russell davies

an incomplete list of interesting speakers

For the last couple of months, whenever I've bumped into someone particularly interesting, I've asked them if they'd like to speak at Interesting2008. What I haven't necessarily done is write that fact down anywhere. That's the first reason this list is incomplete. So, if you think I've asked you to talk and you're not on this list, and you've not heard from me recently, will you get in touch and remind me please?

The second reason is slightly less pathetic. It's just that some people don't necessarily know whether they'll be able to make it or not. So I'm not including them so as not to raise false hopes.

Having said that, here's a list of people who are almost definitely going to talk, in no particular order.

Leisa Reichelt isn't exactly sure what she's going to talk about, but it'll be something to do with perception.

Andrew Walkingshaw promises he'll have a title / subject for his really soon.

Michael Johnson is so organised that he's already written a blog post about his talk, though I'm still not 100% sure what it means.

Kim Plowright originally volunteered to do something along the lines of her OpenTech talk, but, since it's been accepted there she's going to have to come up with something else.

James Bridle says he's going to talk about booze: "in part inspired by that Clay Shirky bit on gin (expanding on and arguing with it), some chat about booze and civilisation, work being the curse of the drinking classes, and so on. No title as such yet. Something in latin, perhaps. In vino civitas."

Simon James and Ken Hollings are going to do a live performance of Welcome To Mars. A story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs with live moogery and noises.

George Oates doens't know what she's going to talk about yet, though she admits to getting a little nervous about it.

Andrew Dick says there's no digital manifestation of him I can link to, but that he's going to talk about "the curious case of the sleepless nights, or something."

Phil Gyford is going to have another bash at what he did last time, which didn't quite come off, but was fascinating. And I'm going to make him come back every year until it works.

Anna Pickard says: "I *think* I would like to speak on the relative funniosity of some words over others, portmanteaux and things.  Probably. It is only half formed."

Daniel Raven-Ellison is going to talk about 'Wire Wool Kids'. Which I think is the only proper title I've had from anyone, so thus far, he's winning.

We don't know what Matt Webb's going to talk about yet. We may not know once he's finished, but years from now, it'll fall into place and we'll realise he was right all along.

Gavin Starks has raised all sorts of possible topics from "Acoustic Cosmology" to measuring the energy footprint of everything in the world. Not sure what he'll settle on, it's bound to be good anyway.

I can't resist quoting the email that Max Gadney sent me about what he's planning on talking about:

"What it is I like. How I got into it. An example of an exciting area (the crazy knife stuff) that turns out to be only part of the picture. My ruminations on the whole picture (generational mental models about the war - and us on a turning point - loads of sven hassell covers! etc). Some examples of my new thinking about the whole picture."

Which, coincidentally relates to what I'm hoping Jenny Owen will talk about - Churchill.

And, I told a lie earlier, someone else sent me a proper title - Gemma Teed is going to talk about "Lions, Tigers and Bears - why horses are scared of crisp packets".

Max (see above) also helped persuaded Matt Dent (yes, that Matt Dent) to come and talk. Not sure what about yet.

Excitingly, Steve Hardy is coming all the way from Montreal to speak, which is bloody good of him. He says he's leaning towards addressing "What, specifically, do generalists do?" but he's not certain. Given that I've just discovered he's Marketing Director for WowWee I'm rather hoping he's going to bring some robots with him.

Blimey. That's a lot of people already isn't it? Hope you're all planning on being there until midnight.

Like I say, there are more names to come, some musical fun to announce and all sorts of desperate pleas for sponsors and help will undoubtedly follow as the enormity of doing this whole thing again begins to dawn on me.

But right now, having typed that list out, I'm bloody excited about the whole thing. If, for some reason, you're less excited now and want to get rid of your ticket you can go back to eventbrite and get your money back, no questions asked, or pop over to the ticket swapping wiki and someone there might snap it up.

Oh, just remembered another, Roo's going to do three minutes about Lego.

