You hear a lot of talk about digital natives and how their generational swamping of everything will change the world. I don't really buy that. I don't buy many generational generalisations at all. But if we accept the general generational generalisation premise, then I think its time to start cherishing the skills and attitudes of analogue natives.
I was recently slightly involved in a sort of art project done by some alpha digital natives that involved sending a real physical object to people. It was a nice idea. But you could tell they hadn't given enough thought to the problems of analogue friction. My participation in this nice little idea required two specific trips to the post office and about 40 minutes of waiting around in queues. Which is too much for a nice little idea. A digital version of this idea would have required about 3 minutes of commitment while not going anywhere. And that would have been fine.
Of course, part of the charm of this thing is that it was physical/analogue/real - but I think an analogue native would have recognised that they'd have needed to work much harder to remove the friction, or make it much more than a nice little idea.
So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it's hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That's enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as 'digital natives' get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.
(For some reason various posts aren't showing up in my RSS feed. Not sure why. So I'm reposting this to see if I can get it to happen. Sorry if you get it twice. )
OK. So, following on from Monday's blahfest, why does it matter so much that we're building a false assumption about marketing and stuff into our technologies, and that we can't get organisations to co-operate and integrate all the phases of a product experience.
The first answer is to do with the increased spiminess of products; the way that every little product will soon come with an accessible bit of information space. This will be a good thing. A product that knows its own history, materials, construction and disposal routine is going to be a smarter and more sustainable product. The only problem is...
...the same mess of corporate non-talking we saw before is quickly going to port itself onto the spime's slender infospace - as soon as the marketing folks find out what the heck a spime is. And this will result in a crappy mess of promotions, cashbacks, trailers, warranty information, EULAs, starbursts and limited time offers crowding out the subtle bits of information design all the design students are dreaming of right now. (Plus, imagine the corporate fuss when someone decides to hack the spime like this.)
And, what's worse, we're going to see the same mess writ even larger - all over our cities. If we thought urban spam was bad. Wait until it's animated, live and augmented, skinned onto our buildings and beamed into our spex.
Designers and architects are excitedly planning for a world where every building is draped in an interactive skin. Buildings like this are being imagined, and will presumably, at some point be built:
And some of them will be beautiful. But most of them will be covered in unsatisfactory media art, and then, fairly swiftly, they'll be featuring 2-for-1 offers from the local pizza shop. Similarly Dan Hill's vision of The Well-Tempered Environment is gorgeous, intelligent and compelling. And I bet stuff like that is going to happen. So we should start talking about the fact that the communication idea encapsulated in an image like this:
Is conceptually more likely to look like this:
(Made-up logo courtesy of Ben.) The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist.
And, as Chris points out, it's already happening. Not in a thoughtful, measured, interaction designy way but in a land-grabbing, shouting in your face, attention-to-me, marketingy way. The likes of JC Decaux are steadily replacing static print posters with screens and movement. And media buyers are buying them and agencies are supplying odd animated versions of posters.
And this makes a huge difference because turning posters into telly is a big change. It's not gradual and it makes us re-examine them and re-evaluate the deal we've made. Which is where I need to take a moment and talk of urban spam. I've been thinking about this a bit more recently, and some of it has a bearing here.
First obvious statement: there've been commercial messages in public spaces for as long as there've been public spaces. Probably. There wasn't a golden age when the public square was free of people hawking their wares. If anything, an environment like Central London is probably less cluttered with advertising than it was 50 years ago. (Anyone? I'm sort of guessing, but I think that's true.)
However, in recent years the declining efficacy of regular 'broadcast advertising' has created the largely horrible ambient and guerilla media industries - a huge marketing arms race aiming to squeeze every drop of attention from unwilling eyeballs.
