoot character who becomes the second Spider-Man) and ended up at Cable (a telepathic and telekinetic mutant, basically, as you do). And it struck me that comics have a business model and a model of comms that loads of brands could do well to follow. I know I'm just talking about a very specific strain of (superhero) comics here. But they know their market and they understand how to keep it loyal. It's no mistake that the people within it don't index as consumers, but as readers, fans and obsessives. Check that out on the social gravity chart. And here's just a few reasons why I think that's the case. 1. They are immersive. I don't just mean that a comic is a work of fiction, or immersive in the sense that you might talk about Second Life. I mean how each and many characters have a richly complex and finely detailed personal history and a web of interdependent characters and ideas around them. You gain loads by bringing even a bit of prior knowledge to them. Look one up on Wikipedia, you'll see what I mean. 2. There's a rich seam of iterative, test-and-refine stories. Hard-coded into many different characters is the sense that this is always just one version of the story. There may be parallel stories, or, after a certain time - once a narrative arc has concluded, after a creative team has wound down, or simply when sales no longer make it viable - it becomes ripe for reinterpretation. DC even creates semi-regular cataclysmic events by which its entire universe hits a reset button, allowing its characters to re-experience old events in new ways, or to explore other narrative possibilities. 3. There are so many touchpoints, and they are all same but different. There are the comics themselves (and if it's a big character, there may be several titles running concurrently), merchandising from children's toys to collectors' models, console and arcade games, free Flash games online, fan fiction, and (again if it's a big character) cartoon animation and film. Each touchpoint plays to its own media's strengths and is self-contained, but at the same time gains in richness with the fan's intimacy with other references. And I thought, it'd be great if other products could steal some of this. So, yeah. (Pic courtesy of this person).

coming soon

2009-07-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a bit of a personal project recently. It's the sort of thing I might see by someone else and think, ooh, that's interesting. So hopefully you'll think the same. Truth be told it's taken me ages so far, but that's probably because it has been such a busy year, personally and workwise. And because I've got that thing where I'm quite proud and quite scared of it at the same time. It combines a bit of blog with a bit of tumblog (or is that tumbleblog, I'm never quite sure). And there might be audio and photo-sharing elements. But that probably depends on people like you being interested enough in it. So that's it. Oh, and it's about names. And it's coming soon. Probably in the next couple of weeks. All being well.

calls to action

2009-07-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

A new Flickr set around signage, packaging and general branding stuff that tells you to do things. I think, in some sort of vague way, it came out of this from earlier in the year. I've only just started the set, so come back in a week, it'll look much better then. I promise.

fails to register

2009-07-05T13:02:00.001-07:00

mj

2009-06-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

I've always been a massive Michael Jackson fan. So I wanted to post something short and sweet about the impact his music had on me, and how I think he as a person/brand/postmodern phenomenon affected the world. (I find it a bit odd that lots of the creative and planning blogs I follow don't talk about people...just ideas and work. Which is ironic when you consider that brands really spend a lot of their time aspiring to be people these days.) Except that I realised that lots of my favourite tracks of his have less great videos. And lots of the great videos are for songs I favour a bit less. And where there's an overlap in the Venn diagram, embeds have been disabled. What's more, the music's pretty ubiquitous at the moment. You're all probably listening to it on Spotify anyway. So for demonstrating impact, these two do it nicely. You've almost certainly seen them before. The first is the Filipino prisoners doing Thriller. I'm not even sure I need to say anything about it. The second is Ian Brown's cover of Billie Jean. I think this comes close to the ultimate expression of artistic fandom. The song's simply too good not to cover; at the same time he knows that he simply can't reach the level of the original, so much so that he's almost celebrating that fact, paying homage. Sorry the video's a bit rubbish.

people who break things

2009-06-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm really enjoying Wired UK magazine so far. Especially the features about people who don't quite fit in. The ones whose natural inclination is to test the claims that brands and industries make for themselves to the limit. They are people who like to try to break things. It's always because they believe in better, although those around them don't really see it that way. Like this man. Marc Weber Tobias is a lawyer who has made it his life's work to hack locks. And that has made all kinds of companies - lock makers and the people who depend on their products - quite unhappy. He likes to refer to it as "the Marc Weber Tobias problem". But if I was a senior figure in any big organisation, I like to think I'd seek out and listen to people who like to break things. In fact, I'd ask them to actively see what they could find to break. Because whatever business you're in - but I'll say it's especially true of comms - the people who go against the grain, and who cut against the consensus, usually do so because they believe in better.