 

swell maps

I dug this lovely old thing out when I was making this muxtape. But I'd forgotten how much I loved this cover. I bought it before I'd ever been to New York (or London much) but both were evoked so completely by the maps on the cover, and the contrasts between them - the New York grid and the London mess.

The design is credited to Red Ranch, who also did the Street Sounds Electro stuff, apparently, but I can't find much else out about them. There's probably a whole thing to be done about record covers featuring maps, but the only other one I can think of is the inner sleeve of Tormato by Yes.

seedy

I've talked to and about Richard Reynolds a couple of times on this blog over the years. About his t-shirts, and about Guerilla Gardening. And then, the other day, to announce the arrival of his book this packet of seeds turned up. Splendid idea. We shall be planting them soon. The book's excellent too. And here's Richard talking on Radio 3 the other week.

reasons people aren't coming to interesting2008 - a demographic analysis

People in their 20s aren't coming because they couldn't get it together to get a ticket.

People in their 30s aren't coming because they spend every Saturday in June going to weddings.

People in their 40s aren't coming because they're doing something related to the summer solstice and a mid-life crisis.

And, if you're still after a ticket, they are being traded here. If you're not going to be able to make it someone will probably snap yours up.

get ready and roll the cassette

I made a muxtape for a warm evening. Just in case we have another one. It's got all the cliches, nothing clever. But, well, you know. Roll the cassette.

school orchestra 2.0

Matt and I were cooking up some music plans for Interesting and started nostalging about our days in school orchestras and brass bands. And we realised that we'd like to do that again. And other people probably would too.

Like you maybe? Fancy dusting off that flute? Getting that cello back from your parent's house? Troming that bone?

If so, we thought we'd do the following. Organise a school hall for a good time. (I'm thinking Sunday mornings). Invite anyone who wants to come. Adults, Kids. Whoever. All instruments welcome. All levels of ability. All musical judgment is suspended. We'll have a bash through the kind of tunes everyone likes to play: Dambusters. 1812. Theme From Superman. Maybe even get some arrangements done of things we'd like: Little Fluffy Clouds, Smoke On The Water, whatever. We'll do it because it's joyous to play musical stuff with other people, not because we want to achieve perfection. We might need to donate a couple of quid to the school for the hall but otherwise you'll just need to bring your euphonium and a music stand. We know there are other similar things going on, but, you know, we're not doing that, we're doing this.

Matt will take on the role of musical director and I will be demonstrating the triangle skills that made me the envy of youth orchestras throughout the East Midlands during the late 70s and early 80s.

Interested? Stick name and instrument in the comments

social doing

I know no-one needs another blog post about twitter but here's one anyway.

I've been playing with all sorts of little social things recently - friendfeed, brightkite, etc - and they're all good, they're just a bit confusing. Although twitter seems pointless to many the point of it's pointlessness is clear. There's a big simple question - what are you doing? - and you answer it.

The verbiness of this question is it's genius. Where are you? provokes no poetry, what are you doing? is profound and playful. And when you play the verby game it forces you into thinking about the language, into doing something pleasing circumlocutory. Like this lovely tweet from Helen:

And it's all the verbs that make tweetclouds so interesting.

I know we're all supposed to be thinking about social objects, but social doing seems to be potentially potent too.

after interesting

Last year, after Interesting, we organised a room in a pub round for the corner for post Interesting drinks. Was that any good? I don't know, I went home.

This year we were wondering if we should do something more elaborate, but we don't have a specific venue or anything organised yet. Would anyone out there like to take that on - organising a post Interesting venue?

But, whatever we do, we're going to have Interesting music, because Matt Brown's kindly organised a Last.fm group for us. If you're coming to Interesting, join up and it will create playlists based on what we all listen to. Then we can all get on down to the sounds of Music For Airports and Cliff Martinez. Pa-ar-tay!

sunny

You can't beat London on a sunny spring day. This is Gordon Square. Splendid.

interesting all over the world

Excitingly, Jeffre has just announced Interesting Amsterdam on June 14th and David is putting a gang together to do Interesting NYC.