I think we object to this so much for a number of reasons:
a. Because it doesn't feel like a societally negotiated deal. We're basically OK with the notion of ads in newspapers on in the middle of Coronation Street. That's a deal we've done. We'll swap that much attention for that much subsidised media. But every new bit of spam forces us to examine that deal again; is it worth doing? Are we willing to swap this bit of attention for that bit of fun or utility or free stuff?
b. The deal isn't that clear. What do I get out of Coffee Republic selling space on their tables? Is their coffee noticeably cheaper or better? Are the staff better paid and more cheerful? What do I get out of the way you've brokered my attention?
c. One person's fun is another's spam. These little trucks are advertising a model village. I'd find them charming, some might find them annoying. But, in a new environment, with new media, in a world that people think of as more cluttered and mediated the fun bar is set a lot higher. Bouncing up to me with a free t-shirt isn't going to cut it any more.
d. Most of it is insultingly crass and unimaginative.
All these effects, and more, are going to be magnified by animated, augmented urban spam. There's a massive step change between moving posters and TV Everywhere. Especially when that TV is starting to know you're there and react to you.
And this matters for a couple of reasons. (Probably also obvious) Firstly, because living in Bladerunner brought to you by Cillit Bang would be horrible, just as a person. Secondly, because I think it actually makes for counter-productive marketing. Annoying your potential customers in more and more places is not a useful strategy for businesses.
So, if I remember my actual talk correctly, I just sort of tailed off at this point. But having had more chance to think about it. Having discussed it with people at Design Engaged and having typed all this stuff I have some 'so what now' thoughts to offer.
1. For Total Experience Design to work designers have to go and engage with marketing and communications people. (And vice versa.) If they do, then better products, services and experiences will happen. Designers have a disciplinary advantage here. Marketing, as practised in most large organisations is a failed science based on false assumptions. 'Design thinking' (dread words) is more likely to produce good stuff than 'message thinking'. However it's not enough for designers merely to be right. They also have to be energetic, open and engaged.
This is / will be particularly important in all these new infospaces on all these new screens. I would love to see what Stamen would do with the screens up the escalators at Oxford Street. Or what Kicker could do if they took a manifesto like this and also took on responsibility for designing the media that surrounded the product. That would be awesome. If I were an interaction designer I'd be desperate to see what I could add to the experience if I got my hands on 60 seconds of space in the middle of Dancing With The Stars. Or something.
2. At the moment we see spimes as spewing off data. And when we start with data we always seem to end up with maps and graphs. Don't get me wrong I love maps and graphs, but couldn't we do more than that? Couldn't we think of embedded intelligence as doing more than spewing information? Because, really...
Imagine if you combined the beauty of great data visualisation skills with the willfully fictional imagination of the best advertising. I think you'd get something good.
3. I think there's an emerging area of pratice here. A business that could engage with all this stuff coherently could be a valuable thing. Too many people seem to talk of Total Experience Design but stop at the boundaries of paid-for communications. If you could get that in there too something excellent might happen. And if that same business could design for all these emerging screens, media. infospaces and interactions that would be good.
4. We need to stop describing ad-supported things as 'free'. There might be no exchange of cash but there's an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it's giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that they're not actually free then we might think harder about whether it's the right thing to do. We might do smarter, better things if we recognise the cost we're imposing on people without their permission.
5. I suspect we're going to be surrounded by all this stuff sooner than we think. If we slide into commercialising it the same way we did the web, it's going to be awful. We don't want adwords and banners in our real or augmented worlds. Because they're bad solutions for society and they're bad solutions for business.
The Albert Hall is one of those baroquely Victorian places. (If you can say that.) You know; ornate, elaborate, greebly. And most of the technology they've thrown in complements it; the acoustic clouds manage to look like Alice Through The Looking-Glass mushrooms, the light supports and cables like cobwebs. A bit. Anyway, it all seems to hang together. In a good bricabracy way.
And then, slap in the middle, is the BBC (Proms) logo. Modern, simple, clean. Nice and everything, but it doesn't really fit. I appreciate the need for consistency and standards. But surely, sometimes, context is more important than consistency. Sometimes it might be better to fit in than honour the three-ring corporate identity binder. I bet the Beeb have got a curly, old logo knocking about they could use instead. Maybe something like this. Ben's said something similar here; let's stop worrying about consistency and make more greebly contexts.