the diary vanishes

2009-06-17T07:02:00.001-07:00

This is my Haruki Murakami 2009 diary. Tash bought it for me for Christmas last year, because I love Haruki Murakami books. And this is really, really nice. It's designed as a perfect extension to his stuff published by Vintage. It has the same photography and some nice quotes interspersed throughout. But the thing is, I'm rubbish with diaries. I've managed to get key dates in, like birthdays and pay days. But I don't really update it regularly enough with stuff I'm supposed to remember. I'm just too disorganised to make that work. So I was faced with this dilemma of how to use it in a meaningful way, and not waste such a lovely thing. Just recently it came to me to use the diary as a kind of Twitter-ish type thing for flash fiction. Not that it has to stick to 140 characters or anything. But it does have to get used, once a day, to tell a story in the small space defined for me. It doesn't really matter whether they are any good; it's only important to do them. It's a strange kind of discipline that I feel I can stick to. So far.

"shared manifold of subjectivity"

2009-06-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've been watching and listening to a few TED talks recently. And not that I want to turn this blog into a series of TED embeds or anything, but this one by a cognitive researcher called Nancy Etcoff just seems to speak to me on lots of different levels. Not sure why I keep coming back to happiness as a theme. But I do. And yes, it's because it's useful to think about brands in those terms. But it's also more because it's more interesting and more exciting to think about it from the human being out into that and lots of other directions too, rather than from the brand back. There is something really interesting about the idea, as presented here, that happiness and sadness aren't two points on the same continuum. They live in parallel. And that there are so many layers to happiness. And just why doing social things and approaching things collaboratively are so rewarding.

"who do you want to take with you when you go bar hopping?"

2009-06-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

This talk, found via Dave, is a lovely thing indeed. Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist who demonstrates here humans' irrational behaviour and how we're less in charge of our decisions, cognitively speaking, than we think we are. Everyone just sort of knows this and exploits it. And yet at the same time there are so many assumptions that we make when creating comms of any kind which you're forced to question as a result of watching this too. No need to say any more, just watch it when you have a spare 15 minutes. Me likey.

will the real david cameron please stand up?

2009-06-07T01:35:00.000-07:00

Westminster politicians continue to show what an unsavoury bunch they really are. Saying one thing and then doing another. Only this week it's not so much about expenses, it's more about what they'll do in the cabinet and/or who they want as prime minister. So as the Labour government teeters on the brink, and the (in my view, dismal) prospect of a Conservative one taking its place comes closer and closer, I'm forced to look for up-sides. And the only one I can find is that my old partner in crime Steve, now of Bluefrog, has set himself up with a nice little side line as the UK's foremost David Cameron impersonator. So he should soon be getting a few more bookings, and perhaps I can once more exploit his generosity for a few drinks.

they grow up so fast

2009-06-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

back to work music

2009-06-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

I'm heading back to work on Tuesday after an awesome week off. So I'm putting a playlist together of the stuff we listened to whilst doing things. And so I'm also looking back on what we did. Apart from doing some of my own writing and getting distracted by two planners in a room, we did lots of easy days out. Like go to Greenwich Park with Milo. And going to Tunbridge Wells. We had lunch on the common, which looks like this. And this morning we went to Covent Garden's antiques market, because Tash is into her vintage stuff. The rest of the time we just chilled out in the garden with a bit of Spotify. But one tune was guaranteed to be blaring out of my macbook speakers at least twice a day. It was this glorious mash-up of Umbrella by Rihanna and Hypnotize by the Notorious BIG, by a gentleman calling himself Dan Black. It's brand new to me, and annoyingly (but unsurprisingly) I can't find it on iTunes or Spotify. If I were still regularly digging through the racks at Phonica or Rough Trade, I reckon I could have tracked it down about eight months ago. But babies tend to have a negative impact on your disposable income like that. So here it is on Youtube for you and me to enjoy instead. Lovely.