And the second Interesting South is around the corner. I really like the way they're evolving differently and separately, learning from each other. We do indeed live in Interesting times.

copy and paste

all my pictures taken in january 2008 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

I was quite pleased with the timelapse experiment here so I thought I'd try another thing. The above video is all the pictures I took in January, created by switching Snapz Pro on and holding down the advance key in the large picture view of iPhoto. I like that too, possibly because most of these pictures mean something to me, and obviously they don't to you. But you could make your own. Don't be wasting your cognitive surplus.

pre-experience design

One of the most thought-provoking days I had last year was the dconstruct conference in Brighton. Peter Merholz's brilliant presentation about experience design had me thinking then and it has me thinking now.

One of the stories at the heart of the presentation was about the way George Eastman reinvented photography with Kodak by massively simplifying the photographic process (as far as the customer was concerned). Unlike the messy and complicated procedure that had gone before would-be photographers only had to "Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter)". Mr Merholz is completely right about the way Eastman achieved so much by conceiving of what he was doing as a service rather than a product. Brilliant stuff. And an example to learn from.

But I think it's also worth looking at the way Eastman used advertising as 'pre-experience design'.

The slogan Eastman adopted was 'You Push The Button, We Do The Rest". Which is pithy, persuasive and memorable but not, on the face of it, true. As described above, the process was rather more complicated than that.  But it got to the essence of the simplicity involved and, significantly, by altering expecations about how the experience was going to be, made it feel simpler than it actually was. (I imagine, I'm guessing here.)

Whenever I mention this idea of 'advertising as pre-experience design' to actual designers they mention the Apple iPhone ads, and praise them for using advertising to teach people how to use the product, how to point and pinch etc. And this is certainly admirable. But it's also a universal truth that people think that the thing they do should be the thing that the advertising's about. And I think the genius of these ads is a bit more subtle. Other phone manufacturers will tell you that doing the stuff you need on their phone is objectively, measurably just as quick as on an iPhone, but that people report the iPhone is quicker. I suspect quite a lot of that is because the music on the ads makes the pace the iPhone moves at just feel right.  The ads are a component in the experience, they provide an implicit soundtrack to your experience.

Reading Dan Ariely's Preditably Irrational made me think about this all over again. He tells of a number of experiments which illustrate the effect expectations have on experiences. Coffee served with fancy condiment dispensers nearby is reported as tasting better than the same coffee served next to tatty condiments. The price you pay for a drug alters it's efficacy. If you want people to enjoy the wine you serve you're better off investing in elegant glasses than decent wine. This is not new news. This is just how the brain works. Our feelings, our 'experience of experiences' is shaped by our expectations and it would sensible, if we're trying to create great experiences, that we align the expectations to help the case we want to make.

So far, I suspect, so obvious.

The problem is, I bet it's not happening. I bet there's not a decent-sized corporation anywhere that enables process and experience designers to collaborate on 'expectation design' with marketing and communications people. It just doesn't work like that.

This ad is a gorgeous example of 'pre-experience design', seeing this will alter your experience of driving a Golf at night. Yet I would be absolutely staggered if the creators of the ad had collaborated with, or even seriously talked to the creators of the vehicle about night-driving. But imagine what they could have done if they had.  Imagine the lovely little touches you could have added to the ownership experience if you'd known about this music, those words, this idea. Imagine if they didn't think of it as advertising but thought of it as the ownership experience stretching out in time and media.

Ah well. Anyway. You get the idea.

I guess it seems a bit ambitious to ask practitioners in an emergent field to suddenly take on responsibility for marketing and strategy and all that colossal headache but I'm convinced that some sort of Experience Design will become the master discipline for businesses that want to be good at selling stuff.