We were in a diner over the summer. One of those reconstructed ersatz fifties places with lots of old newspapers stuck on the wall. Except it had clearly been around for at least 20 years. The fittings were worn in the right places, the door had the right not-jammed-any-more feeling. The edges of things were worn smoothed by the passages of many arses. It was fake, but it was still somehow authentic. It had patina.
I've been slightly obsessed with patina since I started writing egg,
bacon, chips and beans. I think it's the thing I like most about cafes.
It's not the same as age or history or vintage. A horribly designed
place can have lovely patina. Patina says a simple thing: people have
been here. People have used this thing. Their traces can't be erased, and they're really hard to fake.
So that cafe may have been a fake classic but it had real patina, real people have been there.
The Star Wars universe has always been good with patina and wear. It's one of the things that made it look different. Now they've got a range of weapons that are promoted as 'with battle damage'. If you were a trendperson you'd be getting your Maslov's out right now and start looking at the teen market - they're buying experience not shininess.
Disney have a damn good try at faking patina in the real world. I adored the matt finishes and shading of Toon Town the first time we visited. They'd taken cartoon furniture and given it the appearance of a lived life. And you see extensions of this in malls all over the developed world. This 'scene' from Tarzan's Treehouse isn't that different from what Pottery Barn are selling.
But patina is incredibly hard to fake. Which is why so much Steampunk stuff looks like Hallmark have started a new line of decorations called Christmas With A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You only get steps to look like this by having thousands of people tramp up and down them every day. I bet patina is something like Rudy Rucker's Gnarliness, something very complex generated from simple rules, but still so complex that the only way to simulate it is to completely reproduce it. You can only compute the gnarls of a tree with another tree. So the only convincing way to get yourself twenty years of patina is to hang around for twenty years. (Greebling will only get you so far.)
That's probably why luxury seems to be turning away from instant bling at the moment. The really rare and valued stuff can't be created or acquired quickly.
But you can pick materials that age well, show their patina gracefully. Formica being one. Leather. Wood. They show you that they've been used. And how. (And peeling paint seems to give you the aesthetic quite quickly.)
And then the back half of Matt's presentation from Picnic made me realise that I get the feeling of patina from some web things too.
Flickr, for instance, has the rub of patina about it. Flickr's full of people and they show you evidence of those people all the time. It feels worn into place by millions of clicks rather than imposed from above by a capricious design god. And it shows you your own usage, it moulds itself to you, so it gets as familiar as an old fountain pen. Sort of. Equally there are web places that more, well, wipe-clean - loads of people there but you never see any evidence of them.
I've never much liked David Bowie, but I loved the scenes with all the TV monitors in The Man Who Fell To Earth. For someone growing up in a land of three TV channels, it was a splendid vision of informational abundance. Imagine all those channels; you'd never, ever get bored. (That didn't quite work out as planned did it?) And I've loved that wall of monitors / control room feel ever since. The TV room at Graceland, Cy Ogle's sphere of monitors in Interface, this lovely control room in Appleseed Ex Machina, or the one at Fermilab, or at Cyworld. Or the genius of LiveNewsCameras.
Maybe that's why the surveillance/CCTV idea is still so pervasive. People like the idea of control rooms.
Anyway, I've started with a tangent. I didn't really mean to be writing about control rooms. I wanted to write about making glance-able web stuff, specifically a full-screen twitter. If I'm working at home I normally have laptop on my lap, feet on drum stool and a samsung monitor on the table connected to a mac mini showing some combination of itunes, twitterific or the telly. (None of this focus stuff for me, I like to be distracted). And, the screensaver is that RSS twitter combo described by Iain. I like twitter sitting in that bit of my attention, in the corner of the room, glanceable, but not pinging at me like twitterific or twhirl do on my desktop. I want it to be a fullscreen ambient thing, not a peering closely thing. And the Apple RSS screensaver is too slow to update, and too small and swirly to read across the room.