ah, so this is what they mean by fast strategy

2009-05-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

I'm supposed to be getting on with some writing myself. But I'm glued to twoplannersinaroom.com. Doug and Colman are writing their APG paper with 24 hours to go before the deadline, because their core insight was about people performing better under pressure. Here's what they say: "Which begs the question: is whats true of planning also true of writing APG papers? Theres only one way to find out. So with only slightly over 24hours to go how do increase the pressure, create greater risk, but more importantly maximize the opportunity? Well - by streaming the entire writing process on the internet, of course."

messaging

2009-05-24T14:05:00.000-07:00

I brazenly tweeted something about messaging a couple of weeks ago. And, probably rightly, Ian and Will called me out on it. Twitter's not necessarily the best discussion medium and I know this is one of those me-versus-the-world things, so I'll do my best to stumble through an explanation why in this post. Be warned, it probably gets a bit worthy. I sort of have a problem with the word "messaging". There's something about it that makes me want to brush my teeth after I've said it. But I feel perfectly fine about "message" or something much more prosaic and amateurish like "copy" or "the words". I'm not saying those are necessarily viable alternatives or anything. They just sit easier with me. There's a couple of (related?) levels to this I think. The first is purely semantic. Messaging sounds like it was grown in a petri dish somewhere, contrived and grafted onto a piece of visual communication. It's one of those marketing neologisms that just feels too abstracted for my liking. It's not like you'd find one human being passing on "a messaging" to another. It's not The Messaging by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. That would be weird. Whereas message seems a bit more genuine, in a weird kind of way. And the others have a touch of naivety about them. They just feel more human. Of course, whether you call it messaging or a message, it's the same thing. I'm not kidding myself. It's still from a brand to a person, in order to stimulate a purchase or use, or to attempt to ensure loyalty. The only difference is charm, I suppose. Like when planners talk like people and not like a cliche of themselves. Which is the neatest way I can find to bring me on to the other level. Messaging feels a bit like it belongs in the more we speak/you listen, disruptive world of advertising. Not to say the whole disruption thing doesn't still exist. Of course it does, it always will to some greater or lesser extent - it's just that we're better off aiming to engage as well as disrupt. Because there's lots of ways of having a dialogue or other interaction with brands. You don't need me to tell you what they are. But I've still sat at a table in meetings where people say things like, "Then users do a behaviour." Which, while it doesn't entirely preclude conversation, doesn't really feel in the spirit of a value exchange. If you're a brand seeking to join in a conversation I think it benefits you to think as human as possible. You just understand the interestingness or usefulness you bring to people better that way. It doesn't mean your brand is human...but it does mean it's something like aspiring to the quality of a fictional character. For me, if your brand is trying to be as human as possible, the language you use in the planning and making of your product/service/comms really matters, because it reveals how you see your relationship with your consumers. And a trace of that, no matter how small, will be visible in all your public touchpoints. So to think one way and try to talk another doesn't really work. Well, that's how I feel anyway. Down with messaging. Long live the message. Because if The Specials had recorded a song called A Messaging To You Rudy, it would have been rubbish. *shuffles off sheepishly*

ex-wrestlers may make excellent politicians

2009-05-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

I found this and this thanks to my good buddy Tom. As a kid I saw Jesse "the body" Ventura as a commentator on the wrestling. But he's also been a Navy Seal, Vietnam vet, The Other One in Predator, and the left-leaning governor of Minnesota. And now he's doing a sterling job as an anti-torture campaigner. Not much reason to post it, except that I'm fed up of all the news about dishonest, money-grabbing politicians in the UK. And this felt like a nice antidote to that.

be irrepressible

2009-05-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

Found out about this via Rishi's blog. You'll see the little widget over there on the left, underneath the "about me" thing. It publishes little bits of content that have been censored elsewhere. This is a good thing, I think.

masters of outdoor media

2009-05-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

Move over "Yes we can". "Labour isn't working". "Not flash, just Gordon". And lots of others I can't think of off the top of my head. Here's a brand new classic. "Say NO to paying the EU £40 million a day, vote UKIP UK Independence Party, 4th June European Election, SAY NO to the European Union."

trying something new

2009-05-20T13:17:00.001-07:00

More on new business models appearing in agency-land. And more adjectives like agile, hungry, nimble and risk-taking to be deservingly ladled out. I found out about Agency Nil through the aforementioned excellent BBH Labs blog. Think they deserve a place on the blogroll now. And if I was working agency-side right now, this kind of business would be really appealing to me.