It would be a shame if that didn't happen, if they got stuck in the same corporate process silos as everyone else.

on the goodness and badness of advertising

Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of advertising is crap, because it states that 90% of everything is crap. But although that may possibly be true it doesn't feel true. It feels like advertising is disproportionately crap. It feels like there are more bad ads than bad movies, bad design, bad novels, bad magazines.

This may be one of the reasons why 'design' is so popular at the moment, and advertising so unpopular. Say 'design' and people think Rams, Ives, Eames. Say advertising and they think Cillit Bang.

This isn't especially fair. It would be just as valid to evoke the Amstrad emailler thing when talking about design or Tom Eckersley when talking about advertising. And there's a sort of floating feeling of moral hierarchy in there too. Advertising is obviously immoral and exploitative but design is somehow not. As though designing something to be bought is less complicit in capitalism than persuading people to buy it.

And the reason why we all feel this finally dawned on me the other day.

It's because advertising can be made to 'work' even if it's aesthetically / culturally /whateverly unsuccessful.

If a movie's unpopular or a piece of product design is obviously bad it disappears really quickly, if an ad's unpopular you're highly likely to see more of it - the business processes of advertising haven't tended to demand cultural success, just repetition. Just because something's dumb, insulting, patronising, unimaginative, glib, doesn't mean it can't be made to work - spend enough money, beat people over the head with it enough and you can get it to do something productive. That's why it feels like advertising's 99% crap, instead of just the usual 90.

This is a reason to be optimistic, because it feels like this business model is going away. Beating people over the head with crap is less and less viable. That will make for a smaller industry but hopefully a better one.

dying like coal, not like dinosaurs

The cliche about the future of the ad agency business is to look up at the lumbering beasts and networks and condemn them as dinosaurs. I don't think this is an especially precise or useful metaphor.

The dinosaurs were a fantastically successful species, dominating the earth for over 160 millions of years. They were wiped out by a singular impact event that they couldn't possibly have predicted, or done anything about. So I don't think that's a particularly good parallel with most ad agencies.

Maybe a more useful comparison is with the coal-mining business.

Mining died in the UK because it was uneconomic, not because all the coal suddenly disappeared. In many parts of the world it's still a thriving business, it's still economic. That seems quite like the ad agency business.

Extracting attention using advertising agencies isn't suddenly impossible, it's just gradually becoming uneconomic in the West. This is predictable and it's possible to prepare for it - through retraining and re-skilling. Whether that will actually happen is debatable. There may be for a future for some specialist businesses and for a few heritage ones, but that's about it.

I guess you could even argue that mining was closed down prematurely because Thatcher hated the miners, and that the agency business is being closed down prematurely because everyone hates advertising.

Is that it for parallels? Is that a better metaphor? I don't know. Maybe. I haven't thought about advertising for ages but I have some mental itches to scratch about it so there may be some more posts about it. Sorry about that.

descent

As Paul has recounted on Dan's blog. We went up Ben Nevis at the weekend. Hardest thing I've ever done, very grateful to Paul for lieing to me all the way up about how the summit was just around the corner. Since I thought I was unlikely to be doing anything like that again I thought I'd try a photography experiment, a sort of time-lapse thing. Chris was kind enough to lend me an N95 for the trip and I made a sling for it out of duck tape and those tie things you always get in toy-packaging. I hung it from the cross-strap on my rucksack so it was about chest height and set it to take a picture every minute and tag it with GPS data.

On the way up it worked for precisely three minutes. But, on the way down it worked for a bit longer, so this video is about an hour of descent from the top of Ben Nevis, compressed into a minute, down to about 1000m, where it stopped working. Not sure why. I like it though, it works as proof of concept. I'm not sure what the concept is exactly, but it's proved. The pictures themselves are all in this flickr set and I'm sure there's something clever you could do with the attached GPS data, but I'm not sure what.

a bit of a descent of ben nevis from russelldavies on Vimeo.