Russell Davies

chicken-sexing, expertise and 10,000 hours of something

I got to the end of a note-book today and found my notes from dconstruct, which reminded me of all sorts of things I wanted to think/write about, and triggered all sorts of thoughts. The first one was from the presentation that Jared Spool did.

He spent a lot of time on the idea that interaction design could be learned but was not available to introspection; ie You can do it well without knowing how you do it. And it can be learned, but not explained. He used the example of chicken-sexing:

Apparently it's quite useful to be able to sex a chicken at an early age. So you can separate male from female and feed them differently. But it's very hard to do, so people who can do it are highly prized. They can stand in-front of a conveyor-belt pointing at chicks and get a 98% accuracy rate.  But they can't explain how they do it. And when they want to train someone they get them to stand next to an expert and the novice starts pointing at chicks and guessing. When they get one wrong the expert hits them on the arm. After a few weeks the novice gets up to an 80% accuracy rate, after a year they get up to the 90s. They've created someone else who can do it, but not explain it.

That's, roughly, the story he tells. A bunch of people thought it was a bit banal ('do something a lot you get better at it') but it rather struck a chord with me. I guess because I've spent quite a lot of of time trying to pass on whatever it is I've learned about doing ads and stuff. And I find it incredibly hard to do. Many's the time I've sat there trying to explain why I think we should do A rather than B and not really knowing how I know. Mostly I assume it's some sort of pattern recognition, you see a situation enough times, get it wrong a few times, get it right a few times, you develop some sort of muscle memory about what to do.

Which struck a chord when I watched this video of Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker conference. He starts off by talking about different ways of solving hard problems (which we'll get to later) but in the middle he talks about expertise, and how it seems that 10,000 hours of doing something will make you an expert in it. (Sort of) It takes 10,000 hours (or 10-years) of dedicated 'heavy-lifing' and application to be a pro-tennis player, or violinist, or chess-master or anything. And I reckon I've probably done about 10,000 hours of useful planning thinking stuff (given that I've been doing it for about 20 years, but I've spent a lot of time in stupid meetings and making cups of tea.)

The thing I find myself worrying about is 'expertise in what?'. What have I spent 10,000 hours learning? As I do more and more stuff that's not advertising I think I'll start to find out just what it is I've learned. I'm looking forward to that. But, more importantly, what are we asking people at the start, or in the middle of their careers, to spend 10,000 hours doing? Will it be any use to them 10,000 hours later? Are we making them experts in something that won't be around 10,000 hours later, or are we giving them expertise in something that will last? That seems like an important thing to wonder about.

Anyway.

 

interesting south

I'm really enjoying how Emily and the folks are approaching Interesting South. They've just stuck a line-up on the blog and it looks brilliant. You even get a hint at what people are going to talk about, made me realise that was probably a thing I messed up on. This was the only line-up we had for Interesting at the Conway Hall.

new contender for best tagline ever

restored audio

A comment from Wim alerted me to the fact that all the audio I'd lodged with Hipcast had stopped working because my credit card had expired. (They were called Audioblog when I started using them, I'm not sure I'd ever sign up with someone called Hipcast.) Anyway, they were very quick and responsive in sorting out the problem so all the audio seems to be back. Which means Wim can now listen to the Jon Steel interview, and so can everyone else. (If you're looking for audio excitement I'd also recommend the Bill Drummond interview on Resonance for No Music Day.) But, personally, I was reminded how much fun I'd had interviewing Jeffre and Helen about Buffy The Vampire Slayer for my planned In Our Own Time series. We only ever did the one but I still think it's a good idea. I should try and round up some people for another show.

hats off to penguin

I for one, an enormously grateful to Penguin. Because if it wasn't for them most of my presentations about interesting, imaginative, clever digital/real things people have done would be empty. They'd probably get my vote for Marketing Company Of Recent Years (if such a thing was votable). Which makes it all the more surprising that I was so churlish when they tried to send me a book a while ago. I think they probably just the felt of the brunt of my pissedofness about all the stupid PR blog/outreach email you get. Which has only gotten worse recently. But, the thing you have to applaud them for; they remember. So they very, very delicately reached out today to see if I'd be interested in a copy of Mark Penn's Microtrends. And yes, I would, because I imagined there'd a student planner or someone out there who'd like a copy. And hearing that, they've offered 5 copies so now we can have a Special Mark Penn's Microtrends Prize Give-Away Competition.