rejection can be a good thing

2009-05-19T13:36:00.001-07:00

I got a rejection email today from a literary/art project I've recently discovered. I thought I'd send them a bit of flash fiction I'd recently written, but they (rightly) decided it wasn't right for them on this occasion. Earlier in the year I'd wanted to get more personal writing on the go again. And last month I was dismayed to find out that Wandering Army, one of the online magazines that had accepted a few of my stories in the past, had disappeared. So I didn't mind getting the rejection. Not at all. It just felt great to be trying again. I know it's a good story. Maybe it'll find a home somewhere else, and I will have a look. But the most important thing is that I'm doing something I care about. The other bit of good news is that I've been in touch with Marc, the editor of Wandering Army. He explained that he couldn't bear to watch the site dwindle whilst he did other things, so he did the decent thing and took it offline. And he was even kind enough to send me PDFs of my things that were published. The first page of one is up there at the start of the post, because annoyingly Blogger won't let you attach documents. Better go. I'm off to work on a short story.

worth checking out

2009-05-18T14:21:00.001-07:00

I'm not normally that into reading agency blogs. I usually find them a little bit weird, not really personal enough. And sometimes just a thinly veiled vehicle for promoting the business, rather than a genuine idea and conversation kind of place. But have a read of BBH Labs' blog. I like the curiosity in it. And the eclectic focus and relative newness both feel like good things. Some interesting things to find. It was thanks to BBH Labs that I stumbled upon Daniel Light's blog. He does lots of clever stuff around promoting films like Watchmen. Lots of interesting things to read around that. And there are some lovely films like this to see too.

faster + closer = better

2009-05-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

This is one of those posts where you spot something interesting that someone else is talking about and then do it for yourself, without adding much. But I think these presentations from the IPA Game Changers event, which I found on Will's blog, are worth it.

IPA 'Game Changers' event, 13th May 2009 – Made by Many presentation

View more presentations from Ipa strategy group .

IPA 'Game Changers' event, 13th May 2009 – Six to Start presentation

View more presentations from Ipa strategy group .

I'm not sure if these agencies would call themselves game-changers exactly. I've never met them before, but they seem rather nice and humble, content to let others do the talking up. But you know they're on the right side of the game by the speed with which they work: often conceiving of and doing projects live, if not to otherwise incredibly tight timescales. But what I really love is the close collaboration that makes what they do possible. Made By Many even talk about having the client in the room. And not keeping the techie people away from the client. The stakes are high with this model of working, both in the time and relationships sense. So everyone involved has to submit themselves to the process a bit. You've got to believe it's going to work with the people involved. Proper mutual respect all round then. Which we like.

animals are robots too

2009-05-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

When I was little I used to love the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. My grandparents lived round the corner, so we would go a lot. I loved the dusty randomness of the journey it would take you on. Ah look, here's some native American headdresses. Right next to a case of rare Egyptian beetles. That sort of thing. The museum has become a lot more polished since then, but the heart of it is still the same. And I was dead excited when Annie at work pointed out this exhibition to me. Robot animals! Using familiar gadgets and parts to show, for example, how a grasshopper jumps or how a bat sees its way in the dark. Robots at the Horniman Museum. Think I'd struggle to find a better combination than that.

at first meh, now not quite so much

2009-05-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

Spotted on Great Eastern Street, just round the corner from work. At first I was thinking yeah, OK, I quite like that it's not a billboard. Then the fact that it's on a part of the road with loads of traffic and not much footfall was annoying me. And to be honest, they could really have got this in amongst the cafes and bars and clothes shops. Maybe they have somewhere else and I just haven't noticed. I would love that. But the hidden thing is key. That web address at the end takes you through to a page about the Crisis hidden gigs. These nights are about highlighting what it's like to be one of the hidden homeless, barely visible to the rest of the world and not knowing where you'll be from one night to the next. Worth a look.

this is your library card

2009-05-09T07:19:00.001-07:00

Our local library has just opened after being closed for the last year or so. We went along to introduce Milo, our six-month-old, to the idea of libraries in general. And we each got new library cards. I just really like them. Not sure about the coloured balls. Maybe they are there to create a sense of fun for people who don't get excited by books. And I haven't had a library card for years, so maybe lots of them are like this, but I remember having a rubbish laminated thing when I was a kid. Whereas this one folds out. And gives you a little tear-off bookmark thingy with your library ID on it, so you can renew online without needing to have your card handy. I know it's just a library card and I probably shouldn't love it as much as this. But I can't think of many examples of your council giving you something that's both nicely designed and useful. Can you?