So, I'm wondering if there's a fullscreen twitter application. Something as big, legible and self-starting as twistori. Something I can configure for my friend stream, big type you can read from across the room, nice and clean, no need to be able to write twitters into it. I'm not alone in wanting this but I can't seem to find anything that quite does it. I'm probably being stupid, I'm sure I've read about this sort of thing being done at conferences. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Actually, I suspect we might be entering a phase where it makes sense to build internet things you watch rather than do, things for the other monitor, things that replace the TV you're not really paying attention to with a spare monitor you're not really paying attention to. Like Chumby widgets. Or Poke NYC's upl8.tv. There are lots of little apps that will pop something in the corner of my screen, or scroll it along the bottom but I don't want that level of distraction. I have to filter that cognitively. I want something that pops up in large-type on another screen, across the room, something I can filter physically, by not looking at it. Things in the corner of my screen are only pretending to be peripheral, they're still too close. I want my distractions further away, but bigger. Actually, that's not a bad brief for the internet in general is it? - make it further away, but bigger.
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
I've worked with a lot of creative companies in my time. And been in some. And other sorts of companies. And I've occasionally been asked to think about what makes a great creative business. I've never given very good answers because I always bang on about The Magnificent Seven and The Double-Deckers, and, depending on the age of the audience have to start off by explaining who they are before I can ever pursue the analogy. So I thought I'd try and have another go here.
I think there are two ways to start / be a great creative business - 'the group of experts' (which I think of as The Magnificent Seven) and 'the group of friends' (which always makes me think of The Double-Deckers.)
The advantages of the Group Of Experts are obvious. The chief one is their ability to compete with organisations many times their size. (Listen to the song: "They were only Seven but they fought like Seven Hundred".) Because, in the creative industries at least, once you get larger than seven experts you tend to be adding support staff rather than more experts. Some combination of ego, business sense, the desire to do your own thing and human/business dynamics means these things fall apart if they get too big. They either suffer from talent dilution if they grow or bitterness and stagnation if they don't.
(I can't remember if I've ever bored you with my theory of talent dilution. It's simple, dumb really, and explains why creative businesses don't scale. {Except the ones who approach things differently}. If you've got 5 excellent people in a company of 20 - a reasonably regular occurrence - then it's probably an excellent company. If you've got 15 excellent people in a company of 200 - an even more regular occurrence - then it's probably rubbish. I suspect Bill Joy put this more succinctly.
Ideally The Group Of Friends would also be a group of experts but you can't normally have both. If Ringo had been a better drummer and a worse friend then The Beatles wouldn't have been as good (though I happen to think he was a fantastic drummer.) When a business like this is working nothing feels like work. When it's not working it's like being trapped in a horrible marriage. And The Group of Friends model fails too. All the time.
But the reason I like The Double-Deckers as a model is that the home-base is important. And that's where I think the Group Of Friends wins over the Group of Experts. The Experts tend to be Ronin, loose, untied, uncommitted to a place or to each other. The Friends like hanging out together, they're reluctant to go home, so they build a great place to hang-out, a good, welcome environment. And I suspect a good environment is a massive contributor to the success of a good creative business. The Experts believe they carry everything with them in their laptops or saddlebags, but they miss something human when they do that. Which is why I'm starting to feel the need for an office.
Mr Tim Milne, who spoke about printing and things at Interesting is trying a little experiment - trying to turn direct mail into something you might actually want to receive. He's running a test programme at the moment and looking for volunteers for the pilot. (I think you have to be in the UK though.) All the details are here, have a look, it might be rather, well, interesting. You might have to be quick about it, the deadline is midnight tomorrow.
Sorry if this is boring but Matt's thought yesterday about Peak Attention has really stuck with me. And then reading this piece today about visualising radio and the idea of creating glanceable content made me realise that thinking about your attention footprint might be useful. (In a pretentious, just-finding-new-metaphors-for-things kind of way). It might be interesting to think about whether you were delivering enough beauty or utility to merit the attention you were burning in delivering it.
Most urban spam is so annoying, for instance, because it's a waste of attention. You burn a lot, for not much reward. If people are unconsciously conserving attention for the times they really need it they'll be grateful to those who're doing information design sufficiently well that they only require the minimum.
A good principle for advertising might be to follow the idea Matt Jones outlines here. Create things that either demand very little attention but still do something for you or things which really reward a lot of it. What starts to annoy people is the stuff in the middle - like those animated perimeter boards at football matches - they demand extra attention without giving me any other value than the still ones.