The rules are these. Go and have a look at the Microtrends site and have a look at some of the ideas he's put in the book. You don't really need all the data that Penn has at his disposal, you just need to do some good noticing and think of a good name. Stick them in the comments below. Not too long, please.The best 5 new Microtrends win a copy of the book. (Best means some combination of Clever/Insightful/Funny/Lateral.) If we don't get 5 entries then we'll donate the books to a good home.

Oh, and I forgot to suggest a deadline - how about 9pm (GMT) on Thursday?

scanner

I went to see Scanner at The Museum of Garden History on Friday. A fantastic gig. The Museum is a former church, full of assorted garden detritus from across the ages. It makes for a comfortable, intimate atmosphere and a warm, lovely acoustic. Scanner (also known as Robin Rimbaud)'s music suited it to a tee. Ambienty and enveloping but with enough ideas and sufficient tension and drive that it doesn't lapse into New Aginess. But the thing it all reminded me of was how much a city's like the internet. Scanner is not a majority taste, he's not going to pack out the average venue, but the city aggregates enough people that something like this becomes viable. So 50 or so people lounge on the floor of an old church, listen to fantastic sounds and look at old Super 8 film from Derek Jarman. In the queue for coffee/beer you hear accents from all over the world, there's even the odd person who looks slightly familiar from similar things. Very nice. Then you all wonder off, back to your other social networks. And then I got home, stuck some pictures on flickr and, within a day got a friendly email from Mr Rimbaud. Excellent. Some things just go well.

jump

I found this fantastic book in our local Oxfam shop on Friday. It's a simple thing. Pictures of famous people jumping.

This, for instance, is Capt Edward Steichen. Don't you just love him, even if you've no idea who he is, seeing him jumping like this.

And here are our old friends The Duke And Duchess Of Windsor, jumping nicely. I suspect these pictures are so much better because everyone's dressed so formally. It wouldn't be so charming to see some modern celeb jumping up and down in their hoodie and trackies. Looks very like a modern flickr project though. I can imagine a series of webcelebs photographed like this.

Even with everything you know about Nixon, doesn't this graceful little hop make you slightly inclined to vote for him (although that's unlikely to be possible)?

And somehow you feel like this picture tells you something about Robert Oppenheimer's character, and might reveal something of the mind behind the Manhatten Project. I'm sure it doesn't really. It's just a man jumping. But look at that stretch, that energy. Although they're very posed, almost formal, you sense something candid and revealing in the jumping.

Anyway. It's a good book. Keep an eye out in second-hand stores or have a look on alibris.

roi

Having worked for a long time at an agency that resolutely refused to do any form of pre-testing I've had many long and involved conversations about measuring ROI. And they were always deeply frustrating and sterile conversations because we were never really measuring actual ROI, there was always some surrogate number in the way, and some embedded assumption about how communications is supposed to work. The ROI of communications is incredibly hard to determine. Even counter-productively hard.

So full marks to Alan Snitow who's trying to do some proper research on the topic. He describes it like this:

"The idea is to take a look and see what agencies today are actually doing, and how agency people really feel, when it comes to efforts to measure effectiveness and get to ROI for marketing communications.  For all the talk about it at conferences, by pundits, etc no one has ever systematically canvassed agencies to get a sense for what the lay of the land is.  I hope people will share their experiences so we can fix that.

And of course I will happily share my findings with anyone who participates."

Survey is here. Place to leave your email if you'd like a copy of the survey is here.

topsecrethowiesproject

Earlier this year I went down to the Little Big Voice lectures that Howies put on and talked about using the internet to do communications and get your message out etc. While I was there Dave revealed that they were going to be opening a shop in Carnaby Street this Autumn and asked if I could think of any digital/community stuff that they could do with the shop. I immediately said No. But that I suspected I could rope in someone who could.

So I managed to get Matt Jones involved (because he's also a Howies fan) and we sat and tried to think of some stuff.

We wanted to do something that would connect Cardigan Bay with Carnaby Street (because we didn't want the shop to become this detached island in the middle of globalyouthbrandness). We wanted it to be something that Howies fans/customers could contribute to. We wanted it to be visually interesting, since it was supposed to sit in the shop and get people to come in. And we wanted it to reflect the way Howies looks, and the way they look at the world. (So, although we were supposed to be doing something 'digital', it didn't seem right to involve loads of screens, and we didn't want to make something that was too 'energy gratuitous')

So we came up with a thing that we've been calling the flickrometer, inspired, very hugely by Schulze and Webb's social printer. But sillier.