your life story

2009-05-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

Tom at work asked me today if I'd read A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers, and if so, what I thought about it. I said I was in two minds. I'd loved it to begin with, but it began to wear after 100 pages or so. But I've started A million little pieces by James Frey, I said, and I'm loving that so far. Tom said he'd been put off by the knowledge that it was a memoir which took dramatic licence with what had actually happened. And that does divide opinion. But for some reason, that's what magnetically drew me to the book in the first place. Maybe it's because I think some kind of creative or imaginative act is inevitable when you're trying to understand your life. Especially when memory is involved. Warming to the idea, we started talking about works of fiction that map onto authors' lives and the act of creative memoir in general. And there are loads of good ones. Like The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Read his How to be alone book of essays and you'll see what I mean. There's another good example in a different Jonathan (Safran Foer) and his book Everything is illuminated. And I think I've said before how much I love Amy Fusselman's The pharmacist's mate. Or read The liar and Moab is my washpot by Stephen Fry one after the other. Or Boy by Roald Dahl next to, well, any of his fiction. And all that got me thinking about us more generally, as consumers and creators of the information that we assemble under the headings of our lives. You need creative, interpretive tools to help you understand yourself. And sometimes it's easier to get some kind of truth of feeling (however slippery that is) by departing from what people might think is the "real", documentable truth. You need to reach for something beyond you in order to express what it feels like inside. Stuff (ideas themselves, or the stimuli that give us the ideas) helps us to do that. Not (necessarily) the materially aspirational stuff, in the sense that you find in lots of advertising. More the things that enhance or challenge the idea you have about who you really are. Whether that's novels or your own photographs, a pair of trainers or something else. Which is an interesting challenge for all cultural output, whatever it is. There's lots of things out there, but very few really touch people's lives in a way that changes their course, however small. It's rare to achieve it, but it is possible. So I like the idea that whatever I do, I should be aiming to achieve this quality of interesting or useful. (Picture courtesy of the rather splendidly named Auntie P.)

without advertising

2009-05-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you see something so nicely and simply done that you can just afford to say, "Me likey." Reminds me of Twistori.

social objects

2009-05-01T12:23:00.001-07:00

things brands can learn from ET

2009-04-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

I love ET. It was the first film I ever saw at the cinema. And it was the first film I cried my eyes out at. When I went to see the 20th anniversary cut I cried all over again. I don't know why, but ET seems to summarise everything I've felt or thought about, ever. As a character, a film and an idea. So I did this presentation really quickly and stuck it up on Slideshare.

10 things brands can learn from ET

View more presentations from james__h.

At time of writing, the notes aren't working for some reason. And a nice man called Amit who works for Slideshare is finding out why for me. So there's a few contextual things that help to qualify or unpack things, and generally move them on. But you can get the gist in the meantime I think. And if you can't, I've added the notes in a comment at the bottom of the page. I've learned a few things doing this. Firstly that I know nothing about PowerPoint. Secondly that I'll do Keynote or PDF presentations in future, because it looks a bit rubbish as is. And thirdly, this extra-terrestrial chap really is quite clever. But then you probably knew all of that anyway.

active remembering and global goodwill

2009-04-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

This (via Contagious) is a thing of international loveliness to me. The Disposable Memory Project is a global photography experiment along these lines: The relationships between the images and the micro-histories that accompany them are really interesting. If you find one, pick it up and send them your pics. Or, if you don't, you can also be a part of it by dropping your own disposable camera.

things that matter for people who matter

2009-04-29T02:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a few things recently that have really inspired me. Nothing earth-shatteringly new, just things eloquently and insightfully said. I'm writing with a streaming cold and a splitting headache, so excuse me if I gibber. One of these things is Matt's posts on commissioning for attention. Lots of ideas throughout, especially about the relationships between connectivity and content. Go check it out. He also links out to a few sources of inspiration, such as this lovely presentation on the role of objects in social media:

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations from Jyri Engeström.