The simple version of the idea is this: there's a flickr pool where people put pictures that connect to Howies somehow. Canoe or bike trips they've been on. Great mud of our time. Good ideas for tshirts. You know the kind of thing. The folk in Cardigan Bay can contribute, everyone can contribute. And then, periodically, a clever software brain goes and grabs one of those images and makes a unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated postcard out of it. That postcard gets given to customers to treasure or to post, or it's used as part of the display in the store. Well, you can imagine uses for postcards. And, of course, you can also imagine, once you've got a postcard printing brain connected to images on the web, all kinds of interesting projects you could do with surfcams and the like. We'll get to those in a later post.

The only big problem with that idea is it doesn't look very exciting. It's basically a printer. So, if it was going to work as 'retail theatre' we needed to give it some extra Heath Robinson / Tim Hunkin. So we envisaged a contraption that would deliver the postcards with the mechanical ballet of the breakfast machine in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (designed by  Roland Emett).

We talked that through with the Howies folk and they said that sounds good, do that.

Which is where Matt came up with his complete masterstroke - he suggested getting Henry Holland in to actually build the thing. And Henry is a complete ruddy genius. A proper boffin who can do the clever software stuff and the improvised contraption-y building bit. He's taking it from a fanciful idea into something really rather lovely.

(Design by Mime photo by Matt)

This is the inside of the Howies store (before they made it look nice) looking out. Ade, in the middle, is standing where the doors are. Either side are big glass windows. The plan is that the printer will sit on the right (where Henry is). It'll periodically switch itself on and disgorge a postcard which will be elevated by  means to be determined but currently believed to involve old bike chains and a reclaimed  washing machine motor to the ceiling where it will be deposited onto old Hornby railway tracks and will slide down, over the door, to the window on the other side.

Gravity will continue it's work and slip the postcard onto a rollercoaster Henry's constructed from the chassis's of unwanted Matchbox cars, Hornby carriages and plumbing supplies, where it will spiral merrily down until arriving with a little 'ding' in an old letter-tray. Hopefully causing surprise and delight to all. That is, the plan. And it was only a plan until Henry built a prototype and showed us this video, which is genius:

Howies work-in-progress from blackbeltjones on Vimeo. (That's Henry and his brother in action)

I really think it's going to work. You can see more work in progress pictures here.

Which brings me to the reason for this post, which is mainly so Ade or someone at Howies can point to it with their blog. So they don't have to try and explain what we're up to.

Because, over there, they're going to be asking people to start putting pictures in the flickr pool. If they'd like to. That's here.

And, secondly, since we're struggling to come up with a proper name for the thing, they're going to be asking for suggestions, and, I think setting up a special email address for that. So, as soon as they've written their post I'll link to that. But someone had to go first in the mutual linkage. So, that's what this is.

We're also wrestling with issues about printers, postcards and stock at the moment so we might come back to you with questions about those at some point, because I know there are some experienced postcard technicians out there.

Anyway, that's the plan right now. More news soon.

the mole and the internet

I've just come back from a brief trip to Prague. Where I was talking to people about the extraordinary changes the world of TV is going through / is going to go through. Don't think I convinced them of much. While I was there I saw loads of these fellows. The Mole and Kafka seem to be the twin icons of Prague tourism. Overcome with waves of nostalgia I snapped up one for Arthur and brought it home.

And, since Arthur was naturally curious who this guy is, (and he was trying to avoid going to bed) we typed "Mole Krtek"  into YouTube and sat and watched The Mole and The Car (parts 1 and 2.) It's great. Really slow, compared to the usual Cartoon Network fare we love, but sweetly slow. Charming and kind. Makes 60's Czechoslovakia look rather fine. And that 'Konec' at the end brought back Proustian floods of memory. (There's a great profile of Zdenek Miler, the creator of Mole, here)

But I'm really writing this because I want to remember, and I'd like to remind us all, how completely astonishingly great this is. The complete ease that we can sit and watch episodes from an obscure Czech animation. Whenever we want. Using pretty ordinary domestic stuff. It's amazing. Even a couple of years ago we'd have been amazed by this. That it's easy to do. That someone would bother to put it up there. It's extraordinary. I think it's occasionally worth remembering that. Before we take it all for granted.

Anyway.