The other is Daniel's thing about social gravity and emotional density. Which is about galvanising people closest to you by doing the decent thing. Also well worth checking out. Or, if you prefer, focusing on friends and family, rather than the people you haven't met or don't know that well yet. I've used this metaphor a few times elsewhere. What's common about all of this stuff is that it's very personal currency that's being used. Lots of people are saying this, because it's common sense really. You can't attract a community of interest around your brand unless you're prepared to enable conversations around you. And if you're to sustain them, you need stuff for people to share. Which might be little bits of content that cement relationships and provide a playground for personal marks and human-to-human interaction. And you may even need to demonstrate your humanity by entering into the conversation yourself.

officially good

2009-04-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

I'm very chuffed to have been mentioned by the ace Dan as a good blog. Which is very cool, seeing as how much good stuff is on his own one. And I'm in good company, as Dan Heaver's is worth checking out too. Nice one, Dan. We like him.

new kinds of parochial

2009-04-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

Lots of talk seems to be taking place around the idea that you can take the same profile around with you, whichever social networking sites. Is this a great idea? It is. But I'm in two minds about it all. I don't know. Maybe it depends on how you take your profile from A to B. Because I sort of think one of the pleasures of the interwebs is the distributed personality thing. Where you are different parts of you, according to the nature of the platform you're on and the community you're in. There's an overlap of course, but the bits of me on Twitter and Facebook are not the really the same. So the idea that you centrally manage all your different profiles is interesting and would probably be useful. But it's still a rare thing that I want to tweet and update my Facebook status with the same thing, so it might just be about doing the same amount of stuff within a single space. And the idea that it might squeeze different communities, different tools and different bits of you together to create some kind of aggregated output I find a bit odd. Because I'm not sure that's the sum of all the parts. I dunno. Maybe it's not for me and the way I combine these things. Because OpenSocial, Youmeo and others seem to work that way. Perhaps it's about having the flexibility to combine in different ways. Maybe an eBay goes well with a MySpace and a Facebook. And a Twitter with a LinkedIn and a Flickr. It'll be interesting to see new kinds of parochial emerging. I want to try this portability thing out before I make up my mind properly, so I'm waiting to receive my Youmeo invite. I'll let you know. But right now, what do you think? (Thanks to Toby Maloy for the awesome data visualisation of Flickr tag mapping.)

based on extensive research

2009-04-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Or see the more legible version here.

oh no...

2009-04-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

If you know me, you might also know that I like to write other stuff. Not just copy and little strategy bits. Or presentations and blog posts about comms. But actual stories. Flash fiction, short stories and that sort of business. I haven't written much of this kind of thing in the last year, but up until that point I was doing pretty well with getting published in various places. A lot of them were online places, like online fiction magazines, or the sites that accompany literary journals. But the thing is, lots of those places have slowly ceased to exist. It's happened to the Surgery of Modern Warfare, run by the incredibly talented Amy. This Is It magazine. The Journal of Modern Post edited by Jensen Whelan. A few others. You'll just have to take my word for it, I suppose. And now it's happened to Wandering Army. Or it seems like it. I'm trying to find out. But it's not like I've lost the writing I've done or anything. I've just lost that nice feeling of being able to point someone to these things and say, yeah, I did that. It made it past someone's editorial filter. Which was nice and satisfying. And, in a funny way, I'd have quite liked to have printed the pages off, just to, you know, keep in a drawer somewhere, for posterity. But I didn't get round to it in time. Which is one of the potential effects of distributing bits of yourself around the interwebs I guess. So I'm resolving to start writing more short stories again, because it fulfils a bit of a need in my brain. And also I'm going to get me an internet cupboard. (Thanks to Andrew Coulter Enright for the pic.)

robots are heartbreakingly beautiful

2009-04-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

More proof, if any were needed, that robots are heartbreakingly beautiful, capable of making human beings do amazing things. Tweenbots is an art project by Kacie Kinzer, which tests human beings' willingness to assist a robot which needs help on its journey from A to B. Turns out human beings are willing to join a loose network of supporters who have empathy for the robot's story and want it to fulfil its mission. Via @Asi and @BBHLabs. Thanking you.

not all on board

2009-04-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Web Trends Map is a list of the 50 most influential domains on the internet and the people associated with them, mashed up with the Tokyo Metro map. It does look beautiful. But it also seems strangely appropriate that they chose to do it with a transport system that employs people just to shove more commuters on board. It feels like it should be revealing interesting things about people and mapping personal journeys and stuff like that. But it just seems to say stuff about the stations instead. So I'm not sure why it had to be visualised like this. I guess I'm just not sure what kind of story it tells beyond how big stuff is. Or how useful that would be. I'm sure it is to someone. Just probably not to me. Maybe it goes back to that thing that someone said, how data is just one other way of finding an insight.

here we go again

2009-04-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

This isn't new, it's an ad that was around last summer. But I don't remember it. And they are showing a different cut of it at the moment, without the Alan Sugar bit at the end. It reminded me of the other recent celebrity-led campaigns for financial products or brands. And I would just love to know what leads three different agencies to such startlingly similar solutions. Famous people make dry things more interesting? Meh. I've got a lot of respect for Dave Trott and his agency, CST, did this. And, to be fair, it's clear why they chose Sir Alan Sugar last year. But he's not in the cut they are showing at the moment. So what is it about Bob Geldoff, Stephen Hawking and Germaine Greer that sells this stuff? Because they make my teeth itch.

let's get digital/physical

2009-04-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things about the trend for physical things becoming digital and vice versa is how different everything is. It's all part of the same culture, but it's becoming more and more divergent as new tools get created. I've written a bit about what I call active remembering, which has a lot to do with what someone cleverer than me has called the data shadow. There's a loop there, which is about creating and recording something, passing it and consuming the information later. And maybe tagging or commenting, layering up a bit of individual and social history. That's quite interesting. And lots of things seem to work like that. But one of the things I like about augmented reality stuff is the constant feedback loop that goes from digital thing to life thing back to digital thing. It reacts to you reacts to it.
levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo. Found this augmented reality game, levelHead, via a tweet from @mikearauz via @BBHLabs. For probably obvious shape and function reasons, it reminds me of Siftables, another great example of a constant digital-life-digital loop. Maybe it's to do with the fact that these are games, and they talk back to you. Whereas active remembering seems more of a social activity. I think it'd be brilliant if someone mashed up an active remembering tool with an AR or Siftables-type game. Somewhere people connect and say something interesting about who they are to themselves and each other. But that could also somehow take the multiplayer principle out of the screen and onto people's tables. A socially networked augmented reality game. I don't know how that would work.

currently thinking

2009-04-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

my loading haiku

2009-03-30T03:07:00.000-07:00

I've submitted a loading haiku to, well, the Loading Haiku site. And here it is. Thanks Iain.

very goo

2009-03-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

Time was when every other ad featured people making stuff out of other stuff that wasn't originally intended to be used that way. Like pints of Guinness made from books. And people became bored of that sort thing. But this (via Stan) is very, very cool indeed. Probably because it's user generated, done for the love, not for a fee. Apparently it took months and months to do. But worth it, don't you think?

controls

2009-03-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

I was watching an interesting documentary about happiness and learning last night. It was called Who Do You Want Your Child To Be? and you can find it on iPlayer at the moment. There was a bit about how unstructured play helps you because it enables you to think more flexibly than if you are instructed. They showed children starting to solve basic problems having been given room to work things out for themselves. That was quite inspiring. Human beings are a million times more interesting than brands. But it did make me think about brands and how they are perceived to work. Sometimes, the people set up to make decisions about the brand aim to tightly control things from a central place. They make decisions about relatively few things, like key messages and graphic design and advertising, according to a pretty rigid set of rules. Sometimes, they don't have any concern for the experiential stuff; the lived bits where human beings touch the brand and reach a real decision about what it is and where it fits in their lives. That's a bit weird. I think that's how you as a consumer get to feel a fundamental disconnect between the comms and the product and/or service. Seems to me that the human stuff is where it's at for brands. That's the way to connect with people. Adding something useful to their lives, or giving them space to say something about themselves. And creating a feeling of community identity. So there's plenty of new frontiers for intelligent brand thinking...like customer service, product innovation, design and packaging, and other things which, um, I can't quite think of right now. Lots don't invest the same kind of time, budgets and talent into the human interaction side of their business as they do their advertising. Or if they do, the two aren't hooked up very well together. But if more forward-thinking brands aren't thinking about interaction design (in its broadest sense) in the next couple years, I'll be eating my hat. Or theirs. Or something. (Lovely pic courtesy of this person.